#953 The Timeless Universe Hypothesis

Dr. craig’s response

I call your proposal the Hypothesis of a Quiescent Universe, Jack, and I addressed it years ago in my note “The Kalam Cosmological Argument and the Hypothesis of a Quiescent Universe,”  Faith and Philosophy 8 (1991): 104-108. Since this article is not archived on our website, I’ll re-visit the issue here. I’ll take your questions in order.

First, “Why is it that [I] defend the second premise of the Kalam with philosophical arguments regarding the metaphysical possibility of the actual infinite?” The reason is that I first became acquainted with the kalām cosmological argument by reading Stuart Hackett’s book The Resurrection of Theism (1957). In that book Hackett defended philosophical arguments for the finitude of the past. In reading Frederick Copleston’s multi-volume A History of Philosophy, I became acquainted with the long and illustrious history of this argument in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought. These pre-modern thinkers employed philosophical arguments for the beginning of the universe. As I read the standard refutations of these arguments, I was appalled at how flimsy they were. It was only during my doctoral studies at the University of Birmingham that I became acquainted with the scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe from contemporary cosmology. So for me, the philosophical arguments are fundamental, and the scientific evidence provides empirical confirmation of a conclusion already reached on the basis of philosophical argument.

Second, “God never begins to exist, but has only existed for a finite amount of time in the sense that time only began 14 billion years ago. In the same way, the universe could have had a timeless part that gave way to the physical reality in which we see?” This is the hypothesis of a quiescent universe. In order for the universe to exist timelessly, it would have to exist absolutely changelessly. But that is impossible for any physical reality. Nothing can reach a temperature of absolute zero, for there will always be atomic and molecular motion. Therefore, the proposal is physically impossible. Moreover, what would explain the timeless universe’s giving way, as you put it, to the temporal universe that we see? Only the existence of a personal agent endowed with freedom of the will and therefore not determined by antecedent conditions can explain how a temporal effect can arise from a timeless cause. An impersonal, mechanically operating cause would either produce the effect from eternity or not at all. This was al-Ghazali’s great insight as to why the cause of the beginning of the universe must be a Personal Creator.

Third, don’t “all cosmological models suggest that there was always something, whether that's mathematical laws, or a vacuum or physical reality.” No. Indeed, the standard Friedman-Lemaître model implies that spacetime had a beginning a finite time ago before which nothing at all existed. We must be careful of equivocation here. Even on the standard model, the universe has “always” existed in the sense that it has existed at every past time. But because past time is finite, the universe has not “always” existed in the sense that it is beginningless and past eternal. It is this second sense of “always” that is relevant here. The fact is that there are no tenable models of a past eternal universe.

Fourth, “Roger Penrose's theory of Conformal Cyclical Cosmology. . . doesn't require an actually infinite number of moments before this one.” On the contrary, Penrose’s model features an actually infinite series of past universes in succession! That’s why it’s called “cyclical.” To make things even worse, each one of these past universes expands potentially infinitely toward the future. So how in the world could the universe complete a potential infinite by successive addition and make the transition to the next universe? If the universe expands potentially infinitely, then it is impossible to come to an end.

Fifth, “I don't think any model goes from a literal philosophical nothing to the universe as we see it, excluding creation ex nihilo in Abrahamic faiths.” You’re mistaken, Jack. As physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler emphasize with respect to the standard model, “At this singularity, space and time came into existence; literally nothing existed before the singularity, so, if the Universe originated at such a singularity, we would truly have a creation ex nihilo.”[1] Now to avoid misunderstanding, we should not say that the universe goes “from a literal philosophical nothing” to what we see today because nothing is not a state of affairs prior to the universe. Rather, we should say simply that there was an absolutely first physical state of affairs, which was not preceded by anything.

Sixth, “if we define ‘the universe’ broadly as the existence of something, it seems plausible that something has always existed.” I’ve already commented on the equivocal use of the word “always.” But your definition of the universe as “the existence of something” begs the question in favor of atheism. I agree that something has always existed in the sense that there is an eternal being that never began to exist. But that being is not the universe, which did begin to exist, but a transcendent Creator of the universe, or God.