The Wisdom Chronicle is designed to bring nuggets of wisdom from the dozens of books I read every year in all genres. Each week, I endeavor to share the best of what I have gleaned. The determination of relevance lies with you. Blessings, Jim Whiddon

 

171. DATING “Who can I date?” question has two parts: (1) You can date anyone it would be okay to marry; and (2) You can’t date anyone it wouldn’t be okay to marry. Why these rules? Because dating is about marriage. It’s not a search for fun or a search for sex. It’s a search for a suitable marriage partner. Marriage is the state men and women were designed for, not dating. If you merely want to socialize without excluding members of the other sex and without the intention of marriage, okay, but you’re better off doing that in groups.”

Excerpt From: Budziszewski, J. “How to Stay Christian in College.”

172. COURAGE “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

— ANAIS NIN

173. COURAGE “Winston Churchill is often quoted as saying, “There comes into the life of every man a task for which he and he alone is uniquely suited. What a shame if that moment finds him either unwilling or unprepared for that which would become his finest hour.”

Excerpt From: Rainey, Dennis. “Stepping Up.”

174. F.E.A.R = False Expectations Appearing Real –Don Truex

175. CHRISTIAN FRIENDSHIP “Men are notoriously bad at friendships. Wait, that’s too generous. Actually, we’re pathetic at being a friend. Either we surround ourselves with a group of “men” or “guys” who help keep the bar safely within reach (this way we can feel good about ourselves), or we isolate ourselves (this way we don’t have to deal with it). In the first instance, we’re never challenged as we dwell safely in mediocrity. In the second instance, no one ever gets in to see the truth. If someone did get in, the exposure would be too embarrassing. In either case, it’s a recipe for immaturity and stagnation.” It’s wrong to operate with friends on surface levels. It’s disingenuous and dishonest to pass the time in friendships serving up platitudes and niceties”

Excerpt From: Byron Forrest Yawn. “What Every Man Wishes His Father Had Told Him.”

176. JEWISH BUSINESS LAWS “The constitution of Judaism, known in its totality as the Torah, a comprehensive blueprint of reality whose foundation is the Bible, contains over ten times as many laws dealing with honesty in business as it has laws concerning the kosher dietary rules. Furthermore, to accept the theory that Jews prosper primarily by cheating, we would have to accept that cheating, or being obnoxious, confers an advantage in business. But dishonesty and loathsome behavior only pay off in the very short term. Reputation is key.”

Excerpt From: Rabbi Daniel Lapin. “Thou Shall Prosper.”

177. FATHERS “God gives us a unique opportunity as fathers to join him in what has to be one of the most noble, transcendent assignments we’ll ever have as men: He gives us the privilege of joining with Him in shaping the next generation of men.”

Excerpt From: Rainey, Dennis. “Stepping Up.”

178. DEMOCRACY “One story Plato used to teach about the limitations of democracy was about a ship in the middle of the ocean. On this ship was a gruff, burly captain who was rather shortsighted and slightly deaf. He and his crew followed the principles of majority rule on decisions about navigational direction. They had a very skilled navigator who knew how to read the stars on voyages, but the navigator was not very popular and was rather introverted. In the panic of being lost, the captain and crew made a decision to follow the most charismatic, eloquent, and persuasive of the crew members. They ignored and ridiculed the navigator’s suggestions, remained lost, and ultimately starved to death at sea.”

Excerpt From: Simmons, Annette. “The Story Factor.”

179. CHRIST “God knew that the law as laid out in the Old Testament was confusing and hard to remember; so he sent his Son to earth as a person in whom we could see the perfection of the law. By making the Word flesh, God made Jesus a model for holiness. He communicated the perfection of the law through the person of Jesus Christ.”

Excerpt From: Joe Carter & John Coleman. “How to Argue like Jesus.”

180. CULTURAL CHALLENGES “Christ-followers contend with two opposing temptations. The first is cultural withdrawal. When we remove ourselves completely from the surrounding culture, we neglect Jesus’s calling to be “the light of the world” (Matt. 5:14). We have a duty, a healthy Christian obligation, to bless the world around us. The prophet Jeremiah gave this challenge to God’s people exiled in Babylon: “Build homes, and plan to stay. Plant gardens, and eat the food they produce. Marry and have children. Then find spouses for them so that you may have many grandchildren. Multiply! Do not dwindle away! And work for the peace and prosperity of the city where I sent you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, for its welfare will determine your welfare” (Jer. 29:5–7 NLT). Read that last line again. The second temptation is cultural accommodation. A healthy desire to influence culture can turn too easily into an unhealthy preoccupation with acceptance by mainstream culture. When this happens, we consume what the world has to offer and end up with lives no different from anyone else’s.”

Excerpt From: Kinnaman, David. “You Lost Me.”

 

In 1948 an English professor at the University of Chicago penned a book whose main idea resonates well into the modern world and into today’s news headlines. The professor was Richard Weaver and his book was Ideas Have Consequences.

The main thesis of Weaver’s book is that philosophy undergirds all of society. What we believe about reality matters. What we say or think is real matters. Language, and how we use it is important.

In 1948 many intellectuals in Europe and America were left dumbfounded as to how such atrocities could have been committed by Germany in WWII. In the 1930’s, Germany was one of THE most literate nations in the world, so it wasn’t that Germans were ill-informed or unintelligent. After all, Germany had produced such brilliant musical luminaries as Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and hugely influential philosophers like Hegel, Kant, etc…

The problem, as Weaver saw it, wasn’t literacy or education per se, it was the KIND of philosophy that was informing the German view of reality.

Weaver believed that the root problem was the philosophy of nominalism. What is nominalism?

Read more

The Wisdom Chronicle is designed to bring nuggets of wisdom from the dozens of books I read every year in all genres. Each week, I endeavor to share the best of what I have gleaned. The determination of relevance lies with you. Blessings, Jim Whiddon

161. CHILDREN “When Jesus said you have to enter the kingdom like a child, He meant you have to enter with a child’s trust, not with a child’s understanding.”
— Unknown
162. HEART, SOUL AND MIND “That expression “heart, soul, and mind” that we’re so familiar with is an idiom. It’s a way of saying love God with everything you have. Heart our affections. Soul our will. Mind our intentions. That is a wholehearted love for God.”
Excerpt From: Byron Forrest Yawn. “What Every Man Wishes His Father Had Told Him.”
163. OPTIMISM “Optimistic people see blessings amid burdens. They realize the sun always breaks through sooner or later. It refuses to be defined by the presence of dark clouds. After all, the dark clouds are nothing but mist; the sun is built to last.”
Excerpt From: Jeremiah, David. “Searching for Heaven on Earth.”
164. DISCIPLINED INVESTING “There’s an old saying: don’t just do something, stand there. When dealing with investments there is often this feeling that we should be doing something. A lack of action implies we’re missing an opportunity or making a mistake. Cultivating a garden takes lots of hard work, but at some point you have to let the plants grow. If you have a plan, let it work.”
Excerpt From: Richards, Carl. “The Behavior Gap.”
165. ACTION “From thinking proceeds speaking, thence to acting is often but a single step” –G Washington.
166. LAWS AND MORALS “The Twenty-first Amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933, and alcohol sale and consumption went back to being local and state concerns. The debacle led millions of Evangelicals to drop out of politics for decades afterward. Prohibition reminds us of the dangers of using the federal government to enforce private morality. Still, our laws will always reflect, to some degree, our moral beliefs, our religious and cultural ideas.
At the same time, laws shape our morality. Scholars refer to this as the teaching function of law.”
Excerpt From: James Robison & Jay W. Richards. “Indivisible.”
167. WHY AMERICA GREAT “I sought for the key to the greatness and genius of America in her harbors … in her fertile fields and boundless forests, in her rich mines and vast world commerce; in her public school system and institutions of learning. I sought for it in her democratic Congress and in her matchless Constitution. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” — De Tocqueville
168. EDUCATION “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. “For enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,” James Madison noted
in The Federalist Papers. He also pointed out in a speech to the Virginia ratifying convention on June 16, 1788, that “there are more instances of the
abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”

Excerpt From: Ben Carson, M.D. “America the Beautiful.”
169. ENEMIES “One of the great arts of living is that you hear truth in the mouth of your enemies, that you let your critics be the unpaid guardians of your soul…..search for the diamonds of truth in the dunghill of men’s opinions.”
Excerpt From: Mansfield, Stephen. “Mansfield’s Book of Manly Men.”
170. SIX LIFE PUZZLERS
• Why is it easier to criticize than to compliment?
• Why is it easier to give others blame than to give them credit?
• Why is it that so many who are quick to make suggestions find it so difficult
to make decisions?
• Why can’t we realize that it only weakens those we want to help when we do
things for them that they should do for themselves?
• Why is it so much easier to allow emotions rather than reason to control our
decisions?
• Why does the person with the least to say usually take the longest to say it?”
Excerpt From: Wooden, John. “Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections
On and Off the Court.”

The Bible is not just one book, but sixty-six books composed over a period of around fifteen hundred years. The stories recorded in the Bible are not a myth, but real events recorded by real people who lived in real places in history. This means two things: First, as a science, archaeology can often provide a correlation of those stories with material evidence: that they either happened as the Bible records or that there is no evidence that an event happened as the Bible states. Secondly, since the stories in the Bible are a record of real events in the past, the twin sciences of archaeology and geography become indispensable tools to help us understand the Biblical world and even provide additional evidence that the Bible is a reliable source of valuable historical & geographical information.

Archaeology in the “scientific sense,” has been around since at least the mid-nineteenth century, and there has been much that we have learned about the ancient world since that time.[1] Since it’s been well over a century since archaeologists have been digging in the lands of the Bible, the task of knowing what’s been discovered so far and how archaeology and geography correlates with the Bible can be a bit daunting. The following is a list of five books (with links) that will hopefully provide help to the average person in understanding the value of archaeology in illuminating and affirming the Biblical record.

Read more

151. YOU RETIRING? “Don’t put a period where God is putting a comma. Let Him punctuate your life story as He sees fit.” — Unknown

152. TAKE ACTION “Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.” –Thomas Carlyle

153. WHAT MAKES A MANLY MAN “A willingness to subordinate his own desires and aspirations to greater causes: his God, his nation, and his family. He put the welfare and security of others before his own. He knows he is blessed by a sovereign and loving God to be an American, and he believes his family is a gift from God for which he is responsible. Physical strength is never what makes a man manly. Rather, it is moral strength that identifies the true man.”
Excerpt From: Mansfield, Stephen. “Mansfield’s Book of Manly Men.

154. SELF-MADE MEN? “If you know history, you know that there is no such thing as a self-made man or self-made woman. We are shaped by people we have never met.” —David McCullough

155. EMPATHY “How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.”—GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER

156. ATTITUDE “I believe the single most significant decision I can make on a day-today basis is my choice of attitude. It is more important than my past, my education, my bankroll, my successes or failures, fame or pain, what other people think of me or say about me, my circumstances, or my position. Attitude . . . keeps me going or cripples my progress. It alone fuels my fire or assaults my hope. When my attitudes are right, there’s no barrier too high, no valley too deep, no dream too extreme, no challenge too great for me.
Yet, we must admit that we spend more of our time concentrating and fretting over the things that can’t be changed in life than we do giving attention to the one thing that can, our choice of attitude.”
Excerpt From: Charles R. Swindoll. “Wisdom for the Way.”

157. G.K CHESTERTON CLASSICS:
“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
“Do not free the camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.”
“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
“I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.”
“Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.”
“No man knows he is young while he is young.”
“One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.”
“People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.”
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”
“There is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.”
“The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.”
“To be clever enough to get all the money, one must be stupid enough to want it.”
158. GOLF “If you think golf is relaxing, you must not be playing it right.” — Bob Hope
159. GRAVEYARD The story goes that a fellow was walking past a cemetery when he noticed a tombstone with the following inscription:
“As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, you are sure to be.
So may I say, as now I lie,
Prepare yourself, to follow me.”
The gentleman took out a piece of chalk and wrote underneath the inscription:
“To follow you I’m not content,
Until I know which way you went.”
Excerpt From: Wooden, John. “Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court.”
160. THE UNIVERSE “When Francis Bacon spoke of the mysteries of science, he made it sound as if God had set up an Easter egg hunt to entertain a pack of toddlers. God “took delight to hide his works, to the end to have them found out.”
Why would God operate in such a roundabout way? If his intent was to proclaim His majesty, why not arrange the stars to spell out BEHOLD in blazing letters? To seventeenth-century thinkers, this was no mystery. God could have put on a display of cosmic fireworks, but that would have been to win us over by shock and fear. When it came to intellectual questions, coercion was the wrong tool. Having created human beings and endowed us with the power of reason, God surely meant for us to exercise our gifts. The mission of science was to honor God, and the best way to pay Him homage was to discover and proclaim the perfection of His plans.”
Excerpt From: Dolnick, Edward. “The Clockwork Universe.”

This is my last blog dealing with the origin of the universe as an argument for the existence of God. I’ll examine the issue of whether new physics might be discovered to enable the universe to be past eternal. I’ll offer a couple of philosophical arguments against the possibility of an eternal past. If these arguments succeed we can be confident that no scientific discoveries could ever show that the universe has existed forever. Indeed if these arguments are sound, the scientific evidence I’ve offered so far would become superfluous.

If the universe has existed forever, this would entail an actually infinite number of past events. I use the term “actually infinite” to distinguish it from a potential infinite quantity. No one doubts that the number of future events can grow without limit but this is merely a potential infinite. Any finite time in the future there would still have been a finite number of events since the current time so the infinity is just potential – it represents an unattainable limit as this article by George Ellis, a prominent cosmologist, indicates.

Is it possible for actually infinite numbers of entities to be realized in the actual world?

One of the greatest mathematicians of all-time, David Hilbert, certainly didn’t think so: “the infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought.“ Georg Cantor established a mathematically rigorous way of dealing with the concept of infinity that is very useful for mathematical and scientific calculations. Although Hilbert defended Cantor’s work, he argued that infinities couldn’t exist in the actual world or they would lead to absurdities.

Some readers may be thinking that if it is mathematically possible it has to be physically possible. But not everything used in mathematics necessarily implies a direct correspondence with physical ontology (nature of being). Infinitesimals are mathematically feasible and highly useful in calculus, but modern physics holds that everything is quantized. Mathematical consistency and coherence doesn’t necessarily imply physical realization – there are abstract mathematical systems that can be constructed that are coherent but not all of them are necessarily realized anywhere in physics. In computer science we often choose between multiple mathematically equivalent but quite different ways of computing things – they can’t all correspond to physical ontology because they entail fundamentally different ways of modeling reality. Infinities that show up in physics equations are considered problematic unless and until some type of renormalization can be performed.

So if we can show that absurdities result if actual infinites exist, then we have good reasons for rejecting the possibility of an actually infinite number of past events – even if it is mathematically feasible. Here is how philosopher Peter S Williams makes this argument to a lay audience:

Suppose I ask you to loan me a certain book, but you say: ‘I don’t have it right now, but I’ll ask my friend to lend me his copy and then I’ll lend it to you.’

  • Suppose your friend says the same thing and so on…
    1. If the process of asking to borrow the book goes on forever, I’ll never get the book
    2. If I get the book, the process that led to me getting it can’t have gone on forever

Somewhere down the line of requests to borrow the book, someone had the book without having to borrow it. It’s easy to see how this analogy applies to the Kalam – if the arrival of the current event/book required infinitely many prior events, it would have never arrived. You cannot traverse an actual infinity. If the current event/book did arrive, the process that led to it couldn’t have gone on forever.

Another example of the physical impossibility of an actually infinite number of items is the following. Suppose that there is one particle of some type for every positive whole number (integer) – we can think of these as comprising a mathematical set in which we’ve numbered the particles. The number of particles is aleph null and represents a so-called countable infinity. Suppose this type of particle is not stable and thus half of the particles decay in some time interval. One could think of the number of particles in this set as now consisting of the even integers. But one can also reach a contradictory answer that the number of particles is the same as the original by proving mathematically that the number of even, positive integers is the same as the number of positive integers.

This mathematical proof is quite simply done by showing a one-to-one correspondence between the elements in the set. For every integer in the original set, there is one integer in the set of even integers (2,4,6, …) obtained by just doubling the original value. Thus, the number of particles in each set is mathematically identical even though half of the original particles underwent decay. After we wait another half-life, half of the remaining particles have now decayed so the set would consist of particles (4,8,12, …). However it can also be mathematically proven that the number of positive integers that are multiples of 4 is identical to the number of positive integers. Have the number of particles been reduced or not? We reach contradictory results – no matter how many half-lifes we wait, the number of particles is the unchanged and has been reduced as per the usual physics equation. Thus, dealing with the actually infinite in reality would violate the laws of physics.

Philosopher Alexander Pruss offers at 6 arguments in support of premise 2 of the Kalam – that there couldn’t have been an infinite number of past events. Although he thinks actual infinities might be possible in general, he doesn’t think an infinite causal chain is possible. “This strengthens the Kalaam argument by showing that the premises can be weakened: the Kalaam argument only needs the kind of causal anti-infinitism that I now cautiously accept.”

Objection: But doesn’t Christianity require that God has lived through an infinite number of events?

There has never been a time at which God has not existed. However, if time is a physical entity that began to exist, it seems to have been something brought about by a cause outside of time. The classic theistic understanding is that God is an eternal being that exists outside of time. There is an interesting passage in the New Testament, Jude 24, that speaks of God having dominion and glory before time began. See also Titus 1:2 for another Biblical reference consistent with the understanding from modern physics that time had a beginning. As evidence of God being able to see into the future one can study Biblical prophecies of the future state of cities such as Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, Ninevah, Ashkelon and peoples such as the Philistines, Edomites, and Jews. (See this link to explore this evidence for divine inspiration of texts known to be written before the fulfillment)

It may be hard for us to grasp something that exists outside of time since we are constrained in this realm. Many scientists, however, do posit the existence of other space-time dimensions and explain how we would be unaware of these – e.g. see the book Flatland, which Hawking and Sagan point to an illustration of the possibility of unseen dimensions. Perhaps God exists in another realm or dimension of time or perhaps William Lane Craig is right in theorizing that God existed timelessly before creation and stepped into time when He created time.

Final Comments on the Implications of the Kalam

The conclusion of the Kalam is pretty modest. It doesn’t establish the existence of a particular god etc. Deism rather than theism could still be true if this is all we had to go on. The Kalam, however, is a strong refutation of naturalism – the view that nature is all there is. Most atheists hold to naturalism and if they admit that it’s false they’ve undermined the most significant traditional arguments for atheism.

A transcendent cause to the Universe possesses some properties of God such as being beyond space and time and being immaterial. It’s pretty hard to deny this as atheist scientist Lewis Wolpert discovered in his debate with William Lane Craig. Wolpert admited that the universe had a beginning saying “well we know that, nobody disputes that.” The ease with which he is willing to admit this should bother you if you’re a skeptic as it is yet another testimony to how this argument depends only upon mainstream, widely accepted science. Wolpert’s assertion that it might have been a very special computer fails miserably as one can see here.

At this very moment I am sitting at a small wooden desk. To my left is a window that looks out onto a body of water. It’s no ordinary body of water. Mountains surround it on almost all sides. As the sun goes down my eyes soak in the beauty of the gray surface of the water against the backdrop of the mountains extending just beyond its edge. By this time the setting sun has engulfed the range in a fiery, amber light.

photo

Sea of Galilee

 

The beauty alone is compelling enough to move my heart to lift a prayer and a praise to God. But knowing that this water is the famous Sea of Galilee is overwhelming. Knowing that the soil my feet are treading upon is the very soil where Jesus did the majority of his ministry is more than my mind can digest all at once. This is a special moment.

Many of you know that CrossExamined.org and Living Passages have been planning a Footsteps of Jesus Tour in Israel for the summer. The plan was for thirty-five of us to meet yesterday in Tel-Aviv to begin a long and epic list of biblically significant destinations. We have just concluded our first day of our tour. I’ll be posting updates so that you can also take part in the trip.

Here goes a fly-by-summary of our first day.

We started out in Shiloh. In the Old Testament after the Israelites crossed the Jordan River to occupy the Promise Land, Shiloh is the place where the Tabernacle of God had it’s first permanent resting place. The Holy of Holies and the Ark of the Covenant definitely crossed over these grounds. This is also where Hannah prayed for a son before she became pregnant with Samuel as well as where Eli trained Samuel for a large portion of his childhood.

Next we toured through the West Bank. We saw cites built by Herod the Great and a church that is thought to have been the final resting place of John the Baptist’s body. We walked up Mount Gerizim and looked across the valley to Mount Ebal. Here Moses commanded the Israelites to stand, six tribes on Mt. Gerizim and the other six tribes on Mt. Ebal. They were to shout out the blessings and curses that awaited them depending on whether they acted towards God with obedience or rebellion. Reading Deuteronomy 27:12-13 now is a completely different experience.

Something else special about Gerizim is that just below us in the valley between Gerizim and Ebal is Jacob’s well. Remember in John 4 when Jesus approached the Samaritan women at Jacob’s well for water? In verse 20 she refers to Mount Gerizim by saying that her ancestors worshiped on “this” mountain. We were standing on that very Mountain. The woman at the well probably would never have been able to fathom that more than 2000 years later, this mountain is still the place where the few surviving Samaritan descendants continue to worship to this day.

photo 2-1

Standing on Mt. Gerizim looking at Mt. Ebal

Finally we made our way down the mountain to Jacob’s Well. Today an orthodox church has been built around the well. We entered the church quietly and then proceeded down another staircase below the floor to the well. The well is about 130 ft. deep.We drank the cool and pure water thinking about how Jesus’ physical thirst was quenched by the water of this very well. He sat on this very ledge.

photo 3

Dr. Frank Turek drinking from Jacob’s Well

I look forward to sharing our adventures with you again tomorrow.

In my blog series on scientific evidence for God, I’ve initially focused on the origin of the universe. I defended the Kalam cosmological argument and argued that since currently known physics shows that the Universe had to have a beginning there must be a transcendent cause possessing some attributes of the classical understanding of God (as a spaceless, timeless, and immaterial being) Thus, the Kalam provides good reasons for believing in theism over atheism – I claim it provides epistemic support rather than constituting a deductive proof because we cannot prove the premises beyond the shadow of a doubt.

I appreciate the comments and interaction thus far! John raised another good question recently about whether the quantum vacuum could have appeared from nothing and I responded briefly:

Even if our entire universe fluctuated into existence from the quantum vacuum this would not be a defeater for the Kalam unless one could also show that the quantum vacuum is eternal. If spacetime had a beginning, as currently known physics[1] indicates, then so did the quantum vacuum and thus a transcendent spaceless, timeless cause of the Universe would still be required. But if the quantum vacuum itself could emerge from absolutely nothing then the materialist/naturalist would have a path to creating a universe without a god.

I promised to blog in response to this important question, so here it is.

Is it possible for the quantum vacuum to emerge from absolutely nothing?

By “nothing” I mean simply the usual English definition of “not anything.” The concept of “nothing” defined in this way has no properties and thus no potentiality to bring about something. A widely accepted tenet of philosophy is that “out of nothing, nothing comes.” The quantum vacuum is certainly not nothing because it has properties and ones that can be modelled quite accurately using mathematical equations! The quantum vacuum is best thought of as the lowest energy state in spacetime. Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal of the UK, explains:

Cosmologists sometimes claim that the universe can arise ‘from nothing’. But they should watch their language, especially when addressing philosophers. We’ve realised ever since Einstein that empty space can have a structure such that it can be warped and distorted. Even if shrunk down to a ‘point’, it is latent with particles and forces – still a far richer construct than the philosopher’s ‘nothing’. Theorists may, some day, be able to write down fundamental equations governing physical reality. But physics can never explain what ‘breathes fire’ into the equations, and actualised them into a real cosmos. The fundamental question of ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ remains the province of philosophers.

Too bad Lawrence Krauss didn’t heed Rees’s warning. Krauss wrote a book entitled “A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing.” The book’s subtitle references this great question of philosophy about which contemporary philosopher Derek Parfit exclaims: “no question is more sublime than why there is a Universe: why there is anything rather than nothing?”

In the comments section of a critical blog written by ardent atheist Jerry Coyne, Krauss ironically admits his book doesn’t live up to its subtitle “I may not be focusing on the classical question that has bother philosophers, but I don’t think I ever claim to.” But Lawrence, you made that the subtitle of your book! So when pressed even Krauss seems to be backing away some from claiming that the Universe can be created from a state of nothingness prior to the existence of a quantum vacuum. Other times he does seem to be claiming this but even Coyne criticizes him for “a bait-and-switch.” Krauss is equivocating between different definitions of nothing in his argumentation.

Whatever Krauss might be claiming there is no basis for claiming that the quantum vacuum can originate from a state of absolutely nothing. There is no physics of non-being. No scientific experiment has ever been performed in the absence of space and time and thus there is no scientific basis for extrapolating from ‘not anything’ to the physical world.

For a more detailed critique of Krauss by those much more knowledgeable and articulate than myself please read this blog by cosmologist Luke Barnes – here is an excerpt:

Krauss repeatedly talked about universes coming out of nothing, particles coming out of nothing, different types of nothing, nothing being unstable. This is nonsense. The word nothing is often used loosely – I have nothing in my hand, there’s nothing in the fridge etc. But the proper definition of nothing is “not anything”. Nothing is not a type of something, not a kind of thing. It is the absence of anything.

Barnes also has a follow-on blog that is quite helpful where he states:

if something can some out of nothing, then anything and everything can and should come out of nothing at all times and places. This, then, is the empirical evidence we would need in order to believe that the universe could come out of nothing.

I also highly recommend this scathing review of Krauss’ book by philosopher/physicist David Albert that appeared in the NY Times. Here is an excerpt from Albert:

[Physics has] nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those [quantum] fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.

But don’t Christians also claim in a creation from nothing?

Note that when theists speak of “creation ex-nihilo” they are referring to creation out of nothing physical. The Christian view is that God is an eternally existing necessary being and so there was something causally before the Universe began (but not temporally since there was no time!)

Note that there are also independent reasons for thinking that a necessary being such as God must exist – for example in the Leibnizian cosmological argument. I chose not to get into that argument because my series of blogs focuses on science and that is a philosophical argument that doesn’t even depend on the universe having to have a beginning. So in the Christian view, God created the Universe out of nothing physical. While that sounds very mysterious to us, science itself has shown us that all of space, time, matter and energy came into being in the finite past. There is nothing physical or natural left to appeal to as a causal explanation. Thus, by deduction we’re left with a supernatural cause – a cause beyond nature.

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[1] By “currently known physics,” I mean the well understood physics of General Relativity and physics associated with semi-classical spacetime. Because no one knows the correct version of quantum gravity, it is possible that new details concerning quantum physics could permit a past eternal universe. Aron Wall has published some good arguments for why one should not expect any new discoveries in quantum physics to overturn the current understanding that the universe had a beginning. Vilenkin has also argued along these lines as well.

Last year Christianity Today named their top ten archaeological discoveries of 2013. On the top of the list was an object that looks like a small insignificant amulet carved from stone. As it turns out, the object was a scarab from the 18th Dynasty of Egypt – very likely from the reign of Thutmose III or Amenhotep II based on parallels. The significance for those who believe in the Biblical accounts of the Conquest of Canaan as outlined in the Old Testament book of Joshua is great! The scarab is a key piece of evidence excavated last year at an archaeological site situated approximately 9 miles north of Jerusalem. That site is called Khirbet el-Maqatir and the evidence points to it as the city of Ai which the Old Testament (in Joshua 8) states was destroyed by Joshua in around 1406 B.C..

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It depends on what you mean by causality. A philosophically-informed physicist would say Quantum Mechanics (QM) doesn’t do away with causality:

“In fact, QFT[Quantum Field Theory] is constructed in such a way to explicitly preserve causality. Any QFT textbook devotes 10 pages of chapter 1 to explain why the square root of the Klein gordon equation does not make a good wave equation for a QFT – it cannot preserve causality.”

In physics, we speak of things happening based on mathematical laws. For example, two electrons are repulsed by the electromagnetic force and we can compute their path of motion. There seems to be a clear causal connection because the math is fully deterministic. In QM, the only difference is that the math is probabilistic rather than exact. No one is even sure that QM is indeterministic – Bohm’s interpretation might be right. Even if QM is non-deterministic, is it appropriate to say that things are happening without causes? We can use the Schrödinger/Dirac equation to make quite accurate probabilistic computations concerning the evolution of a system. We may not know when a particular radioactive atom will decay but we can use statistically large sets of atoms to accurately perform radiometric dating.

To be sure, there is a lot of controversy over how to interpret causation in QM (e.g., does the observer play a role?) but I don’t think QM really does away with the causal principle in the sense relied upon by the Kalam. The Kalam relies only on there being underlying reasons for things coming into being. If something happens in a manner that can be probabilistically predicted (as is always the case in QM), then it’s not a case of something being created without a cause from absolutely nothing. Things originating without causes could not be predicted even probabilistically!

Here is philosopher/Physicist David Albert on how Quantum Mechanics doesn’t explain the origin of the Universe from absolutely nothing: “The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.”

The Borde-Vilenkin-Guth theorem that I referenced in the previous blog indicates that spacetime cannot be extended into the infinite past. QM operates within spacetime so if spacetime is not eternal it is unreasonable to claim that quantum processes have been eternally in operation. Some physicists do speak of highly speculative theories of creating a universe out of the quantum vacuum but the quantum vacuum is not nothing – it’s just the lowest energy state of spacetime. It’s weird to think about spacetime not existing but such is the implication of BVG and the earlier Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems. This Scientific American article might be helpful in explaining how the Big Bang is not just describing expansion into “some imagined preexisting void.” The Big Bang is not dealing with expansion into preexisting space but the expansion of space.

For more details on the problems when some scientists speak about the Universe being created from absolutely nothing I highly recommend this blog by cosmologist Luke Barnes.