Last week, Christoph Schoenborn, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna, wrote a New York Times
op-ed article discussing the views of Pope John Paul II on evolution and intelligent design. This article triggered an immediate
follow-up news story in the New York Times the following day discussing the ramifications of Cardinal Schoenborn's op-ed article.
The key thought in the op-ed article seems to be summarized in the statements, "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science." This is reexpressed in several similar statements in the op-ed piece. To me, the word "random" is a key factor in these thoughts, so I'd like to dwell on that term, and the idea that randomness is somehow fundamental in scientific explanations.
This assumes first of all that any fundamental randomness in biological processes requires an irreducible element of randomness in the underlying physics. Conversely, if the laws of physics exclude fundamental randomness, then the appearance of randomness in biology presumably becomes dependent upon some fundamental inability to apply the laws of physics to biological systems. While chaos theory may take some stands on this, I will assume here that fundamental randomness in physics is required to have fundamental randomness in biology.
Now in fact, mainstream modern physics does embed randomness at a fundamental level in its explanations of microscopic events. Almost from its inception, quantum mechanics has claimed an irreducible element of probability in its laws via the orthodox, Copenhagen interpretation of the equations. This stipulates that the equations can only predict the probabilities of outcomes, and that no deeper theory is possible which eliminates this uncertainty.
Yet some of the best minds of the twentieth century rejected this school of thought, men like
Einstein and
Schroedinger, both among the founders of quantum theory. Einstein's comment, "God does not throw dice with men," is famous. And Schroedinger, the inventor of wave mechanics, sided with Einstein after an initial period of hesitation. Neither man ever gave up their convictions on this.
In Einstein's case, his criticism was twofold. First he attacked the orthodox view by pointing out the bizarre consequences of its predictions. When so called "entangled" particles are measured after substantial separation, orthodox quantum mechanics predicts a "spooky" action at a distance phenomenon that he thought was unacceptable. Ironically,
recent experimental work validates this spookiness. The apparently bizarre results have been detected.
But in his own approach to physics, Einstein incorporated a much deeper rejection of the orthodox view. Instead of postulating the existence of particles, he insisted that the fundamental objects in his theories must be smooth, fluid-like fields, including even the distributions of charge and mass. He attempted to derive the discrete or particle-like properties of matter from such a theory, and hoped that a property of his equations called nonlinearity would help produce those properties. His fellow scientist Schroedinger pursued an almost identical path and hope. In both cases, the theories would presumably leave open the possibility that the field-like entities would actually be able to physically participate directly in entanglement by virtue of their smeared out distributions prior to measurements on them. Probabilities are not involved because the item requiring the probabilities, for example the "particle" location, may not even exist in a well-defined state prior to the nonlinearity introduced by the measurement. This effectively drops the concept of
local realism as it exists in the classical mechanics of particles. Fundamental randomness then once again would vanish from physics, which becomes a physics of pure fields.
Neither man was able to demonstrate real success from their theories, and their approach was largely abandoned after Einstein's death. Yet, the effort that went into such theories without significant success was actually quite small by today's standards, perhaps less than a hundred man-years total. Who is to say if the approach is truly as barren as mid twentieth century physics assumed? At any rate, the point to note is that a belief in fundamental randomness in physical law still comes down to one's approach, and more than one approach still seems to be allowed. The well documented successes of quantum theory are successes of a set of equations, not necessarily the additional philosophy or interpretation which is normally attached to those equations. The claim of irreducible randomness is an element of the interpretation. To say that science has proven this existence of irreducible randomness is to confuse the accuracy of the mathematics with that of the philosophy surrounding it, and as we see with Einstein and Schroedinger, philosophy is still a matter of one's faith!
As an additional example of this,
physicist J. S. Bell conducted one of the most detailed analyses of the spooky consequences of "entanglement" in orthodox quantum theory. Bell himself advocated another alternative to orthodox quantum theory called the
Bohm interpretation. Moreover, when he tackled the problem of the "collapse of the wavefunction" which orthodox theory postulates occurs during a measurement, he speculated on the possibility of a more satisfactory theory of this. Rather than merely postulate wavefunction collapse in the emergence of a well-defined value in an experiment, he asked (in
Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics) if the collapse could be incorporated into the equations of wavefunction evolution. This is an important point because without it, orthodox quantum theory largely simply postulates the existence and emergence of this "particle state" (the state which Einstein had sought to explicitly derive). Bell's comments are interesting. While no current theory is really successful at incorporating wavefunction collapse into the equations of motion, he speculated that nonlinear wave equations might have the best hope of success at this. But nonlinearity is precisely what Einstein hoped would help produce his particle states. Is there really that much difference between Bell's hope, and Einstein's approach? I don't think so, although they advocated very different models of reality overall.
In the end then, I say the question of irreducible randomness in physical law is still open, and still a matter of philosophy and faith. To say otherwise currently is to confuse philosophy and mathematics. Insofar as he rejects randomness as a factor in evolution, Cardinal Schoenborn is within his rights to follow his faith on that. Beyond that, we can all hope that further progress in physics will clarify this issue.
---Postscript: The more I read about this controversy over evolution, the more I suspect the "real answer" involves the nature of time itself. Is time itself some simple, fundamental, inescapable aspect of Creation? Or is it less than what it seems? Is it possible it is a very persuasive illusion, and that our secular "cause and effect" (or "random mutations and effect") are likewise illusions?
