I appreciate @pevaquark over at PeacefulScience.org, too, and you are correct about his patience and graciousness. He has more of both than I, certainly!
1 Like
Yes. This is a good description of the difficulty with Hawking’s idea of the universe popping into existence from a quantum fluctuation. It explains why the idea never became very popular compared to the multiverse idea.
It also occurs to me that this points to a unfalsifiable aspect of both atheist trends of thought, that of the eternal existence and that of materialistic reductionism. Whenever things don’t quite fit what they believe, then in the first case they can simply posit a bigger cosmos from which the observable universe is derived and in the second they can simply posit composition by even smaller pieces.
3 Likes
- The Benardete Grim Reaper Paradox
Alexander Pruss (Pruss 2009) has deployed the Grim Reaper paradox (Benardete 1964,
Hawthorne 2000) as an argument for the discrete character of time. In Benardete’s
paradox, we are to suppose that there is an infinite number of Grim Reaper mechanisms,
each of which is engineered to do two things: first, to check whether the victim, Fred, is
still alive at the Grim Reaper’s appointed time, and, second, if he is still alive, to kill him
instantaneously. The last Grim Reaper (Reaper 1) performs this dual task at exactly one
minute after noon. The next-to-last Reaper, Reaper 2, is appointed to perform the task at exactly one-half minute after noon. In general, each Reaper number n is assigned the
moment 1/2^n minute after noon. There is no first Reaper: for each Reaper n, there are
infinitely many Reapers who are assigned moments of time earlier than Reaper n’s
appointment.
It is certain that Fred does not survive the ordeal. In order to survive the whole ordeal, he
must still be alive at one minute after twelve, but, we have stipulated that, if he survives
until 12:01 p.m., then Reaper 1 will kill him. We can also prove that Fred will not survive
until 12:01, since in order to do so, he must be alive at 30 seconds after 12, in which case
Reaper 2 will have killed him. In the same way, we can prove that Fred cannot survive
until 1/2^n minutes after 12, for every n. Thus, no Grim Reaper can have the opportunity
to kill Fred. Thus, it is impossible that Fred survive, and also impossible that any Reaper
kill him! However, it seems also to be impossible for Fred to die with certainty and yet to
do so without any cause.
This was the original version by Alexander Pruss and Robert Koons. It has since then been developed further into several different versions (paper below). Interesting note: Pruss is an eternalist (four-dimensionalist) while W.L. Craig always presupposed the A-theory of time in defense of the Kalam argument. Smith btw is an A-theorist, too. This paradox seeks to show that actual infinities lead to paradoxes and are thus impossible.
http://www.robkoons.net/media/83c9b25c56d629ffffff810fffffd524.pdf
I thought the fluctuation was the mechanism which brings the multiverse about?
I think this is identical to another argument proposed by Smith for universe not needing cause/being self caused. I have seen criticism of this that he rebutted but frankly, I couldn’t understand it😐
Smith is one of the best atheistic philosophers in the philosophy of religion, but he is let´s say whacky. Positive arguments for atheism are very few, so he tries to produce some of his own. That leads to such bizarre propositions.
Basically Vallicellas critic of Smiths model is that it suffers from overdetermination. Smith proposes that the universe, albeit having a beginning, due to the continuity of time and the definition of every state being instantanious and half-open, has infinitely many states and therefor the tools to cause its own existence. Vallicella pointed out that this can´t be right, since a parody argument can use the exact same premises, so that, in Vallicellas example, Smith caused himself to exist.
Vallicella reprinted his article on his blog, here is it: https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2012/06/could-the-universe-cause-itself-to-exist.html
If you have trouble to understand it, I think I can help.
Thanks @DoKo
I think I understand the gist of it. TBH I didn’t think much about this particular argument in the first place but it’s always good to ask opinion of others.
Before theists get too excited by this and think this means the quantum fluctuation idea is unworkable… frankly this is the only a similar order of difficulty that theists have with free will. And the same solution I employ for free will will also work in this case, and that is employing a bootstrapping that basically goes outside a strict time-ordered causality. In other words, the criticism can be compared to asking what went before big bang, when we know that the big bang is the origin of time itself.
Why should theists get excited? Why shouldn’t we “like” quantum fluctuation?
Some theists like to claim that atheism is irrational and unworkable, shooting down any alternative to a divine creation. Thus it is not enough for them to simply explain that an idea is compatible with theism.
2 Likes
@marta, Welcome!
I agree. If there would be a real scientific theory like this, we would have heard about it. Another reason why I am confident that it does not exist is that scientific theories must be proven. From what I see this is speculation which cannot be proven, at least in this world.
I read Hawking’s Brief History of Time (1996 edition.) Hawking of course does not believe in God, but I did not find a theory such as Smith talks about and of course you can read it for yourself.
Hawking seems intent of showing that God did not cause the universe to come into being and Smith uses that language also. That of source is not the language that the Bible uses, but the language of Aristotle. We believe that God is the Creator of the universe, makes God totally responsible for this event, not the Cause, which could be just the trigger that sets off this event.
The Big Bang as science describes it is the Beginning of both time and space. Matter, energy, space, and time all came into existence within nanoseconds of each other and they came out of nothing, that is nothing physical. Therefore it seems that the universe did not create itself, while God Who is not limited by time and space might have created the universe.
1 Like
Hi @Relates. Might you expand on what you mean by ‘source’ and ‘trigger’ in this context? Aristotle uses the language of causation in 4 ways (material, formal, efficient, and final) which do you have in view here? Thanks.
Mitchell, I’d like to hear your opinion on the infinity paradoxes
Maybe you need to be more specific. When I look up the term, all I see is confusion that arises from treating infinity as if it were a number. Infinity is not in the set of numbers (whether integers or reals).
For example, Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel shows that even when full, the Hotel with an infinite number of rooms can always make room for more guests. This simply reflects the following equations:
Infinity + 1 = infinity.
Infinity + infinity = infinity.
But you cannot treat these the same as numbers and conclude that last equation means that
infinity - infinity = infinity.
The truth is that there are different ways to take away infinite number of things from an infinite set and the result depends on how you do so. For example, if you subtract infinity in the first equation you get
infinity - infinity = 1
Thus we say that
infinity - infinity = undefined.
The above also does not mean that infinity is just infinity and always the same thing. There are higher orders of infinity. For example, the number of real numbers which is the same infinity as the number of irrational numbers is a greater order of infinity than the number of natural numbers (which is the same as the number of rational numbers). We know when infinities are of the same order because we can set up a one to one correspondence. And we know when infinities are not of the same order because assuming a one to one correspondence leads to contradictions.
I for one appreciate that you’ve never shown any eagerness to throw a net over the lot of us in anything I’ve ever heard you say.
Got to say though, I’ve never heard of an atheist showing any interest in a ‘proof’ of atheism. Doesn’t mean plenty of them aren’t convinced atheism is supported by the failure of theists to produce support for what they consider extraordinary claims. But as for producing positive support for their negative claim, don’t hold your breath.
As for myself I don’t feel obliged to support my disbelief in anything supernatural including a literal God. However I do think a glib dismissal which equates gods with unicorns is not only unnecessarily rude but shows an unbecoming lack of intellectual curiousity.
3 Likes
And yet I do that even though I am a theist. I think we have to acknowledge that no proof or objective evidence means no proof or objective evidence and that puts our subjective belief in God and angels in exactly the same category as the belief of other people in unicorns, fairies, ghosts, psychics, healings crystals, UFOs, and… the multiverse. Just plain honesty and fairness requires this.
So… with such honesty and fairness out of the way… I think the issue is more that of following… that it is demonstrable that not everything which is true necessarily has proof or objective evidence. …And we really need to stop making our own experience of life the measure of reality itself.
Though… I do acknowledge that your approach to this is somewhat different – looking for the psychological functionality of God belief and God experience in human existence.
1 Like
The only item on that list I think is different than the others is the multiverse. In every other case we are asked to consider seriously something for which not one uncontroversial exemplar can be pointed to. What we call the “universe” hasn’t earned its “uni-” prefix. There is no more evidence for a unique big bang phenomenon that there is for more than one. ‘Universes’ exist -or at least one does. This one. The phenomenon has an exemplar. If there have been other singularities we know something, though not everything, about what would have followed.
The problem for supernatural phenomena such as God is much, much greater. There is no shortage of possible instances of gods in the world’s literature and in oral legends. But in every case the supernatural being must be inferred from a story or legend set in the natural world. You can be convinced of the provenance for the account of what is claimed to have happened in the natural world. You can be convinced that the account if true surely implies a supernatural God. You just can’t know anything about that supernatural phenomenon apart from what the scribes in the natural world have recorded. So at some point you have to rely on a faith step - or else get busy with metaphysical apologetics.
No argument here. But I fear some will hear “not everything which-is-necessarily-true has proof or objective evidence”. I’d prefer to say that for which objective evidence does not exist may or may not be true. But whether it is necessarily true will either have to rely on metaphysical mumbo jumbo or a frank admission of faith. (Can you tell which I find more admirable?)
Forgot to address this point, which I still think goes too far. God belief (and I think I’d include belief in animal spirits here) have an ancient and near universal role in human cultures. Dragons, ghosts and unicorns are less pervasive. The ghosts, or spirits of the dead, would be the next most ubiquitous. But claims made for the powers of ghosts are usually more modest than those made of Gods. I can feel the nearness of my dead brother’s spirit or sense what my mother might have said in a situation, but I don’t imagine that they can intercede to figuratively move mountains on my behalf.
Of course I’m not arguing that gods are any more objectively real than these others. All have a subjective reality in our experience. But what we think the psychic phenomena we experience are capable of will be very different than what many believers assume to be possible of supernatural phenomena. I believe in psychic phenomena because I have first hand experience of those. Here I have nothing so exotic in mind as bending spoons, telepathy or seeing the future. I find accounting for the mundane such as creativity, inspiration and insight challenging enough. Without more to go on, I choose to ignore claims that the supernatural can mess with the natural. Lots of things can mess with what we experience psychically, but so far as I know none of them can affect the physical world except through the actions of the bodies which support those minds.
Consider the equation x + 5 = 6. I posit that a multitude of solutions exist to this equation and in support of it I provide an exemplar: 1 is a solution to this equation. Has this really added any likelihood whatsoever to the existence of a multitude of solutions? No. I repeat. No proof or objective evidence is no proof or objective evidence. I am afraid your argument for the existence of the multiverse is just as subjective as all the arguments I have heard for the existence of God.
Agreed.
Such roles vary greatly with period and culture. And frankly some of the so called “gods” in different cultures which you use to prop up your claim of universality are rather similar to the unicorns, fairies, and ghosts of other cultures.
So… I would suggest that there is some degree of continuum in the psychological functionality of all these beliefs. At the very least I think they give more substance to our capacities for imagination, abstraction, and transcendence over mundane physical realities. I am reminded of Terry Pratchett’s “The Hogsfather” where Death suggests that all these myths and fairy tales are the little lies we believe in as children in order to practice for our belief in the bigger “lies” of justice, love, and such. Of course I wouldn’t use the word “lies” for these but I think He still makes a very good point.
2 Likes
Neglected to say I appreciated that. It is meant to be a phenomenological approach. While the phenomenological facts of our subjective experience are certainly not a reliable measure of objective reality, they do constitute a prominent position in our personal realities. I think this is where we sometimes encounter conscience, anguish, hope and all the rest.
I don’t think God exists to literally put together the physical world but rather to make possible the world of our experience. This little focussed light of our conscious mind with its free reign is not free of the totality of its self. Like some ancient deer with greatly oversized antlers which threaten its very survival, I think our oversized powers of abstraction can lead us astray from what our beings require. Rather than serve ourselves and our communities we can get lost in wrinkles and hypotheticals. If God were an ally to these highly experimental modes of cognition we experience ourselves to be, perhaps a co-product of consciousness imbued with the wisdom of how our kind should live, perhaps that would be enough. Some might even call it a godsend. But who knows? Whatever we decide, some commitment to and faith in the Other might help. But with our huge, gaudy antlers it can be hard to believe something so unsophisticated can be relevant. Perhaps we suffer, pathologize and psychologize in order to reach a point where we realize we can’t do it alone. Ultimately it probably doesn’t matter whether we project the Other into the objective world or approach it within, so long as we connect.
Well, I’m wondering whether what’s possible in the realm of mathematics always translates in to the real world. So mathematically it is OK with infinite regress, but would it work the same in physical reality?
I have to admit I find this comment slightly extreme. First I’m not convinced anyone ever believed in unicorns and so on, in the same way we don’t believe in various fictional characters from movies etc. I suppose legends were a sort of entertainment before TV was invented.
C S Lewis made distinction between imagining different worlds and actually believing in them, and my experience is exactly that.
As to the multiverse… I know there’s no tangible proof but some say it is inevitable if current laws of physics are correct, or that at least it’s very likely to be true because mathematical models only work if we assume it to be true… So one could say there are some strong pointers, therefore I’m not sure we could equate this with unicorns?
I will just mention that I’m not bothered by multiverse in the slightest and in this matter I’m 50/50, but I know some people are worried and I’m interested to hear various opinions.
Best wishes, Marta
2 Likes