Young-Earth creationist Werner Gitt believes Jesus is Lord, people have souls, and the Big Bang, abiogenesis, and biological evolution are junk science. He argues that matter cannot create mind and that 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. 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 says 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, and neither Gitt nor anyone else, to my knowledge, has provided a counterexample.[3]
Suppose we wrote on a piece a paper all the information encoded in a peach—its color, consistency, pH level, water content, tensile strength, and so forth—down to the cubic nanometer scale.[4]+ (A cubic nanometer contains three to five atoms, though it depends on the size of the atoms.)
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 out 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 the cosmos 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.
One of Gitt’s premises is that solely material entities never generate anything nonmaterial. Yet, as discussed in chapter 1, consciousness, classified by Gitt as nonmaterial, is plainly generated by the brain, which seems to be a material entity.
Gitt says that consciousness is not physical because it isn’t made of particles that have mass. But is having mass a necessary criterion for classifying an entity as physical? Photons are massless, yet I don’t know of any physicist who denies that photons are part of the physical realm.
Gitt’s intuition that the material and mental are fundamentally distinct categories is also open to question. Physicist Max Tegmark, philosopher Colin McGinn, and others have proposed that consciousness is a phase of matter.[6] That’s a dazzling idea, but not a crazy one. After all, 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.[7]+
Another clue that the mental could be physical is that sufficiently energetic gamma-ray photons can transform into electron–positron pairs. Although photons have no mass, they can exchange their energy for mass in accordance with Einstein’s formula E = mc2. If consciousness is a form of energy (albeit presently undetectable), it may be in principle transformable into something with measurable mass.
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.”[8]
Humans have historically viewed as separate entities what are really different aspects of a single thing. Who, unaware of the theory of electromagnetism, could appreciate the commonality between a magnetized chunk of iron ore and the covalent bond holding together the carbon dioxide you are exhaling now? Einstein, along with his former math professor Hermann Minkowski, showed that space and time, which seem distinct, are aspects of one underlying entity called spacetime. A human is analogous to 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.
Substance monism is, of course, entirely speculative. Scientists do not understand how consciousness arises from brain matter. Our ignorance is not due solely to the mysteriousness of consciousness, which, after all, we directly perceive.[9] 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.[10]
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 am not implying that consciousness is made of dark matter or neutrinos. My point is simply that not everything that is made of matter is readily seen or touched.
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.
Regardless, Gitt cannot reasonably infer a grand supernatural consciousness from our ignorance about how our brain matter generates our minds. While there is no harm in speculating on such topics, we should acknowledge that Gitt is engaged in mere speculation. He does not have 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 seems perfectly capable of assembling DNA without conscious supervision. Speaking more generally, it appears that unguided matter actually produces all information. Let me explain.
The amount of 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. 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. 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 that increase entropy.[11]+
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. Thus, 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.
There is no sound reason to postulate a god to explain the production of information.
[1] Quoted in: 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 (video no longer available).
[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 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.
[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. 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] Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe, 295.
Evolved Atheist, Colin McGinn on Consciousness, December 6, 2009, YouTube video, 9:47, https://youtu.be/jhOqaetijUc.
[7] 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. This notion of causal closure reminds me of the demarcation problem discussed in chapter 2. In that chapter, however, we were discussing “supernatural” versus “natural,” whereas the concept of causal closure concerns “physical” versus “nonphysical.” The difficulty we face in discussing causal closure lies in discerning the distinction between what is physical and what is nonphysical. If an entity causally interacts with the physical realm, is that alone sufficient to classify the entity as physical? I am experiencing a flashback to the dispute we discussed in chapter 2 between Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes.
[8] Quoted in: George Sylvester Viereck, Glimpses of the Great (Duckworth, 1930), 372–3.
[9] 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.
[10] Adam Frank, “Minding Matter,” Aeon, https://aeon.co/essays/materialism-alone-cannot-explain-the-riddle-of-consciousness.
[11] Here’s an example of a nonliving process generating entropy. A photon from the sun strikes the rusty tin roof of my woodshed. Some visible light gets reflected from the tin roof, but most of the sunlight gets absorbed by the tin and emitted in various directions as heat. Thus, one photon traveling in a single direction (straight from Sol to tin) is split into many (maybe twenty or so) less energetic photons, each with a different trajectory. More bits of information are required to describe the resulting higher-entropy system.