Kalam thinking: God posited as a boundary condition in time
I've said it before and I say it again: In many ways I have a lot in common with the de facto Intelligent Design theorists: Viz: Without invoking sentience as a primary force it is, I believe, it is difficult to make intelligible sense of a highly organized universe where the observational experience of human consciousness is so central to the meaning of the reality of the cosmos. The irreducibility & hiddenness of the human first person perspective is the precedence for invoking thoughts of an a priori highly complex sentience underlying the cosmic order. Moreover, accounting for the universe just in terms of simple local interaction between fundamental particles necessarily eventually runs up against a logical hiatus of brute contingency. Therefore I seek aseity & ultimate origins in the complexity of deity and not the localised mindless simplicity of particulate interactions.
But in spite of all that when ever I look at the detail of the de facto IDist's apologetic efforts there is always something I have to take issue with and that issue, if its not to do with their now Trump slanting politics, is their subliminal dualism. This dualism comes out in their habitual use of a "natural forces vs "God" Intelligent Agency" dichotomy. But if it is God who has created and continues to create our world those so called "natural forces" are far from "natural". In fact the cosmos is most unnaturally miraculous everywhere and everywhen.
This post is about my latest beef with de facto ID thinking.
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In a post entitled Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel Tries Banishing The Kalam Constant on the de facto Intelligent Design web site Uncommon Descent, Big Bang theorist Ethan Siegel is criticized for making an attempt to muddy the waters over the question of whether the Big Bang represents an absolute beginning. For as sure as eggs are eggs the de facto IDists are thoroughly committed to the idea that the Big Bang was an absolute beginning. They may well be right about that; in fact as Christian I think it likely they are right. But it is typical of dualist ID, whose "natural forces vs God" dichotomy all but puts created matter on a deistic footing, demands the patching-in of periodic and ad hoc Divine interventions in order to save Christianity. This subliminal deism also leads them to commit to the notion that Big-Bang was the first Big Patch-in. As we shall see they are on precarious ground because the early nanoseconds of creation fade into epistemic obscurity the further we look back and the ground becomes debatable. Worst of all they commit themselves to the flaky Kalam argument.
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UNCOMMON DESCENT: Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel Tries Banishing The Kalam Constant. To do that, he posits an “acausal, indeterminate, random Universe”:
MY COMMENT: Given that Siegel is an atheist he's not being unreasonable here and he is giving some leeway to us theists: Yes, from the observational and theoretical data we have it is not yet possible to certainly decide whether the universe had an absolute start, although Siegel does concede above that a fundamental logical discontinuity at the beginning could conceivably be identified with God's action. But he's right, we don't yet have a water-tight proof one way or the other; rather we have, depending on one's worldview, arguments which may or may not compel. He does not posit an acausal, indeterminate, random Universe”. Rather he's being agnostic about the Kalam argument which in my opinion is an argument with cracks in it. Although I would take issue with Siegel that the use of randomness really "explains" nothing in the deepest sense of the word "explain", I agree with him that randomness does erode the sharpness of the "cause & effect" concept, a concept that only really comes out clearly in classical mechanics. In fact not long after Newton annunciated his laws some enlightenment philosophers interpreted the unbroken chain of Newtonian cause & effect in a self sufficient deistical manner, a manner that has worked against Christianity. This leads very easily into de facto ID's "nature forces vs God" dichotomy with the upshot that IDists are very anxious to show that the otherwise deistical cosmos does from time to time experience divine interventions, thus making good for what they believe to be the cosmos' evolutionary inability to create life by those inferior "natural forces".
One can of course simply relabel randomness as a kind of cause in itself with its effects being seen in disordered patterns, but that is really just a change in semantics. All in all I would suggest that given his convinced atheism Siegel naturally enough is going to favor the elimination of any awkward origins discontinuity or logical hiatus and would much prefer to establish a cosmic continuity from eternity unto eternity; that is, he sees the cosmos as a self supporting affair not needing the input of God as a sustaining and/or continuously creating agent. There's irony in his appeal to randomness: It's a process where there's a discontinuity every moment, but if you are going to claim that randomness is the forever-cosmic-status-quo then the constant discontinuity randomness becomes the new continuity!
But I'll give Siegel this: He's being fair to theists with his agnosticism about whether cosmic origins entail a logical discontinuity or not.
UD quotes ID guru Brian Miller who is writing on Evolution, News and Science about Siegel's views:
MILLER: Siegel begins his piece by outlining the Kalam cosmological argument for God that Meyer detailed in The Return of the God Hypothesis:
“…there is no cause for the phenomenon of when this atom will decay. It is as though the Universe has some sort of random, acausal nature to it that renders certain phenomena fundamentally indeterminate and unknowable. In fact, there are many other quantum phenomena that display this same type of randomness, including entangled spins, the rest masses of unstable particles, the position of a particle that’s passed through a double slit, and so on.”
MY COMMENT: Leaving aside decoherence and multiverse notions (ideas which attempt to reinstate localised determinism) it's true that quantum mechanics is certainly not so compellingly causal as Newtonian mechanics. So, apart from the change in semantics I've already mentioned I would accept that Seigel is right in so far as the concept of "causation" in the context of irreducible randomness is a somewhat strained idea. However, where I do differ with Siegel is that my intuitions cannot accept the absurdity of irreducible randomness, an absurdity which tries to convince us "that's the way things are and that is all there is to it. Get used to it!". If Siegel finds he is able to accept that this meaningless logical hiatus is the end of enquiry then I have say I personally find it senseless and God help Siegel! For me the inquiry must go further rather than being left as the absurd logical hiatus of random contingency. As I always say, atheism teeters on the edge of the nihilist abyss.
In the sense I advance in my previous post on Kalam, the search for a profound "cause" of the highly contingent cosmic state of affairs, affairs which otherwise seem absurd & meaningless, must go beyond a resigned acceptance of the brute-fact descriptions of an ultimately incompressible kernel of algorithmic information. But the Kalam argument is naïve: It is based on notions of temporal antecedents & sequences of events: Whatever begins to exist has a cause..... And need that "cause" be God? Perhaps it's simply preceding "natural causes"?
I suspect that the Kalam argument finds intuitive support from those gross Newtonian intuitions about an unbroken temporal sequence of cause & effect. I don't share those intuitions myself, therefore Kalam doesn't work for me; it is far from axiomatic as far as I'm concerned. If there is any worthy intuition behind Kalam it is that the cosmos must make anthropic sense.
MILLER: This claim is highly misleading since it confuses determinism with causality. Quantum mechanics is not deterministic since it describes only the probabilities that certain events could occur such as the paths a photon could take in the double slit experiment. But the laws of quantum mechanics act in our universe as the causal agent for all such events.
Brian Miller, “Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel Again Desperately
Attempts to Avoid a Cosmic Beginning” at Evolution News and Science Today
(November 8, 2021)
Siegel may be confusing the Kalam Constant with the Shazzam! Constant. What’s really interesting is that he thinks he must answer Meyer’s arguments at all.
MY COMMENT: No, Mr. Miller quantum mechanics isn't a "natural causal agent" (as opposed to an "intelligent agent"?); Rather, it's a sovereign God's ordained constraint on the possible patterns of events that our cosmos can generate. The quantum equations are not best thought of as the cause of the individual random events of quantum collapse, but as a kind of "permissive envelope" of possibility within which the statistics of randomness applies.
The need for the use of statistics in QM is simply an admission that humanly speaking, beyond frequency statistics, the individual events of randomness are epistemically unknowable and we really don't know how particular "random" events fit in with God's active and permissive wills. In referring to quantum mechanics as a causal agent Miller is really engaged in the trivial activity I've already talked about; namely, recycling the word "causal" to cover the role of quantum mechanics as a statistical constraint. Miller is at liberty to engage in this semantic jiggery-pokery, but Miller really should note that the Kalam argument is set very much in the context of time as a sequence of events with one event being the cause of the next event, an event which is regarded as an effect - this concept of cause comes straight out of intuitions that have been formed in the macroscopic world of Newtonian mechanics. Viewing physics as a constraint with divine purposes behind it rather than an old fashioned Newtonian cause & effect scenario is to my mind a much more appropriate nuance.
Miller's subliminal dualism encourages him to hang onto the Kalam argument at all costs. Yes. I agree it is likely that Big Bang does trace back to an absolute logical hiatus. But Miller is part of the ID subculture which has staked so much on the inefficacy of those so called "natural forces" to generate life and therefore has the need to invoke a patched-in intelligent agency. Underlying this, I propose, is a blend of subliminal deism which commits de facto IDists to seek evidence for the existence of intermittent acts of special creation in order to make the epistemic of their explanatory filter to work.
Miller goes on to pick up the debate as to whether on not current theory points to an absolute beginning, in particular debates around the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) theorem, a theorem I mention in my previous post on Kalam. This theorem suggests that an absolute beginning is entailed by Big Bang Theory. But Siegel mentions a paper by Aquirre and Gratton which raises questions over the BGV theorem. Miller counters as follows:
MILLER: And in his extended research notes under Note 6c, Meyer explains why the Aguirre and Gratton model is completely unrealistic. It requires an unimaginable level of fine-tuning in the infinite past for the universe to have contracted to such a special low-entropy, compact state at the transition from contraction to expansion. If the model were even plausible, the level of required fine-tuning would represent even greater evidence of design than it was intended to avoid by removing the beginning. By appealing to it, Siegel is proverbially jumping from the philosophical frying pan into the fire.
MY COMMENT: Miller does have a worthy point here when he tells us that as one goes backwards in time entropy must decrease: This decrease can't go on forever. If as the Boltzmann equation asserts entropy is a monotonically increasing function of the number of microstates consistent with a macrostate then there comes a point where the number of possible microstates is so small that the large-number assumptions of statistical mechanics will break down. I see this as yet another example of the potentially pathological epistemic of hopefully extrapolating physical laws (otherwise only tested in normal circumstances) into the unknown to the point of breakdown.
And another example of extrapolation pathology: As I remarked on my previous post on Big Bang: The other baffling [extrapolation] issue is this: As we follow the shrinking exponential of inflation back in time there comes a point where the scales of gravity and quantum theory collide: What happens then? Gravitational and quantum theory have yet to be united, hence extrapolation beyond the hot big bang period is an extrapolation into the dark unknown. Therefore, apart from speculation on all sides, I guess that is how the situation will remain for some time to come.
In my previous post on the Kalam argument I commented what I believe to be the general import behind the likes of the BGV theorem:
The general mathematical principle being invoked here can be found in algorithmics. The computations inherent in some functions cannot be meaningfully wound back in time indefinitely. There comes a point when the computations prior to a certain time in the past are undefined. So yes, it may well be that the physical computations that run our cosmos have a definite start time. However, it is one thing to hypothesize physical functions that can’t be run back in time indefinitely and quite another to make one’s theology depend on it.
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Both Siegel and Miller show hints of desperation in desiring to see their respective creation agendas justified, although Siegel can be commended for showing a certain amount of epistemic humility in giving us theists some leeway. Miller however looks to be the more desperate or the two and that, I hazard, is because of de facto ID's philosophical dualism and subliminal deist thinking. For the IDist God must be seen to be overtly "intervening" in what they believe to be the creatively ineffectual "natural" order. Therefore a very contingent logical hiatus at the beginning of things will do nicely thankyou very much; it represents a God starting as he means to go on; namely, as an occasional intelligent "cause & effect" agent when "natural forces" are thought by IDists to be unable to do the job. Well yes, I can accept that God may well occasionally miraculously dabble with one-off works, but that doesn't mean that the so-called natural order, which I stress once again is also God's work, isn't also capable of the miraculous. What I object to is that for IDists God becomes an ancillary cause to be invoked when "inferior natural forces" are thought not to be up to the job. What are the dualist IDists going say if evolution was proved beyond reasonable doubt? Do they then abandon "The God hypothesis"?
For IDists "The God Hypothesis" has become too dependent on an absolute beginning and those occasional one-off interventions; And here's the irony: Deism, which posits the existence of self sustaining "natural forces" is a short step from atheism; all one need do is argue that if the universe has a natural self-sustaining sequence of cause & effect then why is there any need for divine one-off interventions at all if it can be shown that "natural forces" can generate life? In focusing so exclusively on a jumped up Newtonian time-based cause & effect paradigm IDists have failed to do justice to a cosmos that has a highly contingent logical hiatus everywhere and everywhen.
ADDENDUM 27/11/2021
Business as usual at de facto ID central
In the YouTube video below William Dembski implicitly assumes a natural forces vs intelligent agency dichotomy and perpetuates the error that evolution, if it were true, doesn't entail the need for an intelligent agent and therefore people like Richard Dawkins can claim to be intellectually fulfilled atheists. As I've maintained before, in terms of the way they think IDists are not far removed from the thinking of atheists.
William Dembski: Gauging the Success of Intelligent Design - YouTube
And by the way: Dembski concludes that de facto ID has not been successful at least in terms of its take-up. As long as it continues to perpetuate old errors it doesn't deserve success.
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