Reasons for believing (2)
So we've already looked at two of
the classic arguments for the existence of God in the last post. We found the
argument from degree weak, and along the way we demolished the ontological
argument as a mere word game: but we also found a much stronger case for the
argument from intelligibility. Now we turn to Thomas Aquinas' other three
arguments, the First Cause, the Unmoved Mover, and the argument from
contingency.
I take the view that these are
pretty much the same argument, which can be summed up in one of them, the First
Cause argument. Everything that happens in the universe is caused by something
else which happened before it. That something else was in turn caused by
earlier events, and so on. But can the sequence go on ad infinitum? Only if
things that have already happened can be caused by things that have not yet
happened can there be a never ending circle of cause and effect. As this is not
possible there must be a First Cause, which set everything else in motion. This
we call God. Or so Thomas Aquinas asserts.
I think the argument from motion to
a First Mover is basically identical, it's just that the cause and its results
are both movements. The same is true with the contingency argument, that every
being owes its existence to other beings and is therefore contingent upon them,
until we get back to an original being who starts everything off, who is
therefore not contingent but has absolute being. "Contingent" here
basically means caused by something else, so again we are dealing with very
much the same argument. So I'm going to stick with the First Cause argument and
leave you to do more thinking about the others if you reckon I'm selling you
short.
The First Cause has received
massive support from the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Let's
not forget that this theory means not merely that all the matter and energy in
the universe started with one unbelievably huge explosion, but that absolutely
everything about our universe also started in the same event. In other words there
was nowhere for the universe to exist before the Big Bang, because there were
no dimensions until it happened – there was nowhere for there to be anything and
there was nowhere for there to be nothing either. Nor was there any time for
anything to happen in, because time was also created by that same Big Bang.
There were no laws of nature, because it was the Big Bang that brought those laws
of nature into existence and forms their starting point. In fact the Big Bang
itself contradicts those laws of nature – those of the conservation of energy
and matter to begin with.
This brings us very directly to
Aquinas' point, that a literally supernatural explanation is required by such
an event – supernatural in the very direct sense of being outside all the laws
of nature that apply to our universe. Naturally this is a source of deep
embarrassment to the contemporary scientific community (though not to their
pioneering predecessors, as we saw last time). Anyway the hunt is on to find
some kind of extranatural cause that is not Supernatural in older senses of the
word. Here's what I make of the journey so far. I hope I am right in believing
there have been three main contenders.
1. We can locate our supernature in
an anomaly, or what Stephen Hawking termed "a singularity" in A Brief History of Time. Unfortunately I
am not a genius mathematician so I can't claim to follow all the amazing maths
involved. But I will admit to being suspicious of the term. Isn't
"singularity" just another way of saying "one-off?" When we
say something is caused by "a singularity," aren't we in fact saying
we don't know how it's caused? In other words we don't really know (and don't
really have to explain?) what might go on in there. We do know that
singularities exist though because they occur in black holes. What if there was
a previous universe that was all sucked down into a supermassive black hole, so
huge and dense that everything except gravity was destroyed? What if it all the
energy thus compressed into an infinitesimally small point then exploded as the
Big Bang?
·
This view doesn't seem to be as fashionable as it was
in 1988 and I am not completely sure of the reasons for this. Here's what I
suspect. The Big Bang on this model presupposes a Big Crunch from a previous
universe – that all the matter and energy in the system is sucked into various
black holes which are then sucked into each other by the sheer power of their
gravity to form the supermassive one that has to explode. However our own
universe is not going to end this way. According to more recent maths there is
not enough mass in the universe to counteract the velocity at which it is
expanding. Matter and energy will become ever more thinly spread and the
universe will die of attenuation - with a whimper, not a bang. That means there
would have to be a radical discontinuity between our universe and the one that
went before because the laws of nature governing the two are different. That
means that we need a further supernature in addition the previous universe
which is capable of spontaneously generating new laws of nature. The Big Crunch
therefore fails to give a complete account of the origins of the universe. Some
other entity needs to be factored in.
2. As an alternative we are offered
a massive fluctuation in the quantum field. Apparently quantum mechanics allows
us to consider a vacuum not as truly empty but as a space where electrons and
positrons may spontaneously emerge and immediately cancel each other out. All
we need then is for an awful lot of these to appear simultaneously in the same
time and space – whatever that is supposed to mean in a quantum context – and
to do so without cancelling each other out, and we have our big bang.
·
Again I don't have the physics to deal with this
properly and would love to have someone who knows their stuff running through it
with me. If only my old mate Roger from uni was here! However it seems to me as
a non-specialist that there are lots of big questions here. I do get that there
is a degree to which very small particles are not "there" in the
Newtonian / Einsteinian universe which is so essential to our own existence -
at some level they act more like fields of energy than bits of matter, so we
can't predict exactly where they are and where they will be next. This isn't
the same, is it, as saying there is this unbelievably energetic quantum field
extending beyond our own universe? We haven't of course observed quantum fields
from outside our own universe because we can't do so. All the observations that
have been made of quantum particles and forces have been carried out inside the
universe. So it's difficult to say what hat we are pulling this particular
rabbit out of. Nor do I think we can have much of a meaningful idea of the
behaviour of such a field. Let's just hope and pray though that it is not often
given to massive random fluctuations of the sort described, or the life of our
universe would be totally chaotic.
3. Thirdly we can go back to the
multiverse to provide our First Cause. In some way new universes keep bubbling
out of a primeval cosmic soup which is the multiverse, or sum total of all
universes. Nearly every bubble is ephemeral and pops because its natural laws
are unsustainable, but once in a while, by a trillion trillionth of a chance, a
viable universe is formed and ours happens to be the holder of this golden
ticket.
·
However in Reasons
for Believing(1) I took the view that this scheme, with its multiplication
of millions of invisible and unverifiable entities, has a fabricated look about
it. It fails the test known as Occam's Razor.
Let's put these three cosmologies
together and ask what they do have in common. All of them try to bypass the
First Cause argument by asserting that there was something there before the Big
Bang. It doesn't really matter too much whether it's a previous universe that
went down the plughole of a Big Crunch, or a highly energetic and turbulent
quantum field, or a multiverse which has the interesting property of
spontaneously generating new universes. The point is that we have something
pre-existent which dispenses with the need for any kind of Creator. I am
reminded of the work of Fred Hoyle, who came up with the Steady State theory of
the universe before the Big Bang was conclusively demonstrated. As an atheist,
Prof Hoyle hated the implication that Big Bang might be held to amount to an
act of creation. He therefore asserted that the universe (as we know) is
expanding and that new matter and energy emerge spontaneously into existence to
fill the gaps. Thus the universe could be eternal and self-sufficient and do
without a creator. That this is completely contrary to what we know of the laws
of nature so far did not deter him.
All the above look like ways to
bring back the Steady State, but on a new level. Since we can't avoid the Big
Bang, let's put something else in "before" it, so the universe can
keep going without a beginning – a quantum field or a Big Crunch or a
multiverse or whatever. But even then, can we succeed in finally exorcising the
Creator from His own? No we can't. Because, at the risk of repeating the
child's embarrassing question, "Who made God then?" the issue of
origins still follows us into these new hypothetical spaces. Where did that
vast quantum field, or that multiverse, or the universe that crunched, arise
from? Did they have a beginning? These ingenious cosmologies fail to answer
Aquinas' question: since everything we see is the product of cause and effect,
was there a First Cause?
And even if they could answer the
question, would we have then have got round God? Or would we find we were
merely describing His immense handiwork, as Newton and Copernicus and Kepler
and all the others famously thought? That the multiverse or the quantum field
or extinct previous universes were also the products of a vast Imagination?
Only one more hurdle to clear, I
promise, as this edition of Reasons for
Believing nears its exhausted end. This is the assertion by Richard Dawkins
that a Creator Being cannot be the explanation for the origins of the universe
because it is not a proper explanation. A proper explanation, says Prof
Dawkins, must simplify the thing being explained. Now it seems that God as
Creator must be, not simpler, but greater and more complex than the universe He
is alleged to have created. God cannot therefore be a proper explanation.
I hope you agree with me that this
argument is deeply flawed. In fact we constantly accept explanations that are
more complex than the thing being explained. The explanation for a joint stool
is that a carpenter, a far more complex entity, made it to sit on. In case that
metaphor seems unfairly to sneak in creation by a personal being, there are
others. The aurora borealis was presumed by early scientists (once we got past
the magic stage) to be the result of emanations from the poles of the earth. In
time a far larger and grander account was accepted, that in fact it is storms
in an object 333,000 times more massive than the earth, hurling matter
93,000,000 miles through space, that interact with our magnetic field and cause
the aurora. The more complex explanation turns out to be the true one.
If we follow Dawkins' logic
through, that every cause must be simpler than its effect, we end up with a
strange inversion of Aquinas. Eventually as we trace the increasing simplifications
further and further back through the chain of cause and effect, phenomenon and
explanation, we can only end up at zero. The ultimate explanation turns out to
be… that there can be no explanations, no causes, and no reasons. And so we'll
have to start thinking about how something came out of nothing all over again.
Then we'll have to accept that Dawkins has led us down a wrong turning that doesn't
lead anywhere. All he has succeeded in demonstrating is the incorrigible
reductionism of his own mind.
Prof Dawkins - incorrigibly reductionist?
Well, what have we got out of all
this notion-crunching? Surveys repeatedly show that people rarely come to
believe because they've been argued into it. This often breaks down into a
macho contest of wills anyway. Instead it's life events that led people to ask
all the big, "Is anybody there?" questions. So - have the two
cosmological bits of this series been worth it? I wanted to do it for three
reasons:
1. To remind
believers that they don't have to accept the much flashed about opinion that
faith is irrational. I hope readers will agree with my stance that repeated
secularising attempts to destroy the Christian world view have not succeeded.
There is still a satisfactory case to be made for faith - in fact some of the
alternatives don't really stack up that well by comparison.
2. To hope
that those who don't believe will continue to explore and ask those big
questions.
3. I'm going
to assert later that faith provides a better means for "seeing life
whole" and "life" needs to include our rational life and
scientific explorations.
Next time I'll be getting on to the
stuff that really excites me, that is, I believe in God because I believe Jesus
is His Son. This is the stuff that takes us from a First Mover who is only
needed to kick the whole game off to a Lord who wants to engage with us… However
I'm just back from holiday and there's a lot waiting to be done so it may be a
few weeks before I can get on to it.
I hope you're sticking with me. Your
thoughts are welcome!
