Don Page is one of the world’s leading experts on theoretical gravitational physics and cosmology, as well as a previous guest-blogger around these parts. (There are more world experts in theoretical physics than there are people who have guest-blogged for me, so the latter category is arguably a greater honor.) He is also, somewhat unusually among cosmologists, an Evangelical Christian, and interested in the relationship between cosmology and religious belief.
Longtime readers may have noticed that I’m not very religious myself. But I’m always willing to engage with people with whom I disagree, if the conversation is substantive and proceeds in good faith. I may disagree with Don, but I’m always interested in what he has to say.
Recently Don watched the debate I had with William Lane Craig on “God and Cosmology.” I think these remarks from a devoted Christian who understands the cosmology very well will be of interest to people on either side of the debate.
Open letter to Sean Carroll and William Lane Craig:
I just ran across your debate at the 2014 Greer-Heard Forum, and greatly enjoyed listening to it. Since my own views are often a combination of one or the others of yours (though they also often differ from both of yours), I thought I would give some comments.
I tend to be skeptical of philosophical arguments for the existence of God, since I do not believe there are any that start with assumptions universally accepted. My own attempt at what I call the Optimal Argument for God (one, two, three, four), certainly makes assumptions that only a small fraction of people, and perhaps even only a small fraction of theists, believe in, such as my assumption that the world is the best possible. You know that well, Sean, from my provocative seminar at Caltech in November on “Cosmological Ontology and Epistemology” that included this argument at the end.
I mainly think philosophical arguments might be useful for motivating someone to think about theism in a new way and perhaps raise the prior probability someone might assign to theism. I do think that if one assigns theism not too low a prior probability, the historical evidence for the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus can lead to a posterior probability for theism (and for Jesus being the Son of God) being quite high. But if one thinks a priori that theism is extremely improbable, then the historical evidence for the Resurrection would be discounted and not lead to a high posterior probability for theism.
I tend to favor a Bayesian approach in which one assigns prior probabilities based on simplicity and then weights these by the likelihoods (the probabilities that different theories assign to our observations) to get, when the product is normalized by dividing by the sum of the products for all theories, the posterior probabilities for the theories. Of course, this is an idealized approach, since we don’t yet have _any_ plausible complete theory for the universe to calculate the conditional probability, given the theory, of any realistic observation.
For me, when I consider evidence from cosmology and physics, I find it remarkable that it seems consistent with all we know that the ultimate theory might be extremely simple and yet lead to sentient experiences such as ours. A Bayesian analysis with Occam’s razor to assign simpler theories higher prior probabilities would favor simpler theories, but the observations we do make preclude the simplest possible theories (such as the theory that nothing concrete exists, or the theory that all logically possible sentient experiences occur with equal probability, which would presumably make ours have zero probability in this theory if there are indeed an infinite number of logically possible sentient experiences). So it seems mysterious why the best theory of the universe (which we don’t have yet) may be extremely simple but yet not maximally simple. I don’t see that naturalism would explain this, though it could well accept it as a brute fact.
One might think that adding the hypothesis that the world (all that exists) includes God would make the theory for the entire world more complex, but it is not obvious that is the case, since it might be that God is even simpler than the universe, so that one would get a simpler explanation starting with God than starting with just the universe. But I agree with your point, Sean, that theism is not very well defined, since for a complete theory of a world that includes God, one would need to specify the nature of God.
For example, I have postulated that God loves mathematical elegance, as well as loving to create sentient beings, so something like this might explain both why the laws of physics, and the quantum state of the universe, and the rules for getting from those to the probabilities of observations, seem much simpler than they might have been, and why there are sentient experiences with a rather high degree of order. However, I admit there is a lot of logically possible variation on what God’s nature could be, so that it seems to me that at least we humans have to take that nature as a brute fact, analogous to the way naturalists would have to take the laws of physics and other aspects of the natural universe as brute facts. I don’t think either theism or naturalism solves this problem, so it seems to me rather a matter of faith which makes more progress toward solving it. That is, theism per se cannot deduce from purely a priori reasoning the full nature of God (e.g., when would He prefer to maintain elegant laws of physics, and when would He prefer to cure someone from cancer in a truly miraculous way that changes the laws of physics), and naturalism per se cannot deduce from purely a priori reasoning the full nature of the universe (e.g., what are the dynamical laws of physics, what are the boundary conditions, what are the rules for getting probabilities, etc.).
In view of these beliefs of mine, I am not convinced that most philosophical arguments for the existence of God are very persuasive. In particular, I am highly skeptical of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which I shall quote here from one of your slides, Bill:
- If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause
which brought the universe into existence. - The universe began to exist.
- Therefore, there is a transcendent cause which brought the
universe into existence.
I do not believe that the first premise is metaphysically necessary, and I am also not at all sure that our universe had a beginning. (I do believe that the first premise is true in the actual world, since I do believe that God exists as a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence, but I do not see that this premise is true in all logically possible worlds.)
I agree with you, Sean, that we learn our ideas of causation from the lawfulness of nature and from the directionality of the second law of thermodynamics that lead to the commonsense view that causes precede their effects (or occur at the same time, if Bill insists). But then we have learned that the laws of physics are CPT invariant (essentially the same in each direction of time), so in a fundamental sense the future determines the past just as much as the past determines the future. I agree that just from our experience of the one-way causation we observe within the universe, which is just a merely effective description and not fundamental, we cannot logically derive the conclusion that the entire universe has a cause, since the effective unidirectional causation we commonly experience is something just within the universe and need not be extrapolated to a putative cause for the universe as a whole.
However, since to me the totality of data, including the historical evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus, is most simply explained by postulating that there is a God who is the Creator of the universe, I do believe by faith that God is indeed the cause of the universe (and indeed the ultimate Cause and Determiner of everything concrete, that is, everything not logically necessary, other than Himself—and I do believe, like Richard Swinburne, that God is concrete and not logically necessary, the ultimate brute fact). I have a hunch that God created a universe with apparent unidirectional causation in order to give His creatures some dim picture of the true causation that He has in relation to the universe He has created. But I do not see any metaphysical necessity in this.
(I have a similar hunch that God created us with the illusion of libertarian free will as a picture of the true freedom that He has, though it might be that if God does only what is best and if there is a unique best, one could object that even God does not have libertarian free will, but in any case I would believe that it would be better for God to do what is best than to have any putative libertarian free will, for which I see little value. Yet another hunch I have is that it is actually sentient experiences rather than created individual `persons’ that are fundamental, but God created our experiences to include beliefs that we are individual persons to give us a dim image of Him as the one true Person, or Persons in the Trinitarian perspective. However, this would take us too far afield from my points here.)
On the issue of whether our universe had a beginning, besides not believing that this is at all relevant to the issue of whether or not God exists, I agreed almost entirely with Sean’s points rather than yours, Bill, on this issue. We simply do not know whether or not our universe had a beginning, but there are certainly models, such as Sean’s with Jennifer Chen (hep-th/0410270 and gr-qc/0505037), that do not have a beginning. I myself have also favored a bounce model in which there is something like a quantum superposition of semiclassical spacetimes (though I don’t really think quantum theory gives probabilities for histories, just for sentient experiences), in most of which the universe contracts from past infinite time and then has a bounce to expand forever. In as much as these spacetimes are approximately classical throughout, there is a time in each that goes from minus infinity to plus infinity.
In this model, as in Sean’s, the coarse-grained entropy has a minimum at or near the time when the spatial volume is minimized (at the bounce), so that entropy increases in both directions away from the bounce. At times well away from the bounce, there is a strong arrow of time, so that in those regions if one defines the direction of time as the direction in which entropy increases, it is rather as if there are two expanding universes both coming out from the bounce. But it is erroneous to say that the bounce is a true beginning of time, since the structure of spacetime there (at least if there is an approximately classical spacetime there) has timelike curves going from a proper time of minus infinity through the bounce (say at proper time zero) and then to proper time of plus infinity. That is, there are worldlines that go through the bounce and have no beginning there, so it seems rather artificial to say the universe began at the bounce that is in the middle just because it happens to be when the entropy is minimized. I think Sean made this point very well in the debate.
In other words, in this model there is a time coordinate t on the spacetime (say the proper time t of a suitable collection of worldlines, such as timelike geodesics that are orthogonal to the extremal hypersurface of minimal spatial volume at the bounce, where one sets 
) that goes from minus infinity to plus infinity with no beginning (and no end). Well away from the bounce, there is a different thermodynamic time 
(increasing with increasing entropy) that for 
increases with 
but for 
decreases with (so there becomes more positive as becomes more negative). For example, if one said that is only defined for 
, say, one might have something like
the positive square root of one less than the square of . This thermodynamic time only has real values when the absolute value of the coordinate time , that is, 
, is no smaller than 1, and then increases with .
One might say that begins (at 
) at 
(for one universe that has growing as decreases from -1 to minus infinity) and at 
(for another universe that has growing as increases from +1 to plus infinity). But since the spacetime exists for all real , with respect to that time arising from general relativity there is no beginning and no end of this universe.
Bill, I think you also objected to a model like this by saying that it violates the second law (presumably in the sense that the coarse-grained entropy does not increase monotonically with for all real ). But if we exist for 
(or for 
; there would be no change to the overall behavior if were replaced with 
, since the laws are CPT invariant), then we would be in a region where the second law is observed to hold, with coarse-grained entropy increasing with 
(or with 
if ). A viable bounce model would have it so that it would be very difficult or impossible for us directly to observe the bounce region where the second law does not apply, so our observations would be in accord with the second law even though it does not apply for the entire universe. I think I objected to both of your probability estimates for various things regarding fine tuning. Probabilities depend on the theory or model, so without a definite model, one cannot claim that the probability for some feature like fine tuning is small. It was correct to list me among the people believing in fine tuning in the sense that I do believe that there are parameters that naively are far different from what one might expect (such as the cosmological constant), but I agreed with the sentiment of the woman questioner that there are not really probabilities in the absence of a model. Bill, you referred to using some “non-standard” probabilities, as if there is just one standard. But there isn’t. As Sean noted, there are models giving high probabilities for Boltzmann brain observations (which I think count strongly against such models) and other models giving low probabilities for them (which on this regard fits our ordered observations statistically). We don’t yet know the best model for avoiding Boltzmann brain domination (and, Sean, you know that I am skeptical of your recent ingenious model), though just because I am skeptical of this particular model does not imply that I believe that the problem is insoluble or gives evidence against a multiverse; in any case it seems also to be a problem that needs to be dealt with even in just single-universe models.
Sean, at one point your referred to some naive estimate of the very low probability of the flatness of the universe, but then you said that we now know the probability of flatness is very near unity. This is indeed true, as Stephen Hawking and I showed long ago (“How Probable Is Inflation?” Nuclear Physics B298, 789-809, 1988) when we used the canonical measure for classical universes, but one could get other probabilities by using other measures from other models.
In summary, I think the evidence from fine tuning is ambiguous, since the probabilities depend on the models. Whether or not the universe had a beginning also is ambiguous, and furthermore I don’t see that it has any relevance to the question of whether or not God exists, since the first premise of the Kalam cosmological argument is highly dubious metaphysically, depending on contingent intuitions we have developed from living in a universe with relatively simple laws of physics and with a strong thermodynamic arrow of time.
Nevertheless, in view of all the evidence, including both the elegance of the laws of physics, the existence of orderly sentient experiences, and the historical evidence, I do believe that God exists and think the world is actually simpler if it contains God than it would have been without God. So I do not agree with you, Sean, that naturalism is simpler than theism, though I can appreciate how you might view it that way.
Best wishes,
Don
Comment on martyrdom as evidence of authenticity: the followers of Jim Jones and David Koresh “martyred” themselves, as have many Buddhist monks, Islamists, at least one priest of Apollo, worshippers of Odin, et cetera.
In my experience, people will believe just about anything, and smart people can rationalize just about any belief. In my Bayesian model, this post confirmed that prior (which of course is true for myself also).
The statement I found most personally confounding was “God may be simple”. As typically described, God is of unknown origin, acts for reasons too difficult for humans to understand, and accomplishes his (or her) miracles by some sort of magic which is also incomprehensible. I don’t see how this concept has any explanatory value (God did it = I don’t how or why it happened). Rather it seems to me to be an excuse for not having an understandable explanation, and for not being willing to do the hard work of gathering and analyzing data which might lead to an understandable explanation. (The latter part does not apply to the author of the post, but does to many of his fellow religionists, in my opinion.)
Whereas, for example, evolution seems a simple, understandable explanation for how life (and ideas, and universes) occur. (Simple in the basic concept: random variation, selection criteria, memory; complex in the details of what can result after billions of years of massively-parallel operation.)
The basic philosophical argument which I think lurks behind all theistic apologetics is: “You can’t prove my God doesn’t exist” (and isn’t simple, and hasn’t made the best of all possible worlds). Which is true, because human thinking isn’t magic, proceeds by trial and error (like biological evolution), and therefore always has the possibility that our imagination (based on our experience/memory/idea genes) has failed to consider all (unknown but actual) alternatives.
In fact, even mathematical proof doesn’t always turn out to be correct (e.g, Andrew Wiles’ first attempt to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem). The best we can do is consider all the evidence we have and proceed in accordance with what seems to be the model which best fits the data, until we get more data. In other words, science.
@Magnema,
I don’t expect the 0% – 100% to be taken seriously. They represent extreme claims. That’s why I said go straight to the 100% conclusion – anyone asserting 100% certainty doesn’t feel they need evidence, probability or anything else to support their case.
“you take guesses as to what the probabilities are – based on what you believe to be reasonable assumptions”
The ‘reasonable assumptions’ need to be, well, reasonable. How do you judge that? With data. It may be incomplete data, contested data, approximate data, but it’s data. If you then have some ‘reasonable assumptions’ then you are not making a guess – well, not in the sense that we guess the roll of a dice, from random variable.
If you are making a guess, why do you need data? If you have no data, as in Don’s case, then you only have the guess. And it’s worthless. It could be anything.
“You don’t need to know the exact correlation coefficient and slope to know that eating more sugar causes worse teeth, and you can make a guess (albeit one that would have to be modified if actual statistics came up) at a conclusion.”
“exact”? Who said exact? There’s a long way from total ignorance (universe creation) to even a reasonable ‘estimate’ (state of nations teeth, sugar consumption).
With teeth, sugar, human populations, we have some data to work with. But when the data is really poor the results are meaningless.
But with no data? Look at it this way:
Problem 1: A company makes bags of 100 black balls, but manufacturing errors cause some balls to be white. We know the limits: 100 black, 100 white. We know from experience that people complain if they have more than 40 white balls. We do some tests and stuff. We play with probabilities. We use Bayes. Whatever. It’s real if uncertain data. What’s the probability of getting a bag with 100 black balls? We can start to look into it.
Problem 2: How are universes made? We don’t know. As an analogy for this, this is me telling you there’s a bag out there; possibly an infinitely large bag; and it might have some balls in it or it might not. If it has, then some might be black, or not. Some might be white, or not. The bag might contain refrigerators rather than balls, or not. Now, what are you going to tell me about the content of the bag – the probability that there are 100 black balls in the bag, that there’s God in the bag, ten gods, …? Nothing. Oh, and there might not actually be a bag out there; there might just be this universe.
Problem 1 is the sort of problem we can play with. Problem 2 is God stuff.
Pretending to know anything at all such that a probability figure for God is meaningful is total bull.
Simon Packer.
Just look at all the misguided martyrs in ISIS and rethink your position on Christian martyrs.
Simon Packer
“God has allowed the creation, as well as the creatures, to reflect the cosmic fallen spiritual environment.”
Quite. That is what those who don’t conclude a tri-omni god created us notice. If the environment before we arrived was a ‘cosmic fallen spiritual environment’ what is tri-omni about it?
I wonder if most early shamanic religions didn’t have their start in seemingly magical abilities exhibited by their founders, like precognition, that actually might have a real physical basis in physics – namely quantum mechanics (QM). In QM the outcome of an event is purely probabilistic. If some primitive single celled amoeba on the early Earth could quantum mechanically ‘detect’ probable future events with life and death consequences – like being eaten by another amoeba – it would confer an evolutionary advantage, and their progeny would continue to propagate. As life evolved to greater and greater complexity this ‘intuitive edge’ would have enhanced survival, and thus would have been selected for. A Pleistocene era human who could sense a saber toothed cat was about to pounce, would have a better chance of transmitting his genes to future generations. Among hunter-gatherer societies individuals with enhanced ‘intuition’ would become the natural religious leaders.
This post is the most striking example of cognitive dissonance I think I’ve ever seen.
I usually don’t comment here because I don’t speak the language usually spoken here. Mr. Carroll has invited a free-for-all, so here’s my two cents worth, which is just as good as anyone else’s regarding this topic:
God is playing a losing game if he/she/it has to stoop to using words (or math) to explain things to its creation. Words are conditioned things; god, presumably, is unconditioned. How can any number or combination of conditioned things add up to something unconditioned? How can god explain anything through words? It’s not that we’re fallen and can’t understand, he/she/it has proven itself to be fallen instead. How can an unconditioned thing divide itself into words and be taken seriously as an unconditioned thing? (Whether or not we can grasp the reality of something unconditioned is irrelevant.) How can we express that we “feel” god to be true and not admit that the feeling is inside us (and quite transitory) and not beamed in from outside. If god put it there it wouldn’t change, would it? The “God is Love” crowd is really quite self-centered, and their proof consists of them relating how good god makes them feel, therefore god exists! A transitory emotion is apparently considered to be eternal!
We’re the product of a catastrophic ecological disaster. The experience ruined us. When you think that our ancestors, after all the predation and hardship the earth threw at them for untold generations, finally learned to grow their own food and kill all the predators and be unbelievably safe compared to their own ancestors you’d think they could have relaxed a bit and enjoyed the fruits of their labor, and passed ease and comfort onto their lucky descendants (us). Instead, it was the beginning of a new disaster, of kings, of war, of genocide, of tribe, of those that deserved to hoard everything and those that deserved to die. They were not able to undo the trajectory of the neuroses the experience produced in them. The epicenter was the awful Middle East, where despite the efforts of innumerable prophets and god wannabes, there hasn’t been a moment’s worth of peace in all the time since.
Furthermore, what made god simple? God’s dad? I’m embarrassed to say it, but that old recursive argument has more of a ring of truth to it than all the bibles in the world. The notion that this-or-that religion has more spiritual currency than others, or of non belief, is just wrong since a beginning cause is plainly not possible.
I believe, with my whole heart, that everything I’ve written is true, and it makes me feel good to do so, so it’s all proven, mkay?
I think Steven Weinberg sums it up best. “If there is a God that has special plans for humans, then He has taken very great pains to hide His concern for us.”
Thanks for all the interesting comments, far more than I can respond to here. Some questions I have discussed in “Scientific and Philosophical Challenges to Theism” and “Religious and Scientific Faith in Simplicity.”
Phillip Helbig asked whether I became a Christian because of arguments like these. Indeed, I did not. I became a Christian because of loving parents and other who taught me about God, because of reading the Bible, and because of experiencing Christ’s forgiveness of my sins. But as I have encountered contrary ideas, arguments have played a bigger role for my remaining a Christian. My answer to Phillip’s further question of why I believe in my God rather than, say, Zeus or Odin, is that the historical evidence I know (see, e.g., the books of N.T. Wright and Michael Licona that Rick mentioned above) is much stronger for the divinity of Jesus than for anyone else in history.
Charlie finds it “reprehensible … that good folks are going to be tortured eternally for coming to the wrong conclusion about the simplest model of the universe or the historicity of Jesus Christ.” I have recently become convinced by John Kronen and Eric Reitan, God’s Final Victory: A Comparative Philosophical Case for Universalism, and Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, that the Bible actually teaches that Christ died for the ultimate salvation of all, though hell serves a temporary purpose to cleanse away remaining evil (even in someone as reprehensibly wicked as Hitler) and leave all souls purified.
Among others, James B. asked about Bayes’ theorem. If one starts absolutely certain of some hypothesis (say either theism or atheism), then no amount of evidence can change that. One needs to start with some uncertainty or openness to be influenced by further data. However, one cannot start without any assumptions, such as the faith in simplicity that is a crucial unprovable basis for science and most other human endeavors.
Kashyap Vasavada asked about “anti science feeling in Abrahamic religions.” I would suggest reading Reijer Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science, of the Christian bases for why modern science developed in the West.
Arch1 asked why I “believe by faith that God is the cause of the universe.” I have faith that the simplest explanation fitting the data is the one most likely to be true. To me the simplest explanation for our orderly universe, simple and yet including sentient beings who love life, is that it was created by an omnipotent, omniscient, loving Being. However, I do admit that simplicity seems to be unavoidably subjective, depending on one’s background knowledge, so it is understandable that others have many different opinions.
JimV rightly questioned martyrdom as evidence of authenticity, but when eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the risen Christ made this the central part of their preaching and yet were willing to be put to death for what they knew to be true or false, I count that as much stronger evidence for the truth of what they claimed they saw with their own eyes.
Professor Page’s writing and these comments have caused a tectonic shift in my understanding of cosmology and its place in the learning disciplines. When “sin, forgiveness, and 1st century myth” are seen as evidence for a divine hand, then surely cosmology is not an empirical science. But rather, fits neatly into metaphysics where tangled words come to conclusions without the annoyance of mathematical rigor. Or evidence of any kind worthy of the name.
Don,
In your reply above you say:
Has the current Pope now begun asserting that in Christianity there is no such a thing as the eternal hell (whatever the hell it means)? no final judgment? Does he now say that the idea has never been there in Christianity?
Have they (the successive Popes) always asserted this position throughout the two millenia+ history of Christianity? even during the middle ages, say, to the white Europeans of that era? And, how about the missionaries, they (those Popes/papal authorities) have sent to India from time to time? Have the missionaries always been preaching this position? also in India? What is your information on this count? … Also, on the previous count?
–Ajit
[E&OE]
Prof Page,
I admire your polite responses. Your comment regarding certainty is recommendable.
George Ellis in his presentation (Tenerife) make a distincion between cosmology and Cosmology(BigC).
Science (with its limits because of its mandate) can only argue with honesty on premises called cosmology. And there nobody can find scientific arguments for a entity commonly called God. Naturalist would end with the universe as a brute fact.
However, in Cosmology one can legitimately argue for a pre-bang entity, a/the source of everything in timelesness, unbelievable low in entrophy, high in potential, the real brute fact. I believe that that is the real issue to argue, taking into account that it falls outside the mandate of natural science.
Hi Coel (and others)
I feel I am doing what lawyers and many others do most days: I take a starting hypothesis: in this case, ‘Christianity is True’. If so, Jesus was the second person of the Trinity, creative agent of the cosmos and of realms not observable to man, incarnate as man in self-limitation and redeemer of mankind.
I then search for coherence and credibility. This can be approached through several windows:
-Direct personal experience, subjective or objective
-Indirect testimony and the credibility thereof (history, archaeology, testimony of living people, does the Bible read like real people doing the sort of stuff people do?…this is important, people read Shakespeare because they see the whiff of relational reality in it, kind of pre-facebook relational dynamics. I am not talking here about miracles, I am talking about how people actually behave in general)
-Scientific Community conclusions on distant origins (personally I don’t hang much on these)
-Alignment of an overall worldview with all the above and probably more.
The scientific method only differs if you are the one hypothesizing, and in the type of evidence normally admitted. Christianity is, at foundation, presented as is. You are left to believe or not.
I became a believer at university, and someone knocked on my door and asked who I believed Jesus was? I said I didn’t know. He said ‘you need to find out’. I knew him and evaluated him as sincere. At the end of the day I would say to you that the weight of claims made by Christ is such that you need to find out. I personally am not a universalist. I frequently put myself at personal risk to carry a salvation message.
However, in Cosmology one can legitimately argue for a pre-bang entity, a/the source of everything in timelesness, unbelievable low in entrophy, high in potential, the real brute fact. I believe that that is the real issue to argue, taking into account that it falls outside the mandate of natural science.
)))))))))))))
You mean Allah right? Or maybe the Feathered Serpent of the Maya. Or how about Uthlanga of the Zulu. I don’t understand it so god did it? Sound familiar? It’s called god of the gaps and it’s not a good argument. How is ” god did it ” even a sensible argument. Who did god and who did the god that did god and the god that did god that did god and so on. And then to add on to the absurdity you connect this god did it “explanation? with your favorite iron age myth, a choice mostly dependent on where you were born. Really!!!
It is always interesting talking to intelligent rational theists as you can ask them simple questions about religion. If I was to meet Don I would ask him the following:
1. Why a Christian God out of thousands of other gods?
2. Why are religions so extremely cultural?
3. Do you believe in the literal events of the Bible, eg Noah and the ark, Adam and Eve?
4. How do you decide which parts of the Bible to be read as literal or not, eg slavery?
5. How do you reconcile the large number of contradictions in the Bible?
6. If God can be eternal then why couldn’t a much simpler universe be eternal?
7. Since Eve was the only original woman, then did her children mate with her?
I think that if there aren’t good answers to the above questions then it doesn’t make sense to go into extremely complicated ideas about God?
Bob, Paul and cognitive dissonance spotters
A worldview must be made to converge if it takes several significant but largely non-overlapping and seemingly contradictory spheres of input. If science is virtually everything to you, it is relatively straightforward to construct a worldview, the work has been done for you by others. Just buy into mainstream scientific theories for origins, and hope the process extends further and further in depth and time.
Regarding specific deistic/theistic belief systems, having accepted the concept of a creator, one brings other factors in as well, as Don and myself make clear, in order to decide what can be known about that creator.
Scientists frequently have this underlying, and for me patently invalid, conviction that nothing worthwhile or genuine can be discovered outside of the scientific method as thus far applied by the scientific community. Or that ancient man was uniformly primitive; a paradigm implied by an evolutionary framework of belief. I would say from art and literature that culturally and relationally, perhaps men were more principled and sophisticated in past centuries, not less.
Islam I have studied. I do not believe it coheres as a belief system, and it does not, at incipience, interact in depth with history. Most creation myths are very clearly that, ancient myths. The life of Christ is different, it is extremely difficult to extricate from known history. The Bible makes itself vulnerable to historical disproof going back to ancient Israel.
God is infinite, otherwise, you never get to the end of your ‘who made God’ string, obviously. Also you are extrapolating a viewpoint born from space and time, and attempting to understand the infinite and eternal. I have made this general point repeatedly. We always see from within our own limitations, unless there is revelation from a higher source. That revelation would need to be formulated and constrained to be digestible by us. Perhaps we are just not a smart as we like to think, and need to admit that we need Someone who is a) in control and b) loves us unconditionally.
Further comment on martyrdom: I personally know one person who claims to have seen Jesus and would probably die so claiming. He has also been diagnosed as bi-polar but refuses medication for it. (It is a great tragedy which I do not make light of, having known him for years.) I believe in much earlier times, such people were called “god touched”, which became the pejorative “touched in the head”.
There are also people, myself among them, who occasionally mix up events and times in their memory and recall things that didn’t happen as they recall them. If such recollections seemed important enough to us we might be willing to die for them, since many people die for all sorts of reasons (as noted in my previous comment).
Both these types of delusions are compatible with a world view which centers on evolution, i.e., trial and error produces lots of errors.
“I have postulated that God loves mathematical elegance.”
It seems fatuous to continue reading after running across such statements. Talk about provincialism. God has love, eh? This is the same guy who claims this is the best possible universe? Gosh, he knows a lot that is unknowable. It’s so comforting to discover god is human, after all. The very concept of god is arrogant in the extreme. Here we are, essentially ants crawling around on the face of a planet, imputing motivation to the universe. How bizarre.
In the words of Ishi, we are “smart but not wise.”
To argue about the existence of god shows a shallow understanding of the situation. The sophistication of the argument doesn’t make it any more reasonable. To be arguing it at all admits to the probability of the situation. That’s the first error. After that, they’ve dragged you down to their level.
The universe is maybe based on a timeless vacuum. This vacuum is described by a dual set of operators, and they operate on this vacuum to “gives zero.” This vacuum is for quantum gravity in some way and general relativity does not automatically define energy conservation. As such it means that fluctuations can involve the violation of energy conservation, or where the landscape of the vacuum is not described by a single energy. This leads to vacuum transitions, bubble nucleations and other physics that can generate cosmologies.
Is the world understood better if one includes a God? God is one of those things that is in the same category as “an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.” The very nature of God involves paradoxical infinities. If one insists that a timeless vacuum requires an origin, where timeless suggests no need for a beginning but one is not satisfied with this idea of nothing, then this sort of ∞ – ∞ vacuum or ∞/∞ = reality might seem compelling. However, there is nothing logically, rationally or empirically necessary about this. The apparent need for a God is then a matter of psychological behavior or disposition.
I find the argument concerning the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus curious. I have heard this mentioned before in these debates, but never explicitly demonstrated. There is no evidence of such outside of the Gospels. In fact the Gospel of Matthew has an earthquake along with the resurrection of saints from their graves with the resurrection of Jesus. If lots of people had popped out of their graves, that should have gained a fair amount of attention at the time. The resurrection of Jesus is something one either believes or does not believe. It is a matter of pure faith. There is no real historical evidence that Jesus even existed. The only character in the New Testament that has some weak connection to history outside of “Acts of the Apostles” and his epistles is Saul of Tarsus. There is some evidence for the existence of David and Solomon in Kings and Chronicles. There are indicted references to such kings of Israel as vassals of Egypt on some stelas. Solomon even bargained away a town in order to marry Pharaoh’s daughter in 1 or 2 Kings. Despite what the Bible says, the great kings of ancient Israel were really vassals under the big boss in Karnack Egypt. Anyway, there is weak evidence for any of the Gospel claims of a resurrection, and Christians have to be honest and admit they believe this on pure faith.
LC
I think people on both sides seem too quick to dismiss the possibility that those who claimed to see the risen Christ were just flat out lying.
If we are to believe the words of Paul in I Corinthians 9, the rules of the early Church gave those who had seen the risen Christ “the right to not work for a living.” Surely it is no surprise that a substantially similar list of people to those, who Paul claims have the right to not work for a living, are reported to have seen the the living Christ in the same letter (I Corinthians 15.) Paul himself claims he receives no such benefits, but I’m not sure why we’re supposed to believe him.
As for the claim that these people defended their claimed experiences in the face of certain death — the evidence for that is weak. There is little to no evidence Christians could save themselves by recanting prior to the time of Trajan (98-117ad — by which time most eyewitnesses would have already died of natural causes.) And suppose some early Christian leaders had recanted under those conditions? Then what? Even the Gospels claim Peter denied Christ no less than 3 times. Didn’t exactly stop Christianity in its tracks.
I think the early history of Mormonism is instructive here. Joseph Smith made demonstrably fraudulent claims and must have known he was lying. Yet he died a martyr’s death running from an angry mob. True the incident doesn’t cast Smith in the best light (he pretty clearly was trying to get away, and in any event didn’t seem to have the opportunity to recant) but suppose later leaders of the Mormon Church could have written an account of the event without having to compete with reliable but less flattering accounts of the same. What do you think the story would sound like?
Sean,
This is a provocative post, but thanks for sharing it – it’s interesting to seee how famous physicists reconcile their faith with their science or whether they believe reconciliation is at all necessary.
Don,
You build your belief on Bayes’ theorem. Have any experimental results in your lifetime decreased or increased your posterior belief in god? What hypothetical measurements might impact your posterior belief?
Dear Andrew,
Since I believe in a God of order, whom I believe would create a very elegant universe, the experimental discoveries supporting a moderately simple Standard Model of Particle Physics (even though we hope for an even simpler ultimate theory) have increases my posterior belief in God, as has the cosmological data supporting the Standard Model of Cosmology (though here I also hope for an even simpler multiverse model).
On the other hand, all sorts of logically possible but crazy things would decrease my posterior belief, such as CERN not being able to reproduce any evidence for the Higgs boson next year, seeing electrons decay into uncharged particles with a lifetime much less than the current lower limits, not being able to see distant stars any more, and on and on with all sorts of things that could be different if God did not continue to run the universe in the orderly way He does now.
While theologians’ rational arguments are bounded by statements held by faith, scientific arguments are really not that different.
Science incorporates faith statements simply in order to operate. While the specifics of scientific study and reasoning generally stem from empirical evidence, which is one of the defining characteristics of science, there also exist implicit assumptions. For example, most natural scientists believe—a leap of faith that’s been assailed recently by some modern critics—that they are studying something that’s real, that the natural world, the physical world, actually exists, that it has an independent existence outside of ourselves. A related assumption is that the world is uniform in the sense that its behavior is regular and law-like. Assumptions must also be made about sense perception. We have to assume that our senses are giving us in some way—whether we are looking directly at some object or reading an instrument or a scale or looking through a telescope—we have to assume that our senses are giving us some kind of authentic, reliable information. And we have to rely on our subsequent ability to register and interpret those sensations correctly. Another is that cause must precede effect.
Those are all statements that cannot be proven true. Of course without such assumptions, it would be futile, for example, to bother trying to determine natural laws if we thought they changed every few minutes. But recognizing such implicit assumptions, which are ultimately expressions of faith, shouldn’t lead us to diminish the status or the ability of science to tell us about our world. Instead it shows that the basis of our knowledge claims about the world are invariably grounded upon certain assumptions that are outside the realm of reason.
This does not imply that they are unreasonable; it shows us that the exercise of human reason has its limits. We have to accommodate ourselves to positing some basic assumptions with which we are comfortable that rest ultimately upon unprovable beliefs.
Dear Don,
Thanks for your reply. I’m not religious and I’m relatively young, but it feels to me as though the scientific community is increasingly hostile towards faith, much more so than even ten years ago (Dawkins, new atheism et all). Have you noticed a shift in attitudes? Is it something you’ve experienced personally?
If you had been a young physicist today, do you think you would have been so confident and forthcoming about your faith?