This series has been triggered by my last post where I commented on a blog-post by evangelical atheist Richard Carrier.
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The cosmological argument, the ontological argument, the fine-tuning argument, the Kalem argument and the like are all arguments for the existence of God. I'm afraid to say that in spite of being a speculative theist myself I've found these arguments flawed and unconvincing; see for example here where I criticize the fine-tuning argument or here where I criticize the Kalem argument. There are I submit no "proofs" for God's existence, for like so many objects which we believe to exist, we only do so on the basis of the evidence provided by the sparse sampling of our experience and then attempt to abduct a sense-making narrative around those experiences. All significant objects are usually far too large (& often far too complex) for this sampling to be anywhere near exhaustive or logically obliging. However, an ability to predict in advance the evidential samples these objects throw up does enhance their probability. No surprise then that evidence of God is going to be very partial and debatable; although that's not to say individuals can't have an epiphany which supports a strong intuitively held faith - but of course that's not readily shareable and classifies as subjective & anecdotal evidence. In this series of posts I look into the article I've linked to below by vociferous evangelical atheist Ricard Carrier who, not surprisingly, has little patience with those aforementioned arguments for God....
I will not here be mounting a defense (or critique) of those rather precarious traditional arguments for God's existence. Instead, I'm confining my terms of reference to a critique of the anti-god arguments used by Richard Carrier.
Firstly, let me register a point of agreement with the introduction to Richard's post:
Richard: I
want to make perfectly clear from the start that what I am doing here is not what Krauss and
others are doing, which they have been rightly criticized by theologians for as
missing the point. That a multiverse is inevitable given an initial state of
nothing is not because of quantum
cosmological calculations showing it’s not just possible but actually likely
that a complex universe or even a multiverse would spontaneously arise from any
arbitrarily tiny bubble of absolute vacuum. Like the He-Gao-Cai thesis: “Spontaneous
Creation of the Universe from Nothing,” Physical Review D 89 (2014). Because that still
presupposes the existence of the vacuum, the bubble. They are starting from the
assumption that some quantum of space-time exists, and obeys certain laws of
physics. That’s still pretty impressive, one must admit. But theists will
complain that we then have to explain how that quantum of space-time came
about. Why was it there at all? Why does it
obey those laws of physics? The theologian’s idea of
nothing means absolutely nothing. Not even
physics or tiny empty spaces. Hence, missing the point.
My Comment: Yes, I agree, something-for-nothing-physics actually presumes something; at the very least certain laws of physics. I touched on this subject in this post where atheist physicist Sean Carroll makes similar comments. Richard goes on to consider some of the eternal multiverse theories that have arisen out of quantum theory and inflationary ideas. These are still at the speculative and hypothetical stage, so I won't consider these. At this juncture our own universe is the only one for which we have overwhelming evidence.
Richard then considers the problem of "nothing". Let me say at the start that I'm sympathetic to Richard's general idea that the concept of "nothing" is likely to be either incoherent or logically contradictory; after all we are clearly faced with a cosmos of something on a huge scale and this suggests to me that with regard to ultimate origins something somewhere has a necessary existence or aseity.
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Richard: Proposition 1: That which is logically impossible can never exist or happen......It’s really hard to fathom what one could even mean by saying logical contradictions can obtain in the real world, that the logically impossible is still nevertheless possible. And most theists really won’t go there. After all, they love the ontological argument, which argues that that which is logically necessary, necessarily exists. They try to get a god to be one of those things. That never works. But still. Finding such a proof is a Holy Grail of theology.
My Comment: In my view the ontological argument advanced by Anslem is a wordy smoke and mirrors "proof" of the necessity of God's existence. I'd accept however that if God does exist then presumably his nonexistence is a contradiction, that is, his existence is a logical necessity. But my guess is that proving God's existence to be a logical necessity involves infinities and is therefore beyond finite human understanding (Hence Heb 11:6). If that is the case, then the logical necessity of God's ontology cannot be humanly understood, but rather God's existence can only be apprehended through experiential evidence. So, as far as humans are concerned God's existence is derived from a synthesis of experience and not fancied logical truisms. (That's not say that there is no ontological argument for God's existence, but I suspect it is beyond finite human thought)
Now having admitted the dubiousness of those one-liner (or at most a few lines) logical proofs of God existence here's an interesting irony: We find that in his article Richard himself, like many a theist, is also on a quest for one-liner logical necessity, but not the logical necessity of God (a concept he clearly abhors) but instead one-liner proofs of the logical necessity of an insentient cosmos. This is the holy grail of atheism.
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Richard: Nevertheless,
the very notion that logically necessary things necessarily exist, necessarily
entails logically impossible things never exist. Because one of the things that
necessarily exists, is the absence of logically impossible things. Otherwise,
we could not in fact say logically necessary things necessarily exist. Because
that is claiming it’s logically impossible they could “not” exist; but we just
admitted logically impossible things can happen! If the logically impossible
can actually happen, then it’s possible logically necessary things don’t exist.
Down goes the ontological argument.
There are actually good reasons to conclude the logically impossible cannot exist (in any meaningfully relevant sense), but I won’t go further into that here (see Sense and Goodness without God, index, “contradiction, nature of,” and my remarks on the point in response to Reppert). I’ll just say that the following argument is for people who are unwilling or honestly unable to deny this proposition.
My Comment: The foregoing is just back up for Richard's proposition 1 which states that logically impossible things can't exist. Let's not dispute this! As I think we will eventually see there's a lot of argumentative momentum and energy in Richard's reasoning that is going to prove very useful indeed.
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· Richard: Proposition 2: The most nothingly state of nothing that can ever obtain, is a state of affairs of zero size lacking all properties and contents, except that which is logically necessary.
This actually follows from Proposition 1, combined with the basic meaning of “absolutely nothing.” The most “nothing” nothing you can ever have, is by removing every possible thing that can be removed, until there is nothing left. Which thus includes any quanta of space or time, as well as laws of physics, particles, and so on. But since you can’t “remove” logically necessary things, or have a logically impossible state of affairs, it is logically impossible for any state of nothing to lack that whose existence or occurrence is logically necessary. Which in turn means it is logically impossible for any state of nothing to behave in a logically contradictory way. Because logical contradictions can never obtain. They therefore cannot happen. So they cannot govern what a “nothing” would do.
That gets us down to the most “nothing” nothing that could ever have obtained, by removing things until there are no more things we can remove without creating a logical contradiction. We can remove all durations of time, until time is a dimensionless point, representing “zero” amount of time. That’s what “no time exists” means. We can remove all height and width and depth, until space is a dimensionless point, representing “zero” amount of space, in every direction. We can remove all matter and energy. So, there are no particles, no contents. And we can remove all rules, properties, and laws of physics. Except anything we can prove is logically necessary. If removing something entails a logical contradiction, we can’t remove it. We are stuck with it. There can never have been a state of being that lacked it.
Which means if you still think that’s not “nothing,” but still something (namely, the presence of every logically necessary thing, and the absence of every logical impossibility), then you are admitting that nothing is logically impossible.
My Comment: Nice one Richard, I agree! But now just look at the following (With my emphases)....
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Richard: ...And down goes any argument you may have that requires the universe to have come from nothing without a god around. Because “nothing” can never have existed: it’s logically impossible. Therefore we no longer need gods to explain why there is something. That there would be something is logically necessary. By your own admission.
I
suspect theists won’t go there. And those who do, will have to abandon their
argument that without god we can’t explain why there is something and not
nothing. Because they will have just conceded it is logically necessarily the
case that there will be something, even without gods. The rest will bite the
bullet and admit that yes, when they say that in the absence of gods there once
must have been a state of nothing (from which nothing, they will insist, could
have come), they can only mean the “nothing” I just described: the logically
possible nothing; the one that still isn’t totally nothing, because it still
must contain every logical necessity. But, they will be happy to note, it
contains nothing else. No contents. No quantities of spacetime. No rules. At
least that much of nothing is logically possible. It therefore may once have
been the state of things.
My Comment: I'll be coming back to these last two paragraphs in a bit, especially the bits I've emphasised. Richard goes on to qualify the foregoing with some physics patter telling us that of course we don't actually know from either empirical science or logic whether or not the cosmos is past eternal. But as he himself is aware that doesn't affect the main thrust of his argument, which is to simply set a lower limit on "nothing"; Viz: "nothing" so called is logically obliged to contain all that is logically true. No disagreement with that from my point of view! But what about this: It is logically necessarily the case that there will be something, even without gods ???
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He concludes this section on proposition 2 with the following:
Richard: But here we are just working out what must necessarily be the case if there was ever a state of total nothing, the most empty nothing logically possible. And that means such a nothing-state will be a hypersphere of zero size in all dimensions, with no contents, and governed by no rules or laws, except the laws of logical necessity. Which is at least a plausible hypothesis. We can ask what predicted observations that hypothesis entails, and how well that accords with what we see. So this is what we shall mean by the word Nothing (capitalized) heretofore.
My Comment: Yes, it's a plausible hypothesis and I'm inclined to go along with it. But in stating the foregoing Richard has overlooked the obvious....
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Requoting parts of what I've already quoted above....
Richard: ...And down goes any argument you may have that requires the universe to have come from nothing without a god around. Because “nothing” can never have existed: it’s logically impossible. Therefore we no longer need gods to explain why there is something. That there would be something is logically necessary. By your own admission.
I suspect theists won’t go there. And those who do, will have to abandon their argument that without god we can’t explain why there is something and not nothing. Because they will have just conceded it is logically necessarily the case that there will be something, even without gods.
My Comment: OK, so once all mere logical possible contingencies have been removed and we are reduced to entities or entities that are logical truisms (that is, their non-existence would be a contradiction) how do we know that among those logically obliged objects we are not left with that dreaded unmentionable entity - and dare I say it ...... an entity which is both a logical truism (in a way we perhaps can't comprehend) and is actually sentient? After all, whatever the inadequacies and failures of the so-called ontological argument, the first cause argument, the fine-tuning argument and what have you (And I'm the first to be critical of them) it is at least clear that no theistic creationist is actually saying things come out of absolutely nothing because their starting point is God and such an entity (which is presumably logically necessary) can hardly be classified as nothing.
So, in the next parts of this series I'll be looking at what Richard is telling us about that much-loathed a priori theistic creative dynamic (which theology usually tells us has aseity) and comparing it with the insentient a priori creative dynamic he is proposing.
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Reflections and Speculations
Ex-nihilo creation is in actual fact a relative thing: In one sense even I can create something from nothing in the commonsense use of the word "nothing". If I start with say either a blank canvass, or a blank computer memory or even blank neurons in my mind, my cognitive processes can fill these featureless media with wonderful patterns, thoughts and stories. It's well within the trammels of natural language use to say that I've created those patterns from nothing but my own cognition and will. So, on this permissible common linguistic usage I've created something from nothing and yet at the same time it has not come from absolutely nothing because I'm creator. It all depends on what you mean by "nothing". But there is one big difference to this kind of creation and the lower-limit "nothing" that Richard is talking about: Viz: Human creators are mere logical contingences, patterns and configurations of particles that can be extinguished; they are not logical truisms. Nevertheless, human creativity can be used as a suggestive metaphor for the kind of creativity we are envisaging that might be the prerogative of a priori sentient deity.
There is a human intuition derived from our experience of the macroscopic world that identity is bound up with hypostatic identity; that is, identity is bound up with identity of substance. Hence for example when a human dies and their remains return to the earth we might ask where has the humanity gone? Some might answer (and I've heard this sort of thing at woodland inhumations and cremations) that the deceased humanity is now part of the surrounding nature. But is this claim anything other than a comforting sentiment? Because for me human identity derives from its configurations and the patterns of behavior it imprints on the material medium. Humanity is not a hypostatic identity; human uniqueness derives from its dynamic configurational form and the patterns in space and time it impresses on the medium of matter.
It's true that in many macroscopic connections hyperstatic identity can be defined; that is, we can follow through the hypostasis as it changes in form from configuration to configuration. But at the microscopic level the hypostatic model fails. The indistinguishability of quantum particles leads to quantum statistics where interchangeability of fundamental particles is a meaningless concept and must be canceled from the apparently logically possible combinations/permutations. (See the appendix 1 in this document)
We are actually familiar with this kind of indistinguishability even in some macroscopic cases: For example, computer bits: To talk of swapping the values of two bits set to "1" is a meaningless notion. But you can change and move an identified binary pattern impressed on a computer memory. In this context identity is found in pattern and configuration and not in hypostasis.
This model suggests to me that if a sentient entity of some sort is the logical truism after one has eliminated all mere logically possible contingencies, then the mind of this entity is the cognitive medium on which the logically possible contingent pattens and configurations are reified, developed, changed and perhaps even destroyed. But of course, it is a highly debatable and contentious point that a fundamental sentient cognitive medium is the irreducible logical kernel upon which those ephemeral created patterns are reified. That a hard-core logical reduction leaves behind this divine medium when all mere logically possible art has been removed is likely to go down like a feather sandwich with the Richard Carriers of this world. But we know what St Paul thinks. In Acts17:24ff we read:
24 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
