A good question!
Or is it?
I’ve talked before about the issue of why the universe exists at all (1, 2), but now I’ve had the opportunity to do a relatively careful job with it, courtesy of Eleanor Knox and Alastair Wilson. They are editing an upcoming volume, the Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Physics, and asked me to contribute a chapter on this topic. Final edits aren’t done yet, but I’ve decided to put the draft on the arxiv:
Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?
Sean M. CarrollIt seems natural to ask why the universe exists at all. Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it. But there might not be an absolute answer to why it exists. I argue that any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation.
As you can see, my basic tack hasn’t changed: this kind of question might be the kind of thing that doesn’t have a sensible answer. In our everyday lives, it makes sense to ask “why” this or that event occurs, but such questions have answers only because they are embedded in a larger explanatory context. In particular, because the world of our everyday experience is an emergent approximation with an extremely strong arrow of time, such that we can safely associate “causes” with subsequent “effects.” The universe, considered as all of reality (i.e. let’s include the multiverse, if any), isn’t like that. The right question to ask isn’t “Why did this happen?”, but “Could this have happened in accordance with the laws of physics?” As far as the universe and our current knowledge of the laws of physics is concerned, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” The demand for something more — a reason why the universe exists at all — is a relic piece of metaphysical baggage we would be better off to discard.
This perspective gets pushback from two different sides. On the one hand we have theists, who believe that they can answer why the universe exists, and the answer is God. As we all know, this raises the question of why God exists; but aha, say the theists, that’s different, because God necessarily exists, unlike the universe which could plausibly have not. The problem with that is that nothing exists necessarily, so the move is pretty obviously a cheat. I didn’t have a lot of room in the paper to discuss this in detail (in what after all was meant as a contribution to a volume on the philosophy of physics, not the philosophy of religion), but the basic idea is there. Whether or not you want to invoke God, you will be left with certain features of reality that have to be explained by “and that’s just the way it is.” (Theism could possibly offer a better account of the nature of reality than naturalism — that’s a different question — but it doesn’t let you wiggle out of positing some brute facts about what exists.)
The other side are those scientists who think that modern physics explains why the universe exists. It doesn’t! One purported answer — “because Nothing is unstable” — was never even supposed to explain why the universe exists; it was suggested by Frank Wilczek as a way of explaining why there is more matter than antimatter. But any such line of reasoning has to start by assuming a certain set of laws of physics in the first place. Why is there even a universe that obeys those laws? This, I argue, is not a question to which science is ever going to provide a snappy and convincing answer. The right response is “that’s just the way things are.” It’s up to us as a species to cultivate the intellectual maturity to accept that some questions don’t have the kinds of answers that are designed to make us feel satisfied.
Not familiar with his work, no. I’ll take a look!
Adel Sadeq
You seem to be willing to settle for the hope of progress, using the Physics domain in Penrose’s diagram. Seems to me you are constraining your avenues of enlightenment arbitrarily and foolishly. If you succeed I suppose you might get the answer about the meaning of life you want. Seems to me
-we ourselves (if I put myself within the reductionist paradigm) are not separate from the mind domain so our real progress there is virtually certain to self limit. For example, some think hidden variables in QM could exist but may be undetectable to us because we are made of the same stuff we are seeking to analyse with QM.
-to start in the Physics domain of the diagram, and/or the Math(s) domain, in order to pursue reality (as Penrose himself mostly does) seems to me to be an arbitrary choice, and materialists tend to be blind to their assumption with this. Why not use all the tools available to the Mind domain? Use logic not credulity with them and be sensible, of course.
Simon
Logic means making deductions based on certain facts, So what facts with deductions you know about that our mind is self limiting , at least when it comes to progress in science and physics in particular. Was it last when Dirac wrote his equation or when. Are you going to declare a certain day that physicists stop posting to ARXIV or even worse, ban all research on foundation of physics since there is no use (self limiting). Of course not.
Adel
No, you guessed right. If I’m right, I’m just curious where the inherent limits might be. Marcus Du Sautoy has a bash at it in ‘What we Cannot Know’.
Adel
Also if I’m being super pedantic I’d have to say that the validity of logic itself is an assumption. And you have to define the logic you’re using.
Simon
You can go into endless philosophical discussions and many people write books and such to present some point of view. My point is simple, we only have our minds to guide us and we know it works well. To be clear, I am not claiming that we can know anything just like that. The problem can become amenable to solution (subject to time constraint, importance …) when the problem that is been tackled has to have a lot of observation/data that is accessible directly or indirectly .
There are harder problems like how did life arise, it is a lot harder because you have to gather and infer data of what could have happened in the past. Also, if you ask what exactly is going on in all celestial objects or what is happening at the edge of the universe, obviously these are extremely hard problems. But still they are technical and solvable it is just a matter of enough direct or indirect evidence , and has nothing to do with our minds having limitations. As a matter of fact we make up the limitation of the speed and the agility of the individual minds with having an aggregate of huge numbers of them creating a very powerful problem solving machinery. Actually all the problems that we try to solve are technical, even these days we MRI the brain to say why people go crazy , how dreams manifest …etc. But it is also human nature to self doubt.
http://www.medicaldaily.com/what-love-mri-scan-reveals-what-stages-romantic-love-youre-brain-map-326080
Adel Sadeq
Thanks for the response. We’ll have to agree to disagree. There are I believe rational reasons which indicate you are wrong; it is not just a matter of logistics and persistence. The Du Sautoy book ‘What We Cannot Know’ gives a few reasons and I have set out a few more. Du Sautoy took over the Simonyi Chair at Oxford from Dawkins and is a mathematician. He changed his perspective on atheism somewhat as he wrote the book, by his own admission.
Simon Packer
Thank you. We are just exchanging opinions. Here is a statistic, but neither yours nor mine prove anything. Some people try to equate not knowing as proof for god which I think it does not follow. I am just interested in answering the question of how/why now. Let the answer prove or imply whatever it may.
http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/
Adel
Had a look at the link and nothing there surprises me much, from experience. I’d say it’s mostly down to the attitudes and behaviours scientists develop, and over-playing to their areas of strength and expertise. Creationists, and ultimately Collins (like me) is one, are frequently but far from always dismissed out of hand by the politics of science. We don’t know how to play the right game; worship the right gods.
Some just refuse to even start to engage with a different approach to the one they have already adopted. I find Sean’s ‘Big Picture’ book overly pre-biased to take seriously, quite honestly.
I’d still say that a truly rational ‘rationality’ favours Christianity.
I find this all very misleading, because I don’t think the science behind explaining how there can be conservation of energy due to gravitation really exist. Alan Guth just proposed that it is likely that the amount of gravitational energy of the universe is equal to all of the other energy in the universe. I am still not buying it.
I think that volcanoes invalidate the assumption that energy cannot be taken from a gravitational system, because they can send matter a distance that is further from the center of gravity than it started at. Also, the heat from gravitational pressure that causes that to happen will always exist for a stray planet.
I really think that entire idea completely undermines the fundamental basis of any theory that assumes gravitational energy is negative. Then they are just assumptions built on this assumption as it is anyways. I don’t think that gravitational energy being negative has ever been proven or accepted by most of the scientific community.
Alan Guth is using GR and inflation, I think. Everyday, Newtonian space-time style, logic won’t work for cosmology, but it will work for assessing the historical evidence regarding religious figures claiming to represent (or be) the Creator.
That’s the wonder of quarantining unnecessary complications.
Nice of Him to make it accessible.
I would disagree with the statement that “Nothing is unstable.” A state of nothingness would be like a state of perfect rest. That is about as stable as you can get. Most are agreed that before the universe existed there was a state of nothingness. The First Law of Thermodynamics indicates a universe made up of space, time, matter, and energy coming into existence from a state of nothingness would not happen through natural processes.
The idea that if a God existed, that would demand a cause, is unscientific. There is no Law of Cause and Cause. However, the Law of Inertia would indicate a state of nothingness, or perfect rest, would not change unless acted upon by an outside force or agent. Looking at those laws of science as a whole gives us a supernatural outside force or agent acting as the First Cause that brought the universe into existence from a state of nothingness. What the theists are claiming agrees with the laws of science; a big bang does not.
Starting out with the assumption the universe was not meant to be, is not really how science works. You folks are dealing mostly on a philosophical level and not a scientific one. If you could each put your pre-conceived philosophical worldview beliefs aside, you might learn something of value.
From a starting point of ‘Nothing Whatsoever’ I think it is self-evident that Sean is right; any attempt to explain a universe starting will always require brute facts. But then we don’t have ‘Nothing Whatsoever’, we have brute facts of some sort. ‘Nothing Whatsoever’ is defined by the absence of anything, including concepts, abstractions, any other brute facts. We have bootstrapped our Universe into being with high level conscious concepts which are themselves considered by reductionists to be emergent but presumably are taken to have no ‘disembodied reality’. How do we have a strictly rational basis with which to decide which brute facts are admissible? I can’t see one. From the Physics perspective, the current leads are the best we have; QM and GR plus our stabs at a GUT/ToE. In reality, we can’t use known emergent or contextual mechanisms for a Physics explanation of the beginning. Newton is no use, and even GR and thermodynamics are partial descriptions of a universe we already have.
Any anchor of meaning there may be would surely have to come by another avenue.