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
I agree with Bob; they are not analogous. Not only are there well defined procedures within science which determine what eventually is accepted as true, but also different opinions in science as to what the Hubble constant is or whatever are always provisional and concern things which are uncertain, whereas differences in religious faiths concern things which, to the believers in each camp, are certain.
Bob
You may have permanently dropped out. My arguments are mostly seeded by reading ‘Darwin’s Black Box’ by Behe ( a DI associate) and ‘In Six Days’ by various authors, plus thinking and reading stuff from Richard Dawkins and his critics like McGrath and Kellor. I have also grilled a PhD biochemist personally. Some of my points are standard creationist/ID stuff, I re-submit them because they still aren’t answered in a satisfactory way as far as I can see. One or two are my own thoughts as far as I know.
I think I have a reasonable understanding of how EBNS is purported to work, though it is a pretty broad church (sorry) in reality. Try asking me a test question.
I agree with Don that in practice science requires faith in some basic precepts, but most people would accept the precepts fairly readily. Religion, and for me and many others, EBNS, lean more into less concrete territory. The science/faith distinction is not a sharp one.
It is perfectly possible to do valid detailed work in microbiology/biochemistry /pharmacology and not believe in EBNS. For political reasons it might be best to keep quiet.
It is not possible to do good practical design work on semiconductors or GPS without believing QM/GR.
Don let take this opportunity to thank you for your thoughtful and fair review of Vic Stenger’s last book ,”God and the Multiverse”. Vic and I were friends for about twenty years. I know you didn’t agree with the premise of the book and I respect that. But unlike David Albert ( recipient of one million dollar Templeton grant) in his review of Lawrence Krauss’s book ” A Universe From Nothing” you didn’t do a hatchet job, you were fair and balanced. ( Not faux news fair and Balanced) I also greatly admire your work in cosmology.
Frankly, Don, I think you are trying to have it both ways. But in any case, you have to have two hypotheses to do any kind of likelihood or Bayesian analysis, and you are being very vague about the alternative hypothesis. So let me try this on you:
D = Don’s hypothesis, which as I understand it means that except in the case of the Resurrection and maybe a few other things mentioned in scripture, physical law is respected and all experiments that we perform now in our labs will confirm that.
Q = “physics is all there is”.
The likelihood, after observing any new evidence Ek in our physics experiments, that we will find Ek consistent with D is 1; the likelihood that we will find it consistent with Q is 1. Therefore the likelihood ratio is 1 and the posterior probability of D and the posterior probability of Q are both unchanged by observing Ek.
So, against Q, D does not become more and more plausible as more and more data from our accelerators and such is gathered. These data have no effect whatsoever on our opinion vis-a-vis D and Q.
Note that god really plays no role in this, so it is still a mystery to me that Don takes this as evidence for god. Don ought to look at what Brent Meeker wrote and deal with that…Brent makes my argument in a few words.
As far as the Resurrection is concerned, Don believes it, and I don’t. I don’t even believe that there was a historical character anything like the Jesus of the synoptic gospels. Even if I thought the gospels were based on a historical character, I would not believe in the Resurrection, since a mundane explanation of this story (e.g., the writers of the gospels made it up out of whole cloth, or had unreliable sources, or something similar, all things that we know happen every day), is much, much more likely in my book. Following Hume, I would require evidence that made the mundane explanation even more miraculous than the Resurrection in order to reject the mundane explanation, and I don’t see it.
[Here’s what Hume wrote: “The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), ‘That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish….’
“When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.”]
To Don Page, please:
Taking a simplest possible God according to His own nature – which could be ABSOLUTE HUMBLENESS – God would create universes allowing free will in a manner that beings were entitled to INVENT THE SPIRIT. Such a God has been taught by Jesus: “God is Spirit and wants to be loved as such”. For a scientific fundamental principle leading to a useful knowledge of this God, we have a STRONG PRINCIPLE OF EQUIVALENCE on top of Einstein’s: THE REASON IT ACTS [EXISTENTIAL QUANTUM] IS THE SAME IT EXISTS.
“Faith” has multiple definitions. Go through that list again and see if you would use the same definitions of “faith” for all instances, and compare with religious faith.
. belief in spite of the evidence
. believe despite lack of evidence
. confidence based on past performance
. confidence based on a multitude of observation
etc
Phillip
“The second point, yes they did, before science made your conjecture.”
Reference?
Try
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegorical_interpretations_of_Genesis
for a few examples
Phillip
‘I agree with Bob; they are not analogous. Not only are there well defined procedures within science which determine what eventually is accepted as true…………..’
Please elaborate and tell me exactly why you believe EBNS?
I haven’t had biology since high school and I don’t recall evolution being discussed in that class at all, but just from general knowledge and reason I think I know answers to all of these things which seem to confound creationists:
Q.Serious shortage of likely transitional species in fossil record.
A. By whose objective standard?. By the standard of arithmetic (counting) there are many, such as at least seven (probably more by now) for whales from land creatures. The fact that there are any should give honest creationists pause. How easy is it for fossils to form and remain intact? How many generations of fossils could you produce for your ancestry? If it stops at your great-great-grandparents, is that evidence that they were specially created?
Q. 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.
A. Which says that evolution might take a long time, perhaps millions of years, in massively parallel systems (quadrillions of microbes, millions of higher forms). As it did.
Q. Speciation is not understood in any depth from genome analysis.
A. Without getting into the weeds of whether “species” is an outmoded concept, suppose a group of chimpanzees sees lightning strike a tree and cause a fire. They don’t understand either electricity or combustion. Does their lack of understanding imply anything about the truth of what happened?
Q.Because no-one can read genome into phenotype.
A. Same logical fallacy as the previous issue.
Q.Because most mutations in present man or animals produce nothing or sickness.
A. And some produce Einstein (and Dr.s Carroll and Page) and Usain Bolt. See the first issue.
Q.Because fossil record shows traumatic events at least as much as steady development; particularly Cambrian explosion.
A. I have a personal notion that the development of Hox genes led to a sudden proliferation of body types, but never mind that. Here is an experiment you can do to understand randomness: the random walk. Start at the origin of an x-y coordinate system, flip a coin to see whether you take a step along the x- or y-axis, and another coin to see whether the step is negative or positive. Over time, your distance from the origin will increase approximately as the square root of the number of steps, but watch how progress is actually achieved. You will find there will be longish periods when you simply step back and forth, and other longish periods when you move in the same direction for a number of steps. This is how randomness works – not as a steady progression.
Q. EBNS applies conscious survival motives to pre-conscious entities.
A. In whose mind? Not in mine. Do bacteria have to be conscious to evolve antibiotic resistance?
Q. 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.
A. Who’s counting? Was the first primitive cell that could sense light, leading to the development of the eye, a survival liability? Show us your work, going back in time to list all the occurrences and outcomes? You can’t? Then by your previous illogic your hypothesis must be wrong. I personally don’t know what the ratio is, but as long as it is not zero, evolution can work (see again the first issue).
Q. No-one seems to have an example of mutational path to a higher organism they are willing to nail their colours to.
A. That’s not how science works. People make guesses – hypothesis – and then look for data that might confirm or refute them. See also monkeys and lightning – because we don’t fully understand the details of something doesn’t mean god did it. People still argue about how Stonehenge was built, and the Easter island statues. Some historical events could have happened in many different ways and no one knows which one was the actual way. It doesn’t mean they happened by magic.
There are many possible pieces of evidence that could have refuted evolution – rabbits in the Cambrian, not discovering any physical basis (DNA), not discovering that the average human has 20-100 mutations from the DNA of his or her parents, and the list goes on and on. All the creationists have is the gaps in our knowledge (inevitable in non-magic, non-omniscient beings created by evolution) and their own lack of logic or understanding.
I am slightly ashamed of myself for rising to creationist bait and in penance will refrain from further muddying up this comment stream. Thanks to most of the commenters for some excellent comments.
Don, that the body of Jesus could be found and connect that to the falsifiability of the Resurrection seems to me not even a bad understanding of both the Resurrection and Popper´s concept of a refutable hypothesis. Maybe God is really Spirit and He does not need Jesus’s physical body in anyway for what He wants us to know about Resurrection. So, finding or not Jesus’s body is irrelevant! Saint Paul used to say about preachers: Deceivers yet true!
Prof. Don Page:
Thank you for your reply. Sometime I will look at the reference you are suggesting. In the meantime let me compliment you for courageously defending your belief in divinity. As you know, many prominent physicists go around the world launching tirades against religion! Basically they are using their positions to confuse people who do not know physics that physics (and science in general) has proved that there is nothing like God. We know that scientists have not proved any such thing. Perhaps scientists like you can participate in such debates so the general population does not get the idea that all scientists are atheists! While we are on this subject may I request you to take some time and look at the concept of God in eastern non-Abrahamic religions (Hinduism and Buddhism) also? These religions have no conflict whatsoever with science. You will have hard time finding a single Hindu who believes in 6000 years old universe and is against big bang theory or theory of evolution! Thanks for your letter.
You know, it really must have taken a great deal of psychic energy for our ancestors, with those flat-faces, to create the first words. It’s always characterized like that in popular culture, with lots of grunting and groaning and head-knocking. Not at all like a bird’s song. Having invested the energy to define the world with words of their own making it was not possible for them to retreat from that point. Things became what they were by the act of naming them. It is extremely probable that they did not understand what they were naming, isn’t it, those flat-faces, who must have been motivated mostly by fear? It’s also entirely possible that we can not escape from their basic mistakes, which have tainted everything we’ve done since, and see anything as it actually is. Yet, there seems to be something in the universe that is, well, Universal. Universal and accessible to all. That’s why most religions strike a chord and aren’t dismissed out of hand. They were founded and nurtured by human beings, just like us, that had experiences and realizations, just like us. Just like us, they then proceeded to shoehorn the Universal into our poor and poorly conceived vocabulary, with predictably disastrous results. Some religions, and at least parts of others, recommend taking a break from the wording process, to let the Universal be recognized for what it is without this net of words that we cast over it. No disrespect to anyone, as we are all struggling to understand, but the arguments presented here seem to be modern instances of head-knocking, especially those in ALL CAPS!
@Bob Zannelli – I like that statement: Science can only prove something is wrong. It applies to my rational attitude towards God – God exists: Science cannot prove it wrong. God does not exist: Again, science cannot prove it wrong.
I liken an atheist to someone who tears apart a model-T Ford and proves that Henry Ford is not in there, and concludes that Henry Ford does not and never did exist. Then there are theists who claim that the very existence of the model-T proves that Henry is alive and well. It’s so silly.
The other thing that bothers me is that religion brings a certain strength, a fitness if you will, to a group. Any group that uses a deified human as the “glue” for their society is doomed, whether it is a king, a pharoah, or der fuhrer. They die, and the self-serving lackeys, thugs and morons step into their shoes. The idea that the infallible leader, the “glue” of the society is not to be found in human form is a powerful idea, clearly, since it is so persistent, and the atheist eyes seem to glaze over when asked what is to replace the God they deny.
The emergence of religion as an intitutional process is a necessity coming out of the encounter of the darwinian dogma and reality of life: we’ve got Mutation/Selection within the difficulties of surviving that we all go through but at the very end….. WE ALL ARE GOING TO DIE, AREN’T WE?!! So, for survivability, we need to bring meaning to this otherwise utterly senseless process the hindus call maya. Once religion is invented it becomes intitutionalized. So the religious process is in perfect agreement with Darwinian tenets. But, then, how do you tell apart wheat and weed? This seem to be a question for eschatology to solve. Or should we, as scientists apple eaters, resort to topology?
JimV (and Phillip)
Thanks for your time and comments.
Jim your points 3,4 and 5 are circular faith positions are they not? Evolution is true because we know it’s true? 90+% of statements alluding to evolution in scientific papers are like this as far as I can see. They say nothing new, it is just a nod to the ‘boss’.
I do agree that a rabbit in the Cambrian rock would be a good one for special creation and a bad one for EBNS. I believe a fossilized tree trunk was once found poking through rock strata previously accepted as millions of years in the deposition, must look that one up.
I still feel that EBNS is a loose paradigm and not a more or less mandated fit with the data as it is commonly presented. The processes by which it was commonly accepted are not the same, qualitatively, as those by which 20th century physics was accepted. Most of your points come down to statistical likelihood. Biblical faith is also a loose paradigm on a variety of data.
In physics, particle inference from collision data is statistical inference, it is likely to have high veracity if the data is valid. The statistical processes are thorough and applied to an all-encompassing data set. I don’t see any of this in EBNS ‘proofs’, the situation is probably too complex to model in a genuinely representative way anyway.
Solid science IMO proceeds by hypothesizing a mechanism or model, seeing if the mechanism holds up, and applying deterministic mathematical models or at least statistical models to the data/hypothesis. Do you not think EBNS is a little weak here? A sweeping statement about ‘massively parallel’ is emotive and subjective.
“Please elaborate and tell me exactly why you believe EBNS?”
Evidence-based natural science? Because it works.
Holy crap! I love this blog!
Simon Parker writes (in response to my question of whether and how the Fall changed the laws of physics):
If there were no earthquakes, tidal waves and whatnot prior to the Fall, can you explain how that is in any sense “imperceptible to our known physics”?
I notice that you seem to make quite specific scientific claims about evolution vs special creation, but then seem vague on whether, for example, the laws of physics underwent a step change at the Fall, or to say whether this step chance was localised to Earth (and if so what happened at the interface) or affected the entire universe. Yet your evidence does not seem to be stronger in the one case than the other.
Well, this is true (except that God doesn’t exist, natch) but I’m not sure how it has much to do with what I wrote. Sure, we could discover new stuff at any time, but your view on both creation and the Fall has specific predictive consequences. I understand that Christians tend to shy away from these as the game is always to move the belief out of the danger of falsification, but I believe we should face the things it hurts to think about. For example, would you agree that, as Nature could not have been red in tooth and claw prior to the Fall, we should not expect to find fossils of predators prior to it or fossils of one animal having been eaten by another? I should think that we should also be able to determine the absence of some other natural evils (earthquakes and so on) too, though I’m not much of a geologist.
I noticed what George’s Rey calls “detail resistance” in my thoughts about Christianity prior to working out that Christianity is false, although it wasn’t related specifically to the Fall (but rather, to attempts to analyse the workings of the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues, as I mention in that blog post). Rey’s Meta-atheism: religious avowal as self-deception has a passage (section 3.5 and 3.6 in the linked doc) about this, where he notes that resistance to thinking about just what God did and how he did it generates psychological resistance, and hypothesises that this is because on some level believers already treat the text as fiction, so that, for example, asking about the interface between Fallen and un-Fallen physics is on a par with asking whether Hamlet likes eggs for breakfast.
Bill Jefferys (and Brent Meeker), my point about the new experimental evidence was not that it continued to follow the known laws of physics, but that it appears to point to even simpler laws of physics than what were known before. I consider this to be in support of the theism I believe in, though it would also support a particular form of naturalism that has faith in even simpler laws of physics than what we now know. However, I also consider this recent evidence to be small compared with the past evidence from the previously known laws of physics and even more so from the historical evidence for the Resurrection and divinity of Jesus.
It was an interesting `coincidence’ (which I would consider providential rather than miraculous in the sense of violating known laws of physics) that last night I got to the place in the excellent book by Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, where he summarized many references he gave to rebuttals to Hume’s arguments against miracles, concluding on pages 151-152 with the following conclusion:
“Although Hume’s arguments attempt to prove that one is never justified in believing miracle reports, we have observed that his thesis contains many errors, only a few of which could be explored in this chapter. The problems with Hume’s logic cast considerable doubt on his conclusions. Accordingly, while Hume’s points correctly insist that historians be cautious when investigating specific miracle-claims, the profound weaknesses in them do not prohibit historians from adjudicating on miracle-claims.”
I do think that the differences of opinions about theism and about the posterior probability that Jesus is the Son of God often hang mainly on the prior probabilities one assigns. However, the differences can also be affected by the evidence that one has examined, which is one reason why I would encourage everyone to read books such as Licona’s.
Don,
Licona’s comments seem incoherent to me.
Actually, Hume’s argument can be considered a straightforward Bayesian or likelihood argument. The probability of observing a “miracle,” given that there is a well-understood mundane hypothesis (e.g., lying, unreliable informants, etc. that we have seen operate over and over) is much higher than the probability of observing the same “miracle,” given a hypothesis that physical law has been violated (e.g., a god raises Osiris from the dead). The likelihood ratio strongly favors the former hypothesis. You don’t even need prior probabilities to see this, so your assertion that it all depends on the priors is simply not correct.
I still fail to see how your beliefs about god are supported against a purely naturalistic explanation by seeing that physics is simple. This doesn’t seem to follow at all, and I continue to be mystified by your comments in that regard.
Don and Bill
It seems to me that Don’s claim, that the success of a simple physical theory supports God, makes sense iff he is setting his priors in such a way that theistic theories are weighted by simplicity MORE heavily than naturalistic theories. The only problem with this is that it’s not what he says he’s doing in his original post:
Here he’s saying all theories (not just the theistic theories) are deemed more likely a priori on the basis of being simpler. In order to get from there to a place where a theistic theory of nature is favored he needs the following condition to occur:
But the sense in which the Standard Model Higgs is simple is that its formulation “starting with just the universe” is simple. In fact all of the simplest known physical theories, consistent with the data, are formulated without taking the existence of God as an axiom. So it seems that only way one reaches the conclusion that Don wants is if the known naturalistic formulation of the correct laws of physics is more complicated than the unknown theistic formulation — this seems manifestly more likely to happen if the naturalistic formulation is complicated than if it is simple; a simpler naturalistic formulation of the laws of physics would seem to leave less room for simplification (by theological or any other techniques) than a more complicated one.
As someone who would be considered an Evangelical Christian, I don’t believe there is a single argument which could convince anyone to believe in the existence of God. I also believe there has never been or ever will be a way to scientifically prove or disprove the existence of God. Within Christianity, there are two main schools of thought, which are Arminianism and Calvinism, with Arminianism representing free will and Calvinism representing determinism. While I see both sides, I personally lean toward Arminianism, and free will. This school of thought says, essentially, that you believe in God with your own free will. Nothing can force you to believe in God. With that in mind, if someone were to find definitive scientific proof in the existence of God, your free will would be removed by that same scientific proof. If Arminianism is correct, this means there will never be any proof in God, scientific or otherwise, which means it’s up to each person to decide on their own, one way or another.
Don Page says
I do think that the differences of opinions about theism and about the posterior probability that Jesus is the Son of God often hang mainly on the prior probabilities one assigns. However, the differences can also be affected by the evidence that one has examined, which is one reason why I would encourage everyone to read books such as Licona’s.
))))))))))))))
Don , Sean Carroll has forwarded what he calls the problem of instruction with regard to theist claims. I think it’s a devastating argument against all revealed religions. If there is a deity who wants us to live our lives in a particular way, you think his instruction book would be perfect and he wouldn’t behave in a way that makes his existence seem very unlikely. Instead of a perfect instruction we have several highly flawed books of revelation and the only evidence for the veracity of these books lies in folk tales told long before mass communication.
For example, for Christianity we have a story of a messiah in the tiny country of Palestine , over 2000 years ago for which there is no credible historical evidence. Given the importance of the message, why didn’t Jesus wait until he could go on CNN to give his message. It just strains credibility to think that arriving in Palestine over two thousand years ago is a choice a god would make.Or that the Bible would be his instruction book.
Also, I am sure you don’t take Genesis literally. But if you don’t, how does it make sense that a loving god would need a savage blood sacrifice to keep himself from condemning all of humankind, except he still does because he chose such a bad venue to give his message that billions of humans don’t believe it. And finally, why is not believing worthy of damnation , there is nothing immoral in not believing. ( on this point Islam is even worst)
” With that in mind, if someone were to find definitive scientific proof in the existence of God, your free will would be removed by that same scientific proof. “
The whole argument runs, roughly, as follows.
God refuses to prove that (S)He exists because proof denies faith and without faith God is nothing.
Man then counters that the Babel fish is a dead giveaway because it could not have evolved by chance. So the fish proves that God exists – but hence also, by God’s own reasoning (see 1) that God does not exist.
God says that (S)He hadn’t thought of that (hadn’t thought of 2) and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.
It should be noted that most leading theologians (together with the original author of this article) think that Colluphid’s argument is “a load of dingo’s kidneys.”
Indeed, Ray, I agree with your comments about simplicity.
Andrew mentioned the paper on Ockham’s razor that Jim Berger and I published in American Scientist a couple of decades ago. There we take “simplicity” to reflect the number of adjustable parameters in a theory; a theory is simple if it has few such parameters, not so simple if it has more. The Bayesian Ockham’s razor favors simpler theories because a more complex theory has to put priors on a larger number of adjustable parameters, which forces it to “waste” prior probability on parameter values that do not (in the end) describe reality. This has the effect of favoring the simpler theory when you calculate the posterior probabilities of the theories by integrating over the parameters in the posterior.
What I do not understand about what Don is saying is why he thinks that simplicity is in any way connected with the existence of a deity. One can imagine a particular physical theory, call it T, and then one can augment that theory (obtaining a more complicated one) by augmenting T with the statement D=”and a deity exists”, obtaining theory T’={T,D}. The problem is, that whatever T’ predicts, T predicts just as well, so the augmentation of T with D seems to me to be entirely irrelevant to inference.
That is to say, unless the augmentation of T with D includes the point that D can override T from time to time (unpredictably, it would seem) so that unexpected things like resurrections can happen from time to time. But then we are back to the point that Brent and I have been making: T’ making the same predictions that T makes in our laboratory experiments doesn’t have anything to do with D. It is only when T’ makes different predictions from what T makes, so that the purely physical theory is violated, that we can favor T’ over T. But that seems opposite from what I understand Don to be saying, so I continue to be mystified by his comments.