[upbeat music]
>> Quantum physics,
the very term is enough
to send a chill up your spine
and the theologians
ducking into fox holes.
Stephen Hawking is the quantum
king of popular culture.
Hi 'Brief History of Time' has sold
over nine million copies.
According to The New York Times,
Hawking is the most revered
scientist since Einstein.
[audience laughs]
So when Stephen Hawking says,
in his most recent book 'The Grand Design,
co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow,
that quantum physics renders a
creator and designer of
the universe superfluous,
the temptation is to hoist
the white flag of surrender.
When Hawking goes even further and says
on the recent television
program 'Curiosity',
that modern cosmology
furnishes a proof of atheism,
then the average believer may feel
deeply shaken in his faith.
But do these bold
assertions bare scrutiny?
Sir Martin Rees of the Institute
of Astronomy in Cambridge
and the Astronomer Royal of
Great Britain is not impressed.
In an interview in The Independent,
in September of last year,
he said candidly and I quote,
"Stephen Hawking is a remarkable person,
whom I've known for 40
years and or that reason
any oracular statement he makes
get exaggerated publicity.
I know Stephen Hawking well enough
to know that he has read very little
philosophy and even less theology
and so I don't think we
should attach any weight
to his views on this topic" end quote.
Well tonight I propose
that we take a closer look
at what Hawking has to say
about god's role in creation
and see if his claims do bare scrutiny.
Hawking and Mlodinow open
their book 'The Grand Design'
with a series of profound questions.
What is the nature of reality?
Where did all this come from?
Did the universe need a creator?
And then they say, "traditionally
these are questions
for philosophy but philosophy is dead.
Philosophy has not kept up with
modern developments in
science, particularly physics.
Scientists have become the bearers
of the torch of discovery
in our quest for knowledge."
Now as a professional philosopher
I could only roll my eyes
at the audacity of such a statement.
Two scientists who have to all appearances
little acquaintance to philosophy,
are prepared to pronounce
an entire discipline dead
and to so insult their faculty colleagues
in philosophy at Caltech
and Cambridge University,
including many prominent
philosophers of science,
like Michael Redhead and D.H. Miller,
for supposedly failing to keep up.
Their pronouncement is not
only amazingly condescending
but also outrageously naive.
The man who claims to
have no need of philosophy
is the man most apt to be deceived by it.
And you might therefore anticipate
that Hawking and Mlodinow
subsequent exposition
of their favorite theories
will be underpinned
by a host of unexamined
philosophical presuppositions.
And that expectation is in fact borne out.
Their claims about the laws of nature,
the possibility of miracles,
scientific determinism and
the illusion of free will
are all asserted with only
the thinnest of justification.
Now I don't have time to
talk about these issues
this evening but if you're interested
I've examined them in more detail
at my website reasonablefaith.org.
Just look at the question of the week
number 181 for a
discussion of these issues.
Clearly Mlodinow and Hawking are
up to their necks in
philosophical questions.
What you might not expect however
is that after pronouncing
the death of philosophy
Hawking and Mlodinow should themselves
plunge into a philosophical discussion
of scientific realism versus anti-realism.
I thought philosophy
was supposed to be dead
and yet the first third of their book
is not about current
scientific theories at all
but is a disquisition on the history
and philosophy of science.
And I found this section of the book to be
the most interesting and mind boggling
part of the entire volume.
Let me explain.
Having set aside a Monday afternoon
to read Hawking and Mlodinow's book,
I spent that morning working through
a scholarly philosophical article
from Blackwell's contemporary
debates in metaphysics.
On a physical, or rather,
philosophical viewpoint
which is known as ontological pluralism.
Ontological pluralism, now what is that?
Well ontological pluralism is a view
in an area of philosophy whose
name sounds like stuttering.
It's called meta
metaphysics, meta metaphysics
or as it's sometimes called meta ontology.
This is philosophy at it's most ethereal.
Ontology is the study of what exists,
the nature of reality.
Meta ontology is one notch higher.
It inquires whether ontological disputes
are meaningful and how
best to resolve them.
And ontological pluralism
is a view that holds
that there really is no right answer
to many ontological questions.
Such as, for example, do
composite objects exist?
According to the ontological pluralists,
there are just different
ways of describing reality
and none of these is more correct
or more accurate than another.
So for example, there literally is no
fact of the matter in
answer to the question,
is there such a thing as the moon?
The ontological pluralist would say that
the question has no objective answer.
It's not true that the moon exists
and it's not true that
the moon does not exist.
There just is not fact of the matter
about whether there is
such a thing as the moon.
Well ontological pluralism is
obviously a very radical view,
which is held by a
handful of philosophers.
Imagine my astonishment therefore
to find Hawking and Mlodinow
espousing ontological pluralism
without of course being aware of the name,
as their answer to the question,
what is the nature of reality?
Now, they call their view
model dependent realism
but it's really ontological pluralism.
They explain that models are just
different ways of interpreting
our sense perceptions
and on their view there is no
objective reality out there
to which our models of the world,
more or less, accurately correspond.
And so Mlodinow and Hawking are thus
in fact extreme anti-realists.
They deny that there is any
objective way the world is.
So, for example, contrasting
Young Earth Creationism
and the Big Bang Theory,
Hawking and Mlodinow claim that,
"while the Big Bang Theory is more useful,
nevertheless neither model can be said
to be more really than
the other" end quote.
Now, think of it, this great champion
of modern cosmology thinks that
the Big Bang Model of the universe is
no more real than the creation
of the world 6000 years ago.
So you can't help but wonder
what sort of an argument
would justify adopting so radical a view.
Well, all that Mlodinow
and Hawking have to offer
is the fact that if you were say
an inhabitant of a virtual reality
controlled by alien beings,
there would be no way for you
to tell that you were
in the simulated world
and so you would have no
reason to doubt it's reality.
Well, the trouble with this
sort of argument is that
that doesn't exclude that
there are, in this case,
two competing models of the world.
One is the aliens model
and one is your model
and one of the models is real and
the other one is illusory.
Even if you can't tell which is which.
So it doesn't really support
ontological pluralism at all.
There is a reality which
is real and another
which is purely illusory
in an objective way.
Moreover, the fact that our observations
are model dependent doesn't imply
that we can't have knowledge
of the way the world is
or much less that there is
no way that the world is.
For example, a layman entering
a scientific laboratory
might see that there is a piece
of machinery on the lab table
but he wouldn't see that there is
an interferometer on the lab table
because he lacks the theoretical knowledge
to recognize the machine
as an interferometer.
A caveman entering the laboratory
wouldn't even see that there's
a piece of machinery on the table
because he lacks the concept of a machine
but that does nothing to undermine
the objective truth of the
lab technician's observation
that there is in fact an
interferometer on the table.
Hawking and Mlodinow not content
with ontological pluralism,
really go off the deep
end when they assert
there is no model
independent test of reality
it follows that a well constructed model
creates a reality of it's own.
There is no model
independent test of reality
it follows that a well constructed model
creates a reality of it's own.
Now this is an assertion
of ontological relativism,
which is the view that reality itself
is different for persons
having different models.
So for example, if you're Fred Hoyle
the universe really has existed
eternally in a steady state
but if you're Roger Penrose,
then the universe really did begin
with a big bang a finite time ago.
If you're the ancient physician Gallen,
blood really does not circulate
through the human body
but if you're William Harvey,
who discovered blood
circulation, then it really does.
Now such a view seems crazy
and is made only more so
by Hawking and Mlodinow's claim
that the model itself creates
it's respective reality.
And it hardly needs to be
said that no such conclusion
follows from their being
no model independent test
of the way that the world is.
Now all of this is however
besides my main point.
The main point I'm trying to make is that
despite their claim to speak as scientific
torch bearers of knowledge,
what Hawking and Mlodinow
are engaged in is philosophy.
The most important conclusions
drawn in their book
are philosophical conclusions,
not scientific conclusions.
So, why then do they
pronounce philosophy dead
and claim as scientists to be bearing
the torch of discovery simply because
that enables them to cloak
their amateurish philosophizing
with the mantel of scientific authority
and so avoid the hard work of
actually arguing for rather than
merely asserting their
philosophical viewpoints.
And for that reason I am frankly
not terribly impressed when scientists
begin to pronounce on questions
of philosophy and theology.
For when they do so,
they are speaking outside
their area of specialization
and their opinions have no more value
than the opinions of untutored layman.
In fact, they are untutored laymen
when it comes to those questions
for scientists typically lack
any training in philosophy or theology.
Now with that in mind,
let's look more closely
at Hawking and Mlodinow's
answer to the profound questions
that they initially posed.
Where did the universe come from?
Did the universe need a creator?
Their answer to these questions
involves an appeal to the so-called
No-Boundary model of the
origin of the universe
which was popularized by Hawking
in his book 'A Brief History of Time"
and our two authors of 'The Grand Design'
simply expound the model without
adducing any evidence for it
or mentioning any of the
alternative models to it
nor do they choose to respond
to any of the criticisms of the model.
For example, that the
so-called imaginary time
featured in the model is
physically unintelligible
and therefore merely a mathematical trick
that is useful for
avoiding the cosmological
singularity which appears
in classical theories
at the beginning of the universe.
Still there exposition
in 'The Grand Design'
is not without interest with regard
to the beginning of the universe.
For example, they write
as follows and I quote,
"The realization that time can behave
like another direction of space
means one can get rid of the problem
of time having a beginning in a
similar way in which we got
rid of the edge of the world.
Suppose the beginning of the universe
was like the South Pole of the earth,
with degrees of latitude
playing the role of time.
As one moves north, the
circles of constant latitude,
representing the size of
the universe, would expand.
The universe would start as a point
at the South Pole but the South Pole
is much like any other point.
To ask what happened the before
the beginning of the universe
would be a meaningless question."
>> Just use that.
>> So use this mike and should I
just disregard this one?
Okay, yeah, it's not working very well.
[audience laughs]
"To ask what happened before
the beginning of the universe
would become a meaningless question
because there is nothing
south of the South Pole.
In this picture spacetime has no boundary.
The same laws of nature hold at the
South Pole as at other places." end quote.
This passage is fascinating
because it represents
a rather different
interpretation of the model
that what we had in 'A
Brief History of Time'.
Let me explain.
In his model, Hawking
employs imaginary numbers,
like the square root of negative one.
For the time variable in his equations,
in order to get rid of the initial
cosmological singularity
which is the boundary
of spacetime in the
standard Big Bang model.
The initial segment of
spacetime in Hawking's model
instead of teminating
at a point like a cone
is rounded off rather
like a badminton birdie.
The South Pole of this rounded off surface
is like any other point on that surface,
enhance the idea that
there is no boundary.
Since imaginary time behaves
like a dimension of space,
Hawking interpreted his
No-Boundary universe
to just be, in capital letters.
But in the grand design, as we've seen,
the South Pole is interpreted to represent
the beginning point to
both time and the universe,
despite the fact the
imaginary time behaves
like another spatial dimension,
Hawking allows the circles of latitude
to play the role of time,
which has a beginning
point at the South Pole.
When Hawking speaks of the problem of time
having a beginning what
is means is, and I quote,
"The age old objection to the
universe having a beginning,
an objection which is modeled removes."
So what is that age old objection?
Well that objection, he says,
"is the question what happened before
the beginning of the universe?"
And Hawking is quite right
that this question is
meaningless on his model
since time begins at the South Pole,
it's meaningless to say what
was there before that point
but what he fail to mention is that
this question is equally meaningless
on the standard Big Bang model
since there just is nothing prior to
the initial cosmological singularity.
On either model, the universe has an
absolute temporal beginning.
So the real question is not
what was there before the beginning,
the real question is
why did the universe begin to exist?
Why is there something
rather than nothing?
Hawking and Mlodinow advocate
what they call a top down
approach to this question.
And the idea here is to begin
with our presently observed universe
characterized by the standard
model of particle physics
and then calculate given
the No-Boundary condition,
the probability to various histories
allowed by quantum physics
to reach our present state.
The most probably history represents
the history of observable universe.
Hawking and Mlodinow claim quote,
"In this view the universe
appeared spontaneously
from nothing," end quote.
And by spontaneously they appear
to mean without a cause
but how does that follow from the model?
The top down approach calculates
the probability of our observable universe
given the No-Boundary condition.
It calculates the probability of
our universe given the
No-Boundary condition.
The top down doesn't
calculate the probability
that the No-Boundary condition
should exist in the first place.
It just takes it for granted.
Such a condition is however not
metaphysical or physically necessary.
If the universe came into
being uncaused from nothing
it could have any conceivable
spatiotemporal configuration
For nothingness, or
non-being, has no properties,
no constraint, it's governed
by no physical laws.
Physics only begins at the South Pole
in the No-Boundary model.
There isn't anything in the model
that implies that that point came
to be without a cause.
Indeed, the idea that being
could arise without a cause,
from non-being seems
metaphysically absurd.
In his recent interview on the
television program 'Curiosity'
Hawking goes yet a step further to argue
that atheism is true
because there is no time
at which god could have
created the universe
since time began at the Big Bang.
This is a terrible argument however
since it just assumes
without justification
that causes must precede
their effects in time
but philosophers frequently discuss cases
in which cause and effect
are simultaneously.
That is to say, the cause and the effect
occur at the same time.
So, why couldn't god's
creating the universe
be simultaneous with
universe's coming into being?
In fact, what could be more obvious?
Of course the universe comes into being
at the time that god creates the universe.
Now if Hawking insists
that initial singularity
in the standard model is
not, technically speaking,
a point in spacetime but is rather
a boundary of spacetime, well fine.
We can still say in that
case that god's creating
the universe was coincident with
the universe's coming into being.
That is to say, they occurred together
at the boundary of spacetime.
Besides, his model is
supposed to have eliminated
the boundary point of spacetime
in favor of an ordinary
point like the South Pole,
at which the universe began,
so what's the problem with saying
that god created the universe
at that point of the South Pole?
Hawking's attempt to invalidate theism is,
I'm afraid, singularly unimpressive.
Now Hawking and Mlodinow seem to realize
that they haven't yet
answered the question,
why is there something
rather than nothing,
for they return to this question
in their concluding chapter of the book.
And here they give a
quite different answer.
In the concluding chapter they explain
that there is a constant vacuum energy
contained in empty space
and if the universe's
positive energy associated with matter
is evenly balanced by the negative energy
associated with gravitation,
then the universe can spontaneously
come into being as a fluctuation
of the the energy in the vacuum.
Which by a clever slight of hand they say,
we may as well call zero.
Now this seems to be a very different
account of the universe's origin,
for it presupposes the reality of space
and the energy in it.
So, it's puzzling when Hawking and
Mlodinow conclude and I quote,
"Because there is a law like gravity
the universe can and will
create itself from nothing
in the manner describe in
chapter six" end quote.
Now here it said that the nothingness
spoken of in chapter six is not really
nothingness after all but it's space
filled with vacuum energy.
But space filled with vacuum
energy is hardly nothing
and certainly doesn't exist prior to
the South Pole in the model.
And all of this just goes
to reinforce the conviction
that the No-Boundary
approach only describes
the evolution of our universe
from it's origin at the South
Pole to it's present state
but it is simply silent as to why
the universe came to
exist in the first place.
Now what all of this
implies is that Hawking
hasn't even begun to address the question
why is there something
rather than nothing?
For nothing, in his vocabulary,
does not have the
traditional meaning non-being
but rather it means the quantum vacuum,
space filled vacuum energy.
Hawking and Mlodinow's equivocal
use of terms is painfully evident
in an interview that
they did with Larry King
on his program 'Larry King Live'.
And here's how this interview went.
Hawking: gravity and quantum theory
cause universes to be created
[audience laughing]
spontaneously out of nothing.
King: who created the nothing?
Where did the nothing come from?
Mlodinow: according to quantum theory,
there is no such thing as nothingness.
Now in this ridiculous exchange
Hawking is using nothing to
refer to the quantum vacuum
while Mlodinow is using
it to refer to non-being
and that way they simply
avoid the tough question,
why is there something
rather than nothing,
by equivocating on the
meaning of the word nothing.
So, in conclusion, despite
Hawking and Mlodinow's
constant sniping at religious
belief throughout their book,
I think there's actually genuine profit
in this book for religious believers,
especially for those of us who are
interested in natural theology,
that is to say arguments
for god's existence,
for the authors affirm and argue for
the fact of an absolute beginning
of time and the universe which points
to a transcendent creator of the universe.
Given the desperation and or irrelevancy
of their proffered
answers to the questions
that motivated their inquiry,
I think that their book does turns out
to be quite supportive of the
existence of a personal
creator of the universe.
Thank you.
[audience applauds]
So, now we've got time for discussion
on anything that I've said
so just raise your hand
and I'll call upon you and
we'll take your question.
>> Audience Member: Wasn't it Duns Scotus
that originally used that phrase,
why is there something
rather than nothing?
Doesn't that go all the way-
>> The question was that why is there
something rather than nothing,
does that go back to the medieval
theologian John John Duns Scotus?
I don't remember Scotus enunciating
that question specifically.
It's usually associated with Leibniz,
a 17th century German
philosopher and mathematician.
Leibniz said that the first question
which should rightly be asked
is why is there something
rather than nothing.
But in one sense this question has
been the central question of metaphysics
ever since the ancient Greek philosophers,
Plato and Parmenides, why is their being
and what is the explanation of reality?
So the question was explicitly formulated,
I know by Leibniz.
Perhaps earlier but the
burden of the question
has always been part
of Western philosophy.
Yes.
>> Audience Member: When you talked about
ontological relativism pluralism,
when it comes down to the
perception of reality,
potentially again in relativism,
the models determine kind of the reality.
>> Yes.
[Audience Member] Is that
possible also a constructionism?
Can you kind of extend
a little bit on that,
because as we kind of talked
within classical thinking
theory right now,
communication, and the idea
here that they try to create
is that because of our senses,
because of our perception,
we perceive the world in different ways
and therefore, somehow,
that affects the world,
which I don't see.
>> Yeah, this ontological relativism
that Hawking and Mlodinow endorse
is very similar to these
social constructionists
views of post-modernists,
who says that each individual
constructs reality for himself
and leads, I think, as I said
to these preposterous
conclusions that for example,
for Gallen blood really doesn't
circulate through the body
but for William Harvey
it does, which seems mad.
I think that the truth of model
dependent perceptions of the world is
that our concepts will
determine how we see the world.
I gave the example of different
people entering a laboratory
and seeing a machine.
Someone who has the theoretical knowledge
will see, oh that's an interferometer
there on the table but a caveman
who doesn't even understand
what a machine is
wouldn't even see there's
a machine on the table.
Similarly,if a person
who doesn't understand
the rules of baseball and
who walks into a stadium
would see a ball flying over the wall
but he wouldn't see that a
home run has just been hit.
You have to understand
the rules of baseball
to see that a home run has been hit.
Similarly, a person who
say doesn't understand
the game of chess wouldn't understand
that a person has just
checkmated his opponent,
he wouldn't see the checkmate has occurred
he would just see that the man has moved
one figurine to another square
but a person who sees the rule,
understands the rules of chess
will see that he has
checkmated his opponent.
That's the truth of the fact that
our prior conceptions
shape how we see the world
but I think you can see from my examples
that this does absolutely nothing
to undermine the objectivity of
the way the world really is
or that our perceptions create the world.
Indeed, having the right
conceptual knowledge
can actually assist you in
understanding the world.
The technician who sees that there is
an interferometer on the table
grasps the world more accurately
than the caveman who doesn't have
the theoretical knowledge
to see that fact.
So, far from undermining the
objectivity of the world,
our theological equip--
or rather our theoretical equipment
and cognitive frameworks can actually
help us to see the world more adequately
and more accurately but it certainly
doesn't do anything to undermine
the objectivity of the world in itself
much less to suggest that
our models create the world.
Yes.
>> You had mentioned, you briefly-
this is on, you briefly mentioned
that atemporal causality,
where things happen simultaneously
the cause and the effect are simultaneous,
and one of the examples
you've used in the past was
the cushion sitting on the pillow.
Well I tried that example with
an atheist friend and he said,
oh no, no but those things-
the cushion needs molecules
to move and all that.
Is there another example that
we can use to prove that
point or to show that point?
>> Well, when he asked for an example
of simultaneous causation and the example
that I give is one from Kant.
A heavy ball resting on a cushion
causes a concavity in that cushion.
It causes a depression in the cushion.
Clearly the concave shape of the cushion
doesn't cause the roundness
of the ball, right?
It's very clear which
way the causality goes
and yet it's not as though the ball
had to exist prior to the cushion.
They could have existed
together from eternity past.
The ball could have always
been on the cushion.
So the cushion never existed without
the depression or the
concavity caused by the ball
and this would be, I think, an example,
of simultaneous causation
on the macro level.
Now, your atheist friend or the denier
of simultaneous causation can try to
get away from it by saying,
well but when you examine it
on the atomic or micro level
then in fact there do need to be
an exchange of particles between the ball
and the cushion to mediate
the causal influence.
Well alright, on the micro level
when you go down that deep then
there wouldn't be simultaneous
causation of the particles but
what you could say there is
again the impact of one
particle upon another
doesn't happen until
they come into contact,
so that again it is simultaneous.
It is when one particle contacts
the other that causation occurs
but before the come into contact
the particle certainly
doesn't cause anything.
There's a temporal gap,
that's not causing anything
in that other particle,
there has to be contact
so I don't think ultimately you
escape the force of the example
by trying to go down to
the microscopic level.
It seems to me that that just
changes the nature of the problem
but it still makes sense to talk about
cause and effect being simultaneous.
And indeed I would say here
the burden of proof is on the objector.
He's gotta give some reason why causes
would have to be prior
to their effects in time.
And that's a really bizarre idea
when you think about it.
That the cause has to
be prior to it's effect.
How could it produce it's cause,
or it's effect, until they are
at the same time because if there's any
gap in-between them the cause could
disappear in the next instant
and so never come into
contact with the effect,
well then how would the effect be produced
across that temporal gap.
The idea that causes must be
chronologically prior to the effect
I think is really, really strange
and so the detractor of this answer,
that god and creation are simultaneous,
I thinks got a real
burden of proof to bare.
Yes.
>> I'm taking this out of the realm
of philosophy for a
minute, if you don't mind.
I don't know if you heard,
I'm sure a handful of people heard on KQED
yesterday Tom Wright was on
with some other theologians and
a caller calls in and he
asks about historical Jesus
and says, did Jesus learn from
so-and-so and this person and N.T. Wright,
he commented that he
thought it was amazing
how firm Americans are in their
desire to not believe who Jesus was.
And I was curious-
And he said more so
than he saw in England.
I'm curious from your personal level,
and this is obviously
a leading question but
would somebody like Stephen Hawking
and you find him being incredibly popular
in pop culture and social circles
you hear a lot about this character,
do you find it similar
to what Tom Wright saw,
in that this is the last thing that
Americans want to believe,
that the universe came from someone
or do you find it a
genuine interest in his
contribution to the scientific community
and what he's presenting?
>> Are you talking about in Britain?
>> No, no I'm just curious in general.
Stephen Hawking, is his popularity,
do you find it's due to his contribution
scientifically or a fear
to conclude the opposite?
>> Well, I think that a Sir Martin Rees,
whom I quoted indicated Stephen Hawking
is a unique individual because of
his Lou Gehrig's disease
and the incredible battle
that he's fought against that
and yet the scientific contribution
that he's made in mathematical physics,
he has become a sort of iconic figure
and unfortunately has used that
scientific authority
to make pronouncements
outside his area of specialization,
in philosophy and theology.
And those pronouncements I think are
tremendously interesting to people.
He's been on Star Trek,
he was on the cover of Time magazine,
he's on television programs,
his editorials appeared
in The Wall Street Journal
in advance of the release
of 'The Grand Design',
his works are runaway bestsellers.
So yes, if I'm answering you're-
the question I think you're asking,
he seems to be a tremendously
influential figure in pop culture
with respect to these religious questions.
>> And just to kind of
push a little further,
I was curious if you
caught what I was saying
about N.T. Wright's comments,
sorry this is running on,
but he was saying that people just
do not want to face the
conclusions about Jesus
therefore they try to explain away
who Jesus was and I was just curious,
do you find that people are
latching onto Stephen Hawking-
yes he's a very interesting character,
but do you find a lot of that similar
sentiment-
>> Well,
I have to say, in certain quarters,
like on YouTube and the Internet,
I am shocked the degree to which
theological prejudices will
make people deny a neutral,
a religiously neutral statement
like the universe began to exist.
You would think a statement like
the universe began to exist
being theologically
neutral in and of itself
would be one to which scientific
evidence would be relevant and which
you could fairly adjudicate
based on scientific evidence.
And yet, I think seeing
the sort of theological
implications of this has caused
many people to oppose the
truth of that statement
on quite unscientific grounds
and to latch onto these
sorts of speculative models
in any sort of attempt to avoid
the beginning on the universe,
whether there's good evidence
for these models or not.
So in certain quarters at least
I do think that there
is a remarkable denial
of the evidence for the
beginning of the universe
based upon theological motivations.
Yes, down here there's a question.
>> Audience Member: It's
related, but I was wondering
do you think 'The Grand Design' would-
Hi, Hello, check, okay, I
was wondering if you believe
'The Grand Design' would be a good book
as an introduction to cosmology
and understanding relativity theory
and the Big Bang theory
and everything like that
or if there's another book
that you would recommend
that perhaps isn't as
theologically biased and have these
philosophical problems.
>> Yeah, this book really
is theologically biased.
And as I say, the first third of
the book is pure philosophy.
It's not about science.
It's this ontological relativity,
ontological pluralism, and then these
views on free will, miracles,
just a lot of pop philosophizing
masquerading as science,
so for that reason I
wouldn't recommend the book
as a source for understanding
contemporary cosmological theories.
>> Is there one you would recommend
to understand relativity theory
and the the Big Bang model
and everything like that?
>> Well, in terms of relativity theory
I actually would recommend going back
and reading some of
Albert Einstein's books.
He did some popular level
books on relativity theory.
I think he wrote a book on
the theory of relativity,
general and special relativity.
I can no longer remember the title,
I footnote it in my published work.
But he wrote popular level
books on relativity theory
that are very readable and engaging
and I would go back and read his work
or some of the early works
of Sir Arthur Eddington,
an early pioneer in cosmology.
These are great works of
scientific popularization,
quite unlike Hawking's attempts
at scientific popularization
which are filled with amateurish
philosophizing and inaccuracies.
So I would recommend the
works of Sir Arthur Eddington
and some of the works of
Albert Einstein himself
for understanding these.
With respect to quantum theory,
a very nice book on a lay level
is one by a man named Nick Herbert called
'Quantum Reality' I
think is the title of it
if you Google his name though
you would certainly recognize the title,
if that's not exactly it,
Nick Herbert 'Quantum Reality'.
And this is so helpful because
he goes through about nine
different interpretations of
the equations of quantum mechanics
and explains how we
don't really know which,
if any, of these physical interpretations
is the right one and just debunks
a lot of the myths about the philosophical
implications of quantum mechanics.
So that's a really a nice
popular level book too.
Okay, over here.
>> That's great, what do you think
about some of the attempts to render
all causation simultaneous?
>> Speak a little more clearly.
What do I-
>> What do you think about
some attempts render all
causation simultaneous?
>> All causation
simultaneous.
>> Yeah, yeah,
I've heard there are some.
>> I don't have any
brief to carry for that.
I mean in one sense you could say that,
for example, a horse is caused by
the mating of two horses prior to it
and in that sense the cause existed prior
to the effect and led up to it.
I think that in different instances
what you identify as the cause
is going to be person dependent.
It's going to be what you want to focus on
and so in some cases you might well
point to prior entities as being the cause
of the entity that you have in question
even if there is an event that takes place
in the process where say you do
have two things that are
absolutely simultaneous.
All I'm saying is that
you can't disqualify god
as being the cause of the Big Bang
because he didn't exist
temporally prior to the Big Bang.
That isn't a good objection to saying that
god is the cause of the Big Bang.
There's one.
>> Audience Member: What I don't get is
if they believe in ontological relativism
then why do they like write this book?
Isn't it
a model-
>> Why what?
>> Isn't it a model itself, the book?
That the idea he's trying to
put forward, is also a model.
>> Well, yes I mean it
would follow from their book
that what they're saying
is just their reality.
And not
[audience laughs]
anything that the rest of
us ought to believe in.
I mean that's what's-
I was so astonished when Hawking says
that Young Earth Creationism is
on a par with Big Bang cosmology,
that one is just more
useful than the other
but neither one of them is more real
or accurate than the other.
I mean that's just fantastic.
That means that, for say, Ken Ham
the universe really came
into being 6000 years ago
but for Stephen Hawking its existed
for 13.7 billion years and that there's
no objective fact of the matter,
but that is their view in the book.
That's the view they take
and that's their own
example, it's really amazing.
>> Audience Member: I'm gonna go ahead and
jump in since I have a mike.
So if you're done, over here, sorry.
>> Oh, way in the back, okay.
>> Sorry, so I'm not sure if this is what
Hawking's arguing in his book
but I'm wondering why is it more coherent
to say that an eternal
god created the universe
than that some eternal quantum
vacuum created universe?
>> I haven't tried to
justify the existence
of god in this talk tonight,
I've just attempted to
adjudicate Hawking's
claim to have eliminated the
need for a creator, right?
So this has been purely defensive.
Has he succeeded in showing that you don't
need a creator, that it's superfluous.
Now if I were to try to
give a positive argument,
what I would say is that the evidence
indicates that this quantum vacuum state
is not eternal in the past
but that it had an absolute beginning
and that is what Hawking and Mlodinow
argue for and affirm in their book.
The universe had an end time,
had an absolute beginning at
the South Pole in their model
and since being can't come from non-being,
there has to exist some
sort of transcendent reality
beyond space and time which
brought the universe into being,
including the quantum state out of which
our material universe may have formed
by a quantum fluctuation.
>> Audience Member: So there could be some
like larger space or larger universe
that our smaller universe is a part of
that is eternal?
>> Yes, could our-
this is one possibility,
could our universe just be a part
of a broader multiverse
which is eternal in the past.
Perhaps we're just a bubble in a sea
of expanding bubbles of other universes.
The interesting thing about this
seemingly metaphysical speculation
is that in 2003 three very
prominent cosmologists
Alan Guth, Alexander
Vilenkin, and Arvind Borde,
crafted a theorem which
showed that any universe
which has on average been in a state
of cosmic expansion over it's history
cannot be infinite in the past
but must have a past spacetime boundary.
And they showed that their theorem
also applies to the multiverse.
So that even if our
universe is just a part
of this broader world ensemble of worlds,
even the multiverse itself must have
an absolute beginning at some time
in the finite past.
So that even the multiverse hypothesis
doesn't escape the problem of an absolute
beginning of the universe and then
the philosophical question
why did the universe come into being?
If you're interested in
looking at that more,
take a look at my book 'Reasonable Faith'
in the chapter on god's existence.
It has a thorough discussion of this.
Another question down here.
There.
>> Audience Member:
Hello, I'm thinking about
the possibility of creating
a theory that explains
how something can come out of nothing.
Is it possible for a theory that
explains everything and also itself,
would that be a viable theory?
>> Now, okay, so explain
to me again the proposal.
What is the proposal?
>> A theory that explains how something
comes out of nothing
and also explain itself,
which is meaning self-referential.
>> I don't understand.
You'd have to give me the theory.
I mean Daniel Dennett
suggested something like this.
I should speak into the mike.
Daniel Dennett suggested
something like this.
He said the universe caused
itself to come into being.
He says it's the ultimate
bootstrapping trick,
the universe brought
itself into existence.
Well I think this kind of bootstrapping
is clearly impossible because
in order to bring itself into existence,
the universe would have to exist,
in order to bring itself into existence.
[audience laughs]
So the idea of self-causation is,
I think, logical incoherent.
It has a vicious explanatory circle.
So I cannot imagine any sort of
plausible theory that would explain
how anything did what you said.
Namely, it explains how
it itself came into being.
It would seem to me that would involve
this kind of vicious circularity to it.
You need to have a reality that transcends
the universe and brings-
is different and separate from it
and brings the universe into being.
>> Audience Member: Thank you.
>> Here's a question down front, okay.
>> Audience Member: Yeah,
I realize we have no proof
for the existence of the String theory
is true or not true and that there's
a mathematical elegance to it
but can you comment of how String theory
affects the cosmological arguments
and some of the other natural theology
issues we've been talking about?
>> String theory is an alternative to the
standard model of particle
physics which consider-
conceives of reality on
the most fundamental level
to be not particles but little
one dimensional strings of energy
which vibrate in different ways
and I don't see that
this has any implications
for the question of the
beginning of the universe,
whether or not spacetime
has a past boundary.
Now there are some speculative proposals
about pre Bing Bang cosmologies
based on String theory
but when you look at these more closely,
you find that they cannot be
extrapolated to the infinite past.
That they posit unstable conditions
that could not exist for past infinity
and would quickly
dissolve or become undone
so that they cannot have existed
for infinite time in the past.
And if you're interested in this,
as you seem to have some knowledge of it,
look at the article
that I co-authored with
the physicist James Sinclair in
The Blackwell Companion
to Natural Theology.
And Jim has an excellent, excellent survey
of all of the various
proposals on tap today
for trying to avoid the absolute
beginning of the universe and
extrapolate back to past infinity
and he talks about String theories,
pre Big Bang cosmologies, as well as
inflationary scenarios,
semiclassical models,
even closed time-like curves,
ekpyrotic cyclic models,
oscillating theories, loop
quantum gravity models.
I mean he really does
a nice survey of these
and what he shows is that in every case
none of these are extrapolable
to an eternal infinite past.
The may push the beginning back a step
but they all involve
conditions that preclude
there being an infinite
universe in the past.
They all are still stuck with
the problem of a cosmic beginning.
So what I would say with
respect to the evidence today
is that while scientific
evidence is never compelling,
it's never determinative,
it's always provisional,
having said that, if you
weigh the evidence for
against the proposition the
universe began to exist,
I'm not aware of any evidence that
the universe I eternal in the past.
I don't think there's anything
on that side of the scale that suggests
the universe has existed for
infinite time from eternity past.
I'm not aware of anything.
On the other hand, we do have
some pretty good evidence,
like the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem
that suggests that the universe
had a beginning and is
not eternal in the past.
So that all of the evidence seems to me
to be on one side of the scale,
even if it's not determinative
and absolutely compelling,
that's certainly where the evidence points
and that makes it all more
odd when I mentioned before
of how some people will resist this
theologically neutral statement
and resist the evidence just dogmatically
simply out of theological biases
against the idea of creation.
Any final question before
we bring our time to a close.
There's a-
>> Audience Member: Hi,
I'm really interested in
why for Stephen Hawking something like
ontological pluralism
just seems to be so true?
Do you think that has something to do-
cause it doesn't seem to
help his theory at all
that he would accept
>> No, it really doesn't.
>> Audience Member: ontological pluralism.
Do you think that has to
do with his discipline
or being seeped in a post-modern culture?
Do you have other intuitions about that?
>> This is a very good
question because as you say
it doesn't do anything to
help his model or his theory.
This is a purely philosophical viewpoint.
I think, my suspicion is, that it flows
out of Hawking's positivism
and verification-ism.
Hawking, from his previous works,
still seems to labor under the
old positivism of the 1930s and 40s,
which he probably imbibed during
his training as a young scientist,
which basically said that if you
can't prove something
through the five senses,
through scientific evidence,
then it's meaningless
and has no reality one way or the other.
And I think that this
ontological relativism
may be the kind of vestige
of this positivism,
of thinking that if you
can't prove something
one way or another scientifically
then it's just meaningless and
there is no objective truth about it.
Though it really goes even beyond that
because I mean we've
got pretty good evidence
that the world is not
6000 years old and yet
he seems to want to affirm this relativity
so I can see it as related to his
verification-ism and positivism
but that can't be the whole story.
When I read the book
I wondered about the degree to which
this could be reflecting
his co-author's view.
How much of this book is
really Leonard Mlodinow?
Because I mean Hawking is
very incapacitated physically,
I think it would be hard
for him to write a book.
Could this be that Leonard Mlodinow
has just taken some of
Hawking's scientific works
and popularized them and
put them in the context
of Mlodinow's own
amateurish philosophizing
so that this is really due
to him and not to Hawking
and I don't know the
answer to that question.
I just raise that as a speculation
given that the book is co-authored
and probably owes a lot of the substance
to Leonard Mlodinow and
not to Stephen Hawking.
Well thank you very much for
attending and I hope you
enjoy the rest
[audience applauds]
of the conference.
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