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
Richard,
You say:
“An objection is that it may be possible for humans to build a computer powerful enough to generate and interpret very large hypotheses, and possibly even to devise and run tests of those hypotheses so that very advanced theories, which only the computer can understand, can be constructed. “ [Richard says: May 12, 2015 at 11:21 pm]
Which reads like an anthropomorphic statement about computers. Are we saying the programme (based on a set of symbols and logical rules) enables the Computer to outwit the programmer? How so?
Simon Packer asked (May 13, 2015 at 4:05 am):
“Are the abstract mathematical and logical constructs we take to be immutably true (I am calling these platonic entities), say for example e^(i*pie)=-1, not necessarily true for God unless he ordains them to be true? If not, then God is not the final author, definer and source of all truth. He is then seen as being on the same level as, or perhaps even subject to, ‘platonic logical/mathematical entities’.”
Given the definitions and axioms assumed for a theorem such as Euler’s identity, often written as e^(i* pi) + 1 = 0 to include such basic mathematical concepts as 0, 1, i, e, pi, multiplication, exponentiation, addition, and equality, I would say this is logically necessarily true, a statement that logically can have no author, definer, and source. (Well, the terms have to be defined for the statement to be a meaningful proposition.) So I don’t think it can be logically possible for God to be the final author, definer, and source of purely platonic truth. But in some sense platonic truths are mere truisms (though not always obvious to us finite humans), so I don’t consider them to be at a very high level of reality, even though they are logically necessary. I certainly view God as a concrete being to be at a far higher level than the mere truisms of the platonic realm. I believe God is the author of all concrete truth, but I just don’t think there can be an author of purely abstract truths. I don’t see it as any negation of God’s power to recognize that He cannot do what is logically impossible, such as being the author of truths that can have no author.
TY: Computers are already capable of calculating billions of operations per second, more than a human could do in a lifetime.
Besides, if it isn’t possible to build a computer capable of the strong reasoning that I hypothesized in the passage you quoted, then the objection that the passage was anticipating (which is that humans can artificially extend the range of hypotheses they can process intelligently by some arbitrary amount) is already invalid.
Richard,
Another way for me to express my slight worry that a countable number of hypotheses might not be sufficient in principle to be sure one of them is absolutely right is to note that it is conceivable that the total information content in the world (relative to some putative background knowledge) is infinite, not totally captured by any finite hypothesis. For example, the laws of physics might have some coupling constant that has an infinite number of digits that are not compressible to a finite number. Of course, then we humans with finite capacity could not possibly know a complete hypothesis for such a world.
It is then just a postulate, motivated by Occam’s razor (and perhaps by the optimism that humans can know a complete hypothesis for the actual world), that the actual world has only a finite amount of information in it, which can be completely described by a finite hypothesis. I personally would assign all the prior probability to the countable set of finite hypotheses, but since this choice of a constraint on the priors is subjective, it could completely miss the correct hypothesis if it actually has an infinite amount of information in it.
Physicists do note that it is an advantage of superstring/M theory that it has no undetermined fundamental coupling constants in it, so the dynamical equations (not known yet) presumably have only a finite amount of information in them. One also needs the quantum state, and the rules for getting measures or `probabilities’ of observations from the quantum state, but although we are nowhere near having these, it is conceivable that they will also require only a finite amount of information.
On the other hand, even if a complete theory for our universe (say for the moment leaving aside miracles, though they also could have only a finite amount of information and perhaps even follow from some finite hypothesis for the nature of God that also implies a complete theory for our universe but which is simpler than a good theory for just our universe that does not include God) is finite, so is the human power of understanding, so it is not at all obvious to me whether humans will ever have a complete theory for our universe. I am hopeful that humans might (though not likely within my lifetime) for the dynamical part, and maybe also for what the quantum state is, but for giving the measures of observations, it would seem that we would need to understand them much better. Fundamentally I think they are conscious perceptions, but seeing how to describe them completely appears so difficult that I am highly agnostic as to whether humans will ever accomplish that.
Don
Thanks for the thoughts. It is taking me a while to process all this, and I am making a tentative and partial response to your opinions on divine determination of human actions. Plus a few quick thoughts on platonic truths.
You said:
“I also don’t understand how it can be logically possible for God to create something from nothing without completely determining it.”
This seems the ‘crux’ of your point of view. You certainly seem to have a point, and looking at physical systems, wholly created by God from nothing, I think you would be right.
The freewill camp is I think saying something like this instead:
“God wholly created out of nothing a physical world, and also a spiritual world. In the spiritual world, whose processes are inaccessible to our reductionsist logic, he created beings with some ability to create/influence their own realities apart from his own intentions and desires.”
I would therefore make the general point that nearly all of our reasoning has been centered on the known realities of our own experienced physical creation. This focus is not entirely warranted by a Biblical worldview IMO.
I am not offering rational answers, more simply acknowledging the need for revelation to even start to understand what I think God is doing.
I have used the following Hebrews scripture several times. It tells us that the creation of this physical world was not from things visible to us. So it could have been made from something other than what we see, or it could (less likely to be the intended meaning of the verse IMO) have been from nothing. Also an open question, and not the main point.
Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
(Heb 11:3)
So my main point. It is clear from the above scripture that there is more than one world. Colossians 1v15-17 gives revelation of different created realms and their relationship to the Father and Son. Hebrews also refers to a tabernacle where Christ now intercedes which is not part of this creation.
But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation)
(Heb 9:11)
Relating to the possible existence of freewill entities manifesting in this creation. I am inclined to think that the physics of this creation did not give rise to the human soul, which is the ‘freewill entity’. I am basing this on:
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
(Gen 2:7)
As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.
(Ecc 11:5)
and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
(Ecc 12:7)
(Incidentally, regarding ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, I see no complete distinction. In Hebrew, ‘spirit’ means ‘breath’, and ‘soul’ means ‘breathing being’.)
All of which does no more than remove the mystery of how God might beget beings with true freewill from this creation and place it elsewhere.
I am happy to believe, with little to no understanding of the means used, that:
-God is the ultimate cause of all things, physical, spiritual or conceptual,
-The essence of God’s being does not mandate these things; rather they are products of his creative will and desire,
-God, in line with this, decreed certain concepts to be true in the logical sense,
-God decreed various created ‘realities’ including but not limited to our creation framed by our physics,
-God decreed the existence of beings having a high degree of common attributes of personhood to himself. This personhood is less a product of the physical substantiation we see and more something defined elsewhere by God. He created living spirits which he joins with, and separates from, physical bodies.
-Jesus Christ, as an elemental person of the triune God, became incarnate as mortal man and died for our sins. He was raised from the dead and returned to the Father.
So God is both ‘other’ and ‘with us’; profoundly so for both.
In all the above I am departing from anything resembling logical determinism and handing off (or copping out) to divine revelation.
Looking at aseity and platonics, this is rather peripheral as it still concerns a logical reductionist framework. However it does relate to the aseity of God.
‘William Lane Craig:
“the Christian theist cannot consistently embrace platonism because such a doctrine compromises creatio ex nihilo and divine aseity by its postulation of uncreatables.”’
I am inclined to agree.
I would argue that platonic entities are not necessarily uncreated stand alone truths. Can they finally be extricated from the reality, and the euclidean space, they were, in the first instance, formulated or discovered from? I think that is an open question. For example, in the case of the Euler Formula, the exponent of an imaginary number is found to have a trigonometric identity in the imaginary plane. However the formulation of trigonometry itself involved conceptualization in realized, experienced, Euclidean space. Admittedly, i is a purely abstract concept but it turns out to model some important aspects of experienced reality.
Simon Packer, thanks for your thoughtful reply (May 14, 2015 at 5:09 am). This is perhaps a bit tangential to the main discussion between theists and naturalists on this site of my guest blog, but I think it is not bad to show skeptics that we Christians do have different opinions about many theological and philosophical issues, so we are not just blindly following some dogma laid down in our Christian tradition. I think most of us Christians do agree that Jesus is the Son of God, but on more peripheral issues, there seem to be many different ways to interpret Scripture and the Christian tradition.
Creatio ex nihilo does have to have qualifications of what it is that is created from nothing. I think most Christians would exempt God Himself from what is created from nothing. Although I certainly agree that platonic abstractions, such as logically necessary truths, do not exist in the same way as actual concrete entities, it is convenient to use the same word “exist” for them, as when we say an infinite number of primes “exist,” so I personally would say that logical necessities, such as mathematical theorems, do exist in some sense but are excluded from what is created from nothing. (One could define God to include these logical necessities, but it hardly seems to make sense to me to say that God could create them, any more than it would be to say that God created Himself, though I suppose one could modify the meaning of “create” to make either or both of these statements true.)
So I can understand how others might implicitly exclude libertarian freewill choices from what is created from nothing by God. I also agree with you that Biblical passages such as Hebrews 11:3 do not quite claim that God created everything from nothing, but only that they were not made from what is seen. Therefore, I am not saying that a view of libertarian freewill is necessarily wrong, or that it contradicts the Bible, or that it contradicts creatio ex nihilo suitably restricted, but it is different from my own stronger view of creatio ex nihilo, which personally seems simpler to me, though of course that is a subjective value judgement.
I should note that when I claim, with what I take to be the usual meaning of “create,” that it seems to me that libertarian freewill by any concrete being (by which I mean any entity not logically necessary as the truth of a mathematical theorem is, though this restriction is a bit moot here, since I do not think any logically necessary entity has a will for one to consider whether or not that will is free), other than God, is inconsistent with creatio ex nihilo (with the only exceptions of what is not created from nothing by God being God Himself and logical necessities), I am not assuming that what is created is physical as opposed to spiritual. I have precisely the same problem understanding how it could be logically possible for God to create totally from nothing any being, whether physical, spiritual, and anything else, that makes libertarian freewill choices not determined by God. Coherent discussion of spiritual beings does require logical consistency, so I do not believe that spiritual beings are illogical or violate rules of pure logic, though they may contradict common assumptions we might hold.
You gave a nice summary of what the freewill camp might hold in saying,
“God wholly created out of nothing a physical world, and also a spiritual world. In the spiritual world, whose processes are inaccessible to our reductionsist logic, he created beings with some ability to create/influence their own realities apart from his own intentions and desires.”
I would just say that if this “ability to create/influence their own realities” is really apart from God’s choice, it seems to me logically necessary that it not be totally created from nothing by God, at least with what I take “created from nothing” to mean.
I do note that there is a compatibilist way to read what you wrote, which is that God creates beings with some ability to create/influence their own realities (though what they create/influence is all really completely determined by God) that are “apart from his own intentions and desires” in the sense that God sacrifices some of His own intentions and desires of what they do in order to increase their happiness in doing what they want to do when there is no action by them that would both maximize what would please God and also maximize what would please them. That is, if God is maximizing total happiness, he may determine that the beings do what maximizes total happiness even if this does not maximize God’s happiness alone, so that it is in this latter sense not purely “his own intentions and desires.”
Don,
Have you ever tried correspondence with William Lane Craig directly? It seems to me you both would enjoy/benefit from it, and I personally think you could help him give his Kalam Cosmological argument a much, much needed update that he would value.
Josh, please allow me to chime in before Don Page to your comment on May 14, 2015 at 9:21 am. If I understand the Kalam argument, it hinges on the something “X” coming into existence and then asking what caused X to happen. So the X is the Universe. I think it’s a perfectly logical approach, but it depends strongly on the Science of the Big Bang. What happened at or before is a mystery to us mortals with limited knowledge, but not to God who is eternal.
William Craig is following the “evidence” and we can’t fault him (although if new evidence proves otherwise, Kalam goes with it, and I think William Craig understands the logical pitfall). But the demise of Kalam is not the death of God, nor of the notion of a beginning (so Craig eductive argument might still work, but with new evidence.) I think the critical premise of Kalam is the notion of a “beginning” and so infinite regress makes no sense. Note for example that Aron Wall makes a similar argument in “Fundamental Reality III: Chains, Parsimony, and Magic” in: http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/fundamental-reality-iii-chains-parsimony-and-magic/
“Personally, I find an infinite regress, with nothing more behind it, rather unsatisfactory. It is not that I think there is any logical inconsistency in a universe which extends backwards in time forever. There isn’t. The universe might well work that way. But I feel like such a chain of explanations wouldn’t actually explain anything in the chain properly. For example, in the “ekpyrotic” scenario where the universe involves an eternal bouncing back and forth of two membranes, it wouldn’t tell us why there are two membranes rather than one or four. It would just boil down to saying that: things just are the way they are because they are the way they are. Of course, if there were some additional extra explanation outside of time which somehow determined that there had to be two membranes, that would be different, and would make me much more satisfied with a time that goes back forever.” (end of quotation)
Back in April 6, 2015 at 9:50 am, I asked Don in this Blog for clarification on a few cosmological question (yes, we non-physicists rely heavily on the experts and when they appear to disagree, “we want to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but…” And so I said the following:
“QUESTIONS FOR DON PAGE AND BACK TO COSMOLOGY
Is there an inconsistency in these statements?
Professor Page states in his blog post (above) he is not sure “our universe had a beginning”: “I do not believe that the first premise is metaphysically necessary, and I am also not at all sure that our universe had a beginning. (I do believe that the first premise is true in the actual world, since I do believe that God exists as a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence, but I do not see that this premise is true in all logically possible worlds.)” And “We simply do not know whether or not our universe had a beginning.”
Stephen Hawking states in a Lecture, The Beginning of Time: “In this lecture, I would like to discuss whether time itself has a beginning, and whether it will have an end. All the evidence seems to indicate, that the universe has not existed forever, but that it had a beginning, about 15 billion years ago. This is probably the most remarkable discovery of modern cosmology.” And “The conclusion of this lecture is that the universe has not existed forever. Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago. The beginning of real time, would have been a singularity, at which the laws of physics would have broken down.” Ref: http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html” (end of quotation).
And on April 7, 2015 at 1:23 am, Don responded:
“So far as whether or not the cosmological evidence supports a beginning or not, the evidence seems very unclear to me. I do think it highly plausible that the thermodynamic arrow of time does have some (perhaps rather fuzzy) beginning, so that entropy has not been increasing forever (though I am not sure even about this), but it also seems to me plausible that spacetime could have existed before this point, perhaps even infinitely long before this point with a contracting universe that had entropy decreasing. (However, if there are ordinary observers in that contracting part of the universe, I think they would remember times when the size and entropy of the universe is smaller and think that the future is in the opposite direction of time where they are, so that they would experience an expanding universe with growing entropy, just as we do.)”
Don’s reply in the April 7th comment might shed some light to your inquiry.
TY,
Pardon me for being frank, but I don’t understand your point?
I’m referring to:
“Kalam Cosmological argument a much, much needed update that he would value.” From one of William Craig:
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
If this is NOT what you meant by Kalam (argument for the existence of God), then my comment about beginning and cause is totally irrelevant.
TY,
Yes, you/I were referring to the Kalam argument or at least one of its flavors. I just don’t know what exactly you wanted me to see/agree about it.
If that is one of the flavours, then my question was what’s does Don have to update subject to what he had replied to me. I would be interested to know (a) his view of this form of the cosmological argument for the existence of God (which he didn’t say much on), and (b) whether he disagrees totally of partially with the premises.
TY,
Craig generally takes for granted that the scientific consensus is that the universe had a beginning. Don, given his background, knows that there’s a diversity of other models out there that may or may not require such an explicit beginning as well as the limitations of our current evidence. For instance, even with the oh-so-much substantiation available for the Big Bang, we can (and do) talk about it more as an epoch in our universe’s history rather than an ontological reason for being. Don could conceivably ‘update’ Craig on these nuances (some addressed in Don’s OP).
Don
Thanks for your last reply to me. However I still cannot let go of the real freewill thing. I still believe we do things which are flat not determined or willed by God!
I see insurmountable theological issues otherwise, including a denigration of the call and potential of humanity depicted in say, Hebrews 2, and a parallel dilution of God’s absolute goodness. God’s moral simplicity seems to get corrupted.
God seems to have an ability to ‘beget’ spirits with a degree of his divine nature in them, in that they can autonomously will and act. I have a feeling C.S. Lewis wrote on this, I’m not sure. We cannot do this when we make things; they are either deterministic or malfunctioning. Human reproduction does not count of course because we don’t understand what we are setting in motion by the reproductive act. Perhaps with God’s logic toolkit, rather than ours, all this ‘begetting of freewill entities’ becomes possible?!
I think that is the best I can do!
My last thing on platonic entities and their relationship with our achievable conceptualizations was a bit garbled and perhaps blinkered. I was trying to say that it may be there is no hard distinction between the logical framework of the substantiated reality from which we conceptualize and at least some of the platonic entities we deduce, and therefore it might be possible for God to re-script both.
Don
Lest I sound too antagonistic, I hope we can agree to disagree for the time being. Rolland Baker is head of a large missions organization mostly to the poor and I think he agrees with your deterministic perspective, though perhaps not the universalism.
Also I want God to prevail over my own often erroneous expressions of freewill and I believe from scripture he is able to for those in Christ.
And yes, we have drifted a long way from the initial scope of discussion, but thanks again.
Josh,
William Lane Craig and I have had sporadic email exchanges for many years now. He often does ask me questions about cosmological issues and takes an effort to be accurately informed. For example, I sent him some references this past January 21 and included the following paragraph:
“Anyway, this just seems to reinforce my view that it is dangerous to tie an apologetic to an assumption that the universe had a beginning, since we simply do not know whether or not that is true. Of course, if one just said it is a plausible assumption to try to develop an argument to show that the existence of God is plausible (which is all that I think any of the so-called `proofs’ of the existence of God can do), so that the reader might be motivated to look at historical evidence for Christianity, then I would not have this qualm about the assumption, though to me it still does not seem to make much difference to the question of theism whether or not the universe has a beginning: Logically one could have God create a universe with a beginning or without a beginning, and logically the world could have no God and a universe that either has or does not have a beginning.”
Bill wrote back the same day, “Thanks for the references. I already know and cite the first paper, and I’ll have to look at the other two as time permits. I do want to be accurately informed.”
Then on March 11 I had run across Bill’s debate with Sean and so wrote both of them the long email that Sean then on March 12 kindly asked whether he could post as a guest post on his blog. Earlier on March 12, Bill wrote back to me, “Thanks, Don, for taking the time to write such lengthy reflections! I’ll read them with interest.” I also gave him and Sean an opportunity to correct any mistakes or misrepresentations I made in my email before it was posted, but Bill did not send me any, so I hope that I did not misrepresent him.
Bill does emphasize the evidence for a beginning of the universe more than I would, but he tries to be accurate about what he does say. Our main differences are over philosophical issues that are of course hard to prove. Maybe the Kalam cosmological argument gives those who believe its premises good reasons to believe in God, but this particular argument does not seem very compelling to me personally. (TY, I don’t believe that Premise 1 is necessarily true, and we just don’t know enough yet to know whether or nor Premise 2 is in fact true for our universe.) On the other hand, my Optimal Argument for the Existence of God (see the four references in the second paragraph of my guest post above), with its assumption that the world is the best possible (subject to a constraint on the nature of God if God exists), certainly did not seem very persuasive to a Caltech audience (including Sean) last November when I included it at the end of my seminar on Cosmological Ontology and Epistemology that I had given with less immediate objections in September at a Philosophy of Cosmology conference in Tenerife.
So I recognize that since different people start from different assumptions, different arguments can appeal to different people. However, I would not want someone to feel that just because one particular argument for the existence of God is not persuasive to him or her, therefore there are no reasons to believe in God. This is of course also a danger in what I have written in my guest blog here and in the comments, since I am just giving one particular perspective, and if it is not persuasive, that does not mean there are not much better reasons than what I can express for believing in God and in His Son Jesus Christ.
Simon Packer, thanks for your responses. I’m fine if we agree to disagree on this issue. I was just trying to express some of my reasons for holding the views I have, but I know they are minority views, so I don’t expect most others to hold them.
You did now implicitly bring up the problem of evil, which I agree is one strong motivation for saying that it comes from libertarian freewill choices independent of God. However, this theodicy does not seem to explain natural evil (unless perhaps one attributes that to freewill choices of evil spiritual beings such as Satan), so it does not seem to me to be a sufficient reason for me to give up the simplicity of a strong version of creatio ex nihilo. My Optimal Argument for the Existence of God started out as a theodicy, and then I thought I could try to make it into a more positive argument for theism, but given the fact that very few people accept its premises (not even my wife), it might better function as a speculative theodicy for people such as myself who are highly skeptical of libertarian freewill.
Don,
That’s good to hear that you’ve been in discussion with him about it. If he personally recognizes that “the beginning” is not so set in stone, I haven’t seen this reflected in his debates much, so maybe there will be a shift in tone/focus there. I may disagree with the theistic arguments, but I would still prefer them to be argued well if that makes any sense!
Simon, for a good discussion on free will versus determinism, look up Aron Wall:
http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/fundamental-reality-viii-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness/. Great discussion in that Post. I am inclined to the Wesleyan-Arminianism view of free will rather than the Augustinian-Calvinistic. But do I go to bed worried about which viewpoint is central to Christianity? NO.
Don, I am curious to know why you disagree with premise 1 of the Kalam cosmological argument, which seems very reasonable and perfectly intuitive to non-physicists like me. To use Craig’s famous phrase, things don’t just “pop into existence.” I agree premise 2 is debatable scientifically and theologically, but not an outright falsehood. So, on balance, theists cannot claim the Kalam argument is conclusively a deductive proof of God, and in this sense I can understand your cautious position. It is probably more accurate to say Kalam points to the probability of God’s existence. But, if in addition, premise 1 is false, anyway one looks at it, then this would invalidate the less extreme interpretation of Kalam. So your comments will be helpful to my understanding and I’m sure to many others.
Thanks.
TY,
I think my objection to the Kalam Argument Premise 1 (“Whatever begins to exist has a cause.”) is that I don’t see any inconsistency in a naturalistic world with just a universe that has a beginning. Given what we know about the universe (e.g., its apparent high degree of mathematical order, the sentient experiences within it, and the historical evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, to take three key examples), I personally believe a world with God creating our universe is simpler than just our universe alone without God, so by setting higher priors for simpler theories that fit the observations, I think theism is more probable than naturalism, but I don’t see any outright incoherence or logical inconsistency in naturalism.
Although our universe seems to be quantum, which makes the concept of spacetime (and the question of whether or not time has a beginning) rather fuzzy, I don’t see any logical inconsistency in a classical universe with a big bang existing all by itself with no cause.
There is actually one subtlety here, in that in a mathematical description of spacetime, one usually takes it to be an open set, so that in a big bang model with a singularity at t = 0, the singularity itself is not considered part of the spacetime. This means that in such a model, spacetime goes back to arbitrarily small positive t, but not to t = 0. Therefore, the `beginning’ at t = 0 is not considered part of the spacetime, so in a literal sense, the spacetime itself has no beginning. This might be another objection to the Kalam Argument Premise 2 (“The universe began to exist.”) even if one took a classical big bang model, since for any time t > 0 within the universe, there is an earlier time also within the universe, so in a precise mathematical sense such a universe did not begin to exist. However, one could define a larger mathematical structure that includes t = 0, even though the big bang singularity there is not really part of the classical spacetime, so that one did have a universe with a beginning, and no cause if it stood alone without God. But for the actual universe, this is all rather moot, since our actual universe seems to be quantum rather than classical, and it is not clear even how to define criteria to be able to say whether or not it has a beginning.
Don on the physics I fully trust your explanation, and I’m with you on the first paragraph, except that I still have a hard time grasping this sentence: “I think my objection to the Kalam Argument Premise 1 (“Whatever begins to exist has a cause.”) is that I don’t see any inconsistency in a naturalistic world with just a universe that has a beginning.” I believe in the notion that everything that is contingent has a cause for its existence and not only things with a beginning. So we can say premise 1 is weak but not invalid.
A while back I read Stephen Barr’s Modern Physics and Ancient Faith and he sums up the (deductive) argument for God’s existence by the following syllogism:
1. Every contingent being or fact must have a cause or explanation.
2. Such causes cannot run into an infinite regress.
3. Consequently, there must be a First Cause.
4. Obviously, the First Cause must itself be uncaused.
5. This means that it must be a necessary rather than a contingent being (because of (1). This necessary being is what is meant by God.
You say in your comment that “our actual universe seems to be quantum rather than classical, and it is not clear even how to define criteria to be able to say whether or not it has a beginning.” And the classic example given is the decay of a radioactive nucleus. Based on its half-life, the laws of physics can say 50% of the nuclei decayed in the first hour, 50% of the remainder in the second hour, and so on. So in this probability sense, the fact that a particular nucleus decayed in a particular time is “uncaused”.
Barr argues, however, that this quantum argument for “uncaused” is not cogent because all that Quantum Theory says is that “certain events do not have a completely deterministic physical cause. This does not imply that certain events have no cause whatsoever. This would only follow if one had already assumed that materialism is true and all other causes have to be physical causes.” He gives other reasons for premise 1 being valid but you can look them up in his Appendix A.
So if Kalam is weak as a cosmological argument, what do you make of Barr’s syllogism which does not rely on:
1. Premise 1 of the Kalam Argument; and
2. The tight connection between beginning and creation (which opens up to the atheist counterattack).
Sorry for this long comment but an abbreviated version for this kind of topic would be rather hard for those readers without the benefit of some key details to follow what we are talking about. I need to be sensitive to them as well.
Thanks for your thoughtful and detailed replies.
TY,
I needed a break from my presentation work, so I couldn’t resist your argument. 🙂
It’s also nice when listed as a syllogism, for as you know, breaking only one premise breaks the argument. Luckily, we can break multiple premises.
1. Every contingent being or fact must have a cause or explanation.
That was an interesting response that quantum events might have a non-material cause, but that only provides the possibility of such a cause for them and not the necessity. This premise is entirely about necessity though, and since it’s quite possible that events are at least on some level uncaused, we can’t say they must be caused. The premise also plays too freely with categories–by definition, contingent beings require causes, but we can’t freely categorize things as contingent or not willy nilly.
2. Such causes cannot run into an infinite regress.
This is not logically necessary, and is rather the author’s preference. You might be interested in the Munchhausen trilemma to see this. Basically, if you keep asking “why?”, you must eventually reach intellectually unsatisfactory grounds. An infinite regress is one of those unsavory options, but the other choices (such as a causeless cause) are not so pleasant either. So it’s just the author’s preference that he would prefer a brute fact rather than an infinite regress.
3. Consequently, there must be a First Cause.
No longer follows after 1 & 2 are gone.
4. Obviously, the First Cause must itself be uncaused.
5. This means that it must be a necessary rather than a contingent being (because of (1). This necessary being is what is meant by God.
And this is just sheer hand-waving. Even granting that 1 through 4 were true, all that leaves us with is a First Cause which will, by its nature, cause other events to unfold. It’s entirely non-sequitur to say that this Cause must be a “being.” The Cause could just be a rule, a process, an automaton, etc etc.
In short, these kind of Kalam/PrimeMover arguments are super flimsy. I think Don at least has tried to come up with some novel arguments that might resist these tired faults, and as such I wish the mainline apologists would take the wisdom to heart.
Josh, I think I would agree with you that Cosmological Arguments (of which Kalam is one) for the existence of God lack broad appeal, starting with how causation works, and other philosophical issues (such as whether it exists) that Don said are hard to prove. The strength of the chain is in its weakest link/s and if the premises can be refuted, the whole chain falls apart (as you mentioned).
I agree Don gives a fresh look and so does Aron Wall. http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/fundamental-reality-index/
And I’d like to hear what Don thinks.
P.S: You surely have an understanding boss (or you’re self-employed)
TY,
In the syllogism you gave, I’m afraid I also am not convinced by either 1 or 2:
1. Every contingent being or fact must have a cause or explanation.
2. Such causes cannot run into an infinite regress.
3. Consequently, there must be a First Cause.
4. Obviously, the First Cause must itself be uncaused.
5. This means that it must be a necessary rather than a contingent being (because of (1). This necessary being is what is meant by God.
There is an ambiguity in that “contingent” has the ordinary meaning of depending on something else, but the philosophical meaning of being neither necessary nor impossible. Taking the latter philosophical meaning here, one can say that since an existing entity cannot be impossible, it must be either necessary or contingent. I personally think that only platonic logical necessities, such as mathematical theorems or other truisms, are necessary. Therefore, I think that all concrete entities are contingent in the philosophical sense, including God, though God is certainly not contingent in the ordinary meaning of depending on something else. Therefore, I believe that God is a counterexample to Premise 1, and I personally believe He is the only counterexample.
In the actual world, I do believe that God is the direct cause of everything else concrete (contingent), so there is no infinite regress, but I don’t see why an infinite regress could not be at least logically possible. One could even imagine (though I do not believe this is actual) a deistic God who caused what happened at some beginning time, which then caused the next time, which caused the next time, and so on, but with time infinitely divisible so that there is an infinite number of steps of the causation from God to the present, in which case as seen from the present there would be an infinite regress before one got back to God.
I’m heading to Kyoto tomorrow for a two-week workshop on the black hole information loss paradox (and then after four rushed days back home I go to France for three weeks), so I might be able to comment only infrequently in the next several weeks, but I shall try as often as possible to check what has been said here, which I greatly appreciate from all of you.
Thank you Don. Let me chew on your thoughts.
Have a safe flight to Japan and hope the worship is productive. Since you (being in Edmonton) are closer to the west coast the flight shouldn’t be that tiring.