Did Dawkins and and Hawking really admit the Big Bang is impossible?

Faith & Science Conversation
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I, for the first time in this thread have no idea (or at least I like to imagine I knew something of which I was talking about before). The first time I personally came across this paper was through Reasons to Believe:

Here, Hugh Ross kind of puts a line in the sand and asks:

Has one of Christianity’s core beliefs (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”) just been falsified? Did the Bible get it wrong about the beginning of the universe? Is God irrelevant?

All three of those questions are rather crazy to me to even ask with this paper let alone any paper. Because the questions are even asked it lets me know that the article will seek to entirely disprove, cast doubt and debunk the article because a lot is at stake- i.e. a false dichotomy is presented that either the paper is true or the Bible/Christianity are true.

The objections are interesting.

  1. It is in the theoretical section of Physical Review Letters B, not the Cosmology or Astrophysics section. The implication is that it can more easily be dismissed outright as the ‘real’ papers would be published in the other two sections. We should probably let the other authors who got listed under the ‘theory’ section of that Jounal’s issue what we think of their work: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/physics-letters-b/vol/741/suppl/C
  2. This is an interesting section on the nature of Bohmian trajectories. I’d have to agree with Ross that the paper is a little silly in that their method automatically removes singularities and thus it is not really a ‘result’ that they get an infinite age of the universe because their model automatically removes the singularity (i.e. see this analysis from an early universe Cosmologist: cosmology - Why are some people are claiming that the Big Bang never happened? - Physics Stack Exchange). However, singularities are not good and they generally are indicative that something is amiss. Other laws of Physics for example like Newton’s laws, Coulomb’s law, Ohm’s law, etc. fail to describe some aspect of reality and can end up with singularities or other anomalies. That is all the equations break down and fail to describe typically smaller things very well. My research for example regularly breaks Ohm’s law due to the fact that there simply isn’t enough space for charged particles to squeeze through nanometer sized holes. Does this mean that Ohm’s law is no longer valid? Well no, it just does not describe my system but works plenty well for many other systems. The same is true with General Relativity that predicts such a singularity. Something is wrong with the equation, as it fails to describe very small things where quantum effects are important. Here, there is a clever method to avoid that that as the authors show, this idea originally from the quantum world, can be applied to the early universe to solve an outstanding problem, i.e. the singularity. Now, many Christians and apologists don’t think that such a singularity is a problem, because it is an apologetic proof of God. And so why even bother getting rid of it from that perspective.
  3. This one is the most important of all and is a legitimate cause of hesitation. Most new ideas must be able to not only explain all existing phenomena/data/observations but also must make novel/new predictions that can be testable. This paper is presently outside of the realm of being testable and thus is more speculative (though could later be shown to be true), but because it is just a correction term on the equations of General Relativity, it is entirely consistent with all of those observations at least.
  4. This one is just shady. The article not so subtlety suggests that the paper is tied to the New Age and thus what is a lay-Christian to do? Hate it. Despise it. Shun it. The guys are New Age physicists anyways so to ‘gehenna’ with their paper.

I’d have to agree with you, especially from a Genesis 1 perspective. My apologies if this went a strange turn but I think that it is interesting how being tied to certain theological conclusions can cause many to reject legitimate scientific research. But this being highly speculative I think we ought to have pause on such ideas as the paper has 22 citations since 2015. For comparison, a paper I was a coauthor for published around the same time got 16 citations or so- that paper that we wrote though was hardly ground breaking so I’ll stick to my curiosity with some reservation about such papers I think for now.

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Google Scholar gave me 74 when I searched on “Cosmology from Quantum Potential.” That doesn’t seem revolutionary, either. It seemed highly speculative to me, too. I was just curious if it was gaining any ground.

On RTB’s four criticisms, No. 1 was spurious, but No. 2 was more troublesome to me (their solution seems designed to give the “infinite age” by removing the singularity). On No. 3, their equations did resolve issues and make predictions, so I didn’t think this was necessarily fair. No. 4 was definitely shady.

As far as the theory itself goes, Genesis easily can be read as God bringing order from chaos rather than creating ex nihilo, so I don’t see a problem there. And since Hebrew does not have words for things like “timeless” or “infinite,” it routinely describes God with terms that indicate an existence with no beginning and no end, so I don’t see a conflict there, either.

Bottom line for me:

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Google Scholar also cites this article from ICR and this article on as one of the 74 sources as well as something from Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism called “the overwhelming improbability of classic Christian theism.” But scrolling through it’s somewhere above 22 and less than 74. Not too bad but it just suffered from the unfortunately result of ‘pop science’ catching wind of the paper and misunderstanding it.

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Talking about a chain of events only makes sense within time. If you have no time, there is not an eternal chain of events in the past, but rather a timeless state.

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Hey Matthew, just curious here. I’ve seen you talking in many topics about arguments for God which you think are bad (and I agree with you in most of your remarks), but it got me curious about what arguments/reasons you think are good or which reasons you personally have to be a theist. I don’t know if the question is too personal, but I would find it interesting to hear about them if possible (what reasons someone which is so critical, in the good sense, about arguments for God finds good/reasonable).

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@Jay313, I think that you are making the same mistakes that fundamentalists are making but in a different manner.

Fundamentalists take4 Gen 1 in isolation as do you. Now let us agree that Gen. 1 says God brought order out of chaos. Now Who or what created the chaos? Was it God or some other creator? From the Bible it is very hard to say another creator, since there is only One God the Creator, so according to the Bible God created everything even the chaos out of nothing.

Now here science actually helps Gen. 1 out. The Big Bang Theory says that the universe began as a small infinitely dense ball of mass. This fits well with the description of the initial form of the universe found in Genesis 1:2 (NIV2011)
2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep,

The universe began with a singularity that had no form, or structure. There was no light or energy for a nano second before energy was created by God through the Word (Logos) which caused inflation and the Big Bang.

The problem of ex nihilo is not a scientific question or even theological question. It is a philosophical question. Science cannot understand Nothing, because it is not physical, nor than theology understand Nothing because it is not spiritual. Nothing is a philosophical or logical concept which is needed for humans to understand Reality.

God is the opposite of Nothing, but Nothing is not the absence of God, but the absence of the universe, which includes us. Humans are a part of the universe, not outside of it. We cannot really understand God, but we do experience the reality of God in the reality of life and faith.

If God is God, the Creator, then God is infinite and beyond time and space. If the universe is the universe, then the universe is finite and thus has a Beginning, and it exists in time and space. How can God create something that Has no beginning and no ending so is infinite without creating Godself? God and God’s Creation as not the some, they are different so saying that God has no Beginning is no evidence in favor of an eternal universe.

The false dichotomy of the Fundamentalists that, either the Bible is true or evolution is true, is based on the bad theology that the Bible is the Word of God, which is a relatively new and relatively narrow belief. The dichotomy that God created the universe with a Beginning ex nihilo or the universe is eternal and uncreated is well established belief founded on the fullness of the faith and our understanding of the nature of the universe, based on science, philosophy, and science.

You have no argument from me. It has long been established that time begins with the Beginning of time. Take that away and you have no universe as we know it or at all.

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Hi, Roger. I was just thinking out loud about a way to reconcile the theory with Genesis 1, not stating my own opinions. But I’ll play along …

Why does the chaos need a creator? As @pevaquark has emphasized repeatedly, no cosmologist believes that “everything came from nothing.” What existed before time t=0 in the Big Bang? Not matter in the conventional sense, but whatever that “chaos” was, perhaps it had always been there, just as God himself had always been there? This is not confusing Creator with creation, nor is it saying that creation and Creator are one and the same. Rather, it is simply saying that neither God nor the chaos that existed prior to t=0 had a beginning.

The observable universe had a beginning when God spoke and gave the chaos form. That universe exists in time and space and is finite, in the sense that we can “see” to the edge of it, but what exists beyond that edge? Whatever it is, is it an infinite something, or a finite something? Will the expanding universe run into a limit, a “wall” of sorts, beyond which it cannot go? All this is to say, I see no reason to believe that the chaos that existed prior to t=0 was not infinite in age and scope. That God then took that chaos and shaped it into the wondrous beauty that surrounds us is still a miracle worthy of veneration.

As far as I can see, conceiving of things in this way does not diminish God and is entirely biblical. Not saying this is my conception, but if I keep going, I might talk myself into believing it to be the case.

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@pevaquark

If singularities are not good and need to be avoided, then what do we do with Black Holes? \

If we can make one exception (which is not based on the Christian world view,) why not two? Especially when we are discussing the first second of the Beginning of the universe.

Here we are talking about one of two infinities, an infinite universe or an infinite God. Since there is no evidence that the universe is infinite and every evidence that God is infinite, I would think that by far the best bet is God.

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As per the wikipedia page on gravitational singularities:

Many theories in physics have mathematical singularities of one kind or another. Equations for these physical theories predict that the ball of mass of some quantity becomes infinite or increases without limit. This is generally a sign for a missing piece in the theory, as in the Ultraviolet Catastrophe, re-normalization, and instability of a hydrogen atom predicted by the Larmor formula. Some theories, such as the theory of loop quantum gravity suggest that singularities may not exist. This is also true for such classical unified field theories as the Einstein–Maxwell–Dirac equations. Further in a dynamic Newtonian adaptation of the equations of gravity (DNAg) the singularity is entirely avoided. The idea can be stated in the form that due to quantum gravity effects, there is a minimum distance beyond which the force of gravity no longer continues to increase as the distance between the masses becomes shorter, or alternatively that interpenetrating particle waves mask gravitational effects that would be felt at a distance.

Maybe it’s just my head cold but I have no idea what you are trying to say here. Are you trying to say that singularity = infinity = God (but only in the singularity at the beginning of the universe as predicted by the incomplete equations of GR that do not include quantum effects that we’ve established already are extremely important at this time)?

At the very least, I would hope that you can begin to appreciate how I would see infinity/singularities as someone trained in physics- it’s a problem and a sign that an equation/law/theory is incomplete.

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No one is arguing against this. What I said is that the word generally does not mean never. It means usually. The beginning of the universe is not a usual situation. It is a singular situation.

It seems to me that this is close to what I have been saying, which is that the strong nuclear force cancels out gravitation.

The equations of GR are not incomplete. It is just that they are not the theory of everything, which is the found in the unification of all forces. Why must relativity include quantum physics. then even as it does not include quantum physics now.

One theory which I read above was that the Big Bang began with all four forces united and balanced . They only became separated one by one during this less that second time period

God is infinite and God alone is infinite. I believe that you said that a singularity in math was an infinity. The Big Bang theory says that the universe originally was very small, infinitely dense, a singularity. There is a connection between the three.

Please do not be deceived into thinking that generally means never or always. It means usually. A singularity is appropriate at the beginning of the universe, a most unusual situation.

Additional Comment: The is a big difference between a singularity as a calculation which is often the sign of a problem, and a singularity like a Black Hole which is not a calculation. The singularity at the Beginning of the universe is the second kind.

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All of this cosmic evolution after the inflationary epoch can be rigorously described and modeled by the ΛCDM model of cosmology, which uses the independent frameworks of quantum mechanics and Einstein’s General Relativity. There is no well-supported model describing the action prior to 10−15 seconds or so. Apparently a new unified theory of quantum gravitation is needed to break this barrier. Understanding this earliest of eras in the history of the universe is currently one of the greatest unsolved problems in physics.

This is a quote from the Wikipedia. The lack of a clear model for the beginning of the universe does not mean that it did not happen. It just means that we do not understand it as well as we would like.

Just because we don’t know for sure does not mean that God did not create the universe, particularly because what we do know does point to God as the Creator.

Science depends on the universe being rationality structured. Philosophically the view that the universe is rationally structured depends on the universe being created by a Rational Creator.

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@pevaquark

I will take your lack of response as agreement with my last two comments, unless you respond otherwise.

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Wow, that’s gracious of you.

Shall I speak or remain silent? Certainly sometimes silence is the best option.

So because there is a singular singularity then it is somehow different? You don’t that it is a singular singularity! There are roughly 10^80 protons let’s say in the universe and they all have a singularity according to the incomplete Coulomb’s Law. But maybe there are 10^500 universes that all have singularities. You don’t know and neither do I. But anyways, that is silly to say that because GR (that doesn’t even describe very small things well at all- it fails in every way shape and form when quantum effects are important)- so IF GR predicts a singularity for a scenario that it cannot even describe accurately, then it is not anything significant beyond the fact that the equations are incomplete to describe small things of which the universe once was.

It doesn’t cancel it out. But what were you saying again about these forces or what was your point?

That’s pretty reasonable given the fact that we have seen the electromagnetic and weak force become one at the high energies involved in particle physics (becoming the electroweak force). Something like this:

Okay.

Did I? There’s a reason I left mathematics and went to Physics. My math colleage loves infinity. I don’t like it for the reasons I’ve explained here (it means there’s something incomplete about a law/theory/etc.).

Yes.

Yeah I don’t know about this one. I mean if you plug in that the radius equals zero then yes, you get infinite density but again the equations don’t even work at this point. The Big Bang Theory again for the I don’t know twentieth time does NOT describe the beginning of the universe. It only describes very well what happened after it began expanding.

Sorry you lost me here.

Let me fix this sentence:

‘A singularity only appears at the beginning of the universe because the equations of General Relativity cannot accurate describe quantum effects.’

It’s not? Where do you think what we know about black holes mostly comes from? Ah yes, the equations of General Relativity. :weary:

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What you have described is a paradox in the way that math and physics views the world. Math lives infinities, while physics does not. For some reason you seem compelled to resolve this paradox in favor no infinities, while other people do not.

There is a huge danger in arbitrarily resolving paradoxes our of Reality, because Reality is too complex to be explained without paradoxes. You can’t say that GR does not work with quantum physics because it does work with quantum physics. Maybe we need to understand it better, but you cfannot say that something doesn’t work because we don’t understand exactly how it works.

We know about black holes from black holes, which are real observable physical entities, as opposed to dark matter and energy. Humankind pays millions of dollars to build telescopes on earth and in space to study and observe Black Holes and other cosmological phenomena. Scientists do not just sit in Ivory Towers spinning mathematical theories about them.

On then basic of there observations we know much about the Big Bang and that knowledge indicates there was the abrupt appearance of the space/time continuum. That is what you and others have failed to explain away.

There is no physical evidence to justify saying that every proton has a singularity. There is no physical evidence for a multiverse. According to the rules of science that say that there must be physical evidence to back up such claims, I do know this as well as that the earth’s moon is not made of green cheese.

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36 posts were split to a new topic: Pevaquark Doesn’t Like the Fine Tuning Apologetics and Neither Should You

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7 posts were split to a new topic: Darwinists need to wake up and drink some of Relates’ Coffee

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