Philosophy Lives

Why Stephen Hawkings attempt to banish natural theology only shows

why we need it.
John Haldane
206 COMMENTS

Philosophy, tienne Gilson observed, always buries its undertakers. Philosophy,

according to Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, in their new book The Grand Design,
is dead. It has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics,
[and] scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for
knowledge. Not only, according to Hawking and Mlodinow, has philosophy passed away; so,
too, has natural theology. At any rate, the traditional argument from the order apparent in
the structure and operations of the universe to a transcendent cause of these, namely God, is
wholly redundantor so they claim: [Just] as Darwin and Wallace explained how the
apparently miraculous design of living forms could appear without intervention by a
supreme being, the multiverse concept can explain the fine tuning of physical law without the
need for a benevolent creator who made the Universe for our benefit. Because there is a law
of gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the
reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.
Notwithstanding their death notice for philosophy, in introducing their idea of a fundamental
physical account of the universe, M-theory, the authors themselves cannot resist engaging in
evident philosophizing about the nature of theories and their relationship to reality. To
address the paradoxes arising from quantum physics, they use what they call modeldependent realism, which is based on the idea that our brains interpret the input from our
sensory organs by making a model of the world.
When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the
elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth. But there
may be different ways in which one could model the same physical situation, with each
employing different fundamental elements and concepts. If two such physical theories or
models accurately predict the same events, one cannot be said to be more real than the other.
While a professional philosopher might disambiguate and refine some of these expressions
and formulations, Hawking and Mlodinow are describing a position familiar within the
philosophy of science and known variously as constructive empiricism, pragmatism, and
conceptual relativism. They are not replacing philosophy with science. Indeed, their
discussion shows that, at its most abstract, theoretical physics leaves ordinary empirical
science behind and enters the sphere of philosophy, where it becomes vulnerable to
refutation by reason.
Certainly their argument from M-theory to the redundancy of the God hypothesis, for
example, is open to direct philosophical criticism. If the necessary conditions of our existence
did not obtain, we would not exist, and if the necessary conditions of the necessary
conditions of our existence had not obtained, then neither we nor many other aspects and
elements of the present universe would have been. Any scientific theory that is incompatible
with things having been as they had to have been, in order for the universe to be as it is, is
thereby refuted.
None of this may be very profound or took science to establish, but it does raise a question: Is
the obtaining of the necessary conditions in question explicable, and, if so, how? What we
know about the observable universe, and what we can infer about what is unobservable,
indicate that it is composed of a number of types of entities and forces whose members
exhibit common properties and are subject to a small number of simple laws.

There is nothing obviously inevitable about this fact. The universe could have been spatially
and temporally chaotic. Yet it isnt. Chemistry tells us that elements share well-defined
structural properties in virtue of which they can and do enter into systematic combinations,
and physics tells us that these elements are themselves constructed out of more basic items
whose properties are, if anything, purer and simpler.
Why is there order rather than chaos? One might say that, if there had been chaos, the
question would not arise because we would not exist. In a sense that is true, but it leaves
untouched the central question, which is that of the preconditions of the possibility of order.
Cosmic regularity makes our existence possible; the underlying issue concerns the enabling
conditions of this order itself.
Some proofs of God as existing cause and sustainer of the universe (and of the enabling
conditions) argue from spatiotemporal regularity alone. They reason that, while events in
nature can be explained by reference to the fundamental particles and the laws under which
they operate, natural science cannot explain these factors. Natural explanations having
reached their logical limit, we are forced to say that either the orderliness of the universe has
no explanation or that it has an extra-natural one.
The latter course cannot plausibly take the form of embedding the facts of the universe
within the laws and initial conditions of a SuperUniverse. That would amount to retracting
the claim to have specified the ultimate facts of the material universe, and nature would then
be regarded as a spatial and / or temporal part of SuperNature. The search for the source of
order must reach a dead end if scientific explanation is the only sort there is. But it is not the
only sort, for there is also explanation by reference to purpose and intention.
The universes otherwise inexplicable regularity will have an adequate explanation if it
derives from the purposes of an agent. By definition, no natural agent could have made the
universe, so the only possible explanation of its regularity is that the natural order has a
transcendent cause outside of the universe, which introduces the idea of a creator God.
This traditional argument predates the physical and cosmological investigations that
produced the evidence of fine tuning Hawking and Mlodinow discuss under the heading of
The Apparent Miracle. They correctly observe that earlier versions of this argument, such
as that favored by Newton, focused on our strangely habitable solar system, and they point
out that this argument lost its power when it was discovered that our sun is but one of many
stars orbited by countless planets. That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions
far less remarkable and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed
just to please us as human beings.
They then go on to note, however, that it is not only the peculiar characteristics of our solar
system that seem oddly conducive to the development of human life but also the
characteristics of our entire Universe, and that is much more difficult to explain. The forces
of nature had to allow the production of carbon and other heavy elements, and allow them to
exist stably; they had to facilitate the formation of stars and galaxies but also the periodic
explosion of stars to distribute the elements needed for life more widely, permitting the
formation of planets suitably composed for the evolution of life; and the strengths of the
forces themselves and the masses of the fundamental particles on which they operate had to
be of the correct orders of magnitude, and these lie within very small ranges.
What, they ask, can we make of these coincidences? . . . Our Universe and its laws appear
to have a design that both is tailor made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little
room for alteration. That is not easily explained and raises the natural question of why it is

that way. Fortunately, however, M-theory provides a scientific answer, and it is analogous to
the many-solar-systems response to Newtons wonder at the habitability of our solar system.
Hawking and Mlodinow write:
According to M-theory, ours is not the only universe. Instead M-theory predicts that a great
many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention
of some supernatural being or god. Rather these multiple universes arise naturally from
physical law. They are a prediction of science. Each universe has many possible histories and
many possible states at later times, that is, at times like the present, long after their creation.
Most of these states will be quite unlike the Universe we observe and quite unsuitable for the
existence of any form of life. Only a few would allow creatures like us to exist.
In short, and sparing the detail, ours is but one of an indefinite number of universes with
different laws and forces, each universe being a spontaneous creation out of nothing:
Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe [that is, ours] can and will create itself
from nothing.
There are two telling objections to this: the first to the idea of spontaneous creation, the
second to that of multiple universes.
What of spontaneous creation? When Aquinas and others in the Western natural-theology
tradition argued from the character of the universe to the existence of its transcendent cause,
they were acute enough to describe that original source of the being and character of things
as an uncaused cause and not as the cause of itself. That was a matter of logical coherence,
since the idea that something could create itself from nothing simply makes no sensebe
that something God or the Universe. In order to create, one first has to exist.
What then of multiverses? How effective is this response to the argument from cosmic
order? If there are infinitely many other universes, ordered either in parallel or in temporal
sequence, it may seem inevitable that at least one like ours should exist, but all one can say is
that, as the number of universes proceeds towards infinity, the probability of a difference
between the actual distribution and the probable one diminishes almost to zero. Further,
unless the theory claims that all possibilities are or must be realized, it concedes that a finely
tuned universe might not have existed and thereby allows a probability argument for design.
One may query directly the coherence of the many-universe hypothesis, however. What is
meant by talking about many universes? It might mean unobservable regions of the universe
the one spatio-temporal-causal continuumor, although this is much harder to make sense
of, entirely distinct cosmic setups, wholly discontinuous with the universe we inhabit. The
first possibility fails to serve Hawking and Mlodinows purpose. Any evidence we could have
for these distant regions would necessarily be evidence for situations exhibiting the same
orderliness whose existence seemed to call for explanation.
The second possibilitythat there are many universes, entirely distinct realities, wholly
discontinuous and sharing no common elementsfails also. There can be no empirical
evidence in support of the hypothesis, nor could it be derived as a necessary condition of the
possible existence and character of the only universe of which we have or could have
scientific knowledge.
Hawking and Mlodinow write that the multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account
for the miracle of fine tuning. Whether or not it was invented as such, its deployment in this
context appears ad hoc, introduced only to avoid the conclusion that the general regularities
and particular fine-tuning are due to the agency of a creator.

The basic components of the material universe and the forces operating on them exhibit
properties of stability and regularity that invite explanationthe more so given the narrow
band within which they have to lie in order for there to be intelligent animals able to
investigate and reflect on the conditions of their own existence. Science cannot provide an
ultimate explanation of order.
As Hawking and Mlodinow occasionally seem to recognize, far from philosophy being dead,
having been killed by science, the deepest arguments in this area are not scientific but
philosophical. And if the philosophical reasoning runs in the direction I have suggested, it is
not only philosophy but also natural theology that is alive and ready to bury its latest wouldbe undertakers.
John Haldane is professor of philosophy at the University of St. Andrews and author
of Faithful Reason (2006), Practical Philosophy (2009), and Reasonable Faith (2010).

12.20.2010 | 9:33am
Jimbo says:
Haldane:
Even if the arguments you criticize are philosophical, that is not to say they are religious. So
that in a sense, Reason has indeed triumphed. Even in your own Philosophical account.
Are you at the St. Andrews in Scotland? Or?

12.20.2010 | 11:49am
Assistant Village Idiot says:

Perhaps I am misunderstanding entirely, but it seems that Hawking has only succeeded in
pushing the age-old question back one step further. We used to believe that God was
necessary to directly create our selves. Scientists did a remarkable job of showing that, given
our sun and planet, we might arise without direct miraculous intervention. But that merely
pushed the question back to how the solar system appeared, and in turn, how the universe
appeared. The question of how anything exists was not answered. Here we have the same:
this universe might exist without a direct miracle because in a multiverse, many universes
can spontaneously develop. I get that, but don't see how it changes anything. That a law of
gravity exists and therefore a multiverse is possible is a fine thing to say, but evades the
question as to why a law of gravity should exist.
I have some sympathy with non-theists who protest that adding God into the equation also
does not resolve the issue, and adds an unnecessary complication to the discussion. Bertrand
Russell's "Who made God?" question was sufficient for him to discard deity from the
discussion. Hawking does the same from a more detailed POV and runs up against the same
problem. Thus, having no God in the equation only means we will have Something Else that
is self-existent, eternal, and creative, and call it by a name we feel more comfortable with.
It is rather like the joke that Shakespeare never wrote all those plays - it was someone else
named Shakespeare.
http://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com

12.21.2010 | 3:44am
Martin Snigg says:

A silly marketing ploy "Philosophy is dead" "Universe created itself".

Nearly half the book is philosophy and apparently vacuum quantum energy and t>o are
needed for the universe to form - far from the idea of self creation from nothing.
Prof. Haldane elegantly uses silly journalism on the predictably clownish philosophising of
atheists scientists to write an easy to understand essay about the truly perennial and the truly
eternal. "Just where does the order that we see in the universe come from?" And we know
this can only be a mind.
Back to Aristotle and St Thomas we go - if we didn't already know. :)
Gracias Prof. Haldane and I'm happy he has been made President, The Royal Institute of
Philosophy must, at heart, care about our good.

12.21.2010 | 10:02am
Griffin says:

Some people fail to note this oddity in "Intelligent Design" theory: even if we find intelligent
design in the universe, that doesn't prove the existence of specifically, the Christian God.
In fact, 1) there are many intelligently-designed things in the universe: I have one of them, a
Honda, sitting in my driveway. But man made it.
There are in fact, intelligently designed things in the universe; but moreover, 2) that doesn't
prove that the Judeo-Christian god made them.
Maybe after all, Zeus made the universe?
People mistakenly assume that Intelligent Design proves their own god; but why not some
other god, after all?

12.21.2010 | 1:48pm
Fred says:
Griffin,

Animism posits that everything is alive. It has nothing to say about who or what created the
universe. Polytheistic paganism (your Zeus example) usually posits a collection of gods, each
of which is in charge of some aspect of nature or the soul, e.g., Zeus was god of thunder and
lightening, Athena was goddess of wisdom, Aphrodite was goddess of love, etc. Not even the
pagans themselves ever claimed that any individual god created the universe. The gods were
themselves creatures. Therefore, the most likely candidate for creator of the universe is a
single, monotheistic god at least akin to the Judeo-Christian/Muslim God (all three
monotheistic religions believe in the same God, the God of Abraham, hence the term
Abrahamic faiths). Now it is possible that the single creating force of the universe is some
sort of impersonal force, but impersonal forces don't usually exhibit intelligence. It could also
be some vague Deistic "clockmaker," but the Deist God is really a sort of abstracted version of
the Abrahamic God. So if Intelligent Design is, in fact, the case, the most likely candidate for
designer is some version of the Abrahamic God.

12.21.2010 | 3:14pm
Griffin says:

Animism in fact, along with many other "primitive" religions, has its own creation story;
indeed, Anthropology tells us that "Creation myths" are characteristic of many, perhaps
most, human cultures. Look up a few dozen of them, if you want.

12.21.2010 | 4:34pm
Dave says:

The fact that there are many different 'creation myths' is irrelevant. The point of the current
discussion is the specific philosophical points we draw from them, and in this context
monotheism is the only non-naturalistic contender for a sufficient, necessary explanation of
reality for the following reason. Imagine that Roman polytheism is true and Jupiter and
Neptune get into some sort of fight. Any 'fight' will involve some sort of interaction between
the two deities, and these interactions must themselves be governed by some sort of external
conditions. And since this holds for any polytheistic account, it means that polytheism
implicitly makes impersonal explanation fundamental by necessitating constraints that
govern the interactions of respective deities, meaning that these external constraints become
'meta-laws' that themselves remain unexplained. Thus we must either bite the bullet and
simply not ask for an explanation of the most fundamental laws and regularities governing
the whole of reality, whatever they may be, or we choose to ask in which case we are led to
belief in some sort of necessarily existing thing with certain traits that admittedly bear
striking resemblance to the traits attributed to God in the Western monotheistic tradition. In
either event, when considering the issue philosophically, the anthropological fact that most
cultures or traditions have creation myths is of utterly no consequence; some are,
philosophically speaking, superior to others, and philosophers are perfectly justified in
sorting out which are which.

12.21.2010 | 4:41pm
Bret Lythgoe says:
Prof. Haldane provides expert analysis, to this issue. I would propose that, Prof. Haldane
consider debating Prof. Hawking, on this and related issues. Just as Prof. Haldane had a
wonderfully intellectual discussion (and a very respectful one, too), with Philosopher J.C.
Smart, (ATHEISM & THEISM, Blackwell Publishers, 1996, first edition), he could have one
with Prof. Hawking, and, if not convert Prof. Hawking to religion, at least to philosophy!

12.22.2010 | 5:46am
Ismael says:
Hawking makes two mistakes:
1- He does not know philosophy nor does he understand it (e.g. Thomas Aquinas Arguments
for the existence of God would work equally fine if the universe had no beginning in time.
Tomas Aquinas does not imply a temporal causation but an efficient causation, which is quite
different).
What Hawking is attacking is nothing more than Junior High School philosophy... non
serious issues.

2- M-theory is hardly a solid base to build your case upon Non all physicists accept String
Theory. Lee Smolin (who's an atheist as far as I know) for example, rejects the String Theory,
multiverse hypothesis... and hes not the only physicist who thinks String Theory is nonsense.
Besides Hawking, in spite of his popularity and genius, has hardly brought something
concrete on the scientific table the last several years. His 'findings' are highly debatable and
some of them have been refuted (such as his theories on information loss in black holes).

--@ Griffin
It depends on the Argument for God.
Sure some 'arguments' are pretty unrefined but those are peanuts. One should look at the
serious arguments for Classical Theism (eg in Thomism) and those arguments do not argue
for 'some god created the universe' but for 'The God'.
As Hawking you as well criticize something you do not know or understand.
But do not feel bad, even professional philosophers like Michael Martin make often such
stupid mistake (which makes one wonder about their competence in the subject...)

12.22.2010 | 9:28am
Dai says:

Just to add to what Fred has said, the God of Abraham shouldn't be looked upon in terms of
him being a God of Westerners. Indeed, with the combined population of Muslims, Jews and
Christians in the world being over 4 billion, it seems unfair to posit such a claim, especially
given the proportion of Westerners who follow one of these three faiths. Hindus also believe
in this God and in Jesus, but they incorporate them into their poly-theistic views and so
hedge their bets.
Without being too simplistic, philosophy could be viewed as a method for describing life
based solely on reason. By this definition, Hawkins, who spends most of the book reasoning
why things should be as they are and explains that he in fact has "reasoned away God", has
admitted to being a philosopher! If he does not accept this diagnosis, he should explain his
reasons for why he isn't being a philosopher.

12.22.2010 | 12:42pm
Joe the Human Person says:
Ismael, Dave, and Fred:
Plato's "Parmenides" dialogue, proposed a monotheistic "One" that made the universe; 1)
please refute Plato's dialogue.
Then - objections 2) to 500) - refute one by one, five hundred other Creation Myths, that
often present in effect, a single creator. And then - objections 500) to 1000) - critique the
deeper, structural, "meta" unity, within their superficially polytheistic frame. And then prove

that structural commonality is the same as your Catholic God? (And not the Protestant one?)
Can't do it? Begging off? Relying just on raw assertions of personal superiority and namedropping Aquinas?
And then: how can any Aquinas answer, stand up to all of modern Philosophy?
You're got an awful lot to prove; and so far, you haven't even remotely touched the surface.
Nor would that be possible, in a com box.
In any case, all that would be slightly off topic. More relevant here; as a matter of fact, I
partially agree with the author, that retaining respect for the "natural" world would help
theology. But I don't agree with the author, that the "M" or multi-universe theory necessarily
distracts from that. Since indeed, mutli-universe or multi-dimensional "string" and other
theory, is being used to explain practical effects, in the natural world. At the level of atoms
and below.
Furthermore, regarding the alleged superiority of an "uncaused first cause"? Note that this
answer does not work as a casual explanation of the universe. First because 1) it begs the
question; we are asking for a "cause" of the universe, and then suddenly you merely beg off,
and simply assert there is something "not caused" that started it.
Then too 2) is the notion of an "uncaused first cause," pass the test, of being really clear? Do
you really get a clear image in your mind from it? Most analytical philosophers today suggest
it is "incoherent"; it "cannot be located in logical space." It merely interjects an incoherence,
in the hope that people will not see through it; so that therefore, they will mistake it as solid.
The author and commentator's remarks do not answer anything at all; but merely raise far,
far more questions than they resolve. Even as they attack what may be one of the more
fruitful new avenues of current sub-atomic theory.

12.23.2010 | 5:53am
Dianelos Georgoudis says:

One of the dominant modern myths is that science supports naturalism. In fact naturalisms
gravest problems have their roots in modern discoveries of science, including the apparent
fine-tuning of the fundamental constants, the deep mathematical elegance of physical laws,
the fact that elementary particles such as the electron without any internal moving parts and
without access to any computing machinery are capable of displaying computationally highly
complex behavior, the fact that despite all we know about matter there is nothing that as
much as suggests that matter when organized in a particular way would become conscious,
etc. Never mind the order present in quantum mechanical phenomena which has moved
naturalists to propose ontological interpretations, such as the many worlds interpretation,
which are so implausible as to defy credulity.
And beyond the problems of naturalism's compatibility with science there are the grave
philosophical problems about the nature of existence, the nature of ethics, and the nature of
free will, which still bedevil naturalism. Given how naturalism contradicts not only our sense
of life, but also modern science, I fail to understand how so many knowledgeable
philosophers manage to keep faith that naturalism is true.

12.23.2010 | 7:44am

john chiarello says:

'brains interpret...by making a model of the world' = knowledge comes to us when the brain
oragnizes the input from the 5 senses-Kant!! Hawking qoutes philosophers in an attempt to
say 'we dont need philosophy'- Ah- God takes the wise in this world and turns thing wisdom
into foolishness [apostle Paul]
http://www.corpuschristioutreachministries.blogspot.com

12.23.2010 | 8:01am
john chiarello says:
- left the last comment and then went back and finished the article- really first class stuff!
thanks for the Catholic intellectual heritage- the church [protestants and all the other
groups!] need it! God bless you guys- these are just a few simple posts from a laymen [me!]
[1522] Wasnt sure which way to go today; felt like refuting [or as Sarah Palin says
refudiating!] the recent Stephen Hawking book- hes basically saying nothing new, and what
he is claiming has been shown to be less than true [heck, you dont want the call the man
senile, though who knows?]. In a nutshell the book claims that Gravity itself needed no
originator, that it created all things, even itself! Yikes! This is a complete violation of the Law
of Non contradiction- which states a thing cannot be and not be at the same time and in the
same relationship for gravity to have created itself [which Hawking is saying!] then it had to
be, and not be at the same time- not only is this not good science, it is lunacy. For my new
facebook readers Ill try and post a few notes at the bottom. I also just walked passed my T.V.
while going into the study, sure enough there was a television evangelist on the tube doing
the whole money thing- man if I get into that it will be bad. So for today let me stick a few
relevant posts at the bottom and lets all remember the fallen heroes of 9-1-2001. Its there
day for sure.

-[1516] YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING ME! Okay, the other week I watched a ton of stuff on
wormholes, the universe and modern theories of cosmology. I do really get into this stuff, but
I couldnt stop laughing [crying?] at some points. Those of you who have read my evolution
section have read posts on Dark matter/Dark energy. In those posts I explained how dark
matter, an idea espoused by Alan Guth from M.I.T., became a necessary evil [or unknown]
in order for modern physics to explain the function of the universe. Basically physics teaches
us that you need so much matter to generate enough gravity for the planets and everything
else to function properly; the problem is we have never detected the matter. So Guth said I
know, lets come up with the words dark matter and blame everything on that! Excellent
idea isnt it? But if some Christian did something like this you would laugh him out of the
room. So anyway dark matter eventually became the word to describe this UNKNOWN
element that holds the universe together- much like the way Chance is used by many in
modern theory. So as I watched the programs narrated by Morgan Freeman, I found it
interesting that in one show they admitted that Dark Matter really isnt anything, its just a
word we use to fill in an unknown blank- exactly what I have been saying for years. But then
in the next show in the series, you had a bunch of scientists refer to Dark Matter as a real,
proven thing. They were contradicting themselves. But the clincher came when they ran the
show called are we wrong about everything. This one dealt with all these new up and coming
scientists who are actually challenging all of the old theories, they even debunked the whole
theory of Dark Matter [so I was right all along?]. It would be funny if it werent so sad. Then
for the grand finale they spoke about a new theory called Dark Flow [these guys just cant get
away from dark stuff!]. This idea says there is this flow in the universe that seems to be all
going in one direction; that is they think there is some outside force [in theology we call this

transcendence] that exists outside of the known universe, and this unseen force might
actually be the cause for the functionality of our known universe. In essence they are saying
its not Dark Matter that causes things to function properly, but its this thing that exists
outside of the universe that is doing it. Really, this is too good to be true; modern theory is
now saying some being/thing is causing this to happen. Of course Christians knew this all
along. The bible says that Christ is holding all things together by the power of his word, this
language speaks exactly to the problem of Dark Matter- that is we have never been able to
detect by natural means, anything that is big enough to be responsible for holding
everything together. Christians have believed that the very nature of God is responsible for
doing this; he exists and fills in the empty space- the so called function of dark matter. I dont
mean to ridicule these fine men who have given their lives to the worthy pursuit of modern
scientific theory, its just when their own scientists begin to tells us look, these other guys
have been wrong all along then we really need to take a second look.

12.23.2010 | 8:11am
john chiarello says:
Griffin- your Honda sitting in your garage did not 'get there' from nothing- an intelligent
'mind' created it- man. Thats the whole argument my friend!!

12.23.2010 | 9:54am
John Cummins says:
Prof. Haldane,

How is a sane person, competent with language, to interpret this,

Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe [that is, ours] can and will create itself
from nothing.
as anything but embarrassing nonsense? In various forms, it has been presented by
cosmologists to the public in various popular intellectual forums since at least the 1980s.
If there is a "law such as gravity", then there is not "nothing". In the summer, Stephen Barr
addressed the new Hawking book here and pointed out that "universe" means one thing to us
and another to cosmologists: a self-contained realm of specific physical laws, but not
necessarily the only such realm; "multiverse" is a collection of universes. What's the universe
in standard usage is the "multiverse" to them.
It seems that, by never explicating this non-standard, specialized use and definition of
"universe", Hawking hopes to fake out the public by stifling critical thought, by fostering the
impulse to wonder, by promoting the state of fascination. Because he implies that nothing
and "laws such as gravity" exist at the same time, does that mean that this is a non-standard
"nothing", meaning only "nothing" relative to our "universe"?

12.23.2010 | 10:11am
Joe The Human says:

This is discussed in the comments to the recent First Things article, on the day that Nothing
Created Everything. By Joe Carter?

The consensus seems to be that the Big Bang theory explains a lot; but finally there is a flaw.
In that indeed, there is nothing in "Nothing" to explode and create the universe.
At the same time though,, to say "God-did-it" doesn't ultimately explian anything either;
where did God come from anyway? To just say he was, or is, is to beg off all explanation.
The best answer as to the ultimate origin of the Universe therefore? Is "we don't know."

12.23.2010 | 1:05pm
harry says:
Joe the Human,
You admit that the Universe had an origin -- that at some point it wasn't. And you admit that
there was nothing before that origin. So, you must believe something came from nothing. If
that is indeed the case, far from concluding that "we don't know," we can very reasonably
conclude that someone/something that transcends nature, is distinct from it, and the
existence of which is not in any way dependent upon nature, is responsible for it. That
existence, be it a "what" or a "who," evidently has the power required to bring forth
something from nothing, and the knowledge required to bring it about such that that
"something" would eventually lead to intelligent, self-aware beings and the environment to
sustain them. That would require a lot of knowledge, enough that it is also reasonable to
conclude that that being is a "who" and not a "what." After all, "whats" are composed of
matter, and this being was around before there was matter. This being must be pure "who."
I'll call that being "God." You call it whatever you want.

12.23.2010 | 5:57pm
Aaron Rasmussen says:

I've never fully understood why religion and science feel the need to play on each other's turf.
Religion is really about meaning and purpose. Science is about applying a particular skeptical
methodological process to the natural world in order to discover how it works.
But religion insists on making claims about the natural world that it has no business making
- i.e., that the sun circles the earth, that Moses really parted the Red Sea, etc.
Funny story about the Red Sea - when I was in church school I was forced to watch a video
about how God had accomplished the parting of the Red Sea using the forces of nature there was a big fish tank full of hair gel and a high speed fan that blew at full speed across it ,
"miraculously" causing the hair gel to divide in two. This was supposed to give some
"scientific" explanation for how something like the parting of the Red Sea could be
accomplished "naturally". I remember thinking how insulting the whole farce was to both
science and religion.
And science, too, seems hell bent (excuse the pun) on trying to delegitimize the purpose and
meaning that a religious view of the universe gives to individuals, demonstrating in the
process that it does not understand the limits of skepticism as a tool for explaining the
human spiritual condition.
I've always thought that what both science and religion need is a good dose of humility; the
ability to accept the fact that neither one provides all of the answers. The argument between

them is much like a discussion of who would win if Spiderman and Batman were to get in a
fight. Each side will have an entrenched position guarded with an ironclad argument; there
will be conflict without much hope of persuasion. Why not appreciate both for what they
provide, without feeling threatened by the other?
http://www.rlolegal.com

12.23.2010 | 6:43pm
Bill says:

Harry wins. When Joe the Human writes "to say "God-did-it" doesn't ultimately explain
anything either; where did God come from anyway? To just say he was, or is, is to beg off all
explanation" is to arrive at the point of wisdom but to then close one's eyes. As best I can tell,
Hawking's God is gravity, which appears to be an "uncaused cause" for him. If gravity were
an uncaused cause, then it would be God. Regardless of whether it is or not, something
(someone) got the uni(multi)verse rolling and keeps it (them) in play.
Natural Theology permits us to make inferences about what God is like (intelligent, creative,
eternal, for example). One could also infer that He is personal in some sense, given that
persons exist in his creation and it seems reasonable (to me anyway) that the creator is
unlikely to be completely alien to what he creates. No, this does not mean that men are
machines because men design and build machines, but that machines bear some imprint of
their designers. A Honda serves a recognizable purpose for men.
It also seems reasonable (to me) that the religious sensibilities our species possesses should
serve some reasonable purpose. The logical purpose seems to me to be the ability to relate to
God, in some way similar to the purpose a radio antenna serves in relationship to a
transmitter. An antenna is not much use without a transmitter. Hence the likelihood of
revelation. Did it get that way through probability or chance? Who created probability
anyway? I bet He created gravity too.
If Hawking's views are adequately summarized in this article, he should be embarrassed.
How can such a brilliant mind ignore Aristotle? Trying to sneak gravity in as a cause without
cause appears as logically primitive to me as the Genesis creation account must appear
scientifically primitive to a physicist. Joe, there are many things that our limited minds do
not know about God. However, we can know some things, even if we are much less intelligent
than Stephen Hawking is.

12.24.2010 | 3:14am
Lisa Wilson says:

Subconscious. Our own needs juggling for priority. Food, water, shelter, safety, belonging,
community, esteem, approval, contribution. It's not rocket science, it's psychology. Is there a
really important reason for humanity to believe our purpose is to receive our reward in the
afterlife rather than find our reward in the purpose?

12.24.2010 | 9:09am
john chiarello says:
(806)WHY A MULTI-VERSE THEORY IS FALSE. Jumping back to apologetics. Some
atheists have espoused the multi-verse idea to try to explain away the unbelievable
complexity of the universe and our galaxy and solar system. The further along we advance in
the study of Physics and Cosmology, we find a degree of fine tuning in the universe that is

incomprehensible. We have learned things about our universe that were previously thought
of as mere chance. Even though we theorize that there may be millions or billions of planets
in the universe, as far as we know the only one that has the unbelievable delicate balance of
air and atmosphere to support life is ours. Our unique placement in our galaxy [Milky Way]
allows our solar system to be in a position where we can see our actual location in space
[thru telescopes of course!] there are many other spots that we could have been placed in
that would not have allowed our own viewing of our position. Did God realize [did!] that
there would come a time in human history as man advanced in wisdom where he would
figure out the absolute need for a designer to have done these things? Richard Dawkins and
other atheists realize what a losing game they are playing. They see how it is impossible for
all of this complexity and design to be in our universe and for all of this to have happened
from no thing! So in sheer fantasy they have come up with a solution. A multi-verse. That is
if the probabilities of our existence in our own universe are so complex, then instead of
admitting the astronomical odds [impossibility!] of all this happening by chance, they just
changed the odds. How so? If you flipped a coin and it landed on heads, all day every day for
the rest of your life. What conclusion would you come to? You would check out the coin to
make sure it doesnt have 2 heads! Or in other words the first reasonable, logical conclusion
would be someone designed the coin to make this happen. Now say if you had someone who
said I dont believe that someone designed this to happen. I would ask then how else can
you explain, that by pure chance this unbelievable result has occurred he could then say
well, say if right now as you were flipping the coin, at the same time there are an untold
number of other people all over the world right now flipping coins. Lets say the whole
population of 6.5 billion people on the planet are flipping coins!. Well, I would have to admit
that the odds of one person getting heads every time just went up. Even though it would still
be highly unlikely that out of all 6.5 billion people you would still have one who hit heads non
stop for 25 years in a row, yet the fact is the odds have changed in favor of my friend who
does not believe in an intelligent designer who caused the unbelievable odds to happen. This
in a nutshell is what the multi verse brothers believe. They have simply changed the odds by
saying there are an infinite number of universes. Now, what evidence do we have that there
are multiple universes existing outside of our present universe? None! No wait absolutely
none. Well John, do you mean to tell me that these geniuses of intellect are trying to pass off
something as ridiculous as this without any evidence? Yes. The fact is by definition there can
be no evidence. Our universe is described as all that is presently existing in our space/time
continuum. Anything that we could ever learn or see is by definition in our universe. This is
why science has proven that for all things [space and time included] to have had a beginning
[which is scientific fact!] then there must have been an outside causal agent, who himself was
not limited by time or space [our universe!] who acted upon his own purpose and will to
bring into existence all things. For Dawkins or Hawking to simply say well, we believe there
are untold numbers of infinite big bangs and infinite universes is as ridiculous as saying
everyone else on the planet are flipping coins! NOTE- the multi-verse idea is gaining
ground as an answer to the intelligent design problem seen in our universe. The increased
complexity and fine tuning that science is discovering in our universe poses a tremendous
threat to the old it just happened theory. The obvious silliness of the multi- verse theory is
its absolute contradiction. In essence it says we have been saying for years that the high
improbability of our universe coming into existence from a big bang which has no prior
cause, is next to impossible. But this impossible supposition is now explained by saying
there have been an infinite number of big bangs and an infinite number of universes. If the
odds on all of this coming into existence from nothing are small [impossible] what are the
odds that this next to impossible phenomena has been going on for ever?

-[1458] CONTACT! The other night I caught the movie Contact; I have seen it before but
figured Id re-watch it. The movie pits science against religion; the religious figure [Mathew
Mconaughy] is talking to the scientific atheist [Jodie Foster] as she makes her case against
God she asks the religious figure are you familiar with Ockhams Razor [wow, isnt she
smart!] and the ex-priest says no, is it some sort of porno movie? and of course the atheist
goes on to quote the famous saying. Ockhams razor is the principle developed by William of
Ockham that says when you have multiple solutions to a problem that the simplest answer is
usually the correct one. Sounds good, whats the problem? The problem is William of
Ockham was indeed a Christian philosopher; he was a contemporary of Thomas Aquinas and
John Duns Scotus. They all lived in the high middle ages [13th-14th centuries]. So for Jodie
Foster to have appealed to him while trying to make the point that religion and science dont
mix, well it would be like me debating someone on Halloween. I say it never existed as a
pagan holiday; you insist it did! As we debate, I say have you ever heard of the term trick or
treat and you say no, whats that. I then changed the channel to the news and they were
doing a story on some scientist who supposedly invented synthetic DNA, they then gave the
various statements from religious groups who were against it and thought it violated ethics.
It was a replay of the same themes of the movie, pitting science against religion. Science and
religion are not enemies, the scientific method was invented by the church, most of the
greatest minds in science have been Christian [or religious] and even till this very day many
of the great men of science are believers. At the end of the movie they gave a short dedication
to Carl [Sagan]. Sagan was the famous atheist who said the universe is all there ever was and
all there ever would be. The apostle Paul said men chose to worship and serve the creation
rather than the creator, therefore God gave them up to reprobate minds. The other night I
watched the special called Hawking's universe I dont know why they called it Hawkings, it
was a simple rehash of the idea of cosmological evolution, nothing new at all. Lets make
something clear, those who espouse the idea that because we have discovered that most all of
the base elements of creation and man are also found in the stars, this in no way proves that
men and creation all evolved from stars! This is one of the most ridiculous ideas I have ever
heard, and yet many learned men are making this case. Some are saying that when stars
explode [novas] that these base elements then form planets and people and monkeys and
elephants and- well you get the idea. What mechanism are they giving us that shows us that
something like this is even possible? Absolutely none. They are simply making the claim that
because we share most of the same matter, that therefore the stars themselves created
everything. This is not only not true science, but it doesnt pass the smell test of elementary
school! It would be like me stumbling across some computer disk, and then finding a
computer to pop it into. Lo and behold I have found the complete works of Shakespeare on
the disk. How did they get there? Sure enough some analyst figures out a way to examine the
matter that makes up the disk [not the intelligence on it!] and lo and behold he identifies the
makeup of the disk. He then proclaims aha, I have figured out where the works of
Shakespeare came from and he then goes on to give us the elements that make up the disk.
Whats the problem? He simply identified the matter of the disk, he did not identify where
the actual intelligence on the disk came from. So when people espouse the idea that the stars
made everything they are talking absolute nonsense. The only true explanation for the
contents on the disk [or the intelligence found in the universe] is the reality that an
intelligent agent put the contents there. There is no other rational explanation. Jodie Foster
was right- when you have multiple solutions to a problem, the simplest is usually correct.
Either the stars made everything [impossible], or God. Ill go with God.
http://www.corpuschristioutreachministries.blogspot.com

12.24.2010 | 5:02pm
Bill says:

John CIf aliens from another galaxy showed up tomorrow, or if we discovered multiverses actually
exist, it would in no way negate the existence of God. I think that it's important not to
overburden our faith with unnecessary things. How many people throughout history
abandoned their faith (wrongly) because they learned that the Earth was not 6000 years old,
but a million times that? Even if there are infinitely many universes that arise by probability
and gravity, that still begs the question of where those two forces came from and, more
importantly, what sustains their existence (and thus ours).
Sigmund Freud tried to negate the existence of God because human beings tend to relate to
God transferentially, as a parent. This was terrible logic (How else would we relate to
someone infinitely powerful?), but many bought into it. Now there are very few Freudians
left, but the damage was done. Now some say that brain neurochemistry proves that we don't
have souls. This is also bunk, but brain neurochemistry is a fact of life. It would be easy for
the unsophisticated to lose their faith over such a thing.
God is mysterious, and so is the cosmos He created. He has revealed to us through His Son,
Sacred Tradition, Scripture, and the Magisterium what we need for eternal salvation. He
never claimed that He had told us everything there is to know about the Universe. Our faith
should never be held hostage to scientific theories subject to modification or revision (e.g., I
believe in evolution, but why do so many Darwinians fail to reproduce?)

12.25.2010 | 9:14am
Richard says:
Bill,
Bingo! And Merry Christmas.
Best,
Richard

12.25.2010 | 5:55pm
Bill says:
Merry Christmas Richard!

12.25.2010 | 7:46pm
Tony Dickey says:
Paradox2140:Progress:New Morality
(http://measuringhistory.com/waves/discussions/paradox2140-progress/new-morality/)
reaches many of the same conclusions from the basis of outer planet measurements, ie.,
mundane astrology. We entered a new paradigm circa 1893, one that will not end until 2384.
We are about 2/3s through the first phase of the period defined by Neptune-Pluto
conjunctions (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Udsip688BaE).
I know, its astrology. But the open-minded will realize how pertinent the conclusions reached
through this method. All of human life is paradox. The 'death of philosophy' and the recent
ineffectiveness of religion is just one of the paradoxes of our current Neptune-Pluto paradox.

Also go here for more fun reading:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?
fbid=127122620649912&set=a.127103090651865.17075.119638511398323
http://measuringhistory.com/waves

12.26.2010 | 1:33am
Erasmus deF says:

Not the multiuniverse theory! Let's go back to Occam who says that given two theories that
attempt to explain something, generally the simpler one is more often the best.

12.26.2010 | 2:12pm
Joe the Human says:
So, since the phrase "God did it," can answer EVERYTHING...: Why is the sky blue? Why is
grass green? Why is there air? "God did it"? Therefore we don't need any complicated science
or exploration, or any reason. Or any intelligence at all. Right?
Just one simple answer for EVERYTHING; right?
Life just got very, VERY simple. Right?

12.26.2010 | 5:50pm
Richard says:
Calm down, Joe. Most of the readers on First Things, I would wager, are firmly pro-science. I
certainly am. That does not make me less a Christian. You'd better read Bill's post again.
Best,
Richard

12.26.2010 | 11:58pm
Dave says:
Joe the Human-

Why would I want to refute Plato's Parmenides dialogue? A 'monotheistic One that made the
universe' sounds a whole lot like "God" in the Western monotheistic tradition does it not?
And I don't need to refute "500 other creation myths" because the point I was making is that,
for the debate at hand, a monotheistic view of ultimate reality is fundamentally superior in
terms of rational explanation than a polytheistic view, at least if you're bound to think there
is some underlying ultimate reality at all. You incorrectly assumed that I am Catholic and
that I believe I could rationally prove the Christian creation story to be correct; I merely
noted that as far as this debate is concerned, polytheism is inferior to monotheism, and
simply noting that lots of different cultures have different opinions does not constitute any
sort of argument in favor of Atheism.
"How can Aquinas stand up to all of modern philosophy?" Well modern philosophy has given
us the problem of induction, the problem of personal identity, the appalling, repugnant

metaphysical doctrine that is nominalism, the mind-body problem, and the radical division
between the world as it is and the world as we know it, so I'm not altogether too impressed
with modern philosophy, nor do I see why you should be. I'm assuming you're a man who
likes science, which is great, except that I don't see how much of it you can buy into if you're a
'modern' philosopher, rejecting, as you would, objective causal connections between events,
objective connection between our ideas and qualities of objects and the 'mind' itself in any
meaningful sense. If you know anything at all about philosophy you probably know that in
the American analytic tradition we tend to arrogantly dismiss the European 'continental'
tradition as sophistry or nonsensical, as it often strays far from or is altogether unconcerned
with the findings of science, but we ought to praise that European tradition for at least being
consistent. The ancestors of Hume and Kant recognized the implications of their radical
skepticism and conceptualism and continued accordingly; analytic philosophers have
generally conveniently ignored the disastrous consequences of the problem of induction or
Hume's account of causation generally and simply gone on pretending it wasn't a problem in
the first place.
Particularly, if you buy into Hume's skepticism of causation, or Kant's transcendental theory
that entails that cause/effect relations cannot take us out of observed experience, you
necessarily reject any sort of cosmology at all- scientific or theological. The reason I believe
Professor Haldane and many philosophers are lambasting Hawking here is that he is arguing
that philosophical, theological speculation on the origin of the universe is meaningless or
impossible, and then engaging in a great deal of it himself. The fact that Hawking might
mathematically model out some theoretical construct such as 'M-theory' or the 'multiverse' in
general is irrelevant; mathematics is simply another species of the language of logic, which
(at least in theory, though I will concede to you often not in practice) is how arguments in
natural theology are supposed to be laid out. From a 'modern' perspective then, 'M-theory,'
'string theory' etc. are no more valuable or defensible than the worst arguments for the
existence of God. Both, at least from a modern perspective, seek to answer questions lying
outside of the realm of what it is even possible for human beings to imagine, let alone
experience. If you're really so impressed with 'modern philosophy' then, you ought to be
rejecting Hawking on skeptical grounds just as much as you'd reject Aquinas, Haldane or
anyone else.
Additionally, with regards to the so-called 'cosmological argument,' you're presuming that
'first cause' refers to 'first in a series' where a series is being understood as a temporal chain
of events. In fact the 'first' refers to that which is 'metaphysically primary' or 'metaphysically
necessary.' Let us agree on one thing here; there is something that has always existed and
always will, whether it's God or not. String theory says 'no' to God and instead argues for a
class of one dimensional 'strings,' essentially a variant on the Atomism of Democritus, and
claims that this is the 'metaphysically necessary' level of reality, upon which everything else
that exists depends. Now maybe a rational person would buy this, maybe he wouldn't; but
what is wholly irrational to believe is that there is no necessarily existing thing or class of
things at all. Of course you may choose to rhetorically ask 'well why would be believe the
world to be rational anyways?' But if you ask this you certainly betray the spirit of scientific
inquiry, which from your writings I would presume you value.
Finally, I would like you to name some of the 'many analytical philosophers' who suggest that
the notion of an 'uncaused first cause' is incoherent, and I'd also like to ask what 'getting a
clear picture in your mind' has to do with something being incoherent or not. Tell me, can
you get 'a clear picture in your mind' of a 10,000 sided figure that is distinguishable from a
9,000 sided figure or a 10,001 sided figure? Because I can't and I'll bet you can't either, but
the concept of a 10,000 sided figure is perfectly coherent. Equating 'a picture in the mind'
with logical coherence is simply an extension of the tremendous modern fallacy of equating
the intellect with the imagination- a fallacy introduced by Locke and seemingly never

corrected. You yourself have a long way to go in making this conflation at all reasonable, so
this serves as no real obstacle to the idea of an uncaused first cause.
So you do not inaccurately perceive my own stance again, let me make it clear here. I am a
moderate Christian whose mother is a scientist. I do not buy into 'God of the gaps' reasoning
and consider myself tolerant and open to disagreement and opposing points of view. My own
irritation at Hawking's book stems from the fact that I'm a philosophy major hoping to find a
job, not from my religious beliefs. Please bear this in mind when you respond.

12.27.2010 | 12:14am
Sam. says:

@Joe the Human As Aaron Rasmussen above said, "Religion is really about meaning and
purpose. Science is about applying a particular skeptical methodological process to the
natural world in order to discover how it works." Pretty straightforward, no? Let science
answer the "how?", and let religion answer the "why?".
Besides, even if God is the most prior answer to the question of cause, there are still other
secondary, more direct causes, which can and ought to be investigated and discovered.
http://wasteyourtime.mtgames.org

12.27.2010 | 12:29pm
Andrew Lyttle says:

@ Dave & sort of @ Joe Humanus,

Dave,
Don't hold your breath for a good answer from J the H. Isn't it rather obvious from his posts
that he doesn't generally understand the philosophical issues involved? Every contribution
he makes, to every column, tends to repeat exactly the same basic logical error of which you
are trying to disabuse him. After a while, shouldn't one just give up and recognize invincible
ignorance when one sees it?
Anyway, he clearly knows only dribs and drabs of philosophical argument to begin with. His
bluster aside, he clearly doesn't have the background necessary to debate the arguments,
because he doesn't actually know what the arguments say. When he tells us that modern
philosophy has somehow put paid to Aquinas's account, you just have to shake your head, as
everyone in the guild knows that much of the most dynamic work being done in philosophy
departments today (in the Anglophone world) goes in precisely the opposite direction. This
chap's a fraud: all patter, no guns. Drop the argument, for sanity's sake.

12.27.2010 | 1:30pm
harry says:
Here are the thoughts of one who readily admits he is an amateur. ;o)
Currently, God did it is a better explanation of the fine-tuning of the Universe than is We
were the lucky winners in the multiverse lottery. There can be, by definition, no observable
evidence for the existence of other universes. Multiverse theory is a desperate attempt to
avoid the conclusions that common sense demands we reach, and is based upon atheistic
religious / philosophical assumptions, not on relentlessly objective, religion-neutral science.

Intelligence is a reality. To deny that it is, is to exhibit its deficiency in one's own instance. As
a reality, it is legitimate for true, religion-neutral science to consider it as a causal factor in
the explanation of phenomena. In some instances it is the obvious explanation, as in the
Rosetta Stone and prehistoric cave paintings. In others it is the best explanation currently
available to science. That is the case with the digitally encoded instructions embedded in the
DNA molecule, and with the miraculous, as Hawking puts it fine-tuning of the
Universe. Life itself being astoundingly complex technology that is beyond our own if it
weren't we could build it from scratch is also currently best explained by including
intelligence as a factor in its origin. (If one doesn't know at least one way a phenomenon can
be intentionally brought about, one cannot have an explanation of how mindless, naturally
occurring processes might bring it about, much less any strictly scientific basis for insisting
that that is the case. In that situation, the assertion that it was brought about mindlessly can
only be based on religions / philosophical assumptions.)
It is only science perverted by religious atheism that denies what common sense makes
evident to everyone else. (It is religious atheism because the belief that God is not there
cannot be proven. It must be taken on faith. Beliefs about God taken on faith are religious
beliefs.) Relentlessly objective, religion-neutral science will continue to follow the evidence
wherever it leads, regardless of whose religious / philosophical ox is gored by its doing so.
Darwin's proposal of how life as we know it could have come about mindlessly was
controversial. The reaction of theists to it was reasonable compared to the reaction of atheists
to the discoveries of modern science mentioned above. Frantically coming up with multiverse
theory is an unreasonable, desperate response. The attempts to explain how massive
amounts of digital logic might have been mindlessly written into the DNA molecule are not
any better. Creation myths seem reasonable in comparison at least their authors often
seemed to realize that an intelligent being of some kind was the best explanation based on
the facts currently available to them.

12.27.2010 | 5:48pm
John Cummins says:
Bill,

Of course I agree with you. The phenomenon of this or that scientist, even great scientist,
feeling that their discovery implies there's no God or God isn't necessary is a paramount case
of: if you've only a hammer, every problem is a nail. Their problem is what we all have with
God and with egotism. Their focus makes them stupid before disciplines not their own and
they end up treading in those disciplines when they make conclusion such as that of Freud's.
(By the way, Freud and his insights are very greatly to be valued within their subject area,
and Civilization and its Discontents, say, is not to be tossed out just because some of Freud's
conclusions aren't necessitated by his premises.)
What is immediately incendiary is the seeming utter denial, or, to be charitable, ignorance,
Hawking shows of the imperative of definition. Pretending that "nothing" and "laws of
physics" are what he says and not what language says is tantamount to dishonesty. Such
eminences as he should be grabbed by the scruff and have their noses shoved into their
semantic nonsense, until they admit their incompetence or their lie, or both of them.
Actually, it's more than this: it's criminal to foist this upon a public with few resources or
time, or even the idea that they can, examine his crap critically.

12.27.2010 | 7:35pm

DWCrmcm says:

"...
Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe [that is, ours] can and will create itself
from nothing.
..."
Because there is a law ??????
Because there is gravity ... extrapolate as you wish.
The law of the universe is aggregation.
Quantum-ism has confused everyone.
"Our universe", which we call The Rational, is a complexity.
There are underlying simplicities.
The infinitely complex requires the infinitely simple.
One could also define God as the infinitely complex and the infinitely simple.
This would allow our understanding of God to simply, truly, and safely ignore the statistical,
the speculative, and the quasi scientific.
The question "why" is and always will be, a prayer.
respectfully
http://rationalmechanisms.com/lexicon

12.27.2010 | 9:19pm
tempo dulu says:
Whilst religion is obviously bogus, the real secrets of the universe, creation etc are probably
still well beyond the understanding of even the brightest human minds. It's like expecting a
mouse to understand Nietzsche. I still struggle on understanding basic quantum physics. If
we can't really understand, how can we judge?
http://al-terity.blogspot.com/

12.28.2010 | 1:07am
Chuck says:

There are so many liars about and the subjects are so complex that we will never figure it out.
All we can hope for is to keep the arrogant and dogmatic people on all sides from taking over
and closing our minds.

12.28.2010 | 5:39am
Jim M says:

Make curtains of goat hair for the tent over the tabernacleeleven altogether."
Exodus 26:7
http://lh5.ggpht.com/_zVvYxLpojG0/SoYZO34P4GI/AAAAAAAAAEo/rjgqGq9KmeI/s800/
Covering2-a.jpg
Five seemingly contradictory sets of equations to describe the same thing:
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/five-major-world-religions.html
Falsifiable 'Super M-Theory' model:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf56jYDv2fc ;)

12.28.2010 | 7:56am
Samc says:

"If that is indeed the case, far from concluding that "we don't know," we can very reasonably
conclude that someone/something that transcends nature, is distinct from it, and the
existence of which is not in any way dependent upon nature, is responsible for it. That
existence, be it a "what" or a "who," evidently has the power required to bring forth
something from nothing, and the knowledge required to bring it about such that that
"something" would eventually lead to intelligent, self-aware beings and the environment to
sustain them."
Harry, where did the god come from then? The only reason that this argument holds any
water with theists is they are preconditioned to believe in a god. They start from the position
that their god is real, not 'what is the state of the universe'.
"It is religious atheism because the belief that God is not there cannot be proven. It must be
taken on faith. Beliefs about God taken on faith are religious beliefs"
Harry, ever head of probability? It is what science is mostly based on. Saying that we cannot
disprove a god is a straw man There is nothing religious about atheism, it is the null
hypothesis. How about some evidence to reject it?
Feel free to believe in a god, but just accept that it is based on faith. Dont try to drag science
and reason down to the level of faith.

12.28.2010 | 9:18am
Joe the Human says:

Just for clarification: my position is not that science offers a sure cosmology. It is rather that
neither religion or science either, has a good answer to the question of the origin of the
universe.
My position is that the complexity of the universe is so great, especially the matter of its
origins, that the best answer to "who or what created the universe," will always be ... "we
don't know."

12.28.2010 | 11:12am
harry says:
Hi, Samc,

"Harry, where did the god come from then?" --samc

One of the reasons God is God is because He didn't "come from" anywhere. He is the One
Who simply "Is." He is the fundamental reality, the essence of being. If He were to concisely
explain Himself to you, He might say something like, "I AM WHO AM," or maybe just "I
AM."
There is nothing religious about atheism, it is the null hypothesis. How about some evidence
to reject it? --samc

Atheism certainly is religious in the sense I mentioned: it requires faith because its basic
premise, God's nonexistence, cannot be proven to be true, and is a belief about God, even if it
is that God does not exist. Beliefs about God taken on faith are religious beliefs.
There is no "if the litmus paper turns red ..." type proof for or against God's existence. There
is, in my opinion, an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence for His existence and
a handful of reasonable, but not insurmountable, arguments against it.
Thanks for your remarks.

12.28.2010 | 11:54am
Andrew Lyttle says:
@ Harry

Atheism isn't a religious hypothesis--it isn't rational enough to be religious. Religions may
abound in dogmas, many of which are worthless and absurd, and in any number of silly
trappings that are there to catch the eye rather than engage the mind. But at the ground of all
religious yearning is the rational recognition that the contingent order of things requires a
transcendent cause in order to exist. Even 'primitive' animisms flow from this recognition,
even if they lack the philosophical sophistication to make the distinction between being as
such and contingent beings.
Atheism on the other hand proposes a model of reality that is quite obviously ludicrous: pure
contingency generating pure contingency ab nihilo. It desribes a universe that cannot
possibly *be*. There is no way of phrasing such a vision in terms of clear modal logic that
does not reveal it to be a manifest nonsense. It may be rational to say, 'I don't understand
God and I don't find any religious doctrines convincing.' That's my position on most days
(though I think there are such things as mystical experience and revelation as well). But it
really is the case that only a fool say, 'There is no God.'

12.28.2010 | 1:39pm
Joe the Human says:

So "I AM" is all that needs to be said? So equally I can say the universe, "JUST IS."
Religion says that you can get miracles, "whatever you ask." Just by praying and having faith;
all the wonders that Jesus did, and "greater things than these." But miracles being at least
partially physical, this is an empirical claim therefore; one which is easily disproven.
Ask, and see if you CAN walk on water. Or ask for the holiest priest you know, to do that.
What will be your finding? If you are honest, you will say the claim is false.
Religion makes huge empirical claims; but those claims are obviously, empirically false. So?
Almost any hypothesis as to the origin of the universe, is better than what religion currently
offers.
We need a better religion than what we are offered by priests.

12.28.2010 | 1:57pm

harry says:

Hello, Joe the Human,

"So equally I can say the universe, "JUST IS." -- J of H
Not really. Think about what Andrew Lyttle just posted.
Take care.

12.28.2010 | 2:45pm
Bill says:

This is a lot of fun. Ill have to stop in again. A few stray thoughts.
1. John C.-Thank you for your kind comments. I agree that Freud was a very interesting guy
who had some good things to say. It always struck me as a bit ironic that someone who
helped create such an elaborate (and useful in an explanatory sense) metapsychology
appeared to have a bit of an aversion to metaphysics.
2. Harry. I agree that Atheism appears to be a religion in a faith based sense. Agnosticism
might not qualify as a religion unless one were too certain about it! :)
3. Joe the Human-Perhaps the limit of Just Is as Is approaches Unity (and Trinity)= I
AM. Just sayin. I think Sam also had an excellent suggestion for you about the very
legitimate investigation of secondary causes, which is what scientists of all stripes do.
Believing in God doesnt require that you limit yourself to theology and Scripture, although
these are outstanding pursuits as well. Peace.

12.28.2010 | 4:41pm
Joe the Human says:

Dave: 1) I am not quite as radical a skeptic, as much of Western tradition has been, from
Descartes '"evil demon," through Derrida. But I find the occasional invocation of radical
skepticism still useful, in countering ... the radical dogmatism that is characteristic of much
of religion.
My 2) actual position on origins though, is skeptical enough. On the question of ultimate
origins and/or the exact nature of God: I am ... agnostic. Therefore,in my position, even
Plato's occasional (if not consistent) monotheism or monism, is only marginally interesting;
and not entirely acceptable. So that 3) any monotheism ends up competing with hundreds of
other monotheisms.
If you are embracing monotheism, but not of a particular type, then you DO need to consider
all the other monotheisms.
But even if I like Plato, then 3) the near identity between Heraclutus' pagan "one" and the
Trinity, though often asserted, is far from a slam dunk. The more dogmatic Christian
traditions do not quite accept it. So already, you yourself and those who follow you, are
leaving the realm of conservative Catholicism.
Good for you. Still? Here we are both already in the religious minority. And are taking a
relatively renegade position.

Though to be sure, I find the "one" attractive; but even there, elements of it seem still,
paradoxical. Where for example did the "one" come from? To assert that there was no
"nothing" from which it came, nothing before it ... seems like a rather raw ... ASSERTION.
Nothing solid.
It "just is"? Is that solid Philosophy? Is that an argument? Is that really better than just
saying the universe just is? Indeed, here the "one" is isomorphic with ... I AM in fact. But that
is not to valorize either.

12.28.2010 | 5:38pm
ManFromAltair says:

It's easy to prove God doesn't exist.

Assume, for the sake of argument, that God exists.
I shall take the liberty of writing down the following sentence, call it P.
P: God does not know that this sentence is true.
Now, either God knows P to be true, or God does not know P to be true.
If God knows P to be true, then P is false and God is mistaken.
If God does not know P to be true, then P is true and I have found a truth which God does not
know.
Since both of these cases lead to a contradictory result, my original assumption must be false.
Hence, God does not exist. REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM
***************
Alright, so God doesn't exist. Is that the end of it? Can God love the world if he doesn't exist?
I don't know, because this is a different kind of question.
***************
Since today's philosophy is psychology, Steven Hawking is implying psychology is a dead end
pursuit.

12.28.2010 | 7:10pm
John Cummins says:
Andrew Lyttle,

This is very nicely done: "at the ground of all religious yearning is the rational recognition
that the contingent order of things requires a transcendent cause in order to exist."

12.28.2010 | 7:26pm
harry says:
Hello, ManFromAltair,
And just what is the assertion in sentence "P" to be known is true or known to be false?

God may not know how to make square circles -- but as soon as you can come up with
intelligible, coherent plans for a square circle, I'll bet He can make it. In the same way, if you
compose a sentence containing an intelligible, coherent assertion, God will know whether it
is true or not.
Your post was mildly amusing, but I am afraid you haven't overwhelmed everyone with
inexorable logic. ;o)

12.28.2010 | 10:16pm
Martin Snigg says:
@ManfromAltair.
See Godel. See equivocation. See stipulated definition. See classical theism. See God's nature.
See 'married bachelor'.

12.29.2010 | 9:00am
Joe the Human says:
Lyttle & Cummings:

Sounds nice ... at first. But 1) why is reality "contingent"? Mightn't all things be exactly as
they are, necessarily? As some forms of Determinism, even Christian religion, suggest?
2) And why would existing or even contingent things, say material things, require a
"transcendental" cause? They would require some cause other than themselves? But what is
to say that cause is "transcendental," in the sense of being say, non-material?
Matter can't create itself? But God can create himself? Is that really an answer? The next
question is: how? Without an explanation, you have merely made yet another series of bald,
unubstantiated assertions; not proofs.
FOr this and other reasons I am an agnostic, as regards the conventional priestly idea of
"God," and his role in the alleged creation of the universe. Personally, I'm looking for a better
definition of "God"; one that makes more sense.
To be sure, the notion of the "One" is interesting, in that way. Or a different concept of God
than most hold.

12.29.2010 | 11:59am
Tom says:

@Joe
My understanding is that reality is called contingent because it could be otherwise than it is.
This point has been argued over and over on the internet: Matter is created by the laws of
nature through quantum fluctuations. By why should there be laws of nature at all? If "no
God" is an appealing hypothesis because it's simple, isn't "no universe" even simpler? Yet
there is a universe, and there are laws of nature which, so far as we know, could be other than
they are. Given this the hypothesis of a transcendent being who causes these laws to exist is
no less rational than the hypothesis that these laws somehow create themselves. None of our
knowledge of the physical world supports one hypothesis over the other.

12.29.2010 | 12:48pm
harry says:
@Bill

While accepting the assertion that atheism is a religious viewpoint, some would object that it
is not an organized religion. I maintain it is the most organized religion - our government has
become, to a large extent, its organization. Through an overreaction to a quite reasonable
aversion to living under a theocracy, we have inadvertently allowed the state to embrace a
particular religious viewpoint. Atheism has become the de facto state religion. We are living
under one of the few systems worse than a theocracy: an "atheocracy." Is the utterly religious
viewpoint -- the belief that there is no God which must be taken on faith -regulated/suppressed the way theism is regulated/suppressed? Think about it. ;o)
@Andrew Lyttle
I just want to say I am very impressed with your remarks.

12.29.2010 | 4:07pm
Bill says:

Harry-Concur. Not for nothing did they call Stalin the "Red Pope."

12.30.2010 | 8:30am
Papalinton says:

John Haldane, no doubt a brilliant philosopher. It is a pity he is blighted with the catholic
virus, so noticeable in the manner that after posing his questions on cosmology, on the
process by which the universe came into being, the regularity of the cosmic constants and the
observable order in chemistry; that is, right at the cutting edge of investigation, he then
defaults, reverts, relapses and regresses to the primitive remnant of our genetic
predisposition for imagining the supernatural and surrender to superstition, and respond
that the only reasonable answer to these questions is the existence of a spectral numen, a
creator god.
As a consultant to the Vatican, I probably should not have expected anything different of Dr
Haldane's religio-philosophical take on this topic.
A reading of his article clearly posits the notion of a sophisticated, but nonetheless, "god of
the gaps" conclusion.
His argument is an 'argument from personal incredulity', that such order, such regularity
could not possibly have occurred on its own. Well we know that's rubbish. Why should order
not be a natural characteristic in this wonderful universe. The attribution of an 'uncaused
cause' simply because something looks neat and tidy is a spurious and tendentious claim. The
more honest response would be to admit, "I don't know, but let's find out, shall we." And
that's where science comes in. It is our primary mechanism for discovering the secrets of our
world and universe. Anyone who posits the ideation of a supernatural realm filled with gods,
demons, angels, spirits, is perhaps putting the horse before the cart. In doing so, this
premature approach only places unnecessary barriers in the way of that exploration.

12.30.2010 | 9:02am
Papalinton says:
Hi Andrew Lyttle

You say, "But at the ground of all religious yearning is the rational recognition that the
contingent order of things requires a transcendent cause in order to exist. Even 'primitive'
animisms flow from this recognition, even if they lack the philosophical sophistication to
make the distinction between being as such and contingent beings."
This is simply acquiescing to our primitive instincts. The tether of religion is infantilism writ
large. The level of adherence to religion is not a measure of maturity, rather it is an indicator
of the incapacity of many of our confreres to jettison one of the last of the primitive remnants
of our genetic predisposition for survival in the African savannah. Our innate predisposition
to superstition and the supernatural is not a product of knowledge and learning. It is rather a
function of the primitive nature of our genetic make-up that was predominantly a result of
developing a survival mechanism that has subsequently been co-opted for a secondary
function. The degree and level of ardency of belief is primarily a measure of the level of
primitive responses that govern our lives. This premature response of defaulting to
supernaturalism can only be mitigated through decent education and continuing social
debate challenging the level of immaturity and juvenility from which such human activity is
derived.
As conscious and reasoning beings we should be training ourselves to cut this umbilical cord.
We do not have to remain ape-like in our behaviour and our preponderance to superstition
and mythicism. Surely our understanding of where we came, our common heritage with all
other living things on this planet, should be a driver to better ourselves, to change, to use our
brain to the best of our ability. As I say, we have the capacity to do so through education and
knowledge.
A call to theism is simply a reverting to our primitive past, a return to the childish world of
the supernatural, a kid's world filled with gods, demons, fairies, goblins, leprechauns, evil
spirits, miracles and imaginary friends.
Sorry Andrew, religion is the dependent variable to the independent variables of everyday
social and physical reality. We shouldn't be looking back 2000 years we should be imagining
2000 years hence. Science provides us with that opportunity.
Cheers

12.30.2010 | 10:13am
Andrew Lyttle says:

I will merely repeat my earlier point. Joe the Human (now joined by Papalinton) simply does
not understand the philosophical issues he thinks he's addressing. He thinks that there is
some obscurity regarding the contingent nature of materially and temporally composite
reality; there is not. He thinks that 'God created himself' is somehow part of the logic of
speaking of God as transcendent source of reality; it manifestly is not. He clearly thinks that
the idea of God is the idea of some other kind of thing, as ontologically in need of causal
grounding as a contingent order, that just happens to be there; it is not. He believes there is
some sort of logical difficulty with the idea of transcendent being that is analogous to the
logical difficulty in the idea of a universe that JUST IS by necessity; there is not. He thinks
that there could possibly be some logically coherent way of stating that the universe JUST IS;
there could not be. In short, he STILL does not understand what the logical content of the

ancient (and modern) arguments regarding ontological contingency is.

As for Papalinton's remarks, they're just silly. There could not possibly be a more
'superstitious' or magical idea than that the universe of contingent things is somehow (by
more eminent composition, to use the language of the schoolmen) a self-subsistent reality
whose *existence* can be explained by the sciences. (CLue to mr P: modern science deals
with things that exist, and for that reason does not--cannot--deal with existence; moreover,
the existence of the universe of contingent things cannot POSSIBLY come about except
through the actuality of that which is not contingent or is composed; and if you do not
understand this distinction, then you have nothing useful to say on the matter.)
Guys, if you're going to bluster on in this silly way, can't you try to reinforce your prejudices
with even a slight *appearance* of philosophical sophistication? There are books out there,
you know. If you want to argue these matters, immerse yourself in a few of them--maybe
Robert Spitzer's recent "New Proofs" volume or some of William Lane Craig's things, or some
of the more easily digested books on these matters by philosophers who have taken the time
to make the arguments. If you can understand at least part of what you're reading, you might
at least grasp how utterly ridiculous the things you're saying here are. At the moment, you're
babbling like nursery-school rejects.
Double cheers.

12.30.2010 | 12:02pm
Ye Olde Statistician says:
Joe the Human says:
So, since the phrase "God did it," can answer EVERYTHING...: ... Therefore we don't need
any complicated science or exploration, or any reason. Or any intelligence at all. Right?
YOS
Wrong. Consider the following assertions by religious schoolmen of olden times:
William of Conches
[They say] "We do not know how this is, but we know that God can do it." You poor fools!
God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why
a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so.
Albertus Magnus
"In studying nature we have not to inquire how God the Creator may, as He freely wills, use
His creatures to work miracles and thereby show forth His power; we have rather to inquire
what Nature with its immanent causes can naturally bring to pass." [De vegetabilibus et
plantis]
Thomas Aquinas
"Nature is nothing but the plan of some art, namely a divine one, put into things themselves,
by which those things move towards a concrete end: as if the man who builds up a ship could
give to the pieces of wood that they could move by themselves to produce the form of the
ship." [Commentary on Physics II.8, lecture 14, no. 268]
Nicholas Oresme
"I propose here to show the causes of some effects which seem to be marvels and to show
that the effects occur naturally There is no reason to take recourse to the heavens, the last
refuge of the weak, or demons, or to our glorious God, as if he would produce these effects

directly [De causa mirabilium]

And so on. Joe has confused the act of creation with efficient material causation.
+++
Joe Human
Just one simple answer for EVERYTHING; right?
Life just got very, VERY simple. Right?
YOS
Wrong, and wrong.
+++
Samc says:
where did the god come from then?
joehuman
paradoxical. Where for example did [Plato's] "one" come from? To assert that there was no
"nothing" from which it came, nothing before it ... seems like a rather raw ... ASSERTION.
Nothing solid.
joehuman
Matter can't create itself? But God can create himself?
YOS
Such weird questions get repeated so often [and so often in the same words] that I suspect
they are a form of prayer, learned from some revered teacher/source and repeated by rote. I
read the same bizarre question in a newspaper column by the science popularizer, R.
Dawkins.
But the train of logic runs thus for some 500 pp.: A essentially-ordered causes cannot
proceed without limit. Therefore, there must be an uncaused cause [an unmoved mover. etc.]
This uncaused cause must be purely actual; otherwise, it would possess a potential and would
be movable [causable] by another. From this once may deduce further properties:
uniqueness, simplicity, essence = existence, eternal, immaterial, outside of nature/spacetime, all-power full, etc., etc. After a while, it becomes clear that this being is pretty much the
traditional vision of God.
IOW, God is not the hypothesis, arbitrarily asserted to have the necessary properties; God is
the conclusion deduced from the necessary properties. Since it is a being whose essence is
simply its existence, the question as to what "created" God is meaningless. Creation is joining
an essence with an act of existence; but this being has been deduced as one who essence just
is to exist. Hence, its self-description as "I AM." In modern terms, "Existence Exists." It is
very hard to deny the existence of Existence Itself.
+++
samc
ever head of probability? It is what science is mostly based on.
YOS
Eek. Are you really claiming that modern science is a house built upon the sand? Probability
is a statement of ignorance; any science "based upon it" is a "science of the gaps" kinda thing.
I've made my living in prob/stat for near forty years now, and have noticed how poorly
understood it is by scientists, engineers, and business managers. (As for social scientists [sic],
ach!)
+++
samc
How about some evidence to reject it [non-existence of God]?

YOS
The existence of change in the world; the ordering of efficient causes; the existence of
scientific natural laws; the existence of existence; etc.
How about some evidence to demonstrate the existence of an objective universe?
+++
joe human
But even if I like Plato, then the near identity between Heraclutus' [?] pagan "one" and the
Trinity, though often asserted, is far from a slam dunk.
YOS
Not to the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus, who determined that the One had three
hypostases: the One, the Intellect, and the Spirit.
+++
ManFromAltair says:
It's easy to prove God doesn't exist. Assume, for the sake of argument, that God exists. I shall
take the liberty of writing down the following sentence, call it P.
P: God does not know that this sentence is true.
etc. etc.
YOS
That's weird. It's lifted and modified from J.R.Lucas' proof that the mind cannot be the brain.
Stems from Gdel's Theorem. However, you have modified it into a logical contradiction,
which immediately causes it to blow up. Language paradoxes need not obligate the real
world.

12.30.2010 | 12:13pm
harry says:
Hi, Papalinton,

It's worse than you think. Catholics don't use God just to fill in the gaps, we attribute the
whole kit and caboodle to Him. That allows us to be completely objective when doing
science. Realizing that God is the author of nature, we understand that there can be no real
conflict between true science and true religion. We don't have to be afraid of the
religious/philosophical implications of scientific discoveries. We are confident that
ultimately, the more we learn about nature, the easier it will be to discern its Author through
His works.
Those who are not so confident in their religious/philosophical beliefs freak out when the
discoveries of science aren't going their way. They come up with absurdities like multiverse
theory. They file lawsuits against school boards. They refuse to acknowledge intelligence as a
possible causal factor in the explanation of various phenomena, even though intelligence is a
reality that we know is the best explanation for phenomena in many instances. They have to
rule it out because their atheistic religious/philosophical beliefs won't allow it. Their
scientific objectivity is gone. True, relentlessly objective science doesn't rule out possible
causal factors simply because of their religious/philosophical implications.
So go ahead and believe with all your heart that mindlessness brought about minds, that a
who can spring forth from a what, that anything we don't yet understand, somehow,
some way, will eventually be explained by the creative power of mindless chance combined
with the laws of nature. I would join you except I am a man of little faith. I just can't muster

up the faith required to attribute all we don't yet understand to the creative power of
mindlessness of the gaps. Maybe I could if there weren't an infinite gap between
mindlessness and a mind, between a what and a who but there is. Maybe I could if I
didn't realize that massive amounts of digital logic (like that found in the DNA molecule) can
only spring from a source capable of being logical, that information can only originate from a
source capable of being informed a who. The notion that nature has its origin in One Who
could say of Himself, I AM WHO AM, is very plausible compared to the alternatives, and
works much better for those of little faith like myself.

12.30.2010 | 12:31pm
Billy says:
Lyttle:

You make lots of assertions, and you say they are abolutely certain. But every one of your
assertions is questioned in current and classsic philosophy. Where do you get the idea they
are all settled questions? Did God tell you?
You throw out dozens of assertions. So let's start first, with one simple point: IS it really true
that the contingent nature of the universe is settled?
Contingency means ... the universe could be other than it is. But if the universe was founded
on laws ... then the universe is ruled, controlled. Possibly, in every aspect. Or "Determined,"
as one school of philsophy says.
So let's start with this one: how and why are you so sure, the universe is contingent? In light
of say, classic Determinism, specifically.
Is it your opinion that Internet Philosophy has decisively disproven determinism?

12.30.2010 | 12:47pm
A. Bailey says:

I have enjoyed this discussion. On other forums this kind of dialogue, such as it is, rapidly
deteriorates, with the atheists calling the theists "Fox News watchers" and the theists
promising to pray for the souls of the apparently Damned.
I particularly enjoyed Dave's comments. If I were running the philosophy department of an
institution of higher learning I'd hire you in a heartbeat.
In any case this has been bookmarked for further perusal.

12.30.2010 | 12:51pm
Johann says:
YOS:
Why exactly, can't a series of causes, extend infinitely? Why must there be a first cause? If
God is infinite, so nature might be as well. In which case, no need for a "first" cause.

This issue, like all the others, is settled, only for the dogmatic few - who went to Catholic
schools, that told them it was settled, only.

12.30.2010 | 1:39pm
harry says:
@Johann,

You wrote:
"Why exactly, can't a series of causes, extend infinitely?"
There are many others who have posted on this forum who I am sure could answer your
question better than I, but I will take a crack at it, more to amuse myself than anything
else. ;o)
If a series of causes and effects extended back infinitely, it wouldn't have a beginning. If it
didn't have a beginning, it couldn't be at all. Since it is, it must have a beginning. Clearly,
because we observe a series of causes and effects, there must be some reality or existence that
is uncaused, that caused everything else. This strikes me more as common sense than
Catholic thought.

12.30.2010 | 2:14pm
Andrew Lyttle says:
@ Johann
As has been pointed out ad nauseam, and as Aquinas pointed out with peculiar clarity, even
an infinite series of causes extending backwards without beginning would still be an infinite
sequence of contingent causes and effects, and as a whole would still not be able to account
for its own existence. It would still as a whole require an infinite uncaused actuality to give it
being. This is why Aquinas and others were very clear to make sure that the argument for a
'first cause' was not confused with an argument for the existence of a first cause in a series of
causes, or one cause among others. It is an argument for the necessary reality of that which is
uncaused being logically prior to every series (no matter how far that series extends forwards
or backwards). This is pretty basic stuff. And it's intuitively obvious as well: if you think
about, an infinite series of contingencies 'just being there' would be a purely magical thing, a
completely unpremised reality magically generating itself out of nothingness. Come on-think about it.

12.30.2010 | 3:14pm
Richard says:
A. Lyttle,

It's no use, A. L. It's infinite regress all the way down. Well, I guess that sounds classier than
turtles, anyway.
Best,
Richard

12.30.2010 | 3:36pm
Papalinton says:
Hi Harry
"If a series of causes and effects extended back infinitely, it wouldn't have a beginning. If it
didn't have a beginning, it couldn't be at all. Since it is, it must have a beginning. Clearly,
because we observe a series of causes and effects, there must be some reality or existence that
is uncaused, that caused everything else. This strikes me more as common sense than
Catholic thought."
Face it, you don't know the answer. Simply because an 'uncaused cause' mitigates the
dissonance in your brain does not make it fact. The start of this universe may well have been
just one of a series of events of an evolving process. It is reasonable to extrapolate that if
energy cannot be created or destroyed it would be logical to suggest this universe is a product
of an earlier cosmic process. This seems to have greater explanatory power, consistent with
what scientific evidence has been discovered and verified, although it is speculation at best.
Simply tacking on a god to kick-start the process, especially an anthropomorphic personal
interfering form of god, is a nonsense.
Attempting to reconcile theo-logical presuppositions with the science is fraught with
irrelevance.
Cheers

12.30.2010 | 3:51pm
Papalinton says:
@ Andrew Lyttle

"Aquinas pointed out with peculiar clarity, even an infinite series .... yadda, yadda, yadda"
A lot of things have happened since the 13thC CE, Andrew. Why is it that catholics keep going
back 800 years to pin their whole raison d'tre on an ancient?
Catholic thinking is in a cul-de-sac. I would no more refer to Galileo if I were to study the
moons of Jupiter today with the Hubble telescope available.
All Aquinas represents is the tradition of catholic thinking. It holds no more water than a
sieve.
Come on - think about it.
Sheesh

12.30.2010 | 4:19pm
Papalinton says:

Did I note someone mentioning William Craig Lane as required reading?

My case rests

12.30.2010 | 4:21pm
Papalinton says:

Did I note someone mention William Lane Craig as required reading?

My case rests.

12.30.2010 | 4:27pm
Ye Olde Statistician says:

Johann says:
Why exactly, can't a series of causes, extend infinitely? Why must there be a first cause?
YOS
Not just any series. Aquinas famously allowed for accidentally-ordered series to proceed
infinitely far into the past (because there was no philosophical proof that the world was not
eternal.) But an essentially-ordered series is different. In an essentially-ordered seres, each
cause derives its causal power from the contemporary action of a prior cause. For example,
Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A is caused by the air waves, which are caused by the clarinet,
which is caused by the vibrating reed, which is caused by Sharon Kam.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr3aB4v8hXI
Notice that all the other causes in the chain are simply *instruments and would lack any
causal power whatever if they were not being moved by a first mover, in this case, Sharon
Kam. Since each intermediate cause derives its causal power from its predecessor, there must
be a first cause. Otherwise, none of the other causes would have the power to act.
Simil atque, an infinite series of forwarded emails would still require a first cause, not in the
sense of an initial forwarding act, but in the sense of a writing of the content. No amount of
forwarding can account for the content. Something outside the accidental series must
account for it.
Post-modern critics of the cosmological arguments always get wrong the nature of the causal
series. This enabled them to misstate the argument, and thus "refute" it. But what they refute
is an argument that none of the traditional theologians ever defended. It's like refuting
Galileo by dropping a cannonball and a feather from a tower and pointing out that they do
not fall at the same rate.

12.30.2010 | 4:51pm
Johann says:

You're still begging the big question: where did God or the First Cause come from?
If something outside the system must have caused everything - then what caused it? How did
that thing outside the system, come into being? Who or what made God? How is it that he
exists? Seems like common sense.
And so, does an uncaused first cause, ex nihilo or otherwise, really make sense, or explain
anything at all? Where, how, did it come into existence? It ... JUST IS?
Ever read Richard Rorty, on the "myth of the given"?

The old Catholic school answers - Aquinas - just won't do.

You're still begging the question: where did the first cause come from?
To be sure, as someone already pointed out earlier, there really are no good arguments. My
own tentative argument is in infinite regress, or a circle. But yours is in the rawest kind of
dogmatic arbitrariness: the first cause, just is. Because they told you so in parochial school?
But where did the first cause come from? It ...just is.
Philosophy has moved on; very, very far. Since Aquinas.
Look up Rorty, on the "myth of the given."
Get real.

12.30.2010 | 5:19pm
James W. says:
Man From:

Here's a better one: "Can God made a rock so heavy, that God cannot move it"?
If he can, then there is something God cannot do.
If he cannot, then ... again, there is something God cannot do.

12.30.2010 | 5:25pm
John P. Dunn says:
Scientific explanations are necessary, but not always sufficient.

12.30.2010 | 5:43pm
Richard says:
Papalinton,
Pythagoras' theorem is very old. And still as good as gold.
As for Aquinas, it won't do to say he's old hat. Engage the argument or pass. As for Johann's
assumption that those who believe in God were imprinted in a Catholic Grade school and
never got over it, that is a feeble move. I might as well say that he read Ayer or Ryle or Sartre
when he was young and impressionable and never recovered. Best to be polite to one's
interlocutors. They might be right.
It is impossible to get a consensus view on Aquinas just now. He is quite variously appraised
by that vast horde of cats, modern philosophers. But I thought one quote in my reading
particularly surprising and thoughtful. It is from the revised second edition of A Dictionary of
Philosophy by Anthony Flew, published in 1984, when he was still the God of Atheists, and
shows a fairness that surprised me:

Textbook Thomism presented theories such as the analogy of Being, the doctrine of natural
law, the real distinction between essence and existence which represented hardenings of a
fluid and nuanced position in Aquinas himself. But in recent decades the work of dedicated
medievalists, secular as well as Christian, and the waning of official Catholic Thomism [this
was after Vatican II and the philosophical repositioning of Catholic thought: R.] have begun
to make room for a just appreciation of Aquinas' genius based upon purely philosophical
criteria.
+++++++
If this is true it is fatal to your reduction of Aquinas' thought to merely Catholic tradition that
holds no more water than a sieve.
Let science prove what it can and may the fates be with it. But the dogmatic assertion that the
transcendental is a chimera beyond a shadow of a doubt is utterly unconvincing to me. I
know you think otherwise. You are not a bashful man. But I wish that you were a more
humble and gentle one.
As Aristotle said long ago, truly, the mark of an educated man is not to demand of a subject
more precision and determinacy than it can provide.
Another favorite quote of mine is from an online source I do not remember, but it takes my
fancy: the greatest triumph of modern science is the dematerialization of the material.
And another, by Frost:
We dance around in a ring and suppose,
But the secret sits in the middle, and knows.
Best,
Richard

12.30.2010 | 5:55pm
Thomas Jones says:

I fear this discussion, albeit satisfying, is in danger of infinite regress itself. (I guess that
makes John Haldane God, which at least clears one thing up).
Just picking up the last post, @Johann, why is "Where did God come from" such a big
question? It's never bothered me, though "Where do we come from" has always. If God is by
definition transcendant of the created order, then I am happy that his existence 'is', by
definition.
Or to put it another way, how do you explain existence without a God? Stephen Hawking
does not avoid this problem - from the summary above, he seems to end up with God as the
law of Gravity.
So once you accept some God, you then have a discussion about about the nature of this God,
some of which are touched upon above, but what exactly is the significance of this question
'Where did God come from'? Why does it seem so important to you? If we stick with logic and
simple philosophy, aren't you just going to end up with another 'God'?

12.30.2010 | 6:49pm
Joe the Human says:
Thomas & Richard:
My position is indeed, that neither science nor religion, really have the final answers, when it
comes at least to origins. In the end, in many situations, Reason runs out .. and we just
choose to accept, rather arbitarily, this or that metaphysical cosmology. While religion seems
to generate endless paradoxes and raw assertions.
However, if the origin of the universe just doesn't make sense, in neither the religious nor the
scientific account? If both seem - as regards cosomogeny at least - to be arbitrary, or
circularr? Then let us turn therefore, to things we CAN make sense of. Like looking to see
what works, in our real, daily lives. And there, as a practical matter, science and technology
have been infinitely more fruitful, than sitting around praying for miracles.
Therefore, given a choice between two different ways of thought, advocating two equally
imponderable metaphysical schemes? At that level indeed, Religion ande Science are equally
speculative, and you might as well choose one, as the other. But , since both are equally
helpless at THAT level of analysis, it might be best to pick the one that seems to deliver best,
in other important areas, other spheres.
While science delivers, far, far, far better, when it comes to the "prosperity" that even God
promised.
SInce metaphysics cancels out, as an imponderable constant ,in both religion and science,
put the question of orign aside. And then compare the other virtues of each field. While there,
science wins ...by a factor of millions.
In fact, it wins big enough, to suggest that whatever the metaphysical basis of the universe
might be, most likely, it is far far closer to things as described by Science, than by Religion.
At least Religion, as most understand it today.

12.30.2010 | 8:08pm
Thomas says:

Science and Common Sence (with apologies to Thomas Jones),

I'm not a big fan of Phillip E. Johnson, because I believe in evolution (the catastrophic
school, not the Darwinian brand), but in an old Commonweal issue he has dug up a priceless
quote on materialist bias in science by one of the biggest guns in contemporary science:
http://ldolphin.org/broken.html
The highly regarded Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin explained the true basis of
evolutionary science in a remarkably candid essay in the New York Review of Books (January
9, 1997). Lewontin has as low an opinion of the adaptationist "just-so" stories of the neoDarwinists as I do. In spite of his skepticism, however, he accepts the basic story of
evolutionary naturalism because, in his own words,
We have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and

institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the

phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to
material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce
material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the
uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the
door.
+++++++++++
How utterly delicious. And for once I can truthfully say, I knew it all the time.
Best,
Richard

12.30.2010 | 8:21pm
harry says:
Hi, Papalinton,
You wrote:
... The start of this universe may well have been just one of a series of events of an evolving
process. It is reasonable to extrapolate that if energy cannot be created or destroyed it would
be logical to suggest this universe is a product of an earlier cosmic process. This seems to
have greater explanatory power, consistent with what scientific evidence has been discovered
and verified, although it is speculation at best. ...
The Universe is expanding. So I don't see how it will ever collapse in on itself so it can bring
forth another Universe with a Big Bang, but let's say that is what has been going on. Let's
suppose this Universe is just the latest in a long series of Universes, each of which eventually
collapsed into a singularity which then began a new one with a Big Bang. If that were
proven to be the case, we still wouldn't know how the process got started. Somebody would
still be asking Why does the chain of Universes, each one being the cause of the next, have to
have a beginning? Why can't we assume matter/energy 'JUST IS'? I am not sure where you
see greater explanatory power in an evolving cosmic process in terms of the questions being
discussed here.
It seems to me that to answer some questions is simply outside of the realm of science.
Science explains what exists not why there is existence. I think what it can do, and has
done, is to provide us with circumstantial evidence which overwhelmingly indicates that it is
far more likely that there is a reality that transcends nature than that there isn't. Science
indicates that the Universe did indeed have a beginning, and its ever expanding Universe
rules out the chain of Universes idea.
Science never observes in nature a case of something arising from nothing. If the Universe
had a beginning, and you can't get something from nothing in the natural order of things, the
existence of a supernatural order as the ultimate cause of nature seems necessary. I suspect
the vitriolic reaction to thinking such as this is not due to a hatred of the idea of an order of
reality that transcends nature, but to a lot of baggage that has been attached to it (the
traditional idea of God and His rules for us). It seems to me the argument ought to be about
the true nature of this quite necessary supernatural order, and not whether it exists. What is
the validity of the traditional view of this supernatural order? Is it just unnecessary baggage?
Or is it based on a revelation from a supernatural being? Did this supernatural being become

one of us and walk among us as many quite reasonable, educated people firmly believe? Or
not? At some point the idea that a supernatural order doesn't exist at all will be dropped and
the debate will be about its/His true nature as it should be.

12.30.2010 | 8:32pm
Joe Sobotka says:
I appreciate Science and those of high intellect. They may be vain enough to speak of the
invisibility of the intellect to those less gifted. However, some of us less gifted know that little
things like morality and courage are often invisible to the intellectuals.

12.30.2010 | 8:48pm
Papalinton says:
Hi Richard
"Pythagoras' theorem is very old. And still as good as gold."
Because it is provable, consistent, verifiable, with limitless capacity for reliable repeatability.
The theorem for a god is simply speculation, a conceptual hole in which to posit the ideation
of a god, as it is the only and closest cognitive unit of meaning in our mind's information base
and imagination that could fit the gap [at the time of Aquinas in this case] to bring some
resolution to the inexplicable nature of the issue, and to mitigate if not ameliorate cognitive
dissonance. Nothing more, nothing less. The level of science knowledge in the 13Th C CE,
that Aquinas worked with, could generally be considered somewhat sited at a very low base.
I'm sorry you seem somewhat sensitive and a little disgruntled by my assertiveness.
Belligerence is rather unbecoming and is certainly not my game-plan. But I do have to put on
the table, unequivocally, the nonsense that any anthropomorphic personal and interfering
spectral numen as described in scripture is the one and same deity that philosophy is
discussing. At best the philosophical 'god' can only be a construct consistent with deism, for
want of a description of the 'uncaused cause' [so enamoured by Aquinas], in order that
philosophical discussion and debate can ensue. It is a definitional thing. What you consider'
god', Hawking considers 'gravity'. I'm happy to go with that.
You say, "As Aristotle said long ago, truly, the mark of an educated man is not to demand of a
subject more precision and determinacy than it can provide."
I concur with the statement. It is the basis from which I suggest that philosophers ditch this
nonsense that the jesus character is the one and the same that created the universe. This is
spurious conflation at its most pristine and a bridge built too far inside the land of the
supernatural to philosophically cross. Any such thinking, including Aquinas, that conflates
the Aristotelian god with that of the bible, is engaging in 'theo-logical' speculation.
Richard, you say, "If this is true it is fatal to your reduction of Aquinas' thought to merely
Catholic tradition that holds no more water than a sieve."
I say, "If" is a wonderful conditional qualifier , isn't it? I guess we are on a 50/50 here.
Equally, if this [Aquinas'] does not hold true ........
And again I agree with you, "Let science prove what it can and may the fates be with it."
Richard, thanks for your advice: "Best to be polite to one's interlocutors. They might be
right." However, I do think I am big enough and ugly enough to fend for myself. But I do
appreciate your concern.
Incidentally, Flew was a deist.

Cheers

12.30.2010 | 9:37pm
Richard says:
Papalinton,

"Incidentally, Flew was a deist."

I was right. You almost certainly don't know much about philosophy (I freely admit that I
don't either--but I do have a keen interest). Anthony Flew, born in 1923, was one of the most
outspoken and feted philosophers of Atheism in the 20th century. When he published the
work cited, he was a staunch atheist. Not until 2004 did he shock the intellectual world by
confessing that he had become a deist. It was a great scandal in philosophy, and any
cognoscente of philosophy would have known all about the details. In view of this apparent
hole in your knowledge, I suggest you tread lightly around philosophical arguments. Terra
incognita and all that.
In the rest of your post lies the materia for many discussions about the dynamics of Christian
belief. It never ceases to amaze me that intelligent people could believe that other intelligent
people could believe the kind of crude conceptions that you ascribe to us. Reading your
conceptualizations of Christianity give me that same shudder of distaste that I feel when, as a
Classicist of 40 years who has often read and taught the Iliad and the Odyssey in the original
languages, and lovingly meditated on these monuments of the Human spirit with students
and other scholars, I see a cheap knockoff like Troy or Clash of the Titans. If you're going to
disagree with me, best know what you're disagreeing with . But the hour is late and the
readers are rightly beginning to grow restive.
I appreciate your civil efforts to communicate. I have made a New Year's resolution a bit
prematurely but nonetheless sincerely to try to humanize my whole approach to discussion
since, if I am not very vigilant, it brings out the worst in me. Everyone, certainly you, deserve
better.
We can talk anon.
Best,
Richard

12.30.2010 | 9:44pm
Edgar Andrews says:

Although I am a scientist and not a philosopher, I inadvertently answered most of Stephen

Hawking's atheistic arguments in my own book "Who made God? Searching for a theory of
everything" published 12 months before "The grand design" (www.whomadegod.com). No, I
don't have a crystal ball; it's just that nothing Hawking and Mlodinow say is particularly new.
http://www.whomadegod.com

12.31.2010 | 12:32am
Ye Olde Statistician says:

Johann
You're still begging the big question: where did God or the First Cause come from?
YOS
I do not think you know what "begging the question" means. It is including the conclusion
among your premises. Neither Aristotle nor Aquinas did so. And even the most vehement of
able critics haven't claimed that in 400 years.
Johann
If something outside the system must have caused everything - then what caused it?
YOS
You have not yet understood the argument. It is the conclusion of the argument that an
unmoved mover must necessarily exist; that an uncaused cause must necessarily exist. To ask
"what caused the uncaused cause" makes no sense.
Johann
How did that thing outside the system, come into being?
YOS
If a being whose essence is its existence must necessarily exist, it makes no sense to ask how
it came into being. "How does Existence Itself come into being?"
Johann
Seems like common sense.
YOS
A frail reed. Common sense is insufficient in quantum mechanics and in higher mathematics.
Why should it not be insufficient in the third realm of knowledge? Logic and reason are far
more reliable.
Johann
The old Catholic school answers - Aquinas - just won't do.
YOS
Actually, Aristotle was not a Catholic.
Johann
You're still begging the question: where did the first cause come from?
YOS
That's not "begging the question." See above. To ask where the first cause came from is
simply to declare that the first cause is not the "first" cause. You would be better served to
simply declare ex cathedra that there is no first cause at all than to make arguments phrased
as self-contradictions. Logic and reason have rules.
Johann
as someone already pointed out earlier, there really are no good arguments.
YOS
Declaring something ex cathedra is not the same as "pointing out."
Johann
yours is in the rawest kind of dogmatic arbitrariness: the first cause, just is. Because they told

you so in parochial school? But where did the first cause come from? It ...just is.
YOS
There are no dogmas, arbitrary or not, cited in Aristotle's argument for the unmoved mover,
nor in Aquinas' arguments for the uncaused cause, et al. Aristotle did not teach in parochial
school, but in the Peripatetic School in Athens. The first cause is a necessary conclusion of
deductive reasoning. It's modus ponens all the way down. Nothing arbitrary about it. And
again, you are -in actual fact- "begging the question" when you ask "where did the first cause
come from?" In order to ask that question you implicitly assume that the first cause is not
first. In fact, you are asserting "A is not A" which is a denial of the Principle of NonContradiction. And from a contradiction, you can actually prove anything, since you are no
longer bound by the chains of logic.
Johann
Philosophy has moved on; very, very far. Since Aquinas.
YOS
That's probably why it's gotten lost. See Dave's comments further upthread.
Here we are stuck with moderns making serious arguments that they do not exist and
applying their minds to proving that they haven't got one. Not only that, but the decoupling
of cause and effect in modern philosophy makes the scientific program very iffy.

12.31.2010 | 3:28am
Papalinton says:
Hi Richard

You say, "[Incidentally, Flew was a deist.] I was right. You almost certainly don't know much
about philosophy (I freely admit that I don't either--but I do have a keen interest). Anthony
Flew ..... "
What the dickens are talking about, Richard? How does "Incidentally, Flew was a deist",
result in, "I was right. You almost certainly don't know much about philosophy.... "
Please enlighten me. If you are thinking from my comment that I did not know Flew was an
avowed atheist before acknowledging his belief in deism, then I'm sorry Richard, rocks in the
head. The hype and controversy over his declaration is so old news as I actually followed it as
it was being reported and discussed. I simply say, Oh Dear. Much ado about nothing. [Indeed
Shakespeare IS a god, not like that ghost of an apparition you offer]
Richard you mistakingly offer a caricature of my conception of the christianities when you
say, "In the rest of your post lies the materia for many discussions about the dynamics of
Christian belief. It never ceases to amaze me that intelligent people could believe that other
intelligent people could believe the kind of crude conceptions that you ascribe to us. Reading
your conceptualizations of Christianity give me that same shudder of distaste that I feel
when, as a Classicist of 40 years who has often read and taught the Iliad and the Odyssey in
the original languages, and lovingly meditated on these monuments of the Human spirit with
students and other scholars, I see a cheap knockoff like Troy or Clash of the Titans."
I too love the Iliad, and the Odyssey. They are beautiful works of literature and one would be
less than honest to not be captivated by the story telling, of the travails and delight of the

exploration of the human condition weaved within.

Equally the bible to me is a beautiful work of the human imagination and the triumph of the
human spirit; a compendium of the experiences, the hopes and the dreams of countless
people in their time. It is one of the greatest pieces of literature that emerged at the infancy of
our unbroken line of recorded history that binds us to this day.
The notion that is crass in this scenario, is that theists take one further and unreasoned step
and posit the supernatural realm and all its contained active entities as being actual/real.
Had the christianities continued the way of Zeus and the Greek pantheon, the way of the
Roman pantheon, the way of Egypt and the gods Osiris, Isis, Sobek, Ptah, or the way of
Mesopotamian or Babylonian understandings, as another chapter in the great recordings of
the human spirit, including the Iliad, the Odyssey, there would have been no contention. The
tradition of the Catholic church is no more than the perpetuation of an unsustainable and
false premise, the belief in the reality and actuality of a god; an omniscient, omnibenevolent,
omnipotent anthropomorphic village creation, one that should have remained an idealization
representing an explanation of the inexplicable nature of our environment, our world and the
cosmos, much as we have assigned all the other and older religions.
As I say in an earlier thread, the level of adherence to religion is not a measure of maturity,
rather it is an indicator of the incapacity of many of our confreres to jettison one of the last of
the primitive remnants of our genetic predisposition for survival in the African savannah.
Our innate predisposition to superstition and the supernatural is not a product of knowledge
and learning. It is rather a function of the primitive nature of our genetic make-up that was
predominantly a result of developing a survival mechanism that has subsequently been coopted for a secondary function. The degree and level of ardency of belief is a measure of the
level of primitive responses that govern our lives. We see this and recognise this so clearly in
astrology, alchemy, tarot cards, crystal-ball gazing, fortune-telling, and for so many
christians, the veracity of all other religions extant [Buddhism, Islam, Scientology,
Mormonism]. This premature response of defaulting to supernaturalism can only be
mitigated through decent education and continuing social debate challenging the veracity of
an actual supernatural sphere from which entities are capable of manipulating the physical
world when they so desire.
Richard, religion is essentially social, in both senses of the word. It is an activity that humans
do together; it is created, maintained, and perpetuated by human group behaviour. [It is a
cultural construct] It is also social in the sense that it extends that sociality beyond the
human world, to a [putative] realm of non-human agents who also interact with us socially.
This actively-engaging notion is the single common thread that binds all deity forms of
religions, from the Babylonians, Egyptians Greeks, Judaism, and includes christianity right
among them.
This form of god [the jesus god] is simply unsustainable as veritas and should not be
confused or conflated with the god of philosophy. The jesus/christ legend must be placed in
the same category as Apollo, Osiris, Zeus, Mithra, Apollonius of Tyana. Such a cleave will
rightly position the bible among the greatest of human literature, one of the greatest peeks
[and I mean look into, behind the scene] into the fount of the spirit of human creativity and
imagination, a rightful place along with the Iliad, the Odessey, among the Shakespeares.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Cheers Richard
Happy reading.

12.31.2010 | 3:31am
Martin Snigg says:

What YOS said. And to add,

http://agentintellect.blogspot.com/2010/12/minding-god.html
Cosmological arguments argue the universe began to exist, this has received the empirical
confirmation of Big Bang cosmology i.e. matter, energy, space and time began to exist,
therefore something that exists independently of matter, energy, space and time brought
them into existence.
The Big Bang only! proves that there is an immaterial, spaceless (hence omnipresent and
transcendent), timeless, and unimaginably powerful cause of the universe, and the response
is, "Yeah, so?" Really?
And
http://agentintellect.blogspot.com/2009/10/but-who-made-god.html
The whole point of these arguments is that there must be a cause that is not an effect of a
previous cause itself. To ask why this first cause is this way is to ignore the argument that has
just been made that this first cause is this way. Of course, showing that something is the case
is not the same thing as showing why it is the case. .. the atheist is claiming -- at least with
this objection -- that unless the argument proves why something is the case, it doesn't prove
that it's the case. This is obviously false.
I could say that the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter equals pi (in Euclidean
space). I could then prove this mathematically. The atheist objection would be "Why should
this ratio equal pi?" The answer would be, "It does. Here's the proof again." The atheist
would then object "Your mathematical proof doesn't explain why this ratio equals pi."
It reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin balks at his math homework.
You put two numbers together and they magically become some third number. No one can
say how or why it happens, you just have to accept it on faith. "As a math atheist, I should be
excused from this."

12.31.2010 | 6:32am
Papalinton says:

Hi Edgar Andrews
"Although I am a scientist and not a philosopher ... ".
More germane to the discussion, are you a practicing christian?
It is one thing to declare yourself as a scientist [and a terribly gifted and credentialed one at
that as I have read], Prof Andrews, but the context in which you make that declaration is
equally important, I'm sure you will agree.
You book seems to indicate your coming from a similar if not the same stable as Francis
Collins, a scientist in his day job, and a transcendent on Sundays [no disrespect intended].
The tenor of your book, that science can only describe but can never explain the why of
existence, seems to reside somewhere in the SJ Gould "Non-overlapping magisteria [NOMA]
narrative.

I note that almost without exception all reviews of your book come from people that clearly
have a vested interest in the tradition and practice of religion and that their comments
expose their close alignment to your religious musings.
The truth of the matter is, your eloquent utilization of 'science-speak' to give legitimacy to the
christianities as an actual/factual proposition is a nonsense. The correlation between science
and the veracity of a spectral numen is simply speculation at best. The so-called 'trooth' of
the christianities has very poor explanatory power in explaining the myriad of past and
present religions [old gods don't die, they get forgotten, as history tells us]. It does not in any
shape or form explain the inordinate amount of suffering and evil in the world in the
presence of this all-loving, all-caring god. The nonsense trotted out through the doctrine of
theodicy cannot rationally explain this fact.
No, not much new is revealed through your book, that has not been thought through before.
Hawking's 'gravity' as the creator of all is still a pretty good proposition.
I wish you well
Cheers

12.31.2010 | 7:11am
thomas jones says:
@Joe the Human
In your recent comment you make the plausible point that 'Science & Technology' delivers
more good stuff in our lives than 'Religion'. I do agree that 'Science & Technology' is the
major source of economic growth for the last few centuries. But I also think (a) although it's
common to do, it's generous to credit Science with all the good stuff from technology.
Surprisingly few technological improvements especially pre 20th Century follow from
Science, in most cases the Science (understanding) follows the technology (machine). The
two things are by no means the same thing - technology develops through tinkering
entrepreneurs, who often have no knowledge of the science that will eventually explain their
development. The inventions powering the industrial revolution - steam engines etc - did not
rely on scientific theory.
Second, I do not think I would ever define Religion as sitting around praying for miracles.
Belief in purpose, progress, in right & wrong, in order, are powerful forces and Western
development is in some significant way entwined with the culture that Religion built. Richard
Dawkins I believe has other ideas, but then, why are we getting our history from a scientist?
We don't turn to historians for Science do we?

12.31.2010 | 8:50am
Knethrea says:

This whole article can be summed up into one big fallacy; "argument from ignorance."
This over-exhausting "need's an explanation" is why so many people fall into a pitfall of
conformational biases that leads to really bad decisions.
The HONEST answer is "We don't know." Objective morality, laws of logic, laws of physics--they exist because we observe them. Until we can DEMONSTRATE where they come from,

anything pulled out of metaphysics as an explanation is a bold faced lie. These basic laws are
true tautologies, nothing else can be asserted unless it becomes demonstrable. That's it. For x
to be true, does not require an explanation for why x is true if you can observe that x is true.
If you decide to pull God out of the realm of metaphysics, then I am just as valid to pull
"magic ninjas" out of there and for every reason to give me for not believing in my ninjas can
be used to justify a non-belief in your God. The ONLY honest answer to how these
fundamental forces exists is "We don't know!" Once you assert ANYTHING then others will
pile syllogisms after syllogisms until some 13 year old is stoned to death for adultery in front
of a thousand spectators all for a lie that should have never been asserted in the first place.
The honest probability that these laws came into existence through natural means is one.
Until we can figure out how many universes exist with different parameters, we DO NOT
have a data set to do any kind of statistical analysis. Until we can prove that whatever existed
before the Big Bang could have produced a universe with different parameters than the one
we live in, any statement on the probability or improbability of these laws existing is a lie or
somebody pulling data points out of their rectum for fun.

12.31.2010 | 8:50am
Joe the Human says:
YOS:
I referred conventionally to Aquinas here, in relation to the First Cause, because others here
did. In fact to be sure, Aquinas was in part, an Aristolean; and Aristotle was indeed, the
original source for this theory.
So now I have to read all of Aristotle, and then address the problem in his own terms? Why
bother? Aristotle lived more than 2,000 years ago; most of his ideas are long since disproven
in reams of philosophical argumentation.
But briefly? The assertion seems to be in part, that "logically" there must be a first cause ... or
else we have an infinite regress of causes. But in fact, there are many who say the universe is
indeed, "infinite." While an infinite universe does not have a first cause. It cannot have an
end, or a beginning. Thinking that it does, is like thinking that the world ended somewhere;
and you could sail off the end of the world.
Happy sailing.

12.31.2010 | 9:11am
Johann says:
"Begging the question," means in part, assuming in your premises, what needs to be proven;
what you need to extablish ,in your conclusion. But in effect, it also means more broadly,
simply, not answering the question.
Here, you and A. have not answered the question. The question is, "what caused existence"?
But you have not proven what caused the universe, or existence (or God).
Instead, you merely asserted, from the start, that there are things that are uncaused. Thus,
begging the question. By simply rejecting causality itself in effect. In this allegedly special
circumstance, of God. Asserting there is something that is not caused.

Rejecting casuality, is not an answer to "what caused existence." Instead, it simply rejects the
question.

12.31.2010 | 9:38am
A. Bailey says:
I guess I was wrong about the "Fox News watcher" comment. Papalinton seems to be going
ad hominem a lot now. It's difficult to follow the arguments, but that can't be a good sign.

12.31.2010 | 10:54am
Bill says:

From the blog, "Leaving Christianity":

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica.
In a logical format, Saint Thomas's argument can be stated as follows:
1. Everything is caused by something other than itself
2. Therefore the universe was caused by something other than itself.
3. The string of causes cannot be infinitely long.
4. If the string of causes cannot be infinitely long, there must be a first cause.
5. Therefore, there must be a first cause, namely god.
The most telling criticism of this argument is that it is self-refuting. If everything has a cause
other than itself, then god must have a cause other than himself. But if god has a cause other
than himself, he cannot be the first cause.

12.31.2010 | 12:01pm
Richard says:
Papalinton,

Im glad to hear that reports of your philosophical ignorance have been greatly exaggerated.
But if this is so, why in the world did you conclude your post with the note that Flew was a
Deist? It has nothing to do with my point, unless you meant to imply that he was a Deist at
the time of the quote and thus infected with the virus of supernaturalism.
Im glad to see that you see the beauties of the Bible. That is something. I deny that it is crass
to use this as one of the foundations of belief in the supernatural, because I think it is part of
the history of the human experience of the supernatural, which has taken on many forms.
Obviously, as a Christian I think that some forms are fuller and more valid than others, but
the phenomenon has been well nigh universal (in cultures, not necessarily persons). Hence I
am not inclined to brand as utterly false other articulations of this encounter, and not under
the necessity of seeing Christianity and a few other faiths as the last islands of infancy in the
onrushing tide of mature reason. This is not to say that I defend every particle of every
religion (including strict literalism in interpreting the Bible), but I find intimations of truth,
and sometimes even instruction, in other creeds.
Religion is something that happens to people, if it is genuine. You are at least correct to say

This actively-engaging notion is the single common thread that binds all deity forms of
religion. Of course religion is social. So is everything human. As for Jesus being in the same
category with Zeus in terms of historicity, I think that those who maintain that are crackers,
although much else about him is open to legitimate debate. Apollonius of Tyana seems to
have been an historical personality, but our sources for him are far fewer than those for
Christ, and he does not seem to have intended to be a cosmically salvific figure as Christ did.
He may very well have been a great man, and perhaps an authentically spiritual one. All we
really have is Philostratus hagiographic account, pretty clearly written to present a pagan
rival to Christ, and the earlier works of Damis, which Philostratus may or may not have
invented.
As for your pronouncements on the nature of religion and religionists through history, now
thoroughly familiar to those who reads your posts, I see simply as more Also sprach
Papalinton. Declaration is not demonstration. Given your attitudes, I am unmoved by your
views as to whether or not people of faith are mature or atavistic throwbacks. I dont fault
you for your atheismas I have said before I respect the position when reasoned out, and I
think your atheism is reasonable but not conclusive. But some of your statements about
Christianity seem to a Christian to border on parody. No Christian I know claims that a
Palestinian carpenter created (however understoodbut this is another, deeper matter) the
universe, but rather that the eternal Logos which fused with the human nature of that
carpenter did so. For you these are yada yada yada (a characterization from a man who could
be accused of doing a lot of yada yada yadaing himself). For me they are the deep truth of
things.
I notice that you did not take up Richard Lewontins candid admission of the materialistic
bias of science as he practices it. This is science as metaphysical naturalism, a reach outside
of its realm, and hence logically invalid even if it should happen to be true. It is akin to what
Karl Popper called promissory materialism. I see no reason why scientists mustnt believe it
but I object when they advance this as on the same level of certainty as quantum theory. I see
the point of science as methodological naturalism. When it ceases to be naturalistic it ceases
to be science. But to say nothing real lies beyond their domain, well that just makes me smile.
For me Michael Ruse is the very model of the rational atheist, a (provisional) disbeliever who
staunchly defends evolution but categorically denies that a properly nuanced Christianity and
a scientific world view cannot coherently coexist. You assert the contrary consistently.
However, not only have you not proved this incommensurability, but you cannot (not that
you dont write beautifully). And if you think that people cannot simultaneously be
supernaturalist and rational, well, sorry Papalinton, but rocks in the head.
Best,
Richard
P.S. Happy reading? Awfully sold on ourselves, arent we? Or is this PL the ironist?
I cant always tell.

12.31.2010 | 12:22pm
harry says:
Hi, Bill,
You wrote:

From the blog, 'Leaving Christianity':

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica.
In a logical format, Saint Thomas's argument can be stated as follows:
1. Everything is caused by something other than itself
2. Therefore the universe was caused by something other than itself.
3. The string of causes cannot be infinitely long.
4. If the string of causes cannot be infinitely long, there must be a first cause.
5. Therefore, there must be a first cause, namely god.
The most telling criticism of this argument is that it is self-refuting. If everything has a cause
other than itself, then god must have a cause other than himself. But if god has a cause other
than himself, he cannot be the first cause.
How about if it were put this way:
In the natural order, we observe that everything is caused by something other than itself.
Nature cannot have caused itself. Therefore the cause of nature cannot have been a natural
cause. There must be an order of reality that transcends nature, is distinct from it and is in no
way dependent upon it, that brought nature about. This reality is either the ultimate,
fundamental, uncaused reality that JUST IS or its cause can be traced back to such a
reality.

12.31.2010 | 1:26pm
Joe the Human says:

THere is indeed, a strange equivalence between science and religion, when it comes to
metaphysics. But to be sure, science usually admits that things beyond or "meta" physics are
not its purview; all it has there, are guesses, hypotheses Note H. himself qualifiwithin es his
thoughts here, with a "perhaps."
Whereas religious folks, in the very same situation, are absolutely dogmatically sure? Even
when, when metaphysics cancels out, science and technology (which are related by way of
Empiricism), are a million times better at providing the "prosperity" that was promised in
the name of god.
Catholic vanity, knows no bounds.

12.31.2010 | 1:55pm
Richard says:
Joe,

First you were a Protestant pretending to be a Catholic. Then an atheist pretending to be a

Protestant. Now the mask comes off. But with the constant name change I smelled hypocrisy
early in the game.
I also saw early in your charade that the name of the game was slur Catholicism.
I should bet on the horses.

Richard

12.31.2010 | 3:09pm
Joe the Human says:
Richard:

Still, I do say there is a kind of equivalence between science and religion; and elsewhere I
allow a kind of unity. Believe it or not.
Feeling the need to go Ad Hominem? Be careful of the psychological phenomenon of
"projection"; finding your own sins in others. As Paul warned: tthose who criticize others of
something, will be found to have the very same sin, in themselves.

12.31.2010 | 7:25pm
Papalinton says:
Hi Richard
You say, "This is not to say that I defend every particle of every religion (including strict
literalism in interpreting the Bible), but I find intimations of truth, and sometimes even
instruction, in other creeds.'
I am happy to read that. Of course! there are intimations of truth, and sometimes even
instruction embedded in other creeds but the bible has no more or securer a mandate
additional to those truths and instruction. Ask a Muslim. Ask a Jew. Ask a Buddhist.
As a christian you say so, but that does not settle or substantiate the claim. You say, " ... but
the phenomenon [experience of the supernatural] has been well nigh universal (in cultures,
not necessarily persons)]". I say, absolutely. All humans [even me] are predisposed to the
supernatural and superstition, as they derive from the survival response built into our
genetic make-up to ensure that we were not eaten by the first tiger we confronted on the
savannah, when we should have known that small rustling in the brush may constitute a
mortal danger. This mechanism has now been co-opted by our social religious construct, over
time, and is pretty much doing the same thing. The bottom line of religion is really about our
personal survival; it attempts to address one of our greatest concerns of being so painfully
aware a species as we are, that of being cognizant of our own mortality, it provides a salve
against our conscious knowing and understanding of all the bad things that [we can imagine]
are so very possible could happen to us, our children, family, friends in the course of our
lives. There is no doubt religion is salvific. It helps ease the mind and reassures us. It
reassures us through the belief that we have someone, something watching over us [a god, a
father figure], it reassures us that if and when we pay the ultimate price, we live eternally in
the care of people and a parent in a nice place. Richard, this is wonderful. Our brain and
mind has this wicked and magnificent capacity to build a reassuring environment in which
we and our family can feel safe, feel at ease. BUT, it is a placebo, powerful yes, undeniable
yes, inspirited yes, real - only in our minds, our thoughts. We know misfortune can happen
equally to the faithful as to the non-believer in equal measure. There simply is no evidence,
no statistical blip, that god's protection of believers results in more non-believers dying in
numbers greater than normal distribution. In short, it is a PLACEBO.
As it is with all religions, sects and cults, whether animists or polytheists or monotheists, the

myriad of religions extant is an indicator of the universality of the supernatural experience

[as you rightly point out], a thousand ways that humanity has constructed an edifice in
response to the ultimate awareness of our own mortality. The innumerable number of beliefs,
however, is not a testament to the truth or actual reality of gods and the supernatural
domain, rather it is an indicator that avenues for resolving the fear of the tenuous grip we
have on life, of our own mortality are as various as there are people in the world.
In this sense the bible is wonderful literature to study how Jews and christians sought to
respond to the question of our survival, our mortality, our place in the world, our response to
the inexplicable things that happen all around us. It is a joy to read of the human spirit, of
shining the light into the dark recesses of our mind, of surmounting the insurmountable.
We cannot have a full understanding of our historical roots and an understanding of the
development of western culture without the bible. It is that important. It is fundamental to
knowing from where we came. That is its beauty. That is its rightful place. As is the Quran,
the Vedas, the Egyptian 'Book of the Dead', Iliad, the Dead Sea scrolls.
Richard you say, "Religion is something that happens to people, if it is genuine." I say,
absolutely, but how does one determine genuine? Genuine to whom? You either believe or
not believe. The extent and depth of one's belief is such a personal matter, not to be
determined by some other source of piety as if to determine the worth of that person for
being not genuine enough. Equally I suggest to you, atheism is something that happens to
people. Intuitively, I could suggest [and I may have intimated such, although quite
inadvertently, in my previous comments] that belief in god and atheism is a continuum, on
which there is a correlation between the strength of our individual genetic pull of innate
supernaturalism and our level of belief in faith on the one end, and others who's genetic pull
are not so strong and which manifests in a tendency to atheism on the other end of that
continuum. Speculative, I know, but perhaps plausible.
You say, "Given your attitudes, I am unmoved by your views as to whether or not people of
faith are mature or atavistic throwbacks." I'm sorry that attitude is the reason for your
dismissing the content of my argument, Richard. I don't believe it is, although you say it. I
think you do not want to respond to it.
You say, "And if you think that people cannot simultaneously be supernaturalist and rational,
well, sorry Papalinton, but rocks in the head."
I say, obviously they can. But then paradox occurs frequently in nature. And yes probably
rocks in my head but I'm fairly sure they are not theological rocks.
And lastly, "P.S. Happy reading? Awfully sold on ourselves, arent we? Or is this PL the
ironist?
I cant always tell."
I say, not one bit of irony, genuine as the day is long.
Richard, happy reading [no persiflage intended]
Cheers

12.31.2010 | 7:51pm
Ye Olde Statistician says:
Knethrea says:
Objective morality, laws of logic, laws of physics--- they exist because we observe them.

YOS
Where exactly have you *observed a law of logic? How long was it? How much did it weigh?
Where have you seen a law of physics? I have seen falling objects, but I have not seen a law of
gravity. I might *reason myself toward a law of gravity -- science has reasoned itself toward
three or four different laws of gravity from time to time -- but I can only *observe physical
objects in motion.
I can't wait to learn where you have seen objective evidence of the irrationality of SQRT(2).
+++
Knethrea says:
For x to be true, does not require an explanation for why x is true if you can observe that x is
true.
YOS
Oh, good. No need for "gravity," then. If we observe falling bodies, that is sufficient unto the
day.
Knethrea says:
If you decide to pull God out of the realm of metaphysics, then I am just as valid to pull
"magic ninjas" out of there
YOS
Actually, you can't. Not if you follow the rules of logic. One does not "decide" to "pull God"
out of the realm of metaphysics. God is not an hypothesis put forward to explain a set of data.
Your magic ninjas are not the same kind of thing as the unmoved mover (et al.)
BTW, pulling magic ninjas out of metaphysics does not make *you "valid."
+++
Joe the Human says:
So now I have to read all of Aristotle... [It would help -- YOS] Why bother? Aristotle lived
more than 2,000 years ago [So did Pythagoras, Euclid, and some other folks -- YOS]
most of Aristotle's ideas are long since disproven in reams of philosophical argumentation.
[How would you know if you haven't actually read his ideas? See "read Aristotle", above.-YOS]
The assertion seems to be in part, that "logically" there must be a first cause ... or else we
have an infinite regress of causes. But in fact, there are many who say the universe is indeed,
"infinite." [In science, you would have to prove this -- YOS] While an infinite universe does
not have a first cause. It cannot have an end, or a beginning. Thinking that it does, is like
thinking that the world ended somewhere; and you could sail off the end of the world.
YOS
The assertion that a chain of logical deductions travels in a circle is not logically tenable. One
would have to explain how it was that the circle exists.
Why cannot an "infinite" universe have a first cause? What have beginnings [and endings!]
have to do with first causes? Perhaps, you don't understand what is meant by "first cause" as
opposed to "secondary causes".
Among those who assumed that the universe was eternal was... (drum roll) ...Thomas

Aquinas. One hopes that this might create a wriggle of doubt in your mind that the eternity of
the world somehow refutes his argument. Bedab! He assumed the world was eternal because
while he believed otherwise he knew of no philosophical proof that it was not. Modern
physics does a far better job of refuting the eternity of the world; but Aquinas did not have
access to modern physics.
Your summary of the argument is incorrect.
+++
Johann
"Begging the question," ... means more broadly, simply, not answering the question.
YOS
No, it does not. That may be a part of your troubles with logic and reason.
Johann
Here, you and A. [Aristotle?] have not answered the question. The question is, "what caused
existence"? ... Instead, you merely asserted, from the start, that there are things that are
uncaused.
YOS
No, the question has been answered numerous times. You simply did not understand the
answer (or perhaps did not want to acknowledge it). The necessary existence of an uncaused
cause is a *conclusion of a series of syllogisms. It is not an assertion. You really ought to learn
what an argument states before you set out to refute it. That is why "modern philosophy" has
not refuted Aristotelianism. It simply has never addressed it. It merely "asserted" that it was
pass, old-fashioned, not modern and hip. And for the Moderns, who worry so much about
being unfashionable and out of date, this mattered a great deal.
+++
Bill says:
From the blog, "Leaving Christianity":
In a logical format, Saint Thomas's argument can be stated as follows:
1. Everything is caused by something other than itself (etc.)
YOS
The fact that a tendentious blog must *misstate the argument so baldly might be evidence
that either the author did not know what the actual argument is or else, finding himself
unable to refute the actual argument, resorted deliberately to a straw man. More likely, he
found it misstated in this manner in a newspaper column I have seen by the science
popularizer, R. Dawkins, and accepted it on faith without resort to empirical evidence. (In
this case the 'empirical evidence' of what Thomas Aquinas actually wrote. For a precis, see
ST, Pt. 1, Q.2, here: http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/sth1002.html and scroll down to
Article 3.)

12.31.2010 | 8:43pm
Tom says:
Knethrea,
You are correct to say in your comments that we do not know the origin of natural laws,etc.
But you end by claiming that everything we observe has a purely natural origin. I think this is
a genuine example of begging the question, and I think that you do not do justice to other

points of view when you say that the inference that God are exists is irrational, in fact, it is as
reasonable and as justifiable on the basis of what we know as the naturalistic view that you
favor.

1.1.2011 | 8:15am
A biologist weighs in says:
Oh boy.
I have actually waded through a lot of the above...I need to get a life while there is still time.
The bloviating so far is largely based on sheer superstitious nonsense, ignorance, a complete
misunderstanding of science, and how it works.
Rather than employing the ad hominen approach, I think you fine fellows and fellas could do
well to read Dawkin's (more than just a science "popularizer",...please), latest work..."The
Greatest Show on Earth".
Honestly. It's a bodice-ripper, a page-turner, a barn-burner, and an eye-opener.
Hopefully, it will pique curiosity about evolution in those who have previously been deniers
(Remember the flat earth? And Copernicus? Strange how these are no longer issues, even
amongst fervent fundamentalists).
One brick at a time, I guess.
Happy reading.
If one has a curiosity as to how evolution works (eg the strangeness of the recurrent laryngeal
nerve, and the development of the retina, to name but two), this is work a few bucks.
It's better than Ben Hur.
Oh, and the universe? And God?
Ummm...which God do you have in mind?
Remember, when the little green men from Mars come down and ask us which is the true
God, and we all put up and hands and say..."Ours...ours!!, and all the others are damned",
there can be only one answer.
"Well, you can't be all right".
And, ironically, we may all be wrong.

1.1.2011 | 10:31am
Joe the Human says:
1) Aquiinas does in fact assume, - if not explicitly state ?- that things must have causes;
otherwise he might Aqsimply say that the universe exists ... and not bother to look for a
cause, for example. Indeed, the whole discussion is heavily focused on the "cause" of the
universe.

2) to suggest that a thing must be caused by something other than itself, seems logical. But
why "transcendent"? Why not a deeper material source?
3) In either cse, you still need to account, in turn, for the existence of your first term;
"transcendent " or otherwise.
What you are doing is failing to answer the question; rather than explain what caused the
universe, you chose to say that there was something there at the start, that is uncaused. In
many sources, that is called "begging the question." Clearly, you don't know fully, what the
term means, in broader usage.
On a minor point: some say that an allegely transcendent - and not incarnational? - God,
having created Time for example, is therefore differnt from and beyond time; and is not
therefore "created," since to be created requires time as one of its subsidary elements. But:
the water that created ice in part, is slightly different from - but then also closely related to the thing it plays a role in creating. So that the notion of no similarily, between creator and
created, even a fundamental difference, being "other" to each other, does not work. Indeed,
not even biblically: since we were "created in his image."
Modern Philophy looked at these and hundreds more logical objections to Aristotloe and
Plato, and Aquinas - and moved on to something far better. Therefore, you are indeed,
merely "asserting" things; since your "logical" arguments are not good logic, at all.
Whatever term you want to use - even if you wish to reject "begging the question" - by
whatever name, what is the fundamental problem with your logic that I am focusing on here?
Is that you are not accepting the question, of what "causes" things; when you -i ndeed assert, that there is something not caused, something quite different from and not an organic
part of, a given event like, specifically, the appearance of the visible universe.
You might like to insist that all things, must have a cause. Indeed, you and others are
insisting we explain the "cause" of the universe (though I prefer to leave that open). But here
again, we come to the major problem with your own "logic": though at times you assert the
importanhce of finding a cause, suddenly you drop this claim, when we get to your favored
"Given," your "god term" as followers of Rorty have called it. Suddenly and on an inadequate
basis, you drop that request that things be explained by causes, when speaking of what
caused God.
The fact that the alternative,the result of this logic, is an infinite regress, note, was considered
by one of the very philosopers many here, claim to follow: Aquinas.
Personally to be sure, I do not strongly support any cosmogony, even those I am describing
hypothetically here. Personally, I believe that none of them are convincing; especially not
Aristotle's "First Cause." Rather than pontificate on the source of the univers, the better
answer, regarding the "cause" of all of existence? Will always be "We don't know."
That seems more truly Christlike and humble to me, moreover. Than engaging in eternal
sophistries. Sophistries with, furthermore, physically deadly consequences. As Knethrea right
noted.
By the way: religion is indeed more than 1) metaphysics, or 2) promises of miracles. It is also
a 3) system of ethics. But much of what is called Chistianity fails on the ground of Ethids as
well. Take a look at Deut. 15.32 or so; where somone who is merely collecting a few "sticks" of
wood on a Sabbath, is stoned to death for it.

Worse than merely being dogmatic, are the many centuries during which the Church decided
to enforce its bad ideas, with violence, murder, war, and torture. As when it burned the first
English translator(s) of the Bible, at the stake, and so forth. In an attempt to end the freedom
of religion, that became part of the greatness of the the American nation. (As I noted in
commends to "Fail Britannia," week or so ago in First Things).
Wouldn't it be better, to be a little more ... open to modern ideas? And modern philosophies?

1.1.2011 | 10:54am
A. Bailey says:

Hey YOS, that's not fair! I go to your reference and it's in Latin. Do you have a reference to an
English translation?

1.1.2011 | 5:24pm
Reg McConnell says:
Edward Fesner took the measure of Hawking and Mlodinow, recently:
"Like the village atheist whose knowledge of theology derives from what he saw last Sunday
on The Jimmy Swaggart Telecast, [Hawking and Mladinow] assume that when philosophers
have argued for God as cause of the world, what they mean is that the universe had a
beginning, that God caused that beginning, and that to rebut their position it suffices to ask
What caused God?
"To ask Who created God? is to evince a failure to understand what defenders of the firstcause argument mean by God. Contrary to what Hawking and Mlodinow seem to think, the
idea of an uncaused first cause is not that of something which needs no creator. It is rather
the idea of something that could not in principle have had a creator, precisely because (unlike
the universe) it could not even in principle have failed to exist. As Aristotle would say, God is
Pure Actuality; as Aquinas would say, he is Subsistent Being Itself. Hawking and Mlodinow
might be unfamiliar with these concepts, but in that case they should not presume to speak
as if they understood the first-cause argument."

1.1.2011 | 5:32pm
Ye Olde Statistician says:

A biologist weighs in says:

read Dawkin's (more than just a science "popularizer",...please), latest work..."The Greatest
Show on Earth".
YOS
A book of popular science, no? Otherwise, in which journal did it appear?
A biologist weighs in says:
Hopefully, it will pique curiosity about evolution in those who have previously been deniers
(Remember the flat earth? And Copernicus?
YOS
Alas, among those who rely on empirical evidence, the "flat earth" thingie is only a myth.

Perhaps at one time scientists thought the earth was flat and others relied on this for their
imagery; but that time was long past even in pagan Greek times. As for Copernicus, granted
his theory was wrong, but what exactly was the problem? That he still had some twenty
epicycles in his system? That Tycho Brahe and "Ursus" could provide predictions just as (and
sometimes even more) accurate?
+++
A. Bailey says:
Hey YOS, that's not fair! I go to your reference and it's in Latin. Do you have a reference to an
English translation?
YOS
Okay, but you gotta remember that everything was written in Latin and the Latin words did
not always mean quite the same thing as the English words used to translate them. The word
"anima" is translated as "soul," but in Latin it means something more like "alive" or "life" (as
in "animated.") So the question of whether living beings have souls literally makes no sense
in Latin: "Do living beings have life?" This sort of thing underlies Joe Human's persistent
confusion over the nature of an uncaused cause.
In particular, the word "motion" in the first way derives from Aristotle's term "" which is
better translated as "change." That is, motion includes such things as the ripening of an
apple, the maturing of a tiger cub, the oxidation of wood, et al. Local motion is change of
physical location; but when we see a well-performed drama we can be moved to pity or joy.
Keep such things in mind.
Keep also in mind that the Summa theologica was intended as a digest for first-year theology
students. So many statements may seem somewhat curt. E.g., when he states of the prime
mover "and this everyone understands as God" moderns should add: "details to follow in the
remainder of the Summa."
Also: in an age when books were hand-crafted, there was no such thing as a standard edition.
So there were no footnotes or references. Instead, students were expected to commit to
memory entire volumes of pagan, muslim, and Christian writings. The equivalent of the
footnote reference was the "key quote". This was a sentence or two from the referenced work,
from which the student was expected to reconstruct an entire argument. So when he writes
"as Aristotle wrote in the Metaphycis, "blah-blah-blah," he is not saying "believe this because
Aristotle said it," he is saying, "Recall the argument that Aristotle laid out in this other book;
the part that begins "blah-blah-blah."
http://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/FP/FP002.html#FPQ2A3THEP1
Oh. Don't forget the style of the genre:
Statement of question. (the thesis)
Objections. Best arguments against. (the antitheses)
An argument for the a thesis
The Respondeo (I answer that...) aka the synthesis.
Specific rebuttals of each objection.
The modern style is to only consider arguments in favor of the thesis.

1.1.2011 | 6:28pm
Ye Olde Statistician says:

Joe the Human says:

1) Aquiinas does in fact assume, - if not explicitly state ?- that things must have causes;
otherwise he might Aqsimply say that the universe exists ... and not bother to look for a
cause, for example. Indeed, the whole discussion is heavily focused on the "cause" of the
universe.
YOS
No, it isn't. You have probably never read the argument, let alone the hundreds of pages that
support and develop it. His argument is from the *ordering of efficient causes. He never says
that "everything has a cause." Indeed, the essence of the Aristotelian argument is that
essentially-ordered causes must have a first cause -- right here, right now. Even if an
accidentally-ordered causal series is infinite -- unlikely by today's science -- an essentiallyordered series cannot be, since each cause in such a series depends upon its predecessors for
its present-tense causal power. Thus, the airwaves cannot produce Mozart's Clarinet
Concerto in A unless the clarinet is playing; and the clarinet cannot be playing unless Sharon
Kam is playing it. Reeds don't vibrate by themselves; keys are not opened or closed by
themselves. (We can take it farther back, if you wish: Sharon Kam would not be playing if her
muscles were not moving, which in turn depend on the nerves, and in turn on the motor
neurons, and in turn on chemical reactions in the synapses, and in turn on the laws of nature,
which in turn depend on.... But all this is happening in the present time.
Joe Human
2) to suggest that a thing must be caused by something other than itself, seems logical. But
why "transcendent"? Why not a deeper material source?
YOS
Sometimes they are. But ultimately, since nothing is moved from potency to act except by
something already in act, the first mover is necessarily a being of pure actuality. (If the first
mover were in potency to anything, then it would not be the "first" mover, since there would
be a mover prior to it. (That is logically prior, not necessarily temporally prior.) It is from the
pure actuality of the First Mover that all sorts of other properties follow.
Joe Human
3) In either cse, you still need to account, in turn, for the existence of your first term;
"transcendent " or otherwise.
YOS
No, because it was never asserted that "everything has a cause." The argument ends in each
case with an Unmoved Mover, an Uncaused Cause, a necessary existant. In order for
something to come into existence, it must first of all not exist. Thus, it cannot give itself
existence; since that which does not exist can't do diddly squat. But we see that things exist.
Therefore, something must have conjoined their essences to an act of existence. But only
something already existing could do so, and this ends up with a being whose essence just is to
exist. We can call it Existence Itself, although if it could speak it would probably call itself "I
AM." Your question amounts to "What caused Existence Itself to exist?" which a moment's
reflection might show to be "What causes A to be A?" But alas: A is A and Existence Exists.
Joe Human
rather than explain what caused the universe, you chose to say that there was something
there at the start, that is uncaused.
YOS
I did not "choose" to say that. It was a logical deduction from the existence of natural laws
like those of evolution, of the existence of Stuff, of the ordering of efficient causes, of change

in the world. The existence of an uncaused cause is not an assumption, but rather a
conclusion.
Joe Human
In many sources, that is called "begging the question." Clearly, you don't know fully, what the
term means, in broader usage.
YOS
Sorry; I'll stick with its usage in logic and reason. You should try it sometime.
+++
Joe Human
Modern Philophy looked at these and hundreds more logical objections to Aristotloe and
Plato, and Aquinas - and moved on to something far better.
YOS
Hume said that causality itself did not exist, only concatenation: that an effect follows a
"cause" was only a coincidence. That's some advance. It pulls the rug right out from under
natural science, and we survived the trip only because scientists, while giving lip service to
Hume & Co., actually pay little attention. Few of them are conversant with philosophy at all,
being tied up in the metrical properties of physical bodies.
Joe Human
Therefore, you are indeed, merely "asserting" things; since your "logical" arguments are not
good logic, at all.
YOS
Then you ought to be able to produce a logical refutation. I'm still waiting, since all your
assertions have been against a straw man version of Aquinas' arguments.
Joe Human
you -i ndeed - assert, that there is something not caused, something quite different from and
not an organic part of, a given event like, specifically, the appearance of the visible universe.
YOS
By appearance, do you mean "creation"? That is something that happens every day, every
instant. The discoverer of the Big Bang, Fr. Georges Lematre, indeed pointed out to Pope
Pius XII that the start of a space-time manifold is not the same thing as a "moment of
creation."
That the Primary Cause is "outside" the space-time manifold follows from its nature as a
being of pure act (bpa). Everything within the universe is subject to change: stars form and
evolve; planets form; elements decay; species evolve and go extinct; individuals are born,
grow, and die; sodium and chlorine combine to form salt, etc. etc. But change is a motion
from potency to act (from potentially some thing to actually that thing) and a bpa has
nothing in potency. Therefore, it cannot be subject to time and space (esp. since both time
and space are metaphysical abstractions that depend for their existence on the existence of
Stuff. "Time is the measure of change in changeable being." No change; no time. No time; not
in the space-time manifold.
Joe Human
You might like to insist that all things, must have a cause. [Nope -- YOS] Indeed, you and
others are insisting we explain the "cause" of the universe (though I prefer to leave that
open).

YOS
A pause to mention Russell's Paradox. The 'universe' is the set of all things that have physical
existence. That is, it is a collection of things, not a "Ding an sich." A collection "exists" when
any element of the collection exists; but it is not itself an element of itself. That leads to all
sorts of logical contradictions. Now, you may hold that it exists in a Platonic world of forms;
but Aristotle's moderate realism is better. Modern philosophy hardly mentions the universe
at all.
So it is not the 'universe' whose existence needs explanation, but rather actually existing
things that are members of the set.
Joe Human
suddenly you drop this claim, when we get to your favored "Given," your "god term" as
followers of Rorty have called it. Suddenly and on an inadequate basis, you drop that request
that things be explained by causes, when speaking of what caused God.
YOS
No. In the course of the argument, it is a conclusion, not a given.
Joe Human
Rather than pontificate on the source of the univers, the better answer, regarding the "cause"
of all of existence? Will always be "We don't know."
YOS
Ah, the appeal to ignorance. That's science? "Some things man was not meant to know!"
Joe Human
Sophistries with, furthermore, physically deadly consequences. As Knethrea right noted.
YOS
Like atomic bombs, nerve gas, and tailored plagues?
Joe Human
Chistianity fails on the ground of Ethids as well. Take a look at Deut. 15.32 or so; where
somone who is merely collecting a few "sticks" of wood on a Sabbath, is stoned to death for it.
YOS
Take that up with the Jews, although I don't recall when last the Jews stoned someone for
picking up sticks. The Christians made an explicit decision back at the beginning of their
Church that the Mosaic law as such did not apply to Christians, save for some few exceptions.
That was because Christianity was orthodox, not orthoprax. But I sense you are trying to
change the topic.

1.1.2011 | 7:39pm
Peter Nyikos says:

Has anyone here (besides Haldane, of course) actually read the book? I'd love to see just how
Hawking and co-author try to justify the colossal non sequitur in "Because there is a law such
as gravity, the Universe [that is, ours] can and will create itself from nothing." Unfortunately,
all the many copies in our public library are checked out so it may be a while before I can see
it.
Papalinton, maybe you can make a stab at justifying it -- you say "Hawking's 'gravity' as the

creator of all is still a pretty good proposition."

Of course, there are laws because there is a universe in which we intelligent beings live:
intelligence would not emerge from pure chaos. But to turn it around and to say that the laws
actually make it possible for the Universe to create itself -- that sounds to me like the
musings of a crank.
Hawking's track record as a man of common sense is not inspiring. He actually theorized at
one point that we would be living our lives backwards (emerging from the grave, entering a
womb at the appropriate time, etc.) if the universe were contracting. It took him quite a while
to admit that this had been a mistake.
I've read _A Brief History of Time_ and am not at all impressed by it. As a topologist, I can
fully appreciate the joke that we cannot tell the difference between a doughnut and a coffee
cup. [Their shapes can be deformed into each other without gluing or tearing.] In a similar
vein, I say that Hawking cannot tell the difference between time and space.
The difference between him and me is that he doesn't see the joke in it--he really thinks in
that book the two become indistinguishable as we approach the time of the Big Bang, and
therefore the Big Bang requires no explanation since there really was no beginning to it all -a beginning requires being able to distinguish between time and space, and in his
mathematical model there is no difference at the point of singularity.
But that is because his mathematical model is naive, and even well beyond the Big Bang it
does not do justice to the distinction between time and space.
Has he abandoned this pseudo-explanation of how there is no need to explain the existence
of the universe, in favor of the M-theory, or is he clinging to both pseudo-explanations
together?
http://www.math.sc.edu/~nyikos

1.1.2011 | 8:45pm
Peter Nyikos says:
The claim that atheism is the null hypothesis seems like just a variation on what I call "The
Forensic Gambit": the burden of proof rests on the affirmative.
This makes sense in most formal debates, which revolve around whether some aspect of the
status quo should be changed. It's a slight variation on the attitude colloquially expressed as
"if it ain't broke, don't fix it". But it makes little or no sense when we are arguing about what
the actual status quo is. Here, I submit, the playing field is and should be level until people
start marshaling evidence for their viewpoints.
The three main contenders for our assent in this blog are as follows:
1. Our space-time continuum ("our universe") which apparently came into existence ca. 13.7
billion years ago, is all there is.
2. There is a supremely powerful and intelligent Creator of our universe. [Haggling about Its
attributes is a red herring of which all too many participants are guilty.]
3. There is a mind-bogglingly huge, if not infinite, collection of universes, with radically
varying laws and initial conditions.

[Of course, there are alternatives, like Hume's image of a universe spun out of the belly of an
infinite spider, but I hope readers will agree that at least one of the three above is to be
preferred to any of them.]
Our universe is so finely tuned for intelligent life that 1. is obviously far less credible than 3. I
also believe it is inferior to 2., again because of the fine tuning, but also because of a
modernized Cosmological Argument. To wit: of following three alternatives, only C. seems to
hold water in the light of the scientific discoveries of the past three decades:
A. The Pulsating Universe Theory, much favored by the Soviets: Our universe had no
absolute beginning because the Big Bang was preceded by a Big Crunch which squeezed a
precursor universe into an incredibly dense ball, and these two were just the latest in an
infinite series of Big Bangs alternating with Big Crunches.
B. Hoyle's Steady State Theory, according to which there was no Big Bang because our
universe has been expanding forever and will continue to expand forever while hydrogen
keeps spontaneously coming into existence to keep it forever youthful.
C. The Big Bang was the beginning of our universe, and it will continue to expand forever.
The Cosmic Background radiation and its actual structure have dealt B. a possibly mortal
blow, while the discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up rather than
slowing down may have been the nail in the coffin of A. The popular accounts of Dark Energy
have as a consequence an ever-accelerating expansion which will write finis to all stars
trillions of years from now, and, due to the decay of the proton, to all matter quintillions of
years from now.
And so we seem to be confronted with almost the opposite of Hawking and Mlodinow's non
sequitur with which I opened my first post: because Dark Energy opposes gravity, our
universe will effectively destroy itself and become a continuum of ever-diluting energy.
If readers replace "our universe" with "All There Is Or Was Or Will Be" (to remove a
weaseling ambiguity from Carl Sagan's opening sentence in _Cosmos_) in all three
alternatives, I hope they will at least be able to sympathize with my belief that Grand
Alternative 1 is inferior to Grand Alternative 2.

1.1.2011 | 9:08pm
Peter Nyikos says:
To A Biologist Weighs In: How many of us here do you take for creationists, whether of the
old earth or young earth variety? I am convinced that all metazoans, and probably all living
things on earth, evolved from a few kinds of simple unicellular organisms. This is perfectly
OK with the Catholic Church, which only asserts that the human soul is divinely created.
And I came to this conclusion through the study of paleontology and anatomy, not the
ramblings of popularizers like Dawkins. In fact, until I read _The Immense Journey_, by
Loren Eiseley, I clung to a kind of neo-Deism like that of Ken Miller: God set it all in motion
at the Big Bang and didn't make any adjustments until He entered human history decisively,
perhaps with the creation of the first human soul. But Loren Eiseley opened my eyes to
another possibility in the soaring passage:
``Perhaps there also, among rotting fish heads and blue,
night-burning bog lights, moved the eternal mystery,

the careful finger of God. The increase was not much.

It was two bubbles, two thin-walled little balloons at the
end of the Snout's small brain. The cerebral hemispheres
had appeared.''
I am still in suspended judgment about whether evolution was coaxed along by such divine
nudges, but I certainly haven't ruled it out.

1.1.2011 | 10:01pm
Peter Nyikos says:
Joe the Human says: "Modern Philophy looked at these and hundreds more logical
objections to Aristotloe and Plato, and Aquinas - and moved on to something far better. "
What is that something far better? logical positivism? linguistical analysis? Marxism?
nihilism?
English philosophy drifted into a sterile backwater about a hundred years ago with its
embracing of logical positivism and linguistical analysis, and Marxist philosophy is a joke. As
for nihilism, I hope not even the atheists in this 100+ comment "blog" have gone that far.
The only modern philosopher since 1910 (the year William James died) of whom I am
genuinely in awe is the late Hans Jonas.
Unlike most Catholics posting here, I am in agreement with the Jonas Axiom that "There is
no reason why there should be something rather than nothing." That is the true meaning of
the existentialist claim that "existence precedes essence". Existentialism gave us a lot of
nonsense (and Jonas, while embracing much that he found good in existentialism, was one of
its most penetrating critics) but this one axiom is one with which I am in agreement.
And so, much as I would like to be able to believe in a benevolent God whose existence is part
of his essence (the God of Anselm and Descartes, among others) I'm afraid the best I can opt
for is a God who is eternally glad of the great stroke of luck that there is something rather
than nothing, and that He is part of it.
But let's not have any of that Kantian nonsense that "existence is not a real predicate"which
Kant invoked in order to refute the Anselmic ("ontological") argument for God's existence.
Kant's *ad hoc ipse dixit* was disposed of very nicely by the existentialist William Barrett in
the closing pages of _Irrational Man_.

1.1.2011 | 10:35pm
Papalinton says:
Hi Reg McConnell

"Edward Fesner[sic] took the measure of Hawking and Mlodinow, recently: ..... "
Well, well, well Edward Feser taking the measure of Hawking and Mlodinow?
Not bloomin' likely, Reg. He has a snowball's chance in hell, of getting the measure of
Hawking, not by a long chalk. Indeed Feser seems a bit of a drip at the best of times, at
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/226868/too-christian-academia/edward-feser

and
http://nondefixi.blogspot.com/2009/02/blackwell-scraps-encyclopedia-under.html
Both articles are well worth the read including the following remarks from the commenters.
Oh Dear.
You say, "To ask Who created God? is to evince a failure to understand what defenders of
the first-cause argument mean by God. Contrary to what Hawking and Mlodinow seem to
think, the idea of an uncaused first cause is not that of something which needs no creator. It
is rather ..... yadda, yadda, yadda"
I say, I am unmoved by your 'unmoved mover'. It was such a fillip for theism when science
first promulgated the idea of the universe coming into being from nothing, a Big Bang. And
religionists are never going to give up that concept without a fight. Trouble is cosmologists,
physicists and philosophers have continued to test the veracity of that particular ideation [big
bang, that is]; therefore further propositions as 'the big bounce', the 'multi-verse', and
investigating other possible scenarios that contribute to making sense of the evidence as it is
coming in continually. Religion, true to its character, is locked, welded on to the notion of the
big bang because it fits their scripture. This view is pretty much reflective of the theological
modus operandi. An example is how 'biblical archeology' started out, to confirm the stories in
the bible, rather than test the veracity of the stories themselves. Biblical archeology as
presented is a bit of a dog's breakfast right now with adherents fleeing in all directions and
departments changing names.
Science is self-correcting. Christianity is self-affirming.
We know much more now of the various elements that constitute the cosmos, nebulae, suns,
red and brown dwarfs, galaxies, planets, black holes, gravity, fluctuations, space-time etc. We
have a pretty good idea that black holes are areas where, once matter, light, energy, etc fall
within their influence, cannot escape and are compacted to a point, a singularity. We suspect,
and are pretty well certain the big bang resulted from the cataclysmic expansion of a
singularity. What we don't know is what happens on the other side of a black hole. But we do
know what happens to a singularity that suddenly expands. If we extrapolate what we seem
to have discovered and apply it, perhaps the big bang is just one of a series of cosmic events,
on the other side of which was a black hole, going back infinitely through other universes in
turn, and, noting the black holes from our current universe, that these singularities may well
be the obverse of another forming universe. Speculative at best, but it sure beats the hell out
of the anthropomorphic village-god construct so enamoured of theists.
Mores the point, science is happy to suggest it doesn't have all the answers yet, but is working
assiduously towards them.
Sorry, Reg, any refutation by Feser, would have been within boundaries proscribed by
theology, and with as much explanatory power as a burst balloon.
In the beginning there was the Word, at the end just a Clich.
Cheers

1.2.2011 | 5:42am
Papalinton says:

Hi Peter Nyikos
CMU is a great alma mater. I'm envious.
Re Hawking's 'The grand design', I've only read a synopsis and I am currently part way
through the actual book. And I too have read his "A Brief History of Time".
You say, "The difference between him and me is that he doesn't see the joke in it- .."
No. The difference between you and he is that he has put the long hard protracted yards into
the study. Armchair expertise is a dime a dozen.
You say, "But that is because his mathematical model is naive ...."
Fair go, buddy, almost an ad hom, and a somewhat less than respectful cheap point made.
Hawking has put his thoughts out there in the public domain for discussion, but your post is
a little unbecoming of a professional. But then, so many people are believers first and
scientists second. As I remarked to Professor Andrews upthread, should one offer their
academic status as a means of establishing their right to a seat at the table, one must also
declare their presups. Context is all important, as you will agree, as indeed [I would suggest]
those lovely people at Our Lady on the Hills would agree.
Hawkings' work, as does all science work, stands or fall on its merits. As you point out
Hawkings has been down a few cul-de-sacs, but his strength and integrity is all the more
remarkable for acknowledging them. Others could learn by his example. Science is selfcorrecting, theism is self-affirming.
Peter, you say, "Of course, there are laws because there is a universe in which we intelligent
beings live: intelligence would not emerge from pure chaos."
Picture our solar system before it formed, the forming of the sun, the planets, each
aggregating to their current size, shape and composition. I would say 'chaos' would have been
an appropriate descriptor of the state of affairs before the solar system began. As the system
settled down, life emerged. The evidence is right there, in front of us, at what could be
considered the neighbourhood level. I think it is not a helpful premise to imply that nothing
comes from chaos. I also think it is not helpful to think the obverse, that is, that order is not a
naturally occurring phenomenon. I would suggest that chaos AND order are both in equal
measure random and perfectly natural occurrences in the cosmos. There are so many
examples from observation that this is a reasonable proposition. I also suggest that to say
that something cannot come from nothing is perhaps a little superficial and somewhat
premature. It seems that at the quantum level, matter, energy, muons, quarks, or whatever
they are, seem to be able to pop in and out of existence quite naturally. They appear to be
observably [through sophisticated and indirect means, I understand as I am not a physicist]
doing so. So, perhaps it is our definition of 'nothing' that may need to be refined or reviewed.
Gravity seems to be a fair bet as a force that keeps various cosmic players in order and in
some form of mathematically predictable harmony. In that, Hawkings may have a point in
his new book. But equally there are innumerable observable examples of chaos reigning,
exploding nebulae, colliding galaxies, swirls of debris seemingly entering an ordered phase of
life [the creation of new galaxies or star systems etc]. So the notion of chaos and order being
mutually exclusive may not be a workable proposition. I suggest that both concepts are two
sides of the same coin. If we understand one of the fundamentals of science correctly, that
energy cannot be created or destroyed, it is a reasonable bet that our universe probably
wasn't created at the big bang [in the sense that there was absolutely nothing before the
singularity, before the big bang] as such, in the grander scheme of things in the cosmos, but
that it is the current link [of which we are familiar] in an eternal chain of cosmic links. From
that premise, there may not necessarily need be a force, external to the system, an unmoved
mover, to get it started. Perhaps the cycle of the cosmos is perpetual and there are indeed
turtles all the way down.

What I am certain about, Peter, as sure as night follows day, theists will append whatever
current and future science discoveries are, and will be made, and the pope will sanctify them.
There is a long recorded history that infers this is the ordinary process of progress.
So rather than drag the chain, embrace it and argue Hawkings proposition through on its
own merits. If it's good it will stand the test, if it isn't it will fall over and we will have to rethink the area. But please, please, do not throw in theological lead weight as part of the
equation. It is most unhelpful, and only draws us back to view the issue through the eyes of
those who lived 2 millennia ago.
Cheers

1.2.2011 | 6:18am
Joe the Human says:
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, question 2, Article 3 [Excerpt]:
"Whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion
be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by
another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover,
and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as
they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion
by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other;
and this everyone understands to be God.
The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. In the world of sense we find there is
an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a
thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is
impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all
efficient causes following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the
intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or
only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first
cause among efficient causes, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. But if in
efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither
will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly
false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the
name of God."
Here Aquinas uses bad, silly logic, as usual. First to simply assert there must be a first cause.
Or else the series would never start. But in an infinite series of events causing other events,
there is not a "first"; yet nevertheless, there is a series of events. Even without a "first."
Sensing the problem with his earlier argument, next to be sure, A. tries to prove there cannot
be an infinity of causes; merely on the very, very lame grounds that if there was not a "first,"
causal event,then there could not be a second result, or a third, or any subsequent effects. But
here again, Aquinas makes a fundamental mistake: in an infinite series, we cannot number
them, or discover the "first". But still, a stream, a sequence of causes, can nevertheless exist.
Furthermore? If God is infinite, and without a cause, then infinite series can exist.
Therefore, it is possible for things to happen, without a "first" cause.

1.2.2011 | 7:15am
Joe the Human says:

First a minor point: "But all this is taking place in the present time"? Where and when did
the reed for that clarinet come? From a reed ... earlier in time. So that, there is a extended
series of causes ... extending back in time. To, presumably, a first causal event in ... time.
FInaly though I reject - and have not extensively read - either Aristotle, or Aquinas. In part
because I reject the whole apparent framework others have made of them: of an "essence" or
"being" vs. "contingent" idea.
The "essence" and "being" with it, sound quite a bit like Plato's dualism, his "forms": free
floating ideas floating in undefined space; basic ideas asserted to be the foundation of all
later, physical/contingent things. LLike it seems, Time, and "Essence." Or "Being." (Which
indeed Aquinas considers in your passage).
But it is surprising that Aquinas should speak of rather disembodied "essences" or "Being"
itself, as if all that was not only LOGICALLY prior to, but also in some way ACTUALLY prior
to, physical things coming into existence or their individual contingent "being." Because
here, A. seems to be committing the very thing he criticized Plato for: a kind of early
deification or reification of Ideas, vs. Nominalism. Or better said, of speaking as if the
attributes or qualities we abstract of material things - like shape, color, and Being - could
exist in some real way, apart from the physical things in which we find them.
It is surprising to hear of Aristotle doing this, especially. Aristotle, in his better moments, in
the reading of many, shied away from Plato's dualistic positing of "ideas," having some kind
of transcendent existence vs. concrete "copies" of those ideas; ideas somehow different in
kind, "transcendent" from the physical universe. Rather than such abstractions as "Being,"
being simple a mere quality of material things.
But abstract thinkers tend to make this mistake often; reifying their abstractions, and
speaking of them as if they had some kind of real existence; as if there was a sort of Math
Land, lying invisibly underneath the world of physical appearances. Leading to a dualistic,
anti-incarnational God.
Fortunately, Mills and others better helped us see such abstractions as even simple number,
deriving as qualifies within physical things; not as some kind of metaphysical, cosmological,
prior base to them. While I would criticize the current emphasis of many on prior "essence"es
and even "Being," on the same grounds.
So that the notion of a "transcendent" God is also wrong too, by the way.

1.2.2011 | 10:25am
Reg McConnell says:
In his book, "The Devil's Delusion, David Berlinski skewers science in general and Hawking
specifically for what he terms "scientific pretensions."
Snippet: A Catechism of Quantum Cosmology
Q: From what did our universe evolve?
A: Our universe evolved from a much smaller, much emptier mini-universe. You may think
of it as an egg.

Q: What was the smaller, emptier universe like?

A: It was a four-dimensional sphere with nothing much inside it. You may think of that as
weird.
Q: How can a sphere have four dimensions?
A: A sphere may have four dimensions if it has one more dimension than a threedimensional sphere. You may think of that as obvious.
Q: Does the smaller, emptier universe have a name?
A: The smaller, emptier universe is called a de Sitter universe. You may think of that as about
time someone paid attention to de Sitter.
Q: Is there anything else I should know about the smaller, emptier universe.?
A: Yes. It represents a solution to Einstein's field equations. You may think of that as a good
thing.
Q: Where was that smaller, emptier universe or egg?
A: It was in the place where space as we know it did not exist. You may think of it as a sac.
Q: When was it there?
A: It was there at the time when time as we know it did not exist. You may think of it as a
mystery.
Q: Where did the egg come from?
A: The egg did not actually come from anywhere. You may think of this as astonishing.
Q: If the egg did not come from anywhere, how did it get there?
A: The egg got there because the wave function of the universe said it was probable. You may
think of this as a done deal.
Q: How did our universe evolve from the egg?
A: It evolved by inflating itself up from its sac to become the universe in which we now find
ourselves. You may think of that as just one of those things.
{But it's what Berlinski says next that is most striking}
"This catechism, I should add, is not a parody of quantum cosmology. It IS quantum
cosmology.
"Readers lacking faith, will, I imagine, wish to know something more about its crucial step,
and that is the emergence of a mini-universe from nothing at all. They will be disappointed to
learn that insofar as the mini-universe is actual, it did not emerge from nothing, and insofar
as it is possible, it did not emerge at all. What can be said about the mini-universe according
to either interpretation is that Hawking has designated it as probable because he has
assumed that it is probable. He has done this by restricting the wave function of the universe

to just those universes that coincide with the de Sitter universe at their boundaries. This
coincidence is all that is needed to produce the desired results. The wave function of the
universe and the de sitter mini-universe are made for each other. The subsequent
computations indicate the obvious: The universe most likely to be found down there in the
sac of time is just the universe Hawking assumed would be found down there. If what
Hawking has described is not quite a circle in thought, it does appear to suggest an oblate
spheroid.
"The result is guaranteed one hunnerd percent as used-car salesmen say."
As you can see, Berlinski is quite adept at demonstrating the utter impoverishment of science
when it comes to offering alternatives to the notion that our universe arose as an act of
creation. There is zero evidence for a multiverse. Zero. It is nothing more than idle
speculation. To insist otherwise is to abandon science for faith (a trait any self-respecting
atheist should abhor).

1.2.2011 | 3:02pm
Peter Nyikos says:
Papalinton, the post of mine to which you responded in the wee hours of today is only one of
four that I made yesterday evening. The others will answer some of your points, so I won't
duplicate what they say here. [I got prompt e-mail acknowledgment of all four posts, so it
looks as though the moderators are waiting for other people to intersperse their comments
with mine before releasing any of the others.]
Anyway, you are using a very parochial and extremely mild picture of things like chaos,
which do not address my comments. When I said "chaos" I didn't refer to entities in our
highly lawful cosmos; I meant REAL chaos, in universes so unordered that physicists cannot
even conceive of them. Nor can the "Skeptical Inquirers" who try to look at alternatives to our
few physical constants (Planck's, etc.); they simply feed other values in for the gravitational,
etc. constants in the articles I have seen.
We can, of course, picture a semi-chaotic universe where matter is made up of subatomic
particles as in ours, but no two of those particles have either the same charge or the same
mass. Even such a mild variation is not seriously contemplated by the multiverse theorists to
my knowledge, nor by the Skeptical Inquirers.
Yet it stands to reason that (1) such semi-chaotic universes far outnumber ordered cosmoses
like ours if we are in a multiverse that has an inconceivably large but still finite number of
universes and (2) life, which by definition requires self-replication to a high degree of
accuracy, cannot long flourish in such a semi-chaotic universe and it is highly unlikely to get
started in the first place.
You say, "If we understand one of the fundamentals of science correctly, that energy cannot
be created or destroyed," and that may be true in our universe (although I believe the current
conventional wisdom is that it is wildly false where the inflationary period is concerned) but
there is absolutely no reason to think it holds in semi-chaotic universes, much less really
chaotic ones.
Face it, my friend: physicists are experts on our universe but are pathetically ill-equipped to
reason about the incredibly great number of universes that are required to explain away the
fine-tuning of our universe. As are we all.

But at least I, a set-theoretic topologist, am quite used to dealing with universes of sets that
are wildly different from each other. [In some, the continuum hypothesis is true; in others, it
is false in a huge variety of ways; and that is only one of many parameters of variation we
deal in.]
As to your comment beginning with "No. The difference between you and him is that he has
put in the long protracted hours...." firstly, I HAVE put in long hours. Secondly, if a mountain
labors and brings forth a mouse, it is no credit to the mountain that it has labored long and
hard to bring it forth; quite the contrary.
Thirdly, what are your credentials for your initial "No."?
For someone who has claimed that "gravity creating the universe from nothing" is a sensible
proposition and who HAS read some of the book, you are most unhelpful in explaining it so
far. Saying that "Gravity keeps the cosmic players in harmony" has absolutely nothing
whatsoever to do with the benighted-seeming claim with its use of the word "nothing". If you
haven't gotten around to that part of the book yet, then you should have refrained from
making such an utterly irrelevant remark.
Finally, it is unbecoming of you to make insinuations about me such as "But then, so many
people are believers first and scientists second." What I, a person passionately interested in
science since the age of seven, have been saying on this thread is informed by over a decade
as an adult agnostic (bordering on atheism for more than one of those years) and sticks
carefully to the methodological constraints of science -- in the broad sense of being interested
in all possible physical universes, and not just the incredibly fine-tuned one in which we find
ourselves.

1.2.2011 | 3:22pm
Ye Olde Statisitician says:
Peter Nyikos
"...as a topologist..."

YOS
Algebraic, I suspect. You might then enjoy the murder mystery, "The Oxford Murders." In my
storied youth I was a general topologist for a brief time, before turning to applied statistics.
Hawking:
the Big Bang requires no explanation since there really was no beginning to it all
YOS
If Hawking really said such a thing, he is clearly confusing "causes" or "explanations" with
"beginnings." Does he also think the open set (0,1) requires no explanation simply because
there is no smallest number in it? Heck, Heytesbury and others were talking about the
intension and remission of forms back in the middle ages.
+++
Peter Nyikos
Of course, there are laws because there is a universe in which we intelligent beings live:
intelligence would not emerge from pure chaos.
Papa
Picture our solar system before it formed, the forming of the sun, the planets, each
aggregating to their current size, shape and composition. I would say 'chaos' would have been

an appropriate descriptor of the state of affairs before the solar system began.
YOS
A nebular gas cloud rotating and condensing in accordance with consistent physical laws is
not "chaos." Nothing possessing form is purely chaotic; so as soon as you have some thing
you no longer have chaos, but nature governed by natural laws. In a purely chaotic world,
there would be no elegant balance between the urging of light pressure to expand forever and
the urging of gravitation to collapse into a point. Particles could go any which way and not in
the directions forces impelled them. Tiger would give birth to petunias. Electrons would go
their merry way regardless of the enticements of the protons.
+++
Papa
I also suggest that to say that something cannot come from nothing is perhaps a little
superficial and somewhat premature. It seems that at the quantum level, matter, energy,
muons, quarks, or whatever they are, seem to be able to pop in and out of existence quite
naturally.
YOS
They are not popping in and out of existence from nothing. There is an energy vacuum, a
quantum state, dynamical laws describing how things might leap from state to state. That is
not nothing. That is like saying your brand new banking account came from "nothing" simply
because it was not there previously. But there was a bank, banking laws, and a banking
system; and that is not nothing. The only folks who need to rethink their definition of
"nothing" are those who think "nothing" means "empty space," as if space were not
something.
There is a discussion here by First Things resident physicist explaining the whole megilla:
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/09/much-ado-about-ldquonothingrdquostephen-hawking-and-the-self-creating-universe
As for the "law" of gravity "creating" the "universe," I can only wonder how there can be
gravity, lawful or otherwise, when there is no matter-energy. But let us suppose Dr. Hawking
is right and the LAW somehow pre-exists the universe. Well, a law is not a thing, but an
immaterial concept; and if it pre-exists the universe, then it must exist outside the universe.
Conceptions are expressed in words, be the words mathematical or no.
So when Dr. Hawking states that the universe was created by some immaterial being outside
the universe, he simply affirms that "in the beginning was the Word."

1.2.2011 | 4:54pm
Papalinton says:

Hi First Things administrator

Do you know when my response to Reg McDonnell's comments upthread will be posted? If it
has been censured and you wish it not to be posted on this site, I would appreciate it being
returned to me via e-mail.
Thanks muchly
Cheers
Papalinton

1.2.2011 | 8:53pm
Blake (formerly Deeply Concerned) says:

Griffin, it is true that having an origin-story is part of being human, right along with all the
other myth-making functions humans rely on.
Myths appear to be akin to human operating systems.
The question I have is, what makes you think the myths and origin-stories written by
humanists are any less faith-based? We are still dealing with stuff beyond the limit of what
we can know.
The reality is that some things are just mysteries to us - beyond what we can know, unless we
take a leap of faith in the form of what assumptions we hold so that we can make pure
possibility into something small enough that our puny logic can get around it and tame it.

1.3.2011 | 5:46am
Papalinton says:
Hi Peter
Cheers and thanks for your response.
You offer some pretty good food for thought. I'm not sure offhandedly wiping the floor with
Hawking is one of them though. Be that as it may, I'm sure he is big enough and ugly enough,
as I and possibly you, to look after himself.
I am about half-way through his book now and am starting to get some sense of his
proposition. I'll comment as I become a little more au fait with the content.
Now, re 'chaos': You say, "When I said "chaos" I didn't refer to entities in our highly lawful
cosmos; I meant REAL chaos, in universes so unordered that physicists cannot even conceive
of them."
I ask, and what is the source for confirming the existence of these universes so unordered
that physicists cannot conceive of them? What is the qualitative difference between 'chaos'
and 'Real chaos' as you define them? Do you mean the scale of them? I suspect chaos is chaos
but I'm willing to learn.
Your paras 3 and 4 are not inconsistent with my thinking, indeed align with them, not that
my thinking is any the better. I'm not sure, though, your meaning in para 3 describing our
universe as "We can, of course, picture a semi-chaotic universe where matter is made up of
subatomic particles as in ours, ... " and in para 4 where you say, " ... that (1) such semichaotic universes far outnumber ordered cosmoses like ours .... "
Just a point of clarification, is our universe 'ordered' or 'semi-chaotic'?
In your 5th para you say, " .. (although I believe the current conventional wisdom is that it is
wildly false where the inflationary period is concerned) .. ". How does the inflationary period,
just after the big bang, compromise the state of energy extant? My understanding is that the
conservation of energy remains universally constant and even now it seems the level of
energy within the universe is a zero-zero sum game. Then again I am no physicist.
In para 6, you say, "Face it, my friend: physicists are experts on our universe but are
pathetically ill-equipped to reason about the incredibly great number of universes that are

required to explain away the fine-tuning of our universe. As are we all. "
Is there an implication that theism has the answer to this question? The very concept of 'fine
tuning', itself, has the implied notion, embedded deep in it, of the cosmological constants
being tweaked by some external agency in order to bring about the required 'goldilocks zone'
to support life. If this is truly the case, there is no science, there is no more physics. If these
constants are not permitted to occur naturally, then all science is meaningless. Is that what
you are implying? The idea of explaining away the fine-tuning constants by means other than
natural occurrence is classically, the argument from personal incredulity, that the apparent
fine-tuning of the universe simply could not have occurred by itself. The alternative of an
anthropomorphic external agency, tweaking the fine-tuning knobs, is simply beyond reason
and logic, and does not add anything to the commonwealth of scientific knowledge.
In para 7, Peter, " .. [In some, the continuum hypothesis is true; in others, it is false in a huge
variety of ways; and that is only one of many parameters of variation we deal in.] .. "
And indeed, Hawking's proposition in 'The grand Design' follows pretty much the sentiment
you have expressed here. Remarkably similar. He suggests a new paradigm that he calls a
'model-dependent realism'. Through this model, he deals with dualities [wave and particle],
suggests a means for addressing the meaning of existence, incorporates M-theory, quarks,
subatomic particles, and looks at what happened before the world existed. It really is an
interesting take on the question to where science may advance in its investigation.
As I say I haven't finished it yet. It is in Chapter 3 that he outlines the model, and the further
chapters begin to flesh out the model.
Your second last paragraph resembles my being admonished by a school-marm. Teh heh,
and delightfully funny. [No disrespect intended, just my sense of humour, Peter] But
notwithstanding, I do apologise unreservedly if I caused any dismay.
In you final paragraph, is your agnosticism related to the science or a comment on theism?
Was your year of living dangerously [atheism] this past year, part way through your ten years
of agnosticism or towards the beginning of that period? That will give me some indication as
to whether the year was a trial run or something that is still unfolding.
The wording of your noting "the incredibly fine-tuned one in which we find ourselves' seems
to suggest a disbelief, a 'shaking of the head', that any such fine-tuning simply cannot be the
result of a natural process. Is this a reasonable statement? Then again, I may be reading too
much into your words. Only through your personal honesty and integrity will I know the
truth or otherwise of this; for whatever you tell me will be accepted as proper.
I look forward to your other comments, Peter
Cheers

1.3.2011 | 6:56am
Papalinton says:
Hi YOS

Great to talk with you again.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
And may 2011 be a great year for all of us.
YOS
"A nebular gas cloud rotating and condensing in accordance with consistent physical laws is
not "chaos.""

Papa
Perhaps a coalescing gas cloud begins to pattern along physical laws. I was thinking a little
further out in time with a simply a swirling mass of matter of no particular form as there
seems to be in most parts of the observable cosmos. The result of colliding galaxies and
exploding nebulae would probably constitute a reasonable idea of chaos in which the
magnitude and sizes of the various players in the big cataclysmic dance will determine the
extent to which that gas cloud begins to reform under the laws of physics or wether the cloud
is consumed into a black hole from where we do not know it goes.
YOS
"They are not popping in and out of existence from nothing. There is an energy vacuum, a
quantum state, dynamical laws describing how things might leap from state to state. That is
not nothing."
Papa
True. My explanation was a little crude. My noting of rethinking what we mean about
nothing is pretty much how you express it. Things seemingly popping out of nothing at the
quantum level is a nonsense and my note about rethinking the definition of nothing is what I
was attempting to across as you so eloquently have. No argument there.
YOS
"There is a discussion here by First Things resident physicist explaining the whole megilla:
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/09/much-ado-about-ldquonothingrdquostephen-hawking-and-the-self-creating-universe."
Papa
Is this physicist the font of all relevant things physical and cosmological? Is he the Catholic
overseer of particle physics? 6 of one,half dozen of another.
I am sure he is a gifted physicist. But there is a vested interest to ensure the
anthropomorphic god of the bible isn't too far from the cutting edge of science. In one of
Barr's comboxes, "A person who would actually know more than I about the question you ask
is is Gerald Cleaver of Baylor university, who is a young superstring theorist (and an
evangelical Christian)."
The question I have to ask," What difference does it make to the credibility of this young
superstring theorist to be known for his religious leanings? Is such notation even relevant to
the science question at hand? Such commentary I suspect speaks of an underbelly of motive
and an element of disingenuousness when, for example, critiquing Hawking's proposition,
supposedly on purely scientific grounds. But Barr's thinking exposes a deeper reason than
that.
YOS, have you read The Grand Design, yet?
Cheers

1.3.2011 | 10:37am
Peter Nyikos says:
Papalinton: The way I use the terms, our universe is highly ordered (in fact, as I'm sure even
you will acknowledge, incredibly fine-tuned for the emergence of intelligent life) and
definitely not semi-chaotic.

In fact, it's even a slight stretch to call a universe in which no two subatomic particles have
either the same charge or the same mass "semi-chaotic" as long as there are such things as
the nuclear force and gravity. Somewhat less of a stretch would be if there were an
astronomical number of kinds of "charges" with only things of the same kind of charge
having any kind of electromagnetic interaction with each other.
Another note on terminology: I urge you to reserve "goldilocks zone" for the region between
two imaginary spheres surrounding a star where it is neither too hot nor too cold for life as
we know it. There are just too many parameters for it to be a useful term in the context you
suggest.
You ask, "what is the source for confirming the existence of these universes so unordered that
physicists cannot conceive of them?"
O, speak not of confirmation unless The Grand Design tells how to confirm the existence of
all the universes of which IT speaks. Are you far enough in the book to be able to tell how
they plan to do it?
Can you decipher whether their M-theory postulates an organized multiverse such as has
been bandied about for decades? You know, black holes developing in a grand multiverse, to
become individual universes like ours, developing their own black holes to become new
universes, and so on ad infinitum?
That should be hardly more to the liking of you atheists than the first of the following three
alternatives:
1. Our space-time continuum ("our universe") which apparently came into existence ca. 13.7
billion years ago, is "all there is or was or ever will be" to use a famous ambiguous formula of
Carl Sagan with which he opens his book "Cosmos".
2. There is a fantastically powerful and intelligent Creator of our universe. [Haggling about
any of its other attributes is red herring where our discussion is concerned.]
3. There is a mind-bogglingly huge, if not infinite, collection of universes, with radically
varying laws (or lack of them) and initial conditions (or lack of them). [The traditional
"multiverse" of which I spoke above does NOT come under this rubric, because each universe
uses the "stuff" of its parent universe as a starting point.]
[Of course, there are alternatives, like Hume's image of a universe spun out of the belly of an
infinite spider, but I hope you will agree that at least one of the three above is to be preferred
to such flights of fancy.]
Our universe is so finely tuned for intelligent life that 1. is obviously far less credible than 3. I
also believe it is inferior to 2., again because of the fine tuning, but also because of a
modernized Cosmological Argument. To wit: of following three alternatives, only C. seems to
hold water in the light of the scientific discoveries of the past three decades:
A. The Pulsating Universe Theory, much favored of yore by the Soviets: Our universe had no
absolute beginning because the Big Bang was preceded by a Big Crunch which squeezed a
precursor universe into an incredibly dense ball, and these two were just the latest in an
infinite series of Big Bangs alternating with Big Crunches.
B. Hoyle's Steady State Theory, according to which there was no Big Bang because our
universe has been expanding forever and will continue to expand forever while hydrogen

keeps spontaneously coming into existence to keep it forever youthful.

C. The Big Bang was the beginning of our universe, and it will continue to expand forever.
The Cosmic Background radiation and its actual structure have dealt B. a possibly mortal
blow, while the discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up rather than
slowing down may have been the nail in the coffin of A. The popular accounts of Dark Energy
have as a consequence an ever-accelerating expansion which will write finis to all stars
trillions of years from now, and, due to the decay of the proton, to all matter quintillions of
years from now.
And so we seem to be confronted with almost the opposite of Hawking and Mlodinow's non
sequitur with which I opened my first post: because Dark Energy opposes gravity, our
universe will effectively destroy itself and become a continuum of ever-diluting energy.
You say, "The wording of your noting "the incredibly fine-tuned one in which we find
ourselves' seems to suggest a disbelief, a 'shaking of the head', that any such fine-tuning
simply cannot be the result of a natural process."
On the contrary, there may be a "natural process" responsible for infinitely many universes
springing into Being with no precursors whatsoever, each totally hermetically sealed off from
each other -- "entirely distinct realities, wholly discontinuous and sharing no common
elements" as Haldane puts it. That is what Grand Alternative 3 above is all about.
What's more, I believe you atheists must fly to this alternative as avidly as Hume's Philo
exhorts Cleanthes to fly to the revealed truth, if you are to continue to win ever greater
percentages of people to your beliefs. Altenative 1 (and even its "integrated multiverse"
variant) will only be "preaching to the atheistic choir" and will not win many people over
from a belief in Grand Alternative 2.

1.3.2011 | 11:50am
Joe the Human says:
A simple interjections:
Is the who universe fine-tuned for life? Do we have for example, just the right distance, from
just the right kind of sun, with just the right kind of planet? And if we do, does that mean
finally, that God is setting all this up? This is the old Evolution argument all over again.
Among other objections: 1) as regards evolution, in our practically infinite universe there are
many atoms. Even in the merel yvisible universe, possibly the number of atoms, might be ten
to the billionth power, say. Or a billion times a billion. In such a massive universe of atoms,
Christians are saying, there couldn't be a single sweet spot or two, where a few dozens atoms
came together, to create life. But saying that, seriously underestimates the size of the
universe - and the massive number of chances for a) a sweet spot or two to exist, and b) for
atoms to come together there, to form life.
For that matter, in an infinite universe, even what seems like an impossibly rare event, can
itself happen an infinity of times.
So in sum: there is enough material out there, enough random material, to create many
clumped, structured events - gases clumping into stars; stars creating or orbiting planets.
Then, there are enough of those structures, for many - even an infinity - of rather complex

life forms.
The current Christian notion of a fine-tuned visible universe, therefore, is just the old antievolution argument all over again; and it's still not good. Becuase of the size of the universe,
there may be other sweet spots; and the universe is big enough that even incredibly rare
events that lead to life, would happen quite often.
In fact, if the universe is infinite, extending beyond the visible universe, then sweet spots and life - have been created in an inifinite number of places.

1.3.2011 | 1:35pm
Papalinton says:
Hi Peter
Thanks for the history lesson
I guess you have pre-suppositionally determined the worth of Hawking's book.
I thought you were interested in a proper discussion.
As is happening elsewhere consistently around the first world, the US an exception [but even
there, something is apparently moving], I will let the emerging trend in communities across
Western societies decide on the fate in the belief in Grand Alternative 2.
As La Place replies,"Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothse-l."
Cheers

1.3.2011 | 1:42pm
harry says:
@atheists

I think you would find a couple of books by Dr. Donald E. Johnson interesting. They are:
Programming of Life and Probability's Nature and Nature's Probability. Dr. Johnson has
Ph.D.s in both Computer & Information Sciences from the University of Minnesota and in
Chemistry from Michigan State University. He was a senior research scientist for 10 years in
pharmaceutical and medical / scientific instruments fields and taught for 20 years in
universities in Wisconsin, Minnesota, California and Europe. His intellectual journey is
interesting. In his own words about his background, from the introduction to Probability's
Nature and Nature's Probability:
During his education, views of the American Chemical Society's From Molecules to Man
program were totally accepted. At that time, he believed anyone not accepting the proven
evolutionary scenario was of the same mentality as someone believing in a flat earth. He
willingly confronted anyone doubting the evolutionary scenarios, relying on the facts
presented during his training to promote those scenarios. Over time, the author began to
doubt the natural explanations that had been so ingrained. It was science, and not his
religion, that caused his disbelief in the explanatory powers of nature in a number of key
areas including the origin and fine-tuning of mass and energy, the origin of life with its
complex information content, and the increase in complexity in living organisms. This
realization was not reached easily, as he had to admit that he had been duped into believing
concepts that were scientifically unfounded. The fantastic leaps of faith required to accept the
natural causes in these areas demand a scientific response to the scientific-sounding

concepts that in fact have no known scientific basis. Scientific integrity needs to be restored
so that ideas that have no methods to test or falsify are not considered part of science. This
applies to Biblical creationism as well at to naturalistic causes in the areas mentioned
above. For example, one should not be able to get away with stating it is possible that life
arose from non-life by ... without first demonstrating that it is indeed possible (defined in
the nature of probability) using known science. One could, of course, state it may be
speculated that , but such a statement wouldn't have the believability that its author
intends to convey by the pseudo-scientific pronouncement.
From the introduction to Programming of Life:
This book draws attention to known facts that are usually overlooked or down-played when
scenarios for the origin of life or Darwinian evolution are presented. The scenarios presented
so far have not adequately addressed the complex functional information of life, especially
the fact that life contains a multitude of complex programming algorithms whose origin by
physical interactions cannot be explained using information science. As an information
scientist, the author believes that the time has come to seriously look at the facts and
consider different avenues of investigation that may provide theories that are scientifically
testable. While acknowledging that science continues to gain new insights (as should be
the case), the claim that we don't have a natural explanation yet, but we will someday is not
a scientific statement. It amounts to a naturalism of the gaps dogma. When that dogma
violates known science, particularly information science, perhaps it's time to reevaluate
stances that purport to be science, but are actually pseudo-scientific speculations.
It appears that it is more likely that the inscription on the Rosetta Stone (since it contains far
less information) is actually the product of mindless erosion than it is that the astounding
information content of a single cell came about mindlessly and accidentally. As Dr. Johnson
puts it, "For abiogenesis, we could consider ... the probability of forming ... the simplest form
of living organism known as 10^-340,000,000. These figures make these scenarios
operationally falsified. There really is no need for them, however, since the probability of a
purely physical source of information contained in life is 0 (impossible, according to
information science) based on alphabet requirements for information transfer and the
complex coding and prescriptive cybernetic information processing systems in life."
In my very humble opinion, it takes a small, reasonable faith to be a theist, and a huge, blind,
irrational faith in the creative power of mindless chance to be an atheist. ;o)

1.3.2011 | 1:47pm
Peter Nyikos says:

Joe the Human: We don't know how "nearly infinite" our universe is but if it is anything less
than a googolplex (10^(10^100)) light years across with an incredibly large number of
different locales with radically different laws (or lack of them) and stuff that doesn't resemble
our atoms in the slightest, it just doesn't begin to address the problem of fine-tuning.
If it is really huge enough to address it, then we are just in my Alternative 3 except that these
universes could start interacting with each other with disastrous consequences for all
concerned. Can you be sure there isn't a universe of antimatter heading towards a collision
with ours, for example?
There is really no point in talking about penny-ante stuff like "just the right distance, from
just the right kind of sun..." or even "gases clumping into stars; stars creating or orbiting
planets" [or, rather, vice versa] as long as such titanic issues are up in the air.

By the way, there is a good bit of talk here about "argument from personal incredulity" but
that talk seems to tend towards the nearly opposite fallacy of "argumentum ad ignorantiam":
`since the evidence for a Creator can be dismissed by us atheists, the absence of credible
evidence is good grounds for believing no such entity exists.'

1.3.2011 | 2:16pm
Alien Life says:
Peter:
I accept something like your alternative 3: an infinitely complex universe or series of
universes, in fact.
Is that livable? It is; if infinity includes not chaos, but order.
As a matter of fact, our galaxy is slated to collide with another - the Andromeda? - in a few
billion years. But after all, the universe does seem to have some order in it, so that such
things do not happen so very often. For all that complexity, it is not chaos out there, after all.
Your front steps will not turn into Daffy Duck singing and transmorphing into a crate of
oranges. We live in a complex, but not chaotic, universe.
For that matter? Just our immediate environment , our planet, is itself already full of
dangerous things. No need to look at the impossibly remote; just watch out for that dirty rag,
and the germs on it.
In fact, this sort of thing is used as part of two or three arguments against God. First,
Theodicy: how could a good God have made so much evil. And then second, why do bad
things happen to good people. And then ... why is there therefore, so much "unintelligent
design," things contrary to God's promises, in the universe.
Atheists are therefore looking at LOTS of material evidence, against the creation of the
universe by a "just" God, say.
Indeed, religionists are simply ignoring lots things. Religionists are defending a religion that
assures us that if we pray, we can walk on water. Even though ... the evidence against that, is
astronomically huge.
Finally, there is nothing really motiving belief ... except a very, very subjective desire to have
an imaginary friend, a father figure, in space.

1.3.2011 | 4:02pm
Ye Olde Statistician says:
Papa
Perhaps a coalescing gas cloud begins to pattern along physical laws. I was thinking a little
further out in time with a simply a swirling mass of matter of no particular form
YOS
But it does have a particular form: it is a swirling mass of matter. An amorphous shape is still
a shape.
+++

YOS
"There is a discussion here by First Things resident physicist explaining the whole megilla:
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/09/much-ado-about-ldquonothingrdquostephen-hawking-and-the-self-creating-universe."
Papa
Is this physicist the font of all relevant things physical and cosmological?
YOS
No, he is a physicist who pointed out that Hawking's physical claimes were not only not
ridiculous, but not even new. He gave a nice explanation of the imaginary multiverse,
quantum states, etc. He also pointed out that Hawking utterly misunderstood what is meant
by "creation" and by "nothing."
Papa
What difference does it make to the credibility of this young superstring theorist to be known
for his religious leanings?
YOS
About the same as it does to mention Hawking's credentials in the metrical properties of
physical bodies to give a spurious credibility to his undisciplined musings in philosophy.
Being a tolerably great physicist does not confer expertise in other fields of study.
+++
Joe Human
Is the who universe fine-tuned for life? ... And if we do, does that mean finally, that God is
setting all this up?
YOS
No.
Joe Human
for atoms to come together there, to form life.
YOS
Ah, so that's how it formed!
Joe Human
So in sum: there is enough material out there, enough random material, to create many
clumped, structured events - gases clumping into stars; stars creating or orbiting planets.
Then, there are enough of those structures, for many - even an infinity - of rather complex
life forms.
YOS
That's nice. Show me one, and then we'll talk about empiricism. It matters not the least if
there are none other or many others.
Joe Human
The current Christian notion of a fine-tuned visible universe,
YOS
You see how scientism affects everyone in the late scientific era? Even Christians fall victim
to it. An argument from probability is not an argument, whether it is the alleged fine-tuning
or the alleged certainty in an allegedly infinite universe of at least one such "sweet spot."

(Since the laws of physics are supposedly common to the entire universe, what would make
one spot "sweet" and another "sour"?)
Such is the silliness that results when Aristotelianism is rejected. For an Aristo-Thomist
rejection of the fine-tuning argument, see here:
http://thomism.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/the-ugliness-of-a-finely-tuned-universe/
Joe Human
In fact, if the universe is infinite, extending beyond the visible universe, then sweet spots and life - have been created in an inifinite number of places.
YOS
If? Ah, for the days of empirical evidence and objective facts.
But not "created," Joe. The transformation of pre-existing matter from one form to another is
not creation.

1.3.2011 | 4:54pm
Joe the Human says:
YOS:
If a glass of water becomes an ice cube, some would say a significant change - even a creation
- has taken place. Indeed, the "form" of a glass of water, is transformed, to a quite different
form: the ice cube. I suggest that all things that seem to be "created," are transformations of
this type.
I think I see your/Aquinas'/Aristotle's argument, that God himself is not "created"; since you
assert, God, being the grounds of Being, of all Essence, creator of all things, is alleged to have
existed before Time. And since time is necessary for Creation, is it asserted that God himself
was not "created." But this argument is false, from what I noted above. This model is
Platonic; it believes that original concepts/"ideas" must somehow *exist* before physical
creation; as the logical grounds for all things. In a modern variant of this, it is assumed that
"essence" and "being," since they are logically implied in all existing things, must have
existed before all things. Like God.
However, look up the Schoolmen's anti-Platonic arguments, (and for that matter, Aristotle's):
that it is incorrect, to assert that things like "Being" or "essence" could have any independent
existence, or any reality at all, except insofar as they are properties, of physical, existing
things.
Could any thing be said to have "being," if there is no thing there? Rather than being, it is
simply ... not. Could red exist ... if there were no red things at all? Here, I follow the
Schoolmen or Scholastics, in their insistence on the real existence of Universals. Universals like being etc. - do not existing floating in space invisibly; but exist only as properities of
matter. As indeed Aristotle is thought to have said. Thus famously correcting Plato's
hierarchically dualistic idealism. Which in religion became "transcendentalism" and
"spirituality."
Your whole argument therefore, that God might "exist," somehow, without being created, as
a first cause, merely because he exists in some spiritual realm that must necessarily be,
before existence? Has been shot down a hundred ways in Philosophy, already. While

Heidegger arguably tried to revive it, no one would call Heidegger a good Christian.
Your argument from the alleged priority of abstract ideas, or spirits, to all existants,
therefore, fails. And your position is therefore a mere, groundless assertion. And therefore,
we might well turn to other, better, more modern ways of thinking about all this.
To be sure, most of science acknowledges itself, that speculations, theories, about the origin
of the universe, are what "perhaps" happened; as a 'theory." Therefore note, most scientists
are nowhere near as dogmatic as say, you are. In this way, ironically, in their humility, they
are even, more Christlike.
In any case, your "logical" efforts having failed, we might well turn to something that seems
to have worked better, over time. Like science. or indeed, mere probability; combinations
and permutations of atoms, might account for an immense amount of complexity, especially
when added to the massive raw number of atoms.
Whether a Logician or Platonist regards an argument from mere probability, as being a
legitimate "argument" or not, certainty common sense experience and science do. So, as long
as we're speculating, why not look around, and make some educated guesses, extending from
what we see now, empirically.
Indeed, we can look in the sky - and "show" you many stars for example; that have evolved
somehow, in an allegedly "chaotic" and unformed universe. And science confirms that there
is enough order in the universe, that it is not chaotic. Even a fairly even distribution of
exploding energy, eventually clumps ... and creates stars. Which astronomy now indeed,
'shows" us. By analogy, just as the universe can create a consistent pattern of stars, likely
consistent life is possible too. [You can probably do something like that in a cloud chamber
yourself probably, if you want experimental verification. While there are countless other
similar, better experiments no doubt.]
Against all that ... should we listen to a bronze-age philosopher, and a "First Things"
physicist? A "First Things" Physicist, especially one at Baylor, a religious University - is a
contradiction in terms. Christians, note, are not objective, by definition: they are sworn to
believe and "have faith" in God, and to thus ignore all empirical evidence contrary to what
they believe. By definition therefore, the "faithful" are unreliable scientific witnesses. they are
sworn to believe in their position, over and above and in spite of all objective evidence.

1.3.2011 | 5:14pm
Peter Nyikos says:

Alien Life, you wrote:

"I accept something like your alternative 3: an infinitely complex universe or series of
universes, in fact."
The rest of what you wrote belies this "acceptance". You might as well be opting for
Alternative 1. For example, your miniscule "out there" is still part of our universe with its
incredibly simple laws. Your talk of "germs" is more of the same. But I'll talk about
Alternative 3 in answer to your question,
"Is that livable?"
Very widely scattered bits would be livable, as long as the overwhelmingly unlivable bits
didn't interfere with the livable ones. So far, in our 13.7 billion years, there has not been

catastrophically major interference.

You add:
"It is; if infinity includes not chaos, but order."
Tiny pockets of order, but overwhelmingly chaos, if it has the structure that Joe the Human
postulates: one grand continuum with nothing to permanently keep chaos away from
cosmos.
The way Haldane and I envision Alternative 3, it's a meaningless question because there is
not enough structure in All There Is to declare that there is more chaos than cosmos.
Infinitely many universes of utter chaos, infinitely many lawful universes where life is as
likely as, or more likely than, ours to give rise to intelligent life.
But your comments show no acknowledgement of thes issues. With your talk about germs
you are attacking the most naive "here on earth we have the best of all possible worlds"
strawman. I am convinced of common descent of all metazoans on earth; Roman Catholics
should have absolutely no problem with that, or even with descent from prokaryotes, ever
since John Paul II declared that evolution is "more than just a hypothesis." And I don't think
God intervenes very much in the workings of our world.
Your "religion that assures us that we can walk on water if we pray" is another strawman. We
are not the Apostles, and we aren't naive enough to think that promises made to them apply
to us too.
You say:
"Finally, there is nothing really motiving belief ... except a very, very subjective desire to have
an imaginary friend, a father figure, in space."
Two can play that amateur psychology game. How's this for a rejoinder: "Epicurus put his
finger on the motivation for your belief in the nonexistence of a life after death: your very,
very subjective desire that you not be subject to the whim of gods nor their neglect in Hades
after you die."
At least I have the word of an atheist to go on; where's your theistic source for the "father
figure" bit?
To see more about what that "neglect in Hades" is all about, read the chapter in Homer's
Odyssey where Achilles appears to Odysseus and says he would rather be the most abject
slave on earth than the king of all the dead.

1.3.2011 | 7:22pm
Papalinton says:
Hi Peter
In your response to Alien Life, "At least I have the word of an atheist to go on; where's your
theistic source for the "father figure" bit?"
'Our Father which art in heaven
Hallowed be ..............................."

1.3.2011 | 7:25pm
Papalinton says:
Hi Peter
In your response to Alien Life, "Your "religion that assures us that we can walk on water if we
pray" is another strawman. We are not the Apostles, and we aren't naive enough to think that
promises made to them apply to us too."
Forgive me for paraphrasing, 'For whatever you pray, you will receive.'

1.3.2011 | 7:28pm
Papalinton says:
Hi YOS
Papa
What difference does it make to the credibility of this young superstring theorist to be known
for his religious leanings?
YOS
About the same as it does to mention Hawking's credentials in the metrical properties of
physical bodies to give a spurious credibility to his undisciplined musings in philosophy.
Being a tolerably great physicist does not confer expertise in other fields of study.
Papa again
Who mentioned Hawking's credentials?

1.3.2011 | 7:43pm
Peter Nyikos says:
Joe the Human: you and Papalinton are singularly lacking in the sense of wonder which
Einstein expressed so well with the words, "The most incomprehensible thing about the
world is that it is comprehensible." You come forth with one strawman after another, the
latest and being that Christians are "sworn" to a belief in God by definition. In that weird
definition, I am not a Christian, and I don't think any of the other participants are either.
You seem not to realize that your village-atheist picture of why we are Christians is so much
wishful thinking. You may think that Bertrand Russell had the last word on the subject of
wishful thinking when he wrote,
"There is something feeble, and a little contemptible, about a man who cannot face the perils
of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware
that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare
not face this thought, and he therefore cannot carry his own reflections to any logical
conclusion. Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinons are not rational, he
becomes furious when they are disputed."
The next time you see a Christian getting furious when his/her beliefs are disputed, and are
tempted to think that what Russell said earlier holds, you might do well to reflect on the way
Russell got hoist by his own petard.

It happened in the presence of Malcolm Muggeridge. Here is how he related it in the

December, 1970 issue of Esquire magazine:
"I well remember my surprise, in a television encounter with Bertrand Russell, at discovering
in him an almost demented hatred of Christ and Christianity, to which he attributed all the
horrors and misfortunes mankind had to endure since the fall of the Roman Empire. As I
attempted to confute this view, I found myself watching in fascination a red flush which rose
steadily up his thin stringy neck and spread to his face ... The script of this strange encounter
is still extant, and reveals the philosopher in a most unphilosophical mood, roaring and
bellowing like any atheist orator at Hyde Park Corner."

1.3.2011 | 8:36pm
Ye Olde Statistician says:
Joe Human
If a glass of water becomes an ice cube, some would say a significant change - even a creation
- has taken place.
YOS
But they would be wrong.
+++
Joe Human
I think I see your/Aquinas'/Aristotle's argument, that God himself is not "created"; since you
assert, God... is alleged to have existed before Time.
YOS
a) There is no "before" Time.
b) It is not an argument that God is not created. It is an argument that contingent being
requires necessary being in order to exist -- i.e., not everything can depend for its existence
on something else -- and that this necessary being is, by a series of further deductions,
indistinguishable from God.
+++
Joe Human
since time is necessary for Creation, is it asserted that God himself was not "created."
YOS
a) Time is not necessary for creation. An eternal universe would also be created.
b) Time is a created thing. Per Einstein's General Relativity, Time is a metaphysical
abstraction that does not exist in the absence of matter.
b) This being so, your "since" is in error.
+++
Joe Human
This model is Platonic;
YOS
Both Aristotle and Thomas were Aristotelians, not Platonists. Their concept of form was
radically different.
+++
Joe Human
it believes that original concepts/"ideas" must somehow *exist* before physical creation; as
the logical grounds for all things. In a modern variant of this...

YOS
...in a modern variant of this we find Hawking asserting that the Law of Gravity, a pure ideal
form, somehow existed, somewhere, before the universe.
+++
Joe Human
Here, I follow the Schoolmen or Scholastics, in their insistence on the real existence of
Universals. Universals - like being etc. - do not existing floating in space invisibly; but exist
only as properities of matter.
YOS
You don't quite have the Aristotelian concept of Form, but teeter close on the abyss of
nominalism.
+++
Joe Human
Your argument from the alleged priority of abstract ideas, or spirits, to all existants,
therefore, fails.
YOS
Then it is indeed fortunate that that was not my argument.
+++
Joe Human
we might well turn to something that seems to have worked better, over time. Like science.
YOS
Has it worked better than Law? Better than Art? Better than Engineering? Or is it simply a
way of assessing the metrical properties of physical bodies (and then confusing this one
aspect of reality with the whole of reality)? Science does not work "better," inasmuch as
"better" is a non-scientific concept. It simply produces useful products for government and
industry by subordinating itself to Goals and to Engineering. Whether those are perfumes or
nerve gas depends on the funding source. As Bacon, Descartes, Hume, and others put it: the
purpose of science was to dominate Nature and put Her in chains so as to extend man's
dominion over the universe. Our present-day feminists and environmentalists have
reservations about this Weltanschauung.
+++
Joe Human
we can look in the sky - and "show" you many stars for example; that have evolved somehow,
in an allegedly "chaotic" and unformed universe.
YOS
a) You may be equivocating on the term "evolution." Stellar evolution and Darwinian
evolution are two very different things. My courses in Astrophysics and Galactic Structure
were some time back, but some things you don't forget.
b) Had the universe been chaotic and unformed, stars could not have formed. Stars emerged
in a universe that was already old, and was ordered by numerous scientific laws.
+++
Joe Human
And science confirms that there is enough [?] order in the universe, that it is not chaotic.
YOS
Oddly enough, that was Thomas Aquinas' fifth argument for the existence of God.
+++
Joe Human
Against all that ... should we listen to a bronze-age philosopher, and a "First Things"

physicist? A "First Things" Physicist, especially one at Baylor

YOS
a) Aristotle lived in the iron age, during that golden age of Athens which the Renaissance
dudes took as the ideal period of history. Aquinas, of course, lived in the early machine age.
b) Dr. Barr teaches at the University of Delaware, not Baylor. Did you read his explication of
Hawking's argument.
Joe Human
Christians, note, are not objective, by definition
YOS
Neither are most anyone else. Anyone who believes "red" is real is by definition not objective.
(See Galileo's Il Saggiatore)
Joe Human
they are sworn to ... ignore all empirical evidence contrary to what they believe.
YOS
I must have missed the swearing-in ceremony. Damn. Never got the memo.
You forgot to say they were booger-noses. I was wondering when you would shuck the mask
of objectivity and resort to bald prejudice. You seem to think that "empirical evidence" is selfexplanatory.

1.3.2011 | 8:55pm
Peter Nyikos says:

Papalinton makes a highly interesting exit:

"Hi Peter
"Thanks for the history lesson"
Huh? You and your fellow atheists are the ones giving one history and prehistory lesson after
another, including some talk about the "African savannah" in emulation of that famous nonanthropologist, Robert Ardrey, and some vague references by Joe the Human to modern
philosophy going on to something "far better" without a blessed clue as to what HE thinks
was that far better thing.
You even tried to pry into my own personal history, like you pried into the history of Barr's
dealings outside First Things in lieu of being able to say ANYTHING intelligent about the
thoroughly on-topic article to which you had been referred. Do you think Barr's mention of
the fact that someone is an evangelical Christian in addition to probably being able to answer
a specialized question in string theory is enough to throughly discredit him?
Not content with my statement that I had been on the verge of atheism for over a year well
into adulthood, during a more-than-decade-long agnosticism (begun after the onset of
adulthood), you kept interrogating me for details. Were you hoping to dig up just one
similarly compromising feature that would allow you to write me off completely?
I guess you couldn't wait for my answer, but decided to write me off anyway on the basis of a
strange fantasy you have about me:

"I guess you have pre-suppositionally determined the worth of Hawking's book."
You're too late with this square peg, Papalinton. You should have inserted it immediately
after my first post, which was polygonal enough for you to be able to make some feeble case
for inserting it. Now, after I politely asked you whether you had read his book far enough to
find out the answers to two key questions, it is pathetically out of place, as is the next square
peg:
"I thought you were interested in a proper discussion."
I am, and my last reply to you was a lot more polite than my first one. That is when you
should have inserted this formulaic Internet Vandal excuse for running away.
Instead you said, "You offer some pretty good food for thought. " And here I had been all
ready to apologize for some intemperate remarks I made in my first reply to you, and was
relieved to see that you hadn't taken offense.
"As is happening elsewhere consistently around the first world, the US an exception [but
even there, something is apparently moving], I will let the emerging trend in communities
across Western societies decide on the fate in the belief in Grand Alternative 2."
I think it more likely that the population implosion there will result in forfeiting that decision
to the Islamic world.
Your claim about the wave of the future is typical of Marxist philosophy; but not so the
pusillanimous comment you make next:
`As La Place replies,"Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothse-l." '
The Marxist philosopher Howard Selsam sneered at this "pallid" [his word for it] statement,
in _Philosophy in Revolution_, adding, "Yet his statement represented the highest point
reached by bourgeois philosophy and science."
He took the sentiment behind it to its logical extreme, counterpoising the following
statement with it:
"The solipsist's explanation of everything as consisting of his own sensations, a product of his
own mind, is undoubtedly the simplest explanation of the word possible. It makes no
`unnecessary' assumptions."
And so we come to the end of your exit:
"Cheers"
Cheers to you too, you bourgeois "scientist" and "philosopher"-- polemicist, actually. You
never did bring any physical or philosophical revelations to the table, nothing but the old
village atheist "sociology" and "anthropology" so you will not be missed.

1.3.2011 | 8:59pm
Papalinton says:
@ Pater

Enlighten us as to how an evening of Muggeridge/Russell repartee contributes to the veracity

of the existence of an all singing/all dancing phantasm?
'We are made in the image of god.'
'God cannot be described.'
Cognitive dissonance?
A talking snake and a talking donkey.
Cognitive dissonance?
Adam, a veritable human being without a navel. Eve, without a navel and with foreign DNA
through some rib tickling operation [I hope there were immuno-suppressant drugs available
for her].
Cognitive dissonance?
COMMANDMENT: Thou shalt have no other god but me. [But I thought there was only one.]
Whether people worshipped a golden cow or not is rather beside the point, isn't it? Surely He
knows they are worshipping Him, even though a little indirectly. There is after all, only one
god. And if this one god is outside our universe, and has been around since before time
immemorial, why would the unmoved mover, use the reasons He does for exterminating
good people by mass flood? It's not as though He doesn't know that there is only one god; it
is He after all. How does one reconcile the village god of Abraham with the god of philosophy
in discussion here?
Cognitive dissonance?
Writ large
Oh Dear

1.3.2011 | 9:08pm
Peter Nyikos says:

Looks like Paplinton's exit wasn't final after all:

`Hi Peter
In your response to Alien Life, "Your "religion that assures us that we can walk on water if we
pray" is another strawman. We are not the Apostles, and we aren't naive enough to think that
promises made to them apply to us too." '
Forgive me for paraphrasing, 'For whatever you pray, you will receive.'
You are paraphrasing a promise he made to the Apostles, and perhaps another he made to
his disciples.
Your point?

1.4.2011 | 5:53am
Papalinton says:

Sorry Peter, no exit I'm afraid until the comboxes run dry.
'Cheers' is my polite 'ciao' at the closing of each commentary.

Peter, you say of me, "Cheers to you too, you bourgeois "scientist" and "philosopher"-polemicist, actually. You never did bring any physical or philosophical revelations to the
table, nothing but the old village atheist "sociology" and "anthropology" so you will not be
missed."
I see you are somewhat peeved but please count to ten and breathe deeply.
Incidentally, it is interesting that you bring up 'sociology' and 'anthropology'; your reasoning
has been quite left behind in the dust generated by the advances in science, sociology,
anthropology, psychology, indeed in all the disciplines related to studying and researching
the human condition and our natural world, out from which a common narrative is
emerging: Religion is first and foremost a cultural construct which has little to no
explanatory power to inform science in any sphere. Religion, once regarded as the principal
discipline in the study of human relations, has been superseded by many other specialised
branches of the humanities and the social sciences, the fundamentals of which are not
prescribed nor proscribed by elements such as the Athanasian and Nicene Creed. There are
many universities and higher Institutes of education and learning, of the religious bent, that
mandate, indeed theological academic staff are required to sign 'Statements of Belief', along
the same lines as the Nicene Creed etc, as a condition of their employment. For what
purpose, other than to ensure nobody, they mean Nobody, steps outside the boundary? This
is generating some quite heated debate re academic freedom etc.
So in any research and investigation into matters theological one can never cross the sanctity
line; it is VERBOTEN.
So much for the self-evidentiary nature of the trooth of scripture and the bible. Science once
resided within the bosom of theology in the very early days. But there was inevitably a
parting of the ways.
You see, Peter, science is about peeking up god's togas and pawing idols to see for oneself. It
means probing sacred cows - and finding no gods, only guts. To a system like religion that
depends for its existence on respect, this is quite hostile. Science, on the other hand,
trespasses on the boundary of the sacred not because it is opposed to the sacred but it has no
concept of sacred at all. Sacred is a 'religious' concept, not a scientific one and not a natural
one. To science nothing is sacred, because 'sacred' is not part of its vocabulary. So when
science ignores religious boundaries, it handles religion roughly - like any pithed frog or
pinned butterfly. And when science finds facts that refute religious claims - about man, about
society, about the universe, or about god[s] - it comes as a tear of the skin that no religion
welcomes or can withstand.
Your reaction to Hawking is one such abrasion of the skin.
Science often only incidentally studies religion as it goes about studying the world and the
cosmos. In areas where religion makes no claims or where religion has little at stake, science
is free to do what it must. Most scientists never study religion itself in any serious manner,
confining their research to butterflies, and volcanoes and clouds.
So when science discovers something that cuts across a religious 'trooth-claim', inevitably it
is the religious that cry foul. The scientific discovery in almost all cases is an inadvertent
foray across the theist's bow. But scientists go where the science leads them.
Cheers Peter

1.4.2011 | 6:52am
old codger says:

It seems a lot of these therotecial scientists have completely lost the plot and have resorted to
imagination to make their case. How can anyone therefore refute that sort of stance.

1.4.2011 | 6:56am
richard says:
Too few commentators engage with the fact of evolution. The creation was the big bang or
event. Evolution follows no rules other than its own.

1.4.2011 | 7:51am
Zdenek V says:

John Haldane writes that "science cannot provide an ultimate explanation" ( of why there is
order rather than chaos ) but I dont see him offer a good argument for this view.
To argue that M-theory does not provide such an ultimate explanation of why there is order
in the universe --even if we bought Haldanes criticism of the multiverse idea --does not
work because that only shows why current scientific accounts fail to deliver but it shows
nothing about the stronger claim Haldane is after viz. that science as such can not provide
ultimate explanations of stuff ( this is the heart of the claim that philosophy is indispensable
or something like that ).
Hawking can moreover reply that the idea that philosophy is needed for dealing with
fundamental questions assumes that philosophy and science are discontinuous and that that
assumption is untenable ( Hawking rejects this discontinuity claim and so his view is not a
criticism of all philosophy but rather of what Frege / Wittgenstein called "First philosophy"
which sees itself as a priori investigation ).
What needs to be shown and what Haldane cannot show, as far as I see, is that there are such
things as philosophical problemswhich science cannot tackle and that there is such a thing
as philosophical method ( presumably a priori method ) which is special and yields non
empirical knowledge. Hawking is right that this assumption is highly dubious.

1.4.2011 | 8:36am
Papalinton says:
I've just finished Hawking's book. He is somewhat cavalier in his approach, particularly his
remarks about M-theory. Hawking's has placed a bit of a bet that it will live up to
expectations. However, that is not what one would call science. It is a bit speculative for me.
Equally, I'm not sure he has made the case fully for the spontaneous birth of the universe. It
sounds OK, but again speculative.
It was a refreshing read to touch base with recent research and how they fit into the scheme
of things. Only time will tell whether 'model-dependent realism' is a viable process to merge
cosmology with quantum dynamics. I think the jury's out.
Cheers

1.4.2011 | 9:42am
Thomas Jay Oord says:

Thanks for this fine article, John! You express well what so many of we theists have said in
other ways or not very well at all. The issues are complex, and neither theists nor atheists do
them justice with simplification.
In appreciation,
Thomas Jay Oord
http://thomasjayoord.com

1.4.2011 | 10:11am
Roger D. Butters says:

I confess to being mildly surprised that, unless I have missed it, there has been no
contribution from anyone such as myself who holds a total and thoroughgoing Skepticism
towards both his own mental activities, and also the external world in which my
conscienceness appears to me to be located.
My skepticism leads me to assume that there is an ineliminable degree of uncertainty in any
awareness of the human condition so that error free knowledge is not possible. Nor is Belief,
insofar as it claims to carry conviction, ever justified. Therefore the best that anyone can do is
to express his mental states as opinions or conditional assumptions.
For what they are worth some of my own assumptions are:
1. There has always been, and will always be a form of material/energy existence, without
either beginning or end.
2 Co-existent with this material/energy will be laws or rules of combination. However these
may be by no means constant and could vary.
3. The difference between Life and Death (Sentience) consists solely of quantitive degrees of
complexity in examples of combination in 2. There are no qualititive differences.
4. In the absence of sentient combinations, Value, of any nature, does not exist.

1.4.2011 | 10:18am
John Smith says:
Copernicus is a greater enemy than Darwin. The integrity of Holy Scripture is undermined as
long as Christians continue to subscribe to anti-biblical cosmological views, epitomized by
everybody from Copernicus to Hawking.

1.4.2011 | 10:22am
Lou Candell says:

Science can easily explain the bio-chemical processes by which earth, water, vegetable matter
and sunlight interact to produce wine. But can it explain the how and why of these processes?
Simply asserting that these processes exist by and of themselves is hardly an answer.

1.4.2011 | 10:43am
Joe the Human says:
HALDANE;
If the universe appears strangely compatible with human life, that does not necessarily mean
that 1) the universe was "Designed" for human beings. Rather, it might mean that 2) this
universe, generates out of itself and its leanings, human beings. Since we are generated by
the universe, therefore, our characteristics are indeed ... compatible with it.
But note: a different environmen - another universe, or merely another planet - might have
generated other kinds of life, other than those based on carbon and water. A planet without
water on it, might have life ... based on its environment. Say on methane? Or silicone?
The allegedly "strange" compatibility of the universe, with human life, therefore? Should be
turned around to make sense. Of course, human life is oddly compatible with this existing
structure; because indeed, it was evolved by that structure. But Intelligent Design people
should now note this: another universe, with a different structure, would perhaps have
merely evolved a different form of life.
Recent discoveries of cynide-compatible micro-organisms, suggest that indeed, the
environment is not designed for humans or other organisms; humans were evolved by the
environment.
So the universe was not designed for human beings; human beings were "designed" by, or
created for, the universe.
Next question: why is it that such immense complexity and structure was built up, as to
sustain the complexities of human life? In an infinite - or merely incredibly vast universe, -as
the original particles begin to clump, soon enough, due to the vast number of possible
permutations and combinations ... any number of structures evolve.
Here indeed, I am explicitly hereby extending the term "Evolution," TO INCLUDE THE
EVOLUTION OF THE MATERIAL UNIVERSE. As the first step of evolution, we see the
appearance of vast clouds of matter, coagulating into galaxies, stars, and planetary systems.
Which is already a rather large amount of order and structure; yet not an amount entirely
inconsistent with what would be predicted out of random accident. Then, once such a level of
basic order is -evolutionarily - established, then these orders in turn, create a first
substructure, on which more elaborate orders can be based; like biological life.
So? Looks simple enough. What therefore is your objection?

1.4.2011 | 10:44am
Zdenek V says:
John Haldane :

"...They are not replacing philosophy with science. Indeed, their discussion shows that, at its

most abstract, theoretical physics leaves ordinary empirical science behind and enters the
sphere of philosophy, where it becomes vulnerable to refutation by reason".

I dont think this follows at all. If science and philosophy are in the same business, involving
figuring out how things hang together, there is a sense in which questions about nature of
scientific inquiry are scientific ( this is how Larry Laudan for eg thinks of phil of science ) .
True, such questions are more abstract in some sense than the ordinary questions re the
world but they may be plausibly thought of as scientific all the same.
This is in fact how many philosophers these days ( and many did in the past until 20th
century ) think about philosophy ; analytic philosophy conceived as completely a priori
investigation into concepts and meaning etc is dead largely.
If this is right and we see Hawking as attacking a prioristic , armchair speculation ,which was
the way philosophy has been conducted much of the 20 the century under the influence of
Frege and Wittgenstein , then his case is not a wild one at all.

1.4.2011 | 1:42pm
Scott Eastham says:
In the same month as Hawking's reprise of his 'superfluous hypothesis' hypothesis, Raimon
Panikkar's 'Rhythm of Being' appeared. This is the grown-up version of the schoolboy debate
usually conducted on these matters in the English-speaking world. If you are interested in
'natural theology,' this is the real stuff. While critical of monotheism in the West (including
its atheistic appendage), these Gifford Lectures offer a multimillennial and cross-cultural
rejoinder to the tendency to mistake the latest scientific model for the whole of reality. This is
a balanced, mature reflection which ultimately aims "to liberate the Divine from the burden
of being God."

1.4.2011 | 2:17pm
Joe the Human says:
ZV:

Well said. The whole world, following the latest, math-derived cosmological or sub-atomic
theory, as it it was God ... is rash to say the least. Such new theories have a half-life of about 7
years.
Maybe Haldane is right. If he is saying what I think he might be: we should base our "natural
theology," more on classic, immediate observables. Or classic, well-established natural
science. Not on the "theorie du jour."

1.4.2011 | 4:09pm
Reg McConnell says:

While this thread has strayed far from Haldane's point, to wit, that Hawking and Mlodinow
are embarrassingly ignorant as to philosophy and natural theology, perhaps some
perspective (regarding the science) is to be gleaned from Robert Spitzer's latest book, "New

Proofs For The Existence of God."

Page 86-87: All inflation and non-inflation cosmologies appear to require a beginning and
transcendental cause. Where does this leave us? If inflation is ultimately upheld as a
theoretically viable and empirically verifiable explanation of our cosmos, then a beginning
and a transcendent cause are required in all models subject to the BGV theorem. This result
applies to all higher- dimensional cosmologies, including those of string theory like the cyclic
ekpryotic and landscape models, that involve space-times satisfying the condition that the
average Hubble expansion in the past is greater than zero, i.e., Hav > 0.
Furthermore, inflationary models such as the one proposed by Gasperini and Veneziano to
which the BGV result does not apply, do not end up avoiding the need for a beginning
because a realistic interpretation of the model, implausible though it may seem, *still*
requires acknowledging that the string perturbative vacuum phase has *finite* duration.
Since the other two phases of the model (inflationary and FLRW) are *also* of finite
duration, the universe has a beginning in this case as well.
On the other hand, if is *not* upheld as a viable explanation then (apart from noninflationary cyclic ekpyrosis) we revert from multiverse scenarios to a single universe again.
In this context, the singularity theorems of classical general relativity regain their traction,
qualified by relevant considerations from quantum gravity and/or quantum cosmology that
are physically and metaphysically reasonable, and lead to the conclusion that our universe
has a beginning and the concomitant necessity of a transcendent cause for space-time,
energy and matter.
It appears, therefore, that a beginning and a transcendent cause of the universe (or
multiverse) are unavoidable.
Pages 99-103: If, as inflation standardly assumes, the de Sitter (dS) space in which our
universe began is a thermal system, than a free floating Boltzmann brain (BB) can
spontaneously appear in dS space due to thermal fluctuations. Under standard conditions for
bubble universe generation in the landscape, the problem formulated by Dyson, Kleban and
Susskind giving rise to the BB phenomenon becomes quite serious. In fact, some calculations
lead to free-floating BBs infinitely outnumbering normal brains, in which case it becomes
infinitely more likely that we ourselves are free-floating BBs rather than persons with a
history living in an orderly universe several billion years old! In short, the BB issue suggests
that the universe if falsified because the persons we take ourselves to be are not typical
observers within it.
Needless to say, multiverse cosmologists find this conclusion rather disturbing and are trying
to preclude it, but they cannot agree on how or whether progress is being made on the
problem. One dominant approach is to find some measure by which our actual existence is
"typical" in the multiverse and the superabundance of BBs is not, often by finagling the decay
times of the inflation fields so that bubble universes don't get large enough to make BBs more
likely than ordinary observers. While there is a sense in which *anything* with a non-zero
probability of happening *will* happen - and an *unbounded* number of times at that - in an
eternally inflating multiverse, a viably typical condition would nonetheless have to
*privilege* events that we take to be preconditions of *our* existence...It is not hard to see
that such a strategy, were it to become a standard means of explaining improbable
occurrences, would spell the end of science as a rational enterprise. By providing an all too
easy explanation for *anything* that has happened or may happen, the multiverse ends up
explaining nothing at all.
Finally, there are reasons internal to string theory itself that cast doubt on the tenability of

the landscape. Michael Dine argues that if a string landscape of metastable ground states
exists, it is likely to lead to a prediction of low-energy supersymmetry. But in the discretuum
of the landscape, he argues, the parameters of low-energy physics seem to be *random*
numbers, and if this is true, the landscape is *not* a correct description of physics as we
know it and so must be rejected. Alternatively, there might be *some* set of principles in the
landscape that explain those laws of nature that do *not* seem to be anthropically
constrained, but it is far from obvious what such principles might be, so even *if* the
landscape were coherent, we would have no key that would enable us to interpret it properly.
Susskind and Douglas think this criticism is very serious...Whatever else may be said, it is
clear that the string landscape hypothesis is a highly speculative construction built on shaky
assumptions and, even if taken seriously, requires meta-level fine-tuning itself, may be
unequal to the task it is intended to perform, may ultimately prove phenomenologically
untenable, and seems to contain the seeds for destroying science as a rational enterprise. Its
prospects, therefore, are not promising.
Given this sobering assessment, one wonders why the string landscape has provoked so
much enthusiasm among cosmologists. Leonard Susskind provides a revealing answer:
"If, for some unforeseen reason, the landscape turns out to be inconsistent - maybe for
mathematical reasons, or because it disagrees with observation - {then} as things stand now
we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of nature's fine-tunings we
will be hard pressed to answer the ID critics."
A closing reflection on the nature of mathematical physics is appropriate. Stephen Hawking
has asked, somewhat poetically, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a
universe for them to describe?" The question deserves a genuine answer. As a matter of logic,
mathematical descriptions may have ontological implications, but they do *not* function as
efficient causes, either metaphysically or materially: *they are causally inert*. When inflation
cosmology describes string vacua as tunneling into existence from absolute nothingness or
from another vacuum state, or even when relativistic quantum field theory describes matter
as popping out of the quantum vacuum, neither mathematical construction provides an
*explanation*, let alone an *efficient cause*, for these events. The belief that a mathematical
description shows that the universe does not have and does not need a cause is both a non
sequitur - it does not follow from the descriptions themselves - and an ontological category
mistake. When landscape theorists like Leonard Susskind assert the existence of a landscape
of possibilities giving rise to a megaverse of actualities and suggest that this provides a
mindless solution to the problem of fine-tuning, they completely ignore the fact that a
virtually unlimited arena of mathematical possibilities cannot *generate even one actual
universe*. The mindless multiverse "solution" to the problem of fine-tuning is, quite literally,
a metaphysical non-starter. What the absence of efficient material causality in fundamental
physics and cosmology reveals instead is the limit of scientific explanations and the need for
a deeper understanding.
When the logical and metaphysical *necessity* of an efficient cause, the demonstrative
*absence* of a material one, and the proof that there was an *absolute beginning* to any
universe or multiverse are all conjoined with the fact that our universe exists and its
conditions are fine-tuned immeasurably beyond the capacity of any mindless process, the
scientific evidence points inexorably toward *transcendent intelligent agency* as the most
plausible, if not the *only* reasonable explanation.

1.4.2011 | 6:34pm

Papalinton says:
Hi Reg McConnell

First it was spirits and demons and gods in the rocks and the trees, rivers and sea.
As inquisitive man approached those trees and climbed the big rock god had shifted
Then it was spirits and demons and gods just over there out of sight in the next valley.
As inquisitive man went just over there into the next valley the gods had shifted.
Then the gods resided on the highest mountain.
As inquisitive man climbed that highest mountain the gods had shifted
Then the gods made their home in the sky
When inquisitive man flew into the sky and looked around the gods had moved house.
Then god moved to all points in the universe.
As inquisitive man began to search and explore the universe god had shifted
Then god moved outside the universe to reside in .... nothing.
Still scientists must go where the science leads them, relativity, M-theory, inexorable.
There is a story unfolding, Reg, but I'm not sure it is the one you are expecting, particularly if
you append that anthropomorphic, finger-tweaking fine tuner, natural law violator and
mendicant portrayed as the Abrahamic phantasm.
Cheers

1.4.2011 | 6:44pm
harry says:
Reg McConnell,
You wrote:
... What the absence of efficient material causality in fundamental physics and cosmology
reveals ... is the limit of scientific explanations and the need for a deeper understanding.
When the logical and metaphysical *necessity* of an efficient cause, the demonstrative
*absence* of a material one, and the proof that there was an *absolute beginning* to any
universe or multiverse are all conjoined with the fact that our universe exists and its
conditions are fine-tuned immeasurably beyond the capacity of any mindless process, the
scientific evidence points inexorably toward *transcendent intelligent agency* as the most
plausible, if not the *only* reasonable explanation.
Very well said. That wraps it up as far as I am concerned. I think much of that statement
would apply to the massive amounts of digital logic in the DNA molecule. There is no known
cause for such a phenomenon except an intelligent agent. With a nearly limitless amount of
non-functional arrangements of DNA nucleotides being possible, the fact that the
arrangement that is there is the correct assembly instructions for building the various three
dimensional protein machines required for the metabolic/reproductive functionality of the
cell indicates that this arrangement is also fine-tuned immeasurably beyond the capacity of
any mindless process, the scientific evidence [pointing] inexorably toward *transcendent
intelligent agency* as the most plausible, if not the *only* reasonable explanation.

1.4.2011 | 7:05pm
Ye Olde Statistician says:

Papa
Religion is first and foremost a cultural construct which has little to no explanatory power to
inform science in any sphere.
YOS
Music is first and foremost a cultural construct which has little to no explanatory power to
inform science in any sphere.
Justice is first and foremost a cultural construct which has little to no explanatory power to
inform science in any sphere.
Science is first and foremost a cultural construct which has little to no explanatory power to
inform music, religion, or justice in any sphere.
Papa
the study of human relations, has been superseded by many other specialised branches of the
humanities and the social sciences, the fundamentals of which are not prescribed nor
proscribed by elements such as the Athanasian and Nicene Creed.
YOS
But why should the creeds, which were intended to define orthodoxy in the Church, have
anything whatsoever to say about the humanities? It's like saying my auto mechanic's manual
is not "prescribed" by the Origin of Species. But, to correct your misspelling: it is social
"sciences".
Papa
Science, on the other hand, trespasses on the boundary of the sacred not because it is
opposed to the sacred but it has no concept of sacred at all.
YOS
True. Makes no never mind whether one works on a new nerve gas, a new deodorant, or a
new vaccine.
Papa
science ... handles religion roughly - like any pithed frog or pinned butterfly.
YOS
I'm not sure a pithed frog can handle anything roughly.
Papa
Equally, I'm not sure [Hawking] has made the case fully for the spontaneous birth of the
universe.
YOS
He hasn't made the case at all. He simply redefined our space-time manifold as the
"universe" and speculated how it might of emerged from a transition of the quantum state
from k=0 manifolds to k=1+ manifolds. But this supposes all sorts of pre-existing structure
and order: quantum mechanics and a superstructure from which space-time manifolds might
emerge. This is like trying to explain the origin of the Earth by showing how North America
broke off of Pangea. All one need do is redefine "Earth" to mean "North America."
Joe Human
So the universe was not designed for human beings; human beings were "designed" by, or
created for, the universe.
YOS

So taught the traditional Christians. In their teachings, the universe was not designed
[intended] "for" human beings, but for showing forth the glory of God. It was the humanists
who put humans on a pedestal - until the humanities were wrecked by scientism.
Joe Human
Here indeed, I am explicitly hereby extending the term "Evolution," TO INCLUDE THE
EVOLUTION OF THE MATERIAL UNIVERSE. As the first step of evolution, we see the
appearance of vast clouds of matter, coagulating into galaxies, stars, and planetary systems.
Which is already a rather large amount of order and structure; yet not an amount entirely
inconsistent with what would be predicted out of random accident.
YOS
IOW, you are redefining "evolution" to mean "change [over time]" -- kinesis, in Aristotle's
term; motus in Aquinas.
Sauwohl! The recognition that there is kinesis/motus/motion/evolution in the world is the
first step in Aristotle's and Aquinas' proofs of the existence of God. So you have taken the
first step on the happy path. You say "evolution of the material universe" and Aquinas says
"aliqua moveri in hoc mundo." Alla same-o same-o. Of course, "evolution" is not a science
any more than "falling bodies" is a science. These are merely facts. But "gravity" is science;
and so is "natural selection."
Which leads us to...
Zdenek V says:
If science and philosophy are in the same business...
YOS
But they are not in the same business. It is a firm (non-scientific) belief of those who worship
scientism to suppose that all other human endeavors are inept efforts to emulate science.
(This is akin to Early Modern artists who supposed that the medievals had *wanted to imitate
the Greeks, but were too inept to do so. This later gave Henri Matisse a good laugh.)
Now, no *scientia can investigate its own premises. You cannot prove the postulates of
Euclidean geometry using Euclidean geometry. Neither can the physics prove the existence of
the physical universe. It must simply take it for granted as an axiom. Then, too, *any system
of rational thought that necessarily works up from axioms using rules of logic will encounter
true statements that are not provable statements. For example, the Continuum Hypothesis
cannot be proven from the axioms of set theory. But if we drop the Axiom of Choice and
simply assume CH is true in a leap of faith, you can prove the Axiom of Choice! (Okay, so
mathematicians get cheap thrills.)
To the extent that the physics is spoken in the language of logic, reason, and mathematics, it
is subject to the same boundaries: true statements outnumber provable statements. Inter
alia, this means no "Theory of Everything" can be known. Jaki pointed this out at a Nobel
conference in Sweden decades ago, and was surprised that the other physicists on the panel
had never heard of Goedel's Theorem. (Hilary Putnam, the philosopher, of course had.)
Murray Gell-Mann was at first affronted, but later began to teach the same thing. Years later,
Hawking caught on, but misunderstood it. He said that that Goedel's Theorem meant that
there could not be a Theory of Everything, but Jaki noted that it meant that we could never
be certain that we had actually found it.
So the three levels of knowing are:
1. The physics, which considers the abstracted qualities of physical bodies.

2. Mathematics, which considers the abstracted qualities of ideal bodies.

3. Metaphysics, which considers being as such.
Hope this helps.

1.4.2011 | 10:37pm
Peter Nyikos says:

Joe the Human says:

"But Intelligent Design people should now note this: another universe, with a different
structure, would perhaps have merely evolved a different form of life."
And Joe the Human should note that another universe, to have a ghost of a chance of doing
that, would also have to have laws incredibly fine-tuned for the emergence of its kind of life.
Certainly it cannot be like the semi-chaotic universe I described a while back to Papalinton:
"We can, of course, picture a semi-chaotic universe where matter is made up of subatomic
particles as in ours, but no two of those particles have either the same charge or the same
mass. Even such a mild variation is not seriously contemplated by the multiverse theorists to
my knowledge, nor by the Skeptical Inquirers.
"Yet it stands to reason that (1) such semi-chaotic universes far outnumber ordered cosmoses
like ours if we are in a multiverse that has an inconceivably large but still finite number of
universes and (2) life, which by definition requires self-replication to a high degree of
accuracy, cannot long flourish in such a semi-chaotic universe and it is highly unlikely to get
started in the first place."
After that initial sop to the multiverse, Joe goes right on with his penny-ante talk about life in
our own incredibly fine-tuned universe, something I took him to task for earlier.
I wonder how Joe reconciles his idea of an infinite universe with the picture presented in
Hawking and Mlodinow's book, where the figures they give for inflation do not even begin to
approach the production of a universe even so much as 10^100 light years across (see p.
129). Not enough, not nearly enough for us to expect even one locality in it to be the size of
the observable universe and to have matter made up of only three different kinds of
subatomic particles, with the ones of each kind all being of the same mass and charge (oe
lack thereof, in the neutron).
I speak of Joe in the third person because he has avoided addressing anything I have said all
this time, and I don't expect him to start now.

1.4.2011 | 11:27pm
dromd says:
If time was a circle it would have no beginning or end.We used to think the earth was flat
because it appeared to be flat.In the same way, we think there was a beginning because that's
what we understand.Because our egos die we created God to save us from death.But life
continues without us.Life is real. We are not.Party on dudes.

1.5.2011 | 12:43am

Peter Nyikos says:

Papalinton: I too have finished the book. I checked it out of the library this afternoon, and
saw almost immediately that it was not a scholarly work: no bibliography, not even
bibliographic references in the body of the text; no footnotes, no endnotes. It is a
popularization on a level somewhere between the magazines Discover and Scientific
American.
I was able to plow through it quickly, because most of it was a rehash of things I already knew
about, including huge gobs of history of science. I've also known for a long time about John
Conway's game of Life and the fact that it realizes what we humans, seeing it from the
outside, recognize as a universal Turing machine. And in an amusing category-mistake, the
authors claim that this means that "the Game of Life world...would be, in a sense,
intelligent!" This despite the fact that they never even bother to define "the Game of Life
world", only the Game of Life which can be (and has been) played innumerable times on
graph paper and on computer screens.
You are being very generous to Hawking when you say:
" I'm not sure he has made the case fully for the spontaneous birth of the universe. "
In fact, the book is so completely a "primer" for the layman that he isn't even trying hard. The
strange statement for which I took him to task in my first comment appears on the next to
last page [p. 180]:
"Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing in the
manner described in Chapter 6".
But the manner is only hinted at in Chapter 6, and only on three pages of it at that: 134-136.
In two of those pages, he seems to say that the universe had no beginning and that therefore
it is meaningless to talk in terms of the "nothing" from which it supposedly arose. Then he
seems to reverse himself and say something that has nothing to do with gravity and
everything to do with Feynman's methods of calculating quantum probabilities. He even
makes it sound like a commonplace:
"In this view, the universe appeared spontaneously, starting off in every posible way ... Some
people make a great mystery of this idea, sometimes called the multiverse concept, but these
are just different expressions of the Feynman concept."
And so, to paraphrase what he said on page 180, it is as if he were saying here,
"Because there are such things as quantum events, the universe (by which we mean all
possible universes including our own) appeared spontaneously, all at once."
But note, there is no effort, none at all, to show how Feynmann's methods actually predict an
event that could be called "the universe appearing spontaneously." For all Chapter 6 tells us,
this could just be another category-mistake: the mistaking of a description of what possible
forms our universe could have taken (including, of course, the form ours actually took), with
the prediction that all these forms can and will be actually be realized.
And if once, why not infinitely many times? Why just one universe that "appeared
spontaneously, starting off in every posible way" [p. 136] and not infinitely many of them?
The authors don't even seem to be aware of this conundrum.
Similar objections seem to apply to the strange reasoning that leads to the use of "the laws of

gravity" in the sentence I quoted from page 180. Gravity is supposed to be "negative energy"
whereas a material body surrounded by empty space is "positive energy" "which means that
one has to do work to assemble the body."
By a sleight of hand he replaces "assemble" by "create," and he really means "create from
nothing." Not from energy, as in E = mc^2, but from nothing! "[I]f the energy of an isolated
body were negative, it could be created in a state of motion so that its negative energy was
exactly balanced by the positive energy due to its motion. If that were true, there would be no
reason that bodies could not appear anywhere and everywhere." [p. 179]
[Query: doesn't this violate Einstein's insight that it is impossible to distinguish between
uniform motion and rest?]
In the following page he states without any explanation that the positive-energy matter and
negative-energy gravity in a universe can be completely balanced so that the net energy is
zero (whatever that means)--and therefore, universes can come into being spontaneously!
But if the creation of a universe is such a simple matter, why don't we see it happening, with
big bangs creating two-dimensional universes inside our three-dimensional one, for
instance? [Yes, the number of dimensions is variable according to the authors!] Again, the
authors seem blissfully unaware of this kind of issue.
But what really gets me is that the authors, who must know how controversial this theory
must be, devote so little space to the concepts of "negative energy" and "positive energy"
which they use in a way totally new to me. Are there any physicists besides them who view
energy in this way?
Their treatment of the subject cries out for amplification, but there is not a single hint as to
where (or WHETHER!) one can read more about this--no names of other physicists, no titles
of books or journal articles, nothing.

1.5.2011 | 1:13am
Zdenek V says:

Ye olde statistitian "But they are not in the same business...."

I think Hawking can persuasively argue against this way of thinking about science. The key is
to reject the idea that there is a priori knowledge on which your defense of Haldane depends.
The general strategy I am talking about goes back to Quine but can be sharpened-up by more
recent work in this area. The upshot is to argue that science and philosophy deal with
synthetic knowledge because there is no useful a priori knowledge of the world : no useful a
priori knowledge means that there is no philosophical method which is distinct from
scientific method and that means that there is methodologically speaking continuity between
science and phil.
On the back of this strategy we ( and Hawking ) can then reject the traditional defense of the
distinction between phil and science you are defending and go on to argue that science can
indeed investigate its own premises. Questions about existence of external world or questions
about scientific method itself etc. can then be seen as essentially synthetic questions to be
investigated scientifically.
Two examples : in ethics, work from evolutionary biology , cognitive science etc is now taken

to be relevant to our understanding of morality which involves the denial that there is a
distinction between science and phil. Second example comes from epistemology where
questions about justification, which are normative questions and which were traditionally
taken to be purely philosophical and unsuitable for scientific investigation, are now
investigated by a naturalistic approach called reliabilism. In short , just as in ethics this way
of thinking about philosophy involves rejection of the claim that science and phil are in
different businesses.

1.5.2011 | 7:12am
Charles Frith says:
So we're back to what made God?
http://www.charlesfrith.com

1.5.2011 | 7:40am
Papalinton says:
Hi YOS
Papa
Religion is first and foremost a cultural construct which has little to no explanatory power to
inform science in any sphere.
YOS
...........
...........
Science is first and foremost a cultural construct which has little to no explanatory power to
inform music, religion, or justice in any sphere.
PapaL
Sciences enables music: the perfect pitch, calculation of the composition of sound through
string vibration, wind vibration, music needs science, great explanatory power in the
production of great music, concert hall design to bring the magic of the moment to reality.
Science challenges religion, be it non-god, 'demon possession' as schizophrenia or epilepsy,
the nonsense of zombie-ism [dead people rising], great explanatory power to demonstrate
the 'exodus' as myth, transubstantiation as figment, feeding 5000 with five fish and a few
loaves as physical nonsense. Great explanatory power showing religion as created in the
mind of man as part of the survival mechanism within the genetic makeup.
Science enables justice to happen; fingerprinting, DNA testing, forensics etc that informs
justice being done.
......................................
Papa
the study of human relations, has been superseded by many other specialised branches of the
humanities and the social sciences, the fundamentals of which are not prescribed nor
proscribed by elements such as the Athanasian and Nicene Creed.
YOS
But why should the creeds, which were intended to define orthodoxy in the Church, have
anything whatsoever to say about the humanities? It's like saying my auto mechanic's manual
is not "prescribed" by the Origin of Species. But, to correct your misspelling: it is social
"sciences".
PapaL

No. Not define, rather prescribe orthodoxy on pain of excommunication or death for heresy
as history informs us in earlier times. Has everything to say about how humanity is treated in
terms of its relationship to the church. It has everything to say about the humanities in the
threat of dismissal prescribed by the declaration of a statement of faith as a condition of
employment. Re Bruce Waltke's sacking from the Reformed Theological Seminary in
Orlando, Florida.
It has everything to say of the totalitarianism of church governance.
........................................
Papa
Science, on the other hand, trespasses on the boundary of the sacred not because it is
opposed to the sacred but it has no concept of sacred at all.
YOS
True. Makes no never mind whether one works on a new nerve gas, a new deodorant, or a
new vaccine.
PapaL
So new nerve gas, deodorant and vaccines are sacred things in the context of which science
pays no respect to.
.........................................
Papa
science ... handles religion roughly - like any pithed frog or pinned butterfly.
YOS
I'm not sure a pithed frog can handle anything roughly.
PapaL
Religion certainly cannot. Scream foul. Scream profane. Scream persecution. Scream
disrespect. Scream insensitive to others beliefs.
.........................................
Papa
Equally, I'm not sure [Hawking] has made the case fully for the spontaneous birth of the
universe.
YOS
He hasn't made the case at all. He simply redefined our space-time manifold as the
"universe" and speculated how it might of emerged from a transition of the quantum state
from k=0 manifolds to k=1+ manifolds. But this supposes all sorts of pre-existing structure
and order: quantum mechanics and a superstructure from which space-time manifolds might
emerge. This is like trying to explain the origin of the Earth by showing how North America
broke off of Pangea. All one need do is redefine "Earth" to mean "North America."
PapaL
Religion presupposes all sorts of pre-existing structure and order: 3-in-1 godhead,
infallibility of the pope, the current ideation of god now posits itself outside the universe,
residing in ..... nothing, from where He is able to bounce the universe ball into existence.
Redefining god is an integral part of the field Apologetics in order that it stay fresh and
connected with the new science. Jesus, if there ever was such a person [and we know that to
be an unlikely possibility as evidentially read between the gospels and Paul's idea of a
heavenly jesus] would not recognise today's god. Hawking makes a good fist of reading the
tea leaves better than theists.

Cheers

1.5.2011 | 7:51am
Neil Tennant says:

A propos John Haldane's passage

"The second possibilitythat there are many universes, entirely distinct realities, wholly
discontinuous and sharing no common elementsfails also. There can be no empirical
evidence in support of the hypothesis, nor could it be derived as a necessary condition of the
possible existence and character of the only universe of which we have or could have
scientific knowledge." --Haldane could have taken the opportunity to point out that Kant, if he were alive today,
would similarly invoke his third category of Gemeinschaft, in order to rule out all those other
universes postulated by Hawking et al. alongside our own universe within 'the' multiverse.
Invoking those other universes within 'the' multiverse---all of them, ex hypothesi, in
principle inaccessible to empirical investigation---bespeaks a rampant scientific realism
curiously at odds with the anti-realist 'constructive pragmatism' that Haldane attributes to
Hawking and Mlodinow on the basis of their claims about alternative theoretical models of
the same phenomena. Can the invokers of 'the' multiverse really be regarded as anti-realists
when it comes to classifying their views on the philosophical spectrum?

1.5.2011 | 9:09am
Tom says:

@ Peter Nyikos
An object trapped in a bound state, like an object at the surface of the earth, or an electron in
an atom, is said to have negative potential energy because work must be done to remove it.

1.5.2011 | 9:33am
Kiz says:

It is helpful to the continuing dialogue that Hawking has clarified who the fundamentalist is
in the debate.

1.5.2011 | 9:36am
dromd says:
To Charles Frith-We made God. It really is that simple.And for most of you who obviously
have vast amounts of knowledge and understanding, I wish you had more to say.

1.5.2011 | 10:07am
balt_orioles1954 says:

Duh. God made the universe, posited the language DNA, coded life. Sorry, can't prove it.
Unfortunately, everyone writing on this comment blog or reading are so utterly metamolecularly "tiny" the further out in space/universe we are observed on our planet - yes,
including your brains, that it is laughable that such tiny, squeaking, "intellectuals" have the

ego/then of course hubris to utter nonsense like stuff came from nothing. Wow, and I
thought a virgin birth was crazy. Keep it simple, be more like a child when viewing life. Stop
reading and theorizing your monkeymind to a point that you simply drive yourself back to
the original question. Where did stuff come from? You'll never know, you are too tiny. Stuck
on the little ball in space. Gulp. Be well - have some fun - do some good - call it a life - God
bless . . .
http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi2707752729/

1.5.2011 | 10:34am
Aldebaran says:

While I wouldn't put it quite the way that balt_orioles1954 does, I second the call for
perspective and humility on both sides of the debate.
The notion that (to use the Darwinian frame of reference, just for convenience) a group of
fairly unevolved hairless primates with relatively large brains somehow has the ability to
solve the riddles of the universe is as absurd as the notion that a god has selected them to be
an object of special attention.
I recommend keeping in mind a favorite aphorism of mine: The universe has no obligation to
respect the limits of the minds and senses of those who contemplate and theorize about it.

1.5.2011 | 11:03am
Sand says:
I have seen quite a few of these discussions and they differ rather little from what I have seen
here.
The main focus of many of the unsettled matters is that, by common experience, nothing
exists without a previous cause. Since that is universal current experience it is then assumed
that this cannot be violated. At best all I can add is that humanity has existed for the
extremely smallest blink in time in which conditions have been rather uniform and perhaps it
is a generalization that may be invalid. Our astronomical instruments, of course, can peer
very deeply into both time and space and they seem to confirm that cause and effect still hold
over those observations. But time is one of those four dimensions that we more or less
accept, neglecting mathematical speculations of other dimensionality and as creatures
embedded in these four it is quite difficult for us to visualize that a static four dimensional
object such as our universe may indeed have causeless effects. If I think of myself as a
microbe crawling across a Jackson Pollock painting and having a strong perception that a
certain red always follows a black which follows a white and this holds true for all the surface
then any other series of events may get fixed in my mind as impossible. But we who can
observe the surface of the painting from the third dimension can see other possibilities.
Frankly, the Biblical man-like being with unimaginable powers envisioned as God impresses
me as terribly naive and His adventures with the apparently untamable human species may
be childishly entertaining but it is nothing to place in measure against the attainments of
science. If there is a God it must be so alien to human perception that it very well could be
merely the envelope of forces that science presents as basic which control the interactions of
energy and matter and time and space. And why should these forces have a beginning? They
merely exist as the controlling factors of the phenomena we observe.

1.5.2011 | 1:36pm

Ye Olde Statistician says:

dromd says:
If time was a circle it would have no beginning or end.We used to think the earth was flat
because it appeared to be flat.In the same way, we think there was a beginning because that's
what we understand.
YOS
Actually, we think so because that's how the equations of general relativity work out. Einstein
had thought the world was eternal, and so did most scientists until then. It's nice to think of
time being a circle. _How_ time might be a "circle" is a mere detail.
+++
Zdenek V says:
I think Hawking can persuasively argue against this way of thinking about science [as being
distinct from philosophy]. The key is to reject the idea that there is a priori knowledge
YOS
Demonstrate by scientific means and without begging the question that an objective universe
exists.
+++
Zdenek
because there is no useful a priori knowledge of the world ... there is no philosophical method
which is distinct from scientific method and that means that there is methodologically
speaking continuity between science and phil.
YOS
Depending on what you mean by "continuity." But does this mean you accept the DuhemQuine hypothesis on the mere instrumental nature of scientific theories?
As Arsitotle said, all knowledge begins in the senses. I'm not sure how you would consider
sensory knowledge of the world. The method of deductive logic is distinct from the scientific
method, which is inductive. So is the mathematical method. A scientist may use these things
as tools in his own work, but that does not make them "part of the scientific method" any
more than my use of a timer in cooking makes timer-making part of the culinary arts.
Of course, one can always re-imagine "scientific method" to include everything, and then
argue that everything is science.
Zdenek
we ( and Hawking ) can then ... argue that science can indeed investigate its own premises.
Questions about existence of external world or questions about scientific method itself etc.
can then be seen as essentially synthetic questions to be investigated scientifically.
YOS
Demonstrate by scientific means and without begging the question that an objective universe
exists. Prove using Euclidean geometry the parallel postulate of Euclid.
Zdenek
in ethics, work from evolutionary biology, cognitive science etc is now taken to be relevant to
our understanding of morality which involves the denial that there is a distinction between
science and phil.
YOS

A bit of circularity there. The fact that a connaisseur and a chemist know something about a
grape does not mean that wine-bibbing is chemistry.
"""One and the same grape. The farmer, the connaisseur, the chemist, the poet and the
broker all have an exact knowledge of what it is. How would it be desirable, necessary, or
even conceivable to know even grapes by a single universal method or system?" -- James
Chastek
Now we only need to know what "cognitive science" means and whether it can suit up in the
same game played by phsyicists and chemists. Of course, "now taken to be relevant" is a
rather fuzzy foundation on which to build such a firm conclusion.
Zdenek
questions about justification, which are normative questions..., are now investigated by a
naturalistic approach called reliabilism.
YOS
No one ever said that scientism was not rampant in this, the collapse of the Modern Ages. For
some insights, read Mary Midgley's THE MYTHS WE LIVE BY.
However, that two ways of looking at things may look at the same thing does not
demonstrate that the two are the same way, or that one way subsumes the other. Surely, one
may study the acoustics of vibrating strings; but I surely hope you don't conclude that
thereby we understand Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwCujH0SQIw

1.5.2011 | 2:52pm
Joe the Human says:
YOS:

To demonstrate by science, the value of science or materiality, would indeed be hard, without
being circular. However, try this argument to start: I will believe you sincerely do not value
the knowledge that we get of the material world, from our senses, and as interpreted by
Science ... when you stop typing on your computer, on an internet, designed by Science and
its related empirical adjunct, Technology. Until then, your anti-science, or radically pro
apriori, or religionist position, is hypocritical.
It now seems that the visible universe - the galaxies and stars - had a beginning, or an
EFFICIENT beginning or cause ... in the Big Bang. However, what is behind or before the Big
Bang, in turn, remains in question. But given the success of science, it now seems most likely
by far, that there is a discoverable, material - not Platonistically "transcendental" - cause.
Science and science-based Philosophy are useful in this investigation. Indeed Philsophy and
Science of course, have always had a close relationship; ironically in fact, the very
philosopher you like to quote, Aristotle, was for some time known not just as a philosopher,
but also even as the "founder of science." Though that reputation has waned, it was not
entirely undeserved. Historically, major discussions in Philosophy, on "Reason," Math,
"Empiricism," inputted into science, and helped clarify its major ideas. While much of the
mainstream of contemporary Philosophy, follows Quine, in indeed, taking material reality,
science, into consideration. Science and Philosophy are somewhat different of course ... but
closely related, too. Especially, ironically, in the very Philosophers you have quoted teh most,

here.
So what should we now think of your position? God told us there are many "false prophets";
and so we to learn which were good, and which were false, by their often physical fruits. And
indeed, why does our age value science? We value it ... because it was enormously fruitful.
While in contrast, efforts like your own attempts to, essentially, Platonistically reify LogicoMathematical entities, are 2,300 years out of date. And they are being rejected finally, in our
own time. As having been useless, and fruitless.

1.5.2011 | 3:18pm
Tom says:

Clearly this is all much more intelligible than anything that has ever appeared in "Social
Text".

1.5.2011 | 5:10pm
To be or not to be says:
Andrew Lyttle,
From what I am understanding, the basis of your argument is some form of dissatisfaction
with nominalism. So far, so good. I wonder though, why you attribute nominalism to science,
when you state that science deals only with things as they exist in their contingency, but not
with existence, on one hand, and why you attribute nominalism to atheism on the other
hand: "pure contingency generating pure contingency ab nihilo"?
I'll leave it to someone else to answer for the inaccuracy of defining atheism in nominalistic
terms, suffice to say that belief in the non-existence of God does not necessarily yield to belief
in the non-existence of order, but simply to the belief that order is not divine. As far as
science goes, unless application of science ("cashing-in" of it, to use an expression from the
man that coined the term "multiverse") is not a legitimate concern of science, I don't think
science deals only with what exists; on the contrary, it deals with orders of existence,
conditions of existence, modes of existence, and why not, existence itself. The very term
"model-dependent realism" seems to sugest that order, generalities, universals, etc, are just
as real and exist just as much as things existing contingently.
The point, which Haldane seems to miss, however, is that dealing with this issues does not
necessarily mean engaging in philosophy more than engaging in scientific questions. He
mentions "constructive empiricism," "pragmatism" and "conceptual relativism" as
Philosophies of science in which Hawking is "buried," forgetting to add that what joins these
positions is the common belief that questions and concerns rising from "ordinary empirical
science" are far superior than refutations by reason alone and far superior than philosophy. If
Hawking and Mlodinow are engaged in such philosophies, let's bear in mind that such
philosophies bury themselves in humble modesty in the face of empirical science.
Which should also be a warning against dishonest claims such as the claim about the ad hoc
nature of these theories. Shouldn't we say that a proposition such as "in X context, x theory
seems to be ad hoc" is not an objection, but a tautology? A more honest way of going about
this issue is to maintain that whether or not it appears ad hoc in warning against "the
conclusion that the general regularities and particular fine-tuning are due to the agency of a
creator," the multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine
tuning, but to account for scientific observations and breakthroughs in physics as in

mathematics, outside mystical, magical and unclear explanations.

To answer whether it explains or not, as Haldane rightfully asks, one has to mind well the
lessons from Godel. On the one hand, holding on to realism will necessarily lead us to accept
circularity, which seems to discomfort the majority of readers, even a circularity of the sort
"the universe creates itself from nothing," (though careful, this claim does not maintain that
creation precedes existence, as Haldane seems to take it, but that creation and existence are
simultaneous, both in a logical as well as a temporal order and there's nothing incoherent
about that). And on the other hand, holding on to [the] circularity [of God] does not
necessarily lead to [its] reality. That sui generis entities seem to be less fallacious than
uncaused causes, is for Hawking an observation that stemms from the relatively less realistic
notion of an uncaused cause, and it doesn't speak to the negation of God, but to God's
redundancy in myths of creation.
And finally, not necessarily outside of the discussion, though leaving Hawking, Mlodinow
and metaphysics aside for the moment, I find the circularity of creation from nothing (be it
God, the universe, or whatever that creates itself from nothing) far more virtuous than the
viciousness of uncaused causes. An uncaused cause is absolutely arbitrary, it sheds the
burden of responsibility, and flirts openly with fatalism. While sui generis entities have
nothing to blame but themselves.

1.5.2011 | 6:05pm
Papalinton says:
Hi To Be or Not To Be

Your review of Hawking and Mlodinow's take on 'model-dependent realism' in respect to the
particularly arcane-bound sophistry of the 'uncaused cause' proposition is a breath of fresh
air. The notion of an 'uncaused cause' is anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-humanity, a
declaration that, at its core, is a massive conversation stopper. The 'uncaused cause' is
impositional, it's arbitrariness speaks of a 'no go zone ' for science and an a priori assumption
that science can never explain the creation of the universe. Such blinkered philosophizing is a
product of the Thomist era and should be consigned to it, in a practical and a historical sense.
It brings little to the discussion in modern cosmology and physics and indeed its only
function is as a brake to the rate of discovery and the advance of knowledge through science.
YOS and Peter will never know of my response to their later comments as four of them have
not been posted in the apparent attempt to protect their sensibilities and their faith as others
have decided they apparently would not be sufficiently robust to withstand critique.
I am saddened
Cheers

1.5.2011 | 6:29pm
John Catan says:
One of the assumptions in this thread is that faith is "propositionally determined" whereas in
my understanding it is a life (grace) that is lived. Secondly, the issue of the separation of
natural theology (thanks to Descartes) from metaphysics is never broached; without
metaphysics how can there be a discussion of causality on the assumed basis of a Humean
definition of the same. Being and its long history in the Western philosophical tradition
should be at hand. How can any discussion of nature, scientific or otherwise, lead to any

discussion of the EXISTENCE of God since no existing nature in our experience involves
existence as part of its nature? On a personal note, I put together some years ago a series of
articles of my teacher (Fr. Joesph Owens C.Ss.R.) that I hoped brought together all the issues
in the Prima Via. Is it too much to ask that someone on this thread read it? I hate the ad
hominem's floating around so please be polite in your differences. THANK YOU
John Catan

1.5.2011 | 7:01pm
Mindjudo says:

I'm going ask a question: If a God, gods or even dog were responsible for existence. Who
created the creator?

1.5.2011 | 8:34pm
Ye Olde Statistician says:
Joe the Human says:
I will believe you sincerely do not value the knowledge that we get of the material world, from
our senses, and as interpreted by Science ... when you stop typing on your computer, on an
internet, designed by Science and its related empirical adjunct, Technology. Until then, your
anti-science, or radically pro apriori, or religionist position, is hypocritical.
YOS
This is indeed peculiar. Nothing I have written devalues knowledge of the material world.
Certainly, Adelard, Aquinas, Hildegard, Albertus Magnus, Nichlas Oresme, and others valued
it. "All knowledge of nature begins in the senses." It just doesn't end there.
Now, no gizmo is "designed by science," but by engineering, and even by lore and rules of
thumb. For most of history, technological innovation preceeded scientific explanation. The
Wright Brothers flew before there was a science of aerodynamics. Science may describe how
it works and make smooth the path of the designer; but the whole point of the Scientific
Revolution was to get Science out of its ivory tower and subordinate it to Engineering and
Industry, so as to make useful products and extend man's dominion of the universe. See
Francis Bacon's The Masculine Birth of Time.
As for a priori: Before you can do science you must assume a priori that an objective universe
exists; that it is rationally ordered - governed by natural laws; that it is largely accessible to
human reason; that the discovery of those laws is a fit occupation for grown-ups. In addition,
one makes a priori assumptions about the nature and methods of formal and material logic,
adopts metaphysical principles (such as that of Parsimony, which we call "Ockham's Razor,"
named after a Franciscan monk famous for applying it to the theory of cognition), and so on.
As for religionist: it is sufficient to observe that the existence of an objective material
universe is grounded in "In the beginning, God created...", so there must be a creation. That
it is rationally ordered and consistent stems from God's nature as a rational being. That
natural things have natural causes stemmed from Augustus' commentary on Genesis and
affirmed by William of Conches, Theodoric of Fribourg, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas,
Nicholas Oresme, Nicholas of Cusa, and many others. So at least one particular religion
provided a fertile field in which natural science could grow and become institutionalized
rather than the hobby of a few wealthy individuals here and there.
Wisdom 7: 15, 17-21. "Now God grant I speak suitably and value these endowments at their

worth: For he is the guide of Wisdom and the director of the wise. ... For he gave me sound
knowledge of existing things, that I might know the organization of the universe and the
force of its elements, the beginning and the end and the midpoint of times, the changes in the
sun's course and the variations of the seasons. Cycles of years, positions of the stars, natures
of animals, tempers of beasts, powers of the winds and thoughts of men, uses of plants and
virtues of roots. Such things as are hidden I learned and such as are plain..."
+++
Joe Human
what is behind or before [sic] the Big Bang, in turn, remains in question. But given the
success of science, it now seems most likely by far, that there is a discoverable, material - not
Platonistically "transcendental" - cause.
YOS
IOW, this is an act of faith on your part, perhaps involving belief in undetected and
undetectable "multiverse" of unseen "universes [sic]". Well, some people would rather
believe in ET than in angels, right? But it is obvious they are scratching the self-same itch.
I have no idea why you keep bringing up Plato.
+++
Joe Human
ironically in fact, the very philosopher you like to quote, Aristotle, was for some time known
not just as a philosopher, but also even as the "founder of science." Though that reputation
has waned, it was not entirely undeserved.
YOS
Why do you say "ironically"?
+++
Joe Human
much of the mainstream of contemporary Philosophy, follows Quine,
YOS
Much of contemporary society will follow anything that moves. Nietzsche seems very
popular, too. And Popper and Kuhn seem to have overtaken Quine. But I hope you are not
equating popularity with correctness.
+++
Joe Human
your own attempts to, essentially, Platonistically reify Logico-Mathematical entities, are
2,300 years out of date. And they are being rejected finally, in our own time. As having been
useless, and fruitless.
YOS
Useless and fruitless. Like music and art and literature, right?
Actually, it seems that Hawking is attempting to "Platonistically reify Logico-Mathematical
entities" by claiming some sort of creative power for the Word - I mean the Law of Gravity.
And we see Logico-Mathematical entitie constantly reified: the quark, black holes, the Higgs
boson, the multiverse (heck, that one isn't even mathematically well-defined); we see
statistical clusters or correlations pronounced to be real entities or causes; and the fruits of
computer models presented and accepted as if they were actual data.

In fact, historians of science have noted that the Renaissance and Early Modern Age saw an
upswing in Platonism at the expense of medieval Aristotelianism.
OTOH, I have been reminding you of Aristotelian realism: all knowledge of nature starts in
the senses. THE ISSUE RAISED IN THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE was that a science that
concerns the metrical properties of physical bodies should not be confused with philosophy,
mathematics, music, law, literature, etc. What Hawking did was bad philosophy.

1.5.2011 | 8:35pm
John Catan says:
TO ALL
The notion of "model-dependent" realism seems a bit odd. Does it mean "model" in the sense
of a group of concepts that "mirror"reality like a work of representitive art or does it mean
that reality is dependent on our conceptual abilities and thus what cannot be conceived,
cannot exist??
Thank you for any clarifications.
John Catan

1.5.2011 | 8:55pm
John Catan says:
Papalinton:
I have difficulty with your claims about the notion of "uncaused cause"
"The notion of an 'uncaused cause' is anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-humanity, a
declaration that, at its core, is a massive conversation stopper. The 'uncaused cause' is
impositional, it's arbitrariness speaks of a 'no go zone ' for science and an a priori assumption
that science can never explain the creation of the universe."
Let me take them one at a time:
First: anti-science--If science is the only knowledge possible then it is true so the claim
cannot be decided until we know your views on the "limits if any" of science thus on another
historically provable definition of "science" your claim is false. It reminds me of philosopher
who teach a doctrine in the classroom that they drop off when they enter their homes. So if
science is understood exclusively then it seems you would not be able to get out of bed before
examining the multitude of possible hypotheses about your floor and of course putting it to
the test but the it would only be "anecdotal" knowleedge yet you would base your life on it.
Seems this argumenbt is won by definition suited to the conclusions one is seeking.
The rest of your somewhat emotional descriptions seem to follow, not the emotions but the
descriptions.
"Uncaused causa" describes the the conclusion of a long and arduous argument and its
conclusion is imposed on the rational man if he wishes to acknowledge that claim.
I shall await any remarks.
John Catan

1.5.2011 | 9:08pm
Ye Olde Statistician says:
Papalinton says:
The notion of an 'uncaused cause' is anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-humanity, a

declaration that, at its core, is a massive conversation stopper. The 'uncaused cause' is
impositional, it's arbitrariness speaks of a 'no go zone ' for science and an a priori assumption
that science can never explain the creation of the universe.
YOS
a) No, no, and no.
b) It cannot be a conversation stopper, by the empirical evidence of this thread.
c) It is not "impositional" [sic], but rather a conclusion deduced from the ordering seen in
efficient causes. In short: the notion that everything must have a cause leads to a
contradiction; hence there must be something with does not have a cause. Just as a series of
endlessly forwarded emails leads to the conclusion that there must be an Unsent Sender.
d) It is not arbitrary, for the reasons just mentioned.
e) Your 'no go zone' for science must be rephrased: it is only a 'no go zone' for *natural*
science. After all, natural science cannot prove the irrationality of SQRT(2) or the beauty of
the Parthenon. There are plenty of 'no-go zones' for natural science; and for that matter 'nogo zones' for mathematical science, political science, theological science, etc.
f) that natural science can never explain the creation of the universe is not an a priori
assumption, but rather definitional. Natural science studies nature - questions of change and
quantity in physical bodies. There must therefore actually be a physical body before, say a
fluctuation in the Dirac sea can spontaneously produce particles or before the quantum state
in the multiverse [sic] can shift from k=0 to k=1+. Creation, OTOH, deals with being as such,
that is, with the sheer existence of physical bodies, regardless whether they are quantum
states or manifolds. Thus, creation - the actual existence versus non-existence of a physical
universe - is an assumption logically prior to natural science.
HOWEVER, I have no doubt myself that natural science will one day explain the beginning of
the space-time manifold in which we live. In fact, I believe that in the Big Bang theory,
physicists have engaged a substantial chunk of that. I point out only in passing that the
originator of the Big Bang, Fr. Georges Lemaitre, was a Belgian priest, and that he had no
problem cautioning the Pope against falling into the same confusion you have between the
beginning of a space-time manifold and the creation of the universe.
By trying like Mormons to place the cause of the universe within the universe, you risk
placing parts of nature itself beyond the reach of natural science. But by placing the
Uncaused Cause outside the universe, the religionists have deduced that everything within
the universe, "from quarks to quasars," is fair game for natural science. This is addressed
nicely in the essay aptly entitled "The Limits of a Limitless Science" by the physicist (and
Benedictine priest) Stanley Jaki. It is included in the eponymous collection available for free
download, here: http://worid-of-books.com/?id=4r_aAAAAMAAJ
In studying nature we have not to inquire how God the Creator may, as He freely wills, use
His creatures to work miracles and thereby show forth His power; we have rather to inquire
what Nature with its immanent causes can naturally bring to pass.
-- St. Albertus Magnus, De vegetabilibus et plantis

1.5.2011 | 10:41pm
Peter Nyikos says:

Papalinton, your "saddened" over me "never" seeing what you have to say is even more
disengenuous than your efforts to cause me distress by coming at me with stale old
arguments only slightly updated from Diderot, d'Holbach, etc. My mailbox is always open,
and you can figure out my email address from my website at the end of the first post by me.
And if you know the algorithm for deducing e-mail addresses from home pages at university

departments, you don't even have to look at my website.

But the smart money says you already know my e-mail address, which is a lot easier to
discover than the fact that I attend Our Lady of the Hills. How long did it take you to unearth
that bit of information, and why does it matter in the slightest to you?
Let me guess about the content of the messages: the "would not be sufficiently robust to
withstand critique" business has nothing to do with my on-topic critique of Hawking's book,
about which you have not uttered a single peep.
Instead, it is just some more off-topic taunting about the religion of fundies while pretending
that I too am sufficently like a fundie. That's what all your trolling (disguised as attempts to
enlighten me) is all about, isn't it?
I hate to prick your balloon, since you are such an amusingly pompous and smug troll in
about 90% of what you've been writing here, but the fact is that I realistically assess the
probability of Scenario 3 to be over 99% and hence of the theistic Scenario 2 to be less than
1%.
Why, you may ask, do I not call myself an "agnostic bordering on atheism NOW," and why do
I attend Our Lady of the Hills? The short answer is that hope springs eternal in the human
breast. The long answer includes many things, the most unusual of which is that I have lost
my main stumbling block to a Christian faith. It isn't anything as easy to handle as the
existence of evil on earth: it is the doctrine of an eternal hell.
Not eternal hell as being always literally as painful as earthly fire -- I could never again think
that this terrible stumbling block is true. No, I take the Biblical descriptions to be
metaphorical for the way the people there will burn with hatred. I believe that all who go
there (if there is such a place) want to be there. Why would they? Because to accept heaven
will mean that they will have to give up slandering others and hurting them in other ways,
and they cannot bring themselves to give up such pleasures.
I have encountered people like that on Usenet -- people who don't care if they are exposed
again and again as slanderers, but will go on slandering in almost every post and covering up
their slanders with lie after lie after lie. I really do believe some of them will gladly go to any
hell -- whether on earth or in the hereafter -- where they can go on acting exactly as they are
acting now.
I don't think it will surprise you in the least to learn that none of the people I have just
described are Christian, and that the worst of the bunch are atheists. Perhaps if I tell you who
they are, you will even want to join them on Usenet in attacking me, although I do not believe
you will want to resort to the worst of the slanders they employ. You will just be satisfied, I
trust, with taunting me as you have done here, in solidarity with them.

1.5.2011 | 11:24pm
Peter Nyikos says:
John Catan, you make a very good point in saying "One of the assumptions in this thread is
that faith is "propositionally determined" whereas in my understanding it is a life (grace) that
is lived."
Indeed, my own faith is much less a matter of belief and much more a commitment to a cause
I believe to be righteous and working for the best ends.

Never having had a course in metaphysics, I'm afraid I have to stick to natural theology
unless I can really learn from a superior teacher. If you really think the articles of Fr. Owens
are good enough, I will gladly have a look at them, although I cannot promse to finish
reading them any time soon.
With my present understanding I can only echo the great philosopher Hans Jonas: "There is
no reason why there should be anything at all." A corollary of this thesis is that there is no
necessary being, in the sense of a being whose existence is logically necessary. God may exist
and may not be contingent on anything else, but that is not the same as saying his existence
is logically necessary.
Strangely enough, Hawking and Mlodinow side more with you than with Jonas and me on
this issue. Just because the law of gravity is not logically contradictory, they assume that the
universe is a necessary "being".
What even their "Theory of Everything" cannot explain is why consciousness is an emergent
property of matter--something they must believe since they are atheists.
They might even, in the end, acknowledge the possibility of a God that is materially based
and emerged in one of the universes and created ours.
Or they might sympathize in the end with the notion that C. S. Lewis fought so hard against:
that God is a being that is emerging from our universe, who may yet become powerful
enough to create a universe of his own. One version of such a God is the Overmind in Arthur
C. Clarke's science fiction novel, _Childhood's End_.

1.6.2011 | 12:19am
Sand says:

Aristotle was, of course, quite correct in his estimation that the foundation of all knowledge is
sense input. But it is important to comprehend that a foundation, as in architecture, is
merely a base for further construction. A church, a school, a bank, a bordello or a launching
pad for astronautic exploration can be constructed thereupon and that secondary
construction also becomes a further foundation for understanding and hugely expanding
useful knowledge.
Plato, in his analogy of the cave of shadows, had made a lasting and dramatic model that has
captured inquisitive minds for millennia and his concept vitally indicates that what we know
is not the initiator of those shadows but merely deceptive and elusive aspects of a very
fugitive reality. One of his basic errors lies in his assumption that the remarkable ability of
perceptive living things in being able to associate various basic sense inputs and mentally
construct validifiable and very useful abstractions from sense input is the key which opens
the door to actual reality. Humanitys huge success in surviving and taking over much of the
Earths bounty for its own use is based on the human nervous systems extraordinary ability
to vastly extend this abstractive skill. Humans are so adept in this that to a very large extent
most human values and delights are founded in abstractions rather than in basic sense input.
But, as any ventriloquist is well aware, basic sense input associations can be very deceptive
and the confusion between a dialogue and a monologue is merely one of an infinite number
of mistakes that the advance in understanding can be not only unfortunately misled but also
sometimes totally devastating.
The human sense input system was obviously developed and refined for survival and other

living creatures that have other critical requirements in ways not demanded of humans have
different sensitivities. Dogs, mice, moles, dolphins, bats, starfish, plants, paramecia,
mushrooms, swifts, eagles, bumblebees, spiders, etc., etc. all have a very different set of basic
sense data to work from and obviously their abstractive sets play very different games with
the universe from that of humans. But these ploys are vital and have been developed over
millions of years which is why we still see them around us.
The point is that their universes plucked from their filtration of what sense input is available
to them is very different from ours and Platos view that there is a reality out there
discernible to our inquisitive and sophisticated minds that is total and universal is an
untenable conclusion. Even within our selected bundle of graspable insights there have been
immense changes from Platos time to ours. His Sun was the huge and undeniable master of
the universe he knew and the Moon was its cool and lovely cohort. Today we recognize our
entire solar system as a negligible bit of accidental construction, no doubt still immensely
important to our lives but of no consequence at all to the universe as we now recognize it.
To return to the initiating subject, Science and philosophy are not separate areas. But
philosophy is a sub-function of science. Philosophy and its sibling, mathematics, are the
initial halting steps in the directions that science takes us. They say maybe, perhaps, how
about? and science lets these eager dogs pull at its leash and perhaps discover a fascinating
real tree to urinate on to the delight of both science and philosophy.

1.6.2011 | 12:27am
Papalinton says:
@ John Catan
" TO ALL
The notion of "model-dependent" realism seems a bit odd. Does it mean "model"......."
Read Hawking and Mlodinow.

1.6.2011 | 1:13am
Papalinton says:
Hi John Catan
John
Let me take them one at a time:
First: anti-science--If science is the only knowledge possible then it is true so the claim
cannot be decided until we know your views on the "limits if any" of science thus on another
historically provable definition of "science" your claim is false.
PapaL
No, it is not the only source of knowledge but it is the primary source of human investigation
that seeks a response to who and what we are, where we came from, our relationship with
each other [including all other living beings], our relationship the the environment, the
world, the cosmos.
I could very easily source a different knowledge set by studying Mythology, English
literature, Roman history, or Babylonian religious predilections or Roman Catholicism.
These are very different sets of knowledge.
John

It reminds me of philosopher who teach a doctrine in the classroom that they drop off when
they enter their homes.
PapaL
Amusing, your idea. I have been known to use something quite similar; There are many
religionists on this sight who also happen to be scientists to earn a crust. They are scientists
in their day job, and transcendants on Sunday and during mid-week bible class.
Incidentally, there are so many on the BioLogos site. I recommend a visit when you have an
opportunity.
John
So if science is understood exclusively then it seems you would not be able to get out of bed
before examining the multitude of possible hypotheses about your floor and of course putting
it to the test but the it would only be "anecdotal" knowleedge yet you would base your life on
it.
PapaL
No, not at all. On the contrary, hopping out of bed and pouring a cup of coffee is natural de
rigeur for me, every morning, almost without exception.
John
Seems this argument is won by definition suited to the conclusions one is seeking.
PapaL
Well it can't be worse than, "The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it!"
John
"Uncaused causa [sic]" describes the the conclusion of a long and arduous argument and its
conclusion is imposed on the rational man if he wishes to acknowledge that claim.
PapaL
Two things about your comment John. Firstly, it has been and always been in the context of
theology. Although taken from the pagan times of Aristotle, by Aquinas. Secondly, I claim it
is impositional, " ... and its conclusion is imposed on the rational man .... "
You need not wait any longer for any remarks.
Cheers

1.6.2011 | 1:56am
Papalinton says:
Hi YOS

Papalinton says:
The notion of an 'uncaused cause' is anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-humanity, a
declaration that, at its core, is a massive conversation stopper. The 'uncaused cause' is
impositional, it's arbitrariness speaks of a 'no go zone ' for science and an a priori assumption
that science can never explain the creation of the universe.
YOS
a) No, no, and no.

PapaL
Ah but yes, yes, and yes.
YOS
b) It cannot be a conversation stopper, by the empirical evidence of this thread.
It is in the sense that regardless i may suggest to you an alternative viable world view you
either refuse to acknowledge the possibility or you are unable to conceptualize such within
the constraints of t your theism.
The aphorism, "The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it!" seems a large contributor to
theist reasoning. The ideation of god must, of necessity pervade all aspects of necessity even
to the exclusion of humanism. If indeed there is a divine grand plan this simply treats all
human beings as objects, play things of this numinous being.
YOS
c) It is not "impositional" [sic], but rather a conclusion deduced from the ordering seen in
efficient causes. In short: the notion that everything must have a cause leads to a
contradiction; hence there must be something with [sic] does not have a cause. Just as a
series of endlessly forwarded emails leads to the conclusion that there must be an Unsent
Sender.
PapaL
I borrow from John Catan above; ""Uncaused causa" describes the the conclusion of a long
and arduous argument and its conclusion is IMPOSED [my capitalisation] on the rational
man if he wishes to acknowledge that claim. It is fine sometimes to argue from a
philosophical perspective and it is reasonable to intuit sometimes things that seem logical
and reasonable. Science at the quantum level seems to be telling us otherwise about the
nature of *natural* science.
YOS
d) It is not arbitrary, for the reasons just mentioned.
PapaL
You couldn't get more arbitrary than "The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it!" I
understand Aquinas was first and foremost a catholic theist. Arbitrariness comes as no
stranger to those in the catholic church. After all, the nature of tradition does not allow any
form of inadvertent leakage away from orthodoxy if it is to maintain tradition.
YOS
e) Your 'no go zone' for science must be rephrased: it is only a 'no go zone' for *natural*
science. After all, natural science cannot prove the irrationality of SQRT(2) or the beauty of
the Parthenon. There are plenty of 'no-go zones' for natural science; and for that matter 'nogo zones' for mathematical science, political science, theological science, etc.
PapaL
Irrelevant. 'Theological Science', as in talking snake, as in visitant impregnation, as in Adam
without a navel, as in virgin birth, as in resurrection and ascension? Now, There's a phrase on
its way to the oxymoron factory.
YOS
f) that natural science can never explain the creation of the universe is not an a priori
assumption, but rather definitional. Natural science studies nature - questions of change and
quantity in physical bodies. There must therefore actually be a physical body before, say a
fluctuation in the Dirac sea can spontaneously produce particles or before the quantum state

in the multiverse [sic] can shift from k=0 to k=1+. Creation, OTOH, deals with being as such,
that is, with the sheer existence of physical bodies, regardless whether they are quantum
states or manifolds.
Thus, creation - the actual existence versus non-existence of a physical universe - is an
assumption logically prior to natural science.
PapaL
Thus, creation is so far out there, prior to any conceptualisation possible, that the creation of
the universe is unknowable. I'm sorry YOS but a qualified, *bunkum*. I say qualified in that
science is still very much in its infancy right now to respond to many questions, but I think
Hawking and Mlodinow, among many others are making a pretty good fist of it. I'm
confident there are many analogous examples in life, the world and the cosmos, that will help
scientists work through the issues to understanding. To say otherwise is not really helpful.
Cheers

1.6.2011 | 3:11am
ZdenekV says:

YOS :"Demonstrate by scientific means and without begging the question that an objective
universe exists. "
Well, naturalists of course reject the claim / assumption that we can *demonstrate*, in your
sense, that there is an independently existing world which has the nature our theories say it
has, so they would try to offer something weaker viz knowledge of the worlds existence based
on *inference to the best explanation*.
That is , we know that there is an independently existing world ( and unobservables like
neutrinos etc ) by inference to the best explanation which provides knowledge which is not
analytic ( ie not a priori ). Again , since there is no useful a priori knowledge of the world ( a
priori knowledge is analytic and useless in this regard because it is guaranteed by the
structure of our concepts ) you cannot know anything about the world in this manner; or this
is what the naturalists will want to say and again takes us to their rejection of the a priori.
Little bit more about a priori knowledge and why it is of little significance in philosophy:
thanks to Quines criticism largely ( in his Two Dogmas ) the naturalists argue that a priori
knowledge is is analytically true that is, guaranteed to be true by the structure of our
concepts.
But , and here is the key thing , any such analytic knowledge will be empty. It fails to tell us
anything substantial about the world. Here they are in agreement with Locke, who saw
clearly that conceptually guaranteed truths are always uninformative :
". . . [H]e trifles with words who makes such a proposition, which, when it is made, contains
no more than one of the terms does, and which a man was supposed to know before: v.g. A
triangle has three sides, or Saffron is yellow..... . . [T] hose trifling propositions that have
a certainty in them, but tis but a verbal certainty, but not instructive." (Locke, 1690, Book
IV, Chapter VIII.).
So, in other words, a priori knowledge ( if there even is such a thing ) is of no philosophical
significance. Philosophy needs only the empirical way of knowing.

1.6.2011 | 3:30am
ZdenekV says:
YOS :"No one ever said that scientism was not rampant in this, the collapse of the Modern
Ages. For some insights, read Mary Midgley's THE MYTHS WE LIVE BY. "
Sorry but I dont buy Midgleys criticism. Her entire line is based on precisely the assumption
I have been criticizing viz. that there is such a thing called "First Philosophy"and
"philosophical method", yielding "philosophical knowledge" which is not only distinct from
scientific knowledge but that such philosophical knowledge ( read a priori conceptual
knowledge ) can be used to criticize science.
The criticism of the so called "scientism" people like Midgley make is based on this
discredited assumption about philosophy ( their argument is that scientism confuses
philosophical questions and problems with scientific questions and problems ) and as I
argued it simply does not hold water roughly for the reasons I glossed ( there is no such thing
as philosophical method to begin with etc ).

1.6.2011 | 8:04am
Papalinton says:
Hi Peter

"Papalinton, your "saddened" over me "never" seeing what you have to say is even more
disengenuous ..... etc. My mailbox is always open, and you can figure out my email address
from my website at the end of the first post by me ......."
PapaL
Peter, you've missed the point entirely. My comments were canned, censured. They did not
want you or anyone else on the FT site to read them. Your right as an adult to deal with any
message you receive as you decide was taken away from you. It was a decision taken right out
of your hands. You were adjudged incapable of responding to the comment and therefore it
was subsequently proscribed from publication. You were treated as a child. As indeed I was
shabbily treated. I was censured anonymously by some person for reasons I do not know and
about which no communication has been opened to me. Dishonour and deceit seems alive in
First Things. As an open forum, I believe we have both been treated unfairly; and I should
not have to resort to another channel to communicate with you, whether e-mail or otherwise.
Indeed the opportunity for other readers to respond was also taken away from them. I would
suggest that should a comment be withheld, a common courtesy would be to at least offer an
explanation, or to note that a comment was made and by whom and note that the moderator
has withheld the comment. At least everyone would then know an attempt has been made to
provide a response and it is not lost into the internet ether.
Peter
Re 'Our Lady of the Hills. How long did it take you to unearth that bit of information, and
why does it matter in the slightest to you?
PapaL
About 10 seconds. As you did not declare your stance in any of your comboxes I took the
opportunity to review to whom I was talking. As I say, context is everything. And I usually
find many if not most theists are a little shy in declaring their interest, particularly the
scientists and philosophers as if it may compromise the authority from which they comment.

And they would be right. Many of the commenters over at BioLogos, also, are afflicted by a
reticence to declare their theist leanings. Don't get me wrong, they are good people. But truly,
to believe that someone actually got up from being dead [No not that one, I'm talking about
Lazarus] and another actually walking on water [and again no, not that One; Peter], is a bit of
a stretch.
Peter
Instead, it is just some more off-topic taunting about the religion of fundies while pretending
that I too am sufficently like a fundie. That's what all your trolling (disguised as attempts to
enlighten me) is all about, isn't it?
PapaL
Not at all Peter. My approach simply attempts to set the record firm that there is no
equivocation about atheism being anything less than a respectable and viable worldview.
Sometimes a little 'shock and awe' to jolt one out of his/her comfort zone is required. And
obviously, you are a little uncomfortable. The tenor of your comments indicates so. It's not
you the man, or father or family man or person that I am challenging, we are after all
brothers in our common humanism. I am challenging the veracity of your worldview. And I
know from research in psychology and psychiatry that the harder one attempts to pry
another from their belief, the tighter and more inward people respond in holding onto their
beliefs. Reason of itself can never overcome faith if one does not wish it so from inside. So i
am not attempting to de-convert. That is a lost cause. Catholicism has taught you well,
despise the atheist; in earlier times, kill the atheist and their families, and confiscate their
assets; always done properly under the aegis of the pope, according to papal decree. It was
common practice. Catholics to this very day despise atheism not so much as some silly devilworshipper concept, or a being at satan's command, the sort of thing you hear from the
pulpit; rather because atheism is a real and present danger and threat to the institution of
papal supremacy and the hierarchy of the church. Whether you are a fundie or not is beside
the point.
Peter
No, I take the Biblical descriptions to be metaphorical for the way the people there will burn
with hatred.
PapaL
And religious people don't burn with hatred. Tell that to the 200 deaf kids raped Boston in
the care of the priest. Now that is hatred and corrupt personal power, and he still dies a good
catholic priest.
Peter
I don't think it will surprise you in the least to learn that none of the people I have just
described are Christian, and that the worst of the bunch are atheists.
PapaL
I do enjoy your sense of humour, Peter. I say let's join Pakistan and bring back blasphemy
and heresy as capital crimes, like it used to be in the 'good old days'.
Cheers

1.6.2011 | 11:53am
balt_orioles1954 says:

An awful lot of words above here and still nothing. The issues is who begat G-d since G-d
created the universe. Someone implied above that we need to consider something other than
linear, and that is true. Like MCsquared, the clue is Pi (3.14nnnn). G-d is a force of energy
like a circle, no beginning, no end, which of course is hard for tiny humans to comprehend,
no instrument will ever be developed to get there. We are too small. And though it is pretty to
think so, that science can prove all things, one needs to understand the measurer, i.e.,
humans, and their limitations, which are vast. If you don't believe this, travel out to where
the universe curves, which you will never see because of the "circular" curve, and tell us what
you look like on that tiny inconceivable dot (earth). Therefore G-d begets all things from the
no beginning and no ending circle (Pi). Pi is an amazing simple little math problem. Keep it
simple, be like the child. The above, and science, is the current example of the fruit from the
tree of knowledge - humans driving themselves crazy - trapping themselves into
desconstructed boxes and feeling hopelessly existential. G-d came to earth with an implied
msg, you will never know anything about how it works out there - tho our heads are huge and
we think we can. So two simple precepts were imparted before He departed. Love G-d and
your neighbor. Can we do just that? Obviously not. But . . . we keep tryin', eh? Deo gratias !
http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/pi/trailer

1.6.2011 | 12:23pm
Dan L says:

1. The line between "doing philosophy" and "doing science" is inherently blurry. Einstein
never performed any experiments. An extra-terrestrial observing Einstein at work probably
could not recognize any difference between what Einstein was doing and what philosophers
do -- writing papers between long pauses for thought.
Scientific theories constitute the same sort of metaphysical systems designed by the likes of
Aristotle, Plato, and Descartes with one important difference; the metaphysical systems
developed by modern scientific theorists is calibrated against the accumulated results of
empirical science.
Historically, the line is even blurrier, as Galileo, Newton, Pascal, and Boyle probably would
have all called themselves philosophers rather than scientists. So we can see that there has
never been a time when scientists were NOT doing philosophy. There is no bright white line
between the fields of philosophical metaphysics and science. In fact, science is really just
checking your answers while making metaphysical deductions. So the plaint that these
scientists are actually doing philosophy -- thereby giving the lie to their own claims -- has no
teeth. The claim is that scientists are better philosophers than philosophers, "philosophy is
dead" should almost certainly be read figuratively.
2. The more interesting part of the criticism you seem to elide completely: that is, that
professional philosophers simply do not understand empirical science well enough to make
it, in your words, "vulnerable to refutation by reason." For such philosophical refutations of
scientific metaphysics inevitably rest on interpretations of "order" and "chaos" as yours
above, as well as "time," "causality," etc. The criticism is that these concepts have very
particular -- and rather peculiar -- interpretations within science that are rather different
from traditional philosophical interpretations of these concepts. Philosophers may be wellequipped to argue about the traditional philosophical interpretations, but for the most part
they are not scientifically literate enough to engage in epistemically normative discussions
about the concepts as understood by scientists.
The result is that scientists HAVE to engage in philosophy because philosophers aren't
keeping up. It's a waste of time to argue about order and chaos with a philosopher who can
give only the roughest account of thermodynamics and information theory. Such a person is

also unequipped to usefully discuss time and space, the big bang, causality (and thereby
teleology), etc.
This is not to say that scientists make better philosophers than philosophers. But
philosophers who aren't scientifically literate aren't equipped to even start discussing, let
alone rebut, the metaphysical arguments made by scientists. I don't think the answer is to
write blog posts whining about the philosophical pretensions of scientists. The answer is for
philosophers to educate themselves about science.

1.6.2011 | 12:31pm
Aldebaran says:

Again, my frame of reference differs from that of balt_orioles1954 (I have no need of the god
concept, myself, nor do I need anyone to tell me whom to love and whom not to love), but his
basic point bears repeating: Few here seem to realize that the universe has no obligation to
conform to little human concepts, be they of science, logic, or theology. Of course, there is
nothing wrong with theorizing and exploring a subject, or trying to advance knowledge.
Rather, it is the firm emotional attachment to your various perspectives, and the need to be
"right", that is so pitiable and absurd.
All the ruffled peacock's feathers, above, demonstrate that this discussion is clearly no longer
a dispassionate exploration of the subject, but instead yet another Internet ego-battle, albeit
with participants whose IQs appear to be a standard deviation or two above the average-which makes the tone of the debate even less excusable.
By all means, though, keep displaying your peacock's tails, while taking a nip out of others', if
it makes you feel better. If there is a superior non-human intelligence that is somehow
observing your antics, then you are no doubt providing him with a good laugh (or the ET
equivalent thereof).

1.6.2011 | 1:53pm
harry says:

Let me approach the existence of supernatural realities from another angle, since the current
horse has not only been beat to death but is ready for packing into dog food cans.
Those who went before us were not stupid. Because they didn't have our technology, we smile
at their misinterpretation of things due to their perception of the material Universe not being
as precise as ours. Yet they had the same intellectual capacity we do and it is foolish not take
their collective wisdom, and their understanding of reality, into consideration. A traditional
belief, like the idea of the existence of our supernatural, rational souls, became traditional
because it rang true to many intelligent people who went before us.
For example, how can there be intelligence without the ability to seize upon and be affected
by abstract concepts? How can an immaterial, abstract concept affect, or be seized upon by,
matter and energy alone as in strictly natural thought processes? Some very ancient
answers to those questions, answers that have persisted for millennia, like the existence of
the immaterial, rational soul, have persisted because they rang true to many people.
Consider the thinking of one Gregory of Nyssa, who was born about A.D. 335:
A definition of the soul is then given, for the sake of clearness in the succeeding discussion.
It is a created, living, intellectual being, with the power, as long as it is provided with organs,

of sensuous perception. For "the mind sees," not the eye; take, for instance, the meaning of
the phases of the moon. The objection that the "organic machine" of the body produces all
thought is met by the instance of the water-organ. Such machines, if thought were really an
attribute of matter, ought to build themselves spontaneously: whereas they are a direct proof
of an invisible thinking power in man.
The water-organ, an amazing musical instrument, was an example of the technology of his
time. It is apparent from Gregory's remarks that the notion that the strictly natural can
produce rational thought is not a new idea. It was replaced with the notion that a
supernatural soul was necessary for rational thought. This became the traditional belief. G.
K. Chesterton pointed out that, Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all
classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that
arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
Today, even the vast majority of those who merely happen to be walking around have
concluded there are realities beyond matter and energy alone. Were all those people in the
past, and are all those people presently walking around, stupid? Ignorant? Irrational?
Liars? All of those conclusions are unreasonable. I think a simple explanation, and one that is
reasonable, is that it is no less difficult to explain a spiritual experience to one who hasn't had
one, or even to one who has, than it would be to explain what the color blue is like to one
who has been completely blind from birth. A spiritual experience, in spite of the difficulty or
impossibility of articulating to another what is was like, nonetheless profoundly confirms
what one already knew intuitively or had already *logically* concluded: there are
supernatural realities. That is why the belief in the supernatural persists.
The tiny fraction of those who happen to be walking around, who are hard core, atheistic
materialists, are put in the rather awkward position of either concluding Everybody is
stupid, or ignorant, or irrational, or liars but us, or that they alone have missed something
that was seized upon by everyone else. Before they decide the former is the case, they should
be able to demonstrate how a massive amount of digital logic found in the DNA molecule
the precise instructions for assembling vast quantities of miniature, three dimensional
protein machines required for the cell's metabolic / reproductive functionality got there
mindlessly.
They can't, of course, because the nanotechnology of life is beyond us. Until we understand at
least one way a phenomenon could be intentionally brought about, there can be no
explanation of how natural processes alone could have brought it about mindlessly and
accidentally. Until a savage learns what it would take to build a laptop computer, he is in no
position to claim laptops can come about accidentally. Laptops are crude technology
compared to life. Savages will be manufacturing them long before devout atheists are
building life forms from scratch and then explaining how the required processes came about
mindlessly.
So, devout atheists, please explain how the digital logic in DNA got there and how
immaterial, abstract concepts can affect and be seized upon by intellects composed of matter
and energy alone. Until then, you need to admit that a transcendent, supernatural mind is
currently the best explanation for much of what we find in nature, if not for nature itself, and
that supernatural realities such as our souls make sense of our ability to grasp
immaterial, abstract concepts, and nature alone does not. It just might be that not everybody
is stupid, or ignorant, or irrational, or liars but you.

1.6.2011 | 2:43pm

RioRico says:

A basic problem: Some questions are meaningless. I'll argue that WHY is always about
intent, and HOW is always about agency. If I ask, "WHY did you shoot me?" I want to know
the intent, not the agency. The answer to "HOW did you shoot me?" may be: "With a
derringer", or "I aimed low", or some other description of the process. But that's the HOW,
not the WHY.
Asking WHY assumes that intent was involved. "HOW is the sky blue?" has answers
involving light, atmosphere, other physical tidbits. "WHY is the sky blue" can only be
answered with something like, "Because a sky-god wanted it that way", which isn't really
useful.
So we ask, "HOW is the universe as it is?" and delve into observable phenomena. If we ask,
"WHY is the universe as it is?" we enter the realm of theology. A parallel: "WHY do humans
get sick?" leads to moralism and mysticism; "HOW do humans get sick?" leads to studies of
observable processes and agencies, factors that may actually be dealt with.
When dealing with physical reality (including our universe or multiverse or whatever), intent
is irrelevant. I don't care WHY a volcano erupts -- Vulcan's mood is beyond my inquiry -- but
knowing HOW it erupts may be critical. Leave your WHYs at the door, please.

1.6.2011 | 3:53pm
Papalinton says:
Hi balt_orioles1954

You say, "If you don't believe this, travel out to where the universe curves, which you will
never see because of the "circular" curve, and tell us what you look like on that tiny
inconceivable dot (earth)."
Perhaps there is news for you, coming from 2010 at the site below:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/727073.stm
and here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqb1lSdqRZY
The universe is flat, and that is one of the reasons it will continue expanding. There are no
curves as such.
Cheers

1.6.2011 | 3:59pm
Papalinton says:
Hi Dan L
You say, "Historically, the line is even blurrier, as Galileo, Newton, Pascal, and Boyle
probably would have all called themselves philosophers rather than scientists."
Well no. Scientist was not in common use until much later. All these people would have been

'natural philosophers' a term more commonly used in their time, but scientists nonetheless.
Cheers

1.6.2011 | 4:38pm
Papalinton says:
Hi RioRico
You make a very good point.
The imprecision in the manner that 'why' and 'how' is used does confuse the issue of
discussion. To ask 'why is there something rather than nothing' is really to ask 'how is there
something rather than nothing'?
The 'Why' has much to do with intentionality, motive. To ask the 'why' question is rightly as
you say, all about invoking a purpose, which is quite simply misleading and rather draws one
into the web of superstition and supernaturalism and away from science.
The more appropriate approach would be to preface most propositions about humans and
their relationship to the world and the cosmos with a 'How?'.
To ask "Why?' is to anthropomorphise the question into looking for beings [spirits in rocks.
and rivers etc] with design and intent.
Cheers

1.6.2011 | 4:56pm
Dan L says:
@Papalinton:
I understand that "scientist" as a word wasn't in use in the seventeenth century. My point is
that even if there HAD been such a word, Newton and Pascal wouldn't have thought of
themselves as such. Both were mathematicians and theologians (in our modern sense of the
terms) as much as scientists, and I imagine they would have objected to anyone trying to
pigeonhole them into any one modern academic field.
This is mostly irrelevant to my argument. Scientists have always and still do engage in
philosophy, because engaging in philosophy is simply part of doing science -- always has
been and still is. My point is that it is not scientists engaging in philosophy that is causing
problems (because it is what they necessarily do), it is that philosophy professors are not
keeping up with the particular philosophical problems posed by modern science. This leads
to antipathy between the two fields when philosophers criticize or elide the results of modern
science without properly understanding the scientific perspective on the phenomenon.
Scientists inevitably infer from such events that the philosophical basis of such critiques is
simply scientific ignorance, and as a result dismiss philosophical criticisms as being either
uninformed or completely meaningless.
I disagree with these scientists -- philosophy as an academic field does have great potential to
further science by offering reasoned criticism. On the other hand, I can empathize with them.
I see accusations of "scientism" hurled around, and instead of a real argument given, the
accuser simply tells the accused that he is "philosophically unsophisticated." But is the
accuser scientifically unsophisticated? As every grammar teacher and every music instructor

tells their students, "You need to know the rules before you can break them." Philosophical
critiques of science are only useful if they're based on knowledge of science rather than
ignorance of science.
In debates about scientism and the limits of science, I routinely see the philosophers giving
the scientists reading lists of decades- or centuries-old philosophical texts -- presumably
subject matter falling somewhat outside the scientists' professional interests. I'm only
suggesting that the philosophers take their own advice and spend some time familiarizing
themselves with the intellectual provenance of the scientists as well.

1.6.2011 | 5:12pm
John Haldane says:
It is gratifying to see so lively and extensive a discussion in response to my article replying to
the claims and arguments of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinov. A number of themes
and topics recur throughout the discussion, but I should like to address a couple of related
matters. First, the relationship between scientific, philosophical and religious thought, and
second, a point of apparent inconsistency in Hawkings and Mlodinovs general theoretical
stance (it would be ironical to term that stance a philosophical one given their dismissal of
philosophy).
First, the relationship between science, philosophy and theology, and, to begin with, that
between scientific (or more broadly empirical), and philosophical thought. One or two
contributors may have been mislead by my defence of philosophy against Hawking and
Mlodinov, concluding that I regard it as a pure a priori enquiry involving only conceptual and
logical analyses.
My starting point was the opposition between philosophy and science implied by Hawking
and Mlodinov in their claim that the former is dead and that the route to ultimate truth now
lies with the latter. I then suggested that they themselves then lapse into philosophical
theorising, which proves to be flawed in various particulars, as well as being selfundermining of the claim of philosophys redundancy.
Talk of science and of philosophy involves broad generalisations and raises the question of
whether, if they differ, the difference is one of kind or of degree. In fact I think each is too
various in its aspects for any general question of that form to have a single answer. What I
certainly reject, however, is the view that philosophy is a pure a priori investigation. As it
happens I discussed this issue in a previous article in First Things (What Philosophy can Do,
November 2005, No. 157). Since this is only available on-line to subscribers perhaps I may
quote from a passage towards the end:
The possibility of philosophy as rational abstract reflection does not depend upon having a
view of the scheme of truths and of modes of enquiry of the sort described by Hume and
rejected by Quine [that is of truths being distinguishable as either factual or logical and of
enquiry as being either empirical or conceptual]. Here the phrase abstract reflection comes
back into its own. Supposing we say that concepts are formed in our dealings with reality and
so are, in that respect, answerable to it. Even concepts built out of these reality-determined
concepts have a connection back to actuality. Still, abstraction and reflection might remove
one very far from the specific let alone the particular, and at that point one may be thinking
about the most general and abstract possibilities. If what I have said is right, however, these
scenarios will not be ungrounded possibilities. It will not, for example, be sufficient to show
that something is possible to show that no logical contradiction follows from its supposition.
Rather one will have to look back to reality asking what there determines how things can be.

Still there will be conceptual truths to think about, not ones true merely by virtue of
definition but propositions the negation of which cannot be made sense of given the body of
beliefs, concepts and conceptual connections we accept. On this understanding thought and
world, or conceptual contents and descriptions of reality, interpenetrate
As regards the relationship between philosophy, science and theology, this again is bound to
be complex and variable depending on the matter in hand, but in general and considering in
particular the question of what theology could claim to add, I offer the following.
While the metaphysician may be criticized for paying insufficient attention to empirical
enquiry, and the natural scientist too little to abstract argument about ultimate principles, at
least both appear to be directed towards describing the structure of things: metaphysical and
natural, respectively. This seems to exhaust the possible totality of reality, and so if there is
anything for theology to do, it can only be to provide a poetic accompaniment comprised of
pleasing imagery but not revealing any objective truth.
This is a now a fairly common view but it rests on a deep misunderstanding about the nature
of enquiry and explanation. A clearer and better view shows the necessity but also the limits
of each discipline, and an order of priority among them that elevates theology. To begin with,
we need to distinguish between three different kinds of answer to the question why?
First, why? may be addressed to the occurrence of an event where the appropriate answer
takes the form of an explanation citing observed or presumed prior events and patterns of
occurrence. Pressed repeatedly this brings us to a description of the fundamental elements of
the material universe and the laws governing their interactions.
Second, why? may be addressed to the ultimates of any theory and answered by showing
that in some sense these things are necessary. For example, while it may not be necessary
that objects have the character they do in this universe, it may be argued that it is necessary
that in any universe that could exist there would have to be objects and events of some sort or
another. This is a metaphysical explanation.
Third, however, why? may be addressed to whatever might occur or be the case and then be
answered not in terms of events, or elements, or laws, or necessities, but in terms of ends or
purposes. This is a personal explanation.
The reintegration of science, metaphysics and theology lies in the direction of showing that
observation gives rise to questions that science answers, but that these themselves raise
questions that call for metaphysical responses, and that these in turn point to a different kind
of explanation which, though ultimate, is also personal. Theology does not do the work of
metaphysics let alone that of science, but it does provide the most transcendent answer
which is also a statement of purpose.
Returning to Hawking and Mlodinov, I said that their theorising is flawed. That claim is
elaborated within my original article in relation to their use of M-theory to provide a
counterpart to the many-solar-systems response to Newton, and in the assertion of selfcausation ex nihilo. As one contributor points out, however, there is an evident tension
between their stated view that if two physical theories or models accurately predict the same
events, one cannot be said to be more real than the other and the postulation of a
multiplicity of really existing, but in principle empirically inaccessible universes. Whether
one prefers to calls this a philosophical or a theoretical contradiction may be a matter of
taste, but it certainly calls for a degree of conceptual clarity that is evidently missing.

1.6.2011 | 5:24pm
Ye Olde Statistician says:

Papa
[Natural science] is not the only source of knowledge but it is the primary source of human
investigation that seeks a response to who and what we are, where we came from, our
relationship with each other [including all other living beings], our relationship the the
environment, the world, the cosmos.
YOS
That's quite a load to carry. But natural science is the science of nature, and nature is
precisely what is in motion (that is, in change). It is the science of the metrical properties of
physical bodies. Anything that is not metrical and physical is beyond its purview; natural
science simply cannot see it. Those focused on precisely measuring physical bodies -- and
fanboys of it -- understandably conclude that because their method cannot see a thing, that
thing is not there. This would be like an astronomer whose only tool is a telescope
disbelieving in microbes because anything not viewable by telescope is not objectively real.
If you can't measure it, it isn't natural science. So it cannot answer for who we are. That is
something known only from introspection. It cannot quite tell us "what we are." At best it can
tell us that we belong to a species of a certain sort and etc. But "what is it like to be a bat?"
There are aspects of the human being that are simply not metrical. We experience color,
sound, pain, and so forth. Galileo, Hume, Descartes, and the other Revolutionaries quite
explicitly shoved these "qualia" into the closet of the mind. They were "subjective" and
therefore not the proper business of science. The best science can do -- and it is very good so
far as it goes -- it to explicate reflection of photons, compression of air waves, propagation of
nerve impulses. But we really ought not to confuse the telephone network with the message,
or the footprint with the journey.
Consider Mary in the Gray Room.
The notion that natural science can explain our relationships with each other is silly. It can
explain a lot of bodily functions. But as Justin Barrett, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford
University, put it: "Suppose that science produces a convincing account for why I think my
wife loves me. Should I then stop believing that she does? Will the natural scientist measure
love on an amorometer? On what scale will it be measured?
Besides, the idea that all things in nature have natural explanations is not exactly a new one:
"For all natural things can be reduced to one principle which is nature; and all voluntary
things can be reduced to one principle which is human reason, or will."
-- T. Aquinas, ST I.2.3. adv.2
-

1.6.2011 | 7:51pm
Papalinton says:
Hi Prof Haldane
You say, "This is a now a fairly common view but it rests on a deep misunderstanding about
the nature of enquiry and explanation. A clearer and better view shows the necessity but also
the limits of each discipline, and an order of priority among them that elevates theology."

PapaL
How so is theology elevated in an order of priority? It is the premier service onto which
science and philosophy append? [I suspect many theists would argue this way simply on the
basis of personal proclivity and a long and deep personal investment in such a view, that
would constitute the world falling in to consider any other viewpoint].
Is it simply because of the historical nature of theology as man's first attempt at providing
some form of explanatory power [in the absence of science as we know of it now] in satisfying
our natural inquisitiveness and quelling the fear experienced in facing inexplicable nature
and things that go bump in the night?
Professor Haldane, you third definition for 'why', a personal one, is an explanation of sorts.
And it fits very well in the theological context. Personal experiences, by definition, preclude
any investigation. Such a proposition is predicated on belief, on faith. So I guess from your
perspective it must be included into your definitional explanation. But it is a two-edged
sword. I cite the many bleeding and crying Marian statues and paint splotches, and peanut
jelly on toast. Indeed one of the experiences of recent times that stirred quite some flutter is
the Medjugorje apparitions at below:
http://www.medjugorje.org/
And the controversy continues as strong today with millions and millions of catholic
believers continuing active support for the supernatural event although the church has
dispelled it as nonsense at below:
http://www.catholicdoors.com/isit/isit10.htm
So the question really, about the personal nature of 'Why?', is how valuable is it in advancing
human knowledge and experience?
The consideration of 'Why' questions at the personal level is a pretty slippery slope.
Professor Haldane, you say, "Theology does not do the work of metaphysics let alone that of
science, but it does provide the most transcendent answer which is also a statement of
purpose. "
PapaL
That transcendent answer of purpose though, is couched in terms of as you say, " .... point to
a different kind of explanation which, though ultimate, is also PERSONAL [my
capitalisation]."
My argument though is that there is where it should stay. It does not advance the
commonwealth of knowledge and understanding of humans universally. Indeed the best that
it can do is find and identify others of a similar mind of similar personal experience, to form
a club, if you will, a catholic club in this case on this thread. But such personal experience are
not global, are not universal. Indeed such experiences can in measure be as various as there
are people experiencing them. We know from history that much internal disparateness and
dissension, even in catholicism, is very much derived from personal interpretation of the
exact same information or evidence. Re the Medjugorje apparitions.
Re Hawking and Mladinow and your, "Whether one prefers to calls this a philosophical or a
theoretical contradiction may be a matter of taste, but it certainly calls for a degree of
conceptual clarity that is evidently missing." I say, perhaps conceptual clarity is called for,
but that does not diminish the substantive framework of their proposal into some form of
amorphous soup.
My two pennies' worth

Cheers

1.6.2011 | 9:07pm
Ye Olde Statistician says:
Some may find this useful:

http://thomism.wordpress.com/2011/01/05/what-is-a-philosophical-question-as-opposedto-a-scientific-one/

1.6.2011 | 10:09pm
Poet says:
I'd like to thank the good professor and all who have contributed to the discussion. As a poet,
I'd like to believe my strength is in poetry. Certainly not metaphysics, although I love to taste
the flavors. I have learned much from the discussion. One question:
What would you say is conserved
whether or not the big bang occurs (occurred)?
Does Hawking say gravity? Anything else come to mind?
Can we imagine the absence of the big bang...and what is there nevertheless?

1.6.2011 | 10:51pm
dromd says:

Philosophy has exposed the illusion that man has created for himself.Through science, man
is seeking to separate the truth from the illusion.

1.6.2011 | 11:24pm
dromd says:
The greatest truth for man is death.Until we can accept death, all truth will escape us.

1.6.2011 | 11:34pm
Teacher says:
My problem with the above article is that it criticizes the the science for not answering the
ultimate questions of the origin of the multiverse or the regularity of the physical laws in our
own universe. Fair enough criticism, and it is only natural to want to further explain that
which is left unknown but the professor then goes on to suggest that somehow this mean
there must be a creator god. The professor writes,
The search for the source of order must reach a dead end if scientific
explanation is the only sort there is. But it is not the only sort, for there
is also explanation by reference to purpose and intention.
The universes otherwise inexplicable regularity will have an adequate

explanation if it derives from the purposes of an agent.

This is the biggest non-sequitor I have encountered and yet I see it everywhere. Natural
Theology is finished because it cannot resolve this conflict. In what way does science's
inability to (yet) explain the regularity observed in the universe in any way support the idea
an "adequate explanation" for the source of order must be derived "from the puropses of an
agent?" The subtle implication of this non-sequitor subtly posits that the two competing
explanations (no creator god vs a creator god) are somehow on equal ground. They are not.
Science has carried humanity towards the realization that there is no god through centuries
of hard work, observation, experimentation, etc. All of which must be confirmed by a
community of experts.
Humanity has reaped countless benefits from science's efforts and come a long way to
understanding our place in the universe. Natural Theology and theists simply pick up at the
end of the narrative and say "I'm not completely satisfied with this answer, so there must be a
supernatural explanation." There is no basis for any truth claims from Natural Theology and
more people should be able to identify their rhetorical strategy as a slightly more
(rhetorically) sophisticated version of school yard bullying. With fingers pointing and
laughter in their voices theists/deists/etc. say "What do you mean you can't explain the
source of order in the observable universe? Look at science, and its limited explanatory
powers." How silly is it to proceed from that to the idea that god must have created the
universe if science cannot (yet) explain everything.
Observing regularity in the universe is not evidence for god, it is an as yet unexplained
phenomenon. The jump from unexplained phenomenon to supernatural creator is silly and
far less satisfying than science's "Wait and see, keep up the hard work" position.

1.7.2011 | 7:08am
Papalinton says:

Hi Dan L
"I understand that "scientist" as a word wasn't in use in the seventeenth century. My point is
that even if there HAD been such a word, Newton and Pascal wouldn't have thought of
themselves as such. Both were mathematicians and theologians (in our modern sense of the
terms) as much as scientists, and I imagine they would have objected to anyone trying to
pigeonhole them into any one modern academic field."
PapaL
Perhaps Newton et al were a little more honest in their day, in comparison to many
nowadays. Many, and I have noted even on this blog, are keen to identify themselves as
scientists, theoretical physicists etc first and foremost, pretty much in line with "any one
modern academic field" [as you say], but seem reticent in freely revealing their religious
predisposition. And as you know context is important.
Notwithstanding that, there is a little bit of professional argey-bargey between scientists and
philosophers. But largely the heat generated is pretty low on the Kelvin scale, indeed on any
thermometric scale.
You say, "I see accusations of "scientism" hurled around, and instead of a real argument
given, the accuser simply tells the accused that he is "philosophically unsophisticated."
PapaL
Yes. That word 'scientism' is largely coined in terms of competing belief systems in which
theists accuse those, particularly atheists, of a belief in scientism. The connotation implied is

that scientism is 'rreeaally baaaad' for you. It is always used in a pejorative sense. It is a word
favoured by believers to develop a context in which an alternative belief system, that is the
antithesis to their christian belief system, can be compared. It is very difficult for theists to
acknowledge that atheism is not a belief system. Rather it is simply a lack of belief, and this is
where 'scientism' comes in.
As for a classic case of scientism [you have to laugh at such hubris] is from the physicist
Ernest Rutherford: "there is physics and there is stamp-collecting."
Anyway Dan