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.
Gallagher, I think we can more or less agree on a certain number of things now. I never said that science needed metaphysics per se. I rather meant that foundational questions, such as the foundations of QM are indeed part of science, and that metaphysical musings can be inspiring for these, even though they are not necessary ingredients per se. There actually are strong metaphysical a prioris, conscious or inconscious, among the proponents of various interpretations of QM. But only empiricism can decide in the end what’s really physically relevant. Empiricism is, and will always remain, the heart of science. The end-product cannot be metaphysical, otherwise it would not be physics anymore. Your analogy with music is not irrelevant in that sense, even though I think the link is more direct in the case of metaphysics. I however strongly object the fact that metaphysical musings cannot be themselves inspired by the advances of science and mathematics, as you seem to imply. It is a great sadness of modern times that many philosophers are out of touch with science, and a similar sadness that scientists are out of touch with philosophy. Note that I separate mathematics from the rest of science, because I dont think mathematics is empirical, at least not in the same sense as physics. For instance, mathematicians do not need real world experiences proving the existence of transfinites to make use of transfinite numbers in some demonstrations. It is entirely possible that transfinite numbers will one day prove themselves directly relevant to physics, but until now it is not the case. That doesnt make the alephs and omega less ontologically “real” than 1 or 2 from a mathematical point of view, where some theorems can elegantly be demonstrated by making use of them. On the other hand, I am certain that searching for a more solid mathematical foundation of QFT can only lead to progress in the hardcore physics itself. But again, only empiricism will decide in the end. On the other hand, natural and real numbers are indispensable to current physics, vector spaces and manifolds too, and are in that sense as “real” as electrons are. To say that electrons are more real than numbers because we can measure their properties is the result of a confusion between the model and the measurement: what is obviously ontologically “more real” than numbers is the measurement itself. The model is making use of composite abstract constructions, the Dirac field known as “electron” and the QED lagrangian being one such construction, that are then used to make the predictions. These constructions are themselves driven by the measurements, but not only. Mathematical objects such as symmetry groups are also important in building them. But then, in the end, only the measurements decide. If the prediction proves correct, we can then say that the electron of the model “exists” as in the model. But then so do the ingredients of the model. This is a different kind of existence, more of a platonist one, than the measurement itself. It is difficult to do physics without, most of the time implicitly, recognizing this kind of platonist existence, whose metaphysical implications are interesting. It is not because these implications are not directly relevant to the efficiency of the physical model that “reasonable” people should all be forbidden to think about them. But anyway, you probably wont agree, but I rest my case now 🙂
@Ben
that’s reasonable, just that I’m not a big fan of foundational arguments in QM, I mean, to me QM basically says that Nature is described by probability amplitudes which evolve according to an evolution equation, and the probability just “is”. Decades of whining about the existence of fundamental probability has led to the non-science subject of Foundations, and ridiculous metaphysical constructions (like MWI) to help atheists and/or determinists sleep at night.
Mathematics is of course COMPLETELY distinguished from almost all philosophy (and infinitely from theology) by its rigour and applicability.
But we’ve strayed a bit from the topic of whether God is necessary in Physics, so I’ll stop now.
Comment deleted by poster. (I misread something!)
Explain to me how a universe can create life, and not just life, but life that can know and understand itself, and not just know and understand itself, why we are what we are, and all the other nuances of human existence,hatred, joy, etc. and not just these, but how can a life created by the universe come to know unconditional Love and not just the love that is self serving, but unconditional service to each other, even to death, a death that would not have a reward, if the universe was its creator. But it does, an eternal one.
Everyone seems to be missing the big picture, which is that the Kalam argument disproves the existence of God. Consider: Let G0 be the cause of the universe. Then, either G0 began to exist, or G0 never began to exist.
Assume G0 began to exist. Then G0 must have a cause, by Craig’s first premise. Call that cause G1. Now, for any natural number n, if Gn began to exist, then Gn must have a cause, G(n+1). This leads to an infinite regression, which is ruled out by Craig’s Hilbert Hotel argument. This means there must be a natural number x, such that Gx never began to exist.
Now, if Gx exists, but never began to exist, then Gx must have an infinite past. Because the past consists of events that have happened, rather than potential events, an infinite past must be an actual infinity. And Craig has shown that actual infinities are not possible.
This means that Gx cannot exist; therefore G(x-1) cannot exist, and so on, all the way back to G0. In this way, the Kalam argument proves that God does not exist. QED
Of course, the above difficulties could be avoided by claiming that the restrictions against infinite regressions and actual infinities do not apply to God(s). But the Kalam argument is so rock-solid, it would be a shame if the conclusions we drew from it — whatever they may be — had to rest on the shifting sands of special pleading.
@Mitchell: Indifference: the universe was created to be a vast mechanism, and these are the unimportant sufferings of a few spontaneously generated microbes crushed between the cogs.
Nice. That’s pretty much what I believe myself, and I find it oddly satisfying.
Its always bugged me as well that this position never shows up in religious debates.
Sean: (or anyone else)
Is it really necessary to have Quantum Gravity to understand the origin of the universe ?
From what I understand IF we have a matter/radiation dominated universe, THEN we see energy density tending to infinity in finite time as we roll the picture back, and the existing laws break down and we need QG
But what if, as in inflation models, we have a vacuum energy dominated universe, before a certain point of time ?
Then the maths seems to say that we can go back infinitely far without any breakdown in the laws.
So, couldn’t THAT be a default state for the universe ? An infinite expanse of space (described by classical GR) filled with vacuum energy which has always existed and just keeps inflating with occasional decays into ordinary matter/energy ?
It would be good to have Quantum Gravity, but seems like it isn’t necessary to model the picture above.
Richard M, Craig responds by saying that God was timeless prior to creation. He says Divine Timelessness may be really strange, but there’s nothing Logically fallacious about it. He also says that God’s act of creating is simultaneous with the universe coming into Existence. And since it’s beginning, God became temporal.
@James Gallagher #71: I think that’s a bit hyperbolic at best. A great deal of philosophy, as with science, is built on th work of others. I think it would take far longer than a month (and I’m not quite sure how the internet makes any difference). In fact, given that micro- and nano-blogs seems to be progressively undermining deep and long thinking, I’d be surprised if most modern people are capable of the kind of philosophic thinking that winds back through people like Kant all the way to Aristotle.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting philosophy is necessary to science, but I do think science is rather “bloodless” without it. (Atom bombs and genetic engineering being great examples.) I would no more want to live in a world without philosophy than I would a world without music or painting. You might consider such things “temporary entertainment,” but I consider them not just fundamental, but vital to the human experience. In fact, if I had to chose between science and art, I would pick art.
Without some sort of philosophy, if not metaphysics, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to define morals or even “common-sense ethics.” Any such are necessarily based on some metaphysical view of human parity and primacy. Consider slavery, something which most people would agree is immoral or, in terms of an atheist view, unethical. Yet it enabled the creation of at least one, if not more, of the Wonders of the World. If my view of reality is such that building wonderful pyramids that last for thousands of years has greater primacy than the lives of thousands of slaves, on what basis can you say my view is truly wrong without appeal to some sort of metaphysics? After all, those slaves are now all long dead and dust, while the pyramids remain. What does their suffering really matter?
If the universe is fully deterministic, and we are nothing more than machines, what does *any* of this matter except as “temporary entertainment?” In 2000 years all of this will be gone and forgotten.
@Richard M #72: I don’t agree that science *does* know what electrons and photons are. I’m not referring to finding something more fundamental. I’m referring to the fact that science doesn’t know if they are, indeed, point particles that (somehow) have properties, or if they are tiny strings that vibrate in more dimensions than we know about, or if they are “kinks” in the mesh of LQG, or something else entirely. Science isn’t, as far as I know, even sure whether they have size or not.
I have no problem accepting them as fundamental pieces of *some* picture, but I don’t believe we know what those pieces actually are. We only know how they behave.
Perhaps the universe is a mere fragment of God, a shadow of Himself that He cast upon the waters of time and space. A revelation of Himself for those who can see. All the Love in the world is a mere shadow of Himself that truly is Himself, so, that may that may well be the case with the universe as well.
I read it. There are two Sean Carrolls.
S.C. Spin A wrote the sober article referenced at the beginning, which can be used by moderates trying to maintain the scientific integrity of public school curricula. Like most scholarly works it won’t be widely advertised, but people with a stake in education will read and remember it.
S.C. Spin B appears on web media panels with other atheists participating in a mutual admiration society with the usual snickers and insults. Thousands of people may view, but only as entertainment to confirm (not change) their own prejudice either way (being outraged for some is entertaining).
Pick your Spin.
Zerub: Yes, that is the special pleading I was referring to.
The funny thing about this particular case of special pleading is that it isn’t fallacious by declaring that there is something special (whether it’s the Universe, or one or more gods). It is fallacious by declaring that the Universe is not special.
The Universe is like a proper class in mathematics — a collection (class) that cannot belong to another class. The collection of all ordinals (Omega) is a proper class, and the collection of all sets (V) is a proper class. Sets are classes, but they are not proper classes. Proper classes are special objects: without them, you get anomalies like Russell’s paradox.
The Universe contains what appears to be an unbounded spacetime (try to plot a course leading you outside the Universe). It is not an object contained within that spacetime [1]. If it were, it would contain itself. The Universe is analogous to a proper class, and therefore already special. Adding one or more objects, giving them special status, and then withholding that special status from the Universe, really is special pleading.
As for “timelessness”, whether or not the concept is logically consistent, it doesn’t help Craig at all. Timelessness requires that nothing is changing. You couldn’t have particles because particles have wave functions associated with them. You certainly couldn’t have thought. And since nothing is changing, God would be unable to contemplate creating the Universe prior to doing so. So Craig doesn’t like actual infinities, but has no problem with this bizarre scenario? In this view, the creation of the Universe would have to be a spontaneous cosmic accident, indistinguishable from the Universe coming into being ex nihilo.
[1] Perhaps the Universe is embedded in some larger multiverse. That need not remove its specialness. Again going to math for an analogy, the class of ordinals is “embedded” (I’m not sure if this is the correct usage of that word) in the class of all sets, in the sense that all of its members are also members of the class of all sets — but that does not mean it is not a proper class.
Wyrd, I think if somebody handed you the absolute essence of everything, you’d wonder what the essence of that essence is. I would not.
We know what particles are by their properties. We may or may not know *all* of their properties. But isn’t that the ideal that physics strives for — to learn these properties, and build models that incorporate those properties?
@Wyrd Smythe #84
I admire your decision to choose art given either science or art has to go, I almost agree, since the science could be recreated over a few hundred years, whereas most of the great art would be lost forever never to be recreated. But for practical reasons I’d have to choose science, and weep about the lost art treasures (In the alternative scenario, where science goes, we’d revert to the middle ages for a few centuries and most of the art would be lost anyway)
Sean, how do you know God doesn’t exist? Maybe God does exist. Does science answer the question? If so, how? Just curious. I’m an agnostic. For me, science deals with explanations of things which can be testable. Since we only have access to the physical world of the Standard Model, etc., because we are made up of Standard Model particles, the only testable ideas and explanations are those that have the Standard Model as their basis (i.e. “natural causes”, “materialism”, etc.). But we don’t know if this aspect of reality is the only one. Hence my agnostic views.
Thanks!
@Zerub #83
Saying that “God became temporal” is incompatible with classical theism. In classical theism, God is eternal. Created beings exist in time, God in eternity, which BTW is not an infinite length of time. For anyone interested in the subject:
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com.ar/2010/09/classical-theism.html
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com.ar/2009/11/william-lane-craig-on-divine-simplicity.html
Sean, why did you delete my comment? It’s an honest question and I’m very interested in reading your reply. Here, I’ve posted it again, but I’ve reworded my question to something better:
How do you know God doesn’t exist? I’m an agnostic. For me, science deals with explanations of things which can be testable. Since we only have access to the physical world of the Standard Model, etc., because we are made up of Standard Model particles, the only testable ideas and explanations are those that have the Standard Model as their basis (i.e. “natural causes”, “materialism”, etc.). But we don’t know if this aspect of reality is the only one. That is, just because a belief isn’t testable, doesn’t mean it cannot be true. We just don’t know if that particular belief is true or false because we have no way of testing it. So it wouldn’t be right to just dismiss it as definitively wrong. Hence my agnostic views. Thanks!
Tom @90&92. No one deleted your question. It is the same tired old “can’t prove a negative” question addressed in a million other places on the innertubes. Go Google it if you really want some answers. There are many responses, some are nice and simple like “How do you know the FSM or the orbiting teapot don’t exist?” Others take a degree in logic to understand. And there are many in between. Take your time. Then take it somewhere else. It doesn’t impress anyone here except your fellow “agnostics”, who are really just atheists who lack the courage of their convictions, or else xian trolls on the prowl.
Also, on those days you are so inclined to entertain the notion of God’s existence, try wrapping your mind around some of the kinds of questions posed by Sean that “sophisticated theologian” and fine tuning expert Alvin Plantinga never seems to answer:
“Why does God favor three generations of elementary particles, with a wide spectrum of masses?”
“Would God use supersymmetry or strong dynamics to stabilize the hierarchy between the weak scale and the Planck scale, or simply set it that way by hand?”
“What would God’s favorite dark matter particle be?”
Ed,
What’s wrong with not knowing whether God exists or not? I know the FSM and orbiting teapot don’t exist because their formation out there is incompatible with initial conditions and the laws of physics. But I can’t say that about God because the laws of physics are patterns we discovered through scientific investigation which has testable hypotheses as its basis. But that doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist or that we can be certain that God doesn’t exist. We can’t be.
(Oops. I see now that the comment wasn’t deleted. I thought it had been deleted because I missed it as I was scrolling down.)
Tom, you simply repeat tired scientific-sounding agnostic nostrums. Exchange God for FSM in all your sentences, and it makes just as much sense. If you were really interested in the philosophical arguments against agnosticism, you’d use Google and find sites like skepticblogs (with articles like http://www.skepticblogs.com/incredulous/2012/09/25/agnosticism-is-untenable-and-irrelevant-part-2/) and match wits with people who regularly refute agnosticism. You’d read books like “Atheism, A Philosophical Justification” or “Atheism: The Case Against God” and find out all you could ever want about the case for atheism. But what do you do? You troll a cosmology blog and burble sophomoric agnostic tropes. Begone, troll. You’re no longer worth the time to respond to. Go to a blog where they eat your type for breakfast, if you dare.
“How do you know God doesn’t exist?”
He came to me in a dream and told me so Himself.
Ed @ September 29th, 2012 at 7:26 pm
How about a God-like structure to reality? There are studies on phenomena to do with an afterlife, for instance Chris Carter’s recent “Science and the Afterlife Experience: Evidence for the Immortality of Consciousness ” (2012). Another indication of this is these kinds of experiences – see this upcoming lecture at the SPR (October 4) by Dr. Mark Fox:
http://www.spr.ac.uk/main/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=42 on extraordinary light phenomena seen during the time when someone dies. Need to be explained. My question – why is the universe structured such that these phenomena occur? Seems to have a kind of “preservative” quality – also no FSMs needed.
i am completely agree with Sean Carroll . indeed not only craig but even many experts don’t understand meaning of beginning that is used in cosmology (specially quantum cosmology). in fact for explaining the singularity there are three option : 1- time had a beginning or end ( should explain initial conditions,boundary conditions,…) . 2- time had no a beginning or end (beginninglessness and endlessness, past infinite. should explain evolution of universe across the singularity ) and i think most likely option 3- neither time nor space exist at the most fundamental ontological level so we encounter with a utterly timeless and spaceless structure(absolute timelessness and spacelesssness in so-called planck scale). i think Sean favours option two ( eternal universe). i also favour a fundamentally eternal universe ,but notice that eternity has two meaning :1- beginninglessness , 2- timelessness . i favour second definition because i think most quantum gravity theories strongly imply non-existence of time and space ( also causality) at the most fundamental level or at the most fundamental ontological basement ( in paul davis phrase). though i think third option is most likely one but i also see no reason forr ejecting eternal universe ( with no beginning or end) as sean favours. also i pointed out sean himself has open eyes to both of 2 and 3 options. for william craig but answer is already obvious , he will says universe had a definite beginning or an end but true is that he doesn’t understand fundamental physics and cosmology. for example he frequently says Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal established a finite universe ( universe with a beginning) . this here i claim he doesn’t understand quantum cosmology .indeed Hartle-Hawking theory disfavour both eternal universe ( in term of beginningless) and a universe with an absolute beginning, this theory goes beyond conventional thinking about universe ,time ,space and laws of nature. Hartle-Hawking theory favours a fundamental timeless and spaceless universe ( with no time,space,causality and evolution and also universe as a whole cann’t have a boundary or initial conditions ,in fact all of these concepts become meaningless at the most fundamental level of reality namely planck scale and this theory opens new windows to redefine universe as a whole, maybe super-ultimate reality as no-boundary proposal suggested is an abstract timeless and spaceless structure so universe in depth is mathematics. and mathematics is ultimate super ground of reality.
Ed,
How am I trolling? This post is about God and I am asking a question related to whether we can know if God exists or not. I can’t exchange God for FSM because the FSM is made out of standard model particles well-organized into a strand of spaghetti. It’s virtually impossible to find such a thing, much less a flying spaghetti monster, out there because it is incompatible with the initial conditions of the universe and the laws of physics. The only place you’d find a strand of spaghetti would be on earth, made by humans. That’s something we can be sure about. The situation is different with a supernatural deity. Can you provide me evidence that a supernatural “world” exists? No, because all we ever know more or less certain about is what we can learn by using the scientific method. The scientific method is based on explaining phenomena we observe using testable hypotheses. Well, all we can ever observe are phenomena in the natural world, and the only testable hypotheses explaining those phenomena are ones which occur within this natural world (otherwise, we’d have no way of discovering them because we ourselves are part of the natural world). But that doesn’t prove that a supernatural deity doesn’t exist. We simply have no way of knowing. And, who knows, maybe the universe did have a beginning in time, and since you cannot explain the “birth” of the universe using reasons that only apply to an already-existing universe (ie. using the laws of physics), then a supernatural explanation (since “natural” refers to an already-existing universe) becomes a possibility. But this we don’t even know yet because we don’t know what quantum gravity really looks like.
@Ed
people who claim agnosticism is cowardly/untenable/illogical are in the spirit of tyrants.
Agnostics just don’t have a stick up their ass like atheists/theists.