Stephen Hawking was a great theoretical physicist and cosmologist, perhaps the most important since Einstein. It is only right that his remains have been interred alongside those of Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. He was, furthermore, a person of tremendous courage and perseverance, accomplishing groundbreaking work despite a decades-long struggle with the debilitating effects of Lou Gehrig’s disease. And by all accounts, he was man of good humor with a rare gift for friendship. It is practically impossible not to admire him. But boy was he annoying when he talked about religion!

In the last year of his life, Hawking was putting the finishing touches on a book that is something of a follow-up to his mega-bestselling A Brief History of Time. Called Brief Answers to the Big Questions, it is a series of short essays on subjects including time travel, the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the physics that obtains within a black hole, and the colonization of space.

But chapter one is entitled simply “Is There a God?” To the surprise of no one who has been paying attention to Hawking’s musings on the subject the last several years, his answer is no. Now, to anyone involved in the apologetics or evangelization game, this is, of course, depressing, since many people, especially the young, will say, “Well, there you have it: the smartest man in the world says that God does not exist.” The problem is that one can be exceptionally intelligent in one arena of thought and actually quite naïve in another. This, I’m afraid, is the case with Stephen Hawking, who, though uniquely well-versed in his chosen field, makes a number of blunders when he wanders into the domains of philosophy and religion.

Things get off to a very bad start in the opening line of the chapter: “Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.” Though certain primitive forms of religion might be construed as attempts to answer what we would consider properly scientific questions, religion, in the developed sense of the term, is not asking and answering scientific questions poorly; rather, it is asking and answering qualitatively different kinds of questions.

Hawking’s glib one-liner beautifully expresses the scientistic attitude, by which I mean the arrogant tendency to reduce all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge. Following their method of empirical observation, hypothesis formation, and experimentation, the sciences can indeed tell us a great deal about a certain dimension of reality. But they cannot, for example, tell us a thing about what makes a work of art beautiful, what makes a free act good or evil, what constitutes a just political arrangement, what are the features of a being qua being—and indeed, why there is a universe of finite existence at all. These are all philosophical and/or religious matters, and when a pure scientist, employing the method proper to the sciences, enters into them, he does so awkwardly, ham-handedly. 

Let me demonstrate this by drawing attention to Hawking’s treatment of the last issue I mentioned—namely, why there should be a universe at all. Hawking opines that theoretical physics can confidently answer this question in such a way that the existence of God is rendered superfluous. Just as, at the quantum level, elementary particles pop into and out of existence regularly without a cause, so the singularity that produced the Big Bang simply came to be out of nothing, without a cause and without an explanation. The result, Hawking concludes, is that “the universe is the ultimate free lunch.”

The first mistake—and armies of Hawking’s followers make it—is to equivocate on the meaning of the word “nothing.” In the strict philosophical (or indeed religious) sense, “nothing” designates absolute nonbeing; but what Hawking and his disciples mean by the term is in fact a fecund field of energy from which realities come and to which they return. The moment one speaks of “coming from” or “returning to,” one is not speaking of nothing! I actually laughed out loud at this part of Hawking’s analysis, which fairly gives away the game: “I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science.” Well, whatever you want to say about the laws of science, they’re not nothing!

Indeed, when the quantum theorists talk about particles popping into being spontaneously, they regularly invoke quantum constants and dynamics according to which such emergences occur. Again, say what you want about these law-like arrangements, they are not absolute nonbeing. And therefore, we are compelled to ask the question why should contingent states of affairs—matter, energy, the Big Bang, the laws of science themselves—exist at all?

The classical response of religious philosophy is that no contingency can be explained satisfactorily by appealing endlessly to other contingencies. Therefore, some finally noncontingent reality, which grounds and actualizes the finite universe, must exist. And this uncaused cause, this reality whose very nature is to be, is what serious religious people call “God.” None of Hawking’s speculations—least of all his musings about the putative “nothing” from which the universe arises—tells against this conviction.

May I say by way of conclusion that I actually rather liked Stephen Hawking’s last book. When he stayed within the confines of his areas of expertise, he was readable, funny, informative, and creative. But could I encourage readers please to take him with a substantial grain of salt when he speaks of the things of God?

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) famously posed the ultimate question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” To this, theoretical physicist Sean Carroll replies: “The universe can simply exist, end of story.”

Still, as I have shown elsewhere, everything must have a reason for its being or coming-to-be, including the cosmos. This metaphysical first principle is ably defended by others as well.¹ One distinction must be added: either a thing is its own reason or not. To the extent it fails to fully explain itself, something else must be posited as an extrinsic sufficient reason: a cause. So, does the cosmos “simply exist” – or does it need a cause?

The leading philosophers of ancient Greece showed no inkling of the concept of creation ex nihilo in time. For Leucippus (c. 490-430 B.C.) and Democritus (c. 460-360 B.C.), indivisible atoms were eternal in the void and creation of the world simply entailed them becoming packed or scattered, thus producing the world of things about us. For Plato (c. 428-348 B.C.), the creation myth of the Timaeus entailed the demiurge looking up to the eternal forms and patterning the pre-existing unordered material chaos according to them to produce the orderly cosmos. Even Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) appears to argue in his Physics, book one, that matter must have always existed as the substratum for the endless change of forms.

Unique to Western thought was the Jewish and Christian belief in a free creation of the world by God in time – ex nihilo et utens nihilo: out of nothing and presupposing no pre-existent material. Neo-Platonists, beginning with Plotinus (c. 204-270), did have a notion of creation ex nihilo, but solely as a necessary emanation from God, not the free creation of Christian thought.

Flash forward to the seventeenth century and we see a resurgence of philosophical atomism by theists Descartes, Gassendi, Boyle, and others. This later begot scientific atomism in nineteenth century chemistry and physics, which then invited the atheistic interpretations of scientific materialism and naturalism. For centuries, atheistic materialists had assumed the eternity of the material world, a view seemingly harmonious with the “new atomism.” All of this also fit well with twentieth century astronomy’s standard “steady state” theory.

The advent of the “Big Bang” theory of cosmic origins by Belgian priest and astronomer Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966) thus met opposition for proposing a scientific hypothesis that the cosmos actually had a temporal beginning. Among the first to complain was Albert Einstein himself. Science had seemed squarely in the atheist’s corner, until this upstart theory was proposed – a theory that sounded too much like what atheists viewed as the “Christian mythology” of creation in time. As astronomer Robert Jastrow observed, this led to a peculiar reaction by scientists in which they opposed a promising new theory – possibly on grounds more philosophical than scientific. It wasn’t until the 1964 cosmic microwave background radiation discovery by Penzias and Wilson that the Big Bang theory became generally accepted as correct.

In the final two sentences of his 1978 book, God and the Astronomers, Dr. Jastrow writes: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Battle Over the “Big Bang’s” Significance

Atheistic scientists, like physicist Stephen Hawking, seek to avoid any possible theological implications of the Big Bang by redefining the meaning of this absolute beginning in time in terms that would avoid any need for God. He posits an imaginary time in which there would be no boundaries to space-time just as there are no boundaries to earth’s surface, concluding: “Thus, the universe would be a completely self-contained system. It would not be determined by anything outside the physical universe that we observe.”

Today we see atheists doing all they can to eliminate a cosmos instantly created by an all-powerful God, either by (1) alleging that something can, indeed, be made out of nothing, in light of quantum mechanics, or (2) by claiming, like Dr. Hawking, that the beginning somehow does not really need a metaphysical explanation.

Still, it turns out that the “nothing” that atheists claim can be used to make an entire cosmos from is not really “nothing” at all, but simply the actual something of a quantum vacuum, which entails a lot of matter-antimatter potential that “crackles with energy.” Empty space is not nothing, but something very physically real.

Everyone truthfully knows that you simply cannot get something from absolutely nothing. Even Dr. Hawking tries to evade an absolute beginning in time for the cosmos by his “no boundary” explanation offered above. This also why materialists who would evade a Creator feel forced to affirm the endless past existence of something -- be it physical matter as such, or some kind of minimal energy field from which the Big Bang exploded, or at least, certain laws of physics. Indeed, one method used to defeat the Kalam cosmological argument for God is to claim that the premise that the universe must have had a beginning in time is false.

The fact that such mental gymnastics are engaged in so as to evade precisely an absolute cosmic beginning bespeaks the massive problems it would present to atheistic materialism.

What is there about the very thought of the cosmos suddenly popping into existence out of absolutely nothing that so instantly moves the mind of most sane men to say, “Then, God must exist!’? What is there about such instantaneous creation ex nihilo that bespeaks so unequivocally to the human mind the exclusive mark of true divinity?

Why Infinite Power is Required

Both atheist and theist alike see in the “out-of-nothing” explosive instant appearance of a Big Bang the manifestation of unlimited raw power, infinite power. Just as clear is the fact that infinite power could reside solely in an infinite being that fulfills the classical definition of God. This is precisely why atheists go to great lengths to deny that any such “creation event” could have ever occurred at the beginning of time.

Still, is such instinctive inference rationally justified? What first stands out is the fact that absolutely no one claims that the cosmos actually appeared out of nowhere and from absolutely nothing. Atheists either claim it always existed in some physical form or other, or else, attempt the bait and switch of claiming it came from nothing – but the “nothing” turns out to be the actual something of the quantum vacuum as explained above. In proclaiming the Christian doctrine of true creation in time, theists do not hold that the cosmos arose from absolutely nothing either. Rather, they say the world was made by the power of the eternal God.

Thus, all explicitly or implicitly concur (1) that something has always existed and (2) that you do not get something from absolutely nothing.

But then, why does it take infinite power to create ex nihilo et utens nihilo? After all, the cosmos which is created, though immense, is still existentially limited. So, why would unlimited power be required to create what is itself limited in being?

Well, as St. Thomas Aquinas points out², “… the power of the maker is measured not only by substance of the thing made but also from the manner of its making ….” To build the Empire State Building in one year is impressive. But to build it in a single day would defy belief. To make a chicken from another chicken by cloning is impressive. To evolve a chicken from random subatomic particles is nearly unimaginable – since the distance between what there is to work with and the produced chicken is even greater than in the cloning example. But to produce a chicken from no preexisting matter requires immeasurable power, since there is no proportion at all between nothing and something. Since immeasurable power is the same as unlimited or infinite power, it would take infinite power for God to create the cosmos ex nihilo.

The Real Meaning of “Being Created”

Thus, on the hypothesis that the cosmos did begin in time, it would depend on the infinite power of God to have created it. Now what depends on another to bring it into existence clearly does not account for its own existence, but rather depends on another for the existence it has received. The creature that “pops into existence” is an effect, that is, a being that does not adequately explain its own existence. As such, it depends on an extrinsic cause for its existence.

So, if God exercises his infinite power to bring the cosmos into being, what happens the next moment after he has created it? Can God cease his causal activity in relation to the world, and yet, the world still exists? As St. Thomas observes³, “When the cause ceases causing, the effect ceases.” Were God to withdraw his creative causality from the cosmos, the cosmos would cease to exist. God must continue to create the universe in order for the universe to continue to exist. This creatio continua or “conservation” must continue for as long as the world continues to exist. Thus, God is said, not only to create the world, but also to conserve it in existence.

Moreover, for St. Thomas, there is a real distinction between the world having a beginning in time and its being created ex nihilo. This is clear from the fact that, while St. Thomas maintains that the belief that the world was created with a temporal beginning is a doctrine of Catholic Faith, he does not maintain that this is possible to prove from natural reason. Indeed, in his short work On the Eternity of the World, St. Thomas explicitly argues for the philosophical possibility of the world’s eternity. After all, God could have been creating (conserving) the world from all eternity: it would have no beginning in time, yet still be created.

This means that the concept of the world beginning in time is distinct from the concept of its being created by the power of God. Even if God did not create the world with a beginning in time, the world would still be the object of his creative act in order to sustain it in being throughout eternity.

For the same reason that it would take infinite power to create the world at the beginning of time, it takes infinite power to keep it in existence even if it existed from all eternity. This is because the real meaning of “being created” is not tied to having a temporal beginning, but rather to the fact that anything exists as opposed to non-existence. It takes infinite power to explain why anything simply exists – even the least subatomic particle “popping into existence” for a nanosecond in a quantum vacuum.

In other words, the creative act is not measured by the fact that something goes from non-being to being at the beginning of its existence, but simply by the fact that it manifests the act of existing as opposed to non-being during its existence. Both acts require exactly the same power to explain fully: infinite power.

The key insight here is that existence itself is an act – the most basic of all acts: that by which a thing is constituted as real as opposed to being nothing at all. This act “does something.” It keeps every creature in being. And the power needed to do this is measured by the same criteria we discussed earlier. Since there is no proportion at all between non-being and being, there is no way to measure the power required to posit this act by which a finite being is being continually created, that is, “standing outside of nothingness,” even if it had no beginning in time.

Infinite power is required to explain the existence of every finite being and of that whole collectivity of finite bodies known as the cosmos. It takes infinite power to explain the existence of the cosmos. But infinite power cannot reside in a finite being or even in a collectivity of finite beings.

Therefore there must exist an Infinite Being, God, who alone can possess and manifest the infinite power required to create and conserve in existence the finite cosmos.

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” The answer to this ultimate question is simply “because God exists and creates it.” God’s infinite power is the reason for his own existence. My argument here is a redacted version of a formal paper that I have published elsewhere.

Postscript

Given the difficulty that some viewers of Strange Notions have had in grasping the insight that physical laws like inertia fail to fully explain the continued motion of heavenly bodies, I suspect that they may find the argument presented herein demanding full explanation of cosmic existence to be even less compelling. Still, it is curious that these same minds that are so skeptical of any rational explanation of our incredible universe should so easily be intellectually satisfied with the “just so” explanation of a cosmos that has always “just happened to exist” without any real explanation either in itself or from an extrinsic cause.

 
On a recent episode of The Late Show, host Stephen Colbert and frequent visitor Neil deGrasse Tyson joked about the astronomical insignificance of New Year’s Day.

Before long, Tyson was talking about the role the Catholic Church played in creating the calendar as we know it. “The world’s calendar is the Gregorian calendar after Pope Gregory,” Tyson explains. “Put that into place in 1582, because the previous Julian calendar was messing up in the year. It was off by ten days. And the pope said, ‘We got to fix this…’ There’s a Vatican Observatory to this day. At the time, before telescopes were invented, these Jesuit priests were put into the service of figuring out why the calendar was shifting in the year.”

Colbert, known for his openness about his Catholic faith, then asks Tyson if it’s true that a Catholic priest formulated the Big Bang Theory. “Yes,” Tyson responds. “Georges Lemaître. Using Einstein’s equations … he deduces that the history of the universe must’ve started with a bang. So Catholics have been in there in multiple places.”

This little exchange might have seemed uninteresting in another era, but not today. The rise in the new atheism and Biblical literalism have made it a commonplace that science and religion are in conflict, and young people are absorbing the idea as axiomatic. In her recent book iGen, about the least religious generation in U.S. history, Dr. Jean Twenge quotes one young person as saying: “I knew from church that I couldn’t believe in both science and God, so that was it. I didn’t believe in God anymore.”

That may be true in some churches, but not the Catholic Church – and it’s worth repeating just as often as the opportunity allows. In Catholicism, belief in science and God are compatible. In fact, Tyson and Colbert’s conversation is a glaring reminder that many Catholic priests and believers have been leading scientists themselves. There are theological and historical reasons for this, but the bottom line is this: Catholicism is a science-friendly religion, and it’s enshrined in the Catholic Catechism.

Even at the peak of the new atheism and its mockery of all things religious in the 2000s, one man seemed to draw the respect and attention of people like Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher: Fr. George Coyne, a priest and astrophysicist who ran the Vatican Observatory outside of Tucson. His very existence was a challenge to the view that religion “poisons” rational, scientific thinking. Like Drummond at the end of Inherit the Wind, who marched out of the courtroom with both the Bible and On the Origin of Species in his hands, Coyne represented an intriguing third option outside of the fray.

The new atheists have largely faded, and affable agnostics like Tyson have filled the vacuum. He may not be an unwavering fan of religion (the first episode of his TV series Comsos painted 16th-century Catholic clerics as anti-science), but he is committed first and foremost to advancing knowledge, not denigrating religion. This is a welcome turn of events, one that has resulted in more positive encounters like the one with Colbert.

And they really only scratched the surface. Catholic scientists were not only behind the formation of the calendar and the formulation of the Big Bang Theory: they were behind groundbreaking discoveries about the size of the earth (Fr. Jean-Félix Picard), pasteurization (Louis Pasteur), and genetics (Gregor Mendel). In fact, one of the first people to correctly explain rainbows was a 13th-century Dominican friar! There’s Roger Bacon, Pascal, Descartes – the list goes on and on. The Church’s unfortunate treatment of Galileo (whether the actual events, or the mythical spin on the events lodged in our collective consciousness) was, at worst, a brief spat in a long and respectful friendship. And Copernicus and Galileo, let’s not forget, were both Catholics themselves.

At the end of the interview Colbert asks what “mystery” of the universe keeps Tyson up at night. His response reveals a deep humility about the observable universe. In the future, dark energy will render the universe so large that all of the galaxies – the source of “everything we know about the history of the universe” – will be “ripped” from view. Then he wonders: was some previous chapter of the universe ripped away from us? “Here we are touching the elephant, not knowing that in fact there’s an elephant standing there. Or maybe there’s the shadow of the elephant and the elephant has been moved. We don’t know what we don’t know.”

The shadow side of the material universe – past, present, and future – is baffling indeed. But what we do know is this: when it comes to putting the tools of observation and the light of reason to good use, science has an ally in the Catholic Church.

In his excellent book, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), physics professor Stephen M. Barr recounts the typical story of the the universe as told by scientific materialists. It's one of the best summaries of the naturalist worldview I've read, from any perspective:

"The world revealed by science bears little resemblance to the world as it was portrayed by religion. Judaism and Christianity taught that the world was created by God, and that things therefore have a purpose and meaning, aside from the purposes and meanings we choose to give them. Moreover, human beings were supposed to be central to that cosmic purpose. These comforting beliefs can no longer be maintained in the face of scientific discoveries.
 
The universe more and more appears to be a vast, cold, blind, and purposeless machine. For a while it appeared that some things might escape the iron grip of science and its laws—perhaps Life or Mind. But the processes of life are now known to be just chemical reactions, involving the same elements and the same basic physical laws that govern the behavior of all matter. The mind itself is, according to the overwhelming consensus of cognitive scientists, completely explicable in the performance of the biochemical computer called the brain. There is nothing in principle that a mind does which an artificial machine could not do just as well or even better. Already, one of the greatest creative chess geniuses of all time has been thrashed by a mass of silicon circuitry.
 
There is no evidence of a spiritual realm, or that God or souls are real. In fact, even if there did exist anything of a spiritual nature, it could have no influence on the visible world, because the material world is a closed-system of physical cause and effect. Nothing external to it could affect its operations without violating the precise mathematical relationships imposed by the laws of physics. The physical world is 'causally closed,' that is, closed off to any non-physical influence.
 
All, therefore, is matter: atoms in ceaseless, aimless motion. In the words of Democritus, everything consists in 'atoms and the void.' Because the ultimate reality is matter, there cannot be any cosmic purpose or meaning, for atoms have no purposes or goals.
 
Once upon a time, scientists believed that even inanimate objects did have purposes or goals: 'ends' which they sought or toward which they tended. For example, heavy objects were said to fall because they sought their proper place at the center of the earth. That was the idea of Aristotelian physics. It was precisely when these ideas were overthrown four hundred years ago that the Scientific Revolution took off. With Galileo and Newton, science definitively rejected 'teleology' in favor of 'mechanism.' That is, science no longer explains phenomena in terms of natural purposes, but in terms of impersonal and undirected mechanisms. And, of course, is there are no purposes anywhere in nature, then there can be no purpose for the existence of the human race. The human race can no longer be thought of as 'central' to a purpose that does not exist.
 
Science has dethroned man. Far from being the center of things, he is now seen to be a very peripheral figure indeed. Every great scientific revolution has further trivialized him and pushed him to the margins. Copernicus removed the Earth from the center of the solar system. Modern astronomy has shown that the solar system itself is on the edge to a quite ordinary galaxy, which contains a hundred billion other stars. That galaxy is, in turn, one of billions and perhaps even an infinite number of galaxies. Earth is an insignificant speck in the vastness of space: its mass compared to all the matter in the observable universe is less than that of a raindrop compared to all the water in all the oceans of the world. All of recorded human history is a fleeting moment in the eons of cosmic time. Even on this cozy planet, which we think of as ours, we are latecomers. Home sapiens has been around at most a few hundred thousand years, compared to the 4 billion years of life's history. The human species is just one branch on an an ancient evolutionary tree, and not so very different from some of the other branches--genetically we overlap more than 98 percent with chimpanzees. We are the product not of purpose, but of chance mutations. Bertrand Russell perfectly summed up man's place in the cosmos when he called him 'a curious accident in a backwater.'" (19-21)

I think atheists and theists can nod their heads in agreement: that's a clear, coherent, accurate depiction of the naturalist worldview. Its main plotline may be called the "marginalization of man." In the religious view man is the center of all things, but the scientific story has since corrected that delusion.

However, there's a problem with this story. Actually, two big problems, according to Barr: its beginning and its end. It's not really true that religious man saw himself at the center of the world. The idea that the Earth sat at the center of the universe stemmed from Greek astronomy and philosophy, not religion;mdash;and certainly not Judaeo-Christian religion. The ancient Jewish picture of the world was vertical, not concentric, with the human race located between the heavens above and the "abyss" below. Humans were lower than angels and higher than plants and animals, but in no sense we were at the center. In fact, the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures depict God casting out man, sending him into exile. (Also, even in the Greek picture the central place was not the most exalted. The further things were from the "center", the more beautiful and sublime they were.)

Yet even if the beginning is a bit off, the bigger problem with the story above is its ending. As Barr notes, "If science had ended in the nineteenth century, the story would have some claim to accuracy...Instead, in the twentieth century [scientists] made discoveries even more profound and revolutionary than those of Copernicus and Newton. And, as a result, the story has become much more interesting" (22).

As with many of the best stories, this one has a plot twist at the end. And not just one plot twist, but at least five. Barr spends most of his book examining each of these plot twists in detail, so for the details I suggest picking up a copy. But here's a short summary of them:

Twist #1 - The Big Bang and the Beginning of the Universe

Jews and Christians have always believed that the world, and time itself, had a beginning, whereas materialists and atheists have tended to imagine the world has always existed. Modern skeptics have generally followed suit. In their minds, the idea of a beginning of time is associated with religious conceptions, not with scientific theory, and those scientists who believe in a beginning do so for religious reasons, not scientific reasons. Indeed, by the nineteenth century almost all the scientific evidence seemed to point to an eternal universe.

But that all changed with the discovery of the Big Bang, which came as a profound shock to the scientific community. According to Barr, "the Big Bang was as clear and as dramatic a beginning as one could have hoped to find" (22). When you combine that discovery with research built on top of the model, you have an overwhelming amount of support for a universe that began in the finite past.

In fact, the esteemed, non-religious cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin concluded at a conference in Cambridge celebrating the 70th birthday of Stephen Hawking:

"All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning...It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning."

Now to be clear, the discover of the Big Bang itself prove the Jewish and Christian doctrine of Creation. Nevertheless, as Barr explains, "it was unquestionably a vindication of the religious view of the universe and a blow to the materialist view" (22).

Twist #2 - The Questions Behind the Questions

In the materialist story above, the world is governed not by a personal God but by impersonal laws. Science looks to physical "mechanisms", processes, and laws to explain events in the world. But as we've deepened our understanding of these empirical laws, we've found that they flow from deeper laws and principles, such as the fundamental laws of atomic physics. And those laws flow from the laws of quantum electrodynamics. And so on, and so forth. Physicists began to look not only at physical effects themselves, but for the mathematical laws that underlie them and for a single, harmonious system that could unite them all.

Barr notes the consequence of these trends:

"It is no longer just particular substances, or objects, or phenomena that physicists asks questions about, it is the universe itself considered as a whole, and the laws of physics considered as a whole. The questions are no longer only, 'Why does this metal act this way?' or 'Why does this gas act this way?' but 'Why is the universe like this?', 'Why are the laws of physics like this?'....
 
"When it is the laws of nature themselves that become the object of curiosity, laws that are seen to form an edifice of great harmony and beauty, the question of a cosmic designer seems no longer irrelevant but inescapable." (24)

In past centuries, atheists and materialists took certain facts for granted such as the existence of a single universe or the three dimensions of space. Indeed, few people, if any, in the nineteenth century would have wondered why there are three spatial dimensions.

But today, those beliefs are not taken for granted. Physicists speak of many universes and many dimensions of space. Yet if we can't even take for granted the very number of universes, it becomes harder to avoid asking, "Why is there any universe at all?" A new openness to these deeper-level questions about reality has also opened many people to the possibility of God.

Twist #3 - The Startling Coincidences That Permit Us to Live

In the materialist story of the world, science has definitively shown that we were not meant to be here. We were a fluke, our existence the result of "a fortuitous concourse of atoms." Science dethroned man in the cosmos.

Except now, science is telling a different story. Beginning in the 1970s, people started talking about "anthropic coincidences", certain features of the laws of physics which seem—just coincidentally—to be exactly what is needed for the existence of life to be possible in our universe. As Barr writes, "The universe and its laws seem in some respects to be balanced on a knife-edge. A little deviation in one direction or the other in the way the world and its laws are put together, and we would not be here. As people have looked harder, the number of such 'coincidences' has grown" (25).

This is exactly what we might expect if human beings were meant to be here, and if the universe was created with us in mind. It doesn't mean the materialist view of the world is certainly false. In fact, skeptics have proposed other ways to explain this apparent fine-tuning for life (though Barr refutes the most popular attempts in his book.)

In any event, what is clear is that the materialists may have prematurely ended their story with the dethroning of man. It looks very much now like the story may turn out the other way.

Twist #4 - The Mind as More Than Machine

If only matter exists, as the materialist thinks, then the human mind must be a machine. The invention and popularization of the computer made this idea even more plausible. Many people, scientists and laymen alike, believe it is only a matter of time before computers become intelligent in ways that rival, or even supplant our own intelligence.

However, the past couple centuries have seen a bevy of arguments against the regnant view that the mind is no more than a physical machine—a "wet computer" or "machine made of meat" as some have called it. Barr covers some philosophical examples in his book, but the most impressive counterargument comes not from philosophy but from the science of computation itself. It's based on a brilliant and revolutionary theorem proved in 1931 by the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel, and then built on by the philosopher John Lucas and the mathematician Roger Penrose. Barr explains:

"The gist of the argument is that if one knew the program a computer uses, then one could in a certain precise sense outwit that program. If, therefore, human beings were computers, then we could in principle learn our own programs and thus be able to outwit ourselves; and this is not possible, at least not as we mean it here."

Perhaps the only way to refute the Lucas-Penrose argument against the "machine mind", which leans on Gödel's Theorem, is to say that the human intellect reasons in a way that is inherently inconsistent. This would imply not just that human beings sometimes make logical mistakes (which is obvious), but that the human mind is radically and inherently unsound in its reasoning faculties. Yet that's a huge problem. Why? Because then to maintain the belief that your mind is only a machine, you would have to argue against your own mental soundness. You would literally identify as insane. Not many physicists are willing to go that far.

In any case, the discovery of Gödel's Theorem offers another blow to the materialist story of the world. It seems that the mind cannot be reduced to mere biochemical reactions.

Twist #5 - Quantum Mechanics and the Defeat of Determinism

Most materialists deny that free will exists, and for centuries this seemed well-grounded in the findings of physics. The laws of physics appeared to be "deterministic," in the sense that what happens at a later time is solely determined through the laws of physics by what happened at earlier times. This was of course a troubling point for Judaism and Christianity, both of which held free will as a central tenant.

However, a truly astonishing reversal came in the 1920s with the discover of quantum theory. Barr describes it as "the greatest and most profound revolution in the history of physics" (27). It transformed the whole structure of theoretical physics, and in the process swept away physical determinism.

In prior centuries, the core of physical science was prediction. That's how theories were tested and proved. But with quantum theory, the present state of a physical system would not, even in principle, be enough to predict everything about its future behavior. No longer could you simply argue from the deterministic character of physics that free will was impossible.

Of course, this doesn't prove that we have free will. Instead, as Barr notes, "quantum theory simply showed that the most powerful argument against free will was obsolete. In the words of the great mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl, 'the old classical determinism...need not oppress us any longer'" (27).

Opening the door to free will was just one of the effects of quantum theory. In its traditional or "standard" interpretation, it also posits the existence of observers who lie, at least in part, outside of the description provided by physics. That's a controversial claim, and has been challenged by radical reinterpretations of quantum theory (such as the "many-worlds interpretation") or by changing quantum theory in some way.

But as Barr writes, "The argument against materialism based on quantum theory is a strong one, and has certainly not been refuted. The line of argument is rather subtle. It is also not well-known, even among practicing physicists. But, if it is correct, it would be the most important philosophical implication to come from any scientific discovery" (28).

The above represents just a sampling of the major discoveries in the great history of science and faith. Barr spends nearly 300 pages examining them in more depth. If you'd like to learn more, I highly recommend you pick up Modern Physics and Ancient Faith for the rest of the story.
 
 
(Image credit: Rutgers)

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!