Early in this review series, I mentioned how Sean Carroll's new book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (Dutton, 2016), gradually becomes weaker as you move through the chapters. It starts off strong and invigorating as he talks about cosmology and fundamental physics, his specialities. But as he moves into the philosophy of mind, meaning, and morality, he gets a bit wobbly.

Moving From Ought to Is

That's evident especially in his chapter on "What Is and What Ought To Be." The chapter starts off fine. Carroll agrees with David Hume, the famous skeptic whom Carroll deems a "forefather of poetic naturalism", that we can never derive an "ought" from an "is." In other words, we can never take a description of the world (how the world is) and logically deduce a prescription (how we ought to behave in response.) Why? Because for naturalists like Carroll and Hume, "is" is all there is. There's nothing outside the natural world to tell us how we ought to behave in response to the natural world. But maybe the natural world itself can offer guidance? Unfortunately no, says Carroll. He writes, "The natural world doesn't pass judgment; it doesn't provide guidance; it doesn't know or care about what ought to happen" (396).

Some atheists disagree, such as Sam Harris. Harris tries to defend objective morality on scientific grounds, suggesting that moral acts ("oughts") are those which bring about the flourishing of sentient creatures. In other words, we ought to do things that bring about the most flourishing. And on this view, it's true that science can tell us what brings about the most flourishing (at least some types of flourishing, that is.) But bracketing the vaguely defined concept of "flourishing" (who decides what counts as flourishing?) the big problem with Harris' view is the hidden premise that we ought to prefer and promote the flourishing of sentient creatures. On what authority does this rest? Is it an objective principle or just Harris' personal belief, one that many people may share, but not all?

Science can only provide us guidance about what to do if we want to attain a specific goal (e.g., sentient flourishing). But science can never reveal moral values or duties suggesting we ought to pursue those specific goals. This is a major reason why Harris' proposal fails.

Carroll understands all of this. He denies that morality can be grounded within science. However, he does think we can discover moral duties using the "tools of reason and rationality" (401).

“Be Excellent to Each Other”

Here's where things get a little wonky. Strangely, Carroll quotes (approvingly) a moral axiom from the 1989 cult classic, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure: "Be excellent to each other." Carroll writes, "As foundational precepts for moral theorizing go, you could do worse" (402). But not much, I would add. It's not clear who determines what "excellent" means. Is abortion excellent? Is murdering one person to save five more excellent? Is it excellent to leave your spouse if you find a more appealing partner?

Another problem with the Bill and Ted morality is why we should obey it. Even if we determined precisely what excellent behavior entails, why should pursue this standard of excellence? Who or what says we ought to follow this axiom? Whether it's Bill, Ted, or Sean Carroll, why should we follow their moral beliefs?

Although Carroll perhaps quoted this line as a joke—though I don't think he did, given his commentary above—it displays the same problems that Hume identified over a century ago.

Other Moral Theories

Throughout the chapter, Carroll surveys several other moral theories, seeming to settle on a form of moral relativism. He says:

"Hume was right. We have no objective guidance on how to distinguish right from wrong: not from God, not from nature, not from the pure force of reason itself....Morality exists only insofar as we make it so, and other people might not pass judgments in the same way we do." (411)

Many people would find this conclusion troubling, and Carroll doesn't shy away from its implications:

"The lack of an ultimate objective scientific grounding for morality can be worrisome. It implies that people with whom we have moral disagreements—whether it's Hitler, the Taliban, or schoolyard bullies who beat up smaller children—aren't wrong in the same sense that it's wrong to deny Darwinian evolution or the expansion of the universe....But that's how the world is." (402)

This chilling quote suggests that Carroll does not believe Hitler or the Taliban were objectively wrong in their actions. It seems he just personally disagrees with their actions because has has a different opinion of how to "be excellent". Moral relativists like Carroll have no objective basis to condemn obviously immoral acts like the Holocaust or 9/11. They're only left with strongly felt and loudly expressed opinions.

A More Judgemental Moral Relativist

It's worth noting Carroll's contention that poetic naturalists are not moral relativists, but instead moral constructivists. The primary difference, according to Carroll, is that relativists don't feel enabled to critically judge the moral decisions of others (especially those deriving from other cultures), whereas constructivists are perfectly happy to do so, even while admitting their moral frameworks are only attempts to systematize their own personal/cultural intuitions about how to act.

But in my mind, this doesn't separate moral constructivism from moral relativism; it just makes the moral constructivist a type of moral relativist. He's still a relativist, but one that is just more judgmental and critical than other relativists.

It's also worth noting that despite examining several different moral theories in his book, from constructivism, to instrumentalism, to consequentialism, to virtue-ethics, to utilitarianism, Carroll never gives serious consideration to the theistic view. He never considers God to be the objective ground of morality. This is likely because Carroll presumes poetic naturalism is true, and thereby precludes God from the outset.

But that would only enforce my earlier criticism, that Carroll's cosmic picture is not big, as his book title suggests, but is in fact too small. In his moral exploration, he fails to find a satisfying answer in part because he needlessly restricts his pool of options!

In the next post we'll wrap up this series with a look at Sean Carroll's “Ten Considerations” for naturalists. Stay tuned!

Throughout Sean Carroll's best-selling book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (Dutton, 2016), Carroll seems comfortable holding two apparently contradictory views. This has been show throughout our review series. For example, he's fine both believing that causality is illusory (at the fundamental level of reality) and true (at the macroscopic level.)

We see this again in the chapter he dedicates to free will, which begins with this assessment (emphasis mine):

"There's a sense in which you do have free will. There's also a sense in which you don't. Which sense is the 'right' one is an issue you're welcome to decide for yourself (if you think you have the ability to make decisions.)" (378)

Carroll lets us know which view he holds: he thinks free will is fundamentally an illusion, and the only reason we use "free will" language is because it's useful. And why do we find it useful? Later he writes, "The unavoidable reality of our incomplete knowledge is responsible for why we find it useful to talk about the future using a language of choice and causation" (380). In other words, free will is false at the fundamental level of reality and we only use "free will" language at higher levels because we lack a complete knowledge of the current state of the universe. If, like Laplace's Demon, we knew the positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe, understood all the forces they are subject to, and had sufficient computational power to apply the laws of motion, then we would not use "free will" language—we would agree that everything is determined.

(NOTE: In a previous post, I showed why the Laplace's Demon idea comes up short.)

We find the same tension elsewhere in the chapter:

"A poetic naturalist says that we can have two very different-sounding ways of describing the world, a physics-level story and a human-level story, which invoke separate sets of concepts and yet end up being compatible in their predictions concerning what happens in the world." (381)

Setting aside the strange description of "physics-level" stories contra "human-level" stories—doesn't physics include human-level phenomena? Carroll probably means "quantum-level" stories—there's still a big problem. Notice that Carroll only defends these two descriptions as being predictively compatible. In other words, both descriptions are acceptable since both make accurate and/or useful predictions about the world.

What he didn't say is whether it's fine to hold these two views even if they contradict. It's not difficult to find contradictory views of the world that nevertheless make similarly accurate predictions. For example, both Newtonian and quantum theories can accurately predict the motions of human-sized objects. So on Carroll's view, they would both be acceptable. However, at the quantum level, Newtonian physics breaks down. It's simply no longer accurate. At best, it offers a good approximation of macroscopic phenomena, but it's fundamentally inaccurate when you consider reality as a whole.

But that doesn't bother Carroll so much. His poetic naturalism permits him to embrace inaccurate accounts of reality so long as they prove useful in daily life. Carroll writes (emphasis mine):

"There is no such notion as free will when we are choosing to describe human behavior as collections of atoms or as a quantum wave function. But that says nothing about whether the concept nevertheless plays a useful role when we choose to describe human beings as people. Indeed, it pretty clearly does play a useful role." (379)

In essence, Carroll's position is that at the quantum level, everything is determined. But at the level of everyday life, the concept of free will is useful. So poetic naturalists hold both views—both "stories"—in tension.

In fairness to Carroll, he doesn't say that the concept of free will is true on a macroscopic level, only that it's useful. But the implication is that he's fine holding erroneous views so long as they're useful—another example of his instrumentalism, which was examined in a previous post.

There are several problems with Carroll's rejection of free will. First is that it's clearly self-contradictory. Look at the above quote. Carroll twice talks about choosing a description of reality. But if we legitimately choose something, free will must exist. If we aren't able to choose something, then its outcome is determined. Thus we can't choose to deny the reality of free will without falling into contradiction.

A second problem, one Carroll admits, is the haunting fact that it seems as if we have free choice. Day to day, it seems as if we freely choose when to get out of bed, what to have for breakfast, how to start our day, what tasks to engage in, who to talk to, when to do home, etc. The common sense view is that each of us make millions of free decisions every day, some conscious and many unconscious.

Carroll actually agrees (emphasis mine): "The concept of choice does exist, and it would be difficult indeed to describe human beings without it" (379). In fact, in the very next chapter, which concerns meaning, Carroll notes several times how we choose what kind of life to live and how we choose to "expand our horizons, to find meaning in something larger than ourselves" (393). Without free will, it's hard to see how anyone could choose their own meaning or purpose.

A third problem is that if determinism is true, and none of our thoughts, conclusions, or actions are freely derived, then there's no reason to believe our views actually correspond to reality. On determinism, a set of elementary particles in my brain interacted to produce a thought such as, "Free will is false." But if the origin of that thought was determined and involved no free thinking on my end, then I can't trust that thought is true! I was determined to arrive at that conclusion, regardless of whether it accurately describes reality. I may believe that "free will is false," but I have very little confidence that's true.

A fourth problem is that if determinism was true, Carroll would not be writing books attempting to persuade people of that fact. If reality is fundamentally determined, why would he spend time trying to convince readers to freely change their minds, to freely adjust their understanding of the world to align with poetic naturalism? Even if I, a theist, read Carroll's book and become convinced that poetic naturalism was true, I couldn't freely reject my theism, no matter what I chose or how hard I tried—I'm simply determined to believe what I believe.

A fifth and very significant problem is human responsibility. If free will is fundamentally an illusion, then what do we do with praise and blame? Do criminals really shoulder moral blame for their actions? Do heroes really deserve praise? In both cases, the actors were just doing what their elementary particles determined them to do. We should neither praise or blame them any more than we would a tree for growing or the rain for falling.

To his credit, Carroll recognizes this final problem as a serious challenge for determinists. He writes:

"At extreme levels of free-will denial, the idea of 'responsibility' is as problematic as that of human choice. How can we assign credit or blame if people don't choose their own actions? And if we can't do that, what is the role of punishment or reward?" (383)

How does Carroll answer this challenge? He writes:

"Poetic naturalists...don't need to face up to these questions, since they accept the reality of human volition, and therefore have no difficulty in attributing responsibility or blame." (383)

Remember the passage quoted earlier where Carroll affirmed that, "There is no such notion as free will when we are choosing to describe human behavior as collections of atoms or as a quantum wave function". In other words, at the fundamental level of reality, free will is an illusion—everything is determined. But in the passage above, Carroll also affirms "the reality of human volition". Once again, the reason Carroll dismisses the challenge of human responsibility is because he has no problem holding two contradictory views.

Carroll closes his chapter on free will with a chilling look at what the future holds if determinism does prove true:

"To the extent that neuroscience becomes better and better at predicting what we will do without reference to our personal volition, it will be less and less appropriate to treat people as freely acting agents. Predestination will become part of our real world."

Most people will find this vision frightening. It seems Carroll is advocating something like The Minority Report, where citizens are punished for what they appear determined to do in the future.

Thankfully, Carroll doesn't think this will ever actually happen, not because it's a bad idea but because the "complexity of cognitive functioning [makes] predicting future actions infeasible in practice" (384). But such a society nevertheless follows in principle from Carroll's other commitments. There's nothing in principle stopping Carroll and others from punishing thought crimes, or even physical crimes years before they occur. It's not a huge leap to envision killing young children who seem determined to make bad choices in the future. For what on Carroll's view would prevent this?

We have just two more posts left in this series. Next time we'll look at Carroll's chapter on morality, then finally his “Ten Considerations” for naturalists. Stay tuned!

I have to admit, when I first opened Sean Carroll's new book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (Dutton, 2016) I immediately flipped to chapter 25, titled "Why Does the Universe Exist?" For many thinkers, ancient and modern, this is the philosophical question: why is there something rather than nothing? Your answer to this question drives your answers to most other big questions, including those about God, meaning, morality, and more. So I was interested in Carroll's response, especially in light of his "poetic naturalism."

(For an introduction to poetic naturalism, see past posts in this series.)

Does the Universe Need Outside Help?

Carroll begins the chapter with a glib anecdote from Sidney Morgenbesser, a philosophy professor at Columbia. Morgenbesser was once asked, “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” and purportedly answered, “If there were nothing, you'd still be complaining” (195). This, of course, is non-sense. If there were nothing, there would be nobody to complain. But thankfully, Carroll doesn't stop with the witticism (though one wonders why he quoted it at all—it certainly doesn't help his case.)

Carroll breaks the main question down into two sub-questions. First, he asks whether the universe could "simply exist". Could it just be a "brute fact" with no outside explanation, or does it require one? Second, he wonders, if the universe does in fact require an explanation, what is the best explanation (196)?

Let's start with his answer to the first sub-question. He writes, "The progress of modern physics and cosmology has sent a fairly unequivocal message: there's nothing wrong with the universe existing without any external help" (196). A few pages later he writes, "To the question of whether the universe could possibly exist all by itself, without any external help, science offers an unequivocal answer: sure it could" (201).

Note the double use of the word "unequivocal", which means "admitting of no doubt or misunderstanding; having only one meaning or interpretation and leading to only one conclusion."

It's worth pausing here to note that in a previous chapter titled "Accepting Uncertainty", Carroll writes (emphasis mine):

"It is this kind of [religious] stance—that there is a kind of knowledge that is certain, which we should receive with docility, to which we would submit—that I'm arguing against. There are no such kinds of knowledge. We can always be mistaken, and one of the most important features of a successful strategy for understanding the world is that it will constantly be testing its presuppositions, admitting the possibility of error, and trying to do better." (128)

But apparently, this open-minded prescription only applies to religious believers, and not poetic naturalists like Carroll, since as noted above, he twice admits to being "unequivocally" certain (i.e., without any doubt) that the universe could exist all by itself.

Carroll's confidence here should cause the discerning reader to naturally wonder, "How and where has modern science determined the universe could exist all by itself? Which experiments or calculations have proved that?" Unfortunately, Carroll never explains in this book. He just asserts that modern science has settled the issue and hopes readers trust his confidence.

One problem with this is that science simply can't say anything about why or how the universe exists since, by it's own limitations, the sciences are constrained to questions about the natural world (i.e., that which exists within the universe). It can't ask, or answer, or even weigh in on metaphysical "why" questions like "Why does the universe exist?" or "Why is the universe this way, and not that way?"

The Kalam Argument for God

So we're not off to a good start in the chapter. To his credit, Carroll doesn't stop here, though. He next considers the Kalam argument for God, made popular by Evangelical philosopher William Lane Craig. The argument's first premise says that whatever begins to exist has a cause for its existence (implying "out of nothing, nothing comes"). The second premise holds that the universe came into existence (i.e., it has not existed eternally in the past.) From those two premises we can conclude that the universe has a cause, and from there we can deduce different qualities of that cause.

If the Kalam argument is sound, then it shows the universe has a cause outside of itself, and therefore Carroll would be wrong in his "unequivocal" assertions. But is the argument sound? Assuming the terms are clearly defined and the logic valid, the only way to show that the argument is unsound is to refute one of its premises.

Carroll agrees. Surprisingly, he seems to accept the second premise, that the universe began to exist: "There seems to be no obstacle in principle to a universe like ours simply beginning to exist" (201). But it's the first premise he disagrees with. Specifically, Carroll thinks the ancient principle ex nihilo, nihil fit (out of nothing, nothing comes), which is implied in the premise, is indefensible. Even though, as he admits, the principle is "purportedly more foundational even than the laws of physics" (201) and that most philosophers throughout history have believed it, even ancient skeptics like Lucretius, Carroll says it is "perhaps the most egregious example of begging the question in the history of the universe" (202). Why? He writes:

"We are asking whether the universe could come into existence without anything causing it. The response is, 'No, because nothing comes into existence without being caused.' How do we know that? It can't be because we have never seen it happen; the universe is different from the various things inside the universe that we have actually experienced in our lives. And it can't be because we can't imagine it happening, or because it's impossible to construct sensible models in which is happens, since both the imagining and the construction of models have manifestly happened." (202)

There is a lot of confusion here, and it would take several articles to unpack all of it. But in essence, Carroll thinks the principle ex nihilo, nihil fit is false for three reasons: first because since the universe as a whole is "different" than things within the universe, the universe doesn't necessarily follow the same metaphysical principles as things within it; second because we can imagine something coming into being from nothing; and third because it's possible to construct "sensible models" in which something comes from nothing. Let's consider each proposal.

First, Carroll thinks the universe may have come into being without cause, even if nothing else in the universe has, because the universe is simply "different." But how does this follow? Metaphysical principles, such as the one under consideration, are independent of scale. Mice and men are "different", yet they both follow the same principle. So why think everything in the universe follows the principle but not the universe itself, which is nothing more than the collection of everything within the universe? (And lest you think this falls into the fallacy of composition, read Dr. Edward Feser's reply to that suggestion.)

Second, Carroll thinks it's possible to imagine something coming from nothing, which therefore refutes the principle. This argument goes back at least to David Hume but has famously been discredited, even by many Hume supporters. Why? Because it's impossible to conceive of the act of moving from non-being to being. Sure, we can imagine "nothing" at one moment—though I'm skeptical we can even do that—and then another moment picture something suddenly there, but this is not to imagine something coming from nothing. It is simply imagining two successive states of being, one first and then the other. It doesn't demonstrate that it is ontologically intelligible (or possible) for something to come into existence from nothing.

Third, Carroll points to "sensible models" in which something comes from nothing. What are these models? He never says, so it's hard to explore them. This is the last remaining reason to plausibly deny the principle, yet sadly Carroll provides no specifics.

Note again that Carroll doesn't engage with any counterarguments to his position, such as those supporting the principle. For starters, if something can come into being from nothing, then why don't we see this happening all the time? Why would it only happen once in time, with a single universe, rather than with many other universes or multiple things within our own universe? Why don't things just pop into existence all the time? Carroll never responds.

(Karlo Broussard wrote an excellent article covering five reasons the universe can't just exist by itself.)

Well, Why Not?

Carroll finishes this section by offering one more dismissive anecdote:

"In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, an online resource written and edited by professional philosophers, the entry on 'Nothingness' starts by asking, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' and immediately answering, 'Well, why not?' That's a good answer. There is no reason why the universe couldn't have had a first moment in time, nor is there any reason it couldn't have lasted forever, even without the benefit of any external causal or sustaining influence."

Here again we see a lot of confusion. So let's break it down into parts.

First, as far as I can tell, Carroll never engages in this chapter the second question about whether the universe needs a sustaining cause. This is disappointing because for many thinkers, including Aristotle and Aquinas, this is the main reason they believe in a First Cause of the universe. The universe may or may not have needed a cause to get it going, but it certainly needs one to keep it in existence, here and now. Carroll never weighs in on the question.

Second, he concludes all his previous remarks in regards to the first question—does the universe require an initial cause?— with an answer (a "good answer"), which is essentially an appeal to authority. He references an encyclopedia edited by "professional philosophers" at Stanford, presumably to suggest they should know what they're talking about. But the answer he cites isn't really an answer—it's a dismissal of the question. Worse, it fails to engage or even acknowledge any of the arguments against the view that something can come from nothing.

This is really disheartening, especially for someone as bright as Carroll. I can't imagine he would be comfortable with that answer to any other serious question. For example, I'm guessing he would be frustrated if he asked me, "Why are there so many different species of life on earth?" or "Why is space itself expanding?" and I responded, "Well, why not?" That's not a good answer; that's avoiding the question. Carroll would be frustrated by such dismissals, and for the same reason, his readers should be frustrated by his answers to the much more interesting and foundational questions about the universe.

If the Universe Has an Explanation, What Is It?

In the final few pages of the chapter, Carroll switches gears. He assumes, for the sake of argument, that the universe does require an explanation for its existence. But in that case, what is the explanation?

According to Carrol, "The answer is certainly 'We don't know'" (202). Notice again his striking assurance. He's certain we don't know the answer—not confident or convinced, but certain. How did he arrive at such certainty, especially when earlier in the book he cautions against being certain about anything? He doesn't say. And how can we be certain that "we" (whatever that means) don't know something? Isn't there a chance that someone, somewhere knows the answer even if some, most, or all the rest of us are confused? I would think so.

But certainty aside, why exactly does Carroll think we don't know what would explain the universe (if it had an explanation)? Mostly because he finds none of the current proposals satisfying. Modern theories of gravity may be a popular choice, but as Carroll observes, "that can't be the entire answer" since the theories don't explain themselves, and still demand an outside explanation (203). They only kick the question up a level. The same is true about other theories relying on the laws of physics as an ultimate explanation.

The only other possible candidate would be God. But Carroll thinks that explanation fails since it fails to answer the question, "Why does God exist?" It kicks the question up just as other proposals do. Of course, Carroll admits, theists reason that God is by definition necessary since his nature is to exist (unlike our own human nature, which doesn't necessitate existence.) But Carroll doesn't buy that. God, if he exists, can't be a necessary being. Why? Because, Carroll says, "there are no such things as necessary beings" (203). Talk about an egregious example of question begging!

With not a little irony, Carroll counsels just a couple sentences later, near the end of the chapter, "We can't short-circuit the difficult task of figuring out what kind of universe we live in by relying on a priori principles" (203). Would that he take his own advice!

In the next post in this series, we'll examine Sean Carroll's thoughts on whether free will is real or imaginary. Stay tuned!

I've noted many flaws and points of confusion in Sean Carroll's new book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (Dutton, 2016), but one of the strongest sections is its explanation of Bayes' Theorem. The Theorem is a quantitive way to express confidence in certain beliefs. It requires assigning credences (or probabilities) to events or statements, and then tweaking them based on new information.

For example, suppose you're wondering whether a randomly flipped coin will turn up heads. Your prior credence (or initial probability) is 0.5, since it has a 50% chance of landing on heads. But then suppose you learn that the coin is rigged, and there's extra weight added to one side. That new information would naturally cause you to adjust your credence, either up or down depending on the information.

This all should be pretty familiar. Whether we realize it or not, we all use this process, sometimes called induction, to make decisions every day. We start with beliefs, take in new information, and (ideally) adjust those beliefs to better correspond with reality. Bayes' Theorem simply adds a more quantitative dimension to that calculation. Instead of using mere intuition to adjust our credences up or down in light of new information, Bayes uses hard statistics.

According to Carroll, we can learn three lessons from Bayes' Theorem:

1. Never assign perfect certainty to any belief (i.e., no belief can have a credence of 1.0)
2. Always be prepared to update our credences when new evidence comes along
3. Trust mathematics to show how new evidence alters our existing beliefs

Carroll especially shines when explaining how a piece of new information can either boost our confidence up, or bring it down—but it can't do both. For instance, many atheists claim the problem of evil should reduce the probability of whether God exists. But many theists suggest that the problem of evil is actually evidence for God, since an objective moral standard depends on a divine lawgiver. We may be tempted to accept both proposals: the problem of evil brings the probability of God down a little, and it also raises the probability back up. But as Carroll explains, the Theorem doesn't allow that. Each new piece of information can either raise or lower our prior credences. It can't do both.

(Another example is the huge size of the universe. Atheists often point to that in arguments against God, or at least against the idea that humans occupy a special place in the cosmos. Typically, theists respond that God designed a vast universe because (1) it was the only physical way to provide a space hospitable for human life, (2) God is not limited in any way so efficiency is not a concern, and (3) since almost all people marvel at the scale of the cosmos, and wonder is good, God created a large universe as a gift for us to experience and explore—the same reason we prefer a wondrous mountain over a plain pebble. But in light of Bayes' Theorem, the theist can only use those arguments to support their belief in God if they can show they are more likely true than not, that God would do those things if he existed. If the theist cannot or will not make that case, then the best they can hope for is mitigating how much the "large universe" argument bends the probability of God toward atheism.)

On paper, Bayes' Theorem is very helpful, and Carroll admirably shows why. But my one complaint with his presentation in the book is that he skirts around some of its main criticisms. For example, the Bayes calculation depends entirely on the accuracy of the credences. Assigning credences is easy for things like rolling idealized dice, flipping idealized coins, or dealing an idealized deck of cards. But what about more complex things? What's the prior probability of the existence of God? How probable is evil given God's existence? What's the statistical probability of a miracle given certain background information?

In non-idealized scenarios, which pretty much means all of everyday life, it's extremely difficult to assign accurate credences. It's often just a subjective shot in the dark. Carroll admits this, writing, "Some people don't like Bayesian emphasis on priors, because they seem subjective rather than objective. And that's right—they are. It can't be helped; we have to start somewhere" (80). His hope, however, is that Bayes offers a sort of course correction because new credences—what Bayes followers call "consequent probabilities"—will make up for imprecise prior credences. However, this leads to a major problem. If the prior credences are subjective and imprecise, then introducing new subjective, imprecise credences will not solve the problem—it will only compound it.

Throughout the rest of his book, Carroll regularly suggests that Bayesian reasoning supports his poetic naturalism, or components of it. But he almost never shows us the actual Bayesian calculations, with specific credences than can be examined and challenged.

In one of the rare places where he does provide actual credences, the chapter titled "Abducting God," Carroll applies Bayes' Theorem to God's existence. He assigns a prior credence of 50%. In other words, without considering any background evidence, we can initially assume that God's existence is as equally likely as not. That's not a bad starting point. But the rest of the chapter is filled with Carroll's wild presumptions about what the world would or would not like, given God's existence, and how the Bayes calculation should be updated. For example, he argues that the existence of evil, the massive size of the universe, and the lack of consensus about God all bring that 50% confidence level way down. Why? And by how much? It's tough to discern from his book since he provides no specific credences for his views, nor does he defend his belief that certain events would be more likely, given God, than not. He just throws around terms like "more likely" and "less likely" as if they were consensus views we all accept.

The chapter in question offers a perfect case study of how Bayes' Theorem can be both powerful and dangerous. Like a table saw, it can be very useful in certain tasks, but wildly destructive in the hands of a sloppy worker (note: I'm not necessarily suggesting Carroll is sloppy; this is just a general remark about Bayes' Theorem.)

The Theorem's effectiveness depends completely on the accuracy of the credences you put into it. And if we can't agree on the credences—or if, like Carroll, you refuse to even identify specific credences, much less defend them—then the output is irrelevant at best, and dangerously misleading at worst. On paper, Bayes' Theorem is a fantastic way to apprehend truth; in practice, it often has the opposite effect.

In the next post, we'll explore Carroll's answer to another fundamental question: why does the universe exist?

One of the main targets of Sean Carroll's new book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (Dutton, 2016), is causality. Like many naturalists, he sees where the causal chain leads—a series of contingent causes demands a necessary First Cause. So if you want to avoid a First Cause, you must get rid of causality.

As discussed in an earlier post, Carroll's first attempt appealed to the conservation of momentum. It wasn't clear how that principle undermines causality, and Carroll showed many other signs of confusion.

Later in the book, he tries to refute causality again, but this time using a controversial theory of time, known as the "B-theory" or "tenseless" theory of time (Carroll never uses these terms, but they indeed describe his view.)

Philosophers distinguish between two major theories of time, and it's worth noting that the philosophical community is generally split between the positions.

First is the A-theory, which is the common-sensical view that the passage of time is a real feature of the world, and not merely some mind-dependent phenomenon. This position holds that time is tensed, which means the past, present, and future are objectively real—in other words, tense is real (i.e., we can accurately use the "past tense"). If you asked the average person on the street how they understand time, they would likely give an A-theory description.

B-theorists, on the other hand, hold that the flow of time is an illusion, that time is tenseless such that past, present, and future are just illusions of human consciousness. This would imply that temporal becoming (e.g., growing older) is not an objective feature of reality.

If the B-theory were true, causality would indeed become trickier. Some would say that on the B-theory, causality would disappear altogether, while others more modestly claim it still exists, just in a more constricted, nuanced fashion. Either way, if your goal is to disprove causality, the B-theory is your best bet since causality is an obvious feature of reality on the A-theory, but not so on the B-theory.

So other than trying to avoid the conclusion of a First Cause, why does Sean Carroll promote the B-theory of time? Unfortunately, he doesn't tell us in his book. He doesn't acknowledge the two competing views, nor the present debate over which is true. He just asserts the B-theory as true, stating without elaboration, "In reality, both directions of time are created equal" (55), which is only true on the B-theory of time.

Carroll doesn't engage serious scholars who challenge the B-theory of time, nor any arguments for the A-theory. (William Lane Craig, one of the most prominent A-theory proponents, has written at least four scholarly books on the topic. Presumably, since Carroll debated Craig on topics that broached the philosophy of time, he was familiar with those works. But he never acknowledges them in The Big Picture.)

In his book, Carroll merely assumes the B-theory of time is true, without evidence or argument, and then uses that in his quest to show that causality is not a real feature of fundamental reality.

As in his earlier chapters on causality and determinism, Carroll does waffle a bit in this section. While he doesn't think causality is fundamentally real, he also sees the need for causal language. He isn't willing to go as far as Bertrand Russell, who said, "The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age." Carroll believes such a view is "too extreme" since it contradicts our everyday experience of causes. "After all," Carroll writes, "it would be hard to get through the day without appealing to causes at all" (64).

Which is where his "poetic naturalism" comes in. Although Carroll doesn't think causality is a real feature of fundamental reality (since he holds the B-theory of time), he does think it's a useful concept to describe our everyday world, and thus should be retained, at least in the domain of our everyday experience.

But once again, as is the case with other applications of his "poetic naturalism," we're left with a contradiction. Causality is either a real feature of reality, or it's not. What Carroll essentially proposes is that at a fundamental level it's not, because the B-theory is true and thus the passage of time is illusory.

Yet if that's the case, it wouldn't be accurate to use causal language in any situation. At best, such language would create a useful fiction; at worst it would be delusory.

In the next post we'll explore Sean Carroll's take on Bayes’ Theorem of probability.

Today we continue our series looking at physicist Sean Carroll's new book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (Dutton, 2016).

After exploring whether the universe needed a cause to get started, Carroll next turns to the topic of determinism: is reality determined or free?

Laplace's Demon

Carroll's answer relies on a famous thought-experiment involving "Laplace's Demon". Pierre-Simon Laplace was an accomplished French physicist and mathematician. He's also, according to Carroll, one of the fathers of determinism, which holds that all future states are inevitable consequences of past events and causes. Laplace proposed a hypothetical vast intellect (aka "Laplace's Demon") who has an omniscient grasp of reality. In today's scientific language, the Demon would know the positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe, understand all the forces they are subject to, and have sufficient computational power to apply the laws of motion. The Demon would then be able to determine any future event by simply analyzing the state of the universe right now. Or as Carroll says, "Laplace was pointing out that the universe is something like a computer"—current state in, future state out.

Now, Carroll admits that for all practical purposes, Laplace's Demon is not real. He's just a useful thought experiment. Such a Demon will never exist in the real world since there's simply too much information to account for. We will never invent a computer that can ascertain the state of every particle and force at every moment in time. To do so, Carroll admits, would require God-like programming (which he immediately dismisses, uncomfortable with any conclusion that may result in God.) So we will never be able to tell the future with complete certainty, ala Laplace's Demon.

But that's not what Carroll's primarily interested in. He doesn't aim to show that physics can ascertain the future; he's just interested showing that physics can determine the future.

That leads to a natural question: why do we think this is true? Even if a Demon or a computer had complete knowledge of the state of the universe, why should we assume such prior states determine what happens next? Carroll never explains. He simply presumes causal determinism without proving it.

(Careful readers will note that in the previous chapter, Carroll aims to show that causality is not a feature of fundamental reality. But here he aims to prove causal determinism, that prior states cause future states. Carroll either doesn't notice or doesn't worry about the apparent contradiction.)

Later in the book, in a different chapter, Carroll gestures toward a supporting argument for determinism. He writes:

"The Laplacian view...is based on patterns, not on natures and purposes. If this certain thing happens, we know this other thing will necessarily follow thereafter, with the sequence described by the laws of physics. Why is it this way? Because that's the pattern we observe."

This again raises many questions. For instance, why think patterns are mutually exclusive of natures and purposes? Again, Carroll just asserts this without evidence. Why can't things follow patterns given by their nature?

Also, why do things in the world follow these specific patterns and laws, and not others? It's not enough to say, "Because those are the patterns we observe." That just avoids the question. It's equivalent to saying, "Nature follows the patterns we observe because those are the patterns we observe," or to put it more simply, "That's just the way it is," an answer that may satisfy Bruce Hornsby but not the truly curious skeptic.

Still, the biggest problem with Carroll's Laplacian defense of determinism was already preempted by David Hume. The Scottish skeptic affirmed what stock brokers remind us of today, that past performance is no guarantee of future results. The fact that past events usually or even always occur in some pattern doesn't mean future events have to occur that way.

For example, suppose that from birth to age 30, I ate a vanilla ice cream cone at exactly 2:00pm, every single day. So when my 31st birthday party rolled around, you glance at the clock and see it's 1:59pm, and you're nearly certain what will happen next. After all, that's the pattern you've always observed, me eating ice cream at 2:00pm, not just once or twice, but repeatedly and without exception for thirty years. As the hour chime hits, you see me scoop ice cream into a cone, lift the cone to my mouth....and then I stop. I strangely put the cone down and decide not to have any today.

Now, if you suggested I was determined to eat ice cream on my 31st birthday since "that's the pattern [you] observed" (to use Carroll's language), you would have been wrong. Thus determinism can't be solely grounded in the knowledge of past patterns.

But suppose the determinist replied, "Ah! But maybe you were determined to eat ice cream every day for thirty years and then determined to stop eating it on your 31st birthday!" Perhaps. But how would we know it? What arguments or evidence could we offer to support that proposal? Carroll says we know events are determined "because that's the pattern we observed." But in this case, it's precisely not the pattern we observed. Assuming it would be a new determined pattern that was previously unobservable would only beg the question in favor of determinism and make it unfalsifiable.

Determinism, Destiny, and Fate

Bad arguments aside, Carroll's not wholly comfortable with the implications of determinism. Therefore, he tries to soften its blow by distinguishing it from destiny and fate (emphasis mine):

"The physical notion of determinism is different from destiny or fate in a subtle but crucial way: because Laplace's Demon doesn't actually exist, the future may be determined by the present, but literally nobody knows what it will be." (36)

This reveals a confusion. Carroll implies that since we can't know the future, determinism doesn't imply fate or destiny. But our knowledge of the future is irrelevant to the question of whether we're fated or free. Determinism indeed implies fate since perfect knowledge of the current moment yields perfect knowledge of the next, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. That means every future moment is already set based on the state of the world right now (which is, in turn, based on the states before it). On determinism, your entire future is unavoidably fated.

Carroll tries another route to sidestep determinism's dreary implications, this time returning to his poetic naturalism:

"There is one way of talking about the universe that describes it as elementary particles or quantum states, in which Laplace holds sway and what happens next depends only on the state of the system right now. There is also another way of talking about it, where we zoom out a bit and introduce categories like 'people' and 'choices'...Our best theories of human behavior are not deterministic. We don't know any way to predict what a person will do based on what we can readily observe about their current state. Whether we think of human behavior as determined depends on what we know."

Here, again, we spot the confusion. Carroll seems to think determinism means you can predict future states of events—to the degree you can predict them, they're determined. But determinism is independent of what we know or predict. If reality was completely determined, that would remain true whether we predicted some, all, or no future events.

Also, Carroll affirms that while fundamental reality (i.e, level one reality, the deepest, quantum level of the universe) is deterministic, the higher levels (i.e., "emergent" levels) are not necessarily deterministic. In fact, they seem to be quite the opposite. Yet how can this be so? If elementary particles and quantum states are determined, then categories like "choice" would be, at best, useful fictions. They may help us get along in the everyday world, but they're ultimately out of step with fundamental reality. Once again, we see another example of Carroll's instrumentalism, preferring "stories" that work rather than explanations that are true.

The Final Blow Against Determinism

In the end, Carroll offers no convincing reasons to think determinism is true. Yet even if Carroll thought it was true, why would he try to persuade us of it? If determinism was true, then we've been pre-determined to either accept or reject it—we have no choice in the matter! And so we arrive at the final knockout blow against determinism: anyone trying to convince people determinism is true, to convince them to freely change their mind about determinism, implicitly undermines it.

In the next post, we'll looks at Carroll's thoughts about the philosophy of time. Stay tuned!

Many theists, including myself, believe that some of the strongest arguments for God rely on the logical need for a First Cause of the universe (or First Mover, depending on which argument you use.) This sort of argument goes back at least to Aristotle, who thousands of years ago suggested that, "Everything that is in motion must be moved by something" (and by motion he meant any change whatsoever, not just locomotion, or spatial change).

However, physicist Sean Carroll thinks Aristotle had it wrong. In one of the earliest chapters in his new book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (Dutton, 2016), Carroll explains why. His reason? "The whole structure of Aristotle's argument for an unmoved mover rests on his idea that motions require causes. Once we know about conservation of momentum, that ideas loses steam" (28).

To put it another way, Carroll believes that the conservation of momentum debunks the idea of causality, the principle that all actions are determined by causes.

Carroll admits that it does seem to us, in our everyday experience, that things don't "just happen"—something works to cause them, to bring them about. But he still believes causal language is "no longer part of our best fundamental ontology" (29). Poetic naturalists can speak of causality as an emergent, second-level description of reality, but it's not a level-one story we should tell about the world (i.e., it's not a description of how the world really works at its core.)

Now, one obvious question that Carroll's position raises is, how exactly does the conservation of momentum disprove causality? Carroll never offers a clear answer. He suggests that objects on frictionless surfaces moving at constant velocity do not need a cause to keep moving (28).

But of course, this doesn't refute the Aristotelian principle of causality. At best, this would only show that in such cases, you don't need a sustaining cause to keep an object moving. It would say nothing about whether you need an initial cause to start the object's motion.

To use another example, you could say that in general, once a baby boy grows to age 21, he generally doesn't need his father to "stay in motion," and continue developing. Whether his father is alive or dead, distant or close, he can survive just as well (again, generally speaking.) But this fact doesn't show that the father was completely unnecessary in the child's life. For if there was no father, there would be no baby boy—and certainly no 21-year-old man! Thus the father was necessary to explain how the baby boy "started going," but not necessary to explain how he "kept going."

Similarly, Aristotle would agree that everything in that begins to move must be initially moved by something, regardless of whether it continues requiring a cause or not. Even in the hypothetical case of a cup sailing along a frictionless table, you still need to explain what caused the cup to move in the first place. It can't have been in motion forever without cause, at least within the real world, for various reasons (none of which Carroll acknowledges or engages.)

So Carroll's attempt to refute the principle of causality, and thus the universe's need for a First Cause, fails because he doesn't distinguish between different types of causality, such as initial or sustaining causes. He in essence suggests that since things in motion may not require sustaining causes, then they don't need any causal explanations.

(For a helpful background on the critical distinction between different forms of causality, read Dr. Edward Feser's book, Aquinas.)

Carroll makes a similar mistake when he concludes, "The universe doesn't need a push; it can just keep going!" (28). The problem is that, once again, this mixes up two different forms of causality. The first part of his claim concerns how or whether the universe began, whether it had an initial cause to "push" it into existence. The second part concerns how the universe continues existing after it comes into existence, whether or not it has a sustaining cause to "keep [it] going." The two questions are not identical.

Regardless, Carroll offers no convincing reasons to accept either idea, that the universe "doesn't need a push" or that it can "just keep going" without any sustaining cause.

Interestingly, Carroll doesn't think we should get rid of causal language. He writes (emphasis mine):

"It's possible to understand why it's so useful to refer to causes and effects in our everyday experience, even if they're not present in the underlying equations. There are many different useful stories we have to tell about reality to get along in the world." (29)

Note here, again, his concern over whether causal language is useful, not whether it's true. On his view, poetic naturalists can tell whatever stories they want about the world as long as they're useful—as long as they help us "to get along in the world."

But this recalls my major critique of poetic naturalism: it's fine with embracing false accounts of the world so long as they're useful. It cares more about pragmatism than truth.

In the end, this chapter doesn't so much refute causality as it exposes Carroll's internal conflict. He wants to reconcile two contradictory positions, first that causality is fundamentally an illusion, and second that we can't "get along in the world" (nor, I would argue, carry on the work of science) without taking causal language for granted.

Carroll says we should embrace causality because it's useful.

I say we should embrace it because it true.

Either way, whether it's only useful or both useful and true, Carroll gives no reason to oppose theists who use causal language. After all, if such language is useful, then certainly theists can use it in arguments for God!

In the next post, we'll look at another central idea in Carroll's book, determinism.

(Editors Note: Dr. Edward Feser has a post here at Strange Notions digging further into Carroll's views on causality. Read it here.)

Today we continue our look at Sean Carroll's anticipated new book,The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (Dutton, 2016).

Carroll starts his book by diving right into the deep end. The first chapter in the first section concerns a huge topic: the fundamental nature of reality. Carroll explains that philosophers consider this the domain of ontology, but then he offers a strange definition. Ontology, he says, is "the study of the basic structure of the world, the ingredients and relationships of which the universe is ultimately composed" (10).

Unfortunately, this is the first of several confusing errors in his book. There are two major problems in this case. First, it's simply the wrong definition. Ontology is the study of being qua being, or the study of existence. Physics is the study of the basic physical ingredients that make up the world. By getting this definition wrong, Carroll has already begged the question in the first few pages of his book. He's smuggled his conclusion—that physics can adequately answer questions about ontology—into his definition of ontology. It's a simple mistake, but it has profound effects. Instead of putting forth arguments that physics can justly and completely account for the fundamental nature of reality, Carroll simply defines the study of fundamental reality in physicalist terms.

To his credit, Carroll does express caution about any naturalist ontology. He admits that, "Naturalism presents a hugely grandiose claim, and we have every right to be skeptical...Naturalism isn't an obvious, default way to think about the world" (13). It certainly seems, at least to most people, that there is more to reality than collections of impersonal atoms and laws. Therefore if naturalism is true, Carroll affirms, its supporters "need to make the case" for it (13).

That's precisely what he aims to do throughout the rest of his book. His goal is to show how all of reality can be accounted for in naturalist terms, without recourse to God, souls, free will, or anything supernatural. And in Carroll's view, that's best done through a worldview he's coined "poetic naturalism".

What is Poetic Naturalism?

Carroll holds that, "The world is what exists and what happens, but we gain enormous insight by talking about it—telling its story—in different ways" (19). While straight naturalism tells us that the world revealed to us by scientific investigation is all there is, we still need ways of talking about that world. That's where poetic naturalism comes in.

According to Carroll, the "poetic" aspect of poetic naturalism, or what separates it from other naturalist schemes, can be summarized in three points:

1. There are many ways of talking about the world.
2. All good ways of talking must be consistent with one another and with the world.
3. Our purposes in the moment determine the best way of talking.

In other words, the same reality can be described in many different ways, using different stories or concepts. We don't only have to rely on the descriptions of fundamental physics.

Carroll offers a concrete example. For the poetic naturalist, Captain James T. Kirk is both a collection of atoms stretching through space and time (when we're telling a story about his fundamental nature) and a human person who captains the starship USS Enterprise (when describing him at a higher, macroscopic level.) This would be a different approach than, say, eliminativism (or eliminative materialism, or what some people just call straight naturalism). On that view, the latter definition of Captain Kirk would be nothing more than illusion. It may seem like Captain Kirk is more than a collection of atoms, but that's simply false—it's illusory. Poetic naturalism "strikes a middle ground, accepting that values are human constructs, but denying that they are therefore illusory or meaningless" (5).

Within poetic naturalism, Carroll distinguishes three "levels" of storytelling. First is the fundamental reality, the deepest (usually microscopic) way of describing the universe. This is where we talk about reality at rock bottom. The second level includes "emergent" or "effective" descriptions, which are valid within some limited domain. This level is where we see concepts like ships, dogs, animals, books, games, shapes, and more. The third and final level is reserved for values, "concepts of right and wrong, purpose and duty, or beauty and ugliness" (21).

The point of poetic naturalism is that these three levels don't necessarily conflict. You can, for example, talk about "dogs" (a level two concept) to your wife and kids, but then when you're in the laboratory, reduce dogs conceptually to fundamental particles. Different ways of talking are appropriate for different domains of life.

Poetic naturalism is clearly the main idea of Carroll's book. In fact, all other chapters simply apply the poetic naturalist framework to each of life's Big Questions. So that's why before diving in to those specific questions, it's worth asking a more basic one: is poetic naturalism true?

The Big Problem with Poetic Naturalism

Among scientists, there's a long, ongoing dispute about the goal of science. Is science about finding truth, or is it primarily concerned with adequately describing the world? In the twentieth century, the so-called instrumentalists, led by John Dewey and Karl Popper, took the latter view. They held that scientific theories are just practical tools used to map the world around us in order to achieve useful ends (like finding cures and inventing technology). In other words, if a scientific theory "works", then it's good one; if a theory comports with the available empirical data and leads to good results, it's successful.

Suppose a chemist was exploring malaria parasites, and she haphazardly devised a theory that yielded an effective malaria cure. Even if the science behind the theory was dubious, an instrumentalist would say it was a good one.

But here's the problem: sometimes a scientific theory can "work" even when that theory is false. In our malaria example, perhaps the chemist's theory was useful but false. Maybe her theory was flawed even though it resulted in a good end, namely a cure for malaria.

This isn't a rare situation. The history of science is littered with examples. Two significant ones would be geocentrism and Newtonian physics. In both cases, the theories matched our observable data to theretofore unheard of accuracy. Defenders of each theory occupied at one time just the same position that Carroll does now in regards to poetic naturalism: they thought the evident success in prediction, explanation, and description made it nearly impossible, or extremely unlikely, the theory was false, and the remarkable achievements made possible by these theories, false or not, made them good theories.

But we now know both theories are false (or, in the case of Newtonian physics, at least incomplete and fundamentally inaccurate.)

Throughout The Big Picture, it becomes clear that Carroll is most interested in harmonizing the many useful stories we tell about the world. That's the aim of poetic naturalism. The problem, as with geocentric and Newtonian theories, is that the journey toward truth often veers from the path of pragmatism. What's true isn't identical to what works.

(For more background on this distinction, read Mitch Stokes' excellent new book, How to Be an Atheist: Why Many Skeptics Aren't Skeptical Enough.)

So that gets to the biggest problem, in my view, with Carroll's poetic naturalism:

It's preferred because it's useful, not because it's true.

Two More Problems with Poetic Naturalism

There are at least two more flaws with poetic naturalism, both of which affect all forms of naturalism. First, poetic naturalism is self-limiting. Carroll tries to answer the big metaphysical questions noted in the book's subtitle, but since he's closed to supernatural answers, his answers are constrained and unsatisfying. They don't survey the full range of possible solutions. As we'll come to see in later posts, this is why he answers many of the biggest questions with some form of, "Well, we just don't know because science hasn't confirmed that yet...but we're confident it will one day." That answer, of course, is unsatisfying, especially in light of the book's grandiose scope, for even a child can give "we don't know, but maybe one day" answers to life's Big Questions. Those are really non-answers, but they're doubly worse because they neglect possible answers that may lie outside the purview of science.

A second problem with poetic naturalism is that it's self-refuting. As many thinkers have observed over the years, from C.S. Lewis to Victor Reppert, William Hasker, and Alvin Plantinga, if naturalism is true, then it seems to leave us with no reason for believing it to be true. Why? Because all judgments would equally and ultimately be the result of non-rational forces. Thus even if it was true, we would have no good grounds for believing it.

In the next post, we'll examine what happens when Carroll applies his poetic naturalism to a question of ongoing interest here at Strange Notions: did the universe have a First Cause or did it just move itself?

Physicist Sean Carroll has a high reputation in the scientific and atheist communities, and it's well-deserved. He's produced several acclaimed books on the philosophy of time, the Higgs Boson particle, and general relatively.

But none of his past books has been as daring or sweeping as his latest project, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (Dutton, 2016). One reviewer for Nature began by stating, "I don't think I have ever read anything with a bigger ambition than The Big Picture." Just look at the subtitle!

Carroll doesn't hide his lofty ambitions. In one interview he suggested "the book should accompany the Gideons Bible in all hotel rooms in the world." In other words, he hopes this book rivals the impact of the most influential book in human history.

In the months before its release, blogs, forums, Facebook pages, and comment boxes buzzed with anticipation. The Big Picture launched as the #1 bestseller in several Amazon categories including Physics and Cosmology, and almost cracked the Top 100 of all books on Amazon.

Even before reading it, some christened it a manifesto for naturalism, the belief, often associated with atheism, that nothing exists beyond the natural world. Many envisioned the book as the definitive, scientific refutation of theism and/or supernaturalism. (In discussions here at Strange Notions, more than one commenter has confidently said, in effect, "....just wait until Sean Carroll's book comes out—he'll address that issue.")

It's easy to see why Carroll, an unbeliever who claims "almost all cosmologists are atheists," has become such an important figure for atheists. He's smart, articulate, funny, and has impressive scientific credentials.

Even as a theist, I like him a lot; he's one of my favorite atheist writers. First, he's irenic. When reading his books and blog, you rarely see the angry, boorish rhetoric found among many New Atheist writers. You sense Carroll is far more interested in facts than insulting people who disagree with him. (He's also one of the few theoretical cosmologists to have appeared on "The Colbert Report.")

Second, he writes with clarity and verve. Most scientific writing is boring, even for specialists. But Carroll's work sparkles with excitement, and he makes even the most difficult problems in theoretical physics graspable for laymen like me.

Third, he respects philosophy. While scientists like Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, and Neil deGrasse Tyson have suggested philosophy is dead, Carroll penned a viral article chiding their "lazy critiques" of philosophy. It's titled "Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy", and he affirms the principle that everyone does philosophy. But while some do it well, others do it badly—and some do it badly without even knowing it (the worst of all.)

Finally, Carroll has no animus against religion. He never suggests that religion is dangerous (ala Hitchens), abusive (ala Dawkins), or a sign of mental illness (ala Sam Harris.) As a naturalist, he thinks people who believe in God are wrong, of course, but he recognizes the positive ways that religion shapes people's lives. (In fact, as of writing this post, Carroll's latest blog entry is one praising the Catholic priest who formulated the Big Bang model. There's a notable absence of any science vs. religion rhetoric.)

Carroll first came on my radar a couple years ago when he debated William Lane Craig during the 2014 Greer Heard Forum. It was a spectacular exchange. The topic was "God and Cosmology: The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology", and I thought Carroll handled himself better than any atheist who has ever shared the floor with Craig. (Although, in my view, Craig ably handled Carroll's objections and offered his own solid arguments, which Carroll failed to refute. Watch the debate on YouTube or check out the book based on the event, God and Cosmology: William Lane Craig and Sean Carroll in Dialogue.)

With all that in mind, I was almost as eager as my atheist friends to read Carroll's new book. With a subtitle promising to explore life, meaning, and the universe itself, all from a naturalistic point of view, I was excited to learn about Carroll's "Big Picture."

But after reading the book—two times now—I'm left somewhat disappointed. Why?

The book is too small.

By that, I don't mean physically. At a hefty 470 pages with 50 chapters, it's not suffering for girth. But it's small in the sense of Hamlet's reply to Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Carroll believes just the opposite. He thinks there are fewer things, or fewer kinds of things, in heaven and earth (or in objective reality) than in most people's beliefs. Carroll is a reductionist.

This is evident from Carroll's master idea throughout the book, something he calls "poetic naturalism." This is the lens through which he views all other topics. In one sense, poetic naturalism is expansive, at least relative to traditional naturalism. It seeks to expand our understanding of the world by refusing to reduce all knowledge to a small set of fundamental stories (typically the stories told by fundamental physics.) On the other hand,  poetic naturalism is still reductive. As a form of naturalism, it precludes any supernatural explanations (or "stories," to use Carroll's language.) Thus, it's a small worldview, albeit a milder reductionism, offering a "small picture" of the world relative to the truly "Big Picture" offered by theism.

With his poetic naturalism framework in mind, Carroll divides The Big Picture into six parts:

• Part 1 - Cosmos (aka cosmology)
• Part 2 - Understanding (aka epistemology)
• Part 3 - Essence (aka ontology)
• Part 4 - Complexity (aka biology/evolution/teleology)
• Part 5 - Thinking (aka consciousness)
• Part 6 - Caring (aka morality)

In the book's Prologue, Carroll notes that he had two goals in writing the book: first to "explain the story of our universe and why we think it's true", second to "offer a bit of existential therapy...to face reality with a smile, and to make our lives into something valuable" (3).

It would take a whole book to fairly engage all the ideas in such a broad-reaching scope, but over the next few weeks I'll review a handful of important sections that should be especially interesting to Strange Notions readers.

Tomorrow we'll begin with Carroll's first chapter on "The Fundamental Nature of Reality" along with a deeper exploration of poetic naturalism. Stay tuned!

(PS. I'm hoping to get Sean here for an #AMA with Strange Notions readers. I know we'd get some great questions and answers. Hopefully we can make that happen!)

Can the universe be a mere brute fact? Can we say, “The universe just exists and that’s that—it has no explanation at all”?

Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, thinks so. In a recent interview at Salon.com, Carroll says, “There’s certainly no reason to think that there was something that ‘caused’ it; the universe can just be.”

Carroll is in good company with such an assertion. Bertrand Russell, the late British atheistic philosopher, argued the same thing in the famous 1948 BBC radio debate with Fr. Fredrick Copleston: “I should say that the universe is just there, and that’s all.”

Notice neither Carroll nor Russell says the universe is self-explanatory in that its existence belongs to its nature, which would be the sort of explanation for God’s existence. Nor are they saying we don’t know what the explanation of the universe is. They are saying there is no explanation for why the universe exists rather than not. In essence they are denying the principle of sufficient reason, which states, “Everything that is has a sufficient reason for existing.”

How should we respond? Are we to exchange brute fact for brute fact and say, “Things just need an explanation, and that’s that”? Or is there a way we can show the appeal to brute facts is unreasonable? I answer the latter.

There are several arguments one can employ when arguing against the brute fact view, but for the sake of brevity, I will offer only five.

Double Standards

First, I find it interesting how it’s permitted for an atheist to appeal to unintelligible brute facts but not the theist. If a theist were to say, “God is just a brute fact, there is no rhyme or reason to his existence,” then an atheist would feel justified in denying him membership among the intelligentsia. This is manifest when atheists such as Richard Dawkins object to theistic arguments with, “Who designed the designer?”, thinking theists arbitrarily posit God as the terminus of causal series. If theists aren’t allowed to play the “brute fact” card (which we don’t do anyway), then atheists shouldn’t be allowed to do so either.

The Facts of Ordinary Life

A second response is to point out that we don’t appeal to brute facts when dealing with things in ordinary life. For example, suppose a team of police officers come across a dead body on their shift and begin conjecturing possible explanations. “It’s murder,” one says. “No, I think this was a suicide,” the other officer responds. Another officer says, “No, I disagree, I think the cause is a heart attack.” The last officer says, “We’re wasting our time here—it’s just an unintelligible and inexplicable brute fact that this corpse is here. Let’s keep going.” What would we think of such a police officer? How about, “He’s not a good one!” I think his chief would concur.

So, why should an appeal to a brute fact when faced with the existence of the universe be reasonable when an appeal to a brute fact when faced with a dead body is not?

Can’t Get Out of the Taxi

Our atheist friend might object, “I’m not saying we should accept the police officer’s appeal to a brute fact. I acknowledge everything in the universe probably has an explanation for its existence. But there is no reason to think the universe has to have an explanation for its existence.”

Besides the fact this objection begs the question against the theist—if God exists then the universe would have an explanation for its existence—it commits what some philosophers have aptly called the “taxicab fallacy”; thus a third argument against the brute fact view. Why commit to the idea “Whatever exists has a reason for its existence” and then dismiss it like you dismiss a taxicab once you arrive at the universe as a whole? Such a move is arbitrary and thus unreasonable.

“But,” an atheist might say, “isn’t a theist guilty of the same fallacy in saying God doesn’t have a cause for his existence?” The answer is no, because the theist is not saying God is a brute fact, i.e., he has no reason or explanation for his existence. It is essential to classical theism that God’s existence, though not caused by another, is explained by his essence. His essence is existence itself—ipsum esse subsistens. This is not something theists arbitrarily assert but is the conclusion of deductive reasoning that starts with certain features of the world—motion (change), efficient causality, contingency, degrees of being, and final causality.  So the theist is not guilty of the taxicab fallacy.

Skepticism of the Senses

Another reason the brute fact view is unreasonable is because it entails radical skepticism about perception. As philosopher Alexander Pruss argues in his essay “The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument” (in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, edited by William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland), if things can exist without any sufficient reason, then there might be no reason for our perceptional experiences.

For example, according to this line of reasoning there might be no connection between your experience of reading this article on a computer and the actual article the computer is showing on its monitor. Your experience might just be a brute fact having nothing to do with any of the objective things with which we normally would associate your experience.

Do we want to go down that bleak road of skepticism and say all our sensory experiences are untrustworthy? There might be some radical skeptics who choose to walk that path (such skeptics can read this article). But for most reasonable people this is not a path that can be traveled, because such a path leads to the demise of science, which is something I assume Carroll wouldn’t endorse because he would be out of a job.

We need to be able to trust our sensory perceptions if we intend to discover truths about reality through empirical observation. So, unless one is willing to throw science out, one shouldn’t allow brute facts in the game.

No Arguments Allowed

The last argument I’ll offer for consideration comes from philosopher Edward Feser in his book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction. Feser argues the denial of the principle of sufficient reason is at the same time a denial of rational argumentation, including any argument for brute facts. Consider how when we accept the conclusion “Socrates is mortal,” we do so based on the premises “All men are mortal” and “Socrates is a man.” In other words, we recognize the conclusion as rational because the premises are true and the argument is logically valid.

But if brute facts are possible, and the principle of sufficient reason is false, then it follows that our conclusion “Socrates is mortal” might have nothing to do with the truth of the premises and their logical structure. It might also be possible our cognitive faculties themselves had no role to play in explaining why we came to that conclusion.

The bottom line is, if brute facts are possible, there might be no reason whatsoever we believe what we do, even the belief that we believe on rational grounds. This applies to any conclusion we might draw, even the conclusion “Things can exist without a reason for their existence.” But if the conclusion “Things, like the universe, can exist without a reason for their existence” might itself be a brute fact—namely, it has no connection to truth or logic—then we would have no reason to accept it as true. So to deny the principle of sufficient reason undercuts any ground one might have for doubting the principle. It’s self-refuting and thus unreasonable.

Conclusion

Sean Carroll is a brilliant man. He is courageous in taking on heavyweights of the likes of Dr. William Lane Craig. But why such a great mind can’t see the rational implications of denying the principle of sufficient reason, I do not know. Perhaps he just hasn’t thought it through. Or perhaps he just isn’t willing to open the door to a line of reasoning that leads to theism. Whatever may be the case, the appeal to brute facts is not a good parry when in the ring with a theist.