Another excerpt from the powerful, uproarious & polemical The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (2009) by Dr David Berlinski *
The cosmological argument⸸ just given [in the previous chapter] covers familiar ground: God is a cause. But God enters the troubled human imagination in a second way, and that is as the answer to the question why the universe exists at all. Something deeper is at issue, and so something deeper is wanted. Even if we understood how the universe came into existence, the question why it exists and why it continues to exists would remain.
At some moment in the unrecoverable past, the battle-ready Hebrews understood that the scattered deities of the Near Eastern world were a manifestation of a single God. "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one!"
If God is one, he is one absolutely, the Hebrew Bible affirms, because not only does he exists, he must exist. The five simple words of the declaration in Exodus —"I am that I am"― suggest that God's existence is necessary. Being what He is, God could not fail to be who He is, and being who He is, God could not fail to be.
This is the heart of a second cosmological argument. It draws a connection between the existence of the universe and the existence of the Deity. The argument is not simple, and it is by no means conclusive.
Everything that exists has a precarious hold on being. Here today, gone tomorrow is more than an adage; it is a principle of metaphysics. We have an uncommon ability mentally to shuffle things in and out of existence; but applied so easily to others, this power cannot be self-applied. No matter with what determination we stare into the void, the staring itself makes the effort an exercise in irrelevance. Who is staring? If we cannot imagine a world without us (and so in my case a world gone mad with grief), we can give our reluctant assent to the proposition that things might continue in our absence.
[Thomas] Aquinas applies this argument to the universe, because he can see no reason to suppose that its existence is guaranteed. If it might not exist, why, then, does it exist?
Why indeed?
There now follows a remarkable, a bold, but a problematic step in the argument: If it is possible that something might not exist, Aquinas asserts, then it is certain that at some time it did not exist. In this, Aquinas was reprising a view of possibility that may be traced back to the Greek philosopher Diodorus.
But if the universe did not exist at some moment of time, then it emerged from absolutely nothing. The universe is everything that there is. What beyond nothing is left to explain its promotion from inexistence to existence?
This, Aquinas observes, is incoherent. Ex nihilo nihil fit. From nothing, nothing, as ancient writers said. Because it is impossible to understand the emergence of something from nothing, Aquinas concludes, something must have acted to bring the universe into existence. That something, the argument continues, could have been contingent or necessary. If contingent, we are no further advanced. We have simply chased perplexities into the past. If not contingent, then necessary. When it comes to things that exist necessarily, it is wasteful to assume more than one. What could the others do? Thus there is one thing whose existence is necessary, and if necessary, by the very same argument, eternal. Since it is eternal, it has no cause. Questions about its origins are pointless.
What is God if not an infinite and necessarily existing being?
This argument is by no means foolish. It is spacious. It has a certain grandeur. But it remains only as strong as its weakest premise: If the universe might never have existed, then for sure at some time or other it did not exist.
When this premise is placed in hot type on cold paper, suspicions arise that it covers an inference that Aquinas cannot support. The steps involved in passing from I exist to I might exist―they are fine. The additional steps that carry the metaphysician from I might not exist to at one time I did not (or will not) exist—they are fine too. They are as fine as metaphysical inferences ever get. But to suppose that precisely the same steps carry the universe from it might not exist to it did not exist suggests the fallacy of composition at work, as when the set of turtles is said to be a turtle on the grounds that its members are all turtles. One for all and all for one is not a principle of metaphysics. A universe of perishable things is not necessarily perishable. This objection does not by itself close the case. No case in metaphysics or theology is ever closed. But it does indicate that some further argument is needed, and this Aquinas does not provide.
Let us suppose, then, that the universe passes sedately from the everlasting to the everlasting. It has been there forever and it will be there forever. This is the universe that Einstein championed before he appreciated the explosive nature of Big Bang cosmology, and it is a universe that has always induced a sense of calm in those who contemplate it. If it does not appear to be the universe and thus our universe, a great many cosmologists in the twentieth have regarded that as a defect in the plan of creation. A universe of this sort makes a busy, causally imperious God unnecessary; what is worse, it makes him incoherent. A cause must precede its effect, and if the universe is eternal, there was no moment in which God could have brought about the creation of the universe. In a world with so much time, it is odd to think that God―of all people!―would have no time in which to work. The best he could do from the outside would be to barge into the universe occasionally and cause a great deal of commotion.
Nonetheless, an eternal universe leads to a question very similar to the question that Aquinas asked, and it allows us to recapture some of the force of the second cosmological argument without the affliction of a very doubtful premise. The reformation strikes for a deeper level of doubt and perplexity than the original argument and for this reason carries an emotional burden that the original argument lacks.
"If the universe was always there and will always be there, why is it there at all?"
There is no point in answering this question by assuming that our own fond familiar universe must exist. With all due respect to the universe, this is an assumption no one wishes to make, because no description that we can offer of the universe suggests that its existence is necessary. But if the universe does not exist necessarily, then plainly it might never have existed at all, even if it has existed for all time.
And this is precisely the problem. With the possibility of inexistence staring it in the face, why does the universe exist? To say that universe just is, as Stephen Hawking has said, is to reject out of hand any further questions. We know that it is. It is right there in plain sight. What philosophers such as ourselves wish to know is why it is. It may be that at the end of these inquiries we will answer our own question by saying that the universe exists for no reason whatsoever. At the end of these inquiries, and not the beginning.
No matter how cheerfully physicists may endorse this conclusion, it is dreadful.
This is something we know too.
Two arguments are now at work. The first is due to Aquinas.
Its first premise:
Its first premise:
The first demands a cause; the second, a reason.
Both arguments are inferences to God, but they proceed from different sources in the imagination.
A causally successful God is what He seems: By creating the universe, He has gotten the job done, and if in return He demands a good deal by way of worshipful admiration, who is to gainsay Him?
A God who functions as a reason is occupied with what German metaphysicians might call the foundations of being. He functions as an anchor and so as a refuge.
Both Gods are equally necessary, but the God engaged in anchoring the universe does not necessarily bother himself with its creation. Why should He? The thing has been there forever. His role is otherwise, and it is more fundamental. It is to this lofty and remote deity that the human heart turns when it wishes to assure itself that there is one thing in Being answering to the majesty of I AM THAT I AM.⥉
God is in this sense an answer to the question long posed by metaphysicians: Why is there something rather than nothing? If anything exists contingently, the second cosmological argument affirms, at least one thing exists necessarily. There is something rather than nothing, because at least one part of existence has its origins in what must be. As for the rest of creation, in one way or another it may be allowed to take care of itself. In reaching for a God who exists necessarily, the theologians have covered their most important base.
And the scientists, until now scoffing at the sidelines, what have they to say about all this?
In the early years of the nineteenth century, the English polymath Thomas Young demonstrated that light behaves like a wave. After shining a beam of light through two slits, he observed interference patterns forming on a screen placed behind them. Wave crests met wave crests to form bigger crests; wave troughs met wave troughs to form bigger troughs; and when crests and troughs were not meeting companionably, they interfered with one another in order to extinguish themselves.
What could be simpler? Light is like a wave.
Ah, but on the other hand, Einstein demonstrated in 1905 that in order to explain the photoelectric effect, it was necessary (or at least convenient) to assume that light comprises particles. Send a beam of light toward a metal surface, and electrons pop out. Plainly they pop out because they have been knocked off. To accommodate both popping out and knocking off, Einstein found it necessary to think of light as if it were composed of discrete packets of energy.
What could be simpler? Light is like a particle.
It was not entirely clear how in the matter of Young v. Einstein, both men could have been right.
The consortium of physicists who created quantum mechanics in the third decade of the twentieth century – Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born – finessed this problem by declaring Young v. Einstein a draw. Light, they argued, is both like a wave and like a particle, and what is more, it is like a wave and like a particle on the level of individual photons themselves. Photons, physicists came to understand, interfere with themselves, and if deep down no one had the slightest idea how to picture autointerference, what physicists were willing to give up was the picture and not the interference.
The finessing required, as one might imagine, a good deal of finesse.
A quantum particle – an electron or a photon, say – is here, and somewhat later, it is there. The old here-and-there, Schrödinger specified in terms of the properties of a wave. It is here where the wave mounts and there where it dips. Passing through two slits, the wave peaks at the left and peaks as well at the right, flowing, as waves tend to do, through both slits at once.
But a wave is intended to track the moving position of a single particle, and it is here that the formalism of quantum mechanics commits the physicist to a form of legerdemain that has to this day resisted all attempts at explication. It is one thing to say that a wave may pass through two slits; it is quite another thing to say that a single particle may divide its allegiance in just the same way. Nonetheless, this is just what physicists were forced to say. By now, they say it without a second thought. The particle that could be here or there they represent by a wave that is here and there. If that is where the wave is, the particle enjoys a doubling of its position in space, with each position corresponding to a distinct physical state. Somehow both physical states are real and they are real at the same time. They are, as physicists say, superimposed. They exist together. There is no getting rid of them. Superimposed states are themselves described by the undulation of a wave, which is generally described as a wave packet to signify the extent to which it embodies a variety of different quantum states and so a variety of separate waves. It is Schrödinger's equation that describes the wave packets' undulations.
The formalism of quantum mechanics, physicists at once realized, defeated all efforts to picture the quantum world. If no pictures were available, neither was there a link to common sense. Light is both a wave and a particle, and it is both a wave and a particle at the same time. This conclusion embodies a mystery, one that no subsequent analytical efforts have dissolved. The mystery will not appear entirely unfamiliar to Christians persuaded of the threefold aspect of the deity. If light is a particle and a wave, religious believers might observe, God is a Father, a Son, and a Holy Ghost. This is not an analogy that has captured the allegiance of scientific atheists.
The interpretation of quantum mechanical formalism did little to dispel the mystery it embodied. In 1926, Max Born provided the standard scheme by which equations of quantum mechanics might be understood. The details are complex, but in a rough-and-ready way, Born suggested that the quantum mechanical waves passing sedately throughout the universe might be understood in terms of the probabilities that they reveal. Thus the amplitude of a wave is a sign that quite likely there is a particle there and so a clue to its position, and the distance between wave peaks is again a sign that quite likely the particle is travelling with a particular momentum. A wave with two peaks rising like the devil's horns might represent a particle dividing its allegiances equally between two slits.
Under Born's interpretation of quantum mechanics, the identity of a particle undergoes further deconstruction. The old here-or-there has long since passed to the new here-and-there, but what is here and there is now a matter of chance. Having impossibly divided itself between two slits, a single photon undergoes further demotion to appear in quantum mechanics as the ghost of its position. It could be here, it could be there, and somehow it could be at both places at once.
These divided allegiances come to an end abruptly when an observer, padding in from outside the quantum system, undertakes a measurement. So long as no one is looking, the electron is all things to all men. But let the physicist have a look, and boom! the particle that could be here and there becomes here or there all over again. The wave packet collapses into just one of its possibilities. The other quantum states that it embodies vanish, and they vanish instantaneously.
No one knows why.
Niels Bohr – widely considered to be inscrutable in his conversation, owing to the particular flavor of his Danish Grope and Mumble – embraced this interpretation of quantum mechanics, whence its designation as the Copenhagen interpretation. It has become canonical.
It has not, however, explained the connection between the quantum realm and the classical realm. "So long as the wave packet reduction is an essential component [of quantum mechanics]," the physicist John Bell observed, "and so long as we do not know when and how it takes over from the Schrödinger equation, we do not have an exact and unambiguous formulation of our most fundamental physical theory."
If this is so, why is our most fundamental physical theory fundamental?
I'm just asking.
Cosmology studies the universe as a whole, and quantum cosmology brings the apparatus of quantum mechanics to bear on the whole of the universe. It is the most speculative of inquiries and it is among the least successful. It seems to tempt physicists to a certain gracelessness.
Considering the cosmological argument, the physicist Victor Stenger scoffs that it is the "last resort of the theist who seeks to argue for the existence of God from science and finds all his other arguments fail." Sheer chutzpah, if I may use the Greek for cheek. It is Stenger who is arguing against the existence of God "from science." The result, as one might expect, is unedifying. "Why," Stenger asks, "is there God rather than nothing?" It is what physicists always ask before they have thought about what they are asking.
If God must exist, the question why God does exist answers itself. Must is must.
Having rejected Aquinas, Stenger is persuaded that "we can give a plausible scientific reason based on our best current knowledge of physics that something is more natural than nothing!" The appeal to what is natural elicits an old urge among physicists to possess the concept of naturalness voluptuously. But it is worth remembering that what is at issue is not whether something is more natural than anything, but why the universe exists at all. Naturalness has nothing to do with it.
Oxford's Peter Atkins has attempted to address this issue. "If we are to be honest," he argues, "then we have to accept that science will be able to claim complete success only if it achieves what many might think impossible: accounting for the emergence of everything from absolutely nothing." Atkins does not seem to recognize that when the human mind encounters the thesis that something has emerged from nothing, it is not encountering a question to which any coherent answer exists. His confidence that a scientific answer must nonetheless be forthcoming needs to be assessed in other terms, possibly those involving clinical self-delusion.
Among physicists, the question of how something emerged from nothing has one decisive effect: It loosens their tongues. "One thing [that] is clear," a physicist writes, "in our framing of questions such as 'How did the Universe get started?' is that the Universe was self-creating. This is not a statement on a 'cause' behind the origin of the Universe, nor is it a statement on a lack of purpose or destiny. It is simply a statement that the Universe was emergent, that the actual Universe probably derived from an indeterminate sea of potentiality that we call the quantum vacuum, whose properties may always remain beyond our current understanding."
It cannot be said that "an indeterminate sea of potentiality" has anything like the clarifying effect needed by the discussion, and indeed, except for sheer snobbishness, physicists have offered no reason to prefer this description of the Source of Being to the one offered by Abu al-Hassan al Hashari in ninth-century Baghdad. The various Islamic versions of that indeterminate sea of being he rejected in a spasm of fierce disgust. "We confess," he wrote, "that God is firmly seated on his throne. We confess that God has two hands, without asking how. We confess that God has two eyes, without asking how. We confess that God has a face."
So long as frank confessions are being undertaken, I must confess that a God looking agreeably like me makes precisely as much sense as an "indeterminate sea of potentiality," with the additional advantage that He is said to be responsive to prayer.
Having begun with Stenger, I might as well finish him off. Proposing to show how something might emerge from nothing, he introduces "another universe [that] existed prior to ours that tunnelled through... to become our universe. Critics will argue that we have no way of observing such an earlier universe, and so this is not very scientific" (italics added).
This is true. Critics will do just that. Before they do, they will certainly observe that Stenger has completely misunderstood the terms of the problem that he has set himself, and that far from showing how something can arise from nothing, he has shown only that something might arise from something else. This is not an observation that has ever evoked a firestorm of controversy.
A man must really know his own limits, as Clint Eastwood observed.
The Sea of Indeterminate Potentiality, and all cognate concepts, belong to a group of physical arguments with two aims. The first is to find a way around the initial singularity of standard Big Bang cosmology. Physicists accept this aim devoutly because the Big Bang singularity strikes an uncomfortably theistic note. Nothing but intellectual mischief can result from leaving that singularity where it is. Who knows what poor ideas religious believers might take from cosmology were they to imagine that in the beginning the universe began?
The second aim is to account for the emergence of the universe in some way that will allow physicists to say with quiet pride that they have gotten the thing to appear from nothing, and especially nothing resembling a deity or a singularity.
This is the province of ideas first advanced by Stephen Hawking and James Hartle and later by Hawking, Ian Moss, and Neil Turok. The details may be found in Hawking's bestselling A Brief History of Time, a book that was widely considered fascinating by those who did not read it, and incomprehensible by those who did. Their work will seem remarkably familiar to readers who grasp the principle behind pyramid schemes or magical acts in which women disappear into a box only to emerge as tigers shortly thereafter.
Quantum mechanics of the old-fashioned kind assesses the behaviour of particles, chiefly by showing that particles are not particles at all but a kind of probabilistic smear. In quantum cosmology, the particles are gone. Gone as well is the classical form of Schrödinger's equation, though its domestic companion, a wave function taking universes as its objects (more or less), also operates in terms of probabilities.
Quantum cosmology dispenses with the Copenhagen interpretation's queer distinction between the quantum world and the classical world, wherein the electron belongs to the quantum world, the physicist to the classical world. There are no classical physicists loitering about quantum cosmology, and no classical world either. It is quantum mechanics all the way down, and, of course, all the way up as well.
Now, when Schrödinger first came to appreciate the mysteries of quantum theory, he devised a thought experiment to explain his own perplexity......
It was the use of the word imaginary in this context that gave his ideas their air of pontifical mystification. How can numbers be imaginary? They cannot be. Hawking was simply appealing to the complex numbers, and these are perfectly well-defined mathematical objects. They correspond more or less to pairs of points in the plane.
The complex numbers have one outstanding advantage: they are not ordered. They do not go anywhere. If time is measured by the complex numbers, there is no before at work and no worries at all about winding up at the Big Bang singularity. Thus in Hawking's scheme, at the point in which the regime of the real numbers gives way, the complex regime takes over. As the physicist descends toward the place formerly known as the Big Bang singularity, time smoothly executes a transformation all its own, the region around the tip becoming gently curved, so that the cone ends in a pendulous sac. There is now a moment corresponding to the magician's withdrawal of a handkerchief from his sleeve: The Big Bang singularity has disappeared!
It is just gone.
Within the sac, the physicist cannot see or otherwise determine a before before his last before. He is adrift in a directionless borough of space and time.
It is very much like Brooklyn, one reason that the early universe (and everyone else) was so eager to get out of there.
In commenting on the scenario described by Hawking and his colleagues, Roger Penrose, writing in The Road to Reality offered his opinion that their theories were remarkably elegant. It was a gracious remark. A far more natural reaction would be to ask, "Can they really get away with that?" From a technical point of view the answer is yes. They have the mathematical means. In going down, one version of space and time gives way. Another becomes ascendant. A fog of sorts begins to cover everything. It disappears on coming up. In between the going down and the coming up, the original Big Bang singularity has vanished.
When scholars persuaded of the essential inerrancy of the Bible attempt to reconcile the Book of Genesis with contemporary estimates of the age of the cosmos, they do so by changing the time mentioned in the Bible and so altering its nature. These efforts are not necessarily foolish. Often there is a real ingenuity required, and no little physical competence. The physicist Gerald Schroeder is convinced that the Hebrew Bible provides a stunning insight into the cosmos of creation, and he has travelled the world in an effort to present his views. They have not been well received by physicists, who in their retirement often enjoy writing critical assessments of biblical scholarship, a vocation that allows them to demonstrate their knowledge without ever defending it. The gravamen of their concerns lies less with the plausibility of various schemes than with their motivation. And that is frankly and honestly in the service of a religious agenda.
And Hawking?
The question is leading, Your Honour, I know that, but look where it is leading.
Never mind looking, if you are otherwise occupied. I'll point out the place myself. It is leading to a place that anyone who follows human thought should find familiar. Arguments follow from assumptions, and assumptions follow from belief, and very rarely—perhaps never—do beliefs reflect an agenda determined entirely by the facts. No less than the doctrines of religious belief, the doctrines of quantum cosmology are what they seem: biased, partial, inconclusive, and largely in the service of passionate but unexamined conviction.
There is no surprise in any of this, and if there is, there should not be.
With the Big Bang singularity removed from sight, there remains the second part of quantum cosmology's two-part agenda, and that is to provide a scenario for the emergence of the universe—our own universe, that is, now demoted in grandeur from the universe to one among many.
The argument that Hawking has offered may be conveyed by question-and-answer, as in the Catholic catechism.
A Catechism of Quantum Cosmology
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Q: From what did our universe evolve?
A: Our universe evolved from a much smaller, much emptier mini-universe. You may think of it as an egg.
Q: What was the smaller, emptier universe like?
A: It was a four-dimensional sphere with nothing much inside it. You may think of that as weird.
Q: How can a sphere have four dimensions?
A: A sphere may have four dimensions if it has one more dimension than a three-dimensional sphere. You may think of that as obvious.
Q: Does the smaller, emptier universe have a name?
A: The smaller, emptier universe is called a de Sitter universe. You may think of that as about time someone paid attention to de Sitter.
Q: Is there anything else I should know about the smaller, emptier universe?
A: Yes. It represents a solution to Einstein's field equations. You may think of that as a good thing.
Q: Where was the smaller, emptier universe or egg?
A: It was in the place where space as we know it did not exist. You may think of it as a sac.
Q: When was it there?
A: It was there at the time when time as we know it did not exist. You may think of it as a mystery.
Q: Where did the egg come from?
A: The egg did not actually come from anywhere. You may think of this as astonishing.
Q: If the egg did not come from anywhere, hoe did it get there?
A: The egg got there because the wave function of the universe said it was probable. You may think of this as a done deal.
Q: How did our universe evolve from the egg?
A: It evolved by inflating itself up from its sac to become the universe in which we now find ourselves. You may think of that as just one of those things.
This catechism, I should add, is not a parody of quantum cosmology. It is quantum cosmology.
Readers lacking faith will, I imagine, wish to know something more about its crucial step, and that is the emergence of a mini-universe from nothing at all. They will be disappointed to learn that insofar as the mini-universe is actual, it did not emerge from nothing, and insofar as it is possible, it did not emerge at all. What can be said about the mini-universe according to either interpretation is that Hawking has designed it as probable because he has assumed that it is probable. He has done this by restricting the wave function of the universe to just those universes that coincide with the de Sitter universe at their boundaries. This coincidence is all that is needed to produce the desired results. The wave function of the universe and the de Sitter mini-universe are made for each other. The subsequent computations indicate the obvious: The universe most likely to be found down there in the sac of time is just the universe Hawking assumed would be found down there. If what Hawking has described is not quite a circle in thought, it does appear to suggest an oblate spheroid.
The result is guaranteed—one hunnerd percent, as used-car salesmen say.
Among philosophers concerned to promote atheism, satisfaction in Hawking's conclusion has been considerable. Witness Quentin Smith: "Now Stephen Hawking's theory dissolves any worries about how the universe could begin to exist uncaused." Smith is so pleased by the conclusion of Hawking's argument that he has not concerned himself overmuch with its premises. Or with its reasoning.
While Hawking's scheme has since its inception been the subject of many technical and philosophical criticisms, disputes have been, I mus say, disappointingly courteous. Unlike particle physicists, whose natural level of aggression compares favourably with that of the timber wolf, cosmologists are often languid in argument, and they attend to the deficiencies of one another's work with studied elegance of men who keep silk handkerchiefs in their sleeve.
In 1984, Alexander Vilenkin published a paper adverting to the creation of the universe out of nothing According to his view, the universe tunnelled its way into becoming a de Sitter universe. Twenty years later, he was moved in a paper entitled "Quantum Cosmology and Eternal Inflation" to ask whether his original paper might not have been his "greatest mistake". Clearly he was not in this regard worried about an embarrassment of riches. On more sober reflection, he decided the point in his favour. At the conclusion of his paper, he observed that "sadly, quantum cosmology is not likely to become an observational science."
Correct. Quantum cosmology is a branch of mathematical metaphysics. It provides no cause for the emergence of the universe, and so does not answer the first cosmological question, and it offers no reason for the existence of the universe, and so does not address the second. If the mystification induced by its modest mathematics were removed from the subject, what remains would not appear appreciably different in kind from various creation myths in which the origin of the universe is attributed to sexual congress between primordial deities.
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* Watch Berlinski's presentations on YouTube, here and here. See also my previous post excerpted from the same book: TIME, DEATH, LIFE, AND LONGING.
⸸ Broadly, the cosmological argument is an argument for the existence of God which claims that all things in nature depend on something else for their existence (i.e. are contingent), and that the whole cosmos must therefore itself depend on a being which exists independently or necessarily.
⥉ אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה (Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh = "I Am That I Am").
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| שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָֽד – Sh'ma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad |
At some moment in the unrecoverable past, the battle-ready Hebrews understood that the scattered deities of the Near Eastern world were a manifestation of a single God. "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one!"
If God is one, he is one absolutely, the Hebrew Bible affirms, because not only does he exists, he must exist. The five simple words of the declaration in Exodus —"I am that I am"― suggest that God's existence is necessary. Being what He is, God could not fail to be who He is, and being who He is, God could not fail to be.
This is the heart of a second cosmological argument. It draws a connection between the existence of the universe and the existence of the Deity. The argument is not simple, and it is by no means conclusive.
🔯
Everything that exists has a precarious hold on being. Here today, gone tomorrow is more than an adage; it is a principle of metaphysics. We have an uncommon ability mentally to shuffle things in and out of existence; but applied so easily to others, this power cannot be self-applied. No matter with what determination we stare into the void, the staring itself makes the effort an exercise in irrelevance. Who is staring? If we cannot imagine a world without us (and so in my case a world gone mad with grief), we can give our reluctant assent to the proposition that things might continue in our absence.
[Thomas] Aquinas applies this argument to the universe, because he can see no reason to suppose that its existence is guaranteed. If it might not exist, why, then, does it exist?
Why indeed?
There now follows a remarkable, a bold, but a problematic step in the argument: If it is possible that something might not exist, Aquinas asserts, then it is certain that at some time it did not exist. In this, Aquinas was reprising a view of possibility that may be traced back to the Greek philosopher Diodorus.
But if the universe did not exist at some moment of time, then it emerged from absolutely nothing. The universe is everything that there is. What beyond nothing is left to explain its promotion from inexistence to existence?
This, Aquinas observes, is incoherent. Ex nihilo nihil fit. From nothing, nothing, as ancient writers said. Because it is impossible to understand the emergence of something from nothing, Aquinas concludes, something must have acted to bring the universe into existence. That something, the argument continues, could have been contingent or necessary. If contingent, we are no further advanced. We have simply chased perplexities into the past. If not contingent, then necessary. When it comes to things that exist necessarily, it is wasteful to assume more than one. What could the others do? Thus there is one thing whose existence is necessary, and if necessary, by the very same argument, eternal. Since it is eternal, it has no cause. Questions about its origins are pointless.
What is God if not an infinite and necessarily existing being?
🔯
This argument is by no means foolish. It is spacious. It has a certain grandeur. But it remains only as strong as its weakest premise: If the universe might never have existed, then for sure at some time or other it did not exist.
When this premise is placed in hot type on cold paper, suspicions arise that it covers an inference that Aquinas cannot support. The steps involved in passing from I exist to I might exist―they are fine. The additional steps that carry the metaphysician from I might not exist to at one time I did not (or will not) exist—they are fine too. They are as fine as metaphysical inferences ever get. But to suppose that precisely the same steps carry the universe from it might not exist to it did not exist suggests the fallacy of composition at work, as when the set of turtles is said to be a turtle on the grounds that its members are all turtles. One for all and all for one is not a principle of metaphysics. A universe of perishable things is not necessarily perishable. This objection does not by itself close the case. No case in metaphysics or theology is ever closed. But it does indicate that some further argument is needed, and this Aquinas does not provide.
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Let us suppose, then, that the universe passes sedately from the everlasting to the everlasting. It has been there forever and it will be there forever. This is the universe that Einstein championed before he appreciated the explosive nature of Big Bang cosmology, and it is a universe that has always induced a sense of calm in those who contemplate it. If it does not appear to be the universe and thus our universe, a great many cosmologists in the twentieth have regarded that as a defect in the plan of creation. A universe of this sort makes a busy, causally imperious God unnecessary; what is worse, it makes him incoherent. A cause must precede its effect, and if the universe is eternal, there was no moment in which God could have brought about the creation of the universe. In a world with so much time, it is odd to think that God―of all people!―would have no time in which to work. The best he could do from the outside would be to barge into the universe occasionally and cause a great deal of commotion.
Nonetheless, an eternal universe leads to a question very similar to the question that Aquinas asked, and it allows us to recapture some of the force of the second cosmological argument without the affliction of a very doubtful premise. The reformation strikes for a deeper level of doubt and perplexity than the original argument and for this reason carries an emotional burden that the original argument lacks.
"If the universe was always there and will always be there, why is it there at all?"
There is no point in answering this question by assuming that our own fond familiar universe must exist. With all due respect to the universe, this is an assumption no one wishes to make, because no description that we can offer of the universe suggests that its existence is necessary. But if the universe does not exist necessarily, then plainly it might never have existed at all, even if it has existed for all time.
And this is precisely the problem. With the possibility of inexistence staring it in the face, why does the universe exist? To say that universe just is, as Stephen Hawking has said, is to reject out of hand any further questions. We know that it is. It is right there in plain sight. What philosophers such as ourselves wish to know is why it is. It may be that at the end of these inquiries we will answer our own question by saying that the universe exists for no reason whatsoever. At the end of these inquiries, and not the beginning.
No matter how cheerfully physicists may endorse this conclusion, it is dreadful.
This is something we know too.
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Two arguments are now at work. The first is due to Aquinas.
Its first premise:
If the universe is contingent, then at some time it did not exist.Its second:
At that time, it emerged from nothing.Its conclusion:
This is crazy.And the second argument, derived from a mixed salad of philosophical greens of my own devising:
Its first premise:
If the universe is contingent, there is no saying whether it existed forever. Maybe. Maybe not.Its second:
If anything might not exist, then it is reasonable to ask why it does exist.Its conclusion:
Well, why does it exist? No, I mean really?The first argument asks of the universe how it emerged; the second, why it is there.
The first demands a cause; the second, a reason.
Both arguments are inferences to God, but they proceed from different sources in the imagination.
A causally successful God is what He seems: By creating the universe, He has gotten the job done, and if in return He demands a good deal by way of worshipful admiration, who is to gainsay Him?
A God who functions as a reason is occupied with what German metaphysicians might call the foundations of being. He functions as an anchor and so as a refuge.
Both Gods are equally necessary, but the God engaged in anchoring the universe does not necessarily bother himself with its creation. Why should He? The thing has been there forever. His role is otherwise, and it is more fundamental. It is to this lofty and remote deity that the human heart turns when it wishes to assure itself that there is one thing in Being answering to the majesty of I AM THAT I AM.⥉
God is in this sense an answer to the question long posed by metaphysicians: Why is there something rather than nothing? If anything exists contingently, the second cosmological argument affirms, at least one thing exists necessarily. There is something rather than nothing, because at least one part of existence has its origins in what must be. As for the rest of creation, in one way or another it may be allowed to take care of itself. In reaching for a God who exists necessarily, the theologians have covered their most important base.
And the scientists, until now scoffing at the sidelines, what have they to say about all this?
THE HEART OF THE MATTER
In the early years of the nineteenth century, the English polymath Thomas Young demonstrated that light behaves like a wave. After shining a beam of light through two slits, he observed interference patterns forming on a screen placed behind them. Wave crests met wave crests to form bigger crests; wave troughs met wave troughs to form bigger troughs; and when crests and troughs were not meeting companionably, they interfered with one another in order to extinguish themselves.
What could be simpler? Light is like a wave.
Ah, but on the other hand, Einstein demonstrated in 1905 that in order to explain the photoelectric effect, it was necessary (or at least convenient) to assume that light comprises particles. Send a beam of light toward a metal surface, and electrons pop out. Plainly they pop out because they have been knocked off. To accommodate both popping out and knocking off, Einstein found it necessary to think of light as if it were composed of discrete packets of energy.
What could be simpler? Light is like a particle.
It was not entirely clear how in the matter of Young v. Einstein, both men could have been right.
The consortium of physicists who created quantum mechanics in the third decade of the twentieth century – Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born – finessed this problem by declaring Young v. Einstein a draw. Light, they argued, is both like a wave and like a particle, and what is more, it is like a wave and like a particle on the level of individual photons themselves. Photons, physicists came to understand, interfere with themselves, and if deep down no one had the slightest idea how to picture autointerference, what physicists were willing to give up was the picture and not the interference.
The finessing required, as one might imagine, a good deal of finesse.
A quantum particle – an electron or a photon, say – is here, and somewhat later, it is there. The old here-and-there, Schrödinger specified in terms of the properties of a wave. It is here where the wave mounts and there where it dips. Passing through two slits, the wave peaks at the left and peaks as well at the right, flowing, as waves tend to do, through both slits at once.
But a wave is intended to track the moving position of a single particle, and it is here that the formalism of quantum mechanics commits the physicist to a form of legerdemain that has to this day resisted all attempts at explication. It is one thing to say that a wave may pass through two slits; it is quite another thing to say that a single particle may divide its allegiance in just the same way. Nonetheless, this is just what physicists were forced to say. By now, they say it without a second thought. The particle that could be here or there they represent by a wave that is here and there. If that is where the wave is, the particle enjoys a doubling of its position in space, with each position corresponding to a distinct physical state. Somehow both physical states are real and they are real at the same time. They are, as physicists say, superimposed. They exist together. There is no getting rid of them. Superimposed states are themselves described by the undulation of a wave, which is generally described as a wave packet to signify the extent to which it embodies a variety of different quantum states and so a variety of separate waves. It is Schrödinger's equation that describes the wave packets' undulations.
The formalism of quantum mechanics, physicists at once realized, defeated all efforts to picture the quantum world. If no pictures were available, neither was there a link to common sense. Light is both a wave and a particle, and it is both a wave and a particle at the same time. This conclusion embodies a mystery, one that no subsequent analytical efforts have dissolved. The mystery will not appear entirely unfamiliar to Christians persuaded of the threefold aspect of the deity. If light is a particle and a wave, religious believers might observe, God is a Father, a Son, and a Holy Ghost. This is not an analogy that has captured the allegiance of scientific atheists.
The interpretation of quantum mechanical formalism did little to dispel the mystery it embodied. In 1926, Max Born provided the standard scheme by which equations of quantum mechanics might be understood. The details are complex, but in a rough-and-ready way, Born suggested that the quantum mechanical waves passing sedately throughout the universe might be understood in terms of the probabilities that they reveal. Thus the amplitude of a wave is a sign that quite likely there is a particle there and so a clue to its position, and the distance between wave peaks is again a sign that quite likely the particle is travelling with a particular momentum. A wave with two peaks rising like the devil's horns might represent a particle dividing its allegiances equally between two slits.
Under Born's interpretation of quantum mechanics, the identity of a particle undergoes further deconstruction. The old here-or-there has long since passed to the new here-and-there, but what is here and there is now a matter of chance. Having impossibly divided itself between two slits, a single photon undergoes further demotion to appear in quantum mechanics as the ghost of its position. It could be here, it could be there, and somehow it could be at both places at once.
These divided allegiances come to an end abruptly when an observer, padding in from outside the quantum system, undertakes a measurement. So long as no one is looking, the electron is all things to all men. But let the physicist have a look, and boom! the particle that could be here and there becomes here or there all over again. The wave packet collapses into just one of its possibilities. The other quantum states that it embodies vanish, and they vanish instantaneously.
No one knows why.
Niels Bohr – widely considered to be inscrutable in his conversation, owing to the particular flavor of his Danish Grope and Mumble – embraced this interpretation of quantum mechanics, whence its designation as the Copenhagen interpretation. It has become canonical.
It has not, however, explained the connection between the quantum realm and the classical realm. "So long as the wave packet reduction is an essential component [of quantum mechanics]," the physicist John Bell observed, "and so long as we do not know when and how it takes over from the Schrödinger equation, we do not have an exact and unambiguous formulation of our most fundamental physical theory."
If this is so, why is our most fundamental physical theory fundamental?
I'm just asking.
SOMETHING FROM NOTHING
Cosmology studies the universe as a whole, and quantum cosmology brings the apparatus of quantum mechanics to bear on the whole of the universe. It is the most speculative of inquiries and it is among the least successful. It seems to tempt physicists to a certain gracelessness.
Considering the cosmological argument, the physicist Victor Stenger scoffs that it is the "last resort of the theist who seeks to argue for the existence of God from science and finds all his other arguments fail." Sheer chutzpah, if I may use the Greek for cheek. It is Stenger who is arguing against the existence of God "from science." The result, as one might expect, is unedifying. "Why," Stenger asks, "is there God rather than nothing?" It is what physicists always ask before they have thought about what they are asking.
If God must exist, the question why God does exist answers itself. Must is must.
Having rejected Aquinas, Stenger is persuaded that "we can give a plausible scientific reason based on our best current knowledge of physics that something is more natural than nothing!" The appeal to what is natural elicits an old urge among physicists to possess the concept of naturalness voluptuously. But it is worth remembering that what is at issue is not whether something is more natural than anything, but why the universe exists at all. Naturalness has nothing to do with it.
Oxford's Peter Atkins has attempted to address this issue. "If we are to be honest," he argues, "then we have to accept that science will be able to claim complete success only if it achieves what many might think impossible: accounting for the emergence of everything from absolutely nothing." Atkins does not seem to recognize that when the human mind encounters the thesis that something has emerged from nothing, it is not encountering a question to which any coherent answer exists. His confidence that a scientific answer must nonetheless be forthcoming needs to be assessed in other terms, possibly those involving clinical self-delusion.
Among physicists, the question of how something emerged from nothing has one decisive effect: It loosens their tongues. "One thing [that] is clear," a physicist writes, "in our framing of questions such as 'How did the Universe get started?' is that the Universe was self-creating. This is not a statement on a 'cause' behind the origin of the Universe, nor is it a statement on a lack of purpose or destiny. It is simply a statement that the Universe was emergent, that the actual Universe probably derived from an indeterminate sea of potentiality that we call the quantum vacuum, whose properties may always remain beyond our current understanding."
It cannot be said that "an indeterminate sea of potentiality" has anything like the clarifying effect needed by the discussion, and indeed, except for sheer snobbishness, physicists have offered no reason to prefer this description of the Source of Being to the one offered by Abu al-Hassan al Hashari in ninth-century Baghdad. The various Islamic versions of that indeterminate sea of being he rejected in a spasm of fierce disgust. "We confess," he wrote, "that God is firmly seated on his throne. We confess that God has two hands, without asking how. We confess that God has two eyes, without asking how. We confess that God has a face."
So long as frank confessions are being undertaken, I must confess that a God looking agreeably like me makes precisely as much sense as an "indeterminate sea of potentiality," with the additional advantage that He is said to be responsive to prayer.
Having begun with Stenger, I might as well finish him off. Proposing to show how something might emerge from nothing, he introduces "another universe [that] existed prior to ours that tunnelled through... to become our universe. Critics will argue that we have no way of observing such an earlier universe, and so this is not very scientific" (italics added).
This is true. Critics will do just that. Before they do, they will certainly observe that Stenger has completely misunderstood the terms of the problem that he has set himself, and that far from showing how something can arise from nothing, he has shown only that something might arise from something else. This is not an observation that has ever evoked a firestorm of controversy.
A man must really know his own limits, as Clint Eastwood observed.
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The Sea of Indeterminate Potentiality, and all cognate concepts, belong to a group of physical arguments with two aims. The first is to find a way around the initial singularity of standard Big Bang cosmology. Physicists accept this aim devoutly because the Big Bang singularity strikes an uncomfortably theistic note. Nothing but intellectual mischief can result from leaving that singularity where it is. Who knows what poor ideas religious believers might take from cosmology were they to imagine that in the beginning the universe began?
The second aim is to account for the emergence of the universe in some way that will allow physicists to say with quiet pride that they have gotten the thing to appear from nothing, and especially nothing resembling a deity or a singularity.
This is the province of ideas first advanced by Stephen Hawking and James Hartle and later by Hawking, Ian Moss, and Neil Turok. The details may be found in Hawking's bestselling A Brief History of Time, a book that was widely considered fascinating by those who did not read it, and incomprehensible by those who did. Their work will seem remarkably familiar to readers who grasp the principle behind pyramid schemes or magical acts in which women disappear into a box only to emerge as tigers shortly thereafter.
Quantum mechanics of the old-fashioned kind assesses the behaviour of particles, chiefly by showing that particles are not particles at all but a kind of probabilistic smear. In quantum cosmology, the particles are gone. Gone as well is the classical form of Schrödinger's equation, though its domestic companion, a wave function taking universes as its objects (more or less), also operates in terms of probabilities.
Quantum cosmology dispenses with the Copenhagen interpretation's queer distinction between the quantum world and the classical world, wherein the electron belongs to the quantum world, the physicist to the classical world. There are no classical physicists loitering about quantum cosmology, and no classical world either. It is quantum mechanics all the way down, and, of course, all the way up as well.
Now, when Schrödinger first came to appreciate the mysteries of quantum theory, he devised a thought experiment to explain his own perplexity......
Imagine that a cat has been placed in a sealed container, together with a device that if it goes off will kill it—a revolver, say, or some sort of radioactive pellet. Whether the device goes off is a matter of chance. So long as no one is looking, the cat exists in a superposition of quantum states, at once half dead (the gun might fire) and half alive (it might not). As soon as an observer peeks into the box, that superposition gives way. That cat is either dead or alive and there are no two ways about it. Schrödinger thought the idea of a cat both alive and dead intellectually discouraging.
Schrödinger's cat is a part of the mythology of quantum theory, and according to the Copenhagen interpretation, it is there for the count, because no one can imagine how to get rid of the poor creature.
For this reason any number of physicists have endeavoured to get rid of the Copenhagen interpretation instead. In 1957, Hugh Everett III, a young physicist at Princeton, argued in his Ph.D. dissertation that the collapse of the wave function could be explained on the assumption that reality somehow contains far more worlds than previously imagined. Where an observer in classical quantum theory would occupy himself in collapsing what we may fondly recall as the good, old-fashioned wave function, according to the many-worlds interpretation, at precisely the moment a measurement is made, the universe branches into a two or more universes. The cat who was half dead and half alive gives rise to two separate universes, one containing a cat who is dead, the other containing a cat who is alive. The new universes cluttering up creation embody the quantum states that were previously in a state of quantum superposition.
The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is rather like the incarnation. It appeals to those who believe in it, and it rewards belief in a proportion to which belief is sincere.
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The wave function of the universe is designed to represent the behaviour of the universe – all of it. It floats in the void – these metaphors are inescapable – and passes judgement on universes. Some are probable, other likely, and still others a very bad bet. Nonetheless, the wave function of the universe cannot be seen, measured, assessed, or tested. It is purely a theoretical artifact. Physicists have found it remarkably easy to pass from speculation about the wave function of the universe to the conviction that there is a wave function. This is nothing more than an endearing human weakness. Less endearing by far is their sullen contempt toward religious argument when it is engaged in precisely the same attempt to reach by speculation what cannot be grasped in any other way.
By itself, the wave function of the universe can do little to advance the double agenda of quantum cosmology: to get rid of the initial singularity of Big Bang cosmology, and to show how the universe emerged from nothing much or nothing at all. It is a necessary piece of equipment, like the mountain climber's rope.
What the physicist requires to get climbing is a readjustment of our traditionl physical notions of time, a way of giving it a new look. The new look is necessary because, as Stephen Hawking and Roger Pensrose demonstrated in the mid-1960s, the Big Bang singularity is simply unavoidable. Within general relativity, time has an unvarying direction. If a man is going down toward the Big Bang, it is one thing before another, and if he is coming up from the Big Bang, one thing after another. This is a feature of the real number system itself. It cannot be changed. Within quantum cosmology, however, time has been altered. Very much like a physician who proposes to cure his patient's infection by infecting him with another affliction, Hawking suggested that in going down toward the Big Bang, one mathematical regime (that of the real numbers) would somehow give way to another (that of the imaginary numbers).
The complex numbers have one outstanding advantage: they are not ordered. They do not go anywhere. If time is measured by the complex numbers, there is no before at work and no worries at all about winding up at the Big Bang singularity. Thus in Hawking's scheme, at the point in which the regime of the real numbers gives way, the complex regime takes over. As the physicist descends toward the place formerly known as the Big Bang singularity, time smoothly executes a transformation all its own, the region around the tip becoming gently curved, so that the cone ends in a pendulous sac. There is now a moment corresponding to the magician's withdrawal of a handkerchief from his sleeve: The Big Bang singularity has disappeared!
It is just gone.
Within the sac, the physicist cannot see or otherwise determine a before before his last before. He is adrift in a directionless borough of space and time.
It is very much like Brooklyn, one reason that the early universe (and everyone else) was so eager to get out of there.
CAN THEY GET AWAY WITH IT?
In commenting on the scenario described by Hawking and his colleagues, Roger Penrose, writing in The Road to Reality offered his opinion that their theories were remarkably elegant. It was a gracious remark. A far more natural reaction would be to ask, "Can they really get away with that?" From a technical point of view the answer is yes. They have the mathematical means. In going down, one version of space and time gives way. Another becomes ascendant. A fog of sorts begins to cover everything. It disappears on coming up. In between the going down and the coming up, the original Big Bang singularity has vanished.
When scholars persuaded of the essential inerrancy of the Bible attempt to reconcile the Book of Genesis with contemporary estimates of the age of the cosmos, they do so by changing the time mentioned in the Bible and so altering its nature. These efforts are not necessarily foolish. Often there is a real ingenuity required, and no little physical competence. The physicist Gerald Schroeder is convinced that the Hebrew Bible provides a stunning insight into the cosmos of creation, and he has travelled the world in an effort to present his views. They have not been well received by physicists, who in their retirement often enjoy writing critical assessments of biblical scholarship, a vocation that allows them to demonstrate their knowledge without ever defending it. The gravamen of their concerns lies less with the plausibility of various schemes than with their motivation. And that is frankly and honestly in the service of a religious agenda.
And Hawking?
The question is leading, Your Honour, I know that, but look where it is leading.
Never mind looking, if you are otherwise occupied. I'll point out the place myself. It is leading to a place that anyone who follows human thought should find familiar. Arguments follow from assumptions, and assumptions follow from belief, and very rarely—perhaps never—do beliefs reflect an agenda determined entirely by the facts. No less than the doctrines of religious belief, the doctrines of quantum cosmology are what they seem: biased, partial, inconclusive, and largely in the service of passionate but unexamined conviction.
There is no surprise in any of this, and if there is, there should not be.
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With the Big Bang singularity removed from sight, there remains the second part of quantum cosmology's two-part agenda, and that is to provide a scenario for the emergence of the universe—our own universe, that is, now demoted in grandeur from the universe to one among many.
The argument that Hawking has offered may be conveyed by question-and-answer, as in the Catholic catechism.
A Catechism of Quantum Cosmology
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Q: From what did our universe evolve?
A: Our universe evolved from a much smaller, much emptier mini-universe. You may think of it as an egg.
Q: What was the smaller, emptier universe like?
A: It was a four-dimensional sphere with nothing much inside it. You may think of that as weird.
Q: How can a sphere have four dimensions?
A: A sphere may have four dimensions if it has one more dimension than a three-dimensional sphere. You may think of that as obvious.
Q: Does the smaller, emptier universe have a name?
A: The smaller, emptier universe is called a de Sitter universe. You may think of that as about time someone paid attention to de Sitter.
Q: Is there anything else I should know about the smaller, emptier universe?
A: Yes. It represents a solution to Einstein's field equations. You may think of that as a good thing.
Q: Where was the smaller, emptier universe or egg?
A: It was in the place where space as we know it did not exist. You may think of it as a sac.
Q: When was it there?
A: It was there at the time when time as we know it did not exist. You may think of it as a mystery.
Q: Where did the egg come from?
A: The egg did not actually come from anywhere. You may think of this as astonishing.
Q: If the egg did not come from anywhere, hoe did it get there?
A: The egg got there because the wave function of the universe said it was probable. You may think of this as a done deal.
Q: How did our universe evolve from the egg?
A: It evolved by inflating itself up from its sac to become the universe in which we now find ourselves. You may think of that as just one of those things.
This catechism, I should add, is not a parody of quantum cosmology. It is quantum cosmology.
Readers lacking faith will, I imagine, wish to know something more about its crucial step, and that is the emergence of a mini-universe from nothing at all. They will be disappointed to learn that insofar as the mini-universe is actual, it did not emerge from nothing, and insofar as it is possible, it did not emerge at all. What can be said about the mini-universe according to either interpretation is that Hawking has designed it as probable because he has assumed that it is probable. He has done this by restricting the wave function of the universe to just those universes that coincide with the de Sitter universe at their boundaries. This coincidence is all that is needed to produce the desired results. The wave function of the universe and the de Sitter mini-universe are made for each other. The subsequent computations indicate the obvious: The universe most likely to be found down there in the sac of time is just the universe Hawking assumed would be found down there. If what Hawking has described is not quite a circle in thought, it does appear to suggest an oblate spheroid.
The result is guaranteed—one hunnerd percent, as used-car salesmen say.
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Among philosophers concerned to promote atheism, satisfaction in Hawking's conclusion has been considerable. Witness Quentin Smith: "Now Stephen Hawking's theory dissolves any worries about how the universe could begin to exist uncaused." Smith is so pleased by the conclusion of Hawking's argument that he has not concerned himself overmuch with its premises. Or with its reasoning.
While Hawking's scheme has since its inception been the subject of many technical and philosophical criticisms, disputes have been, I mus say, disappointingly courteous. Unlike particle physicists, whose natural level of aggression compares favourably with that of the timber wolf, cosmologists are often languid in argument, and they attend to the deficiencies of one another's work with studied elegance of men who keep silk handkerchiefs in their sleeve.
In 1984, Alexander Vilenkin published a paper adverting to the creation of the universe out of nothing According to his view, the universe tunnelled its way into becoming a de Sitter universe. Twenty years later, he was moved in a paper entitled "Quantum Cosmology and Eternal Inflation" to ask whether his original paper might not have been his "greatest mistake". Clearly he was not in this regard worried about an embarrassment of riches. On more sober reflection, he decided the point in his favour. At the conclusion of his paper, he observed that "sadly, quantum cosmology is not likely to become an observational science."
Correct. Quantum cosmology is a branch of mathematical metaphysics. It provides no cause for the emergence of the universe, and so does not answer the first cosmological question, and it offers no reason for the existence of the universe, and so does not address the second. If the mystification induced by its modest mathematics were removed from the subject, what remains would not appear appreciably different in kind from various creation myths in which the origin of the universe is attributed to sexual congress between primordial deities.
(David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion, ch. 5)
* Watch Berlinski's presentations on YouTube, here and here. See also my previous post excerpted from the same book: TIME, DEATH, LIFE, AND LONGING.
⸸ Broadly, the cosmological argument is an argument for the existence of God which claims that all things in nature depend on something else for their existence (i.e. are contingent), and that the whole cosmos must therefore itself depend on a being which exists independently or necessarily.
⥉ אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה (Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh = "I Am That I Am").
