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Has Hawking Eliminated God? (part 1)

January 31, 2011     Time: 00:26:16
Has Hawking Eliminated God?

Summary

William Lane Craig discusses The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.

Transcript Has Hawking Eliminated God? Part 1

 

Kevin Harris: Thank you so much for joining us on the Reasonable Faith podcast with Dr. William Lane Craig. Kevin Harris in the studio with Dr. Craig. Bill, on my reading list is Stephen Hawking's new book. I know that you've read it because you've commented on it. Let's sum it up a little bit on this podcast.

Dr. Craig: Right. The people who are marketing this book were very clever because they created a lot of controversy and a lot of stir before it was ever released by saying that Hawking and Mlodinov's new book has eliminated God, and it looked like it was taking a stronger stance than Hawking's earlier book A Brief History of Time. In fact, when you read it, I think it was all hype.

Kevin Harris: Well, it was because I did see that a lot—“Hawking dispels God” – and so you had a lot of interesting headlines like that.

Dr. Craig: Exactly. But in fact the book really doesn't take a harder position than he took in A Brief History of Time, nor does it offer any new scientific theories or evidence that wasn't mentioned in the Brief History of Time. It's basically a recapitulation of his no boundary proposal that he developed with James Hartle at UCSB for avoiding the initial cosmological singularity. And then he propounds a multiverse theory, a many-worlds view, in order to get rid of the fine-tuning.

Kevin Harris: So he's kind of bought into the multiverse, then?

Dr. Craig: Yes. But, again, that's not really anything new in this book. So in terms of the scientific material in the book it's pretty much a rehash of earlier stuff.

Kevin Harris: We should probably say the name of the book.

Dr. Craig: Yes, The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and his co-author Leonard Mlodinov from Cal Tech.

Kevin Harris: So it's a book talking about intelligent design, is that right?

Dr. Craig: [laughter] The book's title is a misnomer. The purpose of the book is to show that there's no grand design, that in fact everything is simply explained by the laws of nature without any sort of grand design behind it all. So the title is misleading, I guess.

Kevin Harris: Again, because you mentioned this boundary-less universe that he proposes where, if you were to reduce the universe backwards in time, rather than come to a point it would kind of come to a curve.

Dr. Craig: Right.

Kevin Harris: Kind of like a badminton birdie.

Dr. Craig: That's right.

Kevin Harris: Why is that a more appealing model to him? What's the difference between a cone and a point?

Dr. Craig: Well, the difference would be that the cone has an edge to that geometrical structure, whereas the badminton birdie doesn't have an edge—you can go right on through the south pole and up the other side. And so as a result the laws of physics don't break down anywhere in the model. But I think, as you're sensing, the model in fact involves an absolute beginning to time and the universe, just as much as the standard model does. It just doesn’t begin at a point of infinite density, spacetime curvature, temperature, and so forth. The south pole that is featured in the model is like any other point in spacetime rather than being a singular point. But it's still the beginning of the universe.

And I did think that one of the most interesting features of this book that was new is the interpretation that they lend to the Hartle-Hawking no boundary proposal. Namely, they treat the south pole in the model as the beginning of time, and the lines of latitude that would go north from the south pole up the structure they treat those as a measure of time, of the duration of the universe, so that the universe and time itself has a beginning at the south pole in the model, which is, of course, the second premise of the kalam cosmological argument – that the universe began to exist. So rather than present this imaginary time regime that's pictured at the beginning of the model as timeless or just existing in a sort of tenseless way, they present this in The Grand Design as the absolute beginning of time. And Hawking says this has the advantage of avoiding the otherwise awkward question “What was there before the beginning?” because on this model time begins to exist at the south pole, and therefore there is no before. Therefore it's meaningless to ask “What was there before the Big Bang?” Now what he doesn't seem to appreciate is that while that does effectively remove that question, the standard model with the singularity does exactly the same thing. It is meaningless to ask what took place before the singularity because the singularity represents the boundary point of space and time, and therefore it's meaningless to ask what there was before. So the theist who believes that God created the universe will say with respect at least to physical time, [1] that while God is causally prior to the universe he's not temporally prior to the universe. Traditionally theologians have interpreted God to be timeless, and therefore he would not exist temporally prior or chronologically prior to the beginning. The answer to the question “What was there before the Big Bang?” in a chronological sense is “nothing.” There wasn't anything. God is causally prior to the Big Bang, but not temporally prior.

Kevin Harris: Okay.

Dr. Craig: So I found the book, actually, to be very supportive of theism and of natural theology, at least with respect to the cosmological argument.

Kevin Harris: The kalam, in particular, then. Back to these diagrams of the Big Bang that we often see on science shows, and even in your work. It's difficult sometimes, Bill, to depict the Big Bang because when you show the lines of time going upward, and things like this, and have a south pole, and things like this, it's as if you're looking at it from the outside, you're looking at it from a distance. And there was no distance. The only way you could observe the Big Bang would be from the inside as it went out because there was no time and space beyond it. And so sometimes those models can be confusing.

Dr. Craig: Very, very misleading.

Kevin Harris: An explosion in space rather than an explosion of space.

Dr. Craig: Right. Even the word 'Big Bang' suggests the image of this super dense pellet existing in this big empty container of space which then blew up. And that's not the model – it's much more radical than that – as you say, it cannot be visualized from the outside because there is no outside.

Kevin Harris: That's not to say that we can't diagram it—we just have to keep in mind with these diagrams that sometimes the perspective can be kind of deceiving.

Dr. Craig: Right. In the diagrams that we draw one of the spatial dimensions is suppressed – you have to eliminate it – and replace it with a dimension representing time, so that time is typically the vertical dimension in these models as the spatial universe, which is represented as a sort of a two-dimensional disc. As it evolves through time the lines of latitude grow larger and larger as the space expands over time.

Kevin Harris: Bill, on the first page of this book by Stephen Hawking he says, “philosophy is dead.” Now, we've had a lot of fun with that, but I certainly wouldn't want to take him out of context on that. If one were to say that just as-is, they're uttering a philosophy and saying 'my philosophy is that philosophy is dead'—well then apparently it's not. I don't know if he means that. He may mean . . . well, what does he mean?

Dr. Craig: Well, Kevin, I think that's what he means. He says here on page five, “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.” So he means to answer traditional philosophical questions, like why is there something rather than nothing, by science rather than philosophy. And I just happened to notice what I had forgotten before, this first chapter in which that paragraph occurs is called “The Mystery of Being.” So he's not trying to deal with just a scientific question, he is trying to answer a metaphysical question. The mystery of being is a metaphysical question about why is there anything rather than nothing. And that question simply can't be answered on a scientific level because science doesn't handle these sorts of metaphysical issues about why anything at all exists.

Kevin Harris: Yeah, one reviewer on Amazon said that Hawking makes his point quite convincingly. “Philosophy is dead in the sense of answering the most mysterious of life's questions. It's up to science and scientific theory to provide clues to the true answers, as philosophy in its most ancient forms has taken a back seat. But modern philosophy, scientific philosophy, has taken root.” Now, we've talked about scientism and I think that's what this reviewer is saying, that scientism is the only way to get answers.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, this is an expression of scientism, where he says scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery. [2] Scientists are now going to answer these traditional metaphysical questions. And what I would say to that reviewer is that if philosophy is incapable of answering these metaphysical questions then it is absolutely hopeless to think that science could ever answer them because they're simply not within the purview of science, which is based upon empirical discovery and theorizing, and therefore cannot answer questions about the mystery of being. That is simply not within the purview of science. And you find in the book, then, in fact, what the authors do is they misconstrue these philosophical questions, so that instead of answering the question 'why is there something rather than nothing?' they redefine the word nothing to mean empty space filled with vacuum energy. And then they can explain why the universe exists as a fluctuation of the energy that is contained in empty space. But, as one person remarked to me in a quip, he said, “what they're answering is not why is there something rather than nothing, but why there is something rather than something else.”

Kevin Harris: Oh, yeah.

Dr. Craig: And that's quite right. There science can do a good job at explaining the origin of the different phases of the universe as it goes through transitions from, say, a vacuum state to a material state, but it cannot address the metaphysical question of the mystery of being—why is there anything at all?

Kevin Harris: Now, his answer to the mystery of being would be what, then?

Dr. Craig: He doesn't answer it. They redefine the terms so as to answer a quite different question. Instead of answering the metaphysical question 'why is there something rather than nothing?' they redefine the word nothing to mean the quantum vacuum, empty space filled with vacuum energy. And something is, then, our observable universe, and the answer how did our observable universe come out of the quantum vacuum, which is an important scientific point, but it's not the question Leibniz was asking when he asked why is there something rather than nothing? We want to know, for example, why is there a vacuum filled with energy rather than something else or rather than nothing at all? And they cannot address these questions. So in fact they don't answer the questions that they set themselves out in the beginning of the book. They simply address a different set of questions.

Kevin Harris: Okay, I want to pause in the action here for just a moment and tell you that there are a few spots left for Israel Tour 2011 hosted by Reasonable Faith and Dr. William Lane Craig. Now this is in May. If you go to our website ReasonableFaith.org you'll see full details. This is a fantastic tour – Cesarea, Sea of Galilee, Copernaum – and Dr. Craig is going to be giving some after dinner presentations, time for questions and answers, and Dr. Craig is going to be lecturing at Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. You have the opportunity to be at that lecture. As you can imagine this is going to be something. Hebrew University and Dr. Craig's lecture. Now, you can view the full tour dates, the prices and the full itinerary when you go to ReasonableFaith.org and click on Israel Tour 2011. Obviously this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Only a few spots left. Go now to ReasonableFaith.org.

Hawking says, “In The Grand Design we explain why according to quantum theory the cosmos does not have just a single existence or history, but rather every possible history of the universe exists simultaneously.” I hear this a lot in quantum mechanics, in quantum physics. I hear people actually imbue quantum mechanics with almost divine properties, that they can do anything, and the mystery and if you can't explain something it's quantum mechanics. It's almost a quantum mechanics of the gaps kind of thing. And you hear things, Bill, like that a particle takes every conceivable path simultaneously, but yet that's impossible.

Dr. Craig: What he's referring to there is Richard Feynman's so-called sum over histories move to calculate the probability of a quantum particle which is fired from point A hitting a target at point B. And this is merely a mathematical device for calculating probabilities without running into intractable infinities. Otherwise you get these infinities that ruin your equations. So using the sum over histories method, it's a mathematical trick where you pretend that the particle takes all possible paths, [3] and some of these cancel each other out, and you arrive at the most probable point at which the particle will strike the target. But this is nothing more than a mathematical reckoning device. To treat it as a metaphysical picture of reality is a gratuitous piece of metaphysics which I think scarcely any scientist would take seriously. When I mentioned this in my Defenders class one of the members of the class is a quantum chemist at Georgia Tech, and he raised his hand and he said, “I just can't believe that they would interpret Feynman's sum over histories method to be a literal picture of the way reality is.” He says, “Nobody thinks that; it's just a trick we use for avoiding these infinite quantities.” So this is just, as I say, gratuitous metaphysics for which there's no ground at all, but it sounds so impressive because one is invoking the authority of these scientists, who are now the torch bearers in our quest for knowledge. But in fact there's no reason to think that this is a picture of the way reality actually is.

Kevin Harris: Yeah, it's almost like a God substitute – quantum mechanics is a God substitute – that when you get to that level things are, well, frankly, supernatural, almost. But then they don't want it to be supernatural. So I'm glad you cleared that up.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, there's a lot of abuse of quantum physics in theology and philosophy. We've seen that, for example, in the attempt of Eastern religions to appropriate the idea of observer-dependent reality, the Toa of Physics that Fritjof Capra wrote of for example. These are all, I think, abuses of science treating mathematical tricks as though they were serious metaphysics, and then taking one physical interpretation of quantum mechanics and saying that this is the true interpretation, when in fact there are something like ten, at least ten, different physical interpretations of the equations of quantum mechanics. They're empirically equivalent. Nobody knows which one if any of them is the correct interpretation.

Kevin Harris: Well, if anybody takes a hard line and starts throwing quantum mechanics at you for some reason, you would say, well, which of the ten theories do you hold?

Dr. Craig: Right, I would say which of the ten physical interpretations do you think is correct, and why?

Kevin Harris: Yeah.

Dr. Craig: The second question, at least, is unanswerable.

Kevin Harris: Side road, real quick, Bill: what is shown in the double slit experiment? I've heard about that a lot.

Dr. Craig: Right. They do a very nice job in the book of explaining a lot of these experiments that are done in quantum mechanics. And in that sense much of the book I found to be very helpful, and beautifully illustrated. And the double slit experiments and other experiments of this sort show that the photons, or the fundamental particles, exhibit behavior that is sometimes wave-like and sometimes particle-like. And so it is a great mystery as to exactly what these fundamental features of reality are really like, because they exhibit the behavior of both light waves, but also of tiny particles.

Kevin Harris: Yeah, waves and particles are not the same thing.

Dr. Craig: No, right, and yet the fundamental features of quantum physics seem to exhibit the behavior, on occasion, of both.

Kevin Harris: Well, does that mean that they're supernatural? [laughter]

Dr. Craig: No, no, it just means that we don't understand their nature. It will depend on the conditions for the experiment – how you measure them – whether or not it exhibits wave-like behavior or it exhibits particle-like behavior, and we don't understand why this is so. But there's no logical contradiction here. It's not as though it is exhibiting both particle-behavior and wave-behavior in contradictory ways. It depends on the measurement situation, and it's always consistent. But we just don't understand the nature of these fundamental entities, that they would exhibit these different kinds of behavior that we associate exclusively with particles or with waves.

Kevin Harris: Bill, just from my own observation, it looks like the multiverse and world-ensemble-type theories are growing rather than waning. Now, for a while I thought that maybe they would kind of die out as an answer to design and some of the things like that. But multiverse seems to be growing in popularity, that there are many universes and we are one of just many.

Dr. Craig: This is the other theologically significant issue that Mlodinov and Hawking address in the book. The first one would be the beginning of the universe, which we see they affirm, that there is an absolute beginning to time and the universe in the no boundary proposal. The other issue they address is the fine-tuning of the universe. [4] Here it's interesting, Kevin, that they misstate the issue very seriously. They ask 'why does the universe have the present laws of physics that it does rather than different laws', and that's not the question people are asking about fine-tuning. The question we want to know is: why is the universe characterized by the constants and quantities with the values that they have, rather than different values of those constants and quantities? And we are talking about other possible universes governed by the same laws of nature, not different laws, as they state. Nobody knows what universes governed by different laws of nature would look like. But because we're talking about other universes that are governed by the same laws of nature, but with different values of the constants and quantities, we can figure out what those universes would look like. And Hawking and Mlodinov, again, do a very nice job of showing how this is done, and explaining how if you alter these constants and quantities by utterly trivial amounts you wind up with life-prohibiting universes. It turns out that our universe is balanced on a razor's edge of incompressible fineness in order for the universe to be life-permitting. And the improbability of this occurring is so great, Kevin, that really the only way of rescuing the hypothesis of chance is to go with the multiverse hypothesis, or the world-ensemble hypothesis whereby you multiply your probabilistic resources to such an extent that you can guarantee that finely-tuned universes like ours will appear by chance somewhere in the ensemble.

Kevin Harris: If you have enough universes the chances are that one of them is going to be this one, with these constants and quantities.

Dr. Craig: Right, and in fact if you say there are an infinite number then you'll get an infinite number of fine-tuned universes just like ours. And so what drives this is not science, frankly, it's a metaphysical proposal to avoid having to posit an intelligent, transcendent, ultra-mundane designer of the cosmos.

Kevin Harris: We've discussed this in podcasts before, Bill. It only puts the problem back one step. If there are many universes, unless you go into an infinite regress, and all of the things we talk about in the kalam cosmological argument, well then, was there a first?

Dr. Craig: Right, that issue still remains on the table. And they're committed to the Hartle-Hawking no boundary proposal which says that there is an absolute beginning to time and the universe. Now, the question would be: why think that there is a world ensemble of universes? Why think that there is a multitude of these things? And here their appeal is to the Feynman sum over histories proposal, that this gives us the many worlds. But, as I say, that is just a gratuitous piece of metaphysics—that is not in any way intended to give us a number of real concrete universes. These are just possible paths that the universe could take in order to arrive at the standard model of physics that we observe today. So there's no evidence for such a world ensemble or multiverse that they give in the book, nor do they even respond, Kevin, to the most important critiques of the multiverse hypothesis that have been offered by people like Hawking's erstwhile collaborator Roger Penrose at Oxford University. Penrose has said that these multiverse hypotheses are worse than useless with regard to explaining the fine-tuning of the universe because on these multiverse theories we ought to be observing a much, much different universe than what in fact we observe, so that our observations are really strongly disconfirmatory of the world ensemble or multiverse hypothesis.

Kevin Harris: I'm a rank amateur at this, and that seems to be the case to me. If anything it seems like he could shave them off with Ockham's razor, and it's kind of bloated to me, that we have to have all these . . .

Dr. Craig: Oh, yeah, I would have to agree with you there. I think that unless you can posit some fundamental simple mechanism that would pump out these many worlds, then, I think, you are going to fall prey to Ockham's razor because your theory will be vastly, vastly more complicated. And nobody knows what this fundamental, simple mechanism would be that would pump out these many worlds. In fact if that mechanism turns out itself to be fine-tuned then you haven't solved anything, [5] you've only pushed the problem back a notch, and since the theory is as yet undiscovered, nobody knows whether or not that will not itself manifest fine-tuning.

Kevin Harris: Robin Collins says that if you're going to pump out loaves of bread you have to have a bread maker in a sense, which would be pretty incredibly fine-tuned.

Dr. Craig: Well, that will be the question. It remains to be seen, I think. But certainly the fine-tuning that we observe is such that when you try to suppress it in one area it pops up in another. It's sort of like that wrinkle in the rug – where you press it down at one point it only appears somewhere else – and so trying to eliminate the fine-tuning by making it physically necessary has been futile up to this point. And nobody knows whether or not anyone will be able to find a multiverse theory that is itself free of fine-tuning, and doesn’t exhibit the same problem.

Kevin Harris: We've got lots more to discuss on this book and on this topic. Let's pick it up there next time on our next podcast with Dr. William Lane Craig. Thank you so much for joining us. And be sure you go to ReasonableFaith.org and see what's new. We'll see you next time. [6]