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
Hi Paul
I also do not wish to abuse the purposes of the blog by departing well away from physics, but then Dr Carroll did get onto fast food, so perhaps this is a broad sort of blog.
My own observations lead me to believe people worship things other than God, and this is placing undue, irrational and ultimately unwise value in them. Someday the truth about reality will dawn.
Faith involves responding to God’s initiatives. It also requires an underlying willingness to lose your life that you might find it. I assume you read the gospels during your Christian phase. The best I can do is elaborate on or rephrase what the Bible teaches.
Presumeably, the Christian Union you referred to told you the essence of the Christian Gospel. I believe the Gospel is true and that you need to respond to it.
Richard
I agree that being taught to worship with no understanding of why or heart desire to do so is a wierd thing to ask anyone to do.
darrelle
Well thanks for your concern if it is genuine. I know from both personal experience and observation of others that what I say about worship is true.
Hi Simon,
I noticed that you offered no reason beyond “I believe” for believing the Christian gospel. If someone told you “I believe the Koran is true and you need to respond to it”, say, would that persuade you to become a Muslim? Even if someone is familiar with the claims of a religion’s holy book, does that mean they should necessarily find them persuasive? In the case of Christianity, I have examined its claims and found them to be false, but if you have any reasons why I should believe them, I’d obviously want to know about that.
I would still be interested in the answers to the questions I posed in my previous comment, in particular, how someone knows when it is legitimate to have a strong feeling of being sure (i.e. “faith”), since not all such feelings are legitimate; and how faith and revelation worked in the case of my namesake, Paul/Saul of Tarsus.
JimV said April 16, 2015 at 10:24 am:
“Newton is a good example. He didn’t continue trying to analyse
higher-order interactions among the planets after “concluding that
periodic divine intervention was necessary to guarantee the stability
of the solar system.” (Wikipedia.) LaPlace famously dispensed with
that god-hypothesis and was able to show with more precise analysis
that “any two planets and the sun must be in mutual equilibrium and
thereby launched his work on the stability of the solar system.” (Also
Wikipedia.) Although Newton failed to reach the current determination
that the current solar system is stable for at least hundreds of
millions of years, he however considered the notion of the trinity to
be unbelievable and so would have been considered a heretic if this
fact were generally known.(Gleick’s biography.)”
Besides historical doubts in Wikipedia as to whether Laplace actually said about God to Napoleon, “Sire, I have no need for that hypothesis,” I want to note that the Wikipedia article on Laplace also says the following:
“Newton himself had doubted the possibility of a mathematical solution
to the whole, even concluding that periodic divine intervention was
necessary to guarantee the stability of the solar system. Dispensing
with the hypothesis of divine intervention would be a major activity
of Laplace’s scientific life.[17] It is now generally regarded that
Laplace’s methods on their own, though vital to the development of the
theory, are not sufficiently precise to demonstrate the stability of
the Solar System,[18] and indeed, the Solar System is understood to be
chaotic, although it happens to be fairly stable.”
For more details, see the Scholarpedia article on Stability of the solar system.
Thus it seems to have been Newton rather than Laplace who was
correct about the instability of the solar system, though Newton was
wrong in thinking that God would have had to intervene within the
current age of the solar system if one accepts that some previous
planets might have already been kicked out and there has not yet been
time for the remaining ones to be kicked out. As one recent paper put
it, “The solar system is not stable but just old.”
Paul Wright: if something you happen to study or investigate is mysterious, would you automatically disbelieve or dismiss it?
Dr. Page notes that the Wikipedia articles I cited contain, as usual, some acknowledgements of contrary points of view. However, I think the point stands that Newton – incorrectly according to my understanding of Dr.Page’s stated views – thought divine intervention was necessary to maintain the solar system in its current status stably for long periods of time and so did not investigate further; whereas Laplace and others did not share this view and therefore were able to make further scientific progress. I would not be surprised if this was the example that Dr. Hawking had in mind when he made the quote which was objected to and which led to my reply to that objection.
Similarly, those who think a creator-god is necessary to account for our universe’s existence seem to lack any desire to investigate how (by what mechanisms) universes and other miracles are created; whereas those who don’t share this conviction do ponder such questions.
I withdraw the part of that reply which stated “Laplace famously dispensed with that hypothesis” since Dr.Page says this may be apocryphal. It is often the case that when some part of written history seems to be too perfect to be true, it isn’t. (George Washington and the cherry tree, etc.) Probably any such story of long ago which isn’t supported by multiple objective sources should be considered with skepticism.
Since I seem to be unable to resist getting drawn back into this discussion, I would also like to note that as far as I am concerned, any scientific and/or philosophical interest ended with Dr. Page’s last summary of his views, and since then we have descended into the same back-and-forth between theists and atheists which has been going on for hundreds if not thousands of years. Perhaps this will come to a final resolution in this thread but I doubt it.
Simon: “Richard – I agree that being taught to worship with no understanding of why or heart desire to do so is a wierd thing to ask anyone to do.”
Thanks for the acknowledgment. Other than our parents and perhaps siblings — or whoever protects us when we are small — we don’t have an innate need to worship anything. It is good to let go of it. I hope someday you can unlearn it, too!
Hi Paul and others
I agree with Jim that I seriously don’t expect this discussion to resolve. Probably the first thing we did agree on, but there you go. I will also end up making statements which you will rightly say are faith based.
You will probably state your reasons why Christianity is false, and I will say why I don’t agree, and neither will be able to conclusively disprove the other.
I believe reductionism/naturalism is overplayed as truth as it stands as I have made clear. My point here is that atheist reductionists need to present their case in a realistic manner. I don’t always see this. Really I feel there is little more to be said there.
I believe the overall evidence for Christianity through various windows of study is rather good. Looking back I have stated many reasons, including why I don’t believe the Koran and Islam. Christianity’s alignment with the human condition as I observe and perceive it is decisive. The words God speaks to me show he understands our lives inside out and is lovingly teaching me about what is really important, even when it hurts. This is therefore not simply a clinical, emotionally detached point of contention for me. I would say that the evidence for the life, teachings and resurrection of Christ is rather stronger than that for unguided/undesigned evolution by natural selection, or the multiverse, or chance abiogenesis. It is therefore a significant datum in my overall worldview. All attempts to pigeonhole Jesus as anyone other than what he said he was, or as not existing, just sound plain flat daft to me.
Regarding belief, we are back to how we really know anything. Again, I still believe we come with a ‘worshipper’ as far as I’m concerned. If we don’t attribute due worth to God, we end up idolising something unworthy. We also come with a ‘knower’. If God works on your ‘knower’, which he can, it is wise to respond. I don’t have a detailed schematic or source code for either your ‘worshipper’ or your ‘knower’. Atheistic Intellectualism is just an exercise in denial and avoidance. It is also inconclusive other than to say that everything is meaningless nothingness.
If you have settled out at a place of unbelief with determination, I probably will not be able to change it.
Hello TY: if something you happen to study or investigate is mysterious, would you automatically disbelieve or dismiss it?
No. However, I agree with Stephen Law that there cannot possibly be a duty to work out exactly what the true story is behind every odd claim someone makes (Evidence, Miracles and the Resurrection of Jesus, Faith and Philosophy 2011. Volume 28, Issue 2, April 2011). If the evidence is at the level of “this bloke told me this other bloke rose from the dead”, one must ask whether you’d believe that if it didn’t come from a co-religionist.
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TY: if something you happen to study or investigate is mysterious, would you automatically disbelieve or dismiss it?
Paul (Wright): “No. However, I agree with Stephen Law that there cannot possibly be a duty to work out exactly what the true story is behind every odd claim someone makes (Evidence, Miracles and the Resurrection of Jesus, Faith and Philosophy 2011. Volume 28, Issue 2, April 2011). If the evidence is at the level of “this bloke told me this other bloke rose from the dead”, one must ask whether you’d believe that if it didn’t come from a co-religionist.”
Paul gives a “hedged “reply, to use a term in options trading.: The “No” quickly followed by “however” So, at the minimum Paul agrees mysteries (natural & supernatural) are not to be equated with untruth. The subject “Did Jesus Exist” is cottage industry, so readers can look up tons of scholarly books and articles, most of which are on the affirmative side. For me the best evidence is still the early gospels and his presence in my life, in the lives of my Christian brothers (saints) writing in this blog (thanks again Professor Sean Carroll), and the lives of millions around the world.
Don Page felt obliged to answer JimV on April 20, 2015 at 4:23 pm in presenting “facts” accurately (we have a due-diligence duty to the broader readership) and so I reluctantly get drawn back into the discussion to tell the world audience that Stephen Law seems to be very confused man if you looked at all the information, not just convenient quotations or references. He debated Christian apologist William Lane and this is part of the exchange:
Craig: That—I said you defended the claim that—something to the effect that—Jesus of Nazareth didn’t exist.
Law: No.
Craig: In your argument in your article in Faith and Philosophy, you give a seven point argument—
Law: Yeah . . . That’s not my view. My view is—The argument that I gave in that piece in Faith and Philosophy journal was that it looks like there’s a good philosophical case for remaining neutral. I mean, we just can’t be sure one way or the other, and that’s not at all the same thing as defending the view that Jesus wasn’t a historical individual.
Craig: All right! So agnosticism about the reality of Jesus. . . . All right!
What? “That’s not my view?”
The 7-point reference is the article Paul wants us to read: Stephen Law, “Evidence, Miracles, and the Existence of Jesus,” Faith and Philosophy 28 (2011): 29-51.
The full debate: “Does God Exist?” William Lane Craig vs Stephen Law. Westminster Central Hall, London
Paul: Who is the real Stephen Law?
TY: I said I agreed with Law that there cannot possibly be a duty to work out exactly what the true story is behind every odd claim someone makes (before rejecting it), and gave a reference to where Law says that. You seem to be very excited about something Law said to Craig about whether Jesus existed. Can you tell me the relevance you think that has here? I didn’t state my position on the rest of Law’s argument, Jesus mythicism and all that jazz (if you want to know what I think about the rest of Law’s paper, I wrote about the paper, Craig’s successful rebuttal and David Marshall’s abject failure, and said I rejected mythicism).
The reason I added to my “no” was to anticipate what your next move might have been. However, possibly that was premature. So, do go on…
JimV said April 20, 2015 at 9:51 pm :
“Dr. Page notes that the Wikipedia articles I cited contain, as usual, some acknowledgements of contrary points of view. However, I think the point stands that Newton – incorrectly according to my understanding of Dr.Page’s stated views – thought divine intervention was necessary to maintain the solar system in its current status stably for long periods of time and so did not investigate further; whereas Laplace and others did not share this view and therefore were able to make further scientific progress.”
I agree that Newton was wrong to think that divine intervention (doing things differently from the elegant laws of physics that He usually uses) was necessary for the solar system. It was just that Laplace’s valuable approximations were not really sufficient to prove that the solar system is stable, and now it is almost certainly known not to be stable. So it seems on the issue of stability, Newton’s intuitions turned out to be better than Laplace’s. It is just that the instability time for the remaining planets is at least of the same order of magnitude at the age.
What I don’t know (Do others?) is whether Newton’s view of the need for divine intervention made it “so [Newton] did not investigate further; whereas Laplace and others did not share this view and therefore were able to make further scientific progress.” Newton was brilliant but only had a finite lifetime and also very many other interests, so could it have been the case that he simply did not get around to making a detailed investigation of the effects of the perturbations of planet-planet gravitational attractions that Laplace brilliantly analyzed (though even Laplace did not have nearly a long enough lifetime to come to the final correct conclusion about the stability of the solar system)? I don’t know but would like to learn if anyone knows the answer to this.
Paul: I include Law and Craig because it’s all part of your response to Simon on
April 20, 2015 at 2:42 pm: “In the case of Christianity, I have examined its claims and found them to be false, but if you have any reasons why I should believe them, I’d obviously want to know about that.” Now here is a philosopher who writes an article against the grain of theological scholarship on the historical Jesus, later debates with St. William (Craig), and makes this astonishing disavowal in “That’s not my view.”
So when I see this kind of intellectual indecisiveness, and I hear you (Paul) say you find Christianity claims false in such a blanket way, I am left wondering what is your process to find evidence and assess it with other competing hypotheses (which is what Don Page has done); but more importantly, Paul, I sense you haven’t really opened your heart to God and he’s been rapping.
But I’m an optimist and what I found positive is that you are open to believing the mysterious. And that’s very healthy.
I see Dr.Page’s point and must agree that I don’t know whether Newton, having concluded on some basis that divine intervention was the method by which the solar system (whose age he did not know but Biblical analysis claimed to be 6000-10000 years old) had been maintained stable during the previous rise of human civilization, still intended at some point to investigate further. In my experience and opinion however, once people think they have a correct general solution, they lose interest in checking the fine details.
Without knowing what was in people’s minds, I cannot be sure, but I think it plausible that Newton’s intuition (instability over a span of perhaps 10,000 years without divine intervention) vs. current understanding (stable for at least hundreds of millions of years, according to Wikipedia) was not in fact better than Laplace’s, at least for all practical purposes. One might in fact say that divine intervention is a prediction of the Christian-god-hypothesis and very long-term stability without divine intervention is predicted by the more humble hypothesis of an uncaring universe (since otherwise under the second hypothesis we would not be here).
TY: I’m still not sure why you felt that Law’s conversation with Craig was relevant. Law’s conclusion in the paper is “there’s good reason to be sceptical about whether Jesus existed”, not “Jesus did not exist”. A fine distinction, perhaps, but philosophy papers are built on those.
I am left wondering what is your process to find evidence and assess it with other competing hypotheses (which is what Don Page has done); but more importantly, Paul, I sense you haven’t really opened your heart to God and he’s been rapping.
You can read about the process of my de-conversion here. I also talked on Premier Christian Radio about it, which you can find over here. I’m happy to answer questions, but perhaps me talking about me is better done on one of those blog posts rather than here on our host’s. 😉
I am not aware of anyone rapping, or indeed laying down dope rhymes and phat beats. Perhaps this is a metaphor for something, though. What should I look out for?
My responses are not getting posted. Will try again later.
Dear Don Page:
This is a fascinating discussion. I had no idea it was still going on – so many days after it started.
I don’t agree that any extraneous assumptions are necessary. I do think that the issue of using priors fuzzies the issues.
Let’s take a closer look at your statements.
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.
No, I think there are compelling arguments against Christianity. I already made several.
As I argued before, you can run a million experiments which test the following hypothesis H1:
(H1) an object that is heavier than water will sink.
A million times can this hypothesis be confirmed. It is from such confirmation that the idea of objects heavier than water sinking arises. Note that such confirmation can be equally interpreted as the statement that an object heavier than water will sink with a probability p less than 1 in a million.
In fact, if you cleverly design experiments, you can make this value p to be even smaller. I think this is what you were missing in my previous comments. By making ‘p’ sufficiently small, we could state that the chances that Jesus walked on water are smaller than 1 in (# seconds that the universe has existed).
That is where the laws of physics come from – by making probabilities extremely minute indeed.
The probability of Jesus having walked on water AND person Y having walked on water at the same time can now be said to be so small that it is unlikely to have happened. That is how you would arrive at support for the fact that the basic claims made about Jesus in Christianity’s documents are basically false. Indeed, they look like fabrications in historical hindsight.
Answering Don Page’s question:
JimV said April 20, 2015 at 9:51 pm :
“Dr. Page notes that the Wikipedia articles I cited contain, as usual, some acknowledgements of contrary points of view. However, I think the point stands that Newton – incorrectly according to my understanding of Dr.Page’s stated views – thought divine intervention was necessary to maintain the solar system in its current status stably for long periods of time and so did not investigate further; whereas Laplace and others did not share this view and therefore were able to make further scientific progress.”
I agree that Newton was wrong to think that divine intervention (doing things differently from the elegant laws of physics that He usually uses) was necessary for the solar system. It was just that Laplace’s valuable approximations were not really sufficient to prove that the solar system is stable, and now it is almost certainly known not to be stable. So it seems on the issue of stability, Newton’s intuitions turned out to be better than Laplace’s. It is just that the instability time for the remaining planets is at least of the same order of magnitude at the age.
What I don’t know (Do others?) is whether Newton’s view of the need for divine intervention made it “so [Newton] did not investigate further; whereas Laplace and others did not share this view and therefore were able to make further scientific progress.” Newton was brilliant but only had a finite lifetime and also very many other interests, so could it have been the case that he simply did not get around to making a detailed investigation of the effects of the perturbations of planet-planet gravitational attractions that Laplace brilliantly analyzed (though even Laplace did not have nearly a long enough lifetime to come to the final correct conclusion about the stability of the solar system)? I don’t know but would like to learn if anyone knows the answer to this.
I think it is unfair to say that it was merely a matter of not having enough time. Precisely, the following statement H1 is not a fair statement to make.
H1: Newton did not make further predictions because he did not have enough time.
This is for two reasons, one based on physics and the other based on sociology:
(1) The space of results on the universe/the solar system was sparse enough at the time that it would be reasonable to expect Newton to also come up with this additional result.
(2) People generally had far more free time at the time. Historically speaking, the disappearance of free time is a fairly modern, late 20th century thing. Alternatively put, if the cost of labor is low and the utility of employing labor is high, people will employ labor. If you can have servants, you can get tons of work done by simply not having to worry about spending time on a lot of things.
Paul (Wright), you wrote: “I am not aware of anyone rapping, or indeed laying down dope rhymes and phat beats. Perhaps this is a metaphor for something, though. What should I look out for?”
I’m not referring to rap music beats (I don’t enjoy rap music to be honest), or similar melodic stains metaphorically speaking. I’m referring to Jesus knocking at your heart’s door to see you and sup with you if you invite him in (You know the verse from Revelation).
I read “Losing my religion: thoughts on leaving Christianity.” It saddens me. This sentence of your article caught my attention: “Evangelical Christianity preaches the existence of an absolute truth, on a par with how most scientists view scientific knowledge.” Paul, I have good news for you. It’s an old myth that scientists go for nothing less than absolute truth. A better theory or model does indeed strengthen science’s grip on reality (as St John Polkinghorne would say) but it’s never the whole of reality. So even in physics, matters are not so doctrinaire. I wish you’d read physicist Aron Wall’s blog post “Pillar of Science III: Approximate Models.” And look up related posts. http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/pillar-of-science-iii-approximate-models/ I know by my own profession that a model is, at best, a representation of realty; an abstraction if you will.
That said, I’m not advocating heretical interpretations of scripture – anything goes, so to speak — but to approach Christianity rigidly, literally, is to kill faith and spiritual growth. Much of Biblical language is metaphorical so right away there is a conflict with absolute understandings.
I’m afraid you did not lose your religion because you didn’t have ONE to start with. This comment is not meant to be an insult, for it seems what you had was a straight jacket masquerading as religion and it immobilised you spiritually. If I can be of any encouragement, I tell you “your religion” is essentially your relationship with God and that sets the tone for other relationships. (I guess you know who first said this with more eloquence).
That’ s all I can say, Paul. And thanks for the exchange and the opportunity to reach out to people who are reading this blog and who are experiencing the same as you did….never to late to find God.
Welcome back, James Bonilla.
However, even though Jesus is the Rock of Ages, He need not sink like a rock. Unless one assigns a high prior probability to the hypothesis that Jesus always would act as other physical objects do, one cannot conclude what Jesus would always do just from experiments of what other physical objects do.
On why Newton did not do the preliminary perturbative analysis Laplace did in celestial mechanics, we need more data from history than just our speculations. I did speculate that it could partly have been a matter of time, and also a matter of other interests for Newton. Newton did so much that it seems rather unfair to expect him to have also done what Laplace did, whose life lasted until very nearly 100 years after the death of Newton. (It would be similarly unfair to expect Laplace to have been able to complete the analysis he started to confirm Newton’s correct intuition that the solar system is unstable.)
I personally think that Lapalce was a brilliant mathemetician and have no problem with him having sought better understanding of classical dynamics than Newton had. Some of his mathematical insights are still used daily of course in things like RF electronics and control loop design. Ultimately it just so happens that the analytic maths gets intractable beyond two bodies and has not gone significantly beyond where Newton got to even now. It is hard to argue though with the perspective that Newton achieved a step increase in analytic insight in general; probably the greatest in history.
I think Dr Page has the significant question regarding the role of theistic faith combined with science. Do we really know whether Newton’s hand off to God here was the most significant factor in him not getting further for mathematical insights into the solar system? Progress since Newton has been slow and messy, involving a mix of simplified analytics, numeric modelling, and chaotic processes. Incidentally I remember discussing the 3 body problem with a relative, also a Christian, who was a Maths fellow at Trinity and admirer of both Newton and Dirac. I actually just e-mailed him to see if he knows anything here. No response yet.
Also I do not believe we have sufficient reason to rule out the possibility that God has been subtly working to get the solar system going and working in an (operationally fairly) stable way.
(The stuff about phat beats was a pun on “rapping”, sorry.)
I’m referring to Jesus knocking at your heart’s door to see you and sup with you if you invite him in (You know the verse from Revelation).
Sure, but “knocking at my heart’s door” is metaphor. For what is it a metaphor?
If it is that I might get a sort of feeling that Christianity is correct, that doesn’t seem a very reliable way of knowing that it is in fact correct. I found an interesting discussion about that on Reddit’s ex-Mormon group, where a current Mormon had come to argue that point with the ex-Mormons. People have strong feelings, “burnings in their bosoms”, “inner witnesses of the Holy Spirit”, and so on, about a variety of mutually contradictory religions. If the “rapping” is of this form, can you explain why a feeling that Christianity is true is more reliable than someone else’s feeling about another religion?
I see a disagreement between you and Simon here: Simon told me that “you must be trusting in a revealer who is trustworthy” in order for revelation to work, but you appear to be saying that “rapping” is available to people who are not trusting in God. Simon never did explain how to solve the apparently chicken and egg problem or how it worked in the case of the Biblical St Paul (who certainly didn’t trust Jesus before his Damascus road experience). Can you explain, as Simon apparently can’t, why everyone doesn’t have an experience like St Paul’s?
On science: I didn’t claim that science has discovered absolute truth, merely that most scientists think the truth is out there to be discovered, rather than being a matter of personal interpretation. Gravity exists whether you belief in it or not, and so on.
I’m afraid you did not lose your religion because you didn’t have ONE to start with.
De-converts are often told they were doing it wrong. In general, if we say we had particular feelings of beliefs, we are told that even the demons believe (as James says). If we instead concentrate on things we did (or didn’t do 😉 ) as a result of that belief, we are told that it is faith that matters, not works. This is a “heads I win, tails you lose” argument. If the meaning of “Christian” is limited to someone who never loses their faith, it can only be applied to the dead. Perhaps you should more accurately write “provisional St William” and so on?
James Bonilla writes:
“I think it is unfair to say that it was merely a matter of not having enough time. Precisely, the following statement H1 is not a fair statement to make.” And he proffers a sociological explanation for why people before the 20th century had “enough time”.
“People generally had far more free time at the time. Historically speaking, the disappearance of free time is a fairly modern, late 20th century thing. Alternatively put, if the cost of labor is low and the utility of employing labor is high, people will employ labor. If you can have servants, you can get tons of work done by simply not having to worry about spending time on a lot of things.”
A few observations:
1. It’s not a question of total time but what things were competing for Newton’s waking hours (assuming he followed early to bed and early to rise spanning 8 hours of sound sleep). Does anyone know enough of Newton’s personal life to say that the time freed up by having a servant to cook and clean for him wasn’t used to hang out with friends at the local pub (to play darts) or for bird watching?
2. Did Newton have a servant? And if he did, do we know enough of the labour contract to determine the effective hours of servant work/day?
3. It’s inaccurate to say that “people generally had far more free time at the time.” Which class of people? During the Industrial Revolution the working class didn’t have that luxury. More accurate to apply that statement to the capitalist class. Facing an elastic supply of labour, they hired all the workers they could find right up to the point where the marginal revenue product of that additional worker just matched the going wage rate (subsistence most likely). And when the supply of labour tightened, as it surely did, they turned to child labour, and to thousands of African slaves to work in the West Indies. Isaac Newton didn’t have trouble with calculus but I’m not sure the chap was optimising “free time” in this fashion.
So I agree with Don page it’s a purely speculative attempt by James to rationalise that Newton had enough time, whereas Don was essentially saying the equivalent of “who knows?” (April 21, 2015 at 9:26 am).
By the way, in one of his brilliant essays “Can Religion be Based on Evidence?” physicist Aron Wall noted that Jesus was “purported to have performed numerous miracles including healing the blind and the lame, restoring the dead, multiplying bread, and walking on water.” And various writers in this blog call them silly claims. I like Aron Wall’s response:
:
“But why are these claims silly? Is it because you have a visceral sense that such things simply cannot happen? Others have a visceral sense of God’s love, but this is hardly regarded as proper evidence by rationalists. Normally, rejecting serious claims without examining the evidence is simply a sign of bias. Nor is it fair to construct an entire worldview of naturalistic materialism based on the presupposition that miracles do not happen, and then say that anything that doesn’t fit well into this worldview should be regarded with grave suspicion as an “extraordinary claim”. That would be circular. What claims are or are not extraordinary depends on the worldview you already possess. If the task is to construct a worldview on the basis of evidence, than one of those worldviews cannot be appealed to in order to make the other ones look ridiculous.”
And so, in this vein, I repeat professor/St Don’s statement:
“However, even though Jesus is the Rock of Ages, He need not sink like a rock. Unless one assigns a high prior probability to the hypothesis that Jesus always would act as other physical objects do, one cannot conclude what Jesus would always do just from experiments of what other physical objects do.”
Hi Paul
“Can you explain, as Simon apparently can’t, why everyone doesn’t have an experience like St Paul’s?”
I am suitably provoked. My response is highly personal. As I said, faith is not algorithmic.
I think God looks at the state of the heart of a person and decides when and how to speak. I observe that even people who see the idea of ‘the heart’ as foolish have a ‘heart condition’. They may be cynical and emotionally detached in their heart. But God can work with anyone who is at all open. There is a book called ‘The Divine Romance’. I have not read it, my wife has, it’s in England in a room, full of our stuff, belonging to the kind Prof. I mentioned in the last post as it happens. I’m waffling. There is an element of romance from God to the whole thing, even if you happen to be a nuts and bolts type person (I was, I don’t know you).
Paul was a very motivated, high energy person with a high level of conviction and commitment to a prior belief system (Hello…). He saw Steven martyred. He started to question his convictions. God read his heart and responded to an openness and integrity he perceived. We are all very very different, and God dials that in. Now that last bit sounded mechanical.
I have a friend who cried out to God at the side of the road following a near fatal car accident and a vision of hell. He is now an evangelist. Mine was a quiet business, but God asked me to confirm it with a public act of identification.
Theologies vary, and the Bible is rather indeterminate here, but personally I think you can make choices as to how you respond to God. Interest, dismissal, etc. I think anyone can initiate conversation with God, even if you are not sure he’s there, and believe he will respond if there is even an element of honest seeking in there. I worked as a chaplain’s aide for a short while and remember speaking with a dying man, who confessed he had dismissed the spiritual earlier in his life but was a lot more interested at that point. I don’t believe we have complete freewill, because the Bible says that we are slaves to sin outside Christ. We cannot really stop. However we do have the capacity to try to engage with God in Christ to the extent that he reveals himself. It is hard to do this publicly in a culture which seems to respect brassy bravado and independence, rather than reasonable humility, but it is possible, and necessary if a person is going to give God everything.