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Materialism at the end of its tether
(Note, April 29: the discussion continues with a comment by Kristor showing what is wrong with Barry W.’s challenge to theism.)
Carol Iannone writes:
There was a program on one of the cable channels a few nights ago, about how the universe came into existence. The narrator started the usual gabble about the big bang, but evidently physicists have become aware of the nagging question of what came BEFORE the big bang. Physicist have often sidestepped that question, or so it has seemed, but for some reason they have decided that they can no longer leave it hanging. So they are endeavoring to answer it.
This is their answer: SOMETHING came from NOTHING.
They admit that it is a little hard to figure how SOMETHING can come from NOTHING, but, as one of them said, once you UNDERSTAND that, then you can begin to savor the wondrous world of what physics can reveal about the big bang and how the teeny weeny ball of matter exploded and became everything in the world that we know. They had done their best to make that ball as teeny weeny as they could, evidently, but it is still SOMETHING and they had to find an origin for it somehow, and this is how they’ve done it. The SOMETHING of the tweeny weeny ball came from NOTHING. The LAWS OF PHYSICS allow for SOMETHING to come from NOTHING. Isn’t that grand? And once we UNDERSTAND that, we launch into the wondrous world of physics.
But, in truth, the word for what they are describing is not UNDERSTAND but ACCEPT. That is, accept ON FAITH that the universe came from nothing. Science can tell you no more than that. That is what they would say if they were honest, but to accept something on faith is not really science, is it? So that gives them a problem, and they use the word UNDERSTAND. Rather than ACCEPT. Or rather than WE JUST DON’T KNOW.
- end of initial entry -
A. Zarkov writes:
The idea that something can come from nothing would on its face seem to contradict common sense, but in quantum physics that can and does happen. Usually we think of a perfect vacuum as “nothing,” but the vacuum has physical properties just like particles. [LA replies: this last phrase is ambiguous.] These properties fluctuate and average to zero. In other words, the vacuum is “nothing” only on average. For example two particles, one anti-matter and the other matter, can spontaneously come into existence for an instant and then annihilate each other. Perfect empty space also has what’s called vacuum energy. Again something out of nothing. We know vacuum energy is real because it has measurable consequences such as the Casimir effect, which is a very small but measurable force between two metal plates very close together. These quantum effects can also manifest on a cosmological scale. This subject rapidly become too technical to discuss in an email, but Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time, attempts to explain these ideas to the general reader. [LA replies: All of your examples imply an already existing universe in which there is space, time, and matter-energy. As we know, in that already existing universe, matter can come into existence out of energy, and vice versa. But that is not the question raised by Carol Iannone. The question she raised is, how this universe consisting of space, time, and matter-energy came into existence in the first place, out of no-space, no-time, no-matter, no-energy.]
As to the question, “What came before the Big Bang?” Stephen Hawking says the question is meaningless, but others differ. Currently just what happened a little before or a little after the Big Bang is controversial and speculative, but is by no means impossible to know. [LA replies: When you’ve figured out what happened before the big bang, let us know about it. Until then, you have no basis for declaring that “is by no means impossible to know” what happened before the big bang.]
Now physics deals with the “how” and not the “why.” We should not look to physics for answers to moral questions, or what our purpose on earth is, or what is the true essence of existence. Physicists make assumptions and measurements to learn how one thing transforms into another. In other words, in physics we can take reductionism only so far. At a certain point, you just assume something and see where it takes you. This is how physicists can live with notions like something from nothing. The statistician George Box once said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” [LA replies: You are ignoring, or rather, if I may say, you are inadvertently participating in, the “double game” that science constantly plays. On one hand science modestly declares that it has no metaphysical agenda, that it just studies what it has the ability to study. On the other hand, the ideology of scientism, of which most or many scientists are promoters, constantly makes metaphysical statements, such as that all existence is material and there can be no non-material existence and hence no God, that all life evolved by material naturalistic processes, that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter, and so on.]
Barry W. writes:
Carol Iannone’s post claims that it is impossible for something to come from nothing; a fair point. But if that is the case, how do you explain the existence of the Christian God? My guess is that the answer is that God is a self-sufficient explanation. Something like this maybe:
Design Advocate: The universe is too complicated and too ordered to have emerged without some designer therefore there is a God.
Counterargument: But wouldn’t this supernatural designer by definition have to be complicated and ordered too? What designed the designer and ordered the orderer?
Design Advocate: God needs no designer. He is self-ordering.
Counterargument: So God is self-ordering out of necessity but the universe can’t be self-ordering? Natural self-ordering = bad. Supernatural self-ordering = good. Oh …
The same pattern applies to the concept of creation.
Theist: Universe needs a creator.
Atheist: Who created the creator?
Theist: Creator doesn’t need a creator. He’s self-sufficient.
Atheist: Natural self-sufficiency = bad. Supernatural self-sufficiency = good. Oh …
Do you have any good arguments to make as to why the theist in the above examples is clearly right and the atheist is clearly wrong? If you do, I would love to hear them.
LA replies:
This is an argument about infinite regress that is constantly brought up by non-believers. The answer simply is that God by definition is the first cause, the source of existence. Thinking is impossible without a beginning of existence.
Further, even while atheists regularly use the notion of infinite regress, or an ever receding first cause, to undermine the idea of God, it is actually the atheists who have the infinite regress problem, not the theists. The theists say that there is a God, infinite being, the source of all existence, who has no source outside himself, period. It is the atheists, lacking the concept of God, who must keep looking at ever receding first causes. So they keep finding ever smaller “particles” of matter, as though if they get to a small enough particle, they will have reached the source of existence.
Here’s an illustration I once gave that addresses the problem of infinite regress.
I wrote:
As for the question of infinite regress that Mr. Sanchez keeps returning to, if he and I were walking along and we came upon a marble statue of Zeus, and Mr. Sanchez said that the statue had created itself through a process of random change, and I said, no, this statue has been created by a sculptor, would I be starting or implying or making necessary an infinite regress? No. I’d simply be saying that this statue was self-evidently the work of a sculptor. I wouldn’t have to know anything in particular about the sculptor for that statement to be true. I wouldn’t have to know what his intentions were, or how he came to be inspired to make this statue, or what tools he used, or how he had come to be born, or what his parents were like, to know for an absolute fact that the statue had been made by a sculptor. End of subject. No infinite regress.
Barry W. continues:
There is another problem with creation I hope you could address. When did the creator create his creation? God by every definition I have seen is “timeless,” “infinite,” “transcendent,” “beyond space and time,” “unlimited,” etc. How does a timeless being who is beyond space and time choose a moment to “create” something? That would imply that there was a “time” before creation and a “time” after. Seems like a paradox to me. [LA replies: God is eternal being. He does not exist in time. He always is, he always was. The universe of time and space is a relative state of being (relative to God, that is) which comes into being “within” God’s infinite and timeless being. And every finite thing within that universe has some measure of being, some more, some less.] Not to mention the fact that if God is without limits how do we know God from non-God and then how does God create something which is non-God? [LA replies: That’s a good question. If God is infinite being, how could there be anything that is not God? While the answer is expressed differently in different traditions, I would put it this way. Everything that exists, exists within God and has a partial state of being within the infinite being of God. Yet, because each being is partial and limited, it does not know this infinite being which is the source of its own being. The higher in the scale of being each being is, the more of being each being has and knows. A sparrow experiences more of being than an earth worm. A dog experiences more of being than a sparrow. A man experiences more of being than a dog. What drives evolution forward to higher and higher forms of life, is the desire to experience more of being, with the ultimate goal of evolution being to know God. But in order for this drama of physical and spiritual evolution to take place, it has to start somewhere, namely at the simplest level. It can’t start with Aristotle or Michelangelo or St. Francis. It starts with hydrogen atoms.] And that is a big part of your moral theory which affects everything down to whether its proper to have oral sex. Namely, that our universe is of God but not God therefore we are flawed, imperfect, etc. Well, how does an infinite being separate himself from his finite creation? [LA replies: in order for the universe to exist, that universe cannot be the same as God. Therefore the universe and all the things in it by their very nature cannot be perfect. Atheists often make this demand of God, that in order for them to believe in God, the universe would have to be heaven and we would all have to be perfect and immortal. But that misses the fundamental idea that God creates a universe of partial beings to express different aspects of being and to grow toward greater being. Because these beings only have a measure of being, not infinite being, they are flawed, mortal, and so on. But at the same time, the partial being of all these beings is undergirded by the infinite being of God which is the source of all.]
Oh, one more thing I remembered. God is always described as being perfect. You have said this yourself many times. What use would a perfect being have for creating anything let alone imperfect beings like us? If your answer is that it fulfills some need in him, well (besides how you know the mind of God) how does a perfect being have needs? Do you not see the problems with that. [LA replies: why speak of a “need”? Why not speak of love and creativity? The beings that come forth out of God’s being are expressions of his love and creativity.]
I hope you have time to answer these questions because I can’t see how you can leave them unanswered. If Traditionalist metaphysics fails then what becomes of Traditionalism? I think that is a fair question.
April 28
Kristor replies to Barry W.:
Carol Iannone’ post essentially claims that it is impossible for something to come from nothing; a fair point. But if that is the case, how do you explain the existence of the Christian God?
What you get from Carol’s post is the Aristotelian First Mover. That’s a good start, but it takes a lot more reasoning to get from there to the God of Israel (I covered some of that ground in a comment at VFR). And, of course, it takes some history to get from the God of Israel to the Christian God, who is also a man from Galilee.
So God is self-ordering out of necessity but the universe can’t be self-ordering?
Yes. The universe can’t be self-ordering because it is contingent. It might not have existed. So something had to have caused it to exist. We call that something God. And in causing the world to exist, God had to have made it just the sort of world that it is, or it would not be the sort of world that it is. Thus the creation of the world entailed its ordainment according to some pattern or other, that would characterize it, and that it would express. Creation is ordering.
God is not “self-ordering,” in the sense that his order is not something that was a procedure that took time, and is therefore aptly referred to adverbially, as with “ordering.” He is eternally ordered: has always been ordered, always will be ordered, is not possibly ever less than perfectly ordered. His order is not something that was done, it is something that eternally is (ditto for his creation of all worlds—more on that in a moment).
There is a pervasive confusion among atheists about the nature of God. They all seem to think that he needed to be caused. But that’s a category error. Only contingent things need to be caused; this is what contingency means. If God is the first cause, then by definition he doesn’t need to be caused. And apologists for theism don’t make up this definition out of thin air for their own rhetorical convenience; it is not a Sophist definition, nor is it even nominalist. Rather, it describes reality, in just the way that the definition of a triangle describes reality.
This may be seen from a fairly simple chain of reasoning. In explaining reality, we are confronted at once with two and only two choices: either the causal chain linking contingent things goes back eternally into the past, so that it requires no cause outside itself; or it had a beginning, so that it does. But it can’t go infinitely back into the past, because if it did, the progress of history could never have traversed the infinite number of steps leading up to this present moment; and since this is true for every moment of the infinite series, no single member of that series could ever have been reached, so that none of them could ever have been reached, rendering the whole infinite series inherently inactual. An infinite series of temporally delimited actualities is not achievable. This is the famous Kalam Cosmological Argument.
So there had to be a beginning to our causal order. In order for there to be a second member of that causal order, there had to have been a first. But that first could not itself be contingent, or it would not be first; it would, rather, continge upon some prior cause. Again, this is not a nominalist definition of primacy, but rather a description of reality.
I should note in passing that even if our causal order did extend infinitely back into the past, we should still be faced with the question why that order displayed the particular order that it does in fact display. Why do things hang together, rather than dissolving in a chaotic stew? I.e., why is there a causal order? Reality requires a logical first cause, as well as a temporal first cause.
Atheist: Natural self-sufficiency = bad. Supernatural self-sufficiency = good.
Yes. The arguments above apply equally to ordering and self-sufficiency. Ordering is creation.
How does a timeless being who is beyond space and time choose a moment to “create” something?
God is pure act, and he is simple. He does not move as we do, or change, or decide, or begin, or differ. He just is. While our world had a beginning, God’s act of creation did not begin, and is not over, and does not end; for it is not a feature of a temporally delimited being, but of an eternal being. God’s creative act, being eternal, is—so far as we temporally delimited actualities are concerned—continuous. It sustains the world in being at every moment, and leads it in orderly fashion from each moment to the next. And this happens, not because God is reaching down into the world and moving things about the way a puppeteer controls his puppets, but because by his very existence God conditions everything that happens, just as the nature of a triangle conditions all triangles.
That would imply that there was a “time” before creation and a “time” after.
Time may be a stranger thing than Mr. White has yet understood. It might help him to consider that it may be more accurate to think of eternity as super-temporal, rather than as sub-temporal: timeful, as opposed to timeless. It is probably more accurate to think of eternity as fullness of time, perfection of time, than as a lack of time. For why should time be different than the other positive values we see imperfectly expressed in contingent, creaturely things?
Creatures are imperfectly good, beautiful, ordered, and so forth. Unless these qualities came from nothing at all—an impossible supposition—they derived from some prior order, goodness and beauty. But prima facie there would seem to be no absolute limit to the goodness, order or beauty that a creature could in principle achieve. So the First Cause—the origin and source of all things—must be perfectly ordered, beautiful and good, in order to form an adequate ontological ground for creatures of any goodness, order or beauty, no matter how sublimely great.
Why should it be different with time? This is what Plato was trying to get at in saying (in the Timaeus) that time is the moving image of eternity. Eternity is the form of time.
… if God is without limits how do we know God from non-God[?]
The same way we finite creatures know that the number series is infinite, but 7 is not. The notion of a limit entails the notion of the limitless.
… how does God create something which is non-God?
How does a potter create a pot? That may seem like an inept analogy, but I dare anyone to explain exactly and completely how a potter creates a pot. It is an insanely difficult question.
I think this question poses a difficulty for atheists only because they think that God is different from creatures in absolutely every respect (except, of course, that they also err in thinking that he is just like creatures in needing a cause). On the contrary, everything that exists shares certain qualities with God, just as the potter shares certain qualities with the pot.
The problems of theology are the same sorts of problems we see solved by actual beings all the time. How does God create the world? Well, how does a potter create a pot? How does Jesus rise from the dead? Well, how are we ourselves resurrected from our past lives at every new moment? What makes me continue on from a moment ago as myself? The Resurrection is not one bit harder to explain than the regular reiteration of my cat. We see these things happen all the time, and we take them for granted, but that does not make them trivially easy to explain. Indeed, the most commonplace things are the very most difficult to explain. CS Lewis said that what we call the natural is the class of miracles to which we have grown accustomed.
… how does an infinite being separate himself from his finite creation?
How do you separate yourself from your consequences? What you are asking here is a basic metaphysical question, disguised as a question about theology. To wit: how are things separate from each other, if indeed they are? Is reality a Many—as it certainly seems to be—or is it really only a One? If the latter, then explanation is not possible, and experience is illusory per se. That can’t get us anywhere as an explanation of our experience, so we have to reject it. Reality is a Many, and disparity among the many items thereof is something we have to accept as just basic, a prime datum of our existence.
What use would a perfect being have for creating anything let alone imperfect beings like us?
None.
Alan Roebuck writes:
Here’s another problem with Mr. W’s position. He says:
Theist: Universe needs a creator.
Atheist: Who created the creator?
Theist: Creator doesn’t need a creator. He’s self-sufficient.
Atheist: Natural self-sufficiency = bad. Supernatural self-sufficiency = good. Oh …
In other words, says Mr. W, if your God needs no cause, then my material cosmos doesn’t need one either.
Except that, to use his language, we have plenty of evidence that the material cosmos needs a cause, and no evidence that God needs a cause. And since reality must start with something rather than nothing, it is fully rational to believe in God as the cause.
The evidence points to the material cosmos needing a cause because, inter alia,
Big Bang theory, still the most successful scientific theory of origins, says the material cosmos hasn’t always existed.
If the material cosmos has existed eternally, it would have reached heat death by now. Since it hasn’t, the material cosmos is not eternal.
Logically, it is impossible to traverse an actual infinity of time events, which would have already occurred if the material cosmos is eternal.
Something must be eternal. The material cosmos is a poor candidate for this eternal stuff. So rather than claiming that you can get something for nothing, or refusing to think, theists draw the correct conclusion: there is a God.
Mr. W. then attempts to find contradictions in the concept of God. Fair enough; the only fully valid way to prove the universal negative that there is no God is to show that God is contradictory. But his arguments are strictly a case of criticizing the mote in the theist’s eye while ignoring the redwood tree in his own. If you can’t get reality from atheism then the opposite of atheism has to be true, even if we cannot specify exactly how God operates. A savage (or even an ordinary member of Western Civilization) does not need to know how a computer operates in order to acknowledge that it does work.
Mr. W.’s challenges can be answered, but only within a theistic worldview, which is, I suspect, precisely what he denies. In this case, his challenges would be analogous to a savage who demands an explanation of a computer that uses only concepts which he acknowledges. I may be mistaken about this, but most challengers who speak as he does reject in principle any explanation that does not conform to philosophical materialism. But of course, if you insist on wearing blinders, you won’t see anything.
Kristor writes:
“If you can’t get reality from atheism then the opposite of atheism has to be true, even if we cannot specify exactly how God operates.”
Great line, Alan.
LA writes:
Below is Barry W.’s reply to my replies to him. His comment perfectly illustrates Mr. Roebuck’s point above:
Mr. W.’s challenges can be answered, but only within a theistic worldview, which is, I suspect, precisely what he denies. In this case, his challenges would be analogous to a savage who demands an explanation of a computer that uses only concepts which he acknowledges. I may be mistaken about this, but most challengers who speak as he does reject in principle any explanation that does not conform to philosophical materialism. But of course, if you insist on wearing blinders, you won’t see anything.
Barry W. replies to LA:
Thank you for replying. Take my answers as argued in good faith even though they are uncompromising in their rejection of theism; i.e. unremitting but respectful.
The answer simply is that God by definition is the first cause, the source of existence. Thinking is impossible without a beginning of existence.
This is non responsive. I don’t accept your definition. You say God is the source of existence. We are back to this:
Auster: God is the source of existence.
Me: What is the source of God?
Auster: God is his own source.
Me: So, God is his own source = good. Existence as its own source = bad. Oh …
What have you solved? Also:
Auster: This statue [i.e. the universe] has been created by a sculptor.
Me: Who sculpted the sculptor?
Auster: This statue was self-evidently the work of a sculptor.
Me: The sculpter must then be self evidently the work of a super-sculpter.
Auster: No, it is actually the atheists who have the infinite regress problem, not the theists.
Me: Actually you do have an infinite regress problem because this is your argument: natural self-sculpting = bad, supernatural self-sculpting = good.
All you have done is make an arbitrary assertion. I set the starting point with what exists. You set your starting point from an erroneous logical inference. Logic only works if its premises are non-contradictory as I will explain.
God is eternal being.
A negative definition. All this says is that God is without limits. This is problematic. Your God is an infinite, timeless, boundary-less consciousness. But if you have a consciousness that is conscious of nothing but itself you have a nonsensical contradiction. This is the problem with theism. It takes terms like consciousness and “being” and applies them to a context where it is impossible for them to apply. [Cognitive theft—see below] In this case, an infinite, limitless entity. If there is nothing but you, how could you know you from non-you?
Timeless, limitless, eternal, infinite, boundless, ultimate—all of these are negative. They only say what God is not, not what he is. This is know as The Argument From Non-Cognitivism. If you say that God is love and creativity, as you eventually do, then you are applying human attributes to an infinite, formless being. But love and creativity are only applicable to conscious beings. They are not applicable to the universe as a whole or to an infinite, boundless being which is a contradiction in terms.
The negative definition approach to God is fatal. In order to overcome the non-cognitivism objection you would have to give positive and primary attributes to your God. But if you did that, your God would no longer be infinite. He would be something specific. As it stands, you are worshiping a square circle.
Everything that exists, exists within God and has a partial state of being within the infinite being of God.
Again, non-responsive to my question. You have to overcome the “infinite being” objection which means you have to explain how a being can have no boundaries and still be meaningfully called a being. All beings that we know of are something apart from what they are not. But this thing you call God is “infinite”; i.e. it is all. Your use of the term being is a stolen concept. Logically speaking, you have no right to use it; i.e. you are stealing it. Strong atheists (not weaklings like Dawkins) often refer to theism as cognitive theft for this very reason.
What drives evolution forward to higher and higher forms of life, is the desire to experience more of being, with the ultimate goal of evolution being to know God.
What drove the evolution of God? Again, we’re back to:
Auster: God needs no evolution but the universe does.
Me: But if the universe is too complex and thus needs a plan for its evolution, how can a super-complex being like God have come about without a plan for its evolution?
Auster: God needs no plan. He is the author of all plans.
Me: Natural complexity = needs a planner. Supernatural planner infinitely more complex than natural = needs no planner. Oh …
And on and on.
Why not speak of love and creativity? The beings that come forth out of God’s being are expressions of his love and creativity.
Love and creativity are attributes of humans who are the primary object. What is the primary object that love and creativity apply to in the case of an “infinite,” “eternal,” “limitless” God? Non-cognitivism again as well as more cognitive theft. How can attributes like “perfect,” “loving,” “creativity” apply to an infinite “being”? In what way does that have any cognitive meaning? This is what you need to answer.
I get that you are desperate for a source of objective morality and that your whole critique of “liberalism” hinges on secularism not being able to produce such an objective source. I can’t stomach the relativistic left also, but I don’t see how you have made your case and I also don’t see how naturalism can not provide an objective source for morality far better than religion and without having to resort to ancient mythology (Abrahamic mythology in this case). That most of today’s secularists and naturalists are relativists does not mean that relativism is inherent in secularism. That’s yet another logical fallacy.
A. Zarkov writes:
My responses to your remarks.
1. The vacuum has particle-like properties such as spin (polarization) and energy.
2. Hawking is probably right in that it make no sense to talk about the nature of the universe “before” the Big Bang, since time is not absolute. If we run the current universe backwards it collapses into a point where space-time becomes singular, and we can’t even define time. In other words, current theories simply can’t deal with the nature of the universe very near the time of the Big Bang. Various speculative theories abound such perpetual inflation, but there is no way to test them. So I would say we simply can’t answer Miss Iannone’s question, and we don’t want to because we can’t test the answer. It’s not a very interesting question for a scientist because it leads nowhere.
3. When I say, “by no means impossible to know,” I mean we can’t prove it’s impossible to know the nature of the universe “before” the Big Bang. Assuming we can somehow define what “before” means in this context.
4. I can’t speak for the scientists that make assertions about the ultimate nature of reality. I can say that’s not my position. I don’t see a conflict between religion and science if each sticks to the appropriate domain. I know theoretical physicists who are also Orthodox Jews who believe in the Torah, and find no conflict between their religion and their physics work.
LA replies:
“So I would say we simply can’t answer Miss Iannone’s question, and we don’t want to because we can’t test the answer.”
You are not being responsive to her point. She was not making an argument of her own. She was quoting the physicists on the TV program who said that we must “understand”—by which they meant, as she pointed out, that we must accept—that something can come out of nothing, and she pointed out how their statement is a demand for unreasoning faith in a materially self-sufficient and self-created universe, not a scientific statement. Your comments in this discussion have been in the nature of a good cop. You’re pointing out more reasonable positions by scientists. You are not dealing with the scientists quoted by Miss Iannone.
A. Zarkov writes:
I didn’t myself hear what these “television physicists” actually said, and it’s possible that Miss Iannone has misquoted them because, in my opinion, no competent physicist would say that we don’t have to “accept that something came out of nothing” to “savor the wondrous world of what physics can reveal about the big bang … ”
The whole narrative which usually runs something like, “Before the Big Bang the universe was an absolute void with no energy, no matter, not even empty space. Then the Big Bang brought forth the material universe—something out of nothing,” is defective. The words “before,” “then” imply an absolute time that exists apart from, and outside of, the material universe that we can observe. Relativity theory put an end to the notion of absolute time. The main thrust of contemporary cosmology is to explain what happened after the Big Bang. That is after the time point we get by running our model of the universe backwards to the point where relativity theory “blows up” and gives an infinite density for everything. Understanding what happened very close to the Big Bang would require the unification of quantum mechanics (the physics of the very small) and gravity (as described by the General Theory of Relativity). So far a testable grand unification does not exist and might never exist. Near the time of the Big Bang, the “smallness” of sub-atomic physics and the “bigness” usually associated with gravity come together.
In my opinion, contemporary television programs dealing with science are awful. I can’t bear to watch them. Compare and contrast to programs such as Bronowski’s, circa 1975 production, The Ascent of Man. Bronowski was a real scientist who understood the material he presented. Even the journalist, James Burke, did a fine job with his 1978 production, Connections. Incidentally I did not like Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. In my opinion, Sagan was more showman than scientist, and a nasty fear-mongering leftist.
So to my answer to Miss Iannone is, If the television scientists said that, then they are wrong, and they do not represent the people who understand cosmology. My advice to her is to turn off the television and go read Hawking or the equivalent. She could also try the Internet. Start with Wikipedia and then go to the references. Note: in general Wikipedia is not to be trusted. It’s only a start.
LA replies:
I understand that Mr. Zarkov acknowledges that if the scientists on the program spoke as reported by Carol Iannone, then they were wrong. However, it seems to me that his comments are still besides what I see as the main point underlying this discussion, which is that the matter-energy that exploded in the big bang had to have a source. While the nature of that source is beyond our comprehension, since it cannot be understood in terms of space, time, and matter-energy, it nevertheless had to exist. And the spokesmen of science, whether they are the type that Mr. Zarkov respects, such as Hawking, or the type he disrespects, such as some of the TV scientists, or Mr. Zarkov himself, keep talking around and trying to avoid the unavoidable inference that the material universe had to have a source which is not itself.
April 29
LA to Kristor:
Barry W.’s comment illustrates Alan’s point that he demands answers in materialistic terms.
Kristor replies:
Indeed so. Mr. W. confuses basic metaphysical terms, and misconstrues basic theological concepts. This indicates that has not studied up enough on theism to know what it is he is rejecting. This is quite common with atheists, I find. They triumphantly flail away at the straw men they have knocked to the ground, and exult that they have shown the foolishness of ideas about God that theists realized were foolish, and abandoned, when humanity was still in the shamanistic era.
Most of his reply to you depends upon the premise that we cannot properly ascribe any positive properties to an infinity. He says that a being with no boundaries cannot properly be called a being, that we cannot coherently ascribe consciousness, love or creativity to an infinite being, and so forth. This is a confusion of infinity with indefiniteness. Some infinite sets are of course quite precisely specifiable, and thus perfectly definite; e.g., the integers, or the rational numbers between 0 and 1. It is therefore possible to ascribe positive properties to such sets—to the infinite set of integers, for example, we may ascribe the quite definite property that its members are all evenly divisible by 1. Indeed, this divisibility is entailed in the very definition of the set; the set is what it is in virtue of this property. The properties that characterize a set, and that we use to define it, are what make it definite. They make it the set that it is, and different from all others.
So then, God is not “all,” as Mr. W. seems to think; he is only himself. What makes him definite is his form. Indeed, he is not as Mr. W. says formless, but on the contrary is pure form.
Mr. W. says, “…. if you have a consciousness that is conscious of nothing but itself you have a nonsensical contradiction. … If there is nothing but [God], how could [he] know [himself] from non-[himself]?” Let it be understood first that theism does not of course assert that God is conscious of nothing but himself, or that there is nothing but God. Pantheism does assert these things; and for the reasons Mr. W. adduces, pantheism makes no sense. Nevertheless, Mr. W. is making a telling and interesting point. He asks how it could be possible for a being to know itself. It couldn’t. So it would seem that if there were nothing other than God, he would be ignorant of his own existence; and this would contradict his omniscience. This is why something like the doctrine of the Trinity is needful. It is far older than the earliest musings of the Church Fathers or the Apostles. One of the names of God from the earliest layers of the Torah is plural: Elohim, gods. And some form of Trinitarianism is common in most religious traditions. Nota bene that the great antiquity of Trinitarianism argues, not that the atheists are right, but that the very earliest theists figured out and repaired the problem with pure monotheism long before there was such a thing as an atheist.
Mr. Zarkov writes that the quantum vacuum has properties. This means that the quantum vacuum is not nothing. To have properties of any kind whatever, a thing must exist. Nothingness is utter deficit of being; it is the absence of any state of affairs whatsoever, even the state of affairs wherein nothing has ever happened. As the Casimir Effect amply demonstrates, it is possible to get something out of the something that is the quantum vacuum. This same sort of quantum vacuum could have given rise to our cosmos. But this begs the question of what gave rise to the quantum vacuum. It is impossible to see how sheer nothingness could have done so.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 27, 2010 01:42 PM | Send
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