California Hold 'Em

Evolve now (3 of 3)

This took a while but here it is at last and with much smaller scope but hopefully more detailed. I wanted to go through two arguments for theism and one against naturalism but the first one took far more space than I thought it would (evidently I can say far more in a shorter time than will suitably fit in a blog post) so I’ll bring those one at a time after this post and we can throw this one around a little in the interim.

I’ll set out Craig’s Kalam Cosmological argument and then give some supporting arguments, and then look at what the cause of the universe this argument entails looks like. The beginning portion of the argument goes:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist a finite time ago.
3. Therefore the universe has a cause.

Now premise one seems to me to be prima facie true, and as per Aristotle I won’t give any supporting arguments in favor of it as they will all be bound to be less convincing than the premise is, for indeed ex nihilo, nihil fit, “out of nothing, nothing comes”.

But what about the second premise? After all it seems at least possible that the universe could have existed eternally in its present state (steady state model) or could at least have been going through an infinite series of big bangs and big crunches, always collapsing and then expanding(oscillating model) – rinse and repeat. Well let me give three arguments in support of this premise which show these solutions to be firstly improbable and finally impossible.

Firstly, an argument against an everlasting or infinite universe, let me first make a distinction between infinites, I want to split something that is actually infinite from something that is potentially infinite, so what’s the difference? An actual infinite is one where all the elements exist in a set at the same time, where you add up all of the parts of the set and the result you get is infinity; on the other hand a potential infinite is one that goes on indefinitely, is endless - like dividing points on a line – but never actually reaches infinity, at any given point in your division the number will still be finite.

Now I’m going to postulate that actual infinities cannot exist, namely because they result in wild contradictions, I’m not the only guy who thinks so, the great mathematician David Hilbert stated:

“The infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought. The role that remains for the infinite to play is solely that of an idea”1

Now why think that? Well let me use Hilbert’s thought experiment called ‘Hilbert’s Hotel’ to bring out the contradiction, let us suppose that Hilbert’s Hotel is completely full, all of the infinite number of rooms are booked and there is no space, and there are three guests at the door, but the clever desk clerk tells them that there’s no problem and he shifts the guest in room 1 into room 4, the guest in room 2 into room 5, the guest in room 3 into room 6 all the way down the line, as a result rooms 1-3 are now vacant and the gracious guests check in. But suppose that all of the guests in the odd numbered rooms decide to check out, as a result an infinite number of guests have left the hotel and yet there are still just as many people checked in as before, they all come back the next day and the clerk gladly checks them all back in and yet it’s still the same number of people, finally all of the infinite number of guests from room five and up check out, at a single swipe the vast hotel is reduced to near vacancy with just four people left.

So actual infinities give contradictory answers, as we saw, infinity plus three equals infinity, infinity plus infinity equals infinity, infinity minus infinity equals infinity and infinity minus infinity equals four.

But there is also the problem of traversing the infinite, or counting to infinity, that is, the problem that there is never a time at which you will reach infinity through successive addition, for there is always one more number to go before reaching infinity, there will always be one more count left to do, at any point the number will still be finite. But say the universe is eternal, that it is actually infinite, well then the question arises, “Why didn’t today come yesterday, or last week, or last year?” because at any point in the past an infinite amount of time will have already elapsed and there is no reason why today should not have come an infinite time ago. You can imagine this by picturing yourself coming across a boy who has just finished counting down from infinity …3, 2, 1. Phew! Well why did he finish now? After all an infinite amount of time had already elapsed at any given point in the past and there is no non-arbitrary reason to give why he finished today.

But an eternal universe involves an actual infinite, but actual infinites are self contradictory, therefore the universe is not eternal.

Secondly, modern science today points towards the origin of the universe a finite time ago, that is big bang cosmology which holds the field today with its postulation of an initial singularity, now this constitutes the absolute beginning of all of space and time, there isn’t anything outside of it or before it in terms of physical matter, there are of course other models such as the oscillating model with the universe expanding and contracting forever but this is physically and observationally impossible as an entirely new physics would need to be invented to explain how a ‘big crunch’ could turn into a ‘big bang’, it is also thermodynamically impossible as is the steady state modal which has to postulate new matter being constantly created spontaneously from nothing. Or there is Hawkings’ quantum gravity modal, but this is not a real solution as it has to use imaginary numbers (squares of -1) before Planck time in order to ‘curve’ the singularity and avoid it, but the singularity disappears once you convert back into real numbers.

Or the vacuum fluctuations models which predict the universe emerging from a quantum fluctuation in a vacuum, however these models all have non-zero probabilities for universes existing at every point in the spacetime vacuum and so given an eternal vacuum all points would spawn universes which would collide and gather into an infinitely old universe which contradicts observation. So the most plausible model is the dominant big bang model which predicts an absolute beginning of the universe out of nothing.

Thirdly there is the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem which is a proof that “any universe which has on average been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past space-time boundary” and this holds regardless of the physical description of the universe prior to Planck time. All models today must account for this and contain a past space-time boundary as we observe the universe to be expanding and that is just what this argument rests on.

Let’s turn now to what a cause of the universe would have to look like, it would have to be uncaused, changeless, timeless, and immaterial, uncaused because we’ve seen that an infinite regress of causes is impossible, timeless and therefore changeless at least without the universe because it created time, and immaterial because it created all of space and so must transcend it. Now there are only two things we know of that fit all of these categories, abstract numbers and unembodied minds, now it cannot be an abstract number that caused all this namely because abstract numbers don’t stand in causal relations to anything, therefore it seems to me most plausible to be an unembodied mind.

This unembodied mind must also be immensely powerful for it brought the universe about and unimaginably intelligent for it fine-tuned it and put into the universe the amazing depth and complexity we see – moreover I think that it must be personal, for how else could a timeless cause give rise to the temporal effect of the universe? If the cause began an infinite time ago then the effect must also have followed an infinite time ago, but a personal being who has say been sitting from eternity past could will to stand up and give rise to a temporal effect even though he has been timeless. And so I think we are brought no only to the transcendent cause of the universe but to its personal creator.

So I at least don’t have any problem when choosing between whether the Christian theist is right or that the universe came from nothing, for nothing, and by nothing. Having said that – it’s time for breakfast.



[1] "On the Infinite," in Philosophy of Mathematics

Homeland Security?

As the 3rd part in Kenji's "Evolve Now" series seems to have been lost for the time being, I decided to post a recent print in the interim. This latest piece is the most complex vector art I've created to date. It totaled about 4 hours worth of work, and contains no less than 300 individual layers.

As with most my art, there is no overt message, as I think you should come to your own conclusions about what is being said here. That being said, this is probably my least ambiguous print to date.

As usual, click for full size.

Evolve now (2 of 3)

In this second part I wanted to look at some of the arguments of this tract and why they fail, I’ll just deal with the highlights as most of the misrepresentations or ambiguity can be laid at the feet of it being after all a tract.

I. Firstly is the issue of cosmogony, or more generally cosmology which is confused with evolution, namely big bang cosmology which not only has massive data backing it such as the ‘Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation’ prediction, but also constitutes the empirical backdrop on which the second premise of the cosmological argument is rooted (a simple form of this argument is given in the March ’07 issue of Activated – but we will get to all this in the next post), in any case, this singularity is caricatured as a ‘furiously spinning dot originating 20-40 billion years ago’. The time estimates are 13.7 billion years, it’s not a dot, it’s a singularity with potentially infinite mass and density, and no one thinks that it was spinning, but like I said, we’ll get to that later.

II. Secondly a definition of science is given, it goes:
“True science is based on what is known as ‘the scientific method’ by which knowledge is advanced by formulating a question, collecting data about it through observation and experimentation, and testing a hypothetical answer. Only after such experimentation has proven a scientific theory to be true by producing observable and repeatable results does the theory move into the realm of scientific fact”.
And it then concludes that unless you’ve been around for billions of years and took photos, you then have to believe that the false dichotomy of evolution and creation are both belief systems.

Several huge problems with this, to begin with that’s not a good definition of science, because not only does it confuse the differentiations made in the philosophy of science between theories which describe data and the observance of data itself but it also doesn’t include any of the so-called ‘soft sciences’ such as music, archaeology, literature, history, and philosophy. Cosmology and the evolutionary theory relative to biology are a mix of both of these involving both observable data, models for the data, and a historical timeline – as usual reality turns out to be far more complex then anyone thought.

Let's flesh out this last problem a little more, for instance, if you accepted this definition and the ensuing conclusion you will have relegated all history to mere belief, the entire history of the world has only happened once and is essentially non-repeatable, so believe whatever you want to; having a hard time explaining the crusades? – no worries, they never happened, just believe it; someone wants evidence that Jesus rose from the dead, good deal, they can just believe it happened. Conversely if I want to believe that it was really ha satan who came to Earth two millennia ago that is just as rational.

I don’t think so. Just believing in something has never made it true for anyone anywhere.

Of course the really fatal flaw in this is that it turns out to be meaningless, because if it’s true that:
1. Something has to be empirically verifiable in order to be science, and
2. That if it’s not than it’s just a belief system, then necessarily
3. The statement in 1. is not empirically verifiable and as such is just a belief system
4. Ergo believe whatever you want because everything is a just a belief

Obviously not, you will notice that the people who think that believing in something makes it true never walk out of third story windows.

III. Thirdly it brings an argument that big bang cosmology contradicts the law of the conservation of angular momentum. Surprise, it doesn’t. I mentioned previously that nobody thinks the original singularity postulated in big bang cosmology was spinning, but let’s say that it was, let’s say that the singularity was spinning clockwise, then doesn’t it contradict that law when we observe that Uranus (the Age of Aquarius, heh) and Venus are spinning counter-clockwise? Answer: No it does not. The law holds for the entirety of the system to which it applies, if you applied it to the singularity (which expanded into the entire known universe) then the angular momentum would be conserved across the entire aggregate angular value of the universe so that it squared when considered as a whole, you could easily have portions of that universe with all bodies spinning counter-clockwise balanced by other portions going clockwise.

IV. Fourthly an argument saying that the evolutionary process contradicts the second law of thermodynamics because it postulates an increase in order when everything is supposed to be decreasing right? Wrong. Several problems here, firstly, this law holds only in closed systems, the Earth is certainly not a closed system, there are gigantic amounts of energy coming in from the sun and getting wasted in all the space around us constantly, secondly, populations are not thermodynamic systems, they are biological ones, thirdly it contradicts itself writing that things are gaining in both complexity and order, when you are speaking of thermodynamic systems, order results in a decrease in complexity and chaotic systems in an increase of complexity, fourthly if this was really true then no one could give birth as this would be an increase of complexity supposedly contradicted by the second law.

V. The next two arguments I think are good ones, essentially basic teleological arguments on the biological scale used by the guys in ID and BioLogos camps, they deal with the origin of life which is notoriously difficult to explain given naturalistic assumptions, it was essentially this class of argument (as well as that dealing with the cosmic scale) that influenced lifetime atheist Antony Flew to convert to Theism (see There is a God). I just wish this section had footnotes :).

VI. This argument wants to say that the current erosion rates place an upper limit on the age of the Earth of about 100,000,000 years, the problem here is that there are additional processes that act to counteract the effects of erosion. There are immense forces from the earth's colliding tectonic plates which are pushing up mountains. There are increases in land mass due to lava from volcanoes, and the addition of rising masses of molten rock from the earth's mantle. The result is that there are many processes involved in mountains: wind and water erosion tear down mountains; other processes build them up. In the U.S. for example, Wisconsin contains a large area of once-tall mountains that are now worn down so low as to constitute a rather simple plain. The Rocky Mountains are newer and were caused by subducting tectonic plates. This process continues to build up the Rockies today, overwhelming the forces of erosion.


So while I think it’s great that we’re putting out material arguing for theism (albeit in a rather roundabout way) we’re cutting our legs off if the main majority of our arguments are all wrong, that’s one of the reasons why I’m excited to be looking forward to a couple arguments in the next section that do work.

If the first part corresponded to Proverbs 1.22 and this part to 1 Thessalonians 5.21 than maybe the next portion will be 1 Pet 3.15.
God willing.

Evolve now (1 of 3)

Foreword.

Most of my posts these days seem somewhat negative so I'll try here to bring in some positive, I'll also modify this to send into WS so that they can modify the tract.

Then again maybe not, I'd have to rewrite the "Evolution: Fact or Fable?" booklet it draws from to do that and I really don't want to bother, maybe we can just boycott it here in NA and drop it from our inventory.

It' just hard to justify perpetuating lies and falsehoods when you're in the business of propagating truth.

In any case I want to look at the 'Evolve now' tract that came from that booklet and see why its arguments fail and then maybe look forward to some that don't, because proselytizing is mostly not going to work unless you know the other guys' arguments better than he does; it does no good to set up ridiculous straw men and then knock them over, the position you're attacking isn't one that he's holding, it just makes you look silly.

I said that it's mostly not going to work because it's possible that the Holy Spirit has been working in the persons life (as per Paul in Acts 17) and ekeinos needs you to be the catalyst, (or maybe even a counter-factual) however given that this is hardly something you can plan around and that you've also been instructed to give a reason for the hope that is within you, I would say it's high time to scan up and get over to the solid epistemic ground that the Christian today can stand on.

Great poem

Roses are #FF0000,
Violets are #0000FF,
All my base are belong to you.

- Not

Epistemic Circularity

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