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The Origins of the Universe

Dialogue I introduces the characters. The discussion is to be concerned, in the first place with arguments for the reality of God based on the existence of the universe, and in the second with those based on particular features of the universe. We begin with a discussion of whether “big bang” theories of the origin of the universe, or other theories which ascribe a beginning to it, imply that there was a Cause for that beginning.

Failing that, can we say that the universe, whatever its origin, requires a “first cause”? Or that if it consists of “contingent” beings, which might or might not have existed, there must be a “necessary being” which could not not-exist? Or that the universe requires an explanation?

Alternatively, is it possible that the universe exists by chance? Can we say that explanation in terms of a God is in some way simpler than any alternative?

The scene is a radio station’s studio. Leslie, Myra, and Geoffrey are sitting rather nervously at a table.

voice of an announcer

As part of our series of Controversies, we have in our studio this evening three well-known amateurs in the long-running debate over science, religion and the reality of God. Leslie Clentham is Lecturer in Philosophy at Highgate Theological Seminary; Myra Dearman is Principal of St Mildred’s School, Wenlock; and Geoffrey Philpotts is the author of The Sceptical Eye. They are here to hold a series of broadcast Dialogues on the theme “From World to God?” Ms. Dearman?

myra

Hello, and welcome. I have been asked to act as a kind of “moderator” to the discussion, should such a functionary be needed, as being the nearest thing we have to an impartial arbiter. This is because while I am myself a Christian believer, I am decidedly doubtful about the usefulness of “natural theology,” the attempt to argue for the reality of a God from premises that ought to be common ground to all, believers or not. On the other hand, Leslie here does think natural theology worthwhile, and our friend Geoffrey, the third member of our party, is not a believer at all, but an atheist.

(Turning to the others.)

Can we clear a little ground first? This programme, as you heard, is called “From World to God?,” so I take it that some forms of natural theology, those which do not begin from the world, are not going to be included in it.

geoffrey

Yes, that’s right. There have been attempts, for example, to prove the existence of a God from purely abstract considerations—the “ontological arguments”—or from the existence of right and wrong. I shouldn’t mind taking Leslie up on such matters one day, but not here and now. They aren’t really arguments from the existence or nature of the world.

leslie

Though perhaps our sense of right and wrong might be regarded as a feature of the world, part of its nature? So might the existence of alleged religious experiences. But yes, the idea is to confine ourselves in these dialogues to the world apart from inner human experiences. Not of course apart from human experience altogether; without that we shouldn’t know there was a world at all!

myra

Kant maintained that there were only two ways one could even try to argue from the world to God: you could start from the detailed constitution of the world, or you could start from “indeterminate experience,” that is, from the existence of anything at all. “More than that there are not, and more there cannot be.” Perhaps we could use this as a starting-point?

geoffrey

That’s all right by me. I might add that Kant himself rejected both of them.

leslie

I think he rather oversimplified the situation, mind you.

myra

How do you mean, “oversimplified”?

leslie

Neither is one straightforward argument: rather, each is a group of more or less similar or related arguments. If you start from “the detailed constitution of the world,” what features of it are you interested in? And if you start from “the existence of anything at all,” well, is there really only one way in which theists have tried to get from that to a God? And some in each group are a lot stronger than others.

myra

Well, then, suppose you explain how one of them might be broken down into these groups of yours. I suggest trying the more general one first.

The “Cosmological Argument”

leslie

Very well. This is what Kant called the “cosmological argument”—or group of arguments, I’d say myself. I should say it could be divided into three sub-groups; and in each of these you will find different people giving different versions.

Firstly, there are those which argue that the universe must have had a beginning in time, and that this first event must have had a cause or reason for it; and the only reasonable candidate for this is the creative will of God. This argument was used extensively in the earlier part of the Middle Ages, by Jewish, Muslim and Christian thinkers alike. They felt that it suited well with what they believed anyway about the beginning of things. God, they knew, had in fact created the world at some point in the past; and surely it must be possible to show that He had.

Secondly, there are those which argue that, irrespective of whether time had a beginning, you need a start to the chain of cause and effect that we observe around us, a First Cause—which we call God. This was the dominant form in the later Middle Ages, though it goes back to earlier times, to the fifth-century “Neoplatonist” philosopher Proclus. A variation of this argues that everything in the created world is a “contingent” being, that is to say, one which might or might not have existed, and that the existence of these implies that of a “necessary being” who couldn’t not-have-existed. (This is the form Kant had chiefly in mind.)

And thirdly (it might perhaps be considered yet another form of the second, but I’d prefer to keep them distinct), you have arguments which seek to show that there has to be an explanation for the universe considered as a whole, as a unity. Causes within the universe can explain effects within it: they cannot explain the whole system of which they themselves are a part.

The Beginning of the Universe?

myra

I hope we don’t need to go into the details of arguments from the early Middle Ages. Couldn’t we be more modern? After all, hasn’t your first sub-group enjoyed a new lease of life in recent days, with the development of so-called “Big Bang” theories of the universe, which seem to show that there really was a beginning of it all, something like 15,000 million years ago? What do you say, Geoffrey?

geoffrey

If this sort of theistic argument is to get off the ground, it needs to show, firstly, that the universe did indeed have a beginning in time, and secondly, that if it I did, this requires a God to explain it. I should query both of these assertions.

myra

A theory was popular at one time called the “steady-state” theory of the universe. The idea was that the universe would look very much the same at any time in its history, and that this history had no beginning. Now none of us is a scientist; we have to take these matters on trust from the people who are; but they seem almost all agreed that there really was a “big bang,” and that the steady-state view did not fit the facts.

geoffrey

Oh, no, that wasn’t what I meant. (Though of course scientific theories do change; you never know what may come next.) Like many other atheists and agnostics, I quite accept that there probably was a “big bang.” But does this necessarily entail a beginning? I had in mind two possibilities. One is the possibility that the universe ends in a “big crunch.” At the time of the “big bang,” the matter of the universe was all compressed together; then it expanded outwards; but in due course it will reach a maximum and begin to contract. Eventually it returns to something like its pre-expansion state—and then it expands again. And of course before our “bang” there was an earlier contraction, and so on. That way you get the “bang” but no beginning of all things. There is an endless cycle.

myra

But isn’t there an objection to that, that as you work back, each expansion would be smaller than its successor? In that case, you would eventually come to an “expansion” which was infinitely small—in other words, to a beginning.

geoffrey

Not if each expansion were (say) half the size of its successor. That way, as you worked back, each oscillation would be smaller than its successor, but there would be no beginning. If our oscillation reached a size of x light-years, the previous one would have reached x/2 light-years, the one before x/4, and so on. However far back you went, there would be no “infinitely small” oscillation.

leslie

But wouldn’t each cycle also be shorter than its successor? Moreover, radiation from each cycle would accumulate, and by now there would be huge amounts of it in the universe—maybe an infinite amount. There isn’t. Nor is there the high or infinite degree of entropy (roughly, disorder) that there ought to be after so many oscillations.

geoffrey

That may be. But in any case it seems that you might have a “crunch” in which the whole system of laws of nature was dissolved and took shape again in (quite possibly) some totally different form; and in that case you couldn’t conclude that the cycles would die down.

leslie

But could you talk of a “cycle” at all in such a case? If the new universe has nothing at all in common with the previous one—matter has been crunched into a state where its former laws no longer apply—I don’t see what meaning there can be in saying that it’s the same universe bouncing back. It would be simpler just to say that there are other universes besides this one, and keep the beginning of time. And if the laws change so much, how can we be sure that there will be any more oscillating?

geoffrey

Even if we pass over all that, there is my second possibility: something like what Stephen Hawking seemed to be saying in A Brief History of Time. That is, that there is no boundary to space-time, and hence no need to appeal to God to set boundary conditions at its beginning. Or, as others have put it, as you get nearer the “bang,” ordinary notions of space and time cease to apply; there is no need to think in terms of an absolute beginning, a “singularity” where the whole of space and its contents were infinitely compressed.

leslie

Don’t forget that this “no boundary” idea is only a “proposal” (Hawking’s word); it isn’t implied by anything we actually know. As Hawking himself presents it, it turns on the use of what he calls “imaginary time”—which elsewhere he describes as “merely a mathematical device or trick to calculate answers about real time.” It seems funny to use a “mathematical trick” to decide such important matters as the reality or non-reality of a God.

geoffrey

But you don’t need to stress the idea of imaginary time; other presentations of this point have not done so. And I am told that while using “imaginary time” is indeed only a trick when one is dealing with special relativity, it becomes more serious when you get on to general relativity.

leslie

Ah. Perhaps I was being unfair to Hawking—or perhaps he wasn’t doing himself justice.

myra

If I have followed him, which is not at all certain, you can use either “real time” or “imaginary time” to describe the history of the universe. One yields a beginning, the other doesn’t. And it seems to me that if either of them does, then we have to treat the world as having a beginning. To adapt an analogy Hawking himself uses, you can go round the earth in circles indefinitely, and you can’t fall off the edge; but the earth is limited, and to someone approaching it from space there is a point where it begins.

geoffrey

The point is not that Hawking’s proposal is proven truth; it is simply that it is a possibility. And if it is possible, then your argument from an alleged beginning is not a proof.

leslie

There is of course another approach, which goes back to the Middle Ages but has been revived in recent years—the attempt to show that there must be a beginning to time, whatever physical theories may happen to be in fashion at the moment. An infinite stretch of time in the future may perhaps be possible—you don’t after all have to complete it. You never actually reach a point infinitely far in the future; it is just that whatever finite length of time you suggest lies ahead, there is more beyond it. There is no end to the time-series. But an infinite past time is another matter altogether; it implies that an infinite number of days and events has actually come to an end. And this seems impossible, literally unimaginable.

geoffrey

Unimaginable, maybe; but all that says is that our imaginations are limited. I can’t imagine a start to time with no moment preceding it either.

leslie

Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the word “unimaginable.” What we can or cannot imagine hardly matters if infinite past time is impossible anyway.

geoffrey

But why should it be impossible? You theists should of all people be reluctant to say this; why shouldn’t your omnipotent and eternal God have created a universe with no beginning (or end)?

leslie

Not even God can create an impossibility.

geoffrey

But either God is in time, in which case presumably he has no beginning himself, or he is not in time at all, in which case questions of ending an infinite series don’t arise; he simply creates an infinite universe which from our point of view goes back for ever. Either way, where is the impossibility?

myra

This seems very queer, Geoffrey. You seem to have suddenly turned theist.

geoffrey

Only ad hominem, to make Leslie see that an infinite past was possible after all. (As many theist philosophers have held, even when, like Maimonides or Aquinas, they thought it wasn’t actually the case.) But in any case, I do not think we need a God, whether there is a beginning or not.

leslie

Yet Hawking himself seems to think that if there was a beginning, there probably would have to be a God,

geoffrey

If he really did mean that, he was wrong. Let me explain.

Firstly, the beginning, if there was one, was not an event. It was not in time in the way that the events that followed it were; it was the start of time. The events in a novel may follow one from the other, but the novel’s opening doesn’t. The various features of a painting have proportions one to another; the corners of the canvas don’t. If the beginning had something before it, you could perhaps treat it as an event which needed a cause (though, by the way, it would surely be a physical cause, not a divine one!); but it didn’t.

leslie

If you insist that causes must be events, yes; but must they? Put it another way: the beginning calls for an explanation. Why did this beginning take place?

geoffrey

No, it doesn’t call for an explanation: indeed, I’m not sure it could have an explanation. An explanation must include, surely, an “If A, then B” at some point. My jumping is explained by the loud explosion just before, because it is our general experience that if there is a loud noise, people jump. But the universe immediately after the singularity (if there was one) could be of almost any kind. You can’t say “If there is a Big Bang, then a universe of such-and-such a sort will emerge.” Every state of affairs that could emerge from the Bang is as likely as any other; there is no “B”—and therefore no explanation for the beginning of things.

leslie

Hold it there! There is no fully specific “B,” perhaps. But there could be a set of possible “Bs.” After all, there is a universe of some sort! As a matter of fact, if God created the universe, He presumably could and did specify what sort it was going to be. But even setting that aside, we have a perfectly good “if, then”: “If there is a divine act of creation, there is a universe.”

geoffrey

That isn’t much of an explanation, is it? We have, after all, no access to this “divine act of creation.” We have never seen such a thing; and my case is that we can’t infer it from what we have seen, either. And I’d like to make another point, please. This “Big Bang” sort of argument seems to assume that if the world did not have a beginning in time, it might after all exist without a God. That is, it could be considered as a self-sufficient whole. But exactly the same can be said of a world that does have a beginning. (and, for that matter, an end). You can treat it as a whole, and ask “Does this expanse of space-time (whether finite or infinite, bounded or unbounded) need a God?” If one form, the infinite one, and probably another, the finite but unbounded one that Hawking favors, do not require a God, then the third, the finite and bounded universe, doesn’t either.

leslie

But of course there is no reason to suppose that an infinite universe, or an unbounded one, could exist without a God. All the form of cosmological argument we’re looking at did was try to make it particularly obvious that this universe couldn’t. If I show you that one particular horse, or one particular kind of horse, has vestiges of other toes, I should not expect to be taken as implying that other kinds don’t.

And in fact I distrust talk of a “self-sufficient” universe. The mere fact (if it be a fact) that the universe did not have a specific beginning a finite time ago does not mean that it has somehow become self-explanatory. In fact, people like Maimonides and Aquinas, whom you mentioned just now, argued that such a universe wasn’t self-explanatory in the least. (They were thinking of one that had no beginning in time, not of a finite but unbounded one, but that makes no difference.) It was just that if the world did have a beginning in time, the argument for a God was even stronger; but it was quite strong enough even if the world had no beginning.

geoffrey

Maybe so; but this means that we are moving on to your second kind of cosmological argument—“sub-group” I think was your expression.

The Quest for a “First Cause”

leslie

Yes, I think that’s right. The second sub-group may be described, roughly, as the quest for a “First Cause.” Not necessarily first in time; more the starting-point of all causal series. The idea is that there are such things as causes and effects in the world; that causes explain their effects; and that there cannot be an infinite series of cause-and-effect with no beginning, because then, if there is no First Cause of all, there is no explanation for anything at all. What have you to say to this form?

geoffrey

That it is no better than the first. Probably worse. It tries to argue to a First Cause behind all causes. But this is based on a false way of looking at things.

Firstly, because there is no reason why the series shouldn’t go back for ever. Advocates of this argument have admitted that as far as philosophy can tell the world might have had no beginning in time. But in that case at least one series of causes and effects—that of events in this world—actually could go back for ever. It is not easy to see that there is any other series of causes and effects. And if there were, the same might apply to it; it too could go back indefinitely.

leslie

Unless the members of the series had to co-exist. Duns Scotus thought that was the case with what he called “essentially ordered” causes—causes which were responsible not for the existence of their effects but for their causative powers.

geoffrey

And William of Ockham pointed out that there was no reason why an essentially ordered cause should not cease to exist before its effect did; so that we were no further on than before. And even if Ockham were wrong, which he wasn’t, why might not this series, or any other you may name, go back for ever?

leslie

It has usually been answered that this would mean an infinity of co-existing things, and that this is impossible.

geoffrey

I do not see why it should be impossible. And the way you phrased your point suggests that you aren’t very sure of it yourself. The point I made earlier still holds good: if God is infinite and almighty, why couldn’t he create an infinity of things all existing together?

And I have another problem for you. We have been talking of “causes” and “effects” for convenience’s sake. But isn’t such talk very misleading?

leslie

Come, come! We talk about them every day. You are not, surely, trying to say that it is very misleading to talk about the “causes” of the First World War, or to say that lung cancer is a distressingly common “effect” of smoking?

geoffrey

No, I’m not. In such cases we are interested in questions like “How might the First World War have been averted?” or “How can we reduce the incidence of lung cancer?” That way, we can single out particular factors which are of special interest or usefulness and call them (for convenience’s sake, as I said) “causes.” But the truth of the matter is that wars and cancers (and more pleasant things too) are the result of enormously complicated states of affairs, linked to one another by the laws of nature. And it is no good trying to move by way of the laws of nature to a First Cause which is not part of nature at all.

myra

I’m not very happy about that, even though I am unsure about attempts to prove the existence of the Lord. You seem to be saying that God could not be the First Cause of the universe, not just that we can’t prove that He is. And this is ridiculous. Moreover, isn’t the will of God in itself a “law of nature”—indeed a more profound one than any other?

geoffrey

Yes, I suppose you are right, or rather would be right if there were a God. If there were, it would be possible to speak of him (or his creative will) as the cause of the universe in much the same way as one might speak of Anglo-German naval rivalry as one of the causes of the First World War. For it would be by his creative will’s being altered that the world could have been prevented from coming into existence. But it certainly isn’t possible to prove the reality of any such will, or of a God to exercise it.

“Contingent” and “Necessary” Beings

myra

What about the idea Leslie mentioned, near the start of our dialogue, of distinguishing between “contingent” and “necessary” beings—beings that exist but might not have, and beings that couldn’t not-exist?

geoffrey

It makes things worse, not better. For the notion of a “necessary being” is not at all a clear one. It seems to mean much the same as a First Cause plus an extra idea imported into the argument from nowhere—the idea that God’s existence is not only a truth but a necessary truth, like the truths of logic. If there were anything in the First Cause argument, it would show only that there was a being who was uncaused, not that there was one who was “necessary.”

leslie

It goes against the grain, but I’m inclined to agree with you.

myra

I am not sure that I am. If God really is God, it seems absurd to say that he might quite well never have existed.

geoffrey

Isn’t this getting perilously close to the “ontological argument,” which tried to show that since the very idea of God implied, as you say, that he was in some way “necessary,” he must exist? We none of us care for that argument, and in any case we agreed at the beginning not to discuss it.

myra

I wasn’t trying to devise an argument at all; just a comment on what Leslie was saying. Sorry, Leslie; you carry on.

leslie

What bothers me is that Geoffrey seems to think the existence of the universe as a whole is something that requires no explanation. To be honest, I have not spent very much time or energy defending the first two forms of this group of “cosmological arguments” because I thought the third was far and away the strongest.

myra

Then can we hear this “strongest argument,” please?

An Explanation for the World?

leslie

Generally speaking, we can look for explanations of things—of events, say, or states of affairs. Obviously, in many cases we don’t bother to look; but even when we don’t, we assume that there is some sort of explanation somewhere. Certainly we can always ask for one. Now this applies to the state of affairs which we call “the existence of the universe.” Why does this state of affairs hold? There must surely be some reason. But the only possible candidate is what you called “the creative will of God.”

geoffrey

You know the obvious answer to that just as well as I do. If everything requires an explanation, doesn’t the existence of a creator require one too?

myra

In some forms of Hinduism it actually has one. Brahma, the Creator, is himself derived from the supreme deity Vishnu; and Vishnu himself may be thought of as deriving from an impersonal Reality which lies beyond even him.

leslie

But that actually illustrates the point I was trying to make. You have to stop somewhere. It may be at the immediate Creator, or some being from whom even he derives; but there is an ultimate Explanation. If this dialogue included a Hindu—at least, a Hindu who held the position Myra has just described—I am sure it would make for much interesting discussion, but it wouldn’t seriously affect my point. Any explanation requires an element of “brute” or “basic” fact and a principle (such as a law of nature, but not confined to them) which links that fact to the thing we want to explain. But you can’t eliminate the element of “basic fact” altogether; that would only produce an incomplete explanation, just the connecting principle and the thing to be explained. And then the latter is not explained after all.

myra

Didn’t St. Thomas Aquinas say something like that? “If you suppress a cause, you suppress its effect.”

geoffrey

He was right in principle, after a fashion, but completely wrong in the way he tried to apply it. There is no question of “suppressing” a First Cause; only of denying that there is one. If something were known to be the potential cause of a world, and somebody suppressed it—if, to take Myra’s Hindu example, Vishnu were to destroy Brahma or forbid him to create the world—then that world would not exist. But there is no question of anything like that being done. Talk of “suppression” is utterly misleading.

leslie

I think the introduction of Aquinas was a bit of a red herring: his language is not that which I was using. My point remains: if your series of explanations contains no element of basic fact, it does not explain. You can have, I suppose, three main types of explanation. First, you can explain one fact in terms of another. Secondly, you can show that the fact is a necessary truth. And thirdly, you can explain it as a matter of chance—it was one of several possibilities, but there simply is no explanation of why this one rather than the others should have been actual. Now the point is that the first of these (and indeed the third) is not a complete explanation, for it leaves us with a further fact that has not been explained. You need what I called a “basic” fact—one that does not require explanation.

geoffrey

But in an infinite series of explanations, there is no need for any “basic fact.” A is the case because B is, and B is because C is, and so on ad infinitum. There is a complete explanation, only it happens to be one that goes on back for ever. That is quite different from giving up part-way!

myra

Doesn’t that bring us back to what we were talking about earlier—the beginning of the universe? If there was a beginning to the universe, you cannot go back ad infinitum.

leslie

Geoffrey wanted at that stage to avoid your point by treating the universe as a whole, didn’t he? Well, I shall do so myself, and argue that even if there are explanations (perhaps) for everything in the universe, we still need an explanation for the universe itself, as a whole. Whether there is a beginning of time, or an infinite past, or some distortion of time on the lines suggested by Hawking—all that makes no difference. The thing as a whole cries out for explanation.

geoffrey

Why? If everything in the universe is explained, there is no need for an explanation for the universe itself; for the universe does not consist of anything over and above its component parts. Your own ancestor Cleanthes put it admirably two hundred years ago: “Did I show you the particular causes of each individual in a collection of twenty particles of matter, I should think it very unreasonable should you afterwards ask me what was the cause of the whole twenty.”

leslie

I’m not absolutely sure about that “not consisting of anything over and above its component parts” business. But let that pass; for I am absolutely sure that Cleanthes’ argument was wrong. If each, or even one, particle in the “collection” is explained in terms of something outside the collection, you have a First Cause (or more than one). But if each is explained purely in terms of others in the collection, all you have is an explanation of why these particles go together, not why they exist, why they go together in a real world as opposed to an imaginary one. If you explain everything in the universe in terms of other things in the universe, all in terms of one another, then you do need an external explanation for the whole. If I never go anywhere without Myra, and Myra never goes anywhere without Geoffrey, and Geoffrey never goes anywhere without me, then if any of us is in this room the others will be too. And yet it still makes sense to ask why we are in this room rather than in another.

This was the heart of Leibniz’s “book argument.” Suppose a geometry textbook, he reasoned, to have been copied from an earlier edition, and that from one before, and that from one before that, and so on: even if the line extended back for ever, we should have been given no reason why there should be such things as geometry textbooks at all.

myra

I am not happy with an illustration taken from something which is quite certainly impossible.

leslie

Leibniz’s point surely was just that, that it was impossible. But let me put it another way. There might be more than one possible universe—I mean, there is more than one way in which a universe might be put together. Indeed, there surely are many. A Newtonian universe, with no relativity or quantum physics, would be quite possible. And in it every event would doubtless follow on from others. The difference between it and the actual universe we live in is that one exists and the other does not. What I am insisting on is that an explanation for the existence of the actual universe may legitimately be asked for—and the natural explanation is the creative will of God.

geoffrey

It may seem natural to you, but it doesn’t to me. I do not see that explanation in terms of God is really any advance. You said that any explanation must include an element of brute fact. Now you have your brute fact—indeed, you really have two of them, the existence of God and his decision to create—which have no explanations at all. But so have I. Granted for the sake of argument that basic facts are inevitable, that we have to have some unexplained element, then the obvious one is the existence of the universe as a whole. After all, we do actually know that the universe exists. We do not know for certain that a God exists; that is what this whole dialogue is about.

The Question of “Simplicity”

leslie

I should say that the difference is that my explanation is simpler.

geoffrey

How do you work that out? Your explanation actually adds to the complexity of things. Remember the old slogan called Ockham’s Razor: “do not multiply entities unless you have to.”

leslie

I don’t see why we shouldn’t have a Hair-Restorer as well as a Razor. If there is no God, we have as our ultimate inexplicability: (1) whatever minimum of scientific laws is needed to describe the way the universe behaves; (2) a description of the universe over a stretch of space and time sufficient to entail a description of it at all other times; and (3) any undetermined, partially uncaused events occurring in the universe. If there is a God, however, we have as inexplicables (I) the existence of a God and (II) His free decision to create an ordered universe of the sort described by (1) (2) and (3). This does require one more entity than the first, I admit; on the other hand, it has replaced (1) (2) and (3) by a set of rational decisions whose possibility flows from (I). In other words, by adding one entity we have simplified the explanation.

To take the universe as “brute fact” is preposterous. This is where “contingency” really does come in. The universe is contingent through and through—it could have been different in an unimaginable number of ways. If it is to be the way it is, it had to have strong initial conditions or restrictions on its nature. More than that: it is the most complex thing of which we know; all other complexities are contained within it. But God is One. Some have even held that He is totally simple, with no elements within Him that can be separated even in thought. I should not wish to defend such a position myself; it seems hard to square with the idea of the Trinity. But certainly God could not be otherwise than the way He is, His free will alone excepted.

Alter your description of the universe, and you have just a universe that is different, perhaps only slightly different: alter your description of God and you do not have God at all. A being like God in all respects except that he, she or it was powerless, or imperfectly good, or the like, would not be a different kind of God but something else altogether, and probably an impossibility at that. God has often, as was mentioned, been thought to be a “necessary being,” one who could not not-exist, and could not be otherwise than He is; but the universe quite certainly might not have existed, and might have been quite different. So that an unexplained and inexplicable God is far, far easier to swallow than an unexplained and inexplicable universe in all its vastness and variety through space and time.

geoffrey

You forget that if God did create the universe, he presumably had in mind a plan for it. Every complexity there is in the universe has an answering complexity in the divine brain. God is not simpler than the universe, but much more complicated; for presumably he has other ideas besides that of the universe, and these add to his complexity.

leslie

I’m not sure of that. That in fact is one reason I mentioned God’s free will! An architect’s drawings for a house are in a sense as complex as the house itself (disregarding such things as the composition of the bricks). But the architect’s thoughts, which produced the drawings, did not just leap into existence of themselves. They began with the idea of a two-bedroomed bungalow or whatever, and evolved from that simple beginning. Again, the postulates and axioms of a formal mathematical system are not infinitely complex—they may be very simple indeed—however complex the system itself is which derives from them. And similarly, while the ultimate state of an infinite mind may be infinitely complex, its original essence need not be. God may be simple in Himself, and yet have thoughts which develop and become more complex. That is not so with the universe.

geoffrey

Why not? A basically simple universe might contain great potential for development—like your mathematical postulates and axioms. Have you come across the Mandelbrot Set? It is in effect a kind of graph, based on the extremely simple formula “z squared plus c,” where you start with z=0 and c=anything you like, and each succeeding result of the equation is fed back into it, so to speak, to become the next z. This formula becomes the basis for a graph or pattern of incredible—in fact, literally infinite—complexity. A universe that was very simple at root might come to look very complicated indeed as it developed.

leslie

Along any particular lines?

geoffrey

Along lines dictated by the scientific laws that govern it.

leslie

But these require explanation, don’t they? They can’t be included in the basic “brute fact.”

geoffrey

Possibly: we can discuss that later. But to bring in that argument would be in effect to abandon the last and (you told us) the strongest of your first group of arguments.

leslie

But I haven’t finished yet! “A simple universe might contain great potential for development,” you say. But in so doing you have abandoned your earlier position, that the whole spread of the universe through space and time could be treated as self-sufficient, as a unit. If it can, it is enormously complex, and, what is more, there is nothing in it that is in any way “special” or “privileged” as logically prior to the rest, in the way that God’s decision to create is logically prior to His decision to create this or that detail of the world. If it can’t be treated as a unit, then we are back to the first sub-group: this “simple” universe had a beginning and I want to know what caused this.

A Universe That Happened by Chance?

geoffrey

Some cosmologists have made suggestions about just that. A while ago, Leslie, you mentioned explanations in terms of chance. Well, the beginning of the universe could have been a chance matter, a very unusual quantum event.

myra

That sounds very queer. Could you amplify it, please?

geoffrey

Not as a real cosmologist could, but I’ll do my best, and hope I get it more or less right. It is well established that what is called a “vacuum” in quantum physics is not an empty nothingness. What are known as “virtual particles” are constantly appearing and disappearing within it. They are like the basic particles that make up you and me, but they last only for a tiny fraction of a second. They come into being and pass away at random, without any determining cause: for at the quantum level determinism does not hold. Now the smaller the energy required to produce such a particle, the longer the time it can last. But the universe could very well have zero energy.

leslie

I beg your pardon?

geoffrey

It’s true. The mass, and therefore the energy, of the universe is of course enormous. But its gravitational energy is also enormous, and apparently this counts as negative where the other is positive. Don’t ask me why, but I am assured that this really is so.

leslie

Is that correct? The last time I heard, they were saying that there was an enormous amount of “dark energy” pushing the galaxies apart, counteracting the pull of gravity; and this would presumably outbalance the “negative energy” you speak of.

myra

None of us knows whether this is in fact correct. I think we’d best assume Geoffrey’s position for the moment, just for the sake of argument.

geoffrey

Thank you. Theories may of course change. But the point about the mass and gravitational energy is that the two may very well cancel out, or nearly so. So that if the universe emerged from the “vacuum” as the result of a chance fluctuation, it could continue to exist for a long time, perhaps indefinitely, without relapsing back into nothingness. Hence you could have a simple beginning to the universe which was not caused by anything, any more than the randomly occurring virtual particles are caused by anything.

leslie

It sounds a fascinating—dare I say, an amusing—speculation. But I can’t see that it makes any real difference, even if the energies did balance out. Is the universe that emerges in this way simple? The universe is not just a balance between mass-energy and gravitation-energy! It has far more to it than that: it has laws, and conditions for those laws to operate, and an indescribable web of intricate detail arising from these. Why did this very specific universe leap into being from the vacuum? And, what is more, is the background simple? You still have to explain the origins of the “vacuum” itself.

geoffrey

At least some physicists have suggested that you don’t even need that vacuum. The universe might tunnel its way into existence out of nothing.

leslie

I am glad you don’t seem to endorse their views! For of course no conclusion can follow when there are no premises. There may be laws of nature which say “Given X and Y, there is such-and-such a chance that a virtual particle will appear,” or even “Given X and Y, there is such-and-such a chance that a universe will appear,” though I confess I find the latter hard to believe. But certainly there can be no law that says “With nothing given at all, a universe will appear”; from nothing you can infer nothing.

geoffrey

Frankly, I rather incline to agree with you. I only mentioned this position because it has been held. The other one, which does allow for a basic vacuum, is much more serious.

myra

I wonder if there’s a catch in that position too. It arouses memories, in me anyway, of an old argument one used to hear occasionally before modern advances in cosmology. Theists were apt to cite the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Heat can only pass from one body to a colder body. This means there is a steady tendency for heat to even itself out across the universe; “entropy” tends to increase.

leslie

Meaning?

myra

Oh, dear. Entropy has been described as a measure of how close a system is to equilibrium or uniformity. For instance, if half a system is hot and half cold, there will be a tendency for it all to even out; and in that case the “entropy” of the system is said to increase. I hope that makes sense to you. And the fact that entropy tends to increase was taken to show that the universe was “running down,” heading for complete uniformity, and had been running down all its life. It must therefore have been “wound up” at its beginning.

Now to this it was sometimes answered that the universe, given sufficient time, might have “wound itself up” by sheer chance, out of chaos. This was very unlikely to happen, but in infinite time even the very unlikely will happen. God was not needed to “wind the universe up” and set it going.

The classic objection to that was that it was more likely to have wound itself up to its present state than to any previous one, because any earlier state would have had lower entropy, and would therefore have been more highly organized than now. It was actually more likely that we and the world around us sprang from chaos complete with our memories and apparent history than that the primeval universe did. And the question I wanted to raise was, would not the same objection apply to your “emergence from a vacuum,” Geoffrey?

geoffrey

No, I don’t think it would. Entropy is irrelevant to the possible emergence of the universe from a quantum vacuum. The old argument you quoted was trying to show that a world with a low entropy could have emerged by sheer chance out of one with a high—a wound-up one out of a run-down one. And I agree that this won’t do. But we aren’t now talking about a world with high entropy as the background from which the world emerges; we’re talking about a quantum vacuum, a state of affairs where particles, and perhaps more than particles, are constantly coming into being and vanishing again

leslie

But if the only consideration that affects what emerged from the vacuum is its total energy, then any system with zero energy is equally likely to emerge. And of course if the world had zero energy thirteen billion years ago, it has zero energy now. Although the universe as it is now is not more likely to have emerged than the primeval one was (which was the catch in the “old argument” Myra was describing), it is surely just as likely to have done so. And this would make nonsense of the whole scientific enterprise—not to mention common sense.

(There is a pause in which all three try frantically to think of something to add)

myra

I begin to wonder whether we haven’t come to something of an impasse. To Geoffrey this vacuum suddenly exploding into the beginnings of our universe, with no reason for its existence, seems simpler and more probable than belief in God; to Leslie it seems the reverse. I must say, I tend to agree with Leslie. This is no doubt largely because I do in fact believe in God already; but I think I might agree even apart from that belief. A vacuum with the potentiality for this universe, right down to teacups, ladybirds and the ink on this page, strikes me as far from simple, or easy to accept as “brute fact.”

geoffrey

The universe is not simple in its contents. That is quite true. But simplicity is not constituted by the small number or the small range of things implied by a theory. (Indeed, if it were, theism would be more complex than atheism, as I pointed out earlier on; it would have all the “things” to account for that atheism has, plus God.) The simplicity we are looking for lies in the structure of the theory itself. How many laws does it need to generate the variety of its contents? It may be that physics will end up with a single theory (the so-called Theory of Everything) to account for all the forces and particles we have at present; and this will be a massive simplification indeed! Yet the contents of the universe—Myra’s teacups and ladybirds and so on—remain exactly the same. That’s why I cannot see that bringing God into it is going to make things any simpler than treating the universe (or a preceding vacuum) as “brute fact.”

leslie

It is also why I think it does make things simpler to believe in God. The theory of a creator God is simpler in structure than the theory of a “brute fact” universe complete with contents and laws, even granted the great simplification that would doubtless be brought about by a Theory of Everything, if it were ever reached.

myra

I’m not too sure how either of you is going to convince the other. I suggest, therefore, that we bring this first Dialogue to a close and move on to another topic—presumably Leslie’s “second group.” That was composed of those arguments which begin from “the detailed constitution of the world,” was it not? So, when we meet again, perhaps you would tell us, Leslie, how you would split this into sub-groups.

leslie

OK. See you tomorrow!

A clear account of the history of “big bang” theories (including the “quantum vacuum” ones) is given in Gribbin’s In Search of the Big Bang (Corgi, 1989). The relation of these theories to natural theology is discussed at length in W. L. Craig & Q. Smith, Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford, 1993); this also includes material on whether the universe must have a beginning in time. Both Craig (a theist) and Smith (an atheist) discuss and reject “oscillating” models of the universe. Craig has also collaborated with Paul Copan in Creation Out of Nothing (Baker Academic and Apollos, 2004) which covers biblical, philosophical and scientific aspects of its subject. For a defence of the “steady state” theory by one of its original developers, see Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe (Michael Joseph, 1983), chapter 7.

The literature on the “cosmological argument” is enormous. My own doctoral thesis in 1970 was on the subject, and lots more has been added since; Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (OUP, 1979; second edition 2004) contains a magisterial defence of it (including a discussion of what is meant by “simplicity”), and of the arguments from “the detailed constitution of the world.” Hawking’s ideas are to be found in A Brief History of Time (Bantam, 1988), pages 134–41; a more popular presentation, with jokes and pictures, is to be found in The Universe in a Nutshell (Bantam, 2001), pp. 59–63 and 82–85. Cf. also John Barrow, The Origin of the Universe (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), chapter 6.