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
And again Paul
“Simon told me that “you must be trusting in a revealer who is trustworthy” in order for revelation to work..”
Here I was talking in the context of learning in the didactic sense, which I thought was the sense of your associated question. Here you appear to be talking about conversion to Christianity.
God may rap on your door. I am rather hoping he will.
Actually that Gravatar icon thing does actually look quite like me at the end of the afternoon now I have the high pressure espresso machine.
Paul
1. Jesus (a person of the Holy Trinity) knows all about you and me and all our brokenness, and you know the line “Jesus love you this I know, for the Bible tells me so”. These are a foundation for sound, correct doctrines. He wants to help you and he comes to your door and knocks (raps if you prefer). But you have to make yourself available. Look up: “Flesh and Spirit II: Original Sin” in http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/. Now you said, “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?” Good point aimed at the problem that there are many competing theo-histories: the Abrahamic faiths, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. It is a serious problem. Unless you (not specifically you Paul) are the type like professor Sean Carroll as far as religious beliefs go, then your choice requires careful examination of the evidence as you make the comparative analysis of the many traditions. But I don’t want to use the professor’s blog for this.
2. “I see a disagreement between you and St. 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.” No disagreement with St Simon because we both are praying for you. Regardless of whether we trust or distrust, God’s love, his grace, comes gratis for all.
3. The seeming contradiction between faith and works – St. James vs St Paul — is really not for both are complementary. Salvation comes through grace (Ephesians 2:8) not just be good deeds. But the Bible also says “walk the walk”. Matthew 7:21: Not everyone who says Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but rather he who does the will of my Father. So there is the clear presumption that “talk” is insufficient.
4. “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?”. Paul, I won’t agree that is the meaning of a Christian. Indeed, we are Christians because we lose faith when besieged by problems and we need that “communion of saints” and God to get us through. Here is a true story. One of the members of the church I attend is going through some personal problems with her son and she stopped coming to service. Her belief was shaken to its roots, But I and various others had discussions with her, offered support. Staying away from church was the wrong way, I advised. And in the same breath I said if you ever were to need my help in any way, just call me (faith in action). And surely she did. She asked me to take her son to an interview to get back into university because she was working and couldn’t get time off. I spent nearly a whole day with her son. Things are looking up for them; Kathy (that’s not her real name) has since realised the power of God. Her challenges are not over, but her faith has been strengthened. God uses us to do good.
5. On science, we are in full agreement.
Why doesn’t my wife call me St. Simon?
Ms Packer has set the bar higher for you Simon, but for me I just unashamedly apply St. Aron Wall’s convention: http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/saints/
St. Aron’s canonization policy applies to serious Christians and from your comments, I think you are, as is St. Don (Page). We speak of the communion of saints, living and the dead.
That said, Ms. Packer must be the better judge of you. I wonder!
Thanks, St. TY, for explaining your convention (following St. Aron Wall) of referring to Christians as “St.” for saint. At first I found it a bit embarrassing to see this attached to my name, since I am certainly not someone who would deserve canonization, but then I realized that in my own Christian tradition saints do simply mean Christians, with all of our failures, and not just those especially honored by a church for exemplary lives of faith. (I also do not believe that Christians are necessarily better than atheists or other nonbelievers in Christianity, so someone should not be thought of as `better’ because of the title St., but I do believe that we Christians are blessed by faith that I would like to share with others.)
However, I hope no one will find me rude if I leave off titles altogether in referring to fellow participants in these interesting discussions, since I myself certainly prefer to be addressed as Don than as Professor Page.
Don: Thanks, and for sharing your Christian faith with such conviction and humility in this blog and indeed the world It is exemplary.
Doing some more Googling, I found a source (http://www.superstringtheory.com/cosmo/cosmo1.html) which states that Newton thought the universe/solar system was only a few thousand years old, no doubt based on the Bible. Elsewhere, in a Google Books biography, I saw that Newton did a calculation based on the Bible to conclude that the universe would end in 2060.
The fact that he seems to have thought divine intervention would be necessary to keep the solar system stable over that length of time (since if it did not go unstable over that length of time there would be no need for divine intervention) settles for me the question of whose intuition was better on this issue, between him and Laplace. Of course Laplace may have had more cosmological information on which to base his intuition. In my experience, intuition is a function of what one knows (or thinks one knows).
These biblically-based beliefs would also have provided strong motivation for not bothering to do further investigation; assuming a deity had the capability and intent to end the universe in a few centuries would necessarily imply the deity would maintain the universe until that time, whether or not it was stable for that duration, or so I would think.
This is of course not intended to disparage Newton’s great accomplishments. I personally consider Galileo, Newton, and Einstein to belong on the metaphorical Mount Rushmore of scientists. It does appear to me however that the religious beliefs which his family and society instilled in him biased him for and against certain conclusions, just as a strong prior biases a Bayesian analysis.
I recently suffered a massive heart attack and died. Brought back with some knowledge that no scientist would ever consider. The truth to the expanding universe is BLACK ENERGY is INTELLIGENT. God ?? Its amazing to think that humans believe that they are the only intelligent things in the universe and leave out any reference to intelligence when looking at scientific data. No big bang but the concept of eternal which no human can comprehend. Intelligence is always expanding & so is the universe against all mathematical theories to explain why the gravitational forces don’t slow expansion.
Yup. I’m a saint part way through sanctification. I like to emphasize saint, my wife sometimes prefers to emphasize ‘part way through’.
I agree Newton was in large part a product of his times and the associated context in the processes of discovery and he acknowledged this with his reference to ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’. We all are, of course. His concept of God was a questioning one like his science, and his attempts at worldview reconciliation are interesting.
Hi Don,
Ex evangelical Christian (17 years – Masters of Theological Studies, former lay evangelist) now atheist here.
First I really appreciate how you contribute to the cosmology discussion/debate in a similar manner to how Francis Collins contributes to the evolution discussion/debate.
Elsewhere I heard your testimony (and forgive me if I get the details wrong) but you were raised in a Christian home and rededicated your life to Christ at a youth or student rally.
My question to you, is if you had been born in Saudi Arabia, would you not, in all likeli hood be a Muslim Cosmologist? Or if you had been born in Thailand, a Buddhist Cosmologist?
JimV writes on April 22, 2015 at 8:31 pm
“This is of course not intended to disparage Newton’s great accomplishments. I personally consider Galileo, Newton, and Einstein to belong on the metaphorical Mount Rushmore of scientists. It does appear to me however that the religious beliefs which his family and society instilled in him biased him for and against certain conclusions, just as a strong prior biases a Bayesian analysis.”
A few comments:
1. It seems JimV’s argument cuts both ways: if Fred Hoyle was an a Christian so that his world view was influenced by the biblical notion of the Beginning or initial cause, he rather than the Belgian Catholic priest Lemaitre might have been associated with the Big Bang rather than the Steady State (debunked by observational evidence).
2. JimV’s point that one’s ideology does influence one’s investigation or hypothesis is both correct and indisputable, and to steal a line from ex-Beatle like Paul McCarthy I ask Jim: What’s wrong with that; I’d like to know. So-called bias is good if not done in an “irrational and capricious manner.” (please see below).
3. Hence, I have problem with the word “bias” and I recall a comment by physicist Aron Wall. Allow me to replay the “tape”:
TY: What an excellent blog. I have been looking for one like this for a long time. I tell what I like about it: Although we all know St. Aron’s Christian bias, but he does not let it intrude into his physics and, as one with a mathematical background, I like that separation of Church and State.
Aron Wall came back with this forceful comment (so full of truths):
(Beginning of quotation):“Your proposal that I keep a separating wall is not really very undivided, is it? I expressed a different aspiration in my About page:
“Undivided Looking” expresses the aspiration that, although compartmentalized thinking is frequently helpful in life, one must also step back and look at the world as a whole. This involves balancing specialized knowledge with common sense to keep both kinds of thinking in perspective.”
So in response I would say, that one’s physics views can and should be influenced by one’s theological views (or vice versa), if there is a legitimate reason why it should do so. There is, after all, only one universe, and therefore no compartments can be kept completely watertight. For example, most economists don’t need to know much about chemistry, but if they’re talking about buying things that might explode then there needs to be some cross-talk.
Christianity is not a “bias”, but a “belief”, one which happens to be true. Deducing things from one’s beliefs is not bias. But perhaps you were speaking in a semi-humorous way, in the way that we might say that all scientists seek to be biased towards the truth!
Reasonable physicists will probably have similar intuitions about how physics should be done (I’m excluding unreasonable people like Young Earth Creationists), regardless of whether they are atheists or theists. Or rather, people have different intuitions about physics but they mostly don’t correlate with religious views! But if on a particular matter (e.g. the universe having a beginning in time) somebody happens to be influenced by their religion (or lack thereof) to think that one viewpoint is more likely than another, I don’t think that should be taboo.
Far from corrupting the scientific process, I think science usually works better when people explore a variety of intuitions and options. As I said in discussing the importance of collaboration in science:
“Healthy scientific collaboration encourages reasonable dissent. Otherwise group-think can insulate the community from effective criticism of accepted ideas. Some people say that scientists should proportion their beliefs to the evidence. However, there’s also some value in diversity of opinion, because it permits subgroups to work on unpopular hypotheses. I suppose things work best when the scientific community taken as a whole proportions its research work to the evidence.”
It doesn’t necessarily matter whether the source of the original intuition is something that could be accepted by all scientists. What matters is that the resulting idea can be tested. Sometimes, the original motivation for a successful scientific theory is rather dubious (e.g the Dirac sea motivation for antimatter), but nevertheless the resulting theory is confirmed by experiment and later is motivated by a different set of considerations.
So I don’t believe in the complete separation of Physics and Theology, hence the blog. But maybe I believe in something else which has some similar effects on my writing. You must after all be detecting something about what I am doing which provoked your favorable statement.” (End of quotation from http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/separation-of-physics-and-theology/)
So I’ve still been keeping up with this out of curiosity, and I wanted to drop in for one point (and then retreat to the safe background of being an observer hah):
TY and Simon– you both have quite a few arguments out there which have diverged from Don’s original claims. Nothing wrong with that, but like you’ve both I think mentioned, there’s innumerable tangents one can take in this area. If you still want to argue for god here and are open to beyond Don’s claims, I might suggest a redirection.
Specifically TY, you laid bare the matter I’d suggest when quoting Wall:
“It doesn’t necessarily matter whether the source of the original intuition is something that could be accepted by all scientists. What matters is that the resulting idea can be tested.”
And that’s it really, that’s what has to be done to convince any of the atheists here about god. Provide some means to test your god hypothesis and actually do so. Provide evidence. Note though that this doesn’t mean evidence that is merely consistent with god. This doesn’t mean anecdotal evidence. This means evidence that is repeatable, that others can try out and agree with, that points to your specific version of god and not just some theism in general, and evidence that would not just as well be explained by differing hypothesis/worldview. Whether or not you think this is fair, that is what you must do if you want to convince any of us simply based on how we (I’m generalizing the “we”) arrive at “knowledge” for large claims.
So, for instance, one of you mentioned god doing something like trying to make himself visible to us (“knocking on our heart”). That could be something like a test because we could all try it (assuming you defined it better and could control for the varieties of test subjects). Nonetheless many of us have and were earnestly religious previously. To presume the reason this test failed because of our biases (as it does for many others, or leads them to different deities) is being a poor experimenter and the equivalent of shoving your fingers in your ears and outright denial of competing evidence. The efficacy of prayer would be a great test, but we already know that doesn’t work. A repeatable miracle would be fancy also, but none such exists. Don’s bayesian analysis would be an interesting type of test if he could take his argument past conjecture and into a thorough mathematical analysis that doesn’t take for granted the links between theism and the many specifics he requires. The resurrection of Jesus would be a sort of post-hoc test if the evidence existing was more than just somewhat consistent with the account and indeed really eliminating other explanations (for instance, the naturalist explanation still remains quite viable for the Jesus story). As it stands, we just don’t have any of this evidence.
And so when you are pressed on any of these issues and either cede that you can’t provide truly convincing evidence on these accounts or you leave it as a faith issue, you can’t be convincing. Even if you were absolutely right in your hunch, you wouldn’t be convincing. To us (again, I generalize the “us”), whereas we might recognize the chance that you could potentially be right, we see the dedication to the idea as indicative of wishful thinking and either way simply will remain unconvinced.
So my suggestion then is stick to the repeatable evidence we can all go and see and that is more than just consistent with god. OR cede that the evidence doesn’t fully exist, and so it is a matter of faith and end the discussion there (for generally we will never accept faith as a convincing reason). Otherwise, yes, it will be a back and forth of tangents ad infinitum.
I’ll run along now. Best of wishes.
Unless someone raises a substantial point which has not already been discussed I hope to make this my last comment on this post:
I thank Josh for all of his comments, not just because I agree with them which I do, but because I think they were very well-written and maintained a good tone.
In response to Ty’s “What’s wrong with that?” I must reiterate for (one hopes) the last time that bias is a plague on the health of reason and is the reason that scientific methods (controlled experiments, statistical analysis, peer review) had to be adopted in order to make progress in understanding the universe. Everyone, including good and bad scientists, has biases, which get in the way of objective judgments. If this were not true, science would not be necessary. Science (I claim) can be defined as ways to overcome bias. Look around you – computers, medicine, refrigerators, automobiles, the metallurgy of water pipes, the chemistry of the paint on your home, the agricultural methods which produced the food you eat – everything I see had some involvement of science, and in most cases that involvement can be traced back to disputes over how reality works which were resolved by objective data. And in most cases there are still some (e.g., flat-earthers, geocentrists) whose biases prevent them from accepting objective data and the consensus which it produced. Einstein said my favorite quote: “All mathematicians make mistakes; good mathematicians find them.” (In which for my own consolation I substitute engineering for math.) I think he would also have agreed that all thinkers have biases but good thinkers try to overcome them.
As this is drawing to a close, I’ll sum up how I feel I’ve got on.
Some of my comments have been inspired by Peter Boghossian’s work (although I’m about to break one of his rules now by expressing some frustration) which recommends Socratic dialogue over aggressive debating.
My perception of that conversation is that it’s been frustratingly difficult to get straight answers out of the Christians here (not including Don, who I haven’t engaged with directly). I don’t know whether it’s just a long thread and people are forgetting what they’ve said, but I’ve heard both that there is enough evidence and that there isn’t, because that would mandate belief (it’s not clear why that’d be a bad thing, though); that trust in God must precede revelation and that God is knocking at the doors of my heart (a metaphor which remains unexplained, but which I assume at least includes a revelation of his existence); that “God wants your heart more than your head” and (in response to my question about how feelings about God can be reliable when so many contradictory religions have them) that I should look at the evidence, which I’d be doing with my head; that ex-Christians were never true Christians and that it somehow makes sense to apply the term “Christian” to someone who is still alive (and who might, for all we know, change their mind, as I did).
Josh describes what would be convincing pretty well. I’m afraid I haven’t seen any of it.
Jim V
“I think (Einstein) would also have agreed that all thinkers have biases but good thinkers try to overcome them.”
I occasionally do a little reality check and ask why I still believe what I believe. I still believe it because I think, all things considered, that it is true.
Josh/ JimV/ Paul
Please don’t be frustrated if we theist and Christians cannot make bread from stones right this very moment, if that is what you want. We don’t tear up the Quantum Mechanics textbook and walk out from the lecture room just because the physics professor has no satisfactory explanation for the funny way sub-atomic particles behave. Once quantum theory works, our belief in it is reasonably justified.
I say it is reasonable to believe that a metaphysically ultimate being with a mind — more than just equations — exists and for this reason I reject the mind-less naturalism as an alternative hypothesis. I come to believe in God in my search for understanding of “why is there something rather than nothing” (G.W.F. Leibniz); in the fact that the existence of a reality called conscience that no physics model can explain (the Nobel Prize is waiting for the originator of that model); the universal fact that regardless of race or creed, human beings have an innate sense of right and wrong (call it moral behavior or ethics, I won’t get into word play); and His power working in us.
From experience – sensory observation, not dreams — God works in peoples’ lives and, combined with the plausibility arguments noted above, his existence is compelling. Seen this way God must be infinite and I must be presumptions to think that the finite can comprehend the infinite.
My friends, I can’t offer more “proof”; I’ve exhausted all my explanation, but please don’t think Christians are crackpots. Great exchanging views with you all.
David Reilly asked me (April 23, 2015 at 5:04 am) the following:
“My question to you, is if you had been born in Saudi Arabia, would you not, in all likelihood be a Muslim Cosmologist? Or if you had been born in Thailand, a Buddhist Cosmologist?”
I would guess that if I had been born in Saudi Arabia or Thailand of the same loving Christian parents I had, I probably would have become a Christian. But I do admit that if I were born of random parents in one of those places, it would be more probable that I would have become a Muslim or a Buddhist (though I suspect improbable that would have become a cosmologist, no matter where I might have been born, since such a small fraction of the population of any country become cosmologists).
However, if indeed Christianity is true, it would not be relevant to its truth whether or not I would have learned it. If I were a random member of the human population, I suspect that I would not have learned about Bayes’ theorem, but that would not make it any less true.
JimV, your comment (April 23, 2015 at 10:21 am) seems to me a bit extreme, “that bias is a plague on the health of reason and is the reason that scientific methods (controlled experiments, statistical analysis, peer review) had to be adopted in order to make progress in understanding the universe. Everyone, including good and bad scientists, has biases, which get in the way of objective judgments. If this were not true, science would not be necessary. Science (I claim) can be defined as ways to overcome bias.”
Some biases seem to be good for science, such as the unprovable faith that simpler hypotheses that fit the observations are better than more complex ones that fit equally well. Most scientists appear to agree with this bias, but there are other biases that are controversial and can be unclear for years, such as Lemaitre’s bias for a universe with a big bang and Hoyle’s bias for a steady state universe. Now physicists are divided with biases as to whether or not there is collapse of the wavefunction, whether or not superstring theory is correct, whether or not there is a multiverse, whether or not consciousness is a epiphenomenon, etc. We hope that future observations can settle these issues, but some may remain undecided for decades. The debate between theism and atheism may continue to go on for centuries, though I myself hope that it can be settled by observations in an afterlife or by Jesus’ return to this earth as Lord and King.
Dr.Page, we may be disagreeing semantically as to what constitutes a bias. In the case of Occam’s Razor I don’t see that as a bias because there are good reasons to prefer simplicity to complexity (because it’s simpler). In the case of Hoyle’s Steady-State hypothesis versus the Big Bang hypothesis, Simon Singh’s excellent book “The Big Bang” ends with a table summarizing the observations and noting which hypothesis explains or does not explain them. Each has points in its favor, but of course the BB hypothesis explains more things, such as the CMBR. Bias enters in, by my definition, after the evidence clearly favors one side, yet some of the proponents of the other side refuse to acknowledge this. More generally, bias is that which causes us to fool ourselves (in Dr. Feynman’s phrase) and ignore evidence. This kind of bias is I think a by-product of the competitive nature which evolution has given us, which makes it difficult for us to admit that we were wrong. The only good thing I can think of to say about this bias is that to get rid of it we might have to get rid of our competitive natures, which are also responsible for driving us to make achievements (and wars).
Personally, I have no faith in Occam’s Razor (not that anyone asked me to). It might work or it might not, in any specific case. It makes life a little easier to use it rather than flipping a coin, but just as with a coin flip, I know that I might be making the wrong choice. I trust Mario’s Sharp Rock more, although that too might be wrong in a specific case.
Another way to explain my point of view is by using my favorite paradigm, evolution. I think human thinking works by trial and error, which implies it can only make progress by acknowledging errors. Without natural selection, there would be no evolution/adaptation-to-environment, and without acknowledging errors, human understanding of the universe could not make progress. “Think that you may be mistaken” is good advice for all of us.
Jim V
You seem to me to have a huge underlying belief in chance Evolution by Natural Selection, and you have not really explained, in my opinion at least, adequately, why you have that bias. Referring to others with a possible bias is not a final answer of course. Bias is a very hard thing to get rid of, simply because inevitably the world is full of specialists, and we use their opinions. To make a worldview, one has to accept conclusions of others in places, because of individual limitations of intellect, memory and time. Those others may be less than objective for various reasons; ego, funding, fear of peers, bad experiences with religion, etc etc. You implicitly believe Evolution by Natural Selection is good science. Not everyone does. Evolution, as I have said before, teaches that you are a survival machine and not a neutral analyzer, so you would have to attempt to apply a methodology as you say, to overcome your possible prejudices, including that belief in EBNS itself. Otherwise you are exhibiting unquestioning worship of EBNS. EBNS if true produces creatures who compete, fine for the purposes of your argument. But you are actually being rather selective in your use of evolutionary outcomes. It also if true produces creatures exhibiting guile and using camouflage. Why are we now intervening and trying to rework the basis by which we got here onto some absolute truth footing? To do so might cost you your survival. Now you can dream up an explanation here, as you nearly always can using the evolutionary paradigm, but it is now in my view a faith position. Evolution is true because we can use it in some form or another to propose a mechanism for a lot of things. It is a slippery beast indeed. God is the simpler hypothesis.
People place a great deal of faith in particular books they have read, but of course on issues of immense complexity like cosmic origins, this is actually very prone to bias introduced by the learning history of the individual writing. A marginal problem in a big theory (say Big Bang) for one might be a show stopper for another.
Paul
You have removed context from some of these statements, and others I’ve already answered. I said there was not enough evidence to mandate faith in Christ. To clarify, what I meant was that there is not the sort of evidence to force even the totally unwilling with irrefutable certain evidence. I said there was enough evidence if you really want to know.
In general I strive for verbal exactitude, but some things just cannot be expressed with complete precision, like creation itself. And verbal precision moves with the times because knowledge changes. Still, I sympathize to an extent, because I have friends who describe spiritual experiences and I have little grasp on what they are trying to get across; others will get really excited.
Code type exactitude does not produce poetry, music and art.
Looking back at my previous comment I see that every point in it has been made by me previously on this thread, albeit with different examples and wordings. Einstein would tell me to stop doing the same things and hoping for a different result. So I will.
As for evolution, if it were on-topic I would enjoy boring people with my views on it. Briefly, it makes sense to me and I see evidence of it almost every day. If somehow that were not the case, it would give me considerable pause that the vast majority of relevant experts had a different opinion than me, so I am glad that all those thousands of experts agree that I am basically correct on this issue. Nor has anything that has been asserted to the contrary on this thread seemed well-based to me, as also pointed out in my previous comments. Dr. Page has also given some hints that he understands and accepts biological evolution, and it is his thread, so perhaps he will take up this debate, or not, as he chooses.
As for the divine-intervention/god-hypothesis being simpler, see a dozen or so rebuttals by myself and others made previously on this thread (ctrl-F and some keywords will find them, on my browser – see for example “explanatory value”).
I’d like to add one point on this (false) notion that science enables (or is) precise language whilst religion obfuscates (or is) imprecise. There is something called the measurement problem in quantum mechanics of how (or whether) wavefunction-collapse occurs. At a particular occasion of measurement, the electron is found “here” rather than “there”. Ask Don (Page) for an answer and he will provide one, but it will not be none of these three: wholly satisfactory, wholly precise, and universally accepted.
On bias, JimV says “This kind of bias is I think a by-product of the competitive nature which evolution has given us, which makes it difficult for us to admit that we were wrong.” Jim, I don’t think it’s the competitive drive from evolution because there is also self-sacrificing behavior or altruism that you observe in human beings and other creatures. I think what you meant to say is plain ole arrogance and pride. Fred Hoyle’s insistence on Steady State might be a example. As well the older Albert Einstein’s in his attempts to undermine the Uncertainty Principle. I say “might” because there could be other reasons.
Jim, I am displaying of course the same attitude from the other side of the fence regarding expecting you to change your mind. Yes, I think Don did say he accepted EBNS.
Jim, Regarding EBNS what is there to understand? It’s not complicated at core. It’s just really at sea with regard to agreed details and rigour.