Guest Post: Don Page on God and Cosmology

960 Comments / Guest Post, Religion

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:

  1. If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause
    which brought the universe into existence.
  2. The universe began to exist.
  3. 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 t = 0) 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 t' (increasing with increasing entropy) that for t >> 0 increases with t but for t << 0 decreases with t (so there t' becomes more positive as t becomes more negative). For example, if one said that t' is only defined for |t| > 1, say, one might have something like

t' = (t^2 - 1)^{1/2},

the positive square root of one less than the square of t. This thermodynamic time t' only has real values when the absolute value of the coordinate time t, that is, |t|, is no smaller than 1, and then t' increases with |t|.

One might say that t' begins (at t' = 0) at t = -1 (for one universe that has t' growing as t decreases from -1 to minus infinity) and at t = +1 (for another universe that has t' growing as t increases from +1 to plus infinity). But since the spacetime exists for all real t, 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 t for all real t). But if we exist for t >> 1 (or for t << -1; there would be no change to the overall behavior if t were replaced with -t, 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 t' \sim t (or with t' \sim -t if t << -1). 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

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960 Comments

960 thoughts on “Guest Post: Don Page on God and Cosmology”

  1. tony

    God is infinite power, infinite knowing, because, He or She or It, however you wish to put it, is the totality of Love itself. Love, Wisdom, Truth, the three persons in one God, each a reflection of the other. Sorry, but there is no other way to put it. It’s not Physics, it never will be, it’s about us and our relations with one another and the world.

  2. Mario R Silveira

    It is not the theory which is simple but its underlying fundamental principles. Suppose we want to calculate which among a thousand chosen species would be living in a thousand years from now. Would this calculus be possible for a grid of a thousand computers to accomplish in, say, a thousand years? What kind of composition should reaveal the best results? The principle of equivalence is terribly simple! What about the general theory of relativity itself?

  3. Brent Meeker

    Suppose there’s a miracle. Everybody recognizes that a miracle is evidence for a supernatural God. Don observes that the universe is orderly and law like. That’s the same as observing there are no miracles. Miracles and no miracles can’t both be evidence for the same proposition. Since miracles are evidence for God, no miracles must be evidence against God.

  4. Reginald Selkirk

    Simon Packer: The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ were public physical events. Jesus did not write the accounts. People who in three cases were probably martyred for their faith in it did; the forth was imprisoned on a Greek island, Patmos

    This appears to be a description of the four canonical gospels. Never mind for the moment the non-canonical gospels. The canonical gospels were all anonymous; attribution to particular authors, (apostles or otherwise) is down to “early church tradition.” The synoptic gospels are certainly not independent accounts, containing passages that are verbatim.

    Also, the author of the gospel of John was certainly not the same person as John of Patmos who wrote the Book of Revelation. The mastery of language displayed in the two books is vastly different. Consult any competent NT textual scholar to confirm this. Even a brief perusal of Wikipedia would put a perceptive person on the hunt.

    The author of the Book of Revelation identifies himself only as “John”.[5] Traditionally, this was often believed to be the same person as John, son of Zebedee, one of the apostles of Jesus, to whom the Gospel of John was also attributed.[5] The early 2nd century writer, Justin Martyr, was the first to equate the author of Revelation with John the Apostle.[6] Other early Christian writers, however, such as Dionysius of Alexandria and Eusebius of Caesarea, noting the differences in language and theological outlook between this work and the Gospel,[7] discounted this possibility, and argued for the exclusion of the Book of Revelation from the canon as a result.[8] The assumption that the apostle John was also author of the Book of Revelation is now widely rejected in modern critical scholarship.[9] The early Christian writer Papias appeared in his writings to distinguish between John the Evangelist and John the Elder,[10] and many biblical scholars now contend that the latter was the author of Revelation.[11][12][13]

  5. Mario R Silveira

    SPECIFYING THE SIMPLEST POSSIBLE NATURE OF GOD

    It is cristal clear the anthropic principle does not say anything about the NATURE OF GOD. Does it? Arguably the anthropic principle does not say anything about human nature as well! It is kind of an empty existentialist heideggerian cry. DASEIN: hey, a fumbled fantasy castle which colapses into itself!

    Friends, please, look at the serene encounter Baruch Spinoza proposes:
    THE REASON IT ACTS IS THE SAME IT EXISTS.

    Look this text from Don Page:
    “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 (Don Page).”

    A question emerges though: What kind of theoretical help could save us at the end of the day on this (sacred) scientific adventure by getting the simplest possible God according to His own nature?

    You already know the answer!

  6. Reginald Selkirk

    Simon Packer: God created conscious beings with a degree of similarity to himself. Genuine freewill and responsibility were imputed to them…

    You should decide ahead of time whether you wish to defend the God of Free Will or the God of the Bible; the two have nothing to do with one another. “Free Will” appears nowhere in the text of the Bible, and the Bible includes multiple episodes in which YWHW violated the free will of people. A prominent example of the Book of Exodus, in which YHWH repeatedly (beginning in chapter 4) “hardened the heart” of Pharaoh so that He could show off by killing more people and animals.

  7. andrew

    Bill Jeffreys & Don Page – it is an honour to discuss such a lofty topic with two famous thinkers! I will think about your words.

    Sean – you have cultivated a stimulating and friendly blog and comments section. It is rare for a discussion on the internet – especially one about god! – to be so reasonable.

    Best wishes to all.

    PS Bill Jeffreys, I assume you the well-known Bayesian Willam H. Jeffreys. I liked your paper “Sharpening Ockam’s Razor on a Bayesian Strop” very much!

  8. Bill Jefferys

    Andrew wrote: “PS Bill Jeffreys, I assume you the well-known Bayesian Willam H. Jeffreys. I liked your paper “Sharpening Ockam’s Razor on a Bayesian Strop” very much!”

    Guilty as charged. And I’m glad you liked the paper that Jim Berger and I wrote.

    BTW there’s kind of a running joke on my last name. There’s a famous Bayesian (who like me was also an astronomer) named Harold Jeffreys, inventor of the Jeffreys prior. Sir Harold, whom I met as a graduate student on his only trip to this side of the pond in the early ’60s, died some years ago at a ripe old age. But when I started going to Bayesian meetings, some people would ask whether I was the one that invented the Jeffreys prior. Of course I have to confess that I’m not Sir Harold. Our last names are spelled slightly differently, as well. Mine is a very uncommon spelling.

  9. Kevin Henderson

    Don,

    Which God you refer to is unclear? When you say ‘best possible’ or ‘logically possible’. I think you are not taking into account the full range of possibilities.

    Maybe someone has mentioned this before, if you were my son you would not have been raised to believe in anything like a God, you would have been an atheist like your parents.

  10. Bill Jefferys

    Don replied to Andrew this way:
    —-
    Since I believe in a God of order, whom I believe would create a very elegant universe, the experimental discoveries supporting a moderately simple Standard Model of Particle Physics (even though we hope for an even simpler ultimate theory) have increases my posterior belief in God, as has the cosmological data supporting the Standard Model of Cosmology (though here I also hope for an even simpler multiverse model).

    On the other hand, all sorts of logically possible but crazy things would decrease my posterior belief, such as CERN not being able to reproduce any evidence for the Higgs boson next year, seeing electrons decay into uncharged particles with a lifetime much less than the current lower limits, not being able to see distant stars any more, and on and on with all sorts of things that could be different if God did not continue to run the universe in the orderly way He does now.

    —-

    What Don says here would make him more sure of the existence of a god would make me less sure, since physics predicts what it does and that’s what we observe.

    Suppose we have, as Don imagines, a collection of possible pieces of observational evidence

    E={E1, E2, …}

    that we might make, some of which are consistent with the hypothesis

    Q=”physics is all there is”

    and some of which are inconsistent with Q but consistent with the alternative hypothesis

    R=”physics is not all there is”

    The possible pieces of evidence that Don imagines include some that are consistent with Q and some that are inconsistent with Q. If Q is true, we can be certain that any piece of evidence Ek that we happen to observe will be consistent with Q:

    P(Having observed Ek, we determine that Ek is consistent with Q | Q) = 1

    whereas we can be sure that that piece of evidence is not inconsistent with Q:

    P(Having observed Ek, we determine that Ek is inconsistent with Q | Q) = 0

    Having observed any random Ek, this is the likelihood that we will determine that it is consistent with Q, given that “physics is all there is”.

    But suppose R is true. Suppose we happen to observe a particular Ek. What is the probability that we will determine that it is inconsistent with Q? Could it still be observed, given that R is true? The answer is “yes,” if we hypothesize that R entails the existence of a god that is omnipotent and therefore capable of making anything happen that it wishes (such as resurrections and other miracles, for example, that are contrary to physical law).

    Therefore we have the following likelihood under the alternative hypothesis:

    P(Having observed Ek, we determine that Ek is inconsistent with Q | R) > 0

    and

    P(Having observed Ek, we determine that Ek is consistent with Q | R) < 1

    since we can be sure that the Ek that we happen to observe is either consistent with Q or inconsistent with Q so these probabilities add to 1:

    P(Having observed Ek, we determine that Ek is consistent with Q | R) +
    P(Having observed Ek, we determine that Ek is inconsistent with Q | R) =1

    Now that we have a likelihood model in hand, we can compute the likelihood ratio upon happening to observe a piece of data Ek that we then determine is consistent with Q:

    P(Having observed Ek we determine that Ek is consistent with Q | Q) /
    P(Having observed Ek we determine that Ek is consistent with Q | R) > 1

    That is, every time that we observe a piece of evidence Ek that is consistent with the hypothesis that “physics is all there is,” we find that it supports “physics is all there is” and undermines the alternative hypothesis that includes an omnipotent god (or for that matter, even a semi-powerful god that is capable of subverting physical law on some occasions).

    Alternatively, every time we observe a piece of evidence Ek, we can compute the likelihood ratio that we will observe it to be inconsistent with Q:

    P(Having observed Ek we determine that Ek is inconsistent with Q | Q) /
    P(Having observed Ek we determine that Ek is inconsistent with Q | R) = 0

    In other words, observing just a single piece of evidence, a single miracle, the Resurrection, for example, does not merely undermine the hypothesis that physics is all there is, it refutes it.

    From a Bayesian point of view, regardless of your choice of prior probabilities of P(Q) and P(R), Bayes’ theorem tells us that as we continue to observe more and more data, each piece of which is consistent with Q, then the posterior odds ratio simply gets larger and larger, and regardless of your choice of prior, the posterior probability of “physics is all there is” approaches 1.

    So I am mystified by Don’s comment that observing more and more data that is only consistent with what physics says we should observe makes him more confident of the existence of a god, whereas observing data inconsistent with physics would make him doubt the existence of god. It seems to me he’s got it entirely backward.

    Now it may be that the god that Don believes in only produces results that are consistent with Q, and that Don’s god eschews miracles, the god of deism if you will, who does not meddle with the universe. If this is what Don believes, then the likelihoods corresponding to his god are identical to those under Q, that is, 1 if Ek is consistent with Q and 0 otherwise; in that case, all the likelihood ratios are 1, the posterior probabilities after observing a ton of data that are all consistent with Q is identical to the prior probabilities, and one learns nothing about the existence of that god regardless of how much data is observed. So even there, Don’s comment mystifies me.

    See here:

    http://bayesrules.net/anthropic.html

    …which was published in “The Improbability of God,” edited by Michael Martin and Rickie Monnier (starts on p. 150)

  12. Swami

    I’m not sure I believe this world is the best possible. As noted by David Hand, the Principle of Mediocrity “says that earth, and by implication humanity, is not located at a special position in the universe, and moreover that there’s nothing special about humanity in other ways.” In spite of this, I don’t think I’m keen to leave this world anytime soon.

  13. Bill Jefferys

    My son says that my problem was due to using a “less than” sign in an equation, which deleted everything until the next “greater than” sign. HTML madness. Also, very annoying.

  14. Simon Packer

    Paul Wright

    ‘Simon Packer: So, did all life get specially created, or do you think things proceeded more or less as current science says they did, except that humans were created in 4004 BC or so? When was the Fall, in your model?’

    I take the essence of the Genesis account on this as my starting point. (I am not for literal 24 hour days and believe the Hebrew does not mandate that, ‘yom’ being used for ‘age’ or ‘period’ elsewhere).

    And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so.
    (Gen 1:24)

    At the end of the day the means by which he did that is not so important. Having said that, I cannot see how God could have used ‘red in tooth and claw’ means to evolve animal design before sin entered the world, i.e. the Fall. So my starting point is the character of God and scripture seen in essence here. The passage as a whole is addressing pre- and non- scientific people and the processes would very likely be ineffable anyway. Inherent in my view of Genesis is that God is the author of the foundational cosmological fabric and processes, but also has other processes and agencies ‘up his sleeve’ to create/intervene. We can’t get that far with deducing the first, the second are probably out of our league. I am not a cosmologist but see no real problems with conventional cosmology including the age of the earth, provided they are seen as tentative. The fossil record is certainly curious, the evidence does not seem to fit a young earth but I don’t think it fits naturalistic EBNS too well either.

    I realise many very intelligent Christians accept the major precepts of EBNS as currently presented.

    Regarding modern man, I definitely go for an act of special creation, and a recent age.

    ‘I was interested when you said that “God has allowed the creation, as well as the creatures, to reflect the cosmic fallen spiritual environment.” Natural evils (earthquakes and suchlike) are a reflection of laws of nature which do not care whether humans get hurt. If you think there was a Fall at a particular point in time after humans were created, are you saying the laws changed at some point? Did they change only on Earth, or throughout the Universe? If only on Earth, where was the interface between the two sets of laws, prior to the Fall? That would have been a truly interesting place for physics research’

    I have answered this somewhat above. Yes, the laws of physics could have changed in a step way at one or more points, perhaps in space(s) as well as time, but I’m not sure if it is necessary to postulate that where the Fall is concerned. (Bono seems to think so..’the universe exploded..cause of one man’s lie’ -‘The Fly’) I believe God could intervene in ways which are imperceptible to our known physics, and in ways which violate known physics. I worship God, not our understanding of the physics he ordained. 20th century physics shows that variables/equations previously considered inviolate/independent may not be so. Relativity could be only the start of this. Our highest math(s) could look like simplistic doodling to God. Our understanding may only be a parochial paradigm on a far more complex (to us) reality.

    In essence, if God, in concerned condescension, chooses to reveal the essence of what he did in creation and the Fall in a simple and relational way, then accept it.

    Natural suffering is real and is included in different forms in the curse of the earth in Genesis 3. It is a response of God to the corrupted spiritual framework now pertaining on planet earth. The kindness of God is sometimes disciplinary harshness; there is a new, harsher, environmental and relational context, and it is to give the opportunity to avoid an even worse one by repentance. Don believes this process will ultimately succeed for all mankind, I place more emphasis on the reality of human freewill. The physical/biological means God used to bring about that curse I have no significant ideas about. Presumably this is an area that gave you difficulties?, and it does have implications for the fossil record.

  15. Phillip Helbig

    “I take the essence of the Genesis account on this as my starting point. (I am not for literal 24 hour days and believe the Hebrew does not mandate that, ‘yom’ being used for ‘age’ or ‘period’ elsewhere).”

    First, “and the evening and the morning were the nth day” makes it pretty clear that a literal day is meant. Second, did anyone claim that something other than a literal day is meant before science showed life had evolved over a long time (and that the Sun and stars are older than the Earth)?

  16. William

    What a pity that the texts in the Bible was condensed in one book. The result led to so much misunderstanding, so much misinterpretation .
    Example, the creation story in Genesis. The Babylonian victor’s world view was making its impression, natuarally,as would happen in a victor victim situation.
    The Jewish religeous leaders counter acted by craftedly integrated tribal versions of creation story in a religeous CONFESSION to eventually be found in Genesis. This confession, in a pre scientific era, was meant to make sense, to give comfort to the Jews and to counter the Babylonian influence.
    What has it got to do with this blog? That Don and others are trying to make sense in a mid scientific era where a legitimate believe is still that the trancended God is the creator, source and upholder of the material world.
    The why of it? as answered by the gospel of Jesus. The material world is to become Godlike. That is expressed in idea of the gospel of the Kingdom of God/Heaven
    Funny that atheist and theist alike are trying to actualize this idea of Jesus to make this world a better place. How we evaluate success is something else.

  17. Simon Packer

    Reginald

    ‘We all acknowledge that the world is not perfect, so that means God must be operating under constraints. Can you please tell us who sets these constraints that God must follow?’

    That was not for me, but I’ll have a go if I may, pending Don, because it leads naturally into the ones you did pitch to me.

    This response pertains to evil which is a result of the actions of conscious entities. I discuss adversity pronounced by God in my response to the question about Exodus further down.

    God has created beings with an unusual degree of reflection of his own nature. He has chosen to constrain himself to accommodate our freewill and it’s sometimes evil consequences. The alternative would have been to create us in a highly constrained (less human) way, or to judge us, or to destroy us. What he has gone for is creation, willful malfunction of the created, followed by possible (for Don inevitable) redemption.

    ‘Also, the author of the gospel of John was certainly not the same person as John of Patmos who wrote the Book of Revelation’

    I disagree. Same person. Sensitive, abstract, mystic tendencies.

    ‘You should decide ahead of time whether you wish to defend the God of Free Will or the God of the Bible; the two have nothing to do with one another.’ You continue by bringing in the example of Moses before Pharaoh.

    The Bible is full of phrases associated with freewill, such as ‘planned’, ‘decided’, ‘choose’, ‘repent’.

    There is a curious verse in Isaiah:

    I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.
    (Isa 45:7)

    God, in one sense, takes responsibility for the evil that has arisen in his creation. He has made the creation so evil can arise. He does not will it. God has decided to raise up beings with genuine responsibilities, and does not desire to take those responsibilities back. Those beings have become evil, as I said above.

    Regarding adversity determined or pronounced by God; there is a difference between evil and discipline, though a person may not see it in the first instance. Evil I would define as malice. Discipline in pure form contains no malice. It is intended for good. I do not see malice in God.

    He has made us in such a way that we can progressively harden our hearts to his voice. Pharaoh did. I see this as an interaction of Pharaoh’s freewill and God’s choice of how he made man. I do not see the hardening as a simple sovereign act of God, although Ex 3v19 implies God foreknew the outcome. But foreknowledge is not predestination, for an eternal being, unless you deny the reality of human freewill. At the first interaction between Pharaoh and Moses, Pharaoh declines God’s directive and God is not mentioned as intervening, Exodus 5v2.

  18. Simon Packer

    Phillip

    ‘First, “and the evening and the morning were the nth day” makes it pretty clear that a literal day is meant. Second, did anyone claim that something other than a literal day is meant before science showed life had evolved over a long time (and that the Sun and stars are older than the Earth)?’

    The account is allegoric/poetic to a degree out of necessity. Such discourses are not about verbal precision. The second point, yes they did, before science made your conjecture.

  19. Reginald Selkirk

    Simon Packer: ‘Also, the author of the gospel of John was certainly not the same person as John of Patmos who wrote the Book of Revelation’
    I disagree. Same person.

    You are at disagreement with a consensus of NT textual scholars on that one.

    As for Free Will, I am not impressed with your response. So YHWH sometimes respects free will and sometimes doesn’t, and that’s enough to justify all the evil in the world? Bizarro.

    You quote a Bible verse indicating that the LORD creates evil. This underlines my statement about the God of the Bible and the God of the philosophers not being the same. Your version of the Biblical God is certainly not omnibenevolent.

  20. Simon Packer

    Bob

    ‘”In the case of evolution by natural selection, I would put the theory in a different category to you.”‘

    ‘Why?’

    I believe in diversification of species by environment for known diversification traits, peppered moth etc. I believe in mutation of viruses against ARV environment.

    I don’t believe in the naturalistic origin of species by (genetic mutation/recombination and) natural selection:

    Because of serious shortage of likely transitional species in fossil record.
    Because of very low likelihood of survival of intermediate mutations required prior to the very specific genetic requirements of a survival winner. Changes would drop out of the population before completion in nearly all cases.
    Because speciation is not understood in any depth from genome analysis.
    Because no-one can read genome into phenotype.
    Because most mutations in present man or animals produce nothing or sickness.
    Because fossil record shows traumatic events at least as much as steady development; particularly Cambrian explosion.
    Because EBNS applies conscious survival motives to pre-conscious entities.
    Because most additional phenotype structures enhancing survival require a high level of functional sophistication from first appearance otherwise they are dead weight and actually a survival liability.
    Because no-one seems to have an example of mutational path to a higher organism they are willing to nail their colours to.

  22. Bob Zannelli

    Simon Packer says:
    March 24, 2015 at 6:33 am
    Bob

    ‘”In the case of evolution by natural selection, I would put the theory in a different category to you.”‘

    ‘Why?’

    I believe in diversification of species by environment for known diversification traits, peppered moth etc. I believe in mutation of viruses against ARV environment.

    I don’t believe in the naturalistic origin of species by (genetic mutation/recombination and) natural selection:

    Because of serious shortage of likely transitional species in fossil record.
    Because of very low likelihood of survival of intermediate mutations required prior to the very specific genetic requirements of a survival winner. Changes would drop out of the population before completion in nearly all cases.
    Because speciation is not understood in any depth from genome analysis.
    Because no-one can read genome into phenotype.
    Because most mutations in present man or animals produce nothing or sickness.
    Because fossil record shows traumatic events at least as much as steady development; particularly Cambrian explosion.
    Because EBNS applies conscious survival motives to pre-conscious entities.
    Because most additional phenotype structures enhancing survival require a high level of functional sophistication from first appearance otherwise they are dead weight and actually a survival liability.
    Because no-one seems to have an example of mutational path to a higher organism they are willing to nail their colours to.

    ))))))))))))))))))))))
    Well that’s it for me. I don’t argue with creationists , it’s a huge waste of time. All you’re doing is parroting nonsense from the “Discovery” Institute. I doubt you have a clue about how Evolution actually works. Everything you write is total nonsense, but it doesn’t matter because you have “faith.”

  23. Don Page

    Bob Zannelli, I was surprised that you wrote, “This is not how science works obviously, faith is not operative in science, faith is exactly what scientists , when they think as scientists, never have.” I would have thought that scientists generally have faith that there is a natural world to investigate, that there are laws of nature, that we can learn some of those laws, that these laws are simpler than they might have been, that they apply in a wide variety of situations, etc. Without such faith in these and other unprovable hypotheses, it is hard for me to see how science could operate. So it seems to me that the scientific community to which I belong is a community of faith.

    The faith of this community partially overlaps with the faith of the theistic religious community to which I also belong, which generally has faith that God exists, that God has a nature (usually essentially or at least predominantly of love), that we can know something about God, that God acts in a faithful way rather than in a completely arbitrary way, that God’s actions are universal, etc. Of course, there are also differences between the faiths of the two communities, such as the usual faith of the theistic community that the ultimate reality is a Person, whereas science need not go beyond faith in impersonal laws of nature.

    There are also different beliefs within the scientific community, such as whether the laws of nature are completely deterministic or whether there is randomness, whether time is real, whether the universe had a beginning, whether the universe is 14 billion years old or is much older, whether a multiverse exists, whether string theory is the best candidate for a theory of everything, whether some observers are Boltzmann brains, etc. There are analogous different beliefs within the religious community, such as whether God determines everything or whether there is libertarian free will, whether God exists in time, whether a beginning of the universe would prove that God exists, whether the universe is at least around 14 billion years old or is much younger, whether God created extraterrestrial life, whether Jesus is the Son of God, whether some people suffer everlasting punishment, etc. Just as I have minority views on some of these physics issues, so I definitely have minority views on several of these theological issues, even within my own Evangelical Christian community.

    Bill Jefferys, let me try to explain my reasoning. Andrew had asked me about the effect of experimental results during my lifetime, so I responded that they increased my confidence in a God of order. This could be falsified if we learn that the universe is actually much more chaotic than we now believe. (I also think Christianity could be falsified if we found what could be shown with high confidence to be the body of Jesus in a tomb, though of course we would have to exclude the possibility that it was the body of one of the very many other people at the time named Yeshua.)

    I think seeing more and more order in the way God usually runs His universe increases the specialness of the miracle of the Resurrection of Jesus. If we observed God performing resurrections all the time in this life, we would have less confidence that the Resurrection of Jesus confirmed His claim to be the Son of God. So although a proof that God did not alter the laws of physics for Jesus and resurrect Him would destroy my Christian faith, evidence that at other times God acts according to elegant laws of physics increases my faith in a God of order who placed even greater value on showing us that Jesus is His Son and in giving us the promise of resurrection to a new glorious life with Him.

  24. Bob Zannelli

    Don Page says

    Bob Zannelli, I was surprised that you wrote, “This is not how science works obviously, faith is not operative in science, faith is exactly what scientists , when they think as scientists, never have.” I would have thought that scientists generally have faith that there is a natural world to investigate, that there are laws of nature, that we can learn some of those laws, that these laws are simpler than they might have been, that they apply in a wide variety of situations, etc. Without such faith in these and other unprovable hypotheses, it is hard for me to see how science could operate. So it seems to me that the scientific community to which I belong is a community of faith.

    )))))))))))

    No Don , science isn’t based on faith. What you describe are the working assumptions that science uses. If these assumptions were to fail us , we would have to abandon them. Faith is something that is never given up , no matter what degree of evidence against it. In fact , it’s even considered a virtue to “hold on to” one’s faith in the light of contrary evidence.

  25. Sean Carroll

    Regarding the issues that Bill Jefferys had with his post: indeed, less than and greater than signs are read as html symbols, so you can’t include them in posts. If you want to make them appear, type

    & lt ;
    or
    & gt ;

    without the spaces, to get < and >, respectively. Various html codes begin with an ampersand and end with a semicolon. You can also get Greek letters, for example: & alpha ; with spaces removed becomes α.

    Note also that you can use LaTeX, as we did in the original post. Begin with $ latex (without the space) and end with $. So

    $ latex R_{\mu\nu} = 0 $

    becomes

    $latex R_{\mu\nu}=0$.

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