I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about “where the laws of physics come from.” Of course I’ve already covered this from the angle of “where do all the physical constants come from” in The Utter Destruction of the Fine Tuning Argument and from the angle of “where do spacetime and its properties come from” in The Other Problem with Nothing and What If We Reimagine ‘Nothing’ as a Field-State? and from the angle of “how might laws of physics derive from spacetime” in Superstring Theory as Metaphysical Atheism and “where do uniformities come from” in The Argument from Uniformities; and how some laws of physics are always inevitable, in any godless world, in All the Laws of Thermodynamics Are Inevitable and All Godless Universes Are Mathematical; and how math (and thus all corresponding mathematical information) is entailed by godless physics in How All Math Is Real, and how physics (and thus all corresponding physical information) is entailed by godless worlds in How the New Wong-Hazen Proposal Refutes Theism and The Ontology of Logic; and how it is supernaturalism (not physicalism) that struggles to explain the existence of informational content in The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism and The God Impossible.

So I’ve pretty much burned this subject down.

But one question in particular asks, “how can information theory explain the world without God,” since “information” suggests a fundamentally mental property and thus should require a mind to exist—and that mind would have to be God. This is, really, an embarrassingly naive line of thought. But Christians typically are scientifically illiterate (and their thought leaders overabundantly dishonest). And so they often don’t know basic things about science or its terminology (see, for examples, Three Common Confusions of Creationists and The Crazy Idea of the Mind Radio; and for surveys of this as a serious pervading problem with all Christian thought today, see: Theism, Naturalism, and Explanatory Power and On Getting Confused by the Idea That Atheism Predicts Nothing as well as Addressing the New Christian Apologetics). Indeed, I think this is another Bumblebee Argument. And understanding that, and where it goes wrong here, is educational for everyone. So today I’ll cover it.

The Bumblebee Argument

I call it this from the classic example of what used to be a common “gotcha” argument tried by theists in the 80s and 90s that only got them laughed out of ever being taken seriously again: “Science can’t explain how bumblebees can fly. Therefore, God.” Because Muslim apologetics is fifty years behind Christian apologetics, they are still using this dumb argument. But it remains popular folklore and thus does still turn up even in super-naive Christian circles. The basic structure of this argument describes maybe 80% (if not 99%) of all Christian arguments for God.

They all go like this:

1. Claim there’s something science can’t explain.
2. Claim that only God can explain it.
3. Conclude God exists.

I’ve pointed out before that almost all Christian apologetics consists of leaving evidence out that, when put back in, reverses their own argument against the existence of God (see, for example, Bayesian Counter-Apologetics). I’ve also pointed out before that almost all Christian apologetics consists of an astonishing gullibility and lack of imagination (see, for example, Ten Ways the World Would Be Different If God Existed and Formalized Gullibility as a Modern Christian Methodology) and a complete lack of any idea how to think critically at all (see, for example, The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking and A Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research).

All of this shows up in the Bumblebee argument: why would you just repeat that and not have checked first whether it was even true? Worse, why would you believe that without having checked first? This illustrates the fundamental fact that Christians are Christians because they are bad at this: their epistemology is broken and incapable of landing them at true beliefs. Which is why, really, Christianity Is a Conspiracy Theory, wholly on par with flat earthism or lizard theory, and only ever sustained as a belief on the same epistemic failures (as I explain in What’s the Harm?).

The Bumblebee Argument is typically an emotional manipulation, as it usually is voiced in arrogant, mocking, belittling tones, to try and “push” the impression that scientists, and the atheists who trust them, are dishonest losers panicking over what they supposedly can’t explain, and thus hiding it; and presenting the Christian as the “truth to power” rebel who is exposing the whole conspiracy, with the only true answer: God! It’s all bullshit. But that’s the psychology of the Bumblebee Argument. It depends on skipping over the fact that neither premise is true. Usually, the thing “science can’t explain” already has been explained (they stupidly forgot to check) or science already has pretty good ideas about. And in the latter case, they skip the actually good hypotheses science already has (often knowingly, and very often with dismissive straw man arguments), and instead deploy an equivocation fallacy, converting “has not explained” into “cannot explain,” to activate their resulting syllogism with a semantic fraud (semantic fraud being yet another very common tool of Christian apologetics).

It’s only worse that their belief that God even could explain the thing they foolishly think can’t be explained is often also bullshit. They typically never articulate any plausible reason God would do things that way, whatever way, making God actually a bad explanation of it, not a good one. Why, after all, would God randomly make bumblebees magical? And (even more unintelligibly) never remember to mention this in the Bible? Or even do anything with it? And if he’s fine making bumblebees magical, why not make, say, moral character magical, so it can resist injury and better fight for the innocent, or anything else actually useful, and not completely stupid like “Oooh. Magic bugs!” Do the magic bugs cure disease? Catch criminals? Forewarn of floods? Do they do anything? “Um. No. They just look cute.” “And you think that’s a good explanation of why they can fly?”

Okay. So. That’s the Bumblebee Argument. It’s the same argument used to try and claim only God can explain why apples are red or humans feel awe or why protons are needlessly made of a soup of quarks and gluons. The “you can’t explain how information exists” is just another version of the same dumb argument. It’s just as scientifically illiterate—or just as dishonest, if its deployer knows well and good what they are hiding rather than gullibly “not knowing.”

The “Origin of Physical Laws” Argument

This also explains their retreat gradient. As soon as you pwn them by showing that, in fact, the thing they arrogantly and stupidly claimed science hadn’t explained, it did explain, they will retreat to what explains whatever that explanation is, and if you pwn them again—catching them not checking again before arrogantly believing a stupid thing—by showing that, indeed, science has also explained that, they will retreat again to whatever explains that explanation—and so on, until they hit the frontier of whatever science they are desperately fishing around in for evidence to get their Bumblebee fallacy to work. But then they retreat to the semantic fallacy of conflating “hasn’t” with “can’t.” Because their argument only works with “can’t.” Otherwise, it’s a Gaps Fallacy, and they’ll be laughed out of the conversation the moment that becomes obvious.

When it comes to “how do laws of physics exist,” the game plays out like this (and I know because I‘ve been in this game more times than I can count, and for decades now, and I’m tired of it):

• Theist: But who commands the laws of physics? Gotta be God!
• Scientist: The laws of physics simply describe the geometric structure of physical systems across the time axis. No one has to command that.
• Theist: But what makes the structure that way and keeps it going? Gotta be God!
• Scientist: Oh for fuck’s sake. Go bug someone else. I have shit to do.
• Theist: [repeats the question to a philosopher because the scientists stopped taking their calls.]
• Philosopher: Read Linford & Schmid, Existential Inertia.
• Theist: Don’t assign me homework. Answer the question!
• Philosopher: Oh for fuck’s sake. Go bug someone else. I have shit to do.
• Theist: [repeats the question to an amateur on the internet because the philosophers stopped taking their calls.]
• Amateur: [explains existential inertia]
• Theist: [complains about existential inertia]

This can then go into many “choose your adventure” side-quests after that, like:

• Amateur: Since you believe nothing happens without a cause, it follows that nothing can change without a cause, and therefore you already agree with existential inertia.
• Theist: But why is it that things can’t change without a cause? Gotta be God!
• Amateur: If you actually believe only God makes it the case that nothing can change without a cause, then you agree the Kalam Cosmological Argument’s first premise is false and therefore we don’t need God to explain why anything exists.
• Theist: [panics; retrenches] Well, but, uh, if things can happen uncaused, then the only thing that could result would be a constantly changing chaos, not a livable, orderly world. But we have a livable, orderly world. Therefore, God.
• Amateur: Unless what happened uncaused was a livable, orderly world.
• Theist: But how likely is that?
• Amateur: How likely is a convenient disembodied uncaused superbeing? Even at best, seems a wash. Evidence then decides. And that doesn’t go well for God.
• Theist: [chafes; rallies] So you admit it’s unlikely?
• Amateur: No. For example, if a continual random chaos would be the first thing to arise (no law of causation exists), yes, indeed, it would continually change randomly. But a livable, orderly world has a nonzero probability of being one of those outcomes. As time approaches infinity all nonzero probabilities approach 100%. So on that model, a livable, orderly world has a probability of eventually arising of ~100%. And once it arises, by its resulting nature it sticks around. And that’s just one model that has that outcome. I could describe more. All will be vastly simpler, better precedented, and more predictively successful of actual observations than “God did it.”
• Theist: [loses their shit; flips the table]

Needless to say, this is all dumb. The theist is just wasting our time by replacing knowledge with arrogance, and just bumbling their way into repeated pwns and self-contradictions, and getting angry instead of enlightened. Because they are delusional. And cognitive dissonance is literally painful. But it’s obvious that they can never even get their Premise 1, much less Premise 2. Good explanations exist for everything; and most things even have completely established scientific explanations; and God is actually a terrible explanation for anything.

Enter the Question of Information

Information theory is useful because it abstracts away unnecessary particulars to understand why things are the way they are or happen when they do (or not), and breaks it down to just what is different between any two states of affairs in terms of structure and content. For example, we can give a complete and correct explanation of why fifty apples weigh about fifty times as much as one apple and thus are harder for us to carry home. But information theory can break this down to just the core difference, which is the informational content of mass. The downward force of gravity and the inertial force of the Higgs field entail a certain amount of force is needed to move something like an apple, but we can abstract this to anything. Carrying home hammers instead of apples. Flying an airplane with a full tank of gas. Predicting where planets will be in the orbits of distant stars. All these completely different situations break down to the same question of information: what is the informational content of the involved masses and forces, and what does that entail about what will or can or won’t or can’t happen to that system.

This being the case does not require “information” to be a magical supernatural fluid that invisibly pervades apples and planets. “Information” here is just a convenient way to label and keep track of things like mass, force, trajectory, charge, arrangement—literally anything and everything. Because All Godless Universes Are Mathematical, all purely physical worlds are completely describable in terms of information. Information is a byproduct of existence: anything that exists (indeed, even anything that only potentially exists) will always (always) be describable in informational terms. So there is no extra special anything needed for that to be the case—least of all a mind; even less a supermind. And even Wikipedia (Wikipedia!) tells you this. So if you didn’t even check Wikipedia you deserve to be laughed out of any conversation about information requiring minds (and not because Wikipedia is especially reliable, but because it’s a universally known and easily accesed trailhead to any path to the truth: see my Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research).

So, when you hear about things like the Black Hole Information Paradox, you should not be gullible and think physicists are talking about a magical invisible fluid called “information” that falls into and later escapes a black hole. Even assuming it does—scientists don’t really know if information lost to a black hole actually returns or goes somewhere else or comes back after being copied into a parallel universe, and so on—endless things are at this point possible. But what physicists mean by information here is not some magical mental thing, but simply the sum total of all the particles and their masses, momentums, trajectories, and other properties, that fall into the black hole: does all that get flattened out and erased—or does, say, the trajectory and energy and phase of each photon that falls in stick around, whether frozen at the event horizon or being transferred to other particles in the interior, or whatever, and then transfers back again to the particles that eventually evaporate from the black hole, such that (in principle) we could rebuild that original photon’s trajectory all the way into the past using the trajectories of all the particles that evaporate from the black hole?

We don’t know. We suspect yes. But the question isn’t a question about mental stuff; it’s a question about physical stuff. “Information” here just means all the ticks in a hypothetical mathematical account-book of all the “differences” of physical condition that exist at every moment on each particle’s path into and out of the black hole. It’s just a convenient way to abstractly keep account of all the physical things happening, not mental things. We call it “information” only because that’s convenient notation in English, and because the study of information transfer began in communication theory, not physics, but was applicable to physics because essentially the same thing happens when anything changes, and so the same mathematical description (and thus rules) apply to all possible states. Not because minds exist. But because “change” consists of measurable differences between one state and another, which can be quantified. And that’s what we call “information.”

For example, if I communicate information to you—let’s say, I send you a text message, which contains a limited number of characters, which reduces to a specific sequence of ones and zeroes in the binary system underlying it—the amount of information in that text is mathematically everything that changes on your end in result of receiving my text (all the knowledge you gain, but also all the knowledge that remains in the text, in your phone, that your brain didn’t extract from it). Information is ultimately just a measure of change. So while in communication theory information can be defined as the measure of “surprise” in something we encounter that “changes our understanding of the world” in some degree, we don’t need minds for the same thing to happen. If a bullet hits an apple, a number of changes have been delivered from the gun and bullet to the apple. This is geometrically identical to a text hitting your phone or brain, causing a number of changes that have been delivered from my phone and brain to yours. Whether it’s rearranged neurons and electrons on a grid, or rearranged atoms in a blasted apple, it’s describably the same.

This is just like how every triangle obeys the laws of trigonometry without anything magical needed—all you need is just the geometry, the physical arrangement of space itself. No mind has to exist for that to be the case. It’s not like if we turned off the “triangularity” switch on some cosmic Platonic switchboard (or if God dosed off for a minute) then the geometry of triangulated space would behave differently. It will always behave the same in all possible worlds, including worlds with no minds in them at all. Because triangulated space is the sum and full explanation of all its properties.

It’s the same for information, which is just measuring the physical number and arrangement of distinctions between states. All you need for that is a physical number and arrangement of distinctions between states. You do not need a mind to have that. Minds have nothing to do with it, just as they have nothing to do with the properties of triangles. All physical worlds will be entirely describable in terms of information, without adding anything whatever to those worlds. Thus information is not a mental property. It’s just a word we use to talk about physical properties. And it’s just incidental that sometimes those physical properties correspond to mental properties, because all minds are entirely the products of physical brains. Thus every mental change is entirely described and entailed by corresponding physical changes in the brain. In other words, a mind is just the output of a brain, which is just another physical system like apples and planets.

And this is standard knowledge. Christians have no excuse not to know this by now. The human concept of information “unifies the theories of material and mental worlds using the world of structures” (see Burgin & Mikkilineni, “Is Information Physical and Does It Have Mass?” in Information 13 (2022)). Information is just a description of structure. And that’s it. It is not some magical extra thing. Anywhere structures exist, information exists—inalienably. No one has to think it. There’s no “informationality” switch on some cosmic Platonic switchboard that God could turn off that would allow structures to exist and not information (or information, and not structure).

So there is no relevant connection between information and minds, much less gods. That’s just a naive misunderstanding of how the English language works. Like, really naive.

Enter the Argument from Information

This point has already been well made by mathematician Jason Rosenhouse on the always-excellent Phil Halper show in “A Mathematician Debunks Creationist Information Theory.” Rosenhouse starts by explaining what the word “information” means in mathematics, which is not what it means in regular speech, which is part of the mistake Christians make with it. He then goes into how the concept began and developed within mathematics and then science. He simplifies information as a quantification of any “reduction in uncertainty.” So, for example, you have more information after flipping a coin than before. And we can measure how much information you gained knowledge of when that happens. But that still is just a measure of physical facts of the system—it’s just a physical coin, that has in physical fact flipped to heads after being able to flip to either. So no “mind” is involved in creating that information. All you have to do to create that information is flip the coin. Which can happen whether people are around or not—or whether God is around or not.

Because any random event is just another flipped coin. For example, genetic mutations? Flipped coins. Rosenhouse thus covers the most common Argument from Information, which is extra-duper stupid: mistaking DNA “code” as something someone had to write rather than something that grows with happenstance ratcheting—in other words, evolution by natural selection at the molecular level. That mistake evinces a complete failure to have checked how anything works in biological science. And I’ll leave you to watch the rest of that video for why that is a face-palmingly naive argument for Christians to make (or shamelessly dishonest, if they know better but make the argument anyway).

Some Christians are smart enough not to make that mistake. They know that code-specificity in DNA evolves naturally, and this is already very well proven and understood in science, not a mystery, nor requiring any intelligent intervention at all. For example, William Dembski and Michael Behe do understand this (whether they clearly communicate this to their audiences or not). Because they well know they need something more than that to get an argument out of. For example, Dembski calculates in No Free Lunch that information gain by random natural selection can be as high as 500 bits per replication. Thus, he (like Behe before him) tries to insist we have examples of information gain that exceed that. Which proves he (like Behe) understands information gain without a mind involved is possible. Indeed, at rates of 100 bits or less, it will be routine. Yet most replication gains (by far) are below that. And there are no examples of sudden information jumps over 500 bits. That’s a myth.

But those Christians might then still fall for the “retreat” position that information at the level of the selection of the laws and initial conditions of the universe must require bit-gains above that and thus require a mind. But when we move to the much larger field of quantum cosmology, we are no longer constrained by the mechanisms of DNA accumulation. In result, far larger spontaneous gains of information become possible. In fact, on a nothing-model (like I describe in What If We Reimagine ‘Nothing’ as a Field-State?), the effective information content of an empty singularity is functionally infinite, because it contains all possibilities, and is not constrained to only one of them (as I explain in The Other Problem with Nothing). That’s why Dembski says only that a random event’s specified complexity should be low, and that it is only a gain in specified complexity that is not expected to exceed 500 bits at random in a single “coin flip.” But even that assumes a constrained space (our known universe of a given age and size). In an unconstrained space (infinity), literally any spontaneous gain in even specified complexity can occur at random. So we don’t need to explain “the origin of information.” It is already entailed by any likely initial condition of a godless universe.

You can see this with picking up and rolling ever larger dice. The larger the die, the more bits of information it can spontaneously create (without intelligent intervention). Each die, unrolled, contains all possible information states for that die; and twenty-sided dice have more informational states than six-sided dice. Hence any randomizer, like a die, already contains all the information it would take to describe all of its possible states. When I roll that die, one state among them is selected, and so we say we now have actual information. But it was not created intelligently. To the contrary, it was created randomly. So an infinitely sided die (like an unbounded nothing-state could be) starts with infinite potential information, and thus the first Big Bang (if ever there was a “first” one) could contain any amount of randomly realized information. No intelligence is required for that because no intelligent selection of all possible states is being made. The selection is necessarily random and thus by definition not intelligent.

This is a logically necessary consequence of the fact that we don’t need minds for random events to occur. Yet random events always actualize information (taking potential information and converting it into actual information). This same reasoning follows for most cosmological theories in science. For example, simple “single state” origin theories (from standard eternal inflation theory to Krauss’s Universe From Nothing) simply posit less-than-infinite random probability distributions producing any ensuing selective outcome. So the amount of potential information entailed by their proposed initial state is just less than infinite; but is still extremely large. And not because the initial state is complex; but because it is simple. “There was an empty geometric point that randomly became anything” or “there was a nearly featureness false vacuum with an unbounded probability distribution” are both theoretically ultra-simple because they specify almost nothing. By contrast, God has infinite specified complexity, and thus his existence should be impossible. Whereas the first random thing, lacking almost all specified complexity (like a nothing-field or a random false vacuum), will inevitably (unintelligently) generate endless information when it randomly collapses into one possible state among all available states.

So God is not needed to explain the origin of information—cosmically or biologically, or in any other respect. Which also means God is not needed to explain where the laws of physics came from, either. Because their informational content (as one selection from among all possible sets of physical laws) requires no intelligence to generate when it is generated randomly. Indeed, random selection actually guarantees high complexity. If you roll a 1000-sided die, you are far more likely to roll a number above 100 than a number below 10. Simple outcomes are not expected from random selection. Those are more signs of intelligent selection. Because there are only two other ways to get simple outcomes (and thus low spontaneous information gains): when some artificial constraints skew or limit selection to simpler outcomes; or when you are extraordinarily lucky. This was Dembski’s entire point. And he can’t abandon it now. Yet it entails our conclusion.

Conclusion

Information isn’t a god, and a god does not give anything information. Information is not even nonphysical. It is an inalienable property of anything that exists in any possible world, even purely physical worlds that never contain minds (much less have anything to do with gods). Anywhere differences exist and are measurable, information exists and is trackable. And that’s that. Which is also why gods are not needed for laws of nature to exist. All possible worlds (all of them—literally every conceivable, realizable world, no matter how dead inside) will be describable with some set of physical laws: whatever happens there will entail a lawlike relation that can be described with an equation or model that corresponds to what we mean by “laws of physics.” And that’s that. A God could decide or change those laws of nature, just as we eventually will when we build our own worlds to live in, but only by doing the same thing we would do: changing the physical structures that realize those laws.

Because laws of physics are not magical commandments that nature just “follows” (see Defining Naturalism: The Definitive Account). That’s another naive mistake of language. They are not called “laws” because they are “legislated” but because they “always hold.” One should not mistake a metaphor for a synonym. That the sun rises does not mean the sun moves around the Earth. To confuse the language we use figuratively for language meant literally is naive and dumb, and not something you should be basing any of your beliefs on, much less a whole religion. Physical “laws” don’t refer to legislation. They refer to descriptions of the physical structure of what exists over time. So to change these “laws” requires changing the underlying physical things. To change inverse square laws, you would have to change the physical geometry of spacetime—making there be more, or fewer, open dimensions of space or time. And even then you could only get those inverse power laws to be a specific way by realizing the corresponding physical geometry—and if there is none, not even a god could do it.

Likewise rest mass and inertia: inertia isn’t just some declared “law” that atoms obey. It is a physical effect of causal interactions with a Higgs field that can only be overcome by moving energy around (indeed, probably geometrically). The only way to change a particle’s rest mass, therefore, would be to physically change something geometrically the case about the Higgs field, or each particle’s vibrational structure. Likewise, all the laws of thermodynamics are inevitable, because they are entailed by physical structure (no god needed); and likewise the laws of hydrostatics (no god needed); and so on. Always a law of physics describes a physical structure, such that the only way to change or remove that law is to change or remove that structure. And that means any time that structure exists, so does the law. There is no way to have the physical structure and not have the corresponding law of physics. So God is never needed to explain any law of physics. All that has to exist is stuff.

Hence what scientists are always doing when trying to figure out why a law of physics exists and is the way it is, is look for the physical structure making that the case. And if Christians run away, along the retreat gradient I already described, they retreat from “We need God to have laws,” which I just refuted and everyone has known was false for centuries already, to “We need God to have structures,” which is just as gullible a declaration. Obviously we don’t need God to have structures. We don’t need that logically. There is no contradiction in a godless physical world with any coherent structure in it you want. And we don’t need it empirically. No structures have ever been plausibly explained as coming from a God, while countless structures have been fully explained as coming from other physical structures; and what remains has many plausible ways it, too, could come from no thing that ends in any god. This is why Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them.

And since structures always entail information, we don’t need God to have information, either. And almost any honest scientist anywhere can explain this to Christians any time. Christians just don’t want to hear it. Which is why anyone whose beliefs correlate with reality just roll their eyes at these Bumblebee Arguments, and exclaim some variant of “Okay, boomer.”