Does Sean Carroll's Universe Have a Beginning?

Kevin Harris: Well, Bill, we've certainly gotten a lot of mileage out of your exchange with Sean Carroll at the 2014 Greer-Heard Forum, and we've done numerous podcasts on the topics that came out of that debate. It’s still frequently discussed today. In fact, I’ve noticed that Sean Carroll’s popularity seems to have grown, at least on social media, and we’ll look at several of the video shorts that he has on YouTube. First, since I brought up popularity, I’m curious. I wanted to ask you: do scholars in the academy such as yourself and Sean Carroll often have to walk the fine line between scholarship and becoming a popularizer, or can you do both?

Dr. Craig: Both Sean Carroll and I have tried to supplement our scholarly academic publications with popular-level works. Carroll publishes popular-level books on science for the layperson. I publish popular-level treatments of philosophy and theology. So both of us are engaged in trying to produce both scholarly and popular literature. The risk in this is that scholars sometimes look down rather condescendingly on colleagues who do popularization. This risk is really augmented when the only thing that these scholars know of your work is the popular-level material. Then they’re apt to think that this person isn’t really producing substantive scholarly material. So there is a real delicate balance and risk here in trying to do both good scholarship and write for a general lay audience. But I think it’s important to try to do so. So both Sean Carroll and I are engaged in this project.

Kevin Harris: Seems to me that you can do both. But other scholars, it’s very disparaging. They say, “He’s a popularizer.” And that’s not a compliment.

Dr. Craig: No. Yes, you can do both. For example, one of the great scientific popularizers was Sir Arthur Eddington, who wrote masterful books for laypeople on relativity theory and cosmology and so forth, still worth reading today. By contrast, Stephen Hawking’s attempts at popularization, such as A Brief History of Time, were really huge failures. They sold very well because of his reputation, but they weren’t good scientific popularization. It’s hard to write popular science. Someone who’s a real master at it today is David Hutchings, with whom I’m doing a book currently. Hutchings has a number of books in popular science, and he really is able to explain these difficult concepts so that the average layman can understand them.

Kevin Harris: Let’s go to the first clip. Carroll is apparently responding to your work in this video short. Here it is.

Dr. Carroll: When scientists talk about the kalam argument, they really focus on whether the universe had a beginning. And the truth is we don’t know. There’s not a lot to say beyond that. We have models in which it did, models in which it didn’t. We don’t know what model is correct. But the other assumption of the kalam, that if the universe had a beginning we need God, that’s just obviously wrong. That’s the part where you should be focusing all of your efforts. For one thing, it’s completely equivocating on the word “cause.” OK? It’s a word that doesn’t appear in fundamental physics. You can read all these papers that William Lane Craig likes to cite about quantum cosmology. The word “cause” is never in there. What’s in there are equations that describe the laws of physics. If you were living 2,500 years ago, you might have thought that in order to explain the physical world you need to talk about the cause of things happening. We know better now. Instead, you should be asking the question, can we come up with models in which the laws of physics explain what happened in a complete and consistent way? The answer is yes, as far as we know. And the answer is there are models that work with or without a beginning to the universe. So it’s the very framework of attaching causes to beginnings that is the big mistake in the kalam argument.

Kevin Harris: Several things there, including whether there is equivocation going on with the term “cause.”

Dr. Craig: Yes, there are several mistakes, I think, made in this clip. First of all, it is not true that there is nothing more to be said than we don’t know whether the universe had a beginning. We can say, for example, that it is probable that the universe had a beginning. Even a determined critic like Lawrence Krauss admits that he thinks it is probable that the universe had a beginning. In that case, the second premise of the kalam cosmological argument is probably true, which is about all that you can ask from a good argument. Moreover, it is not obviously false that if the universe has a cause, that cause is reasonably called God. For a conceptual analysis of what it is to be a cause of the universe discloses that a cause of the beginning of the universe must be a first, beginningless, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, enormously powerful, personal creator of the universe. I think that’s certainly sufficient for a concept of God.

Thirdly, as for the notion of a cause, Carroll’s objection is seriously misconceived. The half-truth in this objection is that causation plays no role in pure mathematics. Therefore, causation does not appear in the mathematical equations of theoretical physics. But that’s only half the story. Every physical theory is composed of two components: a mathematical formalism and a physical interpretation of that formalism. When it comes to the physical interpretation, then causation certainly can and does play a prominent role. For example, an astrophysicist will want to know what is the cause of an observed gravitational field. He wants to know what caused the craters on the surface of the Moon. Indeed, he wants to know the cause of the origin of the Moon itself. The Moon is obviously not eternal and didn’t just pop into existence uncaused out of nothing. So what produced the Moon?

Moreover, in other fields of science, causation plays a crucial role. For example, the evolutionary biologist will want to know what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. We’re all aware of the recent controversy concerning the cause of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Where did it come from? It didn’t just pop into being uncaused out of nothing. In everyday life, causation plays a vital role. A homeowner wants to know what caused the fire that burned down my house. Not only the homeowner, but the police and insurance agents will want to know the answer to that question as well. Recently we’ve asked, what was the cause of the power outage in our neighborhood? There is no reason to restrict ourselves to the mathematical equations of theoretical physics.

Moreover, the notion of causation is a philosophical notion. We’re talking here about something which brings something else into existence, and that is a perfectly intelligible notion. Moreover, we do not in fact have any empirically adequate physical theories whose mathematical equations describe a beginningless universe, much less which describe a universe coming into being out of nothing. There is no physics of non-being that could explain the origin of the universe from nothing. So even if you confine yourself to pure mathematical equations, you will not have an explanation of the origin of the universe.

Kevin Harris: And just to be clear, equivocation is a logical fallacy.

Dr. Craig: That would be right. It’s an informal fallacy. And I think we’ll see later in our podcast today how Carroll himself equivocates on the word “naturalism,” where he’s using it in different senses.

Kevin Harris: Let’s go to the next clip. Carroll talks some more about the kalam. Here it is.

Dr. Carroll: The universe is quantum mechanical, and the fact that there’s a singularity in classical general relativity in the Big Bang doesn’t mean there was a beginning to the universe. It means that classical general relativity is breaking down. It’s no longer applicable, and you should be quantum mechanical. We don’t know enough about quantum gravity to say whether the universe had a beginning or not. We don’t know whether the universe was ever contracting or not. All we can say is that our classical theories break down. And if you’re honest, that’s really all you can say. If you’re driven for some other set of reasons to conclude that there was a beginning to the universe, you’re not being honest. In these cosmologies, the universe exists at all times. There’s no edge to it. There’s no boundary. There’s no moment when it comes into existence. There is absolutely no reason to apply the logic of “we need a creator here” to universes like that.

Kevin Harris: Well, again, when you’re doing a video short on YouTube, you’re limited in time, but whoever put this short on limited his comments to those models that have no boundary, edge, or beginning. Is he referring to his own model, the Carroll–Chen model that he developed with Jennifer Chen?

Dr. Craig: I don’t think so. I think the reference to quantum mechanics suggests that he’s talking about things like the Hartle–Hawking model or Alexander Vilenkin’s quantum gravitational model.

Now, in response to Carroll’s comments here, it’s true that we need to have a quantum mechanical theory of gravitation if we are to provide a description of the initial split second of the universe. But we do not need to have such a description in order to have good grounds for believing that the universe began to exist.

The eminent cosmologist Charles Misner once explained it to me in this way. He said, “Because we don’t have a quantum theory of gravitation, it is as though a tiny window shade were drawn across the first split second of the universe, and we don’t know what goes on behind that shade.” But Misner said, “What we do know is that the universe doesn’t come out on the other side.” So you can know that the universe began to exist without having a physical description of its first physical state.

In quantum mechanical models like Stephen Hawking’s or Alexander Vilenkin’s, they still involve a beginning of the universe. They are not past eternal. Carroll’s statement that the quantum mechanical universe exists at all times is a semantic trick. What that means is that it has existed at every time that there is. But if time is finite and had a beginning, then the universe is not past eternal. It has not existed for infinite time. So even though the universe exists at all times, it is not infinite in the past but had a beginning.

Kevin Harris: Hey, before we continue, I just want to remind you of the great resources that we have at ReasonableFaith.org, including Reasonable Faith’s Equip platform. It’s our on-demand training center for Christian apologetics. Whether you’re new to the conversation or you’re ready to get into some of the really deep stuff, Equip gives you the tools to defend your faith with confidence. Check it out at ReasonableFaith.org. And by the way, it’s free.

In this next clip, Carroll happens to be in discussion with Roger Penrose, and he’s addressing the beginning and nothingness. Here it is.

Dr. Carroll: So if it does turn out to be true that the universe had a beginning, you shouldn’t think of it as there was nothingness and then the universe popped into existence. It’s very hard to not think of it that way because the flow of time is embedded in how we think about the world. And you think about, well, if there was the Big Bang, then it came from nothingness. But there wasn’t a nothingness that turned into the Big Bang. That’s the wrong way of thinking. Think about it from the other side. There was a first moment of time in the history of the universe. And just because there was that doesn’t mean there was some reason why it happened.

Speaker 1: So it’s reasonless at the bottom?

Dr. Carroll: That’s right. You know, I would sadly . . . Roger mentioned the disappointing idea that the universe will last for infinite years in the future and we’ll all be dead. It’s also kind of disappointing to say, well, why did the universe exist at all? And the answer is it just did. Stop asking questions like that.

Kevin Harris: Yeah, that is disappointing. There are multiple things in that short clip to cover, Bill, so take your pick.

Dr. Craig: Well, the thing that just jumps out at me, and I hope it did to you as well, is when he says, “Stop asking questions like that.” How astonishing it is that Carroll would seek to squelch one of the most profound questions that a person can ask, a question about the origin of the universe. Now, Carroll is absolutely correct that you should not think of the beginning of the universe as, first, a state of nothingness and then the universe came into existence out of that state of nothingness. This is a point that I have made repeatedly in my work. Rather, you should think of it as the first moment of time before which there was not anything.

The question is then: Why did the universe begin to exist?

Kevin Harris: He said to think of it instead as the first moment of time in the history of the universe. He also mentions the flow of time and that the universe just is. Again, he has just said it is a brute fact. You come to it right there

Dr. Craig: Yes. For him, you stop asking questions like that. It’s just a brute fact. You shouldn’t even ask it. It’s astonishing to me that he should think that.

It may be the case that Carroll does not accept a dynamic or tensed theory of time, according to which things come into being and go out of being. He probably is articulating a tenseless or static theory of time, according to which the difference between past, present, and future is just a human illusion and everything just exists at its spatiotemporal coordinates. On that view, he would say there is no basis for asking about why the universe began to exist. In that case, it seems to me the appropriate question would be Leibniz’s question: why is there something rather than nothing? That is a profound metaphysical question, given the contingency of the universe.

Kevin Harris: Let’s get into some excerpts from Carroll’s opening statement in a debate that he had at Caltech entitled, “Has science refuted religion?” Carroll argues for naturalism.

Dr. Carroll: Religion and science have gone their separate ways over the years. Five hundred years ago, this debate would not have been held. There was no demarcation between what we would now call science and what we would call religion. There were just attempts to understand the world. And what happened is that science came about by developing techniques, methodologies for gaining reliable knowledge about the world. And the reliable knowledge that we got was incompatible with some of the presuppositions of religious belief.

The basic thing that we learned by doing science for 400 years is something called naturalism, the idea that there is only one reality, that there are not separate planes of the natural and the supernatural, that there is only one material existence, and we are part of the universe. We do not stand outside of it in any way.

Kevin Harris: So he says the scientific method was developed to provide reliable knowledge about the world, and this naturally led to naturalism – no pun intended.

Dr. Craig: Now, it’s important to understand that what Carroll is plumping for here is not methodological naturalism, that is to say, the assumption by the investigative scientist that he is looking only for natural causes of the data. Rather, Carroll is plumping for metaphysical naturalism, which is a philosophical position that is not justified scientifically. Science does not teach the metaphysical worldview of naturalism, which is the view that all that exists is spacetime and its contents. There is nothing scientifically that proves that that sort of metaphysical naturalism is true.

What is correct is that science has developed techniques to help give us reliable knowledge about the physical world. That is one of the triumphs of science. But that concerns the limited domain of science. And there is no reason to think that those techniques are relevant to other fields of inquiry, such as ethics, metaphysics, or even literary criticism. So Carroll here is assuming some sort of scientistic epistemology, as well as begging the question in favor of metaphysical naturalism.

Kevin Harris: Let’s look at some more of those techniques. Here’s more from Carroll on the techniques developed by science.

Dr. Carroll: And the way that science got there is through basically realizing that human beings are not that smart. You are not Vulcans. You’re not Mr. Spock. You’re not perfectly logical. We as human beings are subject to all sorts of biases and cognitive shortcomings. We tend to be wishful thinkers and to see patterns where they’re not there, and so forth. And in response to this, science developed techniques for giving ourselves reality checks, for not letting us believe things that the evidence does not stand up to.

One technique is simply skepticism, which you may have heard of. Scientists are taught that we should be our own theories’ harshest critics. Scientists spend all their time trying to disprove their favorite ideas. This is a remarkable way of doing things that is a little bit counterintuitive, but helps us resist the lure of wishful thinking.

Kevin Harris: You know, I’m sure he didn’t have time in an opening statement in a debate to discuss the various kinds of skepticism: iterative skepticism, global skepticism, local skepticism, and whether one should be skeptical about everything but his own skepticism, things like that. I’m not trying to be uncharitable. Can he be referring to a general skepticism as a valid technique?

Dr. Craig: Well, it seems to me that Carroll is not really talking here about philosophical skepticism, which, as you intimate, is self-defeating. The skeptic claims not to be able to know anything, and then you wonder, well, how do you know that? I think Carroll is simply talking about being self-critical. He says scientists are their own toughest critics, and one can corroborate one’s scientific theory by articulating ways in which it could be falsified, and then you perform experiments to see if the theory survives such attempts at falsification. And if it does, then the theory is said to be corroborated. Surviving these attempts at falsification is actually one technique for proving the truth of a scientific theory.

Now, philosophers do exactly the same thing with the theories that they offer. They always consider the very best objections to the positions that they propose. I’ve often thought that if you want to read really tough critiques of the arguments for the existence of God, then don’t read what the atheists are writing, which are typically very shallow and poorly thought through. Rather, you should read the work of other Christian philosophers, who are the severest critics of certain theistic arguments. So what Carroll is talking about as a scientific technique is one that is analogously applied in doing philosophical work as well.

Kevin Harris: And he has some more techniques. Carroll offers a second technique in this next clip. Here it is.

Dr. Carroll: The other technique is empiricism. We realize that we are not smart enough to get true knowledge about the world just by thinking about it. We have to go out there and look at the world. And what we’ve done by this the last 400 years is to realize that human beings are not separate, that the world is one thing, the natural world, and it can be understood. This is very counterintuitive. This is not at all obvious, this naturalism claim.

Kevin Harris: You can’t just think. You also have to look. Empiricism. Is this the empirical verificationist principle that you’ve talked about, or perhaps a weaker version of it?

Dr. Craig: No, I don’t think so. Carroll is not claiming that if something is not in principle empirically verifiable, then it is meaningless. Rather, he’s merely claiming that in order to do good science, you cannot simply speculate, but you have to experiment and observe. Where he errs, I think, is in thinking that such observation and experiment somehow demonstrate the truth of materialism. Not only are there no good arguments for the truth of materialism, but as I explain in volume 2A of my Systematic Philosophical Theology, in the discussion of divine incorporeality, Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism is a crushing defeater of materialism or physicalism. Interested readers can take a look at that discussion in volume 2A under incorporeality.

Kevin Harris: I’ll just say to my fellow lay apologists, you have to be careful. Don’t jump to a conclusion. If you hear “empiricism,” take a second look. Don’t immediately say, “Ah, he’s talking about the empirical verificationist principle, and that’s been refuted. You can’t even empirically verify the empirical verificationist principle,” or things like that. But that wasn’t what he was talking about there. I’m just saying, drop back. Make sure that you’re not triggered by a certain phrase.

Okay. Dr. Carroll brings up mind–body dualism. We’ll get into that next time on Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. Thanks so much for being here.^[1]