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
TY,
I think Mr. Wall should pay you for all the promotion you’ve done for him here hah.
But although my boss is nice, I work nights, and my presentation is for an interview instead (crossed fingers).
I should mention, by the way, that cosmological arguments aren’t entirely worthless if one values subjective truth, which I think theists would have a much better chance of working the cosmo argument with. For instance, you could post the premises as matters of “if you prefer [philosophical position]…then this follows…” (the infinite regress issue being a good example of this). Most theists would probably reject such an argument as they want god to be clearly objectively true, and the matter could blossom in quite a complex set of choices, but one must naively feel that if there were a good objective “for sure” argument for god, it would have been put forth by now.
Josh, I haven’t sent in my referral invoices to Aron Wall yet. When he sees them, he will hit the roof. On the Cosmological Argument, I agree there is value but it might not be the best way to convince someone of God’s existence.
The issue of whether a god created calculus (on which I am glad to see that Dr. Page seems to agree with me) reminds me of a novel called “The Three-Body Problem” by Cixin Liu, which I have started but may not finish, which in turn reminded me of a short story by the great author Jack Vance. I prefer Jack Vance’s version which is that the Solar System has entered a “Causal Fluxuation Zone” (or something like that), in which nothing makes sense anymore. The few human survivors may find some food and try to eat it only to have it turn into rocks in their stomach, or try to step towards some water only to find they have actually moved in the opposite direction. (There isn’t much that can be done with this premise once it is explained, which is why I think it belongs in a short story rather than a novel.)
This illustrates (conceptually) that there might be several types of universes: 1) matter/energy plus laws plus logic; 2) no matter/energy but laws, with or without logic; 3) matter energy without laws or logic as in Jack Vance’s story; … and so on.
In the case of those lacking laws and logic, it seems to me that nothing is prohibited (since that would be a law), so there is nothing to prevent matter/energy from spontaneously forming, nor to prevent laws and logic from spontaneously occurring and taking control of said universe. This might be what Dr. Stengler meant when he said “nothing” is unstable. (I haven’t read his books but have seen that quote. Anyway, that is what I mean by it.) In that case, creation from “nothing” might be inevitable rather than miraculous. Then we are back to the anthropic principle, as to why, out of all possible universes, we find ourselves in this one which has a tiny niche that evolution was able to adapt us to.
On the historical veracity of the Bible in general and the Resurrection in particular, there are other websites with learned discussions between experts in archaeology and ancient languages. I am not qualified to judge among them, but it seems to me the mythology faction has strong arguments. The current topic at “The Panda’s Thumb” is on this issue. It has a ton of chaff in it (for my tastes) but some grains of wheat also (mainly by Matt Young and Dave Luckett). So, not the best possible example, but no online forum seems to be without chaff (from both sides).
It is often mentioned that cosmologists have shown that universe could arise from nothing (vacuum). This is totally misleading. It should be emphasized that this *nothing* is not “nothing” as understood by common people. It is not something which does not have anything in it!! This vacuum is a quantum vacuum containing quantum fields. Otherwise it would not be able to give rise to known universe.
Don
Have a great trip and workshop! At the risk of potentially diluting your mental efforts, which I’m sure you will not allow to happen, I will reply briefly to your last comment to me while the thoughts are fresh in my mind. Perhaps you could read and/or respond when appropriate considering you schedule and priorities.
You really set me thinking about the immutability of platonic constructs.
I think it is actually me, out of the two of us, who takes ‘creation from nothing’ in the stronger sense, at least if ‘scope’ is the attribute. God, we agree, is to be considered concrete, i.e. not merely conceptual. However I believe God is concrete without being derivative of or contingent upon anything at all.
So God may substantiate a reality and he may also decree abstractions. Platonic abstractions may display or illustrate truthfulness in our context, but are they final truth? To me, this looks like an open question.
I have started looking again at Penrose ‘The Road to Reality’ and chapter one, ‘The Roots of Science’, majors on this relationship. Penrose sees the three areas of the mind, truth and the physical on a flat level, with degrees of mutual derivation, but not organized into a strict hierarchy in terms of their stand alone veracity.
I don’t think Penrose is a believer, but I like his models here. I see all these three areas, as well as the spiritual, which he probably has little regard for, as God-caused. As previously stated, I see God-caused freewill agents also, despite the logical difficulties associated with that. But then this belief system I am describing does not constrain everything at inception to obeying every platonic logical axiom.
Plato contended for three essential categories of ideal; truth (including mathematical and logical axioms), beauty, and good. I would say that all of these three also ultimately also derive from God. (The logical truth ones are the least subjective for us).
I am now asking myself what logic I still have available to me and and why?! We are reasoning within a granted context, and God has granted and defined every aspect of that context, including the available logic. We do not know the bounds of that context, and so cannot evaluate anything correctly outside them. We don’t even necessarily know what logic God ordained outside our context. All this has me thinking of Genesis, those two trees in the Garden, and the problems when one is embraced before and above the other…..I think the sons of Zion will prevail over the sons of Greece! (Zech 9v13)
Faith, hope and love remain (1 C0r 13v13).
Many aspects were explored during this marathon session. One aspect was touched on by a few participants but not nearly argumented and that is the suggestion that the material universe came to existance as a consequence of choice.
The Many World Interpretation postulates the possibility of an infinity of universes. It seems to me that the immense potential must exist for infinite universes to come to existance (unobservable to us). If in reality, this is not the case of coming into existence, the question begs : why not? What is the possibilty of a choice generating mechanism actualising from this immense potential, a preferred reality or finite realities. I suppose consciousness is part of this conundrum.
Can the experts please give their opinions.
Don,
I preface my comment by echoing Simon Packer’s “Perhaps you could read and/or respond when appropriate considering you schedule and priorities.” So please treat my comment as a contingency in its purest form.
My continuing confusion is over the philosophical or metaphysical definitions of necessity and contingency, and the supposed invalidity of Premise 1 (Every contingent being or fact must have a cause or explanation) based on your view that God is contingent rather than necessary.
On the definitions (from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy):
“It is commonly accepted that there are two sorts of existent entities: those that exist but could have failed to exist, and those that could not have failed to exist. Entities of the first sort are contingent beings; entities of the second sort are necessary beings. We will be concerned with the latter sort of entity in this article.
There are various entities which, if they exist, would be candidates for necessary beings: God, propositions, relations, and properties, states of affairs, possible worlds, and numbers, among others. Note that the first entity in this list is a concrete entity, while the rest are abstract entities.”
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/god-necessary-being/
You say, “Taking the latter philosophical meaning here, one can say that since an existing entity cannot be impossible, it must be either necessary or contingent.” Only “platonic logical necessities, such as mathematical theorems or other truisms, are necessary.” You also say, “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.”
But if we go by the Sanford definition, God is a candidate for a necessary being with the attribute of concreteness.
Hi TY
Hope AW and LB paid their bills! I’m sorry if I haven’t followed too many of your suggested links. I couldn’t make the Aron Wall ones work last night.
I tend to get fixated on particular points. I have got(ten) a little fixated on this Platonic truth thing. Sorry if I have been a bit egocentric in my line of thinking. I just straw polled Charles Read to see what he thinks about platonic mathematical entities and their relationship to God. Do you have firm thoughts on this one?
Simon, happily I have come to the conclusion that regarding my references to these reputable theistic physicists (AW and SMB) my “promo” work is all pro bono and for the glory of God (and Jesus Christ given my Christian beliefs). No referral invoices are being sent.
On your question, mathematical entities are by definition necessary. For example, 2 + 2 = 4 ; pi is an irrational number, etc., are all necessary truths, abstract, eternal, and unchanging. God has all these attributes except abstractness. God is necessary, concrete, and personal (opposite of abstract).
I’d be curious to hear Don Page’s reply (subject to his “day job”priorities). I admire him for his versatility.
TY
Should you be interested, the Penrose book is now free at
staff.washington.edu/freitz/penrose.pdf
The triangular diagrams on platonic realities vs mind vs world are thought provoking, see pages 47 and 49 of the .pdf.
It’s an interesting discussion and almost impossible to conceive of mathematical truths being otherwise. They are the best illustration of immutable we have. However to believe that they have eternal veracity at the same level as God, or even ‘prior’ to God, raises tricky questions, doesn’t it?
They could be seen as having their essence in the nature of God, I guess.
We could say that some elements of maths, ‘physicality’ and ‘mind’ are present in the nature of God. But how that arose? If we see God merely as a substantiator of the physical, we are back to the concept of a ‘Demierge’, which is platonic, but would not apply to the Father, rather the Son. Philo the Hellenistic Jew developed the concept of ‘logos’ for a Demierge, probably later adopted by John the Evangelist for Christ. But then Philo was rather flaky (Joke…Philo….filo….pastry…sorry).
Hard though it is to conceptualize, I think God decreed even basic platonic truth, like the meaning and relationship of the integers. If we say that these things have inherent independent existence, how do we explain that? That they are self-evidently true for us is not really an answer. We experience them as self-evidently true; that is all we really know. I take the attributes of God from say the Westminster Catechism, and apply them in the strongest sense possible.
One problem I am seeing in this thread is the use of Bayes’ Theorem to support a very specific hypothesis using very specific evidence (in the form that somebody provides a narrative that matches the hypothesis). I figured out an analogy which illustrates my concern.
Johnny stays out too late one night. His parents ask him where he has been. He explains, “I was at Bobby’s house. We studied for our math test, then started watching old episodes of Big Bang Theory on Netflix. I lost track of time and didn’t realize it was past 10 o’clock.”
His parents come up with two hypotheses.
H1. Johnny is telling the truth.
H2. Johnny is lying to cover up some youthful hijinks.
They believe that all other hypotheses combined have negligible probability.
Although they agree on these initial precepts, using Bayesian arguments, they come to very different conclusions. Hear their arguments and decide which parent is the better Bayesian:
Johnny’s father reasons that the probability that Johnny would tell this story if it had happened is close to 1, but if Johnny had been up to no good, the probability that he would make up a story exactly like this (out of the millions of possible stories) is very small. So based on likelihood ratios, Johnny’s father updates his prior assessment and concludes that the story is almost surely true.
Father’s reasoning (E is Johnny’s story):
p(H1|E)/p(H2|E) = (p(E|H1)/p(E|H2)) * (p(H1)/p(H2))
p(E|H1) >> p(E|H2) (by several orders of magnitude)
p(H1) is about the same (within an order of magnitude) as p(H2)
Therefore p(H1|E) >> p(H2|E).
In other words, “There’s no way Johnny would come up with *this specific story* if he just made it up out of so many possibilities. So it must be true.”
Johnny’s mother notes that we must consider all possible outcomes. If Johnny’s story is E1, there are also E2, E3, E4, … En, where n is some large number. Likewise, we can subdivide H1 into many possible hypotheses, H1.1, H1.2, H1.3, … H1.n, each corresponding to the actual events that must have happened for the corresponding story to be true. Since Johnny will only pick one story to tell (unless he’s a very poor liar), they only need to test one of the many hypotheses created by subdividing H1.
Mother’s reasoning:
p(H1.j|Ei) = 0, if i != j
p(H1.i|Ei)/p(H2|Ei) = (p(Ei|H1.i)/p(Ei|H2)) * (p(H1.i)/p(H2))
p(Ei|H1.i) >> p(Ei|H2) (by several orders of magnitude)
p(H1) is about the same as p(H2), but…
p(H2) >> p(H1.i) (also by several orders of magnitude)
From the fact that (H1.i && Ei) implies H1, together with line 1 of Johnny’s mother’s argument, we know that p(H1.i|Ei) = p(H1|Ei). So Johnny’s mother replaces the second line of her argument with
p(H1|Ei)/p(H2|Ei) = (p(Ei|H1.i)/p(Ei|H2)) * (p(H1.i)/p(H2))
Johnny’s mother continues by noting that p(Ei|H1.i) = 1, p(Ei|H2) = 1/n (this assumes Johnny chooses his story randomly from all possible stories using a uniform distribution), and p(H1.i) = p(H1)/n (assuming the probability distribution of Johnny’s actual activities is also uniform). This argument leads to the conclusion that
p(H1|Ei)/p(H2|Ei) = p(H1)/p(H2)
In other words, the content of the story provides absolutely no help in determining whether the story is true. Admittedly, the “uniform distribution” assumptions are very strong. A weaker assumption, that p(Ei|H2) is equal to p(H1.i), only requires that a lying Johnny would choose his story from a distribution weighted by feasibility. This weaker assumption leads to the same conclusion.
A real-life Johnny is probably going to be a poor judge of just how credible a given story sounds, so neither the uniform nor the matched distribution assumptions are realistic. Likely, he will get carried away and embellish more than he should. To do an accurate Bayesian analysis, we need to know the comparative magnitudes of p(H1.i) and p(Ei|H2), which requires an omniscience we don’t possess.
Richard,
I think what your argument is tantamount to saying,in much simpler terms, is that if thinking it through Bayesian style, we can’t pick both our priors AND our likelihoods. In the case of your story, we can’t arbitrarily assume both our initial belief of whether Johnny is lying AND simultaneously the probability that he would create that specific story under either hypothesis. The hypothesis then should objectively and rigorously lead to a meaningful likelihood, which should be an actual number rather than a feeling (otherwise, in truth, it is presumption). Getting these likelihoods are often impossible in some real-world cases and indeed might require omniscience as you say.
I bring this up because, if I’m rephrasing your concern closely enough, Don has already ceded this (see his comment May 11, 2015 at 8:28 pm, mine at May 12, 2015 at 6:19 am, and his at May 12, 2015 at 12:14 pm). The discussion seems to have moved on to other terms, such as the cosmological argument since.
I have gotten settled in at my workshop in Kyoto and came into my office at 6:40 a.m. today to send emails and respond to comments here, since 14 new ones have appeared after I last had a chance to respond. I found the Leave a Reply option had been closed, as had happened by some default once before, so again I asked Sean whether it would be okay if the comments continued, and he rapidly and kindly emailed back, “Sure, I can keep comments open. It’s good policy to close them down eventually, otherwise spammers find a way in. But as long as the discussion is ongoing, I’m happy to keep them open.”
Sean also noted, in response to another question of mine, “You have long since passed the previous record for number of comments (at my blog and/or its predecessor Cosmic Variance), which stood at 531, for a 2007 post about string theory.”
Kashyap Vasavada, I totally agreed with you when you wrote (May 16, 2015 at 11:14 am) the following:
“It is often mentioned that cosmologists have shown that universe could arise from nothing (vacuum). This is totally misleading. It should be emphasized that this *nothing* is not “nothing” as understood by common people. It is not something which does not have anything in it!! This vacuum is a quantum vacuum containing quantum fields. Otherwise it would not be able to give rise to known universe.”
You might compare my Amazon.com review of Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. Also see the even more scathing review in the New York Times by the leading philosopher of science David Albert, who confirmed to me at the International Philosophy of Cosmology conference in Tenerife, Spain, September 2014 that he is an atheist, so it is not just theists that object to saying that our universe arose from nothing.
Dear Don: Thanks for various links. I have enjoyed reading these comments, though I am coming from a different religious tradition (Hindu). Although we have differences in our beliefs, when attacked by atheists we theists will circle the waggon!!
Simon Packer, I agree with you when you said (May 16, 2015 at 1:55 pm), “I believe God is concrete without being derivative of or contingent upon anything at all.” I do believe that God is not contingent in this sense, but in the technical philosophical sense in which “contingent” means neither necessary nor impossible, I believe that God is “contingent” in that sense, at least with my use of “necessary” as being logically necessary (or broadly logically necessary in the sense that statements can only be logically necessary given some particular meaning of the words in the statements, since, for example, one cannot say 1+1=2 is logically necessary without knowing the meaning of that phrase).
You also wrote,
“So God may substantiate a reality and he may also decree abstractions. Platonic abstractions may display or illustrate truthfulness in our context, but are they final truth? To me, this looks like an open question.”
I would believe that platonic abstractions, such as mathematical theorems, can be truths within the abstract platonic realm, but if one takes `final truth’ to apply only to the concrete realm of the world, then I think no abstract platonic truth can imply any concrete truth. So although I would deny that God can decree abstractions within the platonic realm (since I regard them as just existing in the abstract sense and not being possible to be created), I do believe that God decrees and creates concrete realities that may be described by certain platonic abstractions. For example, I believe that as abstract entities, nonzero real numbers exist of two kinds, positive and negative, and that this is true abstractly without requiring any creation or decree from God. However, I do believe it required a decree and creation from God that there exist, for example, electric charges of both positive and negative values (though which is which is merely a matter of convention which in our present scientific culture was unfortunately set by Benjamin Franklin so that that turned out, which of course he could not have known at the time he made his choice, that the usual charge carriers in ordinary electric currents in wires—electrons—have negative charge).
I also agree with you when you write, “But then this belief system I am describing does not constrain everything at inception to obeying every platonic logical axiom.” Indeed, I do not regard axioms, such as the axiom of choice or its negation, to be either true or false, but only the following of certain conclusions from the axioms (the theorems, but not the conclusions of the theorems, which are no more true than the axioms). However, any coherent description of what God does must obey every platonic logical truth, including every true theorem. This is really a constraint on our descriptions of what God does, since it is only the descriptions (or propositions) that can be incoherent in the philosophical sense of being logically impossible.
TY, thanks for your comments (May 17, 2015 at 9:17 pm), such as pointing out that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “There are various entities which, if they exist, would be candidates for necessary beings: God, propositions, relations, and properties, states of affairs, possible worlds, and numbers, among others.” I agree that God is often considered as a candidate for a necessary being, but since I just don’t understand the sense in which He would be necessary in all possible worlds, I personally find it less confusing to say that only entities that are logically necessary (or ‘broadly logically necessary,’ since what is logically necessary depends on the meaning on assigns to words in sentences about necessity) are necessary.
Since I believe that God really does exist in the actual world, I could agree that God is necessary in the sense of being actually necessary, occurring in the actual world even though not in all broadly logically possible worlds. But a disadvantage of this meaning of necessity is that everything that exists in the actual world is actually necessary in this sense, so this type of necessity does not apply only to God, but also to everything else in the actual world.
Someone might propose that there is a set of possible worlds that contains more worlds than just the one actual world but less than the set or collection of all broadly logically possible worlds. But I don’t see any clearly preferred proper subset of all worlds that is larger than the set containing just the actual world. One can of course define various such sets, such as the set in which certain laws of physics hold, or the set in which there are sentient beings, or the set in which God exists, but these definitions appear to me rather ad hoc, so to me it does not seem to be saying much to define necessity as being what holds true in all worlds with God and then with this definition saying God necessarily exists.
Well, it is time for me to go to the workshop sessions on the Black Hole Information Loss Paradox that start at 10 a.m., so I’ll have to defer responding to other interesting comments until later, assuming that I do get the time. For those whose comments I shall not have time to give responses, I want to apologize for lack of time. I have read and appreciated all the comments, whether or not I get time to respond to them, so I thank each of your for them.
Kashyap Vasavada offered his theistic views on the Hindu religion on May 19, 2015 at 5:30 pm and I can’t help noting that on the personal nature of God, all the major religions agree on this attribute despite the differences in beliefs. I read the following in Concepts of God in http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concepts-god/:
“Some schools of Vedanta are theistic, however, and their response to Advaita is instructive. Vishishtadvaita Vedanta, for example, maintains that Brahman is personal and, indeed, the supreme person (paramatman)—creator and lord (ishvara) who leads the world’s creatures to salvation. Far from being devoid of attributes, Brahman (which Vishishtadvaita identifies with Vishnu) is the sum of all “noble” attributes— omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and all merciful.”
It would seem to me that this fundamental Hindu concept of God the Creator, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and all merciful, accords with that of the Abrahamic Faiths.
Don, many thanks for the response on May 19, 2015 at 5:53 pm. On this comment:
“Since I believe that God really does exist in the actual world, I could agree that God is necessary in the sense of being actually necessary, occurring in the actual world even though not in all broadly logically possible worlds. But a disadvantage of this meaning of necessity is that everything that exists in the actual world is actually necessary in this sense, so this type of necessity does not apply only to God, but also to everything else in the actual world.”
I might be misinterpreting you in that you seem to make a link between “existence” and “necessity”, which would lead to the absurd claim that the Tetley tea bag I drop in my teapot in the morning is necessary. I do have a spreading 30-foot Austrian pine (sheds a heck of a lot of needles) in my front yard, but it didn’t have to be there (though it exists in the actual world). So, like the tea bag, the tree is contingent. I think something is necessary if it had to exist, not in an inevitable sense but in the metaphysical sense that we could apprehend if we understood the nature of the thing. So God is in this sense necessary; or “contingent” by your (technical) definition, but I think we mean the same thing.
Richard,
Maybe there are other factors on which we disagree, but I am taking the historical evidence to suggest strongly that the apostles who claimed to have seen the risen Jesus were not lying. It is reported that all of the apostles except Judas, and later Paul (who also became accepted an apostle), saw Jesus alive again after His death. I don’t know any plausible reason why all of them would agree to lie about their experience. Furthermore, they very quickly preached this to crowds who could have checked whether or not Jesus was still in the tomb. Perhaps most crucially for me, they persisted in this preaching even when persecution came and most of them were put to death for their faith, whose central tenet was that Jesus was risen from the dead. It seems very improbable to me that they would have persisted in this claim if they had known it was a lie.
TY, I am claiming that if `necessary’ is taken to mean not what is true in all broadly logically possible universes but rather what is true in the actual world, then in this sense of what I might call `actual necessity,’ the Tetley tea bag you drop in my teapot in the morning is necessary, as well as your Austrian pine.
I am claiming that, so far as I can see, there are broadly logically possible worlds in which God, your Tetley tea bag, and your Austrian pine all do not exist, whereas in the actual world, all do exist. There is one set G of broadly logically possible worlds that are all such worlds in which God exists, another overlapping set T of such worlds in which your Tetley tea bag exists, and yet another overlapping set A of such worlds in which your Austrian pine exists. Our actual world is in the intersection of all three sets. I’m just saying that it seems to be somewhat ad hoc to choose one particular such set that is neither the full set of all broadly logically worlds nor the single-member set of just the actual world and then define necessary entities as entities that each exist in each world within that intermediate set. Of course, one can choose for consideration any such set that one wants, but I don’t see what the justification would be for using the word `necessary’ or `metaphysically necessary’ for entities that each occur in all members of that chosen set.
I would not object if some more descriptive adjective were used to limit the meaning of `necessary,’ as I did with `actually necessary’ to mean what exists in the actual world. One could use `physically necessary’ to mean what exists in all worlds having the same laws of physics as ours (and indeed this phrase is often used with something like this meaning), and one could use `theistically necessary’ to mean what exists in all worlds in which God exists. But it seems misleading to me to use simply `necessary,’ or `metaphysically necessary’ when one really means something like `physically necessary’ or `theistically necessary.’
@TY: Thanks for pointing out the Stanford encyclopedia article. I essentially agree with you. One of the major points of Hinduism is that there are thousands of paths to reach God and all are acceptable. So basically Hinduism has no problem with Christianity or for that matter with any religion. It did not start out with one prophet. Generations of sages contributed to the vision of the religion, several thousand years back. Original scriptures (Vedas and Upanishads) started with the concept of ultimate reality called Brahman manifested in every particle of the universe and responsible for all laws of nature. But they admitted that it defies all human logic! So this resulted in acknowledgement of beliefs in deities (Avatars) as personal Gods. This has continued until today. Thus even Hindus who worship deities believe that ultimate source is Brahman and personal merciful Gods are representations of Brahman. I think, the writer of the Stanford article did not understand this point. I should not take too much space here, since this thread is about Prof. Don Page trying to convince atheists about Resurrection and Christianity, which is fine with me. In case you are interested, please look at my guest blog on “Hinduism for physicists” (on another physics blog). This can be easily found by googling, since my name is not that common!!
Don
Thanks for your last reply to me. The formal language of philosophy does not come naturally to me, I am more likely to be using words in their everyday sense.
I see God as totally uncaused total cause, as you do, though the mechanism for freewill impartation, if real, is uncertain.
You said;
“….any coherent description of what God does must obey every platonic logical truth, including every true theorem. This is really a constraint on our descriptions of what God does, since it is only the descriptions (or propositions) that can be incoherent in the philosophical sense of being logically impossible.”
I think here you are talking primarily about the physical?
This seems to me to be tantamount to stating “everything God does relating to our creation must be consistent with logical platonic truth.”
When God does miracles, what happens to logical platonic truth? Physics is built on platonic truths. God is free to violate physical law, but in so doing is he violating platonic truth? Or is he merely violating the connection between physics and platonic truth? Or is he using bits of physics we don’t know?
There is I believe a parallel discussion which may help us understand the relationship between God and possible ‘stand alone concepts’. Some form or convention or paradigm is required for any meaningful communication, and God clearly seeks relationship and communication with us.
There are some things we take to be inherent in God, defining who he is before he has done or made anything. The Bible says ‘God is love’ for example. It says we are made in his image, and so there are behavioural and conceptual overlaps between us. Informal or ‘everyday’ logic is necessary to communicate anything much, particularly relational things which seem very important to God.
I would say that relational truths are inherent in God and imparted (partially) to us. Perhaps platonic truths are inherent in God and imparted in part to the creation? I can’t get on with the idea that they have stand alone reality apart from God.
“This vacuum is a quantum vacuum containing quantum fields. Otherwise it would not be able to give rise to known universe.”
The cosmological claim, as I understand it, is that zero net energy is required, with matter being included as part of the energy total. This is an ordinary usage of “nothing”, as when one opens an empty box and says, “There is nothing inside.”
As I said, I don’t see why that can’t be extended to nothing whatever. If there is nothing – no quantum fields, and no laws governing those quantum fields, what prevents quantum fields from forming? Whatever you might cite as a reason cannot exist if nothing (in your sense, e.g., including quantum mechanics as well as energy) does.
Do I think this is how universes got started? No, my answer is I don’t know and lack any confident beliefs on the matter. However, the above argument seems better to me (though not personally compelling) than any logical argument I have heard for the existence of a god.
Of course a god might equally well form under those conditions, even one that is predisposed to want human beings to exist and to want to provide them afterlives with eternal paradise or punishment, but then Occam’s Razor and Mario’s Sharp Rock come into play.
(This reminds me of another good Jack Vance story, one which hinged on the meaning of “Nothing threatens M___ [name of a person in the story whose name I forget].” )
Nothing is still out there. Who knows what might form from it next? (This could be the premise of another story, but Jack Vance died a few years ago, and I can’t think of another writer who would have as much fun with it.)
JimV, this statement from your comment of May 20, 2015 at 5:11 p.m. is noteworthy for the Cosmological Argument: “Do I think this is how universes got started? No, my answer is I don’t know and lack any confident beliefs on the matter. However, the above argument seems better to me (though not personally compelling) than any logical argument I have heard for the existence of a god.”
Let’s go back to Kashyap Vasavada (KV) and Don Page’s (DP) comments on Krauss’ “nothing” and the age-old question: why there is something rather than nothing?. This question relates to the notion that all contingent beings or fact must have an explanation. The universe is a concrete entity and all concrete entities are contingent (even God as Don argues but in a restricted sense). From JimV’s comment, it’s fair to say that some non-theists (the overwhelming majority?) believe the universe is inexplicable. The universe (matter and energy) is all there is, so goes the argument, from which it follows that if there is no universe; there is nothing (absence of anything), and nothingness cannot have an explanation. The one offered by Krauss has been roundly refuted by non-theists (see David Albert’s review that Don quoted) and theists (see Don Page’s review in Amazon) but it is still a proffered explanation.
Theists believe that the cause of all matter and energy must be a non-physical and immaterial being who transcends space and time, which is what all major religions understand God to be.
The proposition (a) that if atheism is true, then the existence of the universe has no explanation is the logical equivalent of (2) If the existence of the universe has even a plausible (theistic) explanation, then atheism is not true. Since these two hang together, one cannot affirm the first but deny the second.
I’d like to know if Jim’s or the non-theist’s position because if he or she accepts P1 he (she) cannot again say, “However, the above argument [i.e., referring to spontaneous creation of “quantum fields” from nothing] seems better to me (though not personally compelling) than any logical argument I have heard for the existence of a god.”
P.S: Don Page argues God is contingent (both in the Amazon book review and in previous comments of this Post, but he qualifies God’s contingency as unique in that God is not dependent on something else and so is not caused to exit by something else.