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
Simon Packer asked the following (May 20, 2015 at 12:12 pm):
“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?”
No, I do not believe miracles violate logical platonic truth, but merely the usual laws of physics that God seems to use most of the time. I believe nothing can violate logical platonic truth, since these truths are merely truisms or tautologies. For example, if the usual laws of physics conserve charge, and if God does not violate this law by doing something different, then God conserves charge. But if God chooses to violate the law of charge conservation, there is no violation of logical platonic truth, but only of this usual law. Different platonic truths are relevant to different laws of physics, so if God chooses to act in different ways, different logical truths or tautologies may apply, but there is no violation of the ones that don’t apply.
As to whether God is “using bits of physics we don’t know” when He performs miracles, I suppose that depends on whether or not we call it physics. I personally believe that God always acts to maximize goodness, so one might say He acts according to the law of love He has chosen to use. Most of the time I believe this is in accordance with the usual laws of physics that both theists and atheists would accept, but some of the time His acting according to the law of love might violate the usual laws of physics. One could then say that this is a fuller expression of the laws of physics, so that then God would be “using bits of physics we don’t know.” However, it might be confusing to those who view the more restricted usual laws of physics as the full laws of physics, so it might be less confusing to them just to say that God is acting differently from usual with respect to the usual laws of physics. But in any case I believe it is God’s acting, so I don’t see any real ontological difference from His usual acts in accordance with the usual laws of physics and His less usual acts that are different.
TY,
Re: your response to JimV, be careful not to misrepresent. Although there must be some nontheist individuals who indeed think the universe is inexplicable, that does not seem to be true of most nontheists. The trend seems to instead be that they (we) hope for an explanation but recognize the difficulty of it and don’t feel we have a satisfactory answer yet.
That doesn’t mean that “something from nothing” arguments can’t be made like Krauss though, as long as we’re appropriately characterizing whether we are talking about the philosophical nothing (no entity, process, rules, etc.) or the physical nothing (no matter/energy). Ironically, Krauss DOES openly acknowledge the distinction in his book, and so some of the criticism directed towards him is unwarranted. One might critique how is book was marketed though, but somehow I think “A Universe from a Quantum Vacuum State which is Effectively Nothing” would have sold far less copies.
Note too that the nontheists (Krauss especially) may seem far more interested in discussing this type of nothing rather than the philosophical nothing. This makes sense when surveying that the physical nothing is all we currently have the capacity to indeed talk about. Speculation over how something can come from a philosophical nothing feels pretty meaningless to us as it is just that, speculation.
So you are left with the possibility that either “God” came from nothing or always existed or other unpleasant logic OR that such unpleasant logic is true of the physical laws of the universe (or some simpler, antecedent law) OR something else we can’t even imagine. Therein we acknowledge we don’t know how it all got going, but we just don’t see any reason to fit God in that hole of ignorance.
Don, thanks, and you have I believe said that platonic truth is absolute, and that God is the totally uncaused total cause. Do you have any further statements about the nature of the relationship between the two?
To all commenters with whom I have interacted, and the ones with whom I have not, thanks, it’s been interesting and for me at least, enlightening. I’m not sure I have much left to say (how many times did I say that already?). So I have a summary. Read it at your peril.
1) Atheist philosopher “We are working on how platonic truth came about and we’re about to get there. We already know how the universe may have come about from no physical matter/energy and the vacuum state. We are pretty smart and worked all this out.”
2) Agnostic philosopher/friendly and accommodating atheist: “God is a postulated sentient entity, being defined conveniently as the agent who is able to bring about philosophical and material ‘something’ out of ‘nothing’. We are pretty smart and worked all this out.”
3) Theist philosopher: “God ordained platonic truth, and substantiated a reality with matter/energy governed by laws and boundary conditions deriving from these truths. We are pretty smart and worked all this out.”
4) Confused literalist philosopher: “God is actually made of concrete and has made a load of other stuff out of it too. We are pretty smart and worked all this out.”
5) Young Earth Creationist philosopher: “God was in a big hurry to look like he wasn’t in a big hurry. We are pretty smart and worked all this out.”
6) Christian philosopher (to include 3 sometimes, definitely 5 and maybe, at a push, 4): “God made everything because he wants to hang out with us if we can all get it all to work. It says so in the Bible and I believe it.”
I have serious days. This wasn’t one of them. No offense intended.
Josh, I agree with you that the inexplicability of the universe is not shared by all non-theist as I said “some”, and because I was careful not to generalise I placed the question mark so it was clear it was not an affirmative statement.
“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. ”
Thanks for the observation because it’s easy to miss the sign and I certainly don’t want to give that impression.
Josh, I am sympathetic to your paragraph (May 21, 2015 at 7:00 am):
So you are left with the possibility that either “God” came from nothing or always existed or other unpleasant logic OR that such unpleasant logic is true of the physical laws of the universe (or some simpler, antecedent law) OR something else we can’t even imagine. Therein we acknowledge we don’t know how it all got going, but we just don’t see any reason to fit God in that hole of ignorance.
In my criticism of the content of Lawrence Krauss’s book (and not just the marketing), just because I strongly believe that atheists have not solved the problem of why something rather than nothing exists, I am not claiming that theists have either. I am just now having an email discussion with some theistic philosophers on the meaning of metaphysical necessity, which many, but not all (an exception being Richard Swinburne, if I interpret his view correctly that God is the ultimate Brute Fact), believing that God is metaphysically necessary and that there exists an explanation for God’s necessary existence, even though we are epistemically unaware of this explanation. On the other hand, I don’t understand what this metaphysical necessity could be, other than what exists in a rather ad hoc set of broadly logically possible worlds that one simply defines to be the metaphysically possible ones, then saying that all entities that each exist in one of these `metaphysically possible’ worlds are `metaphysically necessary.’
Therefore, I would personally say that it is a deep mystery why anything concrete exists at all, including God. One might respond to the question of Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? as it has been done in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Well, why not?”
Personally, I believe that an empty world (one with absolutely no concrete entities that are not logically necessary as I believe platonic truths such as mathematical theorems are) is the simplest, so in my subjective scheme of assigning the prior probability 1/2^n to the nth simplest hypothesis, I would assign a prior probability of 1/2 to this simplest hypothesis, with n=1. But of course our observations would have zero probability in such an empty world, so its likelihood and posterior probability are both zero. I am hence more interested in which possible non-empty world is actual.
Then for me personally it is not that I believe that God exists because I think the existence of God explains why there is something rather than nothing, or because I think God is `metaphysically necessary,’ whatever that means, but rather I believe in God because I believe that if I could order hypotheses by their simplicity and assign a prior probabilities of 1/2^n to them, and if I could calculate the conditional probability of the observations I know (including the perception that I am conscious, the perception that the content of my consciousness seems to have a large degree of order, the perception that I am aware of a lot of historical evidence for the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the perception that living the Christian life of forgiveness seems to work well, etc., etc.) for each of these hypotheses (the `likelihoods’ of the hypotheses) and do a Bayesian analysis with these, then I believe that the sum of the posterior probabilities for theistic (and even for just Christian) hypotheses would be high.
Don, after the e-mail discussion with the theistic philosophers is over, I just wonder if there would be a need to change your view (see comment of May 15, 2015 at 6.14 pm) on the Cosmological Argument by Stephen M. Barr, which I repeat for convenience. Right now, it registers like a “hanging sentence” (given the subsequent discussion”
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.
How would you restructure the syllogism to make the argument good (plausible premises, valid or strong argument, and the premises are more plausible than the conclusion).
Thanks.
Don,
Regarding Krauss, I was more talking about the general critiques levied against his book, not yours specifically (since I haven’t read in some time, though ironically I do recall reading your Amazon review long long ago when I first picked up the book).
I would like to challenge you though that your last paragraph might not need be said in such detail. Effectively, since you can’t do all of those “if” statements, you are really just making a statement of faith or preference… which brings up an interesting idea since you’re theologically rogue in some ways—- do you think that, if god exists, his existence should be objectively convincing? And also, would you personally want to ascribe to such a tremendous ontological claim if he wasn’t objectively convincing? As you still maintain belief despite so many unfulfilled “if”‘s, those questions seemed par for the course.
I’d like to also share empathy for the “something from nothing” question though. In many ways, even if you do place god in the picture, it’s near mind-rending to think about. I enjoy your “why not?” quote which is reminiscent of the idea that “nothing is unstable.” One could also take a frequentist approach by borrowing from Spinoza’s philosophy— recognizing that there’s only one way for “nothing” to be, and so the probability of it being actualized against an infinite number of “somethings” is infinitely small. So I’d argue that you’re right in being more interested with asking things akin to “what is actualized?” or “why is this particular case actualized?”.
What concerns me though is that there is a sort of elephant in the room for these discussions—the answer is most likely utterly unsatisfactory. Given our current tools of logic, the “truth” must be either an infinite regress, circular, or a brute fact(s). Or maybe “everything” is true, but then what counts as a possible “everything”? It’d be nice if theists and atheists could at least shake hands on this.
TY,
I guess I was also encouraging you to battle the majority nontheist perspective as well rather than the subset (as the former is more challenging that the later). Though I hope I wasn’t putting words in your mouth either.
Don
Sorry about the semi-frivolous last one, and please don’t throw me out of this workshop just yet! Thanks again for bearing with us all and me especially. I realize on ongoing reflection that I don’t have a totally firm opinion on this relationship between platonic logical/mathematical ‘truth’ and God.
I’m probably pushing a position here to see if it stands at all, i.e. God decreed platonic logical/mathematical truths for our concrete context, and perhaps for other contexts. This would maybe emphasize the connectedness of these truths with physics, and de-emphasize the immutability of both the ‘truths’ and physics.
You said:
“I personally believe that God always acts to maximize goodness, so one might say He acts according to the law of love He has chosen to use.”
Yes, we agree a character attribute of God is basic, i.e. love. I would actually go further here and say that God cannot not act in love. He is love. Ditto truth. We could discuss how love is tantamount to maximizing goodness, but that could be a working definition. That God is both love and truth is a ‘brute fact’ as I understand that phrase, or ‘faith statement’. So it is impossible to move God relationally in a way which causes him to violate love or truth. Problems may occur of course with our ideas of what love and, more particularly here in this discussion, truth, are. We are not ultimately free to change his definitions, they will prevail.
I understand your point of view that platonic truth is absolute, self-evident truth, and that God may choose to ‘decouple’ physics from the ‘working norm’ of its accord with platonic truth if he chooses.
You also said:
“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.”
I agree , but that was not my intended meaning for final truth. I don’t see this concrete world as an embodiment of absolute truth, maybe not even in the logical/mathematical sense.
I remain a little puzzled by what seems to me to be your present stance, but its not something even highly educated and intelligent theists seem to have a clear understanding of. I probably have lacked exactitude and consistency when using terms such as ‘abstration’, ‘theorem’, ‘axiom’, ‘construct’, etc. I am summarizing what I think you are saying:
-God is the final cause of everything and he is not caused by anything. However there are inherent truths in the nature of everything, including God. We call these ‘platonic mathematical and logical abstractions’.
I am comfortable with ‘God is love and truth’. However here I would say that God has ordained concrete/sentient orders where there is a granted (though undesired by God) freedom to deviate from his nature. I am less comfortable with ‘God is platonic abstractions’. (You did not actually say that). Maybe that is just because of semantics. Or maybe it is because I am not finally convinced that platonic truth is not just observed/subjective truth for us and therefore not immutable and fundamental. We would otherwise be giving platonic truth a substance more fundamentally fixed than God’s love; i.e. God and the universe are not free to deviate from it.
My ‘tree of final realities’ would go something like this: God, Trinity, love, absolute truth, informal, relational truth and logic——-begotten delegated freewill beings including spiritual man—–platonic mathematical truth——physical law and concrete, physical universe and mortal man.
Don Page said:
I am not sure whether you intend to imply that (some) atheists generally believe that the problem has been solved, or that Krauss has claimed that. But, just in case, I wanted to point out that Krauss has always been careful to clarify that his arguments pertaining to this problem are not intended to be a claim that the problem is solved but only to demonstrate that based on the limited understanding modern physics has afforded us as of the present that the arguments he has made are plausible.
He has also made clear that the reason he has made these arguments is to demonstrate that the question as put forth by theologians, apologists and some philosophers is not necessarily the unknowable mystery that it is portrayed as. Not necessarily the unanswerable mystery which makes positing a god seem like a reasonable, the only, resolution. Krauss’s intent is to point out that their is no good reason to suppose that the theist conception of “Why is there Something rather than Nothing” is valid, but that there is some good reason, though not a definitive explanation, for a naturalistic conception of it.
darrelle,
Are you sure? There really are two questions afoot in that discussion— one related to the physical nothing, and another related to the absolutist philosophical nothing. Krauss obviously thinks the first is solvable, but he generally seems unconcerned about the later, and seems in public discussion to always be talking about the former. He even acknowledges this in his book, and my reading was that he finds the second philosophical question a non-issue and meaningless.
Josh, I am still not sure what is the “majority non-theist perspective” encapsulated in a model, or models of some generic type. I have been straining my eyes for such information and if you can cite a few references, I’ll look them up. Even though I’m a dyed in the wool theist, I’m open to reason. The closest in the literature I’ve got to is Aron Wall’s “Did the Universe Begin?” which Don Page describes as an “excellent summary” (comment of April 7, 2015 at 1:23 am) of eight cosmological models. Wall states most of them point to a beginning of some sort, but I’m still trying to find a scientific explanation of how matter and energy came into being (how the blue touch paper got lit).
The Stephen Hawking of A Brief History of Time (1988) seemed to have left the door ajar for “God” but 12 years later in The Grand Design, he totally dismisses God and writes:”Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing, Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
But spontaneous creation (out of nothing) cannot represent the majority view, as we have seen in previous posts. So what is that majority view? In A Brief History of Time, Hawking wrote: “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.” And In The Grand Design, he wrote:: “M-theory is the unified theory Einstein was hoping to find.” M-theory, a form of string theory, would (could?) be the “complete theory”.
As far as I can tell from the literature – the views of academic physicists who know what they are talking about — that complete theory might be wishful thinking, and I’d like to know Don Page’s view about M-theory (or for that matter any theory) for its capability of fully describing the relationships AND accounting for all the parameters so that none is left unexplained. And even if a complete model is formulated, would that imply God did not create the universe? I think Don (who studied under Hawking) would say no.
At any rate I dread the thought of engaging the majority because cosmology is out of my depth and God knows, it’s lot of hands to shake after the debate.
Josh,
I am not sure where I have confused things, but what I attempted to convey about Krauss’s arguments was in no way intended to conflict with what you have, accurately in my opinion, pointed out. Yes, Krauss’s conception of “nothing” which he uses in his arguments is not the same as that used by theologians and the like in their deliberations. He has always been careful to point that out. The difference between the two conceptions of “nothing” is in fact central to his argument.
He argues, again, not as a definitive claim but as an example with some support from modern physics, that based on what we know about our universe from modern physics that actual nothing is not like the philosophical notion of nothing. He is saying, you can philosophize, or theologize, all you want but, that conception of nothing at the base of your arguments? There is no evidential support for it. Despite how intuitive it may seem, there is no reason to suppose it is accurate. And as an example, here is a conception of nothing that, though not definitive, actually does have some evidential support, and also answers the original question without the need for supernatural agents.
I do not agree with the critics that dismiss Krauss because his arguments include a different conception of nothing than the believers he is arguing against. He has always clearly explained that, and explained why, and it is central to his argument. People may disagree with his arguments, but the claims that he has been disingenuous in some way are invalid.
Darelle, please look at this post by physicist Aron Wall, “A Universe from Nothing?” http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/a-universe-from-nothing/
It may help clear some of the “Krauss questions”. Wall attended a talk by Krauss on that subject so this is good material from an eyewitness.
My apologies for all who think I’m the “promo man” for Undivided Looking.
Krauss as presented here and in links seems to be pushing just another stopping off point on the road to nothing as the word clearly means to a philosopher or any reasonable enquirer after hard absolute truth. He is embracing a truckload of platonic logical and mathematical truth as one part of his ‘nothing’.
Simon, I’m not qualified to argue against Strauss but, at best, I can accurately quote what his peers in the field of particle physics write. So I’d like my atheist friends so qualified tell us, the non-physcist theists, where Mr Wall has got things wrong in that post, or has misrepresented Krauss. I don’t want Krauss to “get off the hook” because he’s a good marketer and he’s been peddling that stuff for quite a while. It’s not as if some physics professor just wrote an academic book and got savaged by both theist and atheists. Professor Krauss has built an entire cottage industry on creation without God.
The business model hasn’t changed. When the he wrote a piece on March 17, 2014, “A Scientific Breakthrough Lets Us See to the Beginning of Time”, in The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-scientific-breakthrough-lets-us-see-to-the-beginning-of-time. The article was on the discovery of by astrophysics of polarization distortions in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation
He said, “For some people, the possibility that the laws of physics might illuminate even the creation of our own universe, without the need for supernatural intervention or any demonstration of purpose, is truly terrifying. But Monday’s announcement heralds the possible beginning of a new era, where even such cosmic existential questions are becoming accessible to experiment. ”
Still, we must given Krauss full credit for his careful choice of words: he says “illuminate” and not “cause”.
I suppose, my comment started this saga on Krauss, even though I did not mention his name! So perhaps I should add something. There is no denying the fact that Krauss is an eminent physicist. But who doesn’t like to sell thousands of his books and get invited all over the world to give talks? So in picking the title of the book “something from nothing “he did try to pull a fast one. He knew fully well that majority of his readers would not know cosmology or quantum mechanics. So I must say it was deliberately meant to confuse non-physicist readers about creation of universe from “nothing” (vacuum). BTW for those commentators who say that Krauss is not concerned with philosophical or theological definition of nothing, I would just say please ask the next person you see in the shopping mall, “what does the word ‘ nothing’ mean to you?” and let us know!! Also quantum fluctuations do not arise from nothing. You need quantum fields to start with. About zero total energy, theory is that matter (energy) was cancelled by gravitational energy. This does not qualify to be called “nothing”.
Darelle,
Specifically I was questioning if we can really say that Krauss thinks there is an answer to the philosophical/absolutist question of nothing from something. Particularly because he seems to think the question is meaningless.
TY,
I’m not really sure what specifically you might want me to respond to there, so I’ll take a bit of a blind stab.
First off, you really can say very little generally about atheists with confidence as it’s not a set of beliefs. There’s also, interestingly, very little research on our psychology, so not much scientifically to say either. Anecdotally we can talk about ideas we see recurring in atheist discussions in the media or what we atheists might personally experience, but it is indeed anecdote.
I do tend keep up with the ongoing discussions and atheists popular in the media though, so I could offer my thoughts if there was something specific you were asking (though I wasn’t sure what that was).
RE all on the Kraus discussion,
I think this is a bit of a red herring to the other topics at play. Krauss most certainly is not as interested in the philosophical/absolutist nothing many of you have been discussing. One might critique him for a variety of things, but as long as we’re clear you can discuss “nothing” in more than one way, I don’t see Krauss critiques offering much movement forward in effective discussion.
TY
I am a physicist of sorts…I got a 2-2 in Applied Physics from Durham in the UK in 1982. I went into engineering and sold my “Eisberg-Fundamentals of Modern Physics’ back to Durham University bookshop.
Josh: thanks for the response. I hope one day physics comes up with an answer on creation. I admire science because of my maths and my mind is always open to the natural evidence, and for this reason I accept the evolutionary process. I still think the Stephen Hawking of 1988 was spot on when he wrote In A Brief History of Time: “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.” On Krauss, I agree: let’s not make him more a red herrring more than he already is from these comments. His personal views about God ought not detract from the fact that he’s a serious and reputable physicist.
Simon: You should have sent me that book as I was more deserving then as now.
TY
Another one free as .pdf in several places like:
https://ia902704.us.archive.org/22/items/FundamentalsOfModernPhysics/Eisberg-FundamentalsOfModernPhysics.pdf
Looking at the cover brought back memories. Good for the relatively mathematically challenged. And the relativistically mathematically challenged.
TY wrote:
“……….he (Krauss) wrote a piece on March 17, 2014, “A Scientific Breakthrough Lets Us See to the Beginning of Time”, in The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-scientific-breakthrough-lets-us-see-to-the-beginning-of-time. The article was on the discovery of by astrophysics of polarization distortions in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation”
And Krauss’ conclusion to the piece:
“For some people, the possibility that the laws of physics might illuminate even the creation of our own universe, without the need for supernatural intervention or any demonstration of purpose, is truly terrifying. But Monday’s announcement heralds the possible beginning of a new era, where even such cosmic existential questions are becoming accessible to experiment. ”
Firstly, didn’t Prof. Carroll publish an interview here refuting the results anyway and ascribing them to dust polarization/noise floor?
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/03/02/guest-post-an-interview-with-jamie-bock-of-bicep2/
I only scanned it quickly.
Secondly, this does not really move us on in the philosophical ‘nothing’ or absolute origins thing at all, as the discussions on the talk Aron Wall attended make clear. Krauss’ three nothings all involve the contentious platonic truths, and at least the first one involves fairly accepted physics, and as Aron says, ‘physics isn’t nothing’. Indeed it is even less ‘nothing’ than platonic truth is ‘nothing’. I say “fairly accepted” for the first because the vacuum state is probably accepted physics at its most flaky and pragmatic. Vacuum catastrophe, renormalization? Funny place to start to try to prove the predictive power of science.
To be fair, I do not know what Krauss says about philosophical nothing vs physical nothing (or anything else he said or wrote firsthand).