I should start giving an award for the Most Misleading Science Journalism of the Year. If I did, this article from The Sunday Express would surely be a contender. Here’s the headline (click on it to go to the article):
The piece starts like this:
A TEAM of scientists have made what may turn out to be the most important discovery in HISTORY–how the universe came into being from nothing.
The colossal question has troubled religions, philosophers and scientists since the dawn of time but now a Canadian team believe they have solved the riddle.
And the findings are so conclusive they even challenge the need for religion, or at least an omnipotent creator – the basis of all world religions.
Now the story, which I grant is well written and quite detailed for science journalism (and I realize that the headlines probably weren’t written by the article’s author), is based on a paper by Ahmed Farag Ali, Mir Faizal and Mohammed M. Khalil in The Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. The bad journalism is not the reporting of the theory itself, but the way it’s sold, both in the headline and in snippets of the article.
I haven’t read the original paper, and even from the article can’t fully understand the revolutionary new findings (if they are revolutionary), but they are apparently an elaboration of what we know: in a quantum vacuum, virtual particles can pop in and out of existence, and that can eventually produce the Big Bang and our present Universe. Here’s a brief summary of what the article says; readers are invited to explain the big new finding in the comments.
Scientists have long known that miniscule particles, called virtual particles, come into existence from nothing all the time.
But a team led by Prof Mir Faizal, at the Dept of Physics and Astronomy, at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada, has successfully applied the theory to the very creation of existence itself.
He said: “Virtual particles contain a very small amount of energy and exist for a very small amount of time.
“However what was difficult to explain was how did such a small amount of energy give rise to a big universe like ours?”
Under Inflation Theory the tiny energies and lifespan of the virtual particle become infinitely magnified, resulting in our 13.8 Billion-year-old universe. Just to make things more complicated Dr Mir says we have been looking at the question ‘how did the universe come from nothing?’ all wrong.According to the extraordinary findings, the question is irrelevant because the universe STILL is nothing.Dr Mir said: “Something did not come from nothing. The universe still is nothing, it’s just more elegantly ordered nothing.”
The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.
And the findings are so conclusive they even challenge the need for religion, or at least an omnipotent creator – the basis of all world religions.
. . . Asked if the remarkable findings and the convincing if complex solution removed the need for a God figure to kick start the universe Dr Mir said: “If by God you mean a supernatural super man who breaks his own laws then yes he’s done for, you just don’t need him.“But if you mean God as a great mathematician, then yes!”
The first statement doesn’t disprove God because one could always claim that God created the laws of physics in such a way that they’d give rise to the Universe. A similar claim is made for evolution: God needn’t have created all species ex nihilo: He simply created a world in which the process of evolution would produce the creatures He wanted. Now why an omnipotent God worked so indirectly in these cases (and, for evolution, using a wasteful and painful process) is another question, but let’s leave that to the theologians.
The second snippet is a mixed bag. The first part about dispensing with supernatural intervention to explain the universe is good: we can explain its origin starting with a quantum vacuum—no breaking of the laws of physics is required. And it’s remarkable that we can explain how the universe began in that way using known laws of physics. This is one of the great triumphs of the human intellect.
But the second bit, about God being a great mathematician, is simply the kind of sloppy language that enables religion and gives succor to theists. I doubt that Dr. Mir really thinks that God created the beautiful laws of physics that helped produce the Universe. But if he does, then why does the article have a headline claiming that Mir and his colleagues showed that God didn’t create the Universe? It’s a self-contradictory article if you take Mir’s statement at face value.
But even if you don’t, there’s nothing in the piece that says anything about disproving God. What it says is that we’ve come closer to explaining the Universe using pure naturalism and rationalism. We may never understand why the laws of physics are as they are, but to say that “God made them” says exactly nothing. “God made them” is formally equivalent to “we don’t understand,” and so the burden of proof remains on the theists to find their God in the Big Bang. Regardless of what Feser or Craig say, you can’t simply conjure up an omnipotent being from philosophy alone: one needs evidence.
Andrew Seidel, a lawyer for the Freedom from Religion Foundation who called the Express piece to my attention, summed up this problem on his Facebook page:
Sloppy language like that combined with a desire not to offend religious sensibilities (which religion imposed on us after centuries of abuse), gives us quotes like Einstein’s “God does not play dice with the world.” Even though he clearly said, “the idea of a personal God is a childlike one” and called himself an agnostic.
Faizal is seeking some “purely mathematical theory describing nature,” not god and not religion. So he should stop using the language of god to describe these things. There are better ways to talk about math, science, perfection, immutable laws, and the beginning of everything than by invoking an idea that, as Hitchens put it, “comes from the infancy of our species.”
h/t: Andrew Seidel
I don’t really understand what is so ground breaking – we already knew all this stuff about the quantum vacuum. I think this journalist must be new. 😉
My thoughts too. I see plenty of press hype about scientific papers, but I do not think this one can be topped in the hype area. Except for maybe press hype on papers about sex.
My reaction too.
(And sub)
Yes, we’ve been aware of this since 1927. Monseigneur Georges Lemaître is smiling right now.
In the beginning there was the prime turtle, who
begat another turtle, who begat another turtle…
Which is why it is very important to know the gender of the turtle on whose back your supporting elephants ride …
We have a hundred thousand years of lack of evidence of d*g!! How many more do we need before we bury the d*g hypothesis?!!
Absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence. It only is in cases where you would expect evidence due to the traits of the claim. You can use this to eliminate many (possibly all) specific deities, but not a vacuous nondescript god concept line in deism.
You can eliminate all gods that intervene in the natural world. The only gods left are the ones whose existence is indistinguishable from nonexistence.
A creator god falls to the oldest of logical reasoning. Aristotle started to address it head-on, and flinched at the last moment with the transparent special pleading of his Prime Mover. Get rid of the special pleading and you discover that it is not the case that every effect has a cause.
Once you’re at that point, any seemingly-deistic gods must, of necessity, be local parochial. Perhaps they’re all that those under their domains can ever know, but they’re certainly not universal.
b&
“Aristotle” – you’re saying the word! Argh.
Aristotle! Aristotle! Aristotle!
b&
The word – it hurts!
Aarrgghh! That word — stop saying it!
Gah — look what you’ve done! Now you’ve made me say it!
And again! It’s horrible. Again! I’m domed!
b&
Domed?
Sphere not!
/@
“It’s horrible. I’m domed! ”
It’s orbital, indeed!
Was a bugger for the bottle.
You said just before me.
Our language is so sloppy since god means “to summon a deity to you” not some noun or pronoun. Now Jehovah is a proper noun.
The bit about the universe from nothing has always seemed odd to me. If empty space itself is a boiling froth of virtual particles winking in and out of existence (and the most accurate measurements ever done says it is), then there is no such thing as nothing except as a philosophical concept. ‘Nothing’ is still something.
Or nothing is only nothing for some of the time.
‘What’ya doin’?’
‘Nothing’.
‘Hmmm, that means you are up to something!’
My parents always thought that when my brother and I said we weren’t doing anything!
Let us talk of the perfect vacuum that our universe “wants” to be and if it ever did would destroy us in its wake.
It seems to be an old concept among theoretical physicists. If you don’t have the standard model particle fields you have a simpler vacuum than today.
I think Krauss puts it this way: there is something rather than nothing because nothing is unstable.
I’ve had this discussion many times over the years with the editors of our local rag, the Ventura County Star. I’ll read a well-written article, about which the headline completely misstates the content. (And the captions to photos are even worse, often written by people who apparently hadn’t read the article OR the headline.)
When I’ve discussed this with the writers, they assure me that their frustration exceeds my own. And the editors tell them the same thing they tell me–to go pound sand.
This aligns with what I understand. The headlines are there to get looks. And looks mean sales and sales draw advertisers.
Then why settle for half-measures?
“Boffins reveal Word God Spoke in the Beginning — and it’s not what you think!”
b&
It’s the Excess – I’m surprised they didn’t point out the links between proof of the non-existence of d*g and the effects of asylum seekers on house prices.
It’s a tactic used by so-called women’s magazines too. I got sucked in once about 25 years ago, and I was so pi**ed off with both them and myself that I haven’t bought another one since. The only time I suffer for it is when I’m asked to be part of a quiz team, and there are questions about things called Kardashians et al. that I’ve never heard of. Inevitably someone else has though.
They’re in Star Trek. Not sure which one of the Star Treks, but they’re boldly out there, somewhere. Not of this world, for certain.
😀
The covers of New Zealand womens’ magazines could doubtless be used by a male supremacist to demonstrate that women are mentally impaired. (Which I don’t believe for a moment, I hasten to add).
Headlines from the front page of one grabbed at random from my wife’s stack:
“Dancing With The Stars scandal! Who’s been caught kissing?”
“Kate’s Mum fights for George”
“All Black Luke Romano’s dream proposal”
“Tears and Heartbreak”
“Jen confronts Justin’s mistress”
“Mariah’s a billion dollar Bride”.
That’s all of them. No I don’t know who these people are. The sheer weight of trivia staggers me.
To be fair, I doubt men’s magazines (which I also don’t read) are any better. Rugby players, over-powered 4-WDs and fishing, probably.
cr
All sounds pretty ghastly! I’ve seen these headlines flying around Facebook about Kate doing something terrible, but I’ve no idea what, and a divorce in the offing. If any of it turns out to be real we’ll get treated to that one on the 6 o’clock news I assume.
My hairdresser started getting ‘North and South’ because she was embarrassed that I kept bringing my own stuff to read, so I guess that’s progress!
Calling this “science journalism” may be a stretch. Seems more like tabloid fodder.
“We may never understand why the laws of physics are as they are, but to say that ‘God made them’ says exactly nothing.”
Come to think of it, the author of Jesus and Mo made that same point only 11 days ago.
Actually most of the laws of nature are well understood, even the most fundamental ones. For example, the conservation laws are the result of symmetry – each point in space is the same, so is every direction, so is every point in time. These symmetries result in the laws of conservation of energy, momentum, angular momentum. (As proved by Emmy Noether’s theorem).
I wish I understood that stuff, but it seems to be above my pay grade.
So here are some ‘out there’ statements, and I would like to learn if they are true enough or just muddled.
1. At the big bang there was a symmetry breaking event so that the energy was divided evenly between matter (with gravity), and outward expansion. This is why the universe is said to come from nothing, since these features are well balanced and add up to 0 (or close to it).
2. This also has something to do with our universe being ‘flat’.
3. And, to dig myself deeper in my likely muddled thinking, it is also predicted that b/c of all this our expanding universe will later slow down its expansion to a near stand-still.
Feel free to trash this.
I don’t understand Q1.
Q2. In Relativity gravity is equated to curvature of spacetime. A flat universe means that the average curvature is zero, ie the total energy is zero. (As I understand it, which may be wrong).
Q3. In fact the universe stopped expanding a few billion years ago and the expansion is now increasing, This is caused by so-called “Dark Energy”, but it is not understood.
The expansion slow down, not the expansion, stopped a few billion years ago.
I don’t understand Q1 either, but it seems to be the main point of Krauss’ book A Universe From Nothing.
Q1 The contents of our universe is due to phase changes, it is still a zero energy game. I don’t get Q1, in inflationary cosmology the expansion is there all along, inherited from whatever was before.
Q2 Our universe didn’t have to be flat. But since it is flat we know it is huge, possibly infinite, and that it will never stop expanding. (Dark energy on a background of flat space means eternal expansion. I am less sure how it is _not_ eternal expansion on some other backgrounds. If it is.)
Q3 seems wrong. It could be a claim that was made before the standard cosmology was developed?
People get confused by the use of the word “law” and think of it as a human law. Not simply the ongoing normal. Though there are exceptions, they are not common enough to become a rule or law.
First we need a culture that at least understands how science works in its nomenclature and language.
What a collection of disparate stuff. I had never heard of doubly special relativity, but it seems to be part of some quantum gravity formulations, therefore highly speculative. It’s the idea that on some scales, things start to happen differently.
Sure, inflation of quantum jitters is well known and accepted as the source of matter.
Where did the energy come from? Well, according to Alan Guth, from the inflaton field, which may well still be inflating and occasionally, locally decaying to other universes. This is speculative too, but does explain where the energy came from.
Maybe Jerry could ask his buddy Sean Carroll about this.
And why is there no reference to the original article? There are several papers by these guys on arxiv.org, but none of them would be understandable to me — or the the chap who wrote this article.
The energy doesn’t come from anywhere, because the total energy of the universe is zero (as you would expect from the law of conservation of energy). The energy of a gravitational field is negative, and exactly balances the positive energy of the matter within it.
Then why does Alan Guth (and others) claim that this universe started out in a state of high inflaton-field energy and low entropy?
Lots of problems there.
If we mean that “this” universe started out locally, it would be after it had rid itself of the inflaton field energy and acquired a hot gas of particles instead. (The Hot Big Bang phase.)
If we mean that the larger inflationary universe started out in some era leading up to inflation, it is purely speculative.
The description of our universe’s entropy is, as is a description of its energy, fraught with difficulties. Here is one attempt to sort it out: http://arxiv.org/pdf/0909.3983v3.pdf .
As we can see entropy is very low during inflation, which is a simple particle field and due to expansion rates has cooled the universe to 0 K. (The Cold Inflation phase.) Seems reasonable, but don’t ask me where any preexisting entropy went. =D
Since the authors use a comoving volume I think they actually study the entropy density, which seems reasonable if you want to make comparisons.
Please, someone capable, read the original paper and let us know just what “new discovery” these authors have made!
(“Journalists are credulous?”)
You need a subscription to that journal.
P1: Nothing cannot begin to exist.
P2: Nothing cannot cease to exist.
P3: Something exists.
C1: Nothing ever existed.
P4: God is not something.
C2: from C1 and P4, God never existed.
Where’s my theology hat?
Also note that the above argument works with P4: God is not nothing.
The conundrum is that if matter cannot be created nor destroyed how did it come about? Where was the beginning of the beginning?
Theists have no help with the black box deity doing things without explanation we aren’t even supposed to ask.
Yes and the reason they think everything had to “come about” is that they apply things like the Second Law of Thermodynamics to the Universe rather than as a rule within the Universe. If entropy can reverse direction, the idea that an infinite regress is impossible has no basis.
Oh, matter *can* be created and destroyed; it’s energy that is conserved.
/@
You sell yourself short – where’s your Templeton money?
So…which god is it that didn’t create the Universe?
I’ll start taking theists seriously when they can manage to clear even that laying-on-the-ground bar: merely identifying the particular god whose creative acts we’re supposed to take seriously.
YHWH, the war god and cuckold who raped his way into a virgin’s womb?
Allah, who gave not just a pony, but a flying pony to his beloved Muhammad so they could be together for all eternity?
Some Hindu god with more appendages than a typical Republican from Texas has guns?
Suggesting that some god is responsible for the universe is utterly meaningless. Get back to us when you’ve some clue which god did it.
And, no. I’m not holding my breath. Can’t hold your breath when you’re laughing uproariously at the sort of insane idiocy that thinks that faery tale characters have anything even remotely to do with reality….
b&
Come on, there is not a single Hindu god with more arms than a Texas Republican has guns! Ganesh, give me a break.
Behind the hierarchy of deities and sub deities in Hindu religion is a supreme single deity that is at the top. The only one that will not be destroyed when the universe is rendered into chaos again before the next renewal. Then there is a triad then 33,000 godlings or sub super beings of all types also demons and humans. Or so as I read it.
A tongue in cheek proof that something must exist from Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist
“Suppose there were nothing. Then there would be no laws; for laws, after all, are something. If there were no laws, then everything would be permitted. If everything were permitted, then nothing would be forbidden. So if there were nothing, nothing would be forbidden. Thus nothing is self-forbidding. Therefore, there must be something. QED.”
Tongue in cheek maybe and equivocal definitely. But the idea that “nothing” is logically impossible is not unreasonable. It is certainly highly improbable as there is only one way for a philosophical nothing to exist but a near infinite number of ways for there to be something.
“Nothing” is that which is north of the North Pole, the quotient of zero. To claim that “nothing” can even hypothetically exist is the ultimate expression of incoherence.
b&
It’s not clear that there’s any way for nothing to exist, if we take “nothing” to mean utter nonexistence.
Besides which, it’s a red herring.
Grant for a moment that, whatever it means for nothing to exist, such is the case.
The gods aren’t going to be any help for getting out of this. They don’t exist in this hypothetical, after all. Nothing exists. And if the gods exist, then it’s clearly not the case that nothing exists, unless the gods themselves are nothing….
b&
Yes, I have thought and thought on this and still fail to see why the religious are so fond of “how else could we come from nothing”, when there wasn’t and couldn’t be, nothing.
Common to the ideas of something exists or nothing exists (a contradiction) or god exists (apparently god is different than something) is the concept of existence, an axiomatic and the broadest possible concept. The dichotomy of something vs. nothing is then more accurately stated as existence vs. non-existence which of course leaves no room for the theist to sneak in his god with intentionally misleading language.
The concept of the universe, if defined as the sum total of what exists, neatly connects the basic concept of existence with the all encompassing concept of the universe, of everything that there is. If a god exists it is not excluded a priori from being a part of the universe so how could a theist object to it.
Leibniz, who is cleverer than most of his fellow theists, is sometimes careful to say “why is there something rather than nothing?” is shorthand for “why is there anything other than god?” (Spinoza tries to argue “there isn’t”!)
But, of course, that question presupposes the existence of the very entity whose existence the question is supposed to demonstrate….
b&
Actually, I’m not sure that Leibniz ever thought so. That’s not to say modern theists aren’t bastardizing his stuff, which they are, of course.
Well, it certainly presupposes the existence of the divine. Whether or not Leibniz saw that as a bug or a feature doesn’t really matter….
b&
Yes, it seems a logical contradiction to say “nothing exists” because existence would imply that nothing is a something.
Nailed it. A while back I wrote a little story about lottery tickets, on the (generous) assumption that there is even one way for a philosophical nothing to obtain.
You can get rid of the equivocation by removing the “nothing would be forbidden” comment and just pointing out that when a very large number of events are equiprobable, one of which is “remain nothing” but a lot of which are “something happens,” its statistically unlikely that nothing would continue to happen forever. For nothing to continue to occur forever would be like flipping a coin every microsecond and getting an infinite string of heads.
What bothers me the most is that the title suggests that until this “discovery” physicists were quite ambivalent and open about the possibility of an invisible man with magic powers creating the universe.
Finally physicists can stop spending so much effort and time delving into the ‘god explanation’ and examine other viable answers.
Apparently doubly special relativity is enough of a thing to warrant its own Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubly_special_relativity
Oh, it’s serious. Lee Smolin is an excellent physicist. Plus he speaks out against the mania for string theory.
As far as I know Smolin is fringe (“crackpot” according to physicist Motl: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lee_Smolin ), and haven’t produced much worthwhile results what I can see.
Smolin pushes for fringe theories like “Loop Quantum Theory”*, and he dismisses the consensus of the most promising basic physics (string theory). “Since string theory incorporates all of the fundamental interactions, including gravity, many physicists hope that it fully describes our universe…”. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory ]
* Which, since it lacks dynamics, is not even wrong. You could never explain anything in nature with it, and you don’t need to be much advanced as a physicist to get that.
I also found house physicist Sean Carroll’s take on Smolin: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/10/03/the-trouble-with-physics/#.ViS9uvnhDIU
“To be clear, the scientists working on LQG and other non-stringy approaches to quantum gravity are not crackpots, but honest researchers tackling a very difficult problem.
Nevertheless, for the most part they have not managed to convince the rest of the community that their research programs are worthy of substantial support. String theorists are made, not born; they are simply physicists who have decided that this is the best thing to work on right now, and if something better comes along they would likely switch to that. The current situation could easily change. Many string theorists have done interesting work in phenomenology, cosmology, mathematical physics, condensed matter, and even loop quantum gravity.
If a latter-day Green and Schwarz were to produce a surprising result that convinced people that some alternative to string theory were more promising, it wouldn’t take long for the newcomer to become dominant. Alternatively, if another decade passes without substantial new progress within string theory, it’s not hard to imagine that people will lose interest and switch to other problems. I would personally bet against this possibility; string theory has proved to be a remarkably fruitful source of surprising new ideas, and there’s no reason to expect that track record to come to a halt.”
It’s always a terrible idea when atheists or scientists appear to be trying to disprove God or the need for a God with science. The whole “universe from nothing” line of inquiry is pointless. Nothing is nothing, and we really do look as foolish as the religious when we try to prove that everything came from nothing.
The evidence against God is all in the arguments FOR God, not in quantum physics. Any atheist or scientist who claims to disprove God or the need for God through science should be admonished by smarter atheists and scientists for making our side look bad. Thank you for doing just that, Jerry!
I wouldn’t go as far as you have. The script is almost universal: a True Believer™ discovers somebody is an atheist, and the first words out of the True Believer’s mouth is, “So where do you think everything came from, then? Nothing?”
That’s gotta be addressed in some form or another. It also happens that cosmologists are actually making damned good progress at answering the “Where did it all come from?” question, and that most emphatically belongs front-and-center of any attempt to bring sanity to the discussion.
b&
What Ben said. The physics really does help, since Joe Sixpack does have a gut feeling for conservation of mass/energy. That, plus some intuitive but scientifically wrong ideas about time, creates a genuine puzzle for the average person. Contrast the Philosophical Nothing that David Albert talks about – only in philosophy or theology school could anyone get worked up about that.
Matt makes a good point, IMO. It’s possible to derail the True Believer by simply saying that science has evidence for a much more plausible explanation of the origin of the universe than religion does, and then going with the Hitchens’ riposte about even if the CA were true, the believer still has all his work ahead of him.
“That’s gotta be addressed in some form or another.”
The only credible way to address it is “we don’t know.” Pretending that we do know is playing their game of pretending to know things we do not know. The answer to the question “where did it all come from” will always suffer from the problem of infinite regression.
When we say “we don’t know where it all came from?” we have answered the question “where did it all come from?” as well as that question can be answered. They say “God did it.” We do not have to show an alternate theory to defeat their argument that God did it. We just have to show how dumb their theory is.
We hurt out cause every time we try to replace their answer “God” with one of our own. “We don’t know” is the only correct answer until we do know, which will probably never happen.
Yes, Matt, but –
Showing that conservation of mass/energy doesn’t generate the conundrums the typical theist thinks it does – in particular, showing that “time” in physics doesn’t match their intuitive concept – is still worth doing.
Indeed, Paul. Just don’t state that you have disproved God or the need for God, because no one will ever be able to do that. You can;t prove a negative so claiming to be able to do so causes one to lose credibility.
“don’t state that you have disproved God or the need for God, because no one will ever be able to do that”
You seem very confident of that!
In fact, it is quite possible to falsify a hypothesis, so it is possible (at least in principal) to falsify the “God hypothesis” in just the same way as scientists have falsified the aether hypothesis, the caloric hypothesis, the phlogiston hypothesis, and so on. And it’s not unreasonable to say (in an idiomatic sense), that science has disproved the existence of (and the need for) the aether, caloric, phlogiston, and so on. So why, if the evidence is as compelling, shouldn’t we say that science has disproved the existence of (and the need for) “God”.
In fact, the late Victor Stenger took that tack in his book, _The God Hypothesis_.
The later discovery of the Higgs boson provided even more robust falsification. See Sean Carroll’s talk at Skepticon 5.
/@
And we all know that it’s been proven that 2 + 2 is not 5, other than for very large values of 2 of course.
You stole my favourite tagline!
But if you do want to see 2+2=5, just try adding up 2.4 + 2.4 in a spreadsheet with decimal places set to 0.
(You can also prove 0=1 by a similar method, or at least 1 – 0 = 0)
cr
So, there aren’t any nonexistence proofs?
Care to offer us your proof of the nonexistence of nonexistence proofs?
b&
Did you just make a statement for me and then contradict it? I think you did. Sloppy.
You’re confused.
You claimed that it is impossible to prove a negative claim. However, that claim itself is a negative claim and therefore obviously self-referentially incoherent. I would have thought my challenge should have made that obvious; hopefully, this explicit explanation will get through to you.
It is, further, a most superficially obviously incorrect claim. First, any claim, once proven, also necessarily entails the double negation; if p, then also not (not p). But, even worse for your position, some of the oldest and most famous proofs are nonexistence proofs. Euclid proposed the existence of a prime number larger than all other prime numbers, and then demonstrated that said number cannot possibly exist.
And, as it so happens, relatively minor variations on Euclid’s approach can demonstrate that the power of all powers or the knowledge of all knowledge are equally nonexistent. (Start with the diagonalization technique used to demonstrate that there’re more irrational than rational numbers.) Once you’ve demonstrated the incoherence of omnipotence and omniscience, you’ve demonstrated the nonexistence of all of today’s most popular gods.
Cheers,
b&
Well said!
Eh, you’re quite behind the times as far as cosmology goes. We’ve got the essential details very solidly confirmed all the way back to the period of rapid inflation — with said inflation effectively erasing any and all possibly influences of anything that might have come before, no matter what form or nature they might have taken. We know where everything came from for the last baker’s dozen billion years…and we even know the general outline of the types of reasonable answers for where rapid inflation came from.
To claim we don’t know all that…is akin to claiming that we can’t reasonably refute the objection of a flat Earther that Australians would fall off the bottom of the Earth .
b&
My physics is current. Your above statements do not contradict anything I have said.
You asserted that we don’t know the origins of the universe. That statement is misleadingly incomplete.
One might similarly assert that we don’t know the shape of the Earth…because we lack a real-time Planck-scale model of the Earth and likely always will.
It is most emphatically not true that we don’t know the origins of the Universe. We can trace everything observable back to the inflationary epoch and a bit more; by any objective measure, that is an answer to, “Where did everything come from?” It all came from inflation, and inflation, due to its nature of erasing anything that possibly could have even hypothetically come “before,” is a complete account of the origins of everything.
We’ve got an incomplete picture of where inflation came from, yes. And the view of the pre-inflationary conditions get murkier and murkier the farther you try to look past it.
But everything did most emphatically come through that bottleneck, and it is a complete account of everything to state that that’s where it all came from.
b&
So it’s inflation all the way down. I see.
I totally have egg on my face. I’ve been telling critics of the atheist movement that you don’t exist. I tell them that they are strawmanning when they portray atheists as people who think they can disprove God with physics. But there you are. They are not strawmanning. You exist. Damn. This is going to make defending atheists much harder.
In your other comment you closed by saying “Once you’ve demonstrated the incoherence of omnipotence and omniscience, you’ve demonstrated the nonexistence of all of today’s most popular gods.”
Here you are making my main point from my original comment. The best arguments against God are all in the arguments FOR God, as you have demonstrated above. And notice that you closed with “you’ve demonstrated the nonexistence of today’s most popular gods.” You had to word it that way because the argument is tied to the attributes of the proposed gods not to all possible gods.
Honestly go ahead and make the argument that God has been proven nonexistent by physics. I don’t think that’s true, I don’t think it helps, and I can assure you we don’t need it to be true to win our argument against the proposed gods because they all defeat themselves in their proposed attributes.
Which god?
No — never mind. That game of whackamole can go on all night.
Just offer a definition of the term, “god,” you feel comfortable with that’s applicable to the context of this discussion. One that encompasses all the gods you seriously think might actually exist.
Most likely, it’ll be logically incoherent. On the unlikely chance it’s not, it’ll either be contradicted by physics or, at absolute best, an idol — a totem that exists but that lacks whatever it is that’s claimed to make it more than just a carved statue or whatever.
But, regardless, it’s as guaranteed as the fact that the Sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning that it won’t be anything that’s any more deserving of serious consideration than a proposal that maybe the Sun will actually rise in the West instead.
Or, if you prefer, we can cut to the chase and I’ll tell you what the gods actually are — reveal their true nature to you. At which point you’ll understand why none of them exist. Unless, of course, you’ve got an emotional attachment to one or more gods that you’re not willing to let go of….
b&
@ Matt
But nobody believes in “all possible gods”. Believers believe in specific gods and they make specific (implicit or explicit) truth claims about those gods. And it’s those truth claims which are logically incoherent and, or, in conflict with physics.
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Key among those beliefs for a large number of believers in the world, particularly in the west is that Jesus “rose bodily into Heaven.” So too did his mother. Well, if that’s not a violation of Physics in that his energy simply disappeared somewhere (where, who knows?), then it’s a claim he actually went someone up above to Heaven. Given what people knew 2000 years ago, it’s reasonable to believe that people thought it possible that there were gods or a God living up in the sky somewhere. So, if it’s not a violation of Physics, where the hell is Heaven? Jesus can’t have gone farther than a couple thousand light years away and we’ve yet to find any signs of celestial singing coming from space…
You’ve mistaken me for someone who is trying to make the case that God exists. I don’t believe any god exists. I think it;s really dumb to believe in any god and useless to worship a metaphorical one. Thumbs down on the whole God thing. Poppycock I say.
And yet you’re so certain in your incoherent evidence-contradicting faith-based position that the gods cannot be disproven that you’d label a dangerous crank anybody who would actually bother to put in the minimal effort to look under the bed and discover no monsters.
As I’ve repeatedly observed, you’re quite confused. On more than one subject.
…incidentally, you are aware, are you not, that Epicurus used observation to demonstrate the perfect nonexistence of powerful agents with the best interests of humanity at heart, and he did so a third of a millennium before Mark crafted an Euhemerized biography of Jesus? If that’s not science proving the gods don’t exist, I don’t know what is.
b&
You’re confused, as I have noted several times. The level of your confusion, which I have noted, is revealed in that you keep making my argument for me that the best knockdown arguments against god are in the arguments made FOR god and his conflicting attributes, such as benevolence and omnipotence and omniscience etc. Since this was my original point, and you keep making this point back to me, I have proven that you are confused.
However, I shall state again that a very bad knockdown argument against God is that physics has proven everything came from nothing therefore the nonexistence of god is proven. Man, does that ever suck as an argument, especially when you have pointed out so many good arguments during your confusion.
Nothing is really ‘nothing’ in air quotes, since the nothing being referred to is really something (expanding space with dark energy and virtual particles, I guess). But it does not help by calling it nothing since it does seem unnecessarily provocative.
Anyway, it is the writer of a bad headline that is to blame.
I dislike the phrase ‘so conclusive’. I would argue that ‘conclusive’, as in reaching a conclusion, is non-variable, rather like the words perfect and unique. You can’t have degrees of conclusive.
Okay not an especially important point, but it adds to the suggestion of sloppiness attaching to the article.
Science in the popular media should never be taken as fact on its own merit
In my experience arguing with believers, the who-created-the-rules-of-physics argument boils down to this: we cannot expect fundamental particles and forces to behave consistently without an intelligent creator; that the default state of the pre-universe is inconsistent to the point that nothing could exist. Then they bring out the weasel words to explain God still existed despite their argument that nothing could exist.
By the use of the deity as X to the N power it is useless to discuss things with them since it is simply a made up trump card. One they can pull and just say that the deity is “outside of space-time” and therefor inviolate and supreme etc.
And also they never talk about how improbable super ultra intelligent manipulator of space time can exist in the first place. For get molecular configurations and just settle on that point. I can’t generate the numbers against such a thing existing. But it would at least knock them back on their heels for a few seconds…
Stephen Hawking made similar claims (“there is no need for God”) in The Grand Design, a few years ago now.
*yawn*
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Mystical religionists who couldn’t tell a quadratic equation from a quadrant think they can say just as much about cosmology as teams of scientists, who use advanced, hard-won, and counter-intuitive mathematics and machinery just to examine a piece of a fraction of a morsel of a nigh-infinite speck of the universe. The bloated factory that is the popular press churns out yet another sensationalist headline with all the eagerness of a drunk throwing half his drink up the wall and the other half roughly in the general vicinity of his head. And the public’s general understanding of the nuances of scientific inquiry, methodology, and intellectual integrity is sidelined in favour of yet another “scientists vs god” bit of melodrama.
Is this even news any more?
Nicely put.
I have tried to say something similar here and there a few times.
The barest fraction of the mighty edifice of science and proper knowledge is beyond all the grubbing attempts at explanations the religions offer.
The Sunday Express is sensationalist, so is the physicists who has published there. Linde has had these ideas within his chaotic inflation for 20 years or so.
These scientists on the other hand work on a minority opinion of “Loop Quantum Gravity”. It is a theory popular among mathematicians, that has no lower energy bound and so can’t predict the physics of what is seen.
Especially the Double Special Relativity variant, that against observation proposes that there isn’t a universal speed limit (different energy of photons would give different speed in vacuum) and a minimum length scale (which is partly mooted by supernova observations showing that no speed noise is present as would be expected) is daft.
If BICEP2 had observed the concave inflation potential it seemed to see, Linde’s 20 year old prediction of that the universes started out as a Planck fluctuation, energy corresponding to less than 1 kg of mass, had been supported. But not only did Planck show that whatever BICEP2 observed (pure dust or some remaining gravity wave signal as well) could not easily lie in the concave regime. Planck’s no-model data extraction looks more like the universe experienced a relatively short period of ‘eternal’ inflation. That doesn’t say much on the preceding period I think.
I don’t think that is how it works. If universes are zero energy, as the article describes, you can’t modify – especially ‘create’ – physical laws without it being noticeable. Presumably laws had to be there all the time or arise with the universe in a “just so” manner so energy is preserved. Specifically a universe has to result from some zero energy fluctuation or from a phase change withing another universe. (Bubble universes.)
You really squeeze out the magic-of-the-gaps with such physics, I think.
I was always under the impression that everything we discover about Physics as it relates to laws and equations is simply a description of how everything works, not a prescription that everything has to listen to an abstract set of laws. Is the prescriptive paradigm a common one among Physicists or is this type of talk just the typical question begging that theists smuggle in by saying “things obey laws and since God wrote them, he can make things break them”? I don’t see how abstract laws could possibly “be written” and then magically enforce themselves upon matter and energy. Wouldn’t there have to be descriptions of how this works and now we’re right back to writing descriptive laws instead of prescriptive? Forgive me if I’m missing something entirely obvious (or even something not obvious).
Some law statements of nature are descriptions, and some are explanations (the deeper laws are the latter, generally). None, however, are prescriptive.
“. . . Asked if the remarkable findings and the convincing if complex solution removed the need for a God figure to kick start the universe Dr Mir said: “If by God you mean a supernatural super man who breaks his own laws then yes he’s done for, you just don’t need him.“But if you mean God as a great mathematician, then yes!””
Will this bit is at best confusing:
If X then yes, but if Y then yes!
So he agrees that the findings remove the need for a God in either case, which makes Jerry’s conclusion a waste of his time.