Undivided Looking

In recent posts I've been discussing whether the universe began or not.

Perhaps the most important issue which I have not yet discussed, is the idea (I think originally due to Charles Misner, first pointed out by St. Edward Arthur Milne, and independently by St. Charles Misner) that it may not be well-defined whether time has a beginning or not.  That is, suppose you have a model in which there is a time coordinate $t$, and time has a beginning in the sense that the only allowed times are $t > 0$.  Well, in General Relativity we are free to use whatever time coordinate we like, and nothing stops us from defining a new time coordinate in terms of the old one, let's say $\tau = \log(t)$.  If you look at a plot of the log function, you'll see that $\tau$ ranges from $-\infty$ to $+\infty$.

However, this type of time reparameterization may not be very physical once you get down to the Planck time, about $10^{-43}$ seconds, when quantum gravity effects become important.  Times less than that might not be well-defined.  In any case, the Misner argument suggests that we need to be more careful to define what we mean by time having a beginning.

Similarly, atheist philosopher Quentin Smith has argued that the standard Big Bang Model is inconsistent with divine creation, due to it not really having a beginning, even though the past is finite.  Smith argues that because the time $t = 0$ is singular, technically it shouldn't be included in the spacetime, so actually only times with $t > 0$ exist.  That means that there is no initial moment of creation, and therefore, he claims, God cannot have created the universe.

This is somewhat reminiscent of Hawking's claim that the no boundary proposal doesn't have the right sort of beginning, and it seems to me that my Fuzzing into Existence post is also applicable.  If God is like an author, then he can make a story in which time works in whatever way he pleases.

According to Smith, each time $t$ exists because the preceding times exist, and indeed the laws of physics hold at a given time $t$ (according to him) because they hold at earlier times.  Since each moment of time is fully explained by those before, he claims that the universe is therefore self-caused and therefore fully explained, with no more explanation possible.  (Of course, if time is continuous, then we could make a similar infinite regress of times going back closer and closer to any finite time $t$.  Smith has to struggle a bit to explain why his argument doesn't apply there...)

Now to me, this seems like the sort of explanation which is really no explanation at all.  A satisfying worldview should explain as much as possible with as few assumptions as possible.  If the laws of physics have some property $X$ (e.g. having an electron field, or whatever) now because they were like $X$ a minute ago, and so on all the way back arbitrarily close to the beginning, that doesn't in any way satisfy my curiosity about why they are like $X$ instead of some other way $Y$ (say, having no charged particles).  For if they had been $Y$ for all time, I could have made the same argument.  So it seems that there is a potentially meaningful question "Why are the laws of physics like $X$ rather than like $Y$", which Smith's statements do not really explain.  Maybe there is no explanation, and we have to take $X$ being the way it is as a fundamental fact.  But to say that there could not possibly be an explanation seems rather dogmatic.

And if God exists, then he can explain this fact.  God's will chooses what the laws of physics will be for all time.  So he can choose for the universe to be like $X$ instead of like $Y$.  This would be the fundamental explanation.  Whether or not it is a useful explanation for us as human beings, would depend on whether our puny minds can identify the actual reasons why God might prefer $X$ over $Y$.

The Kalam argument has some intuitive appeal if you think that the universe could not have begun without some causal reason.  Evaluating this claim requires an analysis of what causation is, and why one would think in various situations that a cause is necessary.  But the first preliminary question is whether there are any facts to be explained by the putative cause.  It seems to me that there are.

All of the same reasoning about $X$ and $Y$ would also apply if time stretches back to $-\infty$.  There would still be various timeless facts about the universe which would not really be explained by the infinite regress.  This suggests that the Kalam argument may be misguided to the extent that it attempts to prove God from a temporal beginning a finite time in the past.  The most important issues are the same whether time goes back finitely or infinitely.

But having said all this, it does seem a little bit weirder that the universe should exist for a finite amount of time with no external explanation, than that it should exist for an infinite time with no explanation.   Historically, many materialists (such as Lucretius) have believed that time is infinite, due to their belief that it is impossible for something to come from nothing.  Conversely, monotheists have mostly believed that the universe has a beginning, either for philosophical reasons or because the Bible says so.  (St. Thomas Aquinas argued that God could have created an infinite past, but that divine revelation tells us he didn't.) To that extent, Big Bang cosmology appears to vindicate the standard religious view over the standard nonreligious one.

(Of course, the same cannot be said if—unlike St. Thomas or St. Augustine—one also takes the 6 day creation about 6,000 years ago literally.  Some fundamentalists have argued that this problem can be solved by reparameterizing our coordinate system, but that just seems silly to me.  Also, the days are not in the right order to correspond to the scientific chronology.)

But a Theist could believe that God created time going back infinitely, without contradicting themselves, so long as they are prepared to be flexible about what "creation" means.  Similarly, an Atheist could believe that the universe just started existing 13.8 billion years ago for no reason, without contradicting themselves, so long as they are prepared to be flexible when deciding when explanations are called for.  All four views are logically consistent; the real question is which viewpoint explains the most with the least.

In the last couple of posts, I've discussed the Hartle-Hawking proposal and the math behind it.  Now let's discuss the theological implications.

In his Brief History of Time (written 1988; I'm just going to be engaging with this book and not with any of his more recent pronouncements), Hawking has the following famous saying about the Hartle-Hawking state:

The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe.  With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people [!] have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws.  However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started—it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork, and choose how to start it off.  So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator.  But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither a beginning nor end: it would simply be.  What place, then, for a creator?

The first question to ask here is who counts as "most people"?

The majority of people in the world believe in some type of God or gods capable of supernatural intervention.  Even in the Western world, the majority of people believe in God (as Hawking indicates), and the majority of those believe in a religion called Christianity which teaches that God does produce miracles from time to time.

If Hawking means the English or the Europeans, then admittedly there has been a marked decline in religious faith in Europe (much less so in the US) and many "Christians" there have a merely nominal or cultural affiliation.  But belief in miracles is still far from nonexistent.

In any case, I am obviously not the target demographic, since I believe that God has done some remarkable things since that moment, perhaps 13.8 billion years ago, when he set the ball rolling.  Or was there such a moment?

Hawking suggests that (if his model is correct) there was no such moment of creation.  Not, according to him, because the universe goes infinitely far back in time—he says that it doesn't.  Rather, because the geometry of spacetime is rounded off like a sphere, so that there is no special beginning point, but rather a whole region of points none of which would be any better or worse as a beginning.  As he says:

The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside of itself.  It would just BE.

Now this only works if you go to imaginary time to describe the universe.  With respect to real time, the Hartle-Hawking state does go back forever in time (with high probability).  So if real time is what is important, then what Hawking says about the absence of a beginning is still true, although for a different reason.

If the Hartle-Hawking proposal is right, this could itself be taken as good reason to endorse an "imaginary time" view of the universe, although I'm not sure that's a consistent thing to do given that we at any rate seem to live in real time.  But Hawking himself expresses a more ambivalent view:

So maybe what we call imaginary time is more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like.  But, according to the approach I described in Chapter 1, a scientific theory is just a mathematical model we make to describe our observations: it exists only in our minds.  So it is meaningless to ask: which is real, "real" or "imaginary" time?  It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description.

Yet on this more positivistic view where the model is only aiming to be a "useful description", how could one use it to draw the metaphysical deductions Hawking wants to make, about there being no "place" for a Creator?  But let's leave that aside, and accept the "imaginary time" point of view for purposes of our theological excursion, since it doesn't much matter whether the universe lacks a beginning because it's closed off like a sphere, or because it goes back in time forever.

Now when Hawking asks rhetorically whether there is a "place" for a Creator, the context suggests that he's not so much asking whether there's good reason to believe in a Creator, but whether there even could be a Creator, given the absence of a clear first moment of time.  What would there be left for him to do?   Aside from deciding that there should be a universe, selecting the laws of physics for said universe, deciding that the Hartle-Hawking state is the prettiest state for it to be in, and then (according to Hawking) deciding not to intervene even if it turns out we could use some help.  Other than that, it seems like there is nothing left for God to do!

Really, Hawking is assuming (quite explicitly) that Science has already displaced God to such an extent that the only "place" that could be left for him is to push the button to make everything go, and then "sit back and watch".  (This view is often called Deism nowadays, although historically Deists actually had a much more robust view of divine providence, and merely rejected the miracles and special revelations of particular religions.)

This rather limited God is the type of bad theology which makes religious people throw around the phrase "God of the Gaps", although I still believe that this term is highly misleading and should be retired.  I tried to express a better set of points in that post:

1. Any time we ever believe in anything rationally, we do so because there is some kind of "gap" in our understanding of how the universe works, which is filled by postulating the existence of that thing.

2. All phenomena which occur in Nature do so because God sustains the world in being, thus (at least indirectly) causing everything.

Hawking allows no role for God as the Sustainer of all existence.  But God's role in "sustaining" the world is not really a different type of act from his act of "creating" it.  Hawking invites us to look at the world from a 4-dimensional perspective; in this perspective all points of spacetime exist because God gives them the power to exist, delineating the role that each one plays in the bigger scheme of things.  From that perspective, Creation is something which is happening NOW, not just something which happened (or didn't happen) 13.8 billion years ago.  Stated in a tenseless way, for all the things that exist, they exist because God chooses for them the conditions of their existence.  (One of those conditions being that they are causally related in particular ways to the events before, after, or around them.)

God's role in creation is not a "mechanical" one, providing the initial impetus or force to get the machine working, which can then run for a while on its own.  God is more like an Author writing a story.  An Author stands outside the time-stream of their own story.  As my Dad said in a Slashdot interview:

Once you see the universe from that point of view, many arguments fade into unimportance, such as Hawking's argument that the universe fuzzed into existence at the beginning, and therefore there was no creator. But it's also true that the Lord of the Rings fuzzed into existence, and that doesn't mean it doesn't have a creator. It just means that the creator doesn't create on the same schedule as the creature's.

If God is creating the universe sideways like an Author, then the proper place to look for the effects of that is not at the fuzzy edges, but at the heart of the story. And I am personally convinced that Jesus stands at the heart of the story. The evidence is there if you care to look, and if you don't get distracted by the claims of various people who have various agendas to lead you in every possible direction, and if you don't fall into the trap of looking for a formula rather than looking for God as a person.

To think that God creates the universe and then stands back to watch it, is like thinking that an Author only has to write the first sentence, and then they can read the rest.  Bad news for aspiring fiction writers: you have to write the whole thing.  Maybe once the plot gets into full swing, the characters will start having a "mind of their own", and fail to act in the way the Author originally intended.  But the Author is still in charge.

Nor does he have to "intervene" in order to get things to come out the way he wants them to: everything in the book is subject to the control of the Author, both the parts which follow naturally and inevitably from the previous scenes, and the parts where the Author does something totally unexpected.  In any case, the main "point" of the story is seldom found right at the beginning, but develops as the story progresses.

Traditionally, books have a fixed and determinate sequence of letters, but if the Author wants to start out with something which doesn't have a definite time order (say a map on the first page) then that doesn't impugn their authorship of the rest of the book.  And if the Author wants to make their book be infinitely long in both directions....well, that would probably be easier for God than for a human writer, wouldn't it!

So I think that belief in the creation of the universe does not really depend on there being a first moment of time.  Conversely, this might also make one suspicious of the kalam argument championed by St. William Lane Craig in the debate.  If the doctrine of Creation is not about there being a first moment of time, then there's something dubious about arguing for it as though it were.  This doesn't automatically imply that St. Craig's argument is unsound, but it does suggest that it might not be the best way of looking at things.

Of course, we should also keep in mind what I said in my original post, that the Hartle-Hawking proposal is a speculative idea.  It is a very beautiful idea, but it is difficult to make well-defined, and there is no direct evidence for it.  While there was originally some reason to think it might predict inflation, the current indications seem to be that it predicts the wrong type of universe.

I remember my surprise when, several years ago, I read an article by the atheist philosopher Quentin Smith, showcasing the Hartle-Hawking state as an argument for Atheism.  Never mind his actual argument, which makes no sense.  In a talk given to some atheist club, he stated that his argument "is the strongest scientific argument there is against theism. I think it's even stronger than Darwin's theory of evolution."

Oh my!  Neither Stephen Hawking nor Jim Hartle would make the claim that the Hartle-Hawking state is anywhere near as solidly supported as Darwinian evolution; in fact Jim told me just the other day that he isn't particularly committed to it being true.  (People often assume that if a scientist thinks of an interesting, publishable idea, they must believe in it, but they might only think it is worth considering!)  In fact, I think that only an outsider to the field of quantum gravity could take the "no boundary proposal" as anything other than a provisional, interesting idea worth exploring, which at best might be true.

I've discussed a lot of speculative physics in these last several posts, and I wouldn't want anyone walking away thinking that the physics is more clearly established than it is.  In our current state of knowledge, any statements about the beginning of the universe are necessarily speculative, and if we rest our theological beliefs (for or against Theism) on that shaky foundation, we are setting ourselves up for trouble.