Dinesh D'Souza, in the Dark about Dark Matter and about Science

Of all the attacks leveled against science by the religious faithful, the most insidious are the ones that cast religion and science as comparable approaches to understanding natural the world.  In a debate with Christopher Hitchens at Notre Dame this past January conservative author and speaker Dinesh D'Souza showcased a variation of this kind of "we're just two peas in a pod" claim and, in doing so, succeeded in demonstrating a genuine failure to understand how science really works.  In the process, he does no great service to religion, either.

In making his case for a faith-based approach to science, D'Souza proposes that the existence of God can be employed as a working hypothesis much like any other.  And, as with any provisional hypothesis, he says it should be embraced when it helps account for phenomena which have otherwise resisted explantion.  Seeking confirmation of this God of the gaps argument - familiar to us from the Intelligent Design controversy - D'Souza turns to astrophysics for an illustration of how science relies on the same kind of speculative thinking that religion does.  Here is the background on the example he finds there to exploit.

Galaxy cluster ACO 3341, located
almost 500 million years away
(European Southern Observatory)

The Mystery of the Missing Mass
In the 1920s, not long after galaxies outside our own Milky Way were first identified, they were seen to arrange themselves into clusters, orbiting about one another, presumably, under the influence of their mutual gravitational attraction.  Indeed, the working of gravity in these far, far away places was not unexpected.  Contrary to popular conception, Isaac Newton's stroke of genius had not been in observing a falling apple - he was hardly the first to notice that things fall - but in his bold conjecture that the force responsible for causing his proverbial knock on the head was the very same force responsible for the motion of the planets about the Sun.  Newton's theory proposed that gravity was universal, applying uniformly to everything, everywhere; to the objects of our everyday experience; to the planets and moons of our solar system; and, presumably, to galaxies, each consisting of hundreds of billions of stars, located millions of light-years away.

What took astronomers of the 1930s by surprise was that, when the amount of stuff in these galactic clusters was finally tallied, gravitational accounts did not balance.  A census of the visible matter contained within them - stars and dust clouds and other such "luminous" things - resulted in a total mass insufficient to bind them in their mutual orbits.  According to calculations the galaxies in these clusters should be flying apart at breakneck speed.  The physicists faced a quandary: either Newton had got it wrong, and the force of gravity he proposed was, in fact, not universal, or their exhaustive attempts to catalog the constituents of these galactic clusters had left a significant amount of matter unaccounted for.

Bullet Cluster, best evidence
to date for the existence of
dark matter.

At first this astrophysical mystery went by the name "missing mass" and it was presumed to be an artifact of limitations of the observational techniques available at the time.  Perhaps, for example, large numbers of dead or dormant stars had gone unobserved and, therefore, uncounted in the celestial tally.  But even when astronomers refined their efforts at detection, their gravitational bookkeeping kept coming up short.  To make matters worse, after a few decades passed, new astrophysical puzzles were encountered that also hinted at the existence of missing matter in other astrophysical contexts.  Finally, and reluctantly, a working hypothesis came to be accepted.  The vexing missing mass was assumed to be bound up in a heretofore undetected kind of "dark matter" which was characterized solely by its heft and its failure to shine. Of what it was actually composed, no one had a clue.

Next generation detector,
Xenon Dark Matter Project

Desperately Seeking Dark Matter
Now, according to D'Souza, in the same way that physicists have proposed the existence of dark matter as an explanation for an enigmatic phenomenon, the stability of galactic clusters in spite of an apparent insufficiency of mass, so too can we rely on the hypothesis of God to explain other mysteries of the physical world.  He contends that such "presuppositions" are valid elements in the construction of scientific theories because they yield immense explanatory payoff; disconnected pieces of a puzzle fall into place and suddenly everything makes sense.

Is D'Souza right?  Are "materialist" scientists and those who defer to faith-based hypotheses playing by the same rules?  To see how the their approaches differ, consider this observation from a recent physics arXiv blog post - First Evidence That Mirror Matter May Fill the Universe? - regarding ongoing efforts to solve this problem.

Astronomers call this hidden mass 'dark matter' and physicists around the world are engaged in an increasingly desperate race to find evidence of it here on Earth. [emphasis added]

Now imagine, for a moment, an analogous report on the state of current investigations into some phenomenon or other "explained" by D'Souza's God presupposition:

Scientists call this hidden cause 'God' and researchers around the world are engaged in an increasingly desperate race to confirm His existence.

This comparison, of course, strikes us as ridiculous on its face; no one has ever embarked upon a search for God in order to confirm or refute a physical theory.  Good Lord, how could such a search even be conducted?  Perhaps more significantly, no teams of researchers have ever engaged in a desperate race to reveal God's existence.

What D'Souza fails to appreciate in his casting dark matter as just another presupposition is how unpalatable resorting to such a hypothesis is to physicists, one which they entertain reluctantly because the alternative, a rejection of Newton's theory of universal gravitation, would be even more distasteful.  They tolerate "dark matter" as a convenient fiction, but won't rest easy until the composition of this mysterious substance is revealed, or until a more acceptable explanation steps up to replace it.

History confirms how earnest physicists have been in wrestling similar "presuppositions" to the mat.  Interestingly enough, three examples involve a search for missing mass of one variety or another.

Neptune from the Voyager 2
flyby (1989).

A Missing Planet Found
The first hidden matter search came about with the discovery of Uranus by Sir William Herschel in 1781.  With Newton's theory in hand, astronomers were able to calculate the orbit of the newly discovered planet, but by the early 19th century it had become clear that discrepancies existed between the predicted trajectory of Uranus and that which had been meticulously observed.  These scientists were presented with a dilemma not unlike the one that their counterparts would face a century later: either Sir Isaac had gotten things wrong with his theory of gravity or a very significant mass had gone missing.  Perhaps it took the form of a yet undetected outlying planet which was perturbing the motion of Uranus in its path around the Sun?

As disagreement between theoretical calculations and observational evidence became more and more convincing, a desperate race ensued.  The hidden culprit, the planet Neptune, was revealed by Urbain LeVerrier in 1846.

First neutrino detection
in a bubble chamber (1970).

A Missing Particle Detected
In a second example of a missing mass mystery, by 1930 the radioactive decay of atomic nuclei into constituents components had been long-observed and carefully measured, yet, as a result, a vexing question arose.  When the energies of all the particles emerging from the site of such a decay were added up there was an unexpected energy shortfall.  Either a new kind of particle had fled the scene undetected, carrying with it just the right amount of energy (and, according to Einstein, mass) or the long-cherished principle of conservation of energy - far more fundamental for physics than even Newton's universal gravitation - would have to be abandoned.

This fugitive particle, dubbed the neutrino by Enrico Fermi in 1934, eluded capture for more than two decades; science did not breathe a sigh of relief until Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines detected it directly in 1956.

Schematic of Earth moving
through the hypothetical aether.

The Aether goes Missing - with a Payoff
As a final example of the search for a missing substance - and an illustration that presuppositions demand verification - consider the state of the physics of electromagnetic radiation - i.e. light - in the late 19th century.  About the time of the American Civil War James Clerk Maxwell, in what has become to be regarded as the first unified field theory of physics, demonstrated mathematically that light traveled as a wave, not unlike the way waves spread across the surface of a body of a water.  In much the same way that other wave phenomena required a supporting medium - for example, some gas or mixture of gases for sound - it was presupposed that a medium was necessary for the propagation of light, something that pervaded every nook and cranny of space.  Confident in this hypothesis, physicists even gave the conjectured substance a name; it was called the luminiferous (light-bearing) aether.

An ingenious experiment to detect the existence of this mysterious stuff was undertaken by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in 1887.  It failed utterly, but with that failure was planted the seed of Einstein's theory of special relativity which would blossom less than 20 years later.

As these examples illustrate, what Dinesh D'Souza does not understand is that for scientists a presupposition, better characterized as a working hypothesis, is not the end of an investigation, but a starting point.  Presupposing the existence of God as an explanation, as D'Souza suggests, offers no avenue for further research, it is nothing more than prescription for investigative complacency;  one might as well hang a "gone fishin'" sign on the laboratory door.  Regardless of the spiritual rewards that some derive from a belief in God, as a scientific hypothesis it is worse than a blind alley; positing God as an explanation discourages further research, sometimes benignly, by declaring, falsely, that a difficult problem has been solved, and at other times malignly, by intimidating those who dare to seek honest answers based in physical law.

It is important to point out that D'Souza's attempt to exploit the dark matter hypothesis as evidence of the comparability of scientific and religious reasoning about the world is just the latest round in the assault on science by those who, like him, feel that a purely materialist view of nature is incompatible with their deeply held religious beliefs.  In the late 1980s they took aim at the theory of evolution with their Intelligent Design hypothesis and were, in short order, discredited.  Probing for vulnerabilities elsewhere they have recently turned their sights on astrophysics and neuroscience, hoping for more favorable battlefields.

But, as Ken Miller, professor of biology at Brown University and a practicing Roman Catholic, noted in his essay, The Flagellum Unspun, which convincingly refutes claims of "irreducible complexity", the cornerstone of Intelligent Design theory,

... the struggles of the intelligent design movement are best understood as clamorous and disappointing double failures – rejected by science because they do not fit the facts, and having failed religion because they think too little of God.

Sadly, Dinesh D'Souza seems compelled to repeat this same mistake, looking for confirmation of his belief in God in the wrong places, misrepresenting the enterprise of science and futilely struggling to insert the Deity in the forever-narrowing gaps in our understanding of the natural world.


Dinesh D'Souza, in the Dark about Dark Matter and about Science by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Through a Universe Darkly

"An inordinate fondness for beetles." This is how the eminent evolutionary biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, is reported to have replied when asked by theologians to speculate, based on the character of the biological world, what may have motivated the Creator when he undertook its initial design.

No doubt, they had hoped for a more inspirational answer.

Yet Haldane, a pioneer in mathematical genetics, was absolutely right. He had done the arithmetic, so to speak. At that time over 350,000 species of beetles had been identified, comprising half of all the known insect species. What better insight, then, could one divine concerning divine intention? From all appearances, God played favorites in the animal kingdom, and beetles were at the top of His list.

It's not hard to imagine that a latter-day Haldane, steeped in astrophysics instead of natural history, might be confronted with an analogous theological challenge. What does the character of the physical universe that we inhabit reveal about the mind of the Creator who set things in motion some 14 billion years ago? What insights can we derive about Him from our determined investigations of his His creation?

"An inordinate fondness for dark energy," would be a fitting response.

Following Haldane's lead, let's do the math. According to analysis of the results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a satellite launched in 2001 to measure the cosmic background radiation - the electromagnetic afterglow of the primordial Big Bang - to unprecedented precision, our universe consists of 74 percent dark energy, 22 percent cold dark matter and 3.6 percent interstellar gas, leaving a paltry 0.4 percent to the atoms which make up not only nebulae and stars but also the flotsam and jetsam, our home planet for example, that orbit around them.

Among these constituents, dark energy is the new kid on the astrophysical block, proposed in 1998 to account for the discovery that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. Currently no one quite knows what dark energy is. It could be the physical manifestation of the long-suppressed cosmological constant from Einstein's first formulation of his theory of general relativity. Or, it might represent an entirely new type of matter, a background field of particles that permeates the so-called vacuum of space. Whatever dark energy is, its existence is required to make sense of the large scale structure of the universe as indicated by increasingly accurate measurements from experiments such as WMAP.

As with dark energy, dark matter is a name given to a form of matter whose composition has not yet been determined. In spite of this, astronomers are convinced that it exists, because, without it, the observed motion of galaxies within galactic clusters would be impossible to explain. Such galaxies maintain long-term stable configurations, yet the mass of these gravitationally bound systems, as estimated by adding up that of their readily observable constituents such as stars, is not sufficient to keep them from flying apart. Something must be missing, and the missing something that solves this problem has come to be called dark matter. Although the detailed properties of dark matter remain a mystery, confidence in its existence continues to increase, supported, in part, by recent observations of the colliding galaxies that form the Bullet Cluster.

The most remarkable thing to be said about unremarkable intergalactic gas, which consists of a lone hydrogen atom spaced every cubic meter or so, is that there is so much of it, at least relative to the amount of matter that we find in our immediate neighborhood.

Finally we come in our astrophysical inventory to the category of galactic atoms, weighing in at about one-half of one percent of the entire mass of the universe. A significant fraction of these are hydrogen nuclei, engaged in - or acting as bystanders to - the phenomenon of thermonuclear fusion that powers the stars. Hardly meriting arithmetic mention are the the other naturally-occurring chemical elements, the ones that make up everything from planets to plutoids, from people to petunias. Although "rain drops on roses and whiskers on kittens" are, arguably, a few of our favorites things, they and their kind of material stuff appear not to have meant much to the Creator in His grand design, at least as far as the allocation of mass and energy was concerned.

Returning now to the theological question that opened this discussion, as in Haldane's time, most theologians - indeed, most believers - today look for inspiration in the prospect of a creator God. Yet attempts at an objective reading of creation as the unfolding of a divine plan leaves one contemplating more a slap-dash muddle than a carefully drafted blueprint. To the extent the Creator had humans in mind in the beginning, He chose bizarrely inefficient means to go about creating them. It would seem that an omnipotent being could have done without adding so much dark energy and so many kinds of beetles to the cosmological mix. As far as science can tell, our species is an unintended consequence of the undirected physical processes that gave rise, first to space and time and matter, and, much later, to life on earth.

There is, though, some consolation to be had. God, if he exists, possesses not only an inordinate fondness for beetles and for dark energy, but also an inordinate fondness for puzzles and for wonder. This revelation may be cold comfort for many theologians, but it is a source of unending delight for scientists.


Through a Universe Darkly by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.