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
I might as well chime in here. (I tried to read all the previous comments. Apologies if I missed anything important.)
The whole point of my “Terms and Conditions” post (https://letterstonature.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/terms-and-conditions-a-fine-tuned-critique-of-ikeda-and-jeffreys-part-1/) is that I condition on everything that Ikeda and Jeffery’s condition on. Here is my list of premises.
“L = this universe contains life
X = the physics of this universe includes conditions sufficient for the eXistence of life
E = the physics of this universe includes conditions sufficient for the evolution of life
N = the natural phenomena of this universe are the causal products of the physics of this universe. (Remember that “physics” includes initial conditions in my terminology.)
I = the causes that established the physics of this universe were indifferent to whether our particular physics would allow the survival (evolution) of life.
F = in the set of possible physics, the subset that permit the existence (evolution) of life is very small. In other words, the physics of a particular universe must be fine-tuned if that universe is to support the existence (evolution) of life.
It’s all there. In particular, L is there, exactly the same as in Ikeda and Jeffery’s (IJ) article. I am absolutely not ignoring my own existence as an observer. My conclusion is
p(I | LXFN) / p(~I | LXFN) << p(I | N) / p(~I | N)
There's L. Right there. As well as – and here is the whole point of my post – N. I can assume N and still make the fine-tuning argument work. If I've made a mathematical mistake, then show me. I condition on everything that IJ condition on.
The problem I see with IJ has nothing to do with what we condition on. It's the hypothesis. IJ say "N="The universe is governed solely by Naturalistic law." This is not naturalism. The deist would agree with this premise: every natural effect has a natural cause. The question is not what the laws of nature can do (and whether they can do life, in particular) but whether there is anything over and above the laws of nature. The argument is not about miracles.
In short, I totally agree with IJ's argument. It successfully shows that fine-tuning is not evidence that life in our universe is the result of a deity breaking the laws of nature. What I disagree with is that it says anything about fine-tuning and naturalism.
A few more comments.
Bill Jeffery’s says:
“Barnes’ datum isn’t that, it is D’=”The physical constants of some universe lie in the anthropic zone.” ”
Patently false, and clear evidence against the claim that Bill is “very familiar with Luke Barnes’ critique”. That isn’t a quote from my post, in spite of the quotation marks. And, as shown above, my datum is exactly IJ’s.
Bill Jeffery’s: “I have, by the way, had a back-and-forth with Barnes some years ago on this. You will not be surprised that I wasn’t able to convince him of his error even though I was able to refute the arguments he made to me. After a couple of tries I gave up.”
One email, making the same claim that I wasn’t conditionalising correctly. If there was a devastating refutation in that one email, I missed it amongst the discussion of Stenger’s laughable “MonkeyGod” calculations. Our next email each were about the Hoyle resonance. And that was it.
If the reader would like to hear me talk for 45 minutes about Bayes’s theorem and the importance of conditionalising on everything, in the context of testing multiverse theories, then enjoy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdpgoSItt-0
In case all the better-qualified and smarter commenters have stopped posting here (as most of them have indicated they planned to), I will raise a couple of trivial points.
“F = in the set of possible physics, the subset that permit the existence (evolution) of life is very small. In other words, the physics of a particular universe must be fine-tuned if that universe is to support the existence (evolution) of life.”
This was presented as a premise. No doubt it is supported elsewhere, but I don’t understand how this is possible without an understanding of “life” which verges on the omniscient. Life as we know it is DNA-based. That is the only form of life we have observed and studied (although I think some alternate chemistries have been explored a little). In one of my previous comments I noted that Conway’s “Game of Life” is capable of forming self-replicating and growing patterns of cellular automata, and Stephen Wolfram has shown that cellular automata can be computational Turing machines. Could these form under some sets of physics rules in which DNA can not? Is the creator-god alive (presumably without the use of DNA)? I don’t think we know enough about what forms of “life” can occur to make an reliable estimate of which sets of physical constants preclude all of them. That has been my main objection to the fine-tuning argument.
My second trivial point is related. Suppose there are many possible/conceivable forms of life, with a wide disparity between the sets of physical constants which enable them. Then it might be that any specific universe allows one type of life (say chemically-based) or a few types, but not the vast majority of types. Then by your argument it seems to me every type of life that could occur in its corresponding set of universes would feel justified (incorrectly) to conclude its universe was fine-tuned – if it assumed as you seem to be doing, that it was the only type of life that could exist.
A more general case would be that every set (or small range of sets) of physical constants produces something that is as close to unique as you seem to be assuming life is. In that case, from the viewpoint of each specific set/universe, again your argument could be used to conclude that the universe was created because that something was desired by a creator (no matter which set it was). In other words, the situation could be analogous to a lottery in which the unique individual who won decides his win was divinely ordained, although somebody had to win. This case will not appeal those who assume that there is something inherently special about life in general or humans in particular (theists), but then their argument becomes circular. (Humans are special because the creator of the universe loves them, and this proves that there was a creator of the universe – seems circular to me.)
Luke Barnes: “The important observation in the context of this argument is F not X. The claim that the universe is fine-tuned for intelligent life is more than a claim about this universe. It is a counterfactual claim about how things could have turned out. X is almost certainly true – it follows almost inevitably from L, which is true. F, however, does not follow from L.”
My disagreement here is that I don’t think F is observable. We have but one sample available for observation, and that seems highly unlikely to change. . How could we ever determine what the probability density of possible universes across the space of physical constants is? And following from that, how can we “observe” F?
Add to that the possibility that the number of universes could be very large or even infinite. Then the likelihood of at least one universe (all it takes is one) falling in that narrow range of F, yielding L, approaches 1. Who mentioned the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy already?
I hope that it is not too late to throw my twig into the dying embers of the campfire.
Nor should it be interpreted as a genetic fallacy, just a gentle tease, hard to show on a web page.
Neil deGrasse Tyson commented:
“85% of the National Academy of Sciences reject God,I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t.”
Michael Shermer has a possible response:
“Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”
We have Dr. Carroll and Dr. Page, who look at the same data, but come to opposite conclusions.
Dr. Page is well credentialed in science.
There is even a subtle hint in one of his comments, above: “. . . as Stephen Hawking and I showed long ago”.
Holy Cow!
Dr. Page pulls many rabbits out of his hat.
There are even more in his paper (free PDF here at arXiv)
“Cosmological Ontology and Epistemology,” proceedings of the Philosophy of Cosmology UK/US Conference, 12–16 September 2014.
His list of acknowledgments is almost a Who’s Who of cosmology.
Dr. Page was raised in a Christian home in a country known for its diverse range of Christianity.
He went to a Christian school (William Jewell College, founded by Missouri Baptist Convention).
It comes as no surprise that he adopts Christianity rather than any other belief system.
But, I wonder what type of Baptist Dr Page is?
From the olde joke by US comedian Emo Philips that ends this way:
“He said, ‘Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.’
I said, ‘Die, heretic!’
And I pushed him over.”
(the questioner, attempting to stop what looked like a suicide off a bridge,
was a Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879)
Dr Page makes many claims for his God, all the omnis etc.
He also says:
1) “my assumption that the world is the best possible”
2) “God loves mathematical elegance”
As the philosopher Peter Boghossian often asks:
“How do you know that?”
We are not told.
Instead there is lot of to-and-fro about probabilities.
Imagine if my children were offered this line of reasoning as to whether I exist?
Surely this all powerful Being could not only speak out of a burning bush (Exodus 3) but come down and get on to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, TV shows . . .
For the resurrection, what we have are the translations of the writings in Greek.
They are of oral traditions in a different language from bronze-age, largely illiterate, people.
And, these are perhaps at least one or two generations later than the story.
Even so, there are 4 or 5 different accounts with irreconcilable differences.
So, without evidence, I am expected to accept that there is a Being outside our space-time that can impregnate a human (quite a violation of her rights).
Was this with God sperm that had the appropriate 23 chromosomes? Then give birth to a God in human form who is the Son of Himself?
Shame that they hadn’t thought of the way that the Terminator guardian
(Arnold Schwarzenegger) arrived from the future!
And then is sacrificed on the cross to appease Himself knowing full well that in 3 days time He would be resurrected.
And seemingly as a human body once again.
Not sure where the Holy Spirit comes into this, but the Godhead is a Trinity.
A bit like the three Musketeers: “All for one, one for all”?
From recent advances in understanding of the molecular genetics of human origins, there was never an Adam & Eve.
There are Y-chromosome Adam and mitochondrial Eve.
Ah, it is just a metaphor in the Bible.
As the Elizabethan poet said, we are all “Created sick — Commanded to be well.”
So still a human sacrifice is needed.
How does that work?
Christopher Hitchens pointed out that humans have been around for maybe 200,000 years.
So God waited with arms crossed for most of that time,
then told us: “Do not murder.”
And, why not wait another mere 2,000 years and be in the age of smart phones, TV, etc?
Instead we need apologists who try to excuse this Being of any culpability in the evil of the world He created.
Thinking back to my physics lab, perhaps Dr Page can introduce God-bars as well as error-bars for his next cosmology paper to indicate where the result might be perturbed by a miracle?
Definitely time for me to have that pint of the best homeopathic beer!
Peter: “Definitely time for me to have that pint of the best homeopathic beer!”
About that stuff – It’s just water, man!
Peter
Your post is concerning the character of God. I will respond in like vein.
If we own the evil in ourselves, God has provided a free answer in Christ. God will not take responsibility for it because it is your responsibility, not his. When you realize and acknowledge that, he will help you. If you want to spend eternity with people who would not face up to themselves in this way, God has allowed you to take that option. I don’t think it is a good one. God wants to enjoy life with you.
Aron Wall:
Well, we have to agree to disagree! The reason is that there are so many different religious theories and there is no way to verify which is right.This is completely different from science.While scientists may have difference of opinion for a while, eventually one theory wins. There is nothing like Indian science, German science or American science, science is same for all human race. Hopefully we can bring religion to that stage some day. But I seriously doubt if this will happen any time soon! Thanks for your comments.
Sorry! The above comment was actually supposed to be posted on Aron Wall’s blog. I think by mistake I must have posted it here. Although it is kind of relevant to this discussion, it may be ok to remove it from here
^Richard – I think you may not fully undertand the science behind the ancient art of brewing homeopathic beer. My fave is the 100C micro-brewery one, pricey but you wait until you try it!
^Simon – thanks for your advice. Amongst the evil, I was thinking of the example quoted by the naturalist Sir David Attenborough of the nematode that is parasitic to humans and burrows into the eyeball causing blindness for those living in many parts of Africa.
Peter
And thank you for your reasonable reply. I have spent time in Mozambique, and the nation is blighted with many parasites which most western medical people have not encountered. There has also been terrible flooding and food shortages. There is a also a very high level of witchcraft. Yes there is what looks like indiscriminate evil in the creation. I cannot dispute all that, and, in some sense, God takes overall responsibility as far as I can see, looking at a verse in Isaiah.
“I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the LORD, who does all these things.
(Isa 45:7)”
God set it all in motion, and the outcome cannot be denied.
I see these things as aspects of the curse of the Fall…Genesis 3. I have made it clear previously that I believe in a supernatural element behind the cosmos. Indeed I became convinced of it before I became a Christian, and that while studying physics. If the creation was delegated in part to the angelic realm, which fell, we might see a manifestation of that in the fallen creation. But if so, God ultimately allowed that. Why?
I see this world, whether viewed physically or relationally, as being designed to point us to a higher realm whilst warning us of the outcome of refusing it.
Theism is more explanatory than naturalism.
I came to this thesis after reflecting on Bill Jefferys’ view that for the conditional probability P(O_j|T_i) of one’s observation O_j, given a theory T_i, one should include all “relevant information” in T_i (or at least as part of the condition in this conditional probability), such as the information L that life exists. However, then one is just assuming this information in T_i and is not explaining it. If we assume that T_i includes L, then P(L|T_i) = 1, and we have not really explained life.
I do believe that for the posterior probability P(T_i|O_j), we should include all the information we have in the observation O_j, or at least all relevant information, assuming there actually is any irrelevant information whose deletion from O_j would result in a smaller set of information O’_j that gives P(T_i|O’_j) = P(T_i|O_j). But when we do the Bayesian analysis starting from the prior probability P(T_i) and the likelihood P(O_j|T_i), we should include as little as possible of O_j in T_i, since what we do include in T_i will just be assumed but not explained.
So, for example, when Bill Jefferys effectively includes L, the existence of life, in his theory of naturalism N, he is giving up the possibility of an explanation for the existence of life rather than just assuming it.
Now of course one can debate whether theism or naturalism is a better explanation of life, but one cannot even discuss this when one just assumes that either hypothesis includes the assumption of the existence of life. I do admit that it is not obvious that mere theism implies that a god would create life.
Maybe I would assign a prior probability of something like 0.001 that a god with an unspecified nature would create life. That is, given the wide set of hypotheses of gods with different natures, I might assign a conditional prior probability of very roughly 0.001 that the actual god (whom I shall call God) would have created life.
One needs to compare this with the prior probability that a similarly unspecified naturalism would lead to life. That is, given the wide set of hypotheses of naturalism with different laws of nature, what is the prior probability that they would lead to life. I do personally assume that in our actual universe with its actual laws of nature, these laws did lead to life, without requiring any change by God of these natural laws that He uses except for so-called interventions or miracles. That is, I believe life in our universe arose as a consequence of the laws of nature (which as a theist I believe God chose to use, though under the hypothesis of naturalism that I am entertaining here, the laws of nature would be the ultimate explanation and not have God as a deeper explanation).
The current best (though certainly not only) candidate for the dynamical part of the laws of nature (how things evolve with time) is superstring/M theory, though even if this could be formulated into a complete dynamical theory, it by itself does not include the boundary conditions (e.g., initial conditions) needed to specify which quantum state is actual, out of all those that would satisfy the dynamical laws. Also, it does not include the rules for going from the quantum state to the measures or probabilities of observations. Thus we would need a lot more than just a completion of the dynamical part of superstring/M theory to be able to calculate P(O_j|T_i) even if T_i were a complete naturalistic theory of our universe or multiverse as the only existing concrete entity (e.g., no God).
Now what is known of superstring/M theory is that it seems to be a lot simpler than it might have been. For example, it does not have any undetermined parameters (real numbers that could logically be chosen from a continuum of different values, such as the fine structure constant in the much more incomplete theory of quantum electrodynamics, which describes just the interaction of electron and electromagnetic fields). So in some sense it does not have any fine tuning issue of how to tune parameters within a continuum of possibilities. However, there does seem to be a lot of discrete information in the basic structure of the theory, to distinguish it from a large number of other apparently equally simple theories, such as the theory that the universe is just empty classical Minkowski spacetime (with an arbitrary integer dimension to give a countable infinity of such simple theories), or that it is not just the empty classical static spherically symmetric black hole spacetime in Einstein gravity (the Schwarzschild metric in four spacetime dimensions and its generalization to all higher dimensions). I don’t know how many other sets of possible laws of nature there are that are simpler than those of our actual universe, most of which, such as the empty classical spacetimes listed above, seem very unlikely to lead to any life, but surely there are so many that the a priori probability that an unspecified naturalistic theory would lead to life would be much less than even 0.000001.
So even if I pessimistically said that the probability that an unspecified god would create life is only 0.001, and if I optimistically said that the probability that unspecified laws of nature would lead to life is as high as 0.000001, this would mean that when one considers just the existence of life, the likelihood for this unspecified theism would be at least 1,000 times larger than the likelihood for this unspecified naturalism.
This is just one way in which I believe that theism is more explanatory than naturalism, even before considering the quality of life we observe, evidence for miracles such as the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, etc.
Despite Dr. Page’s patient explanations (of which as a layman I cannot appreciate all the details, but recognize the expertise), I remain perplexed by the following points, previously raised:
1. Why a god who could somehow design and create universes would consider DNA-based life and humans in particular of any greater intrinsic interest than humans apply to ants – certainly interesting creatures but not ones that inspire heights of love. As a DNA-based life form myself, I have some chauvinistic attachment to them, but even I don’t like all DNA lifeforms, and not even all the human ones. (Take Hitler – please.) I’m somewhat ant-like compared to Einstein – he wouldn’t have wanted to waste his time discussing physics with me after an hour or so, much less an eternity.
2. The god concept raises many additional unanswerable questions (questions that could in principle be answered by direct revelation but with 41,000+ sects and counting each with its own god-beliefs, for Christianity alone, revelation does not appear to be reliable). What is the origin of this god? What is its form of life based on (not DNA, I presume)? What are its goals, drives, motivations? How does it manipulate space-time and the laws of physics? Note that, it these questions are themselves answered by some higher set of natural laws, we are back to naturalism.
3. What is so special about DNA-based life, to a god? Could not a god as well construct a universe in which quantum events form cellular automata? For that matter, how do we know a creator god didn’t want rainbows instead? Aren’t rainbows also only possible under certain “fine-tuning” constraints? (Liking all rainbows I could understand.) If a creator-god made this universe for the purpose of letting DNA-life develop, why is there so little DNA life in it compared to, say, dark matter?
4. The fine-tuning argument seems very close to the Lottery Fallacy to me. A lottery winner, unless he or she has an identical twin, is unique among all the contestants. Uniqueness therefore is not sufficient for a probability argument. One must also show that almost all of the other contestants were not also unique in some way. The only way that I know of in which theists attempt to do this with any success is to assume that DNA life is somehow special to a creator-god (rather than rainbows, galaxies, all other impressive inanimate things, and all other forms of life, up to and including god-life), which is a circular argument.
5. The resurrection story is just not reliable to scientific standards. The dictators of North Korea, many historical or semi-historical characters, and many modern-day messiahs have supposed done miraculous things, attested to by their followers. The story of Christianity has never convinced the majority of Jewish people, which were the first people it was told to, supposedly by the direct participants, and the Biblical accounts contain many things which did not happen and translation errors, according to what I understand is the consensus of historians.
Despite all this, theism by its nature cannot be mathematically disproven, given its reliance on miracles. However, scientifically, miracles do not stand up to peer-review with statistical significance vs. placebo. Some people complain that reliance on scientific standards of verification is somehow arrogant. I think that without such selection standards, idea-mutations will not evolve into more functional forms. Based on this presumption (perhaps biased), I don’t think a reasonable god would expect me to believe in it.
In my youth brought up as a Christian, I asked for signs: God, if you exist and want me to know it, make that crow fly from the fence back to the tree. Never got one. Maybe I didn’t give it enough trials, but after a certain point, coincidence would have been just as likely. No doubt many people have made the same experiment, and by the laws of probability, some of them got their miracle.
Dear God, please suspend the Law of Gravity indefinitely till I persuade mother to not jump off the Grand Canyon.
Try to adjust to gravity and see it as a gift. Take your mother in law next time.
To all my atheistic friends of this blog and those readers who care not to write, I say to you: God loves you all and desires that you to have inner peace and contentment. Revelation 3:20, King James Version says: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” And in John 10:10: “The thief comes only to steal, slaughter, and destroy. I’ve come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
God will not barge in; he will not knock down the door, but he waits patiently for the invitation. Give him the opportunity.
To paraphrase professor/St. Don in one of his an eralier comments, the Christian life is satisfying. I can say so from my experience.
Simon: the probability (Bayesian or otherwise) your wish will not come to pass is zero as she died many years ago. And if she were alive, I will take her to the Grand Canyon to see this natural wonder of God’s beautful and fine-tuned world. (I know you are joking.)
Mine died too, a couple of years ago. I can see her smiling down with approval at my wonderful God-given sense of humour (and humility).
Yes, my naive, pre-teen desire for some miraculous sign to substantiate the incredible things I was told in Sunday School is indeed worthy of mockery, if that is what the last two (now four–edit) comments are implying. Yet I did learn better, and there are some grown-ups who advocate belief in much larger supernatural feats than influencing the mind of a crow.
In any case, my point was neither logic, hard evidence, nor direct signs/revelations pointed me toward theism, so from my point of view the argument reduced to that of any con-man: “trust me”; and I don’t see how any reasonable god could fault me for not accepting it on that basis.
P.S. (edit) At about 12 I did answer an “altar call” at Daily Vacation Bible School and knelt in prayer in front of the preacher waiting for Jesus to fill my soul. Nothing happened.
JimV, I still like Sunday School. I bet you liked it and don’t deny that now. Who knows, you’ll go back to it one. God works in miraculous ways, Jim.
Ask St Paul (previously Saul).
Jim, mine wasn’t intended to be mocking, except perhaps towards TY and myself. I do apologize, and, seriously, if it is not patronising to say so, I am praying for you and indeed all the respondents.
Certainly NO mocking, Jim. Leave aside a good and vigorous discussion, which we have so far, I have all of you in my prayers. I tell you Jim: If Simon and I were to ever meet you (what is that probability?), we’ll slap you on the back, invite you to lunch and a suitable drink or beverage and have a nice conversation. That will make heaven rejoice infinitely more than any agreement over fine tuning and the values of the constants. Bill, Josh, James, Richard, all welcome.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle claimed that women had fewer teeth than men. Instead of asking his missus to open her mouth and do a quick count he may well have used the arguments from probability we see on display here.
( Sci Am, 2010, Aristotle’s Error)
Is it really too hard for someone to address the ideas of original sin, Adam & Eve, impregnating a human by a God, redemption by means of killing that Son of God, and His resurrection?
I will leave out all that talking snake stuff, zombies exiting their graves at the resurrection (Matthew 27: [52-53] And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.), etc to keep it simple.
^Richard – of course you know nothing of the science of homeopathy, there is nothing to know! I was hinting at a comparison with other magic stuff . . .
(Australian news item April 2015 Homeopathy no more effective than placebos, a study by the National Health and Medical Research Council)
Peter
Rather than attempt to answer your logical points of doubt, which I can at best do in part, I have a more general point for you to perhaps consider. If you are trying to get God to conform to your understanding of naturalism, and he is the God Christians believe him to be, then surely you are wasting your time. He has framed our present creation in a certain way, for his own reasons and purposes, and has the means to intervene or to change it in a wholesale manner. I spoke last night with a young man who was high on drugs and wandering through traffic in a South African township. He started to cry out to God for help. He saw an intense light, and fell on his knees and gave his life to Jesus.
“It is by faith that we understand that the universe was created by God’s word, so that what can be seen was made out of what cannot be seen.”
(Heb 11:3 GNB)
“For creation was condemned to lose its (initial) purpose, not of its own will, but because God willed it to be so. Yet there was the hope that creation itself would one day be set free from its slavery to decay and would share the glorious freedom of the children of God.
(Rom 8:20-21 GNB)
I don’t know about CPT violation and the second law of thermodynamics, but the creation is in bondage to decay, and this will change at some future point. Our present reality is therefore not actually a final and complete statement on reality in general. God has used a fabric manifesting in part as our understanding of math and physics to frame our reality. However, I believe there is a ‘whole lot of stuff’ going on underneath that we have next to no grasp on. God is able to monitor, perceive and intervene in ways we probably cannot even begin to imagine.
JimV has made many interesting comments that unfortunately I have not had time to respond to, but let me comment on some from his posting April 13, 2015 at 9:29 am:
“1. Why a god who could somehow design and create universes would consider DNA-based life and humans in particular of any greater intrinsic interest than humans apply to ants …”
I would think consciousness (sentience) would be of interest to a God who is consciously aware of things (though no doubt in a much deeper way than our consciousness). Of course, there are many possibilities of what God might be interested in, but I would not put the prior probability too low that God would be interested in creating sentient beings. DNA-based life might just be the way He chose to create them on our earth; there could be many other ways in other parts of creation.
“2. The god concept raises many additional unanswerable questions …”
I agree that there are many questions that are at least unanswered, and presumably there are some properties of God that are the ultimate brute facts, the ultimate sources of all explanations but not themselves explainable in terms of anything more basic, simply because there are no concrete facts more basic then these.
“3. What is so special about DNA-based life, to a god? … If a creator-god made this universe for the purpose of letting DNA-life develop, why is there so little DNA life in it compared to, say, dark matter?”
I think God might well have created sentient beings in different parts of our universe/multiverse that are based on different structures, with DNA being just one of them, one of the ways that sentience can arise from the orderly laws of nature that God seems to have used most of the time. Orderly laws of the form we know them only convert a very tiny fraction of matter into DNA, but if the universe is very, very large (as cosmic inflation suggests), then there could be a very large amount of DNA-based sentience in the universe (and perhaps also sentience based on other structures, though since we are DNA-based and don’t see non-DNA-structures nearly so complex, I would be surprised if there is significant sentience not based on DNA in our immediate neighborhood that we can closely observe).
“4. The fine-tuning argument seems very close to the Lottery Fallacy to me.”
Conscious sentience does seem to be special to me. It does not seem to be logically implied by the present form of the laws of physics that we partially understand (though I am hopeful that it can be explained by laws we have not yet discovered). For example, what we know of superstring/M theory, even if augmented by a law for the quantum state of the universe such as the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal, does not seem at all to imply sentience, though I see no reason why it could not be augmented by additional laws that together with superstring/M theory and a good theory for the quantum state would lead to the consciousness that we experience.
Of course, without knowing what these additional unknown laws are, we cannot predict what physical structures would be conscious, but I would guess that most of the possible sets of laws of nature that are not more complex than ours would not lead to consciousness. So to me it seems plausible that for logically possible laws of nature not too complex, sentience might be rare. However, if a conscious God wanted to created sentient beings, that could explain why He chose to create a universe/multiverse using laws of nature leading to sentience.
“5. The resurrection story is just not reliable to scientific standards.”
I agree that it is not repeatable by scientific experiments, and there is very limited data we can get about it (unlike, say, data about the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is enormous despite the fact that the early universe is not repeatable for us). So we have to make the best use we can of the data that we do have. There are indeed apparently some discrepancies in the accounts, but the basic message that Jesus followers claimed to have seen Him alive in several occasions after His crucifixion occurs in many sources (Paul’s writings, the synoptic Gospels, the Gospel of John, etc.) I don’t see that differences in the details take away from that basic claim.
I do admit that the prior probability one places on a particular theistic hypothesis that would make the Resurrection possible can greatly affect one’s conclusions about the posterior probabilities, so indeed there has been continued controversy about the Resurrection and the interpretation that it confirms Jesus’ claim to be the Son of God.
“Despite all this, theism by its nature cannot be mathematically disproven, given its reliance on miracles. However, scientifically, miracles do not stand up to peer-review with statistical significance vs. placebo.”
I agree that there does not seem to be strong scientific evidence (at least that I am aware of) that God performs miracles in controlled situations (say in which some people are prayed for healing and others are not). God decides what is best despite the expression of our prayers of what we want (though I do think He takes into account our prayers, and praying often helps us realize our reliance on God. as well as helping us to realize that prayer does not give us magic control over God for Him to do just what we want).
In conclusion, God does not act the way we often wish, hope, or expect that He will act. But it does seem to me consistent with what I have observed that there is a God who does what is best, at least if what is best not only includes concern for His sentient creatures but also a love of mathematical elegance and order in the laws of nature He chooses to use most of the time.
In time all the technical details of this of that cosmology theory will be swept aside by new theories, new evidence, but we’d still be asking that basic existential question: why we are here and for what purpose, which is essentially the underlying theme of the Bible. You can write endless PhD theses on the contradictions in the Bible, the scriptures as a whole remain an enduring source of wisdom and guidance. The Bible is not a science text; it is not even a pre-scientific attempt to explain how the physical world works. Science does that well and it is successful mainly because of mathematics.
Equations can only describe phenomena; they have no life in and of themselves. They require a mind to make them work. I think that mind is God. A lot of us say we are atheists, but I have a feeling that many are not because it takes “a heck of a lot” of faith to believe this universe just happened on its own. With summer approaching (in the northern hemisphere) there will be many late hours around a campfire, or on the deck with family and friends, and you’d be looking up to the heavens and the countless stars, and a thought will cross your mind: How it all happened? The Psalmist wrote: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows his handiwork'”
We in the theistic camp don’t say the existence of God can be proven conclusively by pure reason; there is “no knockdown proof” as St John Polkinghorne would say. And St. Don said the same things in various ways in his comments. But there are so many things that awake deep interest in nonreligious people: Cosmic consciousness, universal laws, and objective ethics (some might say morals).
I submit these things point more to Theism or to a living Something than to naturalism. If you think that Something is God (as we Christians know him in a deeply personal way through Jesus Christ) Amen to that; but if not, at least you are not alone. St. Aron (Wall) says it best:
“And if the Something really is a Somebody, then even when you are most alone, your life is a dialogue rather than a monologue. One day, that seemingly impersonal brightness that hovers over existence, may suddenly manifest as a voice speaking to you, that knows your name.
Of course you cannot force God to reveal himself to you. Any approach must be on his side. In retrospect, it is clear to those chosen by God that nothing they did beforehand caused them to deserve or merit the experience of God. It is gratis, an undeserved gift, which comes in spite of human resistance and even deliberate ignorance.”
http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/fundamental-reality-xiii-surprised-by-something/#comments