My article in the Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, which asks “Does the Universe Need God?” (and answers “nope”), got a bit of play last week, thanks to an article by Natalie Wolchover that got picked up by Yahoo, MSNBC, HuffPo, and elsewhere. As a result, views that are pretty commonplace around here reached a somewhat different audience. I started getting more emails than usual, as well as a couple of phone calls, and some online responses. A representative sample:
- “Sean Carroll, servant of Satan…”
- “God has a way of bring His judgement to those who mock Him… John Lennon stated “Christianity will end, it will disappear.” Lennon was shot six times after saying that… Marilyn Monroe said to Billy Graham after Graham said the Spirit of God had sent him to preach to her: “I don’t need your Jesus”. A week later she was found dead in her apartment.”
- “See you in hell.”
- “Maybe GOD is just a DOG that you will meet when you are walking on the Beach trying to figure out how to get sand out of your butt crack.”
I admit that last one is a bit hard to interpret. The others I think are pretty straightforward.
A more temperate response came from theologian William Lane Craig (a fellow Blackwell Companion contributor) on his Reasonable Faith podcast. I mentioned Craig once before, and here we can see him in action. I’m not going to attempt a point-by-point rebuttal of his comments, but I did want to highlight the two points I think are most central to what he’s saying.
One point he makes repeatedly — really the foundational idea from which everything else he has to say flows — is that a naturalist account of the form I advocate simply doesn’t explain why the universe exists at all, and that in my essay I don’t even try. Our old friend the Primordial Existential Question, or Why is there something rather than nothing?
I have to admit I’m a bit baffled here. I suppose it’s literally true that I don’t offer a reason why there is something rather than nothing, but it’s completely false that I ignore the question. There’s a whole section of my paper, entitled “Accounting for the world,” which addresses precisely this point. It’s over a thousand words long. I even mention Craig by name! And he seems not to have noticed that this section was there. (Among my minor sins, I’m happy to confess that I would always check first to see if my name would appear in someone else’s paper. Apparently not everyone works that way.) It would be okay — maybe even interesting — if he had disagreed with the argument and addressed it, but pretending that it’s not there is puzzling. (The podcast is advertised as “Part One,” so maybe this question will be addressed in Part Two, but I still wouldn’t understand the assertion in Part One that I ignored the question.)
The idea is simple, if we may boil it down to the essence: some things happen for “reasons,” and some don’t, and you don’t get to demand that this or that thing must have a reason. Some things just are. Claims to the contrary are merely assertions, and we are as free to ignore them as you are to assert them.
The second major point Craig makes is a claim that I ignored something important: namely, the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin singularity theorem. This is Craig’s favorite bit of cosmology, because it can be used to argue that the universe had a beginning (rather than stretching infinitely far backwards in time), and Craig is really devoted to the idea that the universe had a beginning. As a scientist, I’m not really devoted to any particular cosmological scenario at all, so in my paper I tried to speak fairly about both “beginning cosmologies” and “eternal cosmologies.” Craig quotes (misleadingly) a recent paper by Audrey Mithani and Alex Vilenkin, which concludes by saying “Did the universe have a beginning? At this point, it seems that the answer to this question is probably yes.” Mithani and Vilenkin are also scientists, and are correspondingly willing to be honest about our state of ignorance: thus, “probably” yes. I personally think the answer is “probably no,” but none of us actually knows. The distinction is that the scientists are willing to admit that they don’t really know.
The theorems in question make a simple and interesting point. Start with a classical spacetime — “classical” in the sense that it is a definite four-dimensional Lorentzian manifold, not necessarily one that obeys Einstein’s equation of general relativity. (It’s like saying “start with a path of a particle, but not necessarily one that obeys Newton’s Laws.”) The theorem says that such a spacetime, if it has been expanding sufficiently fast forever, must have a singularity in the past. That’s a good thing to know, if you’re thinking about what kinds of spacetimes there are.
The reason I didn’t explicitly mention this technical result in my essay is that I don’t think it’s extremely relevant to the question. Like many technical results, its conclusions follow rigorously from the assumptions, but both the assumptions and the conclusions must be treated with care. It’s easy, for example, to find examples of eternally-existing cosmologies which simply don’t expand all the time. (We can argue about whether they are realistic models of the world, but that’s a long and inconclusive conversation.) The definition of “singularity in the past” is not really the same as “had a beginning” — it means that some geodesics must eventually come to an end. (Others might not.) Most importantly, I don’t think that any result dealing with classical spacetimes can teach us anything definitive about the beginning of the universe. The moment of the Big Bang is, if anything is, a place where quantum gravity is supremely important. The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin results are simply not about quantum gravity. It’s extremely easy to imagine eternal cosmologies based on quantum mechanics that do not correspond to simple classical spacetimes throughout their history. It’s an interesting result to keep in mind, but nowhere near the end of our investigations into possible histories of the universe.
None of this matters to Craig. He knows what answer he wants to get — the universe had a beginning — and he’ll comb through the cosmology literature looking to cherry-pick quotes that bolster this conclusion. He doesn’t understand the literature at a technical level, which is why he’s always quoting (necessarily imprecise) popular books by Hawking and others, rather than the original papers. That’s fine; we can’t all be experts in everything. But when we’re not experts, it’s not intellectually honest to distort the words of experts to make them sound like they fit our pre-conceived narrative. That’s why engagement with people like Craig is fundamentally less interesting than engagement with open-minded people who are willing to take what the universe has to offer, rather than forcing it into their favorite boxes.
I think there is approach to advocating religion which may work for intellectuals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeshayahu_Leibowitz
As I understand, his trick is basically withdrawal from arguments concerning empirical evidence for God and pulling Immanuel Kant “you observe religious law because it’s the LAW” on you.
Requires a philosophically minded audience though, not to be popular.
I would have to say that why is there something rather than nothing is not the most interesting question as it can only evince our ignorance of things far beyond our experience. A much more interesting question is why is there religion rather than not and why does man seem to need it. This is much closer to our abilities to reasonably understand while at the same time be just beyond our finger tips.
Pavel, that approach looks interesting, but I don’t think it would work for most philosophers, let alone most people.
Deontological ethics (you obey the rules because they’re the rules) works, but only up to a point. We drive our cars on the left-hand or right-hand side of the road because the law has made a choice about that. It’s entirely arbitrary which one they could have chosen, but it’s important that everyone in the same jurisdiction sticks to one and only one. However, that approach generally doesn’t allow for flexibility.
Utilitarian ethics talks about consequence (you did the right thing if the outcome was good), which also works up to a point, but runs into the “ends justify the means” problem.
Virtue ethics (which you can think of as Classical and Christian ethics) talk more about character (you do the right thing because it shows that you are a good person). That also has problems; it’s rare that something that is a virtue to one person is a vice to someone else, but it might be neutral. Practically nobody would call temperance a vice, but not everyone agrees with Aristotle that it is a virtue.
In the real world, no single approach is complete. And this isn’t bringing up the problem that much of our actions are social, and so to many people, there needs to be at least some kind of social ethics, as well as personal ethics.
@Christian Takacs#27 “You really need to get over your axe grinding with religion. For you to be bad mouthing others for believing in things they can’t prove while you play host to many ideas based purely on mathematical conjecture is absurd. You thumb your nose and display smug contempt and disdain for people who want to believe God created the universe, while your fellow physicists happily blather on about 10 Exp 500 universes postulated in string theory and you treat them cordially with respect and serious consideration. For all your education and esoteric specialization, you seem quite blind to the beam in your own eye of belief while you kvetch about the splinter in somebody elses.”
Oh come on. Sean didn’t say that he has deep, unshakable faith in the multiverse, nor does any physicist. Have you ever known a religious person to say “I believe God exists, but if someone has a better explanation I’d be happy to consider it with an open mind. If they have a good argument or convincing evidence I will certainly change my mind about God.” Nonsense. The very term faith is used to show a commitment to a belief inspite of anything that may challenge it. To equate a religious belief with a scientist saying “that’s my current best guess but we’ll see” is just silly.
Firstly, bravo to @Ben in #19 and #34. Brilliantly said, I think.
Secondly, just to set the table, I’m agnostic with slight leanings in both directions, usually leaning towards a belief (and I fully recognize it for just a belief) that–for me–Occam’s Razor suggests there is more to “all this” than simply “all this.” If nothing else, it is just a choice to not believe in a purely materialistic universe.
Thirdly, just for the record, I find militant atheists just as tiresome and intolerant as militant theists (I think some comments in this thread demonstrate this). To me, both have a vision of reality they insist must be true, but which seems based on faith to me.
All that said, I’ve looked at the “Accounting for the world” section of Sean’s paper, but for my point, his summation in this post suffices:
“The idea is simple, if we may boil it down to the essence: some things happen for ‘reasons,’ and some don’t, and you don’t get to demand that this or that thing must have a reason. Some things just are. Claims to the contrary are merely assertions, and we are as free to ignore them as you are to assert them.”
Fair enough. Doesn’t that apply the the existence of a metaphysics? I don’t mean the straw dog of any established religion or vision of what God might be. I simply mean that, if you can accept reality “as is” without explanation, why wouldn’t that same logic also apply to accepting a metaphysics or even God?
The problem with any origin argument is the “turtles all the way down” problem. At some point you have to just accept that “something is.” I usually choose to accept that that something is metaphysical. Clearly some are comfortable choosing the physical path.
My only wish is that those on the physics-only side would stop conflating those of us who lean towards a metaphysics with religious fanatics or even religion, per se. I HAVE no religion; I do have a metaphysics.
Yeah, as Bill Clinton famously explained, it depends on what the meaning of is is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4XT-l-_3y0
William Lane Craig’s arguments depend on certain intuitions about causation. Is there any place for causation in modern physics?
well, there is one deterministic law in the universe for sure, that’s Schrödinger Evolution, which evolves probabilistic states.
Otherwise we’re not sure, but eg, human/animal free-will might not be described by Schrödinger Evolution.
@ francisco –
Wise words.
Thank you very much for sharing them.
Respectfully …
Speaking as a semi-militant atheist (internet-only variety – in real life I just have to shut up and take it as I flip past all-religion-all-the-time cable channels and bow my head for prayers on any and all occasions and hear “and may God bless the United States of America” at the end of every speech and see signs making assertions about Jesus every day, and so on) on the issue of whether theists or atheists have killed more people historically, my answer would be: people kill people. Whether we’re theists or atheists, like Soylent Green we’re just people. A referee (side-judge, actually) made what is regarded as a poor judgment on a football field this past Monday night. The next day I heard his name given on ESPN. He is probably receiving death threats as I write. Of course, if there were a God shining its grace on its chosen race, maybe more of us wouldn’t be like that, but unfortunately that does not seem to be the case.
Metaphysics, or philosophy, is. I think, like rectums. Everyone has one, and most of them smell bad. A lot of the supposedly expert philosophers like Plantinga and Sober seem to think that saying “you can’t prove that a god does not exist, even such a seemly contradictory one as the Christian god” is saying something very profound that atheists have never considered. Before that, I had a generally good opinion of philosophers. Take Socrates: the wisest man in Greece because he alone knew that he knew nothing, and “be what you would like to seem” (great advice for Mitt Romney). Now there’s stuff that I can use. Plato’s Republic, ruled by philosopher kings–not so much.
Here’s my philosophy: whatever convinces you that there must be a god (because things don’t just happen, or this universe which evolution adapted us to over billions of years is just so beautiful in your adapted eyes, or whatever), I’ll bet I could use the same argument with as much force to suggest that there then must be a higher god who created your god, and one above that, ad infinitum. What, you think a god as beautiful and perfect as that just happened? Okay, if you hear voices in your head I can’t argue with that, but I don’t, and the only person I know who does has been diagnosed as bi-polar (a very sad case).
Secondly, whatever I think I know was either wired into me by my evolved DNA or learned empirically (yes, including math and logic – try teaching logic without giving real-life examples). In other words, knowledge is empirical – all the way down. It is what works in this universe.
@55 Wyrd Smythe:
‘if you can accept reality “as is” without explanation, why wouldn’t that same logic also apply to accepting a metaphysics or even God?’
Because reality is an actual, real thing whose existence is proven out by ample evidence. Sean’s point is simply that given the question “Is there a reason the universe exists as it does”, the answers “Because X”, “Because Y”, and “There is no reason” are all equally valid. It’s only our human biases that make us assume that “things happen for a reason” (man I hate that phrase).
But God? Some random metaphysical construction? There’s no evidence that they exist in the first place, so there’s nothing that needs “accepting”.
Sean, Given all that Craig has written, I find the biggest problem with his cosmogony is that he proposed his Kalam argument as a proof of God while his argument falls short of proof. But his argument does support a conjecture of God. I suppose the strongest part of Craig’s argument is that a past-infinite elapse of time is impossible, which for some reason you have yet to grasp. And this impossibility of a past-infinite elapse of time indicates an uncaused original world with no succession of time. However, Craig would strengthen his argument if he admits that getting from proof of an uncaused original world with no succession of time to saying that the uncaused original world is God involves conjecture.
@Ben numbers I am quite happy about. They are abstract constructs that have been created by human culture to aid in understanding our environment. No great mystery there unless you want to turn it into one. As for avoiding disturbing questions I thought I had tackled it pretty much head on.
If my initial construction of my position struck you as insubstantial I will try again.
To consider the question of why there is something rather than nothing it is necessary to postulate the existence of non-existence, which is profoundly absurd. You may consider this merely a linguistic trick, I think it represents a deep and fundamental truth. Non- existence does not, and cannot under any circumstances, be said to exist, therefore it is not necessary to explain existence since there is no alternative to it. OK?
@blindboy #63 & JimV #60: note that I am european, and that might explain why I think differently. Here, atheism is more or less the norm. And screaming out loud the seemingly obvious norm together with the laughing crowd has never been my cup of tea. Anyway, you are both totally right that the “why” question is totally irrelevant. As Wyrd Smythe #55 very wisely noted, the point is that, at some point, we all have to admit that something IS, or one is confronted with the ‘turtles all the way down’ problem (or the ‘God on top of your God’ argument). You choose to say: I believe the ‘material world’ exists and nothing else, because anything beyond it is not needed by Occam’s razor. But, when asked to describe this material world, you are probably going to say, very rightly, that it is all just quantum fields, and state vectors evolving in a Hilbert space. This is all that exists. Fine, but when asked whether numbers, vectors, or Hilbert spaces do exist, you will say: ‘Of course they dont, they are just human creations aiding us in understanding the environment’. But wait a minute, what environment? You mean the one made of state vectors evolving in a Hilbert space, neither of which really exist even though they give the right answers to our scientific experiences. Dont you see the possible contradiction there? When one is saying ‘nothing else than the material world exists because anything beyond it is not needed by Occam’s razor’, but then uses only things that ‘do not really exist’ to describe it because we need them in order to describe it? Note the central role of ‘need’ in the Occam’s razor argument. Again, I’m not here to advocate religious dogmas, which I clearly dont believe in. I just wanted to express the view that, in general, it can be particularly irritating to hear most atheist militants (Sean being an exception) thinking that anyone asking himself/herself any metaphysical question cannot be anything else than an utter idiot, a dogmatist, and a bigot, who should either be fought against or laughed at.
Comment #14 is Poe’s law at work.
@ben,
I think the problem is that the metaphysical/philosopical/theological argument hasn’t evolved much over the centuries, whereas science has.
Metaphysical arguments have existed in pretty much their current form for centuries (the main ones being The Ontological/Cosmological/Teleological argument for God’s existence).
So they belong to an era of ignorance, and trying to appeal to modern science ideas to make the arguments seem more elaborate (than they really are) is a kind of con, that most reasonable people can easily see through.
@Ben Well actually I believe that numbers and the other entities you mention do exist if only as abstract concepts encoded in the brain. Nor do I necessarily condemn those who ask metaphysical questions. I just think that in the case of the particular question of existence/non-existence the traditional complex philosophical analyses miss the point that there is no alternative to existence. Further that all logic must have some starting point, some agreed upon observation and existence is as far as you can go in that direction before you end up with, to continue the metaphor, “a mess of turtles”.
@blindboy: I am fine with the existence argument. But I’d just add, to end up the conversation, that the brain, like all the rest, is made up of quantum fields, i.e., following your reasoning, the brain is made out of abstract concepts encoded in the brain… Doesnt that sound strange? I’m not saying there is an easy way out of this conundrum, there obviously isnt, and it is normal that one can disagree on the answer. I just dont think that, in the context of the present discussion, it is irrelevant. It is surely irrelevant to most things, I mean it is perfectly fine to live a good and interesting life without ever asking such questions, to do research, to do engineering, to do medicine, … but in the context of the present debate, I dont think it is irrelevant. @Gallagher: fine, so is your final argument that I am not reasonable but you are? If yes, then the level of argumentation there is so high that I cannot object 😉
@Gallagher #66: “I think the problem is that the metaphysical/philosopical/theological argument hasn’t evolved much over the centuries, whereas science has.”
Has it? Philosophy seeks to answer the most fundamental questions and has not found them, but has described the situation very well. Science, when it comes to the most fundamental questions does no better.
What is an electron or photon? Science answers: We don’t know (but we can describe them and work with them very well). What is the nature of consciousness? Science answers: We don’t know. What is the nature of time? Entropy? Okay, why did the universe start in such a low state of entropy. Science answers: We don’t know. How is it we live in a universe with such finely tuned parameters? We don’t know. Or the most basic of them all: Why are we here. We don’t know.
Science describes the details of reality most excellently. But when it comes to the most basic, fundamental, existential ones, science does no better than philosophy. And my opinion, for what little it’s worth, is that truly understanding our reality will require both.
@Ben
no, my argument is that metaphysical arguments aren’t any more worthy/convincing today than they were a thousand years ago, whereas Science and our ability to explain and predict our observations has progressed immensely without ever needing to invoke metaphysical ideas in the slightest tiny little bit (some scientists may be inspired by philosophical beliefs, just like they may be inspired by religious beliefs, but the final scientific theory never depends on these beliefs)
Metaphysical arguments can sometimes provide temporary entertainment, like a Mahler Symphony, or a collection of Picasso paintings, but metaphysics has nothing to contribute to Science and vice versa.
@Wyrd Smythe,
We could destroy all philosophy books ever printed and wipe the human race of all knowledge of philosophical arguments (maybe leave a bit of common-sense ethics) and the human race would be no worse off. In fact it would take about 1 month with the internet for the human race to rediscover all the basic philosophical ideas and arguments.
The same could not be said of Science.
However I agree that Science has limitations too, and they begin long before we can start discussing the concept of a god, just plain old human free-will and consciousness isn’t explained by the standard model or any proposed theory of everything, and in fact I believe this will require a new kind of science (no, not cellular automata! 😉 )
Wyrd: We do know what electrons are. We do know what photons are. We know them by their properties. We can tell an electron from a positron from a neutrino and so on.
Every discipline must have its fundamentals, and in physics, particles are fundamental. Saying we don’t know what they are, because we can’t find some more fundamental “stuff” of which they are made, would be like a set theorist saying we don’t know what the empty set is because we can’t find a smaller set contained in the empty set.
Your last paragraph gets one thing right. Science is descriptive. It doesn’t pretend to do
more. It is only when people try to explore the philosophical ramifications of science that things become problematic, and that is because philosophy isn’t constrained by the same rigor that science is constrained by. The best philosophies are constrained by logical consistency, but it is only when the additional constraints of empiricism are applied that philosophy has a chance of accurately reflecting reality — and then, it is no longer philosophy, it is science. Within the constraints of empiricism and consistency, science does just fine.
I think the theological foundations could be explored better than they have been.
Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell.
Institutional religion tends to equate wholistic with singular. Oneness/unity is not the same as one/unit. Connectedness may be universal, but it also lacks distinction. The happy medium is also a big flatline on the universal heart monitor. Manifestation is dualistic; Inside/outside, good/bad, attraction/repulsion, positive/negative, yes/no, expansion/contraction, conservative/liberal, etc.
It should also be kept in mind that polytheists first developed democracy, as a pantheon of contending gods was reflected in political form. Monotheism has historically validated monarchy and other forms of top down rule. Divine right of Kings, etc.
One might reasonably argue that religion is a society’s vision of itself, as government is how it manages itself. Necessarily vision and management often clash and the various religions reflect this relationship. For instance, Christianity was an underground movement for its first four hundred years, before being co-opted by an empire in decline, so there has always been a strong distinction between the religious vision of Christian societies and their political organization. On the other hand, Islam was a very successful political movement for its first seven hundred years, coasted on that for the next six hundred and has only been eclipsed by the industrial west in the last hundred years, since the fall of the Ottomans. So it blends government and religion in ways which westerners cannot fathom. Judaism was largely a cultural movement for two thousand years, with no singular body politic to govern and now has difficulty fitting that very evolved culture into a particular political structure and situation.
Which all goes to say this debate between neo-pagan religiosity and its detractors doesn’t explore the many aspects of human social evolution very deeply.
I should point out I view religion as similar to language, in that all societies need some unifying vision, otherwise they fragment rather quickly, but that like languages, religions can be highly idiosyncratic and subjective.
And yes, they can be as equally destructive, as constructive, but than language can be perverse in how it forms our thinking as well as enlightens it.
Evolution is bottom up, but we can only view it top down.
Life is a game where the goal is to figure out the rules and the first rule is that rules are either subjective or generic.
Sean, thanks for penning a response to this. Your article reinforces a great deal of what I’ve read elsewhere from, y’know, physicists, as opposed to theologians opining on cosmology.