On Being

I am not responsible for the precise accurateness of the facts presented in the following post, although I did my best to inform myself before sharing them with you. If in doubt, please check everything for yourselves.

I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of the beginning. How can something not be and then, all of a sudden, begin to be? Fortunately, I was not the first kid on the block to ask this question, the ancient Greeks went way ahead of me, thousands of years ago, when they started this new field in Philosophy called Metaphysics, the treatise on Being.

The most notable idea of this domain was the obvious observation that being cannot come from non-being, without an efficient cause, in the Aristotelian sense of the term, namely that form of causality which imparts the first notable change upon the subject.

Even though natural philosophy had always advocated that the world was eternal in the past, as opposed to the Biblical view that it had been created by God, a finite time ago, lately, scientific progress in astrophysics has advanced the idea of a past Big-Bang, that humongous explosion out of which everything that is physical came into existence.

This idea started out with Edwin Hubble’s observation that the universe was expanding and was definitively placed among scientific dogma with the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem of the past-finite universe, which showed that any universe/multiverse which is, on average, in a state of cosmic expansion, has an absolute beginning, a space-time boundary, in the past. This beginning must be understood not simply as the beginning of solid “stuff”, taking on a form, but as the coming into existence of space-time itself.

The theorem allowed for indefinite consecutive expansion-contraction-expansion sequences, thus avoiding the absolute beginning problem, so troublesome for atheists, but clearly posed insurmountable challenges for a universe undergoing such a sequence by pointing out the occurrence of inevitable quantum instability during the contraction phase that would make a subsequent expansion akin to impossible.

It’s important to understand that this model does not require an eternal past, and trying to extend it to past infinity is hard to square with the Second Law of Thermodynamics and seems to be ruled out by the accumulation of dark energy, which would, in time, bring an end to the cycling behavior.

Thus, it soon became apparent that physicists needed to reconcile their old naturalistic beliefs of a past eternal universe with the newly found scientific data which confirmed the Biblical idea that the world did, in fact, have an absolute beginning.

But atheists were not quick to give up on the fight, so, even though they were forced one step back, they still tried to find ways to explain an absolute beginning without invoking a Creator as a necessary cause.

The standard cosmological model offers a mathematical description of how the infinitely small, infinitely dense, infinitely hot, infinitely curved initial singularity became our current beautiful cosmic home, following the Big-Bang.

Important names in science, such as Stephen Hawking, James Hartle, Lawrence Krauss and Alexander Vilenkin, have tried to offer alternative models that would not imply the existence of an initial singularity, such as the “No Boundary” and the “Tunneling from Nothing” theories, none of which affect the fundamental prediction of the standard model regarding the absolute beginning of the universe, though.

However, these scientists and others have committed an unforgivable “sin”, by taking upon themselves to disprove metaphysical truths by appealing to mathematical formulas. More specifically, they’ve declared metaphysics obsolete, redundant and useless at providing an explanation of mere existence and have instead offered a story of the universe, coming into being, uncaused and “out of nothing”, a truly “blasphemous” assertion in the eyes of any philosopher.

In support of this, they argued that, if virtual particles can come into being apparently uncaused and “out of nothing” in our universe, then it would be entirely possible for the universe, as a whole, to do the same and thus become “a free lunch”, as a result of a quantum fluctuation or by applying the laws of quantum gravity.

Krauss, in particular, argued that, since the positive and negative energy in the universe balance each other out, and since all matter is convertible into energy, then the total energy in the universe would amount to exactly zero, which would correspond to a state of nothingness, as in non-being. That process could somehow be reversed and thus have nothingness turned into equal amounts of positive and negative energy, which is exactly what we currently observe in our universe. So, he argues, one would expect to find equal amounts of positive and negative energy in the universe, if it started out of nothing.

Alexander Vilenkin also used his “Tunneling from Nothing” theory to calculate a positive probability of a universe/multiverse to emerge spontaneously from non-being, or nothingness in its correct metaphysical sense, through a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling, while the Hawking-Hartle “No Boundary” model, in particular, raised the possibility that the universe, even though is finite, had no initial singularity to produce a boundary (hence the name of the model). Both of these models have, thus, tried to exclude the necessity for a primordial efficient cause of the universe.

Hawking was also concerned with our universe’s fine tuning for intelligent life, so he argued that there are multiple cosmological theories which point to there being a multiverse out there, as opposed to just this one universe. He claimed that if the number of possible universes is infinite and each of them is governed by different physical constants and quantities, then, by applying the anthropic principle, it is possible that an universe just like ours could emerge by mere chance alone, with no need for some creator to do the fine tuning, specifically for our sake.

A variant of the string theory is the M-theory, which also postulates the existence of a great number of parallel universes and which claims that our Big-Bang could have been the result of a collision of two hyper dimensional membranes or “branes”, belonging to other existing universes, therefore ruling out the need for an efficient cause, outside of creation, for our universe and arguing that the initial “nothingness” which exploded into our Big-Bang was actually just the foreseen contact point between two such colliding parallel “branes”.

Even though this latter theory does admit an efficient cause for the emergence of our universe, it still tries to dodge the God hypothesis by pointing out that whatever may exist beyond nature is still nature so it doesn’t need to be supernatural.

Previously, the atheistic arguments have also tried to prove that it would be non-sense to speak of causality when looking into the Big-Bang, since causality automatically implies a prior moment in time, before the Bang, when the cause needed to have acted, whereas the Bang created time itself so there would be no moment when a prior cause could have triggered the birth of the universe. Therefore, the Big-Bang must have happened by itself, without a cause.

All in all, they’ve apparently done a pretty good job at taking God out of the picture, at least on paper, prompting prominent militant atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, to declare that, if Darwinism has made God redundant in biology, Hawking and Krauss have achieved the same in physics, by eliminating the need for a Creator of the universe.

But, just like in the story of the emperor’s new clothes, there was one in the crowd who sincerely cried out that the big man was completely naked. This keen observer was none other than the atheists’ nightmare, philosopher of science, Prof. William Lane Craig PhD., “the one man who has managed to put the fear of God into my fellow atheists”, as neuroscientist Sam Harris himself characterized Craig during their famous debate.

On Stephen Hawking’s approach, presented for the general public in his books “A Brief History of Time” and “The Grand Design”, Craig argued that, if the former claims that the universe literally arose spontaneously from non-being, without a cause, then Hawking needs to explain why it is that only universes arise spontaneously from non-being as opposed to anything and everything else, such as bicycles, Beethoven, root beer etc. In Craig’s opinion, Hawking cannot resort to saying that this is due to certain quantum gravitational constraints because if what he speaks of truly is non-being, then there is no quantum gravity or any constraints thereof in non-being as non-being cannot be constrained by anything, since it has no properties.

Hawking would be contradicting himself when saying that “the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing”, as the very presence of these laws and the quantum theory indicate the existence of something rather than nothing. In addition, the laws of gravity are just mathematical equations and, as such, are abstractions which cannot stand in causal relations, therefore, Craig argued, Hawking must mean something else by “nothing”, perhaps a quantum state in which the classical concepts of space, time and general relativity break down.

But if this is what Hawking means by “nothing”, then that’s already something in itself and Hawking needs to explain why the primordial quantum state in question couldn’t have been created by God.

Regarding Hawking’s attempt to explain the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life by appealing to the many worlds hypothesis, Craig argued that before going for that model, we would need to know why the many worlds postulate would be superior to a single cosmic designer hypothesis, in particular what mechanism is there which explains the origin of the many worlds and if that mechanism is itself fine-tuned. If the mechanism in question itself exhibits fine-tuning, then, in fact, fine-tuning hasn’t been explained, it’s just been pushed back a nudge.

Further on, Craig argues that there is no reason to assume that the many worlds, if they exist, are random in their physical constants and quantities or that the number of worlds is itself infinite. If the number is, in fact, finite, then, by applying the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem of the past-finite universe, it follows that the entire multiverse had an absolute beginning in the past. In this context of a finite number of choices as well as a finite amount of time spent since the beginning of the multiverse, Hawking’s claim that randomness could surely have produced finely-tuned universes by now remains gratuitous and unsupported by evidence.

The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem of the past-finite universe/multiverse would also break the defenses of the M-theory by pointing out that, even if what created our universe was still something natural, though from another universe, outside of our nature, that itself must have had an absolute beginning in an efficient cause that is outside of the causing universe’s nature. So, postulating the occurrence of our Big-Bang as a result of already existing universes colliding with each other does nothing to dismiss the need to explain where those already existing universes came from and how they came into being from non-being in the first place.

Craig also noted that Hawking hasn't answered the objection raised by Oxford professor Roger Penrose is his book “The Road to Reality”, in which Penrose explained that, if we are just a random member of a world ensemble or multiverse, then it is incomprehensibly more probable that we should be observing a much different universe than the one we, in fact, observe, namely we should observe a universe in which the cosmic order would be confined within the limits of our solar system but not beyond, enough to ensure our survival locally but not to do science at a cosmic scale. And therefore, Penrose argued, our observations make it overwhelmingly more probable that there is no randomly ordered world ensemble.

On Lawrence Krauss, whose recent book "A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing" endorses Hawking’s model, Craig said that “if, by “nothing”, Krauss means literally “non-being”, then physics is, by its very nature, impotent to explain how being can originate from non-being since physics explains the transition from one physical state to another physical state, according to certain laws of nature, operating on the initial state’s conditions. But, in an absolute origination of being from non-being, there is no transition, it’s not as though there is something that goes from non-being into being, because there is just the beginning, the origin of something, there is no enduring subject that, once had the property of non-existence and then has the property of existence”.

To put it simply, nothingness is not something that is and has the property of non-being, nothingness is the absence of anything at all so it cannot have any properties whatsoever. Therefore it cannot serve as starting-point for any sort of physical state transition and cannot be claimed to have any predictability. There simply is no way to foretell what non-being can produce if it’s true that it can produce anything at all without an efficient cause. So, Krauss’ assertion that you would, in fact, expect to find equal amounts of positive and negative energy in an universe that came out of nothing is groundless.

Craig goes on to show that both Hawking and Krauss have, by virtue of their unfamiliarity with metaphysical discourse, equivocated nothingness as non-being with nothingness as a quantum state, non-solid but still physical and very much existing.

He is being backed-up by an entire mob of physicists who passionately demolishes Krauss’s pretentions by showing that the nothingness he and Hawking speak of when presenting how something can come into being out of nothing is actually the quantum vacuum, a “sea” of fluctuating energy, with a rich physical structure, which preserves all of the physical laws that we are acquainted with. So it’s not non-being, it’s not literally nothing, it’s actually something. Neither Hawking nor Krauss have done anything to explain how something can come into being out of non-being without an efficient cause and why on earth there was an initial quantum vacuum in the first place, instead of just nothing at all.

The virtual particles are, themselves, born of this quantum vacuum and are constrained at a very short life-span, by virtue of Heinseberg’s uncertainty principle and the constrains related to the balancing of positive and negative energy, so they don’t make a good example of how something can come into being out of non-being and still endure indefinitely afterwards, in order to build up our fine universe. In addition, as theoretical physicist David Bohm argued, quantum mechanics is also consistent with a full deterministic approach, so there is no reason to assume that virtual particles come into being uncaused.

Even though Craig agrees with the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem’s mathematical proof that the universe or any ensemble of universes must have had an absolute beginning in the past, he also argues against Vilenkin’s “Tunneling from Nothing” model’s attempt to calculate a positive probability for a universe or the multiverse to spontaneously come into being, uncaused, out of non-being. He claims that it is profoundly incorrect to use mathematical formulas to represent nothingness as an existing concrete entity, and that math can only shed light on the inner workings of physics when it is committed to an accurate and logically consistent description of what can exist, otherwise it becomes an empty form, devoid of meaning and utility.

Furthermore, he went on to show that the quantum fluctuation or the laws of quantum gravity which Hawking and Krauss had hoped would explain how you could have something out of nothing would need real energy fields, which could only exist in being, not in non-being. One cannot apply known physical laws and effects to theoretical entities that have no correspondent in actual reality because their resulting properties would be self-contradictory. Nothingness is not something which exists and has the property of non-being, it is something which cannot exist, specifically because it has no properties, particularly that of being. So, it cannot be used as a member in an equation aimed at computing any sort of probabilities.

The final nail in the coffin of godless creation was Craig’s argument that causality doesn’t require a moment in time prior to the effect, as atheists claimed, in an attempt to dismiss the need for an efficient cause of the Big-Bang. The cause and the effect can be simultaneous and a good example of that is the entanglement phenomenon found in quantum mechanics: whenever a particle changes its state, its entangled pair (if it has one) instantly replicates the same change, over indefinite lengths of space, in no time at all.

But even if we grant the premise that the standard Big-Bang model is wrong and that there was something before space-time, such as quantum gravity, we would still need to explain where that came from and why so, either way, we cannot escape the need for a cause of the universe.

Of course, we can try to avoid the causality issue with respect to quantum gravity and quantum fluctuations by pointing out that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics allows for indeterministic chaos but we must, nevertheless, keep in mind that the observed phenomena is, also, consistent with a full deterministic approach, as David Bohm noticed. So, ultimately, there is no basis for the statement that we don’t need, much less that there can’t be a cause for the universe. Deterministic or not, this cause is clearly at work.

So the conclusion is inescapable: you need a Creator in order to explain why there is something instead of just nothing. It is my belief that the initial zero-volume singularity never existed, either God caused the first historical quanta of space-time and energy into existence, from nothing to something, and kept creating the next quanta during the expansion we call the Big-Bang or He created the primordial quantum vacuum which, in turn, generated our universe.

We know since 1998 that the cosmos is currently accelerating its expansion, astronomers studying the red-shift spectrum of remote supernovae have confirmed it. What this means is that quanta of space-time and, maybe, even of more energy, are still being created. However, we should not mistake this on-going linear creation within historical time with the instant creation of all quanta of physical existence, may it be space, matter or energy, across all of time’s tenses, in that “split-second” of “meta-time”, which is God’s eternity.

If Einstein’s theory of relativity is correct, then past, present and future coexist simultaneously and, therefore, anything else in our universe coexists with itself in all of these three tenses.

If we picture the whole of space-time and anything existing in it as a sponge cake (kind of like as seen here), having a stream of cocoa running from one end to the other (as in from the Big-Bang to whatever is at the other end of the universe’s history), then any slice you cut out of it (representing the whole of the universe at any one moment in time) cannot be explained either by the left or the right side of the remaining cake. Of course, you can explain why the slice has a cocoa insertion in its midst by pointing out that there’s a continuity in the cocoa stream, running all through the cake, but you cannot explain the existence of the slice by appealing to the rest of the cake, since the slice is not the result of either one of the remaining left or right cake pieces. At one point, you have to invoke the baker as an explanation not just for that particular slice but for the entire cake.

I find it ironical that scientists who are very well accredited in their field of expertise fail so miserably when it comes to basic philosophical terminology. As Einstein himself once put it, “a man of science is a poor philosopher”. Both Hawking and Krauss and I’ve personally heard Peter Atkins as well claim that philosophy’s time has run out and that it is science’s turn now to explain the deep mysteries of existence.

As Craig himself once stated, “the one who thinks does not need philosophy is the most apt at being deceived by his philosophical preconceptions”. I think, in this case, those preconceptions pertain to naturalism, the belief that nothing exists outside nature. The above case is clear proof that the arrogance of the self-proclaimed beacons of scientific enlightenment can and does turn into blatant ignorance and ridicule.

Lesson of the day is: be humble and you shall have knowledge, the knowledge of Socrates, the only true knowledge, the knowledge which admits it knows nothing. And no, by “nothing” I don’t mean the quantum vacuum, Mr. Krauss.