Don Page is one of the world’s leading experts on theoretical gravitational physics and cosmology, as well as a previous guest-blogger around these parts. (There are more world experts in theoretical physics than there are people who have guest-blogged for me, so the latter category is arguably a greater honor.) He is also, somewhat unusually among cosmologists, an Evangelical Christian, and interested in the relationship between cosmology and religious belief.
Longtime readers may have noticed that I’m not very religious myself. But I’m always willing to engage with people with whom I disagree, if the conversation is substantive and proceeds in good faith. I may disagree with Don, but I’m always interested in what he has to say.
Recently Don watched the debate I had with William Lane Craig on “God and Cosmology.” I think these remarks from a devoted Christian who understands the cosmology very well will be of interest to people on either side of the debate.
Open letter to Sean Carroll and William Lane Craig:
I just ran across your debate at the 2014 Greer-Heard Forum, and greatly enjoyed listening to it. Since my own views are often a combination of one or the others of yours (though they also often differ from both of yours), I thought I would give some comments.
I tend to be skeptical of philosophical arguments for the existence of God, since I do not believe there are any that start with assumptions universally accepted. My own attempt at what I call the Optimal Argument for God (one, two, three, four), certainly makes assumptions that only a small fraction of people, and perhaps even only a small fraction of theists, believe in, such as my assumption that the world is the best possible. You know that well, Sean, from my provocative seminar at Caltech in November on “Cosmological Ontology and Epistemology” that included this argument at the end.
I mainly think philosophical arguments might be useful for motivating someone to think about theism in a new way and perhaps raise the prior probability someone might assign to theism. I do think that if one assigns theism not too low a prior probability, the historical evidence for the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus can lead to a posterior probability for theism (and for Jesus being the Son of God) being quite high. But if one thinks a priori that theism is extremely improbable, then the historical evidence for the Resurrection would be discounted and not lead to a high posterior probability for theism.
I tend to favor a Bayesian approach in which one assigns prior probabilities based on simplicity and then weights these by the likelihoods (the probabilities that different theories assign to our observations) to get, when the product is normalized by dividing by the sum of the products for all theories, the posterior probabilities for the theories. Of course, this is an idealized approach, since we don’t yet have _any_ plausible complete theory for the universe to calculate the conditional probability, given the theory, of any realistic observation.
For me, when I consider evidence from cosmology and physics, I find it remarkable that it seems consistent with all we know that the ultimate theory might be extremely simple and yet lead to sentient experiences such as ours. A Bayesian analysis with Occam’s razor to assign simpler theories higher prior probabilities would favor simpler theories, but the observations we do make preclude the simplest possible theories (such as the theory that nothing concrete exists, or the theory that all logically possible sentient experiences occur with equal probability, which would presumably make ours have zero probability in this theory if there are indeed an infinite number of logically possible sentient experiences). So it seems mysterious why the best theory of the universe (which we don’t have yet) may be extremely simple but yet not maximally simple. I don’t see that naturalism would explain this, though it could well accept it as a brute fact.
One might think that adding the hypothesis that the world (all that exists) includes God would make the theory for the entire world more complex, but it is not obvious that is the case, since it might be that God is even simpler than the universe, so that one would get a simpler explanation starting with God than starting with just the universe. But I agree with your point, Sean, that theism is not very well defined, since for a complete theory of a world that includes God, one would need to specify the nature of God.
For example, I have postulated that God loves mathematical elegance, as well as loving to create sentient beings, so something like this might explain both why the laws of physics, and the quantum state of the universe, and the rules for getting from those to the probabilities of observations, seem much simpler than they might have been, and why there are sentient experiences with a rather high degree of order. However, I admit there is a lot of logically possible variation on what God’s nature could be, so that it seems to me that at least we humans have to take that nature as a brute fact, analogous to the way naturalists would have to take the laws of physics and other aspects of the natural universe as brute facts. I don’t think either theism or naturalism solves this problem, so it seems to me rather a matter of faith which makes more progress toward solving it. That is, theism per se cannot deduce from purely a priori reasoning the full nature of God (e.g., when would He prefer to maintain elegant laws of physics, and when would He prefer to cure someone from cancer in a truly miraculous way that changes the laws of physics), and naturalism per se cannot deduce from purely a priori reasoning the full nature of the universe (e.g., what are the dynamical laws of physics, what are the boundary conditions, what are the rules for getting probabilities, etc.).
In view of these beliefs of mine, I am not convinced that most philosophical arguments for the existence of God are very persuasive. In particular, I am highly skeptical of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which I shall quote here from one of your slides, Bill:
- If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause
which brought the universe into existence. - The universe began to exist.
- Therefore, there is a transcendent cause which brought the
universe into existence.
I do not believe that the first premise is metaphysically necessary, and I am also not at all sure that our universe had a beginning. (I do believe that the first premise is true in the actual world, since I do believe that God exists as a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence, but I do not see that this premise is true in all logically possible worlds.)
I agree with you, Sean, that we learn our ideas of causation from the lawfulness of nature and from the directionality of the second law of thermodynamics that lead to the commonsense view that causes precede their effects (or occur at the same time, if Bill insists). But then we have learned that the laws of physics are CPT invariant (essentially the same in each direction of time), so in a fundamental sense the future determines the past just as much as the past determines the future. I agree that just from our experience of the one-way causation we observe within the universe, which is just a merely effective description and not fundamental, we cannot logically derive the conclusion that the entire universe has a cause, since the effective unidirectional causation we commonly experience is something just within the universe and need not be extrapolated to a putative cause for the universe as a whole.
However, since to me the totality of data, including the historical evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus, is most simply explained by postulating that there is a God who is the Creator of the universe, I do believe by faith that God is indeed the cause of the universe (and indeed the ultimate Cause and Determiner of everything concrete, that is, everything not logically necessary, other than Himself—and I do believe, like Richard Swinburne, that God is concrete and not logically necessary, the ultimate brute fact). I have a hunch that God created a universe with apparent unidirectional causation in order to give His creatures some dim picture of the true causation that He has in relation to the universe He has created. But I do not see any metaphysical necessity in this.
(I have a similar hunch that God created us with the illusion of libertarian free will as a picture of the true freedom that He has, though it might be that if God does only what is best and if there is a unique best, one could object that even God does not have libertarian free will, but in any case I would believe that it would be better for God to do what is best than to have any putative libertarian free will, for which I see little value. Yet another hunch I have is that it is actually sentient experiences rather than created individual `persons’ that are fundamental, but God created our experiences to include beliefs that we are individual persons to give us a dim image of Him as the one true Person, or Persons in the Trinitarian perspective. However, this would take us too far afield from my points here.)
On the issue of whether our universe had a beginning, besides not believing that this is at all relevant to the issue of whether or not God exists, I agreed almost entirely with Sean’s points rather than yours, Bill, on this issue. We simply do not know whether or not our universe had a beginning, but there are certainly models, such as Sean’s with Jennifer Chen (hep-th/0410270 and gr-qc/0505037), that do not have a beginning. I myself have also favored a bounce model in which there is something like a quantum superposition of semiclassical spacetimes (though I don’t really think quantum theory gives probabilities for histories, just for sentient experiences), in most of which the universe contracts from past infinite time and then has a bounce to expand forever. In as much as these spacetimes are approximately classical throughout, there is a time in each that goes from minus infinity to plus infinity.
In this model, as in Sean’s, the coarse-grained entropy has a minimum at or near the time when the spatial volume is minimized (at the bounce), so that entropy increases in both directions away from the bounce. At times well away from the bounce, there is a strong arrow of time, so that in those regions if one defines the direction of time as the direction in which entropy increases, it is rather as if there are two expanding universes both coming out from the bounce. But it is erroneous to say that the bounce is a true beginning of time, since the structure of spacetime there (at least if there is an approximately classical spacetime there) has timelike curves going from a proper time of minus infinity through the bounce (say at proper time zero) and then to proper time of plus infinity. That is, there are worldlines that go through the bounce and have no beginning there, so it seems rather artificial to say the universe began at the bounce that is in the middle just because it happens to be when the entropy is minimized. I think Sean made this point very well in the debate.
In other words, in this model there is a time coordinate t on the spacetime (say the proper time t of a suitable collection of worldlines, such as timelike geodesics that are orthogonal to the extremal hypersurface of minimal spatial volume at the bounce, where one sets 
) that goes from minus infinity to plus infinity with no beginning (and no end). Well away from the bounce, there is a different thermodynamic time 
(increasing with increasing entropy) that for 
increases with 
but for 
decreases with (so there becomes more positive as becomes more negative). For example, if one said that is only defined for 
, say, one might have something like
the positive square root of one less than the square of . This thermodynamic time only has real values when the absolute value of the coordinate time , that is, 
, is no smaller than 1, and then increases with .
One might say that begins (at 
) at 
(for one universe that has growing as decreases from -1 to minus infinity) and at 
(for another universe that has growing as increases from +1 to plus infinity). But since the spacetime exists for all real , with respect to that time arising from general relativity there is no beginning and no end of this universe.
Bill, I think you also objected to a model like this by saying that it violates the second law (presumably in the sense that the coarse-grained entropy does not increase monotonically with for all real ). But if we exist for 
(or for 
; there would be no change to the overall behavior if were replaced with 
, since the laws are CPT invariant), then we would be in a region where the second law is observed to hold, with coarse-grained entropy increasing with 
(or with 
if ). A viable bounce model would have it so that it would be very difficult or impossible for us directly to observe the bounce region where the second law does not apply, so our observations would be in accord with the second law even though it does not apply for the entire universe. I think I objected to both of your probability estimates for various things regarding fine tuning. Probabilities depend on the theory or model, so without a definite model, one cannot claim that the probability for some feature like fine tuning is small. It was correct to list me among the people believing in fine tuning in the sense that I do believe that there are parameters that naively are far different from what one might expect (such as the cosmological constant), but I agreed with the sentiment of the woman questioner that there are not really probabilities in the absence of a model. Bill, you referred to using some “non-standard” probabilities, as if there is just one standard. But there isn’t. As Sean noted, there are models giving high probabilities for Boltzmann brain observations (which I think count strongly against such models) and other models giving low probabilities for them (which on this regard fits our ordered observations statistically). We don’t yet know the best model for avoiding Boltzmann brain domination (and, Sean, you know that I am skeptical of your recent ingenious model), though just because I am skeptical of this particular model does not imply that I believe that the problem is insoluble or gives evidence against a multiverse; in any case it seems also to be a problem that needs to be dealt with even in just single-universe models.
Sean, at one point your referred to some naive estimate of the very low probability of the flatness of the universe, but then you said that we now know the probability of flatness is very near unity. This is indeed true, as Stephen Hawking and I showed long ago (“How Probable Is Inflation?” Nuclear Physics B298, 789-809, 1988) when we used the canonical measure for classical universes, but one could get other probabilities by using other measures from other models.
In summary, I think the evidence from fine tuning is ambiguous, since the probabilities depend on the models. Whether or not the universe had a beginning also is ambiguous, and furthermore I don’t see that it has any relevance to the question of whether or not God exists, since the first premise of the Kalam cosmological argument is highly dubious metaphysically, depending on contingent intuitions we have developed from living in a universe with relatively simple laws of physics and with a strong thermodynamic arrow of time.
Nevertheless, in view of all the evidence, including both the elegance of the laws of physics, the existence of orderly sentient experiences, and the historical evidence, I do believe that God exists and think the world is actually simpler if it contains God than it would have been without God. So I do not agree with you, Sean, that naturalism is simpler than theism, though I can appreciate how you might view it that way.
Best wishes,
Don
Simon, I don’t know how simple a comprehensive theory of physics (N) could be. But, by the same reasoning I applied above, it is doubtful to me that it would be simpler than what there is now. But maybe we are like those Ptolemaic astronomers from long ago, with some simpler theory obscured from us by hidden assumptions. As for “permeability”, whatever form that might take, I can only see it complicating any theory S, relative to N. I don’t see a logical impossibility to what you are suggesting; it just seems unlikely.
Instead, I see the most likely scenario being a continued progression of theories N1, N2, N3, etc., each getting closer to N (and getting more and more complex at each step, except for the occasional discontinuity). We may or may not find evidence that compels us to drop out of the N series and adopt S, or at least some first version of S, S1. But the present course seems safer than following the series S1, S2, S3, etc. from the start, while maintaining that we won’t ever switch to the N series unless we find solid evidence against S.
At least the gods of Greek mythology are more falsifiable, since those jerks were almost always (allegedly) intervening. It’s too easy a cop-out if we follow the Christian myth, because for each day that passes without a supernatural event, we just say “I guess He didn’t feel like intervening today. Perhaps tomorrow He will feel differently.” (The present sign on the Universe may well read: “5×10^12 days without a miracle”.)
Don continues to miss my point.
I do not say that you can rule out the resurrection by considering only likelihoods; this gets things exactly backwards.
The resurrection is an (alleged) observation, and observing it rules out the “physics is all there is” hypothesis.
Without the need for priors.
On the other hand, every time we observe something in one of our physics experiments that is consistent with “physics is all there is,” it favors “physics is all there is” just a little bit (likelihood ratio > 1) and undermines the “a god that can cause miracles, including the resurrection” hypothesis just a little bit (likelihood ratio < 1). Likelihood ratios multiply, so as long as we observe, over and over, only independent observations that are consistent with "physics is all there is," the overall likelihood ratio can be made as close to infinity as we desire and, regardless of the priors, the posterior for "physics is all there is" approaches 1 in the limit.
Just a single miracle somewhere along the line refutes "physics is all there is" in favor of a hypothesis including god.
Don seems to think that his observations consistent with physics somehow support his notion of god (who, he claims, can make resurrections happen). He still hasn't made it clear how this can possibly be, in the light of what Brent and I argue. In fact, he hasn't addressed our basic argument at all.
I may well bow out of this in view of Don's failure to address this very basic issue. I have better things to do with my time.
I must admit some concern that we are all so very stuck on the specifics of Don’s analogy when I don’t think he rests his case on it. At worse, it’s a crude attempt for the possibility of considering god as an option, but realistically we would likely cede him this consideration anyway. I do not believe that if, even were the probabilities he mentioned entirely discredited, he would change or even should change his theology (as they are not essential to it).
There are far greater and more integral concerns afoot such as whether or not miracles such as the resurrection possess sufficient evidence to require belief in the first place.
Don, why are you using a single measurement scenario to illustrate this point when Bill Jefferys’ point is about the behavior of the likelihoods as the number of observations is very large? It’s clear that the likelihood function of H_3 over all parameters of the model are going to come into play. If no other state besides E1 is measured in each subsequent experiment n, then the prior (provided it isn’t zero) isn’t going to matter since the posterior is going to approach unity as n goes to infinity. If other states are measured, than the likelihoods for the other sentient states, which are zero, are going to result in a zero posterior probability. Even a single zero likelihood outcome will result in the posterior being zero. The prior certainly wouldn’t have matter at all even if it was unity.
However, this is assuming H_3 is the statement that the 0th state would be observed. This is not how you defined H_3 though. You said H_3 is the hypothesis that there’s only one state, whichever one you observe. The measure is 0 for all sentient experiences i except for the i observed next in the experiment. This isn’t a measure since it’s conditioned on an actual observation, this isn’t a function over the parameter space. Your argument is that the maximum likelihood model is the record of the outcomes of the experiments after these experiments are conducted. That’s not a model. H_3 is paradoxical in your example, it can’t be formally expressed as a likelihood function.
Josh, Don’s argument is that even if miracles are not supernatural, the lack of supernatural events is not a problem if the prior for theism is high. He also makes the claim that continued naturalistic observations will support theism. Bill’s point is that naturalism would be supported for every continued observation that wasn’t miraculous, so the prior probabilities wouldn’t come into play. As far as I can see, Bill’s point is correct, without miracles naturalism is the favored hypothesis. At least that’s my impression, there have been many walls of text here and I can’t claim to remember all of them in detail including my own.
Daniel, if those are the main reasons for continuing this route, then I believe I still disagree (though I may have missed something in the wall of text too hah).
1) You say “[He thinks]… the lack of supernatural events is not a problem if the prior for theism is high.” What’s wrong with this? A theism of sorts may exist that is not highly contingent on supernatural events at some point. That is not the theism of Christianity, certainly, but I think it was clear that Don was speaking very generally and generously if advancing that, only to acknowledge the possibility of theism in some fashion. Granted I don’t think this serves his case at all, but I also don’t find it worthy of mincing words.
2) Also “He also makes the claim that continued naturalistic observations will support theism.” I didn’t take this the way you did. It only seemed to me that he argued that continued consistent, simplistic, and orderly naturalistic observations would be consistent with that of a creator (it certainly would). I don’t think he meant to prove theism from this. If he did, then he is having his cake and eating it too. If we really felt this was his point, that both an entirely naturalistic world and also one with miracles supported theism, then we should not be in discussion with him for nothing could convince him wrong. I’m willing to give him, at least as a scientist and for sake of discussion, a greater benefit of the doubt.
Richard
Thanks for the thoughts. I really don’t know, and I’m not seriously expecting mainstream particle physicists to actively search for theories with supernatural input parameters or ‘vulnerabilities’. They have plenty to sort out already.
My non-too-educated guess is that if GUT/ToE progresses in a really substantial manner, it is either going to get more complex still, and/or use math(s) we don’t have yet.
None of which means I don’t believe in the supernatural….
Josh,
1) There’s nothing wrong with this if it’s not a supernatural theism, I just don’t think that’s what Don is advocating. He believes Jesus is the son of God.
2) I think he’s putting forth a stronger claim than consistency, but again that’s my read of it. Bill Jefferys obviously agrees with your assertion we shouldn’t be arguing haha.
Paul, don’t know if you’re still visiting, and others
Regarding the supernatural, I was lent a book today written by a practicing Yale cardiologist, Chauncey Crandall IV. ‘Raising the Dead’. Interesting reading.
To sum up: we need a miracle. Not a hearsay account of one, one that occurs with the cameras rolling in a controlled environment under pre-specified conditions. If you are going to heal people, we’ll pick the patients and see how well you do vs. placebo. You may as well apply for James Randi’s million-dollar prize and get rich at the same time.
Without that, science, which requires replicatable, statistically-significant data, must continue to rely on naturalism. That’s the whole point of science and how it makes progress. Harsh as it may seem, strict standards of verification drive human thinking towards truth just as natural selection drives evolution.
There might be an alternate where someone proves that a natural, self-running universe with a creator is somehow simpler than just the universe itself but to me that would also be a miracle deserving of the Randi prize (probably a Nobel Prize too).
Until then, of course we are each free to think “whatever it takes to get you through the night,” as my friend Mario says, but it won’t be science.
-What physics is over-ridden?
The physics that says that water can’t be turned into wine by any ordinary physics, for example, or that dead people can’t be raised from the dead by any ordinary physics.
-Is the cosmos permeable to the interventions of God, perhaps by some hidden asymmetry?
I don’t even know what you mean by this.
Daniel,
You might want to check out some of my earlier comments. I tried to block quote the parts where Don explicitly mentioned that his actual conviction stems from the resurrection, meanwhile his simplicity arguments would not be able to push him past agnosticism towards god (and in stead just made room for considering god). It’s not so much also that I don’t think we should be bantering back and forth, but rather that we should cut to the chase. If the cornerstone of Don’s theology rests on the existence of such miracles, that should be the main point of examination.
—
JimV, I believe you have the crux of the matter.
Bill Jefferys, I’m sorry to have been missing your point while trying to correct your confusion about my H_3, which was the hypothesis that even before E_1 was observed, its probability was unity; if this is still confusing, I could replace P(E_1|H_3) = 1 by P(E_1|H_3) = 0.999999 to show explicitly that I do not mean P(E_1|H_3,E_1), which of course is 1 but is not what I meant.
Oh, before trying to address Bill’s point, I should respond to Daniel Kerr’s question, “Don, why are you using a single measurement scenario to illustrate this point when Bill Jefferys’ point is about the behavior of the likelihoods as the number of observations is very large?” I am taking E_1 to be the conscious awareness or knowledge of all previous observations, so that effectively I am combining a large number of observations into one. Of course, the more information there is in E_1 (say from the conscious awareness of records of many past observations), the more complex it may be and the lower the prior probability for the maximum-likelihood hypothesis H_3 that only this combined E_1 has positive probability.
Bill’s point that I have not adequately addressed is, I think, that the more we observe the laws of physics to be obeyed, the greater the likelihood that they are always obeyed. I would object that this depends on the priors.
For example, suppose one has a discrete set of N observations (which I could combine into one observation E_1, but I need not do that here) that each either obeys the laws of physics or not, and suppose that one assumes that for each observation the probability is p that the laws of physics are obeyed, with no correlations between the n observations, and finally assume the prior probability distribution that p is uniformly distributed between 0 and 1. This gives zero prior probability that p is exactly 1, so no matter how many times N (assumed to remain finite) the laws of physics are observed to be obeyed without exception, the posterior probability that p is exactly 1 remains zero. I seem to remember that the posterior expectation value for p after N such observations is (N+1)/(N+2), but I don’t have time to check this now. This of course approaches 1 as N is taken to be arbitrarily large, but it never reaches 1. Roughly, it would say that if one found that the laws of physics are obeyed N times in a row without fail, with this prior one might expect the first failure to occur after order N more observations.
Now one might object that one should assign a positive prior to p having the value exactly one, and I agree that would be plausible for the prior, but it is by no means demanded, since the priors are unavoidably subjective. It is only by making such a prior that one can get any positive posterior probability for p = 1 from any finite sequence of observations, no matter how large.
In the case of the Resurrection, my basic hypothesis (to which I assign a positive prior that it not extremely small) is that God does what is best, and that this best balances elegance of laws of physics with increasing creaturely happiness by means that could include the Resurrection of an incarnated Person of the Godhead. Perhaps there is no good reason for this Resurrection to occur more than once for humans here on Earth. Then one would not expect this miracle to occur more than once here on Earth. Therefore, the Resurrection is perfectly consistent with God’s employing elegant laws of physics most of the time. Observing more and more cases apart from the Resurrection in which the laws of physics are upheld does not reduce the posterior probability that the Resurrection occurred, unless one assumes a prior probability that would exclude this possibility.
Bill Jefferys
‘-What physics is over-ridden?’
Apologies, a bit of a hasty comment on my part. I was actually thinking; suppose resurrection does not violate our known fundamental physics in the sense that mass/energy and even most molecular structure might be conserved, at least for a time, if we consider the body and its vicinity.
I was also thinking that the paradigms that involve new life emerging are similar in some ways to resurrection; paradigms like reproduction, and evolution if you believe it.
Evolution and conscious life itself are high level paradigms. Evolution is postulated based on macro world observations. Physics is seen as conserved, but orchestrated by high level processes. We use a high level paradigm out of necessity because of the complexity. You could say emergent high level processes are at work. I was thinking that similarly the supernatural could perhaps just be categorized as a high level paradigm which in some cases might not violate fundamental physics.
In reality physical laws differ in category, being grouped by organisational level of matter. Some physics is approximate semi-empirical modelling of bulk matter, e.g. Boyle’s Law, Bernouilli’s principle. Seems to me that most higher level laws are actually based on statistical assumptions.
There are obviously big problems with what I said if one seeks to include all possible supernatural events. Water into wine involves different atoms and molecules, and the rearrangement of fundamental particles that would involve would at the very least mean massive sigma departures.
‘-Is the cosmos permeable to the interventions of God, perhaps by some hidden asymmetry?
I don’t even know what you mean by this.’
Presumably you understand the first bit, that I believe it is possible that an ‘outside the cosmos’ agent could intervene via a hidden mechanism. I was wondering whether a successful ToE outcome might involve some arbitrary variables or statistical processes which, if accessible to the ‘outside the cosmos’ entity would allow that being to influence/intervene in a way which seems highly abnormal to us.
Even using Standard Model thinking as a starting point, I thought that it might be possible that undiscovered high energy field operators accessible to this outside operator could act on asymmetries in fundamental particles.
“By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.”
(Heb 11:3)
Josh, March 30, 2015 at 8:33 am, raised some questions he asked me to respond to when I get back, but I shall try during free moments here.
First, Josh asked, “If both naturalism and theism contained within themselves equally viable explanations and predictive power for the ‘miracles’ we see, shouldn’t we bias ourselves towards naturalism?”
I would think we should bias ourselves toward whatever theory that fits the observations (high likelihood) that is also the simplest (high priors when using, for example, Occam’s razor). More precisely, we should favor the theory that gives the largest product of the likelihood and the prior (the largest posterior probability).
However, because the priors are subjective (even if we all subjectively agree to use Occam’s razor and favor simpler theories), we can come to different conclusions. I personally think theism is simpler than naturalism, helping to explain better (1) why we have the particular laws of nature that we do, and (2) why we have the historical evidence for miracles, particularly the Resurrection.
Josh may well be right when he writes, “For instance, we may all be actually agreeing about the application of Occam’s, just not which theory has the better explanatory power.” I think most of agree to use Occam’s razor, though I think there is a lot of disagreement as to how to rank the simplicity of different theories.
Second, Josh asked, “What makes the miraculous claims of Jesus different from other historical and modern supernatural claims in regards to the evidence available? I belief this is important as I presume Don would forfeit his Christianity if the resurrection of Jesus were sufficiently invalidated and that we should reconsider naturalism if it was sufficiently upheld.”
There are many reasons that I cannot explain fully now, but one main reason is that the historical records of reports of the Resurrection seem to be a quite fitting confirmation of what was reported as Jesus claims about Himself. When I read the accounts, they make much more sense as stories handed down from eyewitnesses than as stories made up. (Just to give one minor example, I doubt that stories made up by early church leaders would portray Jesus’ apostles as being so thick-headed about some of the things Jesus said as they are portrayed to be in the Gospels.)
Indeed, I would forfeit my Christianity if the resurrection of Jesus were sufficiently invalidated. If, for example, the body of Jesus were found in a tomb proved to be his, and not just one of the many others named Yeshua at the time (say by being in a group with tombs marked with sufficient evidence to be almost certainly those of the right Joseph and Mary, and with DNA evidence to show they were his parents), I would regard Christianity to be discredited. (I might still think theism is simpler than naturalism, and I might still think many of Jesus’ moral teachings were worth following, but I would no longer believe in the God of the New Testament.)
Don, that was a very clear response, and I think I have a better idea of where we disagree now.
I’m in surprising agreement with much of what you say, but I think this part is where we would quibble:
“I personally think theism is simpler than naturalism, helping to explain better (1) why we have the particular laws of nature that we do, and (2) why we have the historical evidence for miracles, particularly the Resurrection.”
Point (2) would certainly make theism a simpler theory I believe if we agree that the quality of evidence exists. I think most of us would take case with Point (1) though.
I’ll grant that if we strip god, in definition, of many flavors and simply say that he is that which maximizes the well-being of conscious entities, it sounds simple, but there are issues with this in any metric of simplicity such as:
-Why specifically conscious entities?
-Why entities at all?
-Why well-being rather than misery or ambivalence?
-What is a functioning definition of ‘maximal well-being’?
-Are there multiple solutions to ‘maximal well-being,’ and if so, why this specific one?
-If there are not multiple solutions to ‘maximal well-being,’ why do we feel confident that this is indeed the maximized one?
So god must at least be complex enough to favor conscious entities existing and being ‘happy’. I would argue that this is no simple thing at all. But if I cede that, the idea of a maximized happiness really catches us. If there are many ways to do this and god selects one of them, unless god employs a multiverse, then god must be quite complex. If there is only one way to do this OR we do suppose god’s multiverse of maximal well-being, then by what evidence do we believe this really is a maximized one? I personally would like to see you cede that on this matter you simply have faith that this is so.
Given the problem of evil and the numerous books and real life testaments to it (personally I enjoy Candide by Voltaire), it’s hard to imagine that this is indeed the best of possible worlds and that it couldn’t be made arbitrarily better. If even by say 1%.
As for the resurrection, I don’t understand why what you claim is unique or different from other supernatural testimonies held as fiction. Good fiction is indeed consistent and believable. It’s believability, however, only establishes plausibility, not veracity. Moreover, have you read the other religious texts and other myths? When I did, I saw that Jesus’ story really wasn’t all that unique in terms of its credulity. Even better than comparing it to other myths would be comparing it to modern day UFO sightings (which have often coherence, physical evidence, consistency, etc.). So believing on these accounts you’ve mentioned seems to smell strong of confirmation bias. It’s a huge, specific, complex claim, and requires a lot to get it out of the water. Just as you might wish for some pretty damning evidence against Jesus’s resurrection to be swayed otherwise, you must remember that your theology is making the claim, and thus the burden of such strong evidence rests on you. Small examples can’t suffice here if you are interested in convincing anyone, and arguably in holding intellectual honesty in oneself as well.
Dr. Page,
I think we could agree that humans are quite susceptible to illusions. Our sensors and processor (brain) have many flaws that can result in innocent illusion, and can be exploited by nefarious people for less than innocent illusion. We now know that eye witness testimony is highly suspect in many conditions even if the testimony is collected within minutes. This is today when we have awareness of these flaws and much science to debunk illusions.
Imagine the situation 2000 years ago. Human susceptibility to illusion must have been much greater.
The evidence you offer for resurrection is based on testimony collected decades after the event. Can you feel comfortable that a resurrection took place given the state of human understanding and the large gaps in time?
I can understand most of your argument if applied to Theism, but as applied to Christianity it feels like extreme special pleading.
Josh wrote, “So god must at least be complex enough to favor conscious entities existing and being ‘happy’” (and, I might add, to value mathematical simplicity in universes He might create). I totally agree. I do not see how, even in principle, to deduce everything from nothing, or even from an assumption as simple as the hypothesis that at least something concrete (not logically necessary) exists.
Back in my March 23 9:53 am comment, I wrote that “I postulated that it might require M bits of information (again, in some unknown formal language) to specify the full nature of God.” Earlier in this comment, I wrote that “I supposed the actual set [of the laws of physics] required N bits of information to specify.” These N bits would be explained by the M bits if indeed God totally creates and determines everything concrete other than Himself and if what He creates is determined by His full nature, as I personally assume (which, by the way, rules out in my mind libertarian free will by creatures such as ourselves, who I believe are totally determined by God).
So whether theism or naturalism is simpler in my mind reduces to the question of whether M or N is smaller. Of course I do not know for certain. I do recognize that M is not trivial, but neither is N.
At present probably the best candidate for the dynamical part of the laws of physics (how things evolve) is superstring/M theory (though certainly our knowledge of it is nowhere near complete, so we do not actually know the full dynamical laws), which does have the enormous simplicity of having no undetermined parameters (numbers that could in principle require an infinite amount of information to specify all of their digits). However, it does seem to require a fair bit of discrete information (most of which we do not yet know) to specify the mathematical form of superstring/M theory (e.g., to distinguish it from many other possibilities, such as saying the universe is empty classical Minkowski spacetime).
Furthermore, even if we had the full dynamical laws of superstring/M theory and if those were correct for our universe, there still are questions remaining for the complete laws of physics: (1) What are the boundary (e.g., initial) conditions for these dynamical laws? (2) What is the connection between what is described by the dynamical laws and sentient experiences?
In quantum theory, the boundary conditions are given by the quantum state. Hartle and Hawking have made a conceptually simple proposal for what that might be, though Leonard Susskind and I have pointed out technical difficulties that remain to be overcome.
We know even much less about the connection between quantum physics and sentient experiences, though our perception of having similar gustatory parts of our experiences while eating similar food, for example, suggests that there may well be simple unknown laws for this psychophysical parallelism. I have suggested the framework in which the measures of sentient experiences are given by the expectation values, in the quantum state of the universe, of positive quantum operators that each correspond to a particular sentient experience. However, this is nowhere near a complete theory, since we know virtually nothing of what these particular quantum operators are. But it is conceivable that there is some relatively simple law for them.
So when we include the dynamical laws of physics, the boundary conditions, and the connection with consciousness, it certainly seems that the number of bits N required to specify the complete set of the laws of physics without invoking God would not be entirely trivial, even if one left aside describing miracles such as the Resurrection. Therefore, it seems highly plausible (though by no means certain) that the number of bits M required to specify the full nature of God (from which would follow, in my view, a complete specification of what He creates) is less than N, so that a full theistic theory would be simpler than a full naturalistic theory.
I can certainly understand that many others might disagree with me. But I do not think it is correct to say that M is additional information, over and above N, that needs to be specified, since if M is specified, it would imply the N bits of information for the full laws of physics in our universe. That is, assuming that indeed M is less than N, the N bits of information in the laws of physics could be compressed to the M bits of information for the nature of God under a theistic description, but not if theism is not assumed to be true.
Josh, you also wrote, “If there is only one way to do this [maximize happiness] OR we do suppose god’s multiverse of maximal well-being, then by what evidence do we believe this really is a maximized one? I personally would like to see you cede that on this matter you simply have faith that this is so.”
I do cede that this is simply a matter of faith, but it does seem to be a simple hypothesis that is not obviously wrong when I consider maximizing total happiness, God’s as well as the happiness within His creation. I agree that the happiness within creation could have been increased, but it seems plausible to me this would be at the cost of decreasing God’s happiness even more, say by the mathematical ugliness of the magic He might have to perform to increase human happiness.
Don
I am musing over your passage on ‘God’s complexity is M bits, the physics behind the cosmos is N bits’. You are I think postulating that M could perhaps be less than N. I am assuming you are talking about conventional binary bits?
I was curious that you consider the possibility that if God is real (we are agreed on that one!), that his information content could be smaller than that of the physics behind the cosmos.
It seems to me that everything hinges on the phrase you used: ‘unknown formal language’; used to interpret these bits. Do you mean something loosely equivalent to a computer language? If the bits of data are a pure metric of information on their own, how do you see God being able to give rise to a set of laws more complex than himself?
I see self-consistency between your sentience beliefs: that if there is no real freewill available to humanity, there follows a theological disposition towards universalism. I would then think that Universalism would be mandated for God if he is to remain good. I lean towards Armenianism and a growing measure of true delegated sonship. That, interestingly, could lead to more information of sorts, but I feel it all depends on what the bits really mean.
I am a mediocre physicist so apologize in advance for my previous ramblings in your area of specialism, I got an Applied Physics 2-2 at Durham in the UK.
Don, I agree with you that your case for theism is plausible (“M simpler than N”).
I also agree that each person must make their own choice on this as realistically we know too little about the universe to make either case definitively. Even further, I agree that were any miracle (beyond statistical ones) to be true, then that might well be sufficient to push one over to believe M a likely simpler hypothesis. Without the support of miracles, however, it would seem your faith in this (of which I appreciate your acknowledgement) would be misplaced. I would argue that any “faith” at all is misplaced, but I would wager your definition of the word would subscribe more to a rough commitment to an idea upon consistent evidence (but without full evidence), rather than the typical of believing just because we want to.
Those caveats said, aside from miracles, it would seem your willingness to commit faith to “M is simpler than N” would be odd. You acknowledge our lack of knowledge in cosmogony as a means of acknowledging how naturalism alone could be quite complex, but isn’t god equally if not more culpable for this? It would seem to me that we would know so little about god, the origin of his biases, and the functional operation of his biases, that the free parameters are conceivably blown out of the water. This is the point I was making earlier about god’s complexity–not that him having any complexity at all is an issue, but rather that we are at a loss of gauging his complexity in any meaningful way in any system, and so that would not seem a hypothesis to warrant much confidence if argued on those terms.
Nonetheless, it still seems to me the crucial point is Jesus. One can only argue against another faith so far as there are integrally subjective matters (i.e. when does one commit to an idea?). However, whether the resurrection occurred or not is luckily an evidential matter, and moreover it is the lever-point of the argument. The evidence, however, I have not yet seen.
Prof. Page:
I have been reading your debates with other readers (many of them atheists) with lot of interest. In the debate, I am on your theistic side. To me it seems so much arrogant and stupid to argue for a totally insignificant human ( made out of matter which is less than 4% of the universe ) that he/she can understand everything in the universe by his/her limited brain and logic and that there is nothing beyond his/her insignificant sensory perceptions!In my view, we do not know laws of nature in our universe, much less in multiverse.There is not even remote comparison between M and N! But from my perspective (Hindu) the debate is going in the wrong direction. It is impossible for a Hindu to believe that omnipotent God would suffer, no matter how compassionate he is. From the philosophy of Karma (Action and reaction of physics!!) you and only you would bear consequences of your actions, not your spouse, children, parents, friends or anybody else in the universe! I would appreciate your comment on this problem.
What “debate” is going on here? This fellow writing about his beliefs is, when he is doing that, not a scientist writing about science. Why would anyone care about what he (or anyone else) believes? He is talking about something that he believes in, but what is that “something?” No one, him either, knows what he is talking about. This is laughable.
Dear Kashyap Vasavada,
Thanks for your insightful comments. As you say is the Hindu belief, so many medieval Christian philosophers and theologians also thought that God was impassive and did not suffer. However, I interpret the primary source of the Christian faith, the Bible, differently. I do believe that God sacrificed and suffered on our account, particularly in the Incarnation of Jesus (God become human) and the resulting agony on the Cross (not only the physical agony, but the spiritual agony of bearing our sins and of being forsaken by God the Father as Jesus felt the full separation from God that sin brings). I also believe God wants us to sacrifice ourselves and suffer on the behalf of others, whether or not we are recompensed. (And in any case I believe the joys awaiting us when resurrected to be with Jesus for eternity are not in any way earned by our goodness but are purely gifts of grace from God.)
@Don and those who believe
I can say with absolute certainty that God does exist from personal experience, I only wish that there was some way to prove it, unfortunately a Christ experience is impossible to prove, it was a heart to heart meeting, almost face to face. Let’s say when Christ reaches out and touches your heart it almost kills you with its power. No physics involved. I will add though that believing in a Creator is not enough, living a life of Love of neighbor is an absolute necessity whatever you may believe, for the benefit of the world we live in and if you are Christian the path to salvation and for those who aren’t it is still necessary.
I don’t think I know how the universe came to be or most/all of it’s current workings. What I know are some models that match objective test within measurement error.
So there is a small amount we know by that scientific method, and lot’s we don’t know. I would expect that most scientifically minded people reserve knowledge and strong belief to items that have been verified to some reasonable degree. Basing an entire worldview on a premise that has scant credible objective evidence (resurrection) is hard to accept, especially if your approach to knowing/learning follows a scientific methodology.
A question for the believers in God: Are there other areas in your life where you base significant belief/knowing in objectively unverified premises? Feelings, etc. obviously don’t qualify, our individual perceptions are untrustworthy and subjective.
Countless people have been crucified, and much worse, throughout human history. Jesus’s purported sacrifice is nothing exceptional to human experience. Anyone, god or human, who would visit brutal punishment on an innocent for “sins” commited by others is a bad role model. Anyone who thinks that the sacrifice of an innocent in their stead can or should absolve them of their sins is not exhibiting admirable ethics. I doubt any of the believers taking part in this conversation would go along with something like that if they were to find themselves in such a situation during their daily lives.
If you claim the Christian Bible is the primary source of the Christian religion, claiming that Christianity is a religion of love is not reasonably supportable. Even claiming that modern Christianity as practiced in the present, right now, is a religion of love is not reasonably supportable. I do, however, hope that the interpretation of Christianity as a religion of love continues to develope and expand to become the norm among Christians.