QM is more fundamental about how the universe works. And has major implications to discussions here.
Cosmology has clear implications here, as its methods determine the age of the universe. However, I’m not seeing any connections between these discussions and QM, could you elaborate?
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Lets talk about creation from nothing claim that must require God to do.
QM says not so.
Every instant in time, all over the universe, electrons in atoms spontaneously jump from one energy state to a lower energy state. In this process, photons are created out of nothing. Particles can also be created from nothing. This process happens all the time but can not be predicted with certainty. QM says that certainty about the future is not possible.
Further in this universe nothingness can not exist. Every cubic meter of space, particles (and anti-particles) pop into existence and then vanish in a finite amount of time.
There are a lot of great books on this: Sean Carroll’s The Big Picture is very good and readable.
The standard YEC explanation for the creation ex nihilo is one of direct miraculous action on the part of God, which by definition breaks physical laws. So I don’t think invoking QM is a good fit here as it just gets hand-waved away.
A technical quibble, photon emission from an electron changing energy levels is not creation from nothing. It’s just energy transfer from one field to another. And as far as the quantum vacuum goes, arguing that it’s not nothing because of the fluctuations (which are exceptionally short-lived ) veers more into semantics. It’s not technically nothing, but it’s not really much of something either.
It is not just energy transfer from one field to another. We are talking about real particles created from nothing. The photon didn’t exist before it was created. And it was created where nothing existed before AND it was created from nothing.
It is not just semantics, it is real physics. It has been measured and analyzed. QM is the most tested theory ever.
There are many physicists who have begun to wonder if the Big Bang was just such a rare event as an eruption of energy from Quantum Space …
Hi Patrick-
A quantum field is not nothing. As a theist, I would say that God created the quantum field out of which baryonic matter, dark matter, and dark energy arose.
Best,
Chris Falter
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I know what a quantum field is and it is certainly not nothing. [quote=“Chris_Falter, post:122, topic:35106”]
As a theist, I would say that God created the quantum field out of which baryonic matter, dark matter, and dark energy arose.
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As a theist you can say just anything but as a physicist you have to show both theoretically (mathematically) and experimentally with measurements how quantum fields arose and how the fields interact with matter, dark matter and dark energy. There has been a lot of progress in this area in the past few years. The FLWR model of cosmoslogy is pretty much accepted as how the universe came to be 13.8 billion years ago and how it has expanded in space and time since them. Most of the parameters of this model have been measured to less than 1% accuracy.
Hi Patrick - Per the equation e = mc^2, we conclude that energy and matter are interchangeable.
Physicists can design an apparatus that converts a small amount of uranium mass into a large amount of energy. As I’m sure you know, this is commonly referred to as a nuclear bomb.
Likewise, physicists can convert energy into mass by slamming two tiny particles (like an electron and a positron) together and forming much larger particles, like protons and neutrons.
Thus the appearance of a photon from the change in an electron’s energy state does not qualify as creation ex nihilo. The photon is created out of something, in this case energy.
Best,
Chris Falter
Was that hominid able to talk like humans ?
Another way of saying Energy and matter are the same thing. Yes, we now know a lot about how all atoms were and are created. Hydrogen, Helium and Lithium at the time of the Big Bang, all other elements billions of years later in stars.
Why doesn’t this qualify as creation ex nihilo? There was no photon, then an instant later there was one which didn’t exist before. A quantum fluctuation creating a photon from nothing. Happens all the time.
What if the exact same quantum process occurred at the instant of the Big Bang would this qualify as creation ex nihilo?
For the purposes of our discussion I would describe nothing as having all fields in their ground state throughout the entire universe, or perhaps the non-existence of our current space time/universe.
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All fields in their ground state throughout the entire universe sounds a lot like conditions at the instant of the beginning of the inflationary period of the Big Bang. But all fields in their ground state is something and not nothing. And you are right - space, time, and matter did not exist yet.
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Agreed.
I agree that it happens all the time. But the photons arise from a quantum field, not from nihilo.
A car rolls off an assembly line in Detroit. One moment there was no car, the next moment there was. Was it created ex nihilo? No, the car “stuff” was assembled from other “stuff”–steel, rubber, plastic, etc. In the same way, we can say that the photon “stuff” arose from quantum field “stuff.”
The same logic would apply to the Big Bang.
I apologize for the use of the highly technical nomenclature. 
It occurs to me that we have a moderator who is far more qualified to discuss these physics concepts. @Casper_Hesp, I’m sure that you can formulate a response far more astute and accurate than I ever could. Do you care to chime in?
Thanks for the conversation, Patrick. If you care to continue our tete-a-tete, I would be happy to oblige.
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Chris,
I am enjoying our tete-a-tete too. Perhaps we will both learn something new.
Responding to above, I think what you wrote is that nothingness doesn’t and never existed. The universe we live in was always something, there was never before the Big Bang. And nothingness is not part of space as nothingness can’t exist in a volume of space because particle/anto-particles keep being created out of nothing.
Sounds really bizarre but QM keeps being proven correct in every experiment to date.
Hi Patrick, I wouldn’t phrase it quite that way, but I think we are in agreement on that.
I agree with that, too.
I definitely wouldn’t phrase it that way. I make the claim that God always existed. To the extent that the eternal existence of God means that nothingness never existed, I would agree.
Yes, it is all in the phrasing. It is very hard to explain nothingness. But I don’t think it useful to continue to use the Latin creation ex nihilo any longer. Saying it in Latin gives it a mysticism that it shouldn’t have. Today we are doing real science trying to figure out on how the universe came to be 13.8 billion years ago. Terms like singularity, as undefined as they are, have less mysticism associated with it than nihilo.
I’m not sure. I agree that “ex nihilo” does sound a bit mystic, but on the other hand “scientific” words like singularity give a reassuring sense of scientific authority that they really don’t have. Nearly all the ‘real science’ you mention is not devoted to figuring out where the singularity came from, but what happened after it had come to be. The mathematics behind the origin of the singularity is not much more than the modern equivalent of the old enquiry about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin - an attempt to rationalise what, at present, lacks any observational or experimental evidence to direct our enquiry.
Hi @Chris_Falter,
Sorry for remaining silent until now. I must admit, I often steer clear of this kind of discussions because they don’t seem to lead anywhere.
The whole idea of creating something from “nothing” revolves around a discussion of what qualifies as “truly nothing”. In accordance with what you were getting at, you need some quantum field in its ground state to allow for excitations that correspond with particles such as photons. So that does not really qualify as “nothing” even from a physical point of view. For an atheist, the only solution seems to be to conclude that “something” always existed in one form or another, or that it had a timeless existence. Then again, every theist believes something similar: God’s existence is eternal and timeless.
That last point leads me to believe that discussions about the First Cause in terms of natural history aren’t really fruitful. For all that I care, the primordial quantum chaos could be eternal or it could have been completely “timeless” at the singularity, before our current laws of physics were established. Instead of trying to pinpoint the First Cause in the chronology of natural history, I think it is more useful to think about it in terms of the “primary” cause. The primary cause is that which allows both time and space (and everything in it) to exist at all or, alternatively, that which allowed the primordial sea of quantum fluctuations to give rise to our spacetime.
As Christians we believe in a personal God who simply declares “I AM” (denoted by YHWH) and that God created nature. In that sense, God is the most fundamental (or primary) cause of nature. An atheist needs to assign this power of declaring one’s own existence to nature by admitting that “it simply is.” That is where the problem lies, because granting nature such god-like powers makes it into another god, albeit an impersonal one. If atheists accept nature as their god, they aren’t atheists after all.
My two cents,
Casper
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