{"id":8854,"date":"2012-09-25T11:37:34","date_gmt":"2012-09-25T18:37:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=8854"},"modified":"2015-08-27T17:34:56","modified_gmt":"2015-08-28T00:34:56","slug":"let-the-universe-be-the-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2012\/09\/25\/let-the-universe-be-the-universe\/","title":{"rendered":"Let the Universe Be the Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My <a href=\"http:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/writings\/dtung\/\">article in the <em>Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity<\/em>, which asks &#8220;Does the Universe Need God?&#8221;<\/a> (and answers &#8220;nope&#8221;), got a bit of play last week, thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lifeslittlemysteries.com\/2907-science-religion-god-physics.html\">an article by Natalie Wolchover<\/a> that got picked up by Yahoo, MSNBC, HuffPo, and elsewhere. As a result, views that are pretty commonplace around here reached a somewhat different audience. I started getting more emails than usual, as well as a couple of phone calls, and some online responses. A representative sample:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/forums.catholic.com\/showthread.php?t=712530\">&#8220;Sean Carroll, servant of Satan&#8230;&#8221;<\/a><\/li>\n<li>&#8220;God has a way of bring His judgement to those who mock Him&#8230; John Lennon stated &#8220;Christianity will end, it will disappear.&#8221; Lennon was shot six times after saying that&#8230; Marilyn Monroe said to Billy Graham after Graham said the Spirit of God had sent him to preach to her: &#8220;I don&#8217;t need your Jesus&#8221;. A week later she was found dead in her apartment.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;See you in hell.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Maybe GOD is just a DOG that you will meet when you are walking on the Beach trying to figure out how to get sand out of your butt crack.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I admit that last one is a bit hard to interpret. The others I think are pretty straightforward.<\/p>\n<p>A more temperate response came from theologian William Lane Craig (a fellow <em>Blackwell Companion<\/em> contributor) <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reasonablefaith.org\/sean-carroll-on-science-and-god-1\">on his Reasonable Faith podcast<\/a>. I mentioned Craig <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/05\/debating-william-lane-craig\/\">once before<\/a>, and here we can see him in action. I&#8217;m not going to attempt a point-by-point rebuttal of his comments, but I did want to highlight the two points I think are most central to what he&#8217;s saying. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>One point he makes repeatedly &#8212; really the foundational idea from which everything else he has to say flows &#8212; is that a naturalist account of the form I advocate simply doesn&#8217;t explain <em>why<\/em> the universe exists at all, and that in my essay I don&#8217;t even try. Our old friend the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/30\/why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing\/\">Primordial Existential Question<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2012\/04\/28\/a-universe-from-nothing\/\">Why is there something rather than nothing<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>I have to admit I&#8217;m a bit baffled here. I suppose it&#8217;s literally true that I don&#8217;t offer a reason why there is something rather than nothing, but it&#8217;s completely false that I ignore the question. There&#8217;s a whole section of my paper, entitled &#8220;Accounting for the world,&#8221; which addresses precisely this point. It&#8217;s over a thousand words long. I even mention Craig by name! And he seems not to have noticed that this section was there. (Among my minor sins, I&#8217;m happy to confess that I would always check first to see if my name would appear in someone else&#8217;s paper. Apparently not everyone works that way.) It would be okay &#8212; maybe even interesting &#8212; if he had disagreed with the argument and addressed it, but pretending that it&#8217;s not there is puzzling. (The podcast is advertised as &#8220;Part One,&#8221; so maybe this question will be addressed in Part Two, but I still wouldn&#8217;t understand the assertion in Part One that I ignored the question.)<\/p>\n<p>The idea is simple, if we may boil it down to the essence: some things happen for &#8220;reasons,&#8221; and some don&#8217;t, and you don&#8217;t get to demand that this or that thing must have a reason. Some things just are. Claims to the contrary are merely assertions, and we are as free to ignore them as you are to assert them.<\/p>\n<p>The second major point Craig makes is a claim that I ignored something important: namely, the <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/gr-qc\/0110012\">Borde-Guth-Vilenkin singularity theorem<\/a>. This is Craig&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/debunkingwlc.wordpress.com\/2010\/07\/14\/borde-guth-vilenkin\/\">favorite bit of cosmology<\/a>, because it can be used to argue that the universe had a beginning (rather than stretching infinitely far backwards in time), and Craig is <em>really devoted<\/em> to the idea that the universe had a beginning. As a scientist, I&#8217;m not really devoted to any particular cosmological scenario at all, so in my paper I tried to speak fairly about both &#8220;beginning cosmologies&#8221; and &#8220;eternal cosmologies.&#8221; Craig quotes (misleadingly) a <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/arXiv:1204.4658\">recent paper by Audrey Mithani and Alex Vilenkin<\/a>, which concludes by saying &#8220;Did the universe have a beginning? At this point, it seems that the answer to this question is probably yes.&#8221; Mithani and Vilenkin are also scientists, and are correspondingly willing to be honest about our state of ignorance: thus, &#8220;probably&#8221; yes. I personally think the answer is &#8220;probably no,&#8221; but none of us actually knows. The distinction is that the scientists are willing to admit that they don&#8217;t really know.<\/p>\n<p>The theorems in question make a simple and interesting point. Start with a classical spacetime &#8212; &#8220;classical&#8221; in the sense that it is a definite four-dimensional Lorentzian manifold, not necessarily one that obeys Einstein&#8217;s equation of general relativity. (It&#8217;s like saying &#8220;start with a path of a particle, but not necessarily one that obeys Newton&#8217;s Laws.&#8221;) The theorem says that such a spacetime, <em>if<\/em> it has been expanding sufficiently fast <em>forever<\/em>, must have a singularity in the past. That&#8217;s a good thing to know, if you&#8217;re thinking about what kinds of spacetimes there are.<\/p>\n<p>The reason I didn&#8217;t explicitly mention this technical result in my essay is that I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s extremely relevant to the question. Like many technical results, its conclusions follow rigorously from the assumptions, but both the assumptions and the conclusions must be treated with care. It&#8217;s easy, for example, to find examples of eternally-existing cosmologies which simply don&#8217;t expand all the time. (We can argue about whether they are realistic models of the world, but that&#8217;s a long and inconclusive conversation.) The definition of &#8220;singularity in the past&#8221; is not really the same as &#8220;had a beginning&#8221; &#8212; it means that some geodesics must eventually come to an end. (Others might not.) Most importantly, I don&#8217;t think that any result dealing with classical spacetimes can teach us anything definitive about the beginning of the universe. The moment of the Big Bang is, if anything is, a place where quantum gravity is supremely important. The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin results are simply not about quantum gravity. It&#8217;s extremely easy to imagine eternal cosmologies based on quantum mechanics that do not correspond to simple classical spacetimes throughout their history. It&#8217;s an interesting result to keep in mind, but nowhere near the end of our investigations into possible histories of the universe.<\/p>\n<p>None of this matters to Craig. He knows what answer he wants to get &#8212; the universe had a beginning &#8212; and he&#8217;ll comb through the cosmology literature looking to cherry-pick quotes that bolster this conclusion. He doesn&#8217;t understand the literature at a technical level, which is why he&#8217;s always quoting (necessarily imprecise) popular books by Hawking and others, rather than the original papers. That&#8217;s fine; we can&#8217;t all be experts in everything. But when we&#8217;re not experts, it&#8217;s not intellectually honest to distort the words of experts to make them sound like they fit our pre-conceived narrative. That&#8217;s why engagement with people like Craig is fundamentally less interesting than engagement with open-minded people who are willing to take what the universe has to offer, rather than forcing it into their favorite boxes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My article in the Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, which asks &#8220;Does the Universe Need God?&#8221; (and answers &#8220;nope&#8221;), got a bit of play last week, thanks to an article by Natalie Wolchover that got picked up by Yahoo, MSNBC, HuffPo, and elsewhere. As a result, views that are pretty commonplace around here reached [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8854"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12582,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8854\/revisions\/12582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}