The Wisdom Chronicle

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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.”

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Philosophical Arguments that the Universe had a Beginning

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.

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Footsteps of Jesus: Our First Day

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.

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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.

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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.

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Dr. Frank Turek drinking from Jacob’s Well

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

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Much Ado About Nothing

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.

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Has Joshua’s Ai Been Discovered?

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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..

Read more

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Objection to Premise 1 of the Kalam: Doesn’t Quantum Mechanics Violate the Causal Principle?

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.

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Does The Origin of the Universe Point to God?

A logical starting place for consideration of scientific data that may serve as evidence for God is the origin of the universe. William Lane Craig has made famous the following ancient argument known as the “Kalam cosmological argument[1]:”

  1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
  2. The Universe began to exist.
  3. Therefore, the Universe was caused.

See also this video for a nice summary of the argument. Universe here is defined here as the totality of space, time, matter and energy. So even if there are other universes as various multiverse theories entail, they would still be part of the overall Universe. I’ll use the capitalized version of ‘Universe’ to clarify that I’m referring to this broad definition.

If the Universe began to exist, then it’s reasonable that it must have been caused by some cause acting outside of the Universe. William Lane Craig has pointed out that one can deduce the properties for such a cause – it would have to be timeless, spaceless, immaterial and enormously powerful. For otherwise, how could the cause of space, time and matter have any of these properties? Thus, some key attributes of God can be derived by deduction.

While this argument alone doesn’t come close to showing that Christianity is true, it does show that there is a cause that transcends nature. If the Kalam succeeds it gives good reasons for favoring theism over atheism and that is all that scientific arguments for God can hope to accomplish. Skeptics often attempt to refute non-scientific arguments for Christian claims such as the resurrection by appealing to naturalism, the view that nothing exists beyond nature. They might claim, for example, that science has shown that resurrection is impossible. If, however, the Kalam shows that naturalism is falsified, then this is a key first step in a cumulative case for Christianity.

Few philosophers doubt that the Kalam argument is philosophically valid. (i.e., if you grant the premises then the conclusion follows necessarily). So the key factor in determining if the argument is sound is the plausibility of the two premises. Note that we don’t have to prove the premises with absolute certainty to provide epistemic support for theism – we just need to show that the premises are more plausible than not.

Are the Premises True?

Science is largely based on the first premise being true – that things that come into being have causes. Note that no prominent advocate of this or other cosmological arguments has ever claimed that everything that exists has a cause – only that what begins to exist has a cause. Therefore, “Who made God?” is not a serious objection to this argument. If you think it is, I refer you to this blog by philosopher Ed Feser. Even the famous skeptic David Hume admitted “I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that something could arise without a cause.”

Thus, the argument hinges on the second premise. For literally over a thousand years, great religious and non-religious thinkers debated whether or not the universe has always existed. Judaism and Christianity asserted that the Universe was created by God out of nothing – “creation ex-nihilo.” They offered philosophical arguments for why the Universe could not be eternal. Many secular thinkers asserted that the universe was eternal and therefore did not require a cause. In an analogous manner, Christians asserted that God was eternal and therefore could not be caused.

What scientific evidence exists for the truth of the second premise?

For centuries, this question was beyond the scope of science but we know have significant evidence that the Universe began to exist a finite time ago. The first set of evidence centered on the Big Bang origin to our universe now dated to 13.8 billion years ago. This model eventually became the standard origins model after its prediction of the cosmic microwave background radiation was verified in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. (shown below with their antenna)

Wilson_penzias200

These two Bell labs engineers had been trying to determine the source of excess noise in their antenna. Assuming that it was due to a pigeon’s nest, they spent hours looking for and removing dung. As a colleague noted, “they looked for dung but found gold, which is just the opposite of the experience of most of us.” Indeed they won the Nobel Prize for detecting this remnant radiation from the Big Bang. By the way, if you have an old analog TV you can see this background remnant of the Big Bang as a small contribution of the static. Dr. Turek has documented other key evidence for the Big Bang in his I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist book.

The radical thing about the Big Bang was that it appears to be an origin not just of the matter-energy but also of the spacetime of our universe. The Big Bang appears to be a “creation ex nihilo” as affirmed by Nobel Prize-winning physicist George Smoot: “There is no doubt that a parallel exists between the Big Bang as an event and the Christian notion of creation from nothing.”Based on Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, Hawking and Penrose proved that space and time itself began at the Big Bang.

However, since General Relativity doesn’t apply at tiny quantum scales in the early universe, there were speculations that perhaps something preceded the Big Bang. In 2003, an important paper was published by three leading cosmologists who had proposed some of the key speculative theories attempting to circumvent the absolute beginning implied by the Big Bang. Vilenkin summarizes the conclusion of their article in his Many Worlds in One book: “It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.” The ‘proof’ is based on the very general assumption that the Universe has on average expanded which is consistent with observations and theoretical expectations.

Why physicists can’t avoid a creation event?

This was the provocative title of an article appearing in New Scientist in 2012. At a scientific meeting honoring his 70th birthday, Stephen Hawking released this pre-recorded statement: “A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God.” In what was dubbed the “worst birthday presents ever,” Vilenkin presented his recent work showing that 3 different types of origins models of different classes cannot avoid a beginning to the Universe. Admittedly this is still not an absolutely settled conclusion, but Vilenkin summarizes: “All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.” This fits well with the criteria I laid out in the previous blog. Data can be used in support of an argument if it is supported by currently understood science. Science is always provisional and therefore subject to change but if leading atheists specializing in this arena concede that all the current evidence points to the Universe requiring a beginning then I think it is more rational to accept the second premise of the Kalam.

In upcoming blogs, I’ll consider objections to the Kalam and discuss the philosophical arguments against the possibility of an eternal universe.

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[1] Here is an alternate formulation of the Kalam by Peter S Williams that is also helpful to consider:

  1. Every physical event has a cause
  2. There was a first physical event
  3. Therefore, the first physical event had a cause
  4. The first physical event’s cause was non-physical (else the event that caused that physical event would have itself been a prior physical event)
  5. Therefore, something non-physical must exist
  6. Therefore, materialism is false
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The Wisdom Chronicle

141. MEN IN CHURCH “The church has to drag men kicking and screaming out of their lethargy. Men sit bored in church for years avoiding the vortex of the gospel’s “edge of your seat” drama. It’s impossible for most men to imagine Jesus being more exciting than football. They assume spirituality is a female thing. It’s not uncommon for men to bail on the church when faced with its implicitly high expectations. Having not read anything greater than the trade journal in their bathroom, the idea of thinking deeply and technically about God threatens to breach the wall of meticulously constructed mediocrity.”

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

142. SUCCESS TO SIGNIFICANCE “Gold there is, and rubies in abundance, but lips that speak knowledge are a rare jewel.” — King Solomon

143. RAISING SONS “God has given fathers the assignment of saying, “Welcome,son. As imperfect as I may be, it is my desire to take the next couple of  decades and introduce you to God.” If you are a father, this is your assignment. This is your privilege.

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

144. MONEY VS. SEX “Here is the message that the culture is broadcasting: If you cause unbearable pain to others while in pursuit of your sexual pleasure, you will find understanding and sympathy. However, if you are a businessperson causing even the slightest tinge of discomfort to others while in pursuit of profit and wealth, you will immediately and unconditionally be condemned as immoral.”

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

145. PROTECTING MARRIAGE “I’ve established boundaries to protect my marriage. I’m doing battle for my marriage when I don’t meet with a woman by myself unless the door is open or there is a window so that others can observe. I don’t have lunch with other women alone. I don’t travel alone in a car with other women. I copy Barbara on e-mails written to women, and I don’t have private conversations with women on social websites without her knowing.”

Excerpt from; Rainy Dennis. “Stepping Up.”

146. SIGNIFICANCE “The greatest use of a life is to use it for something that will outlast it.” — William James

147. PATRIARCHS “I’ve found that once they reach their sixties and seventies, they begin to feel just as “left behind” as Beck Weathers. Many begin to feel useless, as if their families, their churches, and their communities no longer need them. Some lose their vision, become passive, and stop acting like men. They think their years of impact and accomplishment are over. Yet the Scriptures paint a different picture of this stage of life—it is a time when a man can perhaps have his greatest influence. But he must be willing to courageously step up if he doesn’t want to be left behind.”

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

148. MOSAICS AND CHRISTIAN INFLUENCE “I want to suggest that the widespread desire for a life in the mainstream is one of the consequences of monumental change. This is not the first time mainstream credibility has inspired faithful believers. Think back to the biblical account of Daniel. Life in Babylon gave the young Hebrew the platform and opportunity to influence the broadest circles of political and societal power. God used Daniel and his peers, exiles in a pagan culture, to bring about his purposes. Could it be that the growing desire for mainstream influence among the younger generation is the work of God—preparing them to bring restoration and renewal to our culture?”

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

149. SPORTS “One of the great myths in America is that sports build character. They can and they should. Indeed, sports may be the perfect venue in which to build character. But sports don’t build character unless a coach possesses character and intentionally teaches it.”

Excerpt From: Joe Ehrmann, Paula Ehrmann & Gregory Jordan. “InSideOut Coaching.”

150. POWER OF GOVERNMENT “When [the president] takes office, he or she appoints 5,000 people to run a bureaucracy, nonmilitary nonpostal service of 2 million people, who hire 10 million outside outsource contractors—a workforce of 12 million people—that spends $3 trillion a year. That number is larger than the gross domestic product of all but four countries on the face of the earth.” “So the reason we’re doing what we’re doing…and the way we get progressive change, is to control government.”

Excerpt From: Witwer, Rob. “The Blueprint.”

 

 

 

 

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What Counts as Evidence for God from Science_

What Counts as Evidence for God from Science?

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Some might say that science leaves no room for the supernatural and therefore it’s impossible for science to ever provide any evidence for God. Note that if such a claim is made then science could likewise never claim any evidence against God’s existence as it would be completely blind in that realm. There is actually a scientific effort underway to try to find intelligent life beyond earth. They’re looking for physical alien life forms but a search for supernatural intelligence shares much in common. Both types of searches seek to discover artifacts not produced by humans or natural processes.

 

Independent of how one defines science, however, science can support the truth of premises in philosophical arguments. That is what I would like to offer in this series – philosophical arguments for the existence of God where we have scientific support for the truth of key premises. We want to find the truth about origins without worrying about conventions concerning how to define science. As I previously blogged, science is not the only source of knowledge.

As another introductory blog in this series, I want to provide some background and lay down a foundation. Let’s start with the proper definition of evidence – evidence is not the same thing as proof. Science isn’t in the business of proving things and if you’re waiting for mathematical-type proofs before acting on evidence you’re going to be pretty idle because one almost never has such proof. Here is a fairly standard way of defining evidence: An observation is evidence for a hypothesis if the hypothesis is more likely given the observation than it would have otherwise been.

One can have some evidence for each of several different competing scientific explanations. In some cases, there is not yet enough evidence to determine which candidate hypothesis is true. Thus, evidence does not even necessarily make it more likely that the hypothesis is true than not. The combined evidence and prior probabilities can yield this assessment (from a Bayesian perspective). What I would like to do in this series is to present several different lines of evidence for God that together form a powerful cumulative case. Independent of one’s prior probability that God exists, each piece of evidence increases the likelihood that God exists. Each line of evidence can and should be assessed independently before combining all of the probability assessments. This is a standard Bayesian approach to probability. This series of blogs will be somewhat like a courtroom evaluation of some science-related evidence. I encourage you to interact with this evidence and the argument that it points to God.

There at least two general ways in which God might operate within the universe in detectable ways. First, God might directly intervene to do something beyond the laws of nature to bring about life or some intended feature of nature. This could be detected by finding some feature of nature that seems generally in accord with God’s purposes but which is very unlikely to be the product of natural processes. Secondly, God might setup the natural processes themselves and/or the initial conditions to bring about His purposes. This “fine-tuning” would be detectable evidence for God if these natural laws or initial conditions were constrained to a tiny range among possibilities. Some leading atheist thinkers agree that it’s possible to have this type of scientific evidence for God although they obviously resist the conclusion. Stephen Hawking admits in Brief History of Time that fine-tuning is possible evidence of “a divine purpose in Creation and the choice of the laws of science (by God)” Peter Millican, a prominent philosopher at Oxford, conceded in a debate with William Lane Craig that “if there is an inexplicable coincidence in the fundamental constants of nature whose values have to be precisely-tuned within a wide range of otherwise available possibilities that would make a complex universe possible then this constitutes a phenomenon that very naturally invites explanation in terms of a cosmic scale designer.”

I’ll discuss their responses to this evidence in a future blog but first I’d like to discuss a few possible pitfalls in the origins debate. Here are some problematic responses or arguments in this debate about God and design:

“Feature X is so complicated it must be designed”

This is not a good way to argue for design because it’s not really an argument at all. The theist needs to argue why natural processes would not be expected to account for feature X and why God would be expected to want such a feature.

“Science has no explanation for X, therefore God did it”

This is a “god of the gaps” argument, an argument from ignorance. Even in the Christian view, God has set up many natural processes and it’s highly inappropriate to assume by default that divine intervention is happening in every unknown situation.

Indiscriminately calling every argument for God a ‘god of the gaps’ argument

At the other extreme, the skeptic may reject any evidence that seems to point to God by appealing to a future but as of yet undiscovered natural explanation. Philosopher of science Karl Popper coined a term for this unsubstantiated hope in future evidence to sustain naturalism – “promissory naturalism.” Just as promissory notes promise to pay money in the future, some naturalists promise that evidence will be found to justify naturalism. Returning to our courtroom analogy, one cannot appeal to possible evidence that might be found in the future but rather a judge must examine only currently available evidence. If what is known about science indicates natural processes are highly unlikely to produce an effect that God would plausibly want to bring about, then this wouldn’t be a “god of the gaps” argument.

Using questionable theology to refute clear science

An atheist should not have overly narrow expectations of what a god would or wouldn’t do. If you don’t believe that any gods exist, why assume very particular expectations of how a god would act? Just as a SETI researcher should not refuse to recognize evidence of alien artifacts just because she is surprised at certain aspects of the artifacts relative to her narrowly preconceived expectations, so a truth-seeker shouldn’t dismiss evidence for God because of overly narrow expectations of what God would and wouldn’t do.

In the next blog, we’ll start off at the very beginning and see if we can find evidence for God based on the origin of the universe.

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Can Science Disprove God_

Can Science Disprove God?

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Suppose that there were no scientific evidence whatsoever for the existence of God, would that disprove God? Or would that necessarily make it irrational to believe in God?

 

I argue that it wouldn’t – such an overly-skeptical view reveals a flawed epistemology (theory of knowledge). One who makes such a claim is apparently adhering to a strong form of scientism, the view that science is the only source of knowledge. For, there are many non-scientific reasons for belief in God, such as:

The purpose of this blog is not to explore these non-scientific arguments but merely to point out that one cannot call belief in God irrational without also refuting these types of non-scientific arguments. Explore the hypertext links for sampling if you’re unfamiliar with these arguments. The claim that science is the only source of knowledge is self-refuting – it’s a philosophical claim that cannot be scientifically demonstrated so if science is the only source of knowledge one could not rationally affirm it. Dr. Turek’s Roadrunner Tactic (of applying a claim to itself) reveals this pretty clearly. Most philosophers have long since abandoned this overly narrow epistemology, but unfortunately, some scientists still hold to it.

Too often skeptics point to prominent scientists who are atheists as though that somehow shows that belief in God must be irrational. I confess that I myself, unfortunately,y went through a period of doubts in the late 1990’s in part because of this fear of how so many of these smart scientists could think that there is no evidence of God.

But is science really even the appropriate discipline for determining God’s existence?

I later came to realize the folly of assuming scientists are best-suited for evaluating evidence for God. Sure a disproportionate number of really intelligent people are scientists but are they really trained so as to be able to best evaluate potential evidence for God? Clearly, they are not trained to evaluate any of the non-scientific evidence I listed above. Many of the most vocal atheistic scientists such as Krauss, Dawkins, and Hawking make numerous philosophical mistakes.

Moreover, science is generally defined such that no appeal to the divine is even considered – this is known as methodological naturalism. Thus, both the nature of the knowledge taught to scientists as well as the methodology they learn for evaluating evidence are not well-suited for evaluating the breadth of evidence and arguments about God.

Dr. Ed Feser, who has been on the CrossExamined podcasts here and here, has an excellent rebuttal to scientism. He critiques Alex Rosenberg’s argument that science can show that God doesn’t exist. First, here is Feser’s summary of Rosenberg’s argument:

1. The predictive power and technological applications of physics are unparalleled by those of any other purported source of knowledge.

2. Therefore what physics reveals to us is all that is real.

Feser goes on to explain: “How bad is this argument?  About as bad as this one:

1. Metal detectors have had far greater success in finding coins and other metallic objects in more places than any other method has.

2. Therefore what metal detectors reveal to us (coins and other metallic objects) is all that is real.

Metal detectors are keyed to those aspects of the natural world susceptible of detection via electromagnetic means (or whatever).  But however well they perform this task — indeed, even if they succeeded on every single occasion they were deployed — it simply wouldn’t follow for a moment that there are no aspects of the natural world other than the ones they are sensitive to.  Similarly, what physics does — and there is no doubt that it does it brilliantly — is to capture those aspects of the natural world susceptible of the mathematical modeling that makes a precise prediction and technological application possible.  But here too, it simply doesn’t follow for a moment that there are no other aspects of the natural world.”

But there is also Scientific Evidence for God!

I don’t intend any disrespect for science in this blog – I should mention that I myself have a degree in physics and have worked in scientific/mathematical domains of software engineering for the past 27 years. I have great respect for science and actually, I think that God has also left plenty of scientific evidence for His existence. This blog is an introduction to a series making a case that what we have learned from science actually does support theism over atheism. It’s important, however, to keep things in perspective! Scientific knowledge is just one aspect of knowledge and a skeptic who hasn’t searched out the non-scientific forms of evidence is making a big mistake. Nevertheless, the church too often provides no response or a weak response to challenges to belief in God from atheistic scientists. I think, therefore, that it is important to look at whether or not there are theistic implications from origins science. Over the next few weeks I’ll be making a case in this blog that the following aspects of science provide evidence that God exists:

  • Origin of Universe
  • Origin of the Laws to Support Life
  • Fine-Tuning of the Initial Conditions of the Universe to Support Life
  • Fine-Tuning of the Constants of Nature
  • Origin of Life

Before we get into the evidence, in my next blog I’ll discuss what would constitute suitable evidence for God from science and some of the objections that invariably arise. A careful philosophical evaluation is in order before laying out the facts so that we can properly interpret them.

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