Young-Earth creationist Werner Gitt rejects the Big Bang, Darwinism, and abiogenesis as junk science. He believes Jesus is Lord, we all have immortal souls, matter can’t create mind, and the production of information proves an eternal all-knowing god:
Matter involves mass which is weighable in a gravitational field. In contrast, all non-material entities (for example, information, consciousness, intelligence, will) are massless, and thus have zero weight. Something which is itself solely material never creates anything non-material. There can be no new information [such as we find in DNA] without an intelligent, purposeful sender.[1]
Gitt says information is massless. Yet, based on the weight of all the electrons that carry information on the internet, it has been estimated that the internet weighs as much as five ounces.[2] (For comparison, the weight of the electrons in a bottlenose dolphin is estimated to be eight ounces.) A concept held in consciousness is stored in the brain’s neurons in chemical and electrical form, so it has mass as well, even when the concept lacks gravitas.
Gitt insists that information, considered on its own, apart from how it’s physically stored, is massless. But physicist Jim Al-Khalili says all information must be physically encoded; the word information denotes discernible aspects of a structure or form.[3]
Suppose we wrote down all information encoded in a peach—its color, consistency, pH level, water content, tensile strength, and so forth—down to the cubic nanometer scale.[4]+ Writing down all this information would be a daunting task to say the least, yet the various peach qualities we have enumerated constitute only a tiny fraction of the information encoded in the peach. To record all information in the peach would require writing down the state of each subatomic particle at each possible time interval. In attempting this task, we would come to appreciate that the peach itself is a magnificently concise repository of that information.[5]+
As we go about our daily lives, barely a sliver of the information encoded in our immediate environment gets uploaded to our brains. This makes sense considering that our brains seek only information that facilitates survival. Much more than that would be a hindrance since brains consume lots of calories.
Gitt advances a principle (above) that “something that is itself solely material never creates anything non-material.” Gitt seemingly uses the word material as synonymous with physical. Since the brain is physical, it follows from Gitt’s principle that consciousness must be physical. Gitt nonetheless classifies consciousness as nonphysical. Why? Because it isn’t made of particles that have mass.
That’s not a good reason. Physicists classify plenty of massless things, photons for instance, as physical entities.
Speaking of photons, an event occurs routinely in the middle of the sun (and elsewhere) that has relevance: energetic gamma-ray photons transform into electron–positron pairs. In other words, massless photons exchange their energy for mass in accordance with Einstein’s formula E = mc2.[6]+ If consciousness is a form of energy, albeit presently undetectable, it’s potentially transformable into something with measurable mass.
Physicist Max Tegmark, philosopher Colin McGinn, and others have proposed that consciousness is a phase of matter.[7] The fact that matter and mind interact suggests that they have some common underlying nature, which may be required to achieve what physicists and philosophers call causal closure.[8]+
Imagine a small spider who scampers into the folds of a wadded-up ball of paper, resting her eight legs on what appear to be eight distinct surfaces, without realizing that they are all connected as a unity. Like the spider, we fail to recognize the unity of things around us. Einstein, along with his former math professor Hermann Minkowski, revealed that space and time, which seem distinct, are aspects of one underlying entity called spacetime. Who, unaware of the theory of electromagnetism, could appreciate the commonality between a magnetic chunk of iron ore or “loadstone” (Fe3O4) and the covalent bond holding together the carbon dioxide (CO2) you are exhaling now?
Baruch Spinoza subscribed to substance monism, the belief that everything is made of different states (or phases) of the same substance. Einstein remarked, “Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.”[9]
Substance monism is, of course, entirely speculative. We don’t understand what consciousness is or how it arises from brain matter. Our ignorance is not due solely to the mysteriousness of consciousness, which, after all, we directly perceive.[10] We also lack full understanding of matter. Physicist Adam Frank reminds us that the essence of matter remains deeply mysterious:
After more than a century of profound explorations into the subatomic world, our best theory for how matter behaves still tells us very little about what matter is. Materialists appeal to physics to explain the mind, but in modern physics the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as consciousness itself.[11]
If mind is a kind of matter or phase of matter, it surely isn’t baryonic matter as we understand it today. It’s intangible.
Gitt is impressed by the intangibility of mental states. He says that we can’t touch or see consciousness, whereas we can touch and see matter. But the claim that we can touch and see matter is not true with respect to dark matter, which makes up 85 percent of all matter. Of the remaining 15 percent, neutrinos are the second most common particle in the universe (after photons). In the time it takes you to read this sentence, tens of billions of neutrinos have traveled through your pinky toe. How many did you see or feel?
Obviously, I’m not implying that consciousness is made of dark matter or neutrinos. My point is simply that not everything that’s made of matter is readily seen or touched. To the contrary, matter is mostly intangible.
As mysterious as consciousness is, bear in mind that every mysterious entity that became unmysterious (or less mysterious) did so by getting conscripted into the physical realm. It became explicable as a product of quantum fields. Unfortunately, quantum fields themselves remain pretty gosh-darn mysterious. We have scant reason, apart from temperamental optimism, to trust that quantum field theory, or any future science, will ever fully explain consciousness. Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t.[12]+
Regardless, Gitt cannot reasonably infer a grand supernatural consciousness from our ignorance about how brain matter generates minds. He lacks an adequate basis for a religious conclusion.
Gitt is also mistaken to insist that information, as in DNA, must be created by consciousness. The evolutionary process is perfectly capable of assembling DNA without conscious supervision. Indeed, unguided matter produces all information. Yes, all. Let me explain.
The information required to describe any physical object or system can be expressed as a string of binary digits, more commonly known as bits. Each bit has a value of one or zero (true or false). The more homogenous and uniform a physical system is, the fewer bits are required to describe it. Thus, a highly uniform or organized system contains relatively little information.
Conversely, the more random or non-repetitious a physical system is, the more information it contains (i.e., the more bits of information are required to describe it). The most random state possible for our universe would be a state of maximum entropy (measured in joules per kelvin per mole). Physical processes that contribute entropy to the universe contribute to the information content of the universe.
Life is organized matter. Being organized means being further from a state of entropy. A life form operates as an entropy pump.[13] It sustains itself in a lower state of entropy by consuming energy (such as sunlight or other forms of life such as vegetables) and by expelling comparatively disorganized energy into its environment (such as heat or outgassing). New information—that is, increased entropy—comes from the sum of all life-sustaining processes as well as other, nonliving physical processes.
For example, when a photon strikes the tin roof of my woodshed, most of the photon’s energy is absorbed by the tin and gets re-emitted in various directions as heat. Thus, one photon traveling in a single direction (Sol to tin) is split into perhaps twenty less energetic photons, each with a different trajectory. More bits of information are required to describe the resulting higher-entropy system.
Most information comes from nonliving matter. The universe shortly after the Big Bang contained lots of entropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Entropy produced since the Big Bang is primarily locked within black holes. So, contrary to Gitt’s thesis, it’s not conscious beings, or even living organisms, that create most information. Indeed, even information created by conscious beings ultimately emanates from their constituent matter.
God isn’t required to explain the production of information.
[1] John Aston and Michael Westacott, The Big Argument: Does God Exist? Green Forrest, AR: Master Books, Inc., 2005), 56.
[2] Isabelle Robinson, “How Much Does the Internet Weigh?” AZoQuantum, April 20, 2018, https://www.azoquantum.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=68.
[3] Jim Al-Khalili, “Maxwell’s Demon and the Nature of Information,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqgvqeLybik (offline).
[4] A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. To visualize a nanometer, imagine a strand of hair lying flat on a hard surface. Now imagine that strand of hair being enlarged so that, if you were standing on it, you could look down upon the spire attached to the top of Empire State Building (1,454 feet tall). If you scaled up a cubic nanometer the same amount as that strand of hair, it would be only the size of a pea. Each cubic nanometer contains three to five atoms, though it depends on the size of the atoms. The number of atoms in one strand of hair is unfathomable. The number of atoms in an entire peach is…well, it’s also unfathomable, but more so.
[5] The neuroscientist Stuart Firestein notes that the textbook Principles of Neuroscience weighs more than twice as much as an adult human brain. Writing, historically our most prominent form of information storage, is quite crude and inefficient. Even modern computers are crude and inefficient. David Wilkinson says that predicting weather in the distant future would require a computer larger than we can build. If we were to assume that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle didn’t block us from obtaining information on the subatomic scale, the information available on that scale would exceed our computational abilities—not just now, but forever. Hence, the cosmos can never be thoroughly predictable. This does not, of course, imply that nature is indeterminate, just indeterminable. ♣ Owl In Space, “Understanding Time | A Conversation with Professor David Wilkinson,” June 16, 2019, YouTube video, 31:09, https://youtu.be/P1INTRVHp6c.
[6] Technically, the applicable equation for a massless entity (such as a photon) or an object moving near the speed of light is the more general-purpose equation E2 = (pc)2 + (mc2)2, where p is the momentum.
[7] Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe, 295. Evolved Atheist, Colin McGinn on Consciousness, December 6, 2009, YouTube video, 9:47, https://youtu.be/jhOqaetijUc.
[8] Philosophers have different ideas about what constitutes causal closure. One might suppose, for instance, that if we trace backward through a causal chain associated with a physical event, we will never encounter any nonphysical cause. But that raises another question. If an entity causally interacts with the physical realm, is that alone sufficient to classify the entity as physical?
[9] Quoted in: George Sylvester Viereck, Glimpses of the Great (Duckworth, 1930), 372–3.
[10] Galen Strawson, “Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery. It’s Matter,” New York Times, May 16, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html.
[11] Adam Frank, “Minding Matter,” Aeon, https://aeon.co/essays/materialism-alone-cannot-explain-the-riddle-of-consciousness.
[12] The philosopher Jaegwon Kim wrote: “Reductionism allows only one domain, the physical domain, but the mental may find a home in that domain. Some will say that the reductionist option is hardly distinguishable from eliminativism, that to reduce minds and consciousness to patterns of electrical activity in a network of soulless neurons is in effect to renounce them as a distinctive and valued aspect of our being. This reaction is understandable but inappropriate. There is an honest difference between elimination and conservative reduction. Phlogiston was eliminated, not reduced; temperature and heat were reduced, not eliminated. Witches were eliminated, not reduced; the gene has been reduced, not eliminated. We have a tendency to see the word ‘nonphysical’ when we read ‘mental,’ and think ‘nonmental’ when we see the word ‘physical.’ This has the effect of making the idea of physical reduction of the mental a simple verbal contradiction, abetting the idea that physical reduction of something we cherish as a mental item, like thought or feeling, would turn it into something other than what it is. But this would be the case only if by ‘physical’ we mean ‘nonmental.’ We should not prejudge the issue of mind-body reduction by building irreducibility into the meanings of our words.” (Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2005, 159)
[13] Nick Lane, The Vital Question, W. W. Norton & Company, NY, 2015, 95.