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
James Bonilla writes: “Because there is no close questioning of Jesus on his claims.” I don’t see how that claim is supported. Did he not read about the incredulity of the apostle Thomas? The one who wanted direct evidence of Jesus resurrection (it is irrelevant whether atheists and non-Christians believe this).
James is applying 21st century culture to Palestine in 63BCE. I can understand James’ dismay at the lack of investigative journalism in those ancient days, compared to nowadays, where for example we see people demanding evidence of President Obama’s birth certificate – the real thing. But to a Palestinian Jew in those days, doing a 60 Minutes on Jesus would have been unheard of because he was seen openly daily doing good and wondrous works for all to see. And if he could make lepers clean, healed the sick, he had already established a certain credibility long before he walked on the sea. All of this is just to make the point.
It’s not that people in those days were naïve, for when it comes to basic human nature, nothing has really changed over the many centuries (I noted the skepticism of Thomas). If one lied in those days, the truth got around faster than Twitter. If you were a fraud, you’d have been exposed or chased out of the village or town. And yet I haven’t read of any account written within 100 years after Jesus’ death that he was a con artist.
Let me steal a point from an article by eminent physicist Aron Wall, for it all boils down to plausibility. Ref: http://www.wall.org/~aron/evidence.htm. Today one speaks of the assassination of Julius Caesar based on the accounts of extant Roman historians, but not the accounts of the only eyewitnesses, the Roman Senators. Do we know how the historians sourced their information? And if we don’t know, is that sufficient reason to dismiss the historical event?
By the way, from the comments I have read in this blog post I see writers engaging in ad hominems and the behavior is uncalled for. Don Page is portrayed as one besieged by atheists (in atheist territory). Don is a “big boy” and I’m not worried for him.
TY, I’m not sure if you’re surreptitiously implying my previous comment about limiting number of topics as an ad hominem, but if so that was far from the intention.
You bring an interesting point though, I think, if you’re noting that many accepted historical facts are often based on hearsay of sorts. Nonetheless, we can first acknowledge that many of these events also have corroborating archaeological/physical evidence. Second, many events are quite less extraordinary comparative to claims like the resurrection, and so we might ask for less to be convinced. Third, and most importantly, a general historical consensus is not necessarily a truth commitment. We may accept the validity of events, such as specifics of the life of Alexander the Great, on a sort of non-compete terms–nevertheless, in practice, our certainty of these events are not at all so strong as to originate or hinge a worldview from them (even though widely accepted historically).
I think maybe a fair few have claimed to be God. However pretty much no-one still takes them seriously.
There are plenty of people with sound, or even sought after, character and judgement who believe Christ was and is God.
I feel that anyone using the web for information and opinion still has to make the same sort of validity judgments as ever, although more knowledge is available. Also for many, other ques of human communication are muted by hiding behind a computer display.
I just recommend an open look at evidence for and against Jesus, voiced by both sides. His claim to be creator, everlasting God, and humble and compassionate saviour of mankind, are of such final magnitude that one cannot reasonably overlook them.
Someone read ‘The God Delusion’ and thought it was so patently lob-sided he decided to go to a local church one Sunday. He came back a believer in Christ.
We have all seen things in the first reports of news incidents which turn out to be false, and heard different versions of the same story from different acquaintances who were involved. We have read stories about fictional characters such as Paul Bunyan and Mike Fink which contain authentic details of lumberjack and riverboat life and mention actual geographical locations. Reginald Selkirk has made a convincing case in previous comments that there is no objective, third-party account of the life of Jesus, only hearsay accounts from believers. This does not prove those accounts are false/exaggerated, but it proves, based on the examples cited above, that they could well be. How many, other than Mormons, accept their accounts of the Angel Moroni? How many, other than scientologists, accept their accounts of Xenu?
“And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.
2 (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)
3 And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.”
Wikipedia says:
——————
No source outside Luke Gospel mentions a census of the Roman world covering the entire population (the phrase “all the world” is generally taken to mean the Roman world): the censuses of Augustus covered Roman citizens only.[29] Nor was it the practice in Roman censuses to require people to return to their ancestral homes.[30][31][32][33][34][35] Ben Witherington suggests that a census carried out by Herod the Great might have followed a different approach.[36]
In 1886, the theologian Emil Schürer, in his study, Geschichte des judischen Volks im Zeitalter Jesu Christi (A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ), closely criticised the traditional view. He noted five points which showed, he argued, that the Luke account could not be historically accurate:
Nothing is known in history of a general census by Augustus;
In a Roman census Joseph would not have had to travel to Bethlehem, and Mary would not have had to travel at all;
No Roman census would have been made in Judea during the reign of Herod;
Josephus records no such census and it would have been a notable innovation;
Quirinius was not governor of Syria until long after the reign of Herod.[37]
The suggested alternative translations have been described as “implausible” [38] and “almost impossible”.[39]
Most modern scholars explain the disparity as an error on the part of the author of the Gospel,[40][41] concluding that he was more concerned with creating a symbolic narrative than a historical account,[42] and was either unaware of, or indifferent to,[43] the chronological difficulty. In The Birth of the Messiah (1977), a detailed study of the infancy narratives of Jesus, the American scholar Raymond E. Brown concluded that “this information is dubious on almost every score, despite the elaborate attempts by scholars to defend Lucan accuracy.”[44] W. D. Davies and E. P. Sanders ascribe this to simple error: “on many points, especially about Jesus’ early life, the evangelists were ignorant … they simply did not know, and, guided by rumour, hope or supposition, did the best they could”.[45] Fergus Millar suggests that Luke’s narrative was a construct designed to connect Jesus with the house of David.
—————-
I’m not a historian but it seems to me there is plenty of room for doubt about the historical authenticity of the Bible. The above is one small example from thousands. Those of us who find the stories implausible on their faces, as I did in Sunday School, reflect that every word in the Bible was passed down by word of mouth from story-tellers before being written in dead languages, translated, edited, revised, etc., all by fallible human beings. It seems like a deity that wanted us to believe based on good evidence would have used more direct means to convince us of its existence. Some people claim to “feel” this existence; the vast majority of humanity does not, or “feels” some different sort of deity.
Then one looks at the night sky on a clear night in the country and sees thousands of twinkling lights of stars and galaxies and asks could all of this really have been created so that after 13-14 billion years our species could evolve and live out a morality play on this vast stage?
Simon,
You and I are recommending the same thing. I’m largely just saying let’s make sure we hold the same standards to the resurrection as the other claims which we dismiss.
When you say:
“I think maybe a fair few have claimed to be God. However pretty much no-one still takes them seriously.”
That’s pretty much the key. First off, many people do take them seriously (don’t forget the other largely religious 2/3 of the world with its many flavors). Secondly, many of those who don’t take those ‘others’ seriously dismiss Jesus’s claims in the same way.
Josh
There a list here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_have_been_considered_deities
Among major faiths, like Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, I believe only Christianity believes in an incarnate God.
Josh and Simon, a blog in my opinion is not an efficient forum to discuss religion or theology, but it’s your choice. Worse if the purpose is two-way conversation and elucidation. Few are ever swayed by the arguments of a blog; conversely, people “dig in”.
Thank you Don for your “Open letter to Sean Carroll and William Lane Craig”, which is what brought me to Sean Carroll’s website. I respect Sean Carroll’s views although ours is diametrically opposed. I watched his debate with William Craig and I thought he was very professional and gracious. I also respect the views of writers of this blog post with whom I disagreed philosophically and theologically.
If you want a model of civility and coherence, Don’s responses are case studies. I recommend these blogs:
http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/
https://letterstonature.wordpress.com/author/lukebarnes/
Simon,
I’m being pretty liberal in what I’m accepting in that regard, largely because I feel pretty generous in even entertaining that line of argument. What I was seeking for regarding differences between the resurrection and others were not categorical ones but evidential ones. That Jesus directly claims a sort of divinity does not place claims of his works on any higher evidential pedestal. Nonetheless, depending on your flavor of Buddhism or Hinduism, there are divinity or incarnation claims (the lamas, Krishna, etc.), and other emperor cults were certainly not trivial in there time. Moreover, we should also be considering small cults in this claim as popularity is a poor measure of truth.
All of this, however, is beside the point. The prime issue is that the resurrection of Jesus is an impressive claim on which we only have hearsay. Others both ancient and modern have made impressive claims on which we also have hearsay, yet we discredit them (or at least don’t build a worldview around them). Why not Jesus also?
Don Page,
Although I disagree with your theism, I found this post extremely enlightening on the physics (which constituted the vast bulk of the Open Letter), so thank you. You whip off a few quick observations about causation, the Second Law, CPT-invariance, and the fundamental symmetry of causal determination, in the course of agreeing with Sean that the intuitive pull of the Cosmological Argument, felt by many people, is off base. To you and Sean, all of these things probably seem dead obvious. But to me they are an eye opener, and I have tried in this post of my blog to explain these ideas to myself, and to others with a similar level of physics literacy (I’m a mechanical engineer). If you (any physics expert) would be so kind as to look at it and correct any gross errors, or suggest better explanations, I’d appreciate it.
Glad to see the recognition for Hinduism (Krishna) and hopefully Buddhism as well. Let us also add Islam to the mix in terms of supernatural claims. Not only did Mohammed manage to do a lot of the same things that Jesus claimed to be able to do (worth mentioning – climbing to heaven on a horse – this stuff is the hard stuff), he went about actually conquering areas of the world promising [[stuff deleted]].
Glad that somebody else also called out “ad hominem”s in this discussion. There is no place for “ad hominem”s in a blog.
Back to the discussion itself:
James Bonilla writes: “Because there is no close questioning of Jesus on his claims.” I don’t see how that claim is supported. Did he not read about the incredulity of the apostle Thomas? The one who wanted direct evidence of Jesus resurrection (it is irrelevant whether atheists and non-Christians believe this).
James is applying 21st century culture to Palestine in 63BCE. I can understand James’ dismay at the lack of investigative journalism in those ancient days, compared to nowadays, where for example we see people demanding evidence of President Obama’s birth certificate – the real thing. But to a Palestinian Jew in those days, doing a 60 Minutes on Jesus would have been unheard of because he was seen openly daily doing good and wondrous works for all to see. And if he could make lepers clean, healed the sick, he had already established a certain credibility long before he walked on the sea. All of this is just to make the point.
I am applying a consistent standard. I would apply the same standard to all other religions – including, say, Islam, Pastafarianism and Scientology. I don’t wish to discuss Islam in this discussion, but am happy to discuss Scientology and Pastafarianism. To Pastafarians, surely, the doings of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and His Son must be equally impressive.
There is an odd disappearance – in the historical record – of virtually all these miracle-makers, people who can consistently execute miracles. The simplest explanation : those miracles from prior to the modern age were most likely faked. Jesus must have had some of the same skills that magicians today do.
> James Bonilla writes: “Because there is no close questioning of Jesus on his claims.”
> I don’t see how that claim is supported. Did he not read about the incredulity
> of the apostle Thomas?
I know about this issue you are bringing up and am quite familiar with the part of the Christian literature that deals with the incredulity of Thomas.
However, Thomas did not :
(1) set any clear standards for what should be expected out of a miracle.
(2) ask for repeatable experiments (“repeatable experiments” in double quotes, if you will).
(3) employ any scientific measures such as clocks and tape to verify even a single miracle.
I do not wish to discuss Islam in this discussion, but can say that, with some help from scientists, some of these Pastafarians can be made to accept that a scientific standard of “repeatable experiment”s should be considered the standard for the claims from their religion as well.
Happy Easter to all!
I’ve had a wonderful Easter Day walking 7.5 miles, 5:30-7:40 a.m., from our workshop location near Madley (where I am without a car) to attend 8:00 and 9:30 Easter services in Hereford and then taking a bus back to Madley for an 11:00 service there, and finally walking back to the workshop location just in time for lunch. But in the early afternoon the internet was down, so I went on another walk to bushwhack through brambles up a wooded hill to total about 25 kilometers walked today. Then with social events this evening at our workshop, I have not had time to respond today to comments, though I have appreciated reading them just now after 10:30 p.m. here. Let’s see whether I have time to respond tomorrow, but it is a busy day with talks, so I can make no promises.
To James, Josh, and their fellow atheists, to theists, Christians, and non-Christians — all humanity regardless of colour or creed — I wish you all a wonderful Easter of that blessed Magician (Christ Jesus), God incarnate, who was born in Bethlehem (the exact date unknown), was crucified, died, was buried, and rose on the third day, witnessed by many, and has been in the peoples’ hearts across the globe for over 2,000 years later.
Like St. Page, I too had a great 10 a.m service — at St Francis of Assisi. It snowed lightly in my area but winter doesn’t like to go away without a fight. I share with you this unique message of forgiveness, faith and hope, and triumph over death (spiritual and physical).
I just want to share that hope and joy with you.
TY wrote: “James is applying 21st century culture to Palestine in 63BCE.”
Well, yes, them’s the breaks. We live in the 21st century and it is reasonable to use 21st century standards to judge evidence, even evidence from the remote past. This is what we do in archaeology, paleontology, and the study of history. It’s too bad that standards of reportage in the first century weren’t up to the standards of the 21st century, but you have to deal with what you’ve got. It just won’t do to wave your hands and say that we should relax our standards to accommodate what we’ve got. That’s not what historians should do. If the evidence is weak, a good historian will point that out and say (if a Bayesian) this is the probability of that hypothesis, this is the probability of an alternative hypothesis, etc. And a good Bayesian won’t stack the deck by using priors to favor the hypothesis that he or she wants to come out on top.
People engaged in religious apologetics don’t behave like good historians. Their purpose is to advocate for a particular position. Which is why I pay such arguments little attention.
Easter greetings to you Bill Jefferys.
On the topic of Easter, I realized I have the theists to thank for all these wonderful holidays we might not get otherwise, hah. So greetings indeed!
@ Josh:
Interesting comment ! You may not know that Hindus have some religious significance for just about every day in the year. So if you were Hindu, you might have 365 days of festivities!!
TY
‘Josh and Simon, a blog in my opinion is not an efficient forum to discuss religion or theology, but it’s your choice. Worse if the purpose is two-way conversation and elucidation. Few are ever swayed by the arguments of a blog; conversely, people “dig in”.’
Judging by your avatar, your faith seems to have made you happier than the rest of us.
I will therefore listen to your advice as soon as I have sorted everyone out.
But…. Prof Page does not believe in choice as a genuine reality. So maybe I’ll choose to ignore your advice after all.
Happy Easter again…one thing I do know, seriously…..Christ is Risen!
Josh (April 4, 2015 at 3:43 pm) wrote the following:
“It is to say that, since the prior is not truly founded on evidence, it should not be used as evidence, and can’t be used to sway further truth claims (especially worldviews). I should caveat that I am not claiming that you are using it as evidence, but I want to make sure you evaluate the resurrection independently, using the same rigors of evidence you would require for any other matter.”
I agree that what is an absolutely prior probability (logically before any observations at all) is before any evidence, so indeed it is not evidence. I don’t see any objective way to set such priors. I am arguing that if one sets the prior for a suitable theistic hypothesis (and I agree “theism” is too broad and ill-defined an hypothesis to be tested, just as “naturalism” is too broad to be tested without a specific hypothesis of what the laws of nature are) not much lower than the prior for a corresponding naturalistic hypothesis, then I think the posterior probability for some particular form of Christian theism would be high. But since each person is free to set his or her own priors, I cannot claim that I have a strong argument for Christianity in the absence of prior assumptions for which by their very nature there can be no evidence. All I can do is argue that analogously there are no compelling arguments against Christianity.
Now, I do agree that theists and atheists often share many priors that are not logically before all evidence, such as beliefs that historical records do indicate something about the past, and that there can be varying degrees of support from varying types of historical evidence. I am certainly not strong on the details of historical evidence, so I can’t give compelling arguments that “Jesus is the only religious leader I know who claimed to be the Son of God and lived a life that supported such a claim.” This is the impression that I have, but I could be corrected, though it would depend on what criteria one used to say a person “lived a life that supported such a claim.”
I also claimed that the evidence for “UFO’s, government conspiracies, bigfoot, etc.” (deliberately leaving out from my list other faiths) is very weak, which is the impression that I have, though again there might be information that I lack that would refute this.
I do believe that the historical evidence for the Resurrection is crucial for Christianity (though also depending crucially on assumptions that one must make that are logically prior to all evidence), so that is indeed an excellent place to focus. Unfortunately, with my commitments to my career in physics and my philosophical interests, I have only had time to consider arguments for the philosophical plausibility of Christianity but am no means an expert in defending the historical evidence for Christianity. I do think one definitely needs to look for other sources for that evidence, since I personally cannot give a full justification of all the evidence that I believe strongly points to Christianity if one adopts suitable prior probabilities.
I hope no-one was offended by my facetious comment.
We are English and from Warwickshire, which is close to Herefordshire, but now live in Cape Town where we celebrated Easter Sunday at the Bay Church in Muizenberg.
St Simon, God gave us humans free will. I’m libertarian or Wesleyan in this sense. Let’s thank God — the personal God whom you and I believe in — people can discuss and debate, with all the conviction in them, AND peacefully (as in the English Parliament). In many parts of the world, you’d be summarily executed. So I say to you: go on and debate.
For those who are lookng for “historicity” and “evidence” related to scripture,, I again cite Progfessor Aron Wall’s article. He has a blog, Undivided Looking, and if you really want a proper discussion, the professor is most willing to take your questions. And he knows his physics! (By the way, there is a reason “looking” comes with the moidifier, “undivided)”.
http://www.wall.org/~aron/evidence.htm
And for rigorous and clearly written essays on Rev Bayes theorm, look up Professor Luke Barnes’blog. He too knows his physics.
https://letterstonature.wordpress.com/2013/10/26/10-nice-things-about-bayes-theorem/
I suggest wrters of this blog read these articles.
St. TY,
I’m with you on the reality of human freewill, as would become clear if you look back through the long string of comments. Indeed I think it is something very special God imputed to us, a part of being made in his image. Prof./St. Don has universalist inclinations and I think he has said here that he does not believe in the reality of human freewill, seeing it as essentially an illusion because God determines everything and wins out over us ultimately. The stuff here deriving from the theorem of the fine statistician Rev. Bayes, I have not followed too closely. Lots of discussion about ‘priories’.
Don, I think I understand you better now and really do need to address the priors issue. There’s a few things to say, so I’ll try and number them:
1) This discussion of priors can be helped if we call them for what they effectively are–biases. Although we wish to eliminate them as much as possible in our lives, I accept that we must conditionally ascribe to some simply in order to function and survive. However, in order to be open to change and better groundings, we must check ourselves. The way to do that is to postpone our priors temporarily and look critically at evidence to see if we can knock holes in our ideas. This should absolutely be done for the resurrection, and I’m firmly convinced it is not. I know your background is physics/philosophy, but as you are making a strong, complicated, positive claim thereon, as well as building a worldview upon it, I would think that you would need to subject it to the extreme prejudice that is testing one’s best held ideas. Given the impact and implications, I don’t see how you could afford to not be well-versed on the issue (including how the issue maintains itself without support of the prior).
2) A Bayesian analysis using priors is not always the best way of inferring truth. Particularly, it is only useful if meaningful calculations can be done. That’s not to say that, given more knowledge, they couldn’t be. It’s to say that currently, regarding the resurrection, we can’t and thereby shouldn’t. What we can talk about meaningfully is standards of evidence and whether that evidence exists.
3) Picking priors is far from an arbitrary matter and should be done with extreme prejudice against the prior hopeful. Since both the theists/atheists seem to agree on simplicity, we’ve used that as a means of applying that prejudice. I’ve already made my argument that god contains such vast undefined regions in his nature as to have an extreme difficulty in claiming any comparative amount of simplicity to naturalism. I would argue that naturalism is simpler as, even without god, we would ascribe to it (with or without god as a prior, we still find natural laws existing in our priors by necessity). Nonetheless, if you were to staunchly claim we know nothing meaningful currently about the true simplicity of either, then why not ascribe faith to the one that could be simpler? By virtue of being an entity, it would seem god must lose out on this, as entities can not be described without a reasonably complex set of rules (meanwhile naturalism could conceivably be a short set of one or two or three, etc.). If you disagree with this and claim utter and absolute agnosticism towards simplicity, then I would argue you should establish neither prior by any argument of simplicity. Ironically though, you would still need to establish some sort of naturalism as a prior if you ever intended to do science. If you still object here, then I’ll likely drop the simplicity argument as it does feel like its beginning to chase its own tail.
4) Another important way to see whether your priors are worthy is if they are useful for making predictions. On this account, I think theism fails the most obviously. For instance, theism alone would not predict an ambivalent, benevolent, or malevolent creator specifically. If you add your prior of maximizing sentient well-being, we are still left with little predictive power. Unless you can somehow show that this universe is of maximal well-being, then it most certainly doesn’t predict our world. Even worse, it does not predict miracles or Christianity. These things may be consistent with such theism, but they are not predicted by it (you would need to show that such theism could only be expressed via those specific miracles in Christianity). Even worse, we are not sure that those events which might be consistent with it occurred without employing our prior! Finally, the theory makes no independently verifiable future predictions. If we are extremely prejudice against holding priors and must have good reason to do so, then it doesn’t seem to me that theism passes this test, especially since even the things it holds as consistent with its theory are also consistent with naturalism (until otherwise verified as supernatural).
To summarize a bit of excessive monologue here– Even though we might employ priors, we should still seek to independently verify the resurrection. Furthermore, we should have a bias against biases of sorts, and in doing so, we find that although we could establish theism as a prior, we are left with little reason to. And for a prior (a bias) to be established, we should have an immensely strong case to do so.
Short comment, adding to what Josh wrote about simplicity.
The criterion I use for simplicity is identical to the one that Jim Berger and I used in our paper on the Bayesian Ockham’s razor. In particular, we regard a hypothesis as simpler if it allows for fewer observational outcomes than another (more complex) hypothesis.
In the present context, and to reinforce what Josh wrote, I classify “physics is all there is” as simpler than a hypothesis that includes a god in addition, simply because introducing a god allows some things to happen (“miracles”) that are not consistent with “physics is all there is”. Things like resurrections, water-into-wine, riding a white horse to heaven as Muhammad is claimed to have done, etc.
So, by this criterion, it is indisputable, in my view, that the “physics is all there is” hypothesis is simpler, and given that a powerful god can do all sorts of things that are inconsistent with physics, vastly simpler than a hypothesis that includes a god.
Of course this is quite apart from my other point, that in the limit of a large amount of data, the combined likelihood for “physics is all there is” against a hypothesis that includes a god approaches infinity, so that regardless of the priors, the posterior probability of “physics is all there is” approaches 1. I do not dispute Don’s point (made by an example that he admits is rather artificial) that priors can be important when the amount of data is small, but that is not the case in my example.
QUESTIONS FOR DON PAGE AND BACK TO COSMOLOGY
Is there an inconsistency in these statements?
Professor Page states in his blog post (above) he is not sure “our universe had a beginning”: “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.)” And “We simply do not know whether or not our universe had a beginning.”
Stephen Hawking states in a Lecture, The Beginning of Time: “In this lecture, I would like to discuss whether time itself has a beginning, and whether it will have an end. All the evidence seems to indicate, that the universe has not existed forever, but that it had a beginning, about 15 billion years ago. This is probably the most remarkable discovery of modern cosmology.” And “The conclusion of this lecture is that the universe has not existed forever. Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago. The beginning of real time, would have been a singularity, at which the laws of physics would have broken down.”
Ref: http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html
What do the physics models suggest?
Professor Aron Wall (Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; previously post-doctoral at UC, Santa Barbara) wrote an excellent survey of the cosmology models and in his recap, and then classified these models as either FOR or AGAIST the question: Did the Universe Begin. (I realise from my own field of study that all theories are provisional, but let’s leave this complication aside for now):
FOR the Universe had a Beginning:
1. Big Bang Cosmology
2. Singularity Theorems (Penrose, Hawkins, et. al)
3. BGV Theorem (can “evade Bouncing Cosmology: universe contracts and then expands)
4. The Ordinary Second Law
5. The Generalised Second Law
6. The No Boundary Problem
AGAINST the Universe had a Beginning:
1. Quantum Eternity Theorem
2. The No Boundary Problem
Ref: http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/did-the-universe-begin-x-recap/
It seems to me there is more theoretical support for the “FOR” side and a comment from Don Page would be welcome.
The Bible does speak of a “beginning” but Christianty idea of God’s existence is independent of which physics model supports this notion of time and beginning. Though many of these models lean towards or support a beginning is heartening, that scientific support is not a determining factor in anyone’s firm theistic belief.
Thanks for your response, Don.