Undeception

As I teased earlier, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss and astrophysicist Rodney Holder engaged in a conversation about cosmological origins on Unbelievable over the weekend. It was an entertaining though not altogether surprising debate, confirming my impression of Krauss’s book. I have not read it, but as I always say in these scenarios, reading the book is not a prerequisite for commenting on what the author says is the point and thrust of his own book. This is not a review of the book; it’s a review of some of Krauss’s ideas and his presentation of those ideas, which are presumably not that different from those argued in his book.

But I guess the point I’m trying to make is that the real, if you wish, miracle that people seem to think requires the existence of God is that you can create a universe full of stuff, full of stars, planets, humans, remarkable things out of nothing, literally where there were no stars, particle, space, etc. And that particular “miracle” is something that the laws of physics certainly has plausible explanations for.

If this summarized Lawrence Krauss’s book A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing as well as he claims it does, I doubt I would have any major problem with it. I like eliminating the god of the gaps as much as anyone. But Krauss and his New Atheist compadres have bigger ideas for his book than just that.

At one point in the interview he says, ”The key, fascinating thing to try to understand is how we got this amazing universe and how you don’t need a Creator; you don’t need someone to obviate the laws of physics to produce it.” In the book Krauss offers a few variations on how to answer the question of the universe’s origin. This would indeed problematize the cosmological argument, especially when the latter is being used as a proof rather than as a pointer; in science, the more plausible mundane explanations are available to contend with a counter-intuitive explanation, the less likely the counter-intuitive explanation (here, a divine miracle) appears. But Krauss’s interlocutor for this debate was less than convinced that his explanations were compelling enough to make natural theology an entirely superfluous supposition.

Holder, a former priest and a current astrophysicist, argues that in attempting to settle the philosopher’s quandary about the universe’s creation from nothing, Krauss does not properly begin with nothing. Indeed, in the interview, Krauss speaks of this or that conceived pre-Universe state as “approaching” the “philosophers’ nothing“. Holder is not convinced: ”He’s ontologized this nothing.” In one model under consideration, Holder points out that Krauss is not beginning with the absence of anything, but a quantum vaccuum. Krauss did not argue with this point.

Holder then noted that even under an alternative model discussed in the book beginning with an actual “absence of space,” Krauss speaks of this nothing as having properties, which would disqualify that lack of space from being the philosophers’ nothing: “…It has the property of being unstable; it has the property of being able to be acted upon by quantum fields and gravity and so on.”  Krauss objected that those things did not exist in that model: rather, there is a “metaverse” in which there is potential for those things to exist. Rejoined Holder, even the potential is not nothing. The existence of potential is still existence.

This prompted a pointed response from Krauss: “If the universe didn’t have the potential to exist, then how did God create it?” Krauss seemed similarly bothered by the “why? why? why?” question, to which he expected the answer, “turtles all the way down:” that is, if we persist on asking “why this created object?” until we get to an eternal object, we could still always ask “why that eternal object?” And like Dawkins, Krauss maintains that we could do this with the existence of God, as well.

Holder launched into an explanation of God as a necessary being, claiming that most scientists hold that the universe, on the other hand, is contingent. I consider that this difference in types of existence can conceivably be squared with apophatic theology of the Cappadocian variety, which despite on the surface maintaining that God Himself does not exist (and does exist) is really arguing that God has an existence of an altogether different kind than the way we can conceive of existence; He is the very basis for the kind of existence we are familiar with. Holder mentions Hawking’s discussion of what “breathes fire into equations.”

Another point in the book that Krauss wanted to point out is that the laws of physics creating and sustaining the universe could themselves be generated naturally. Holder didn’t repudiate the idea, but he apparently still wants to take it back one more step, asking why these particular laws exist: “So there can be the most wonderful theory, but why is this theory even instantiated?” They did not go far down this road in this discussion, but I wish they had had the time to!

One thing they did have the time to get into was the question of the value of philosophy.

Krauss stated his belief that physics has begun to answer the questions that used to be the domain of theology and philosophy. He argues that the philosophers’ distinction between something and nothing have been shown to be irrelevant distinctions under science’s microscope (note that in answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing, Krauss in effect wants to deny the premise of the question). Although he occasionally equivocates on this, it certainly appears as though Krauss wants to bookend Sam Harris’s The End of Faith with The End of Philosophy.

Many philosophers are up at arms against Krauss for dismissing philosophy as increasingly irrelevant in his empiricist’s world of logical positivism, as he does in this interview (he admits that he “discounted” a recent scathing NY Times review because it was by a philosopher rather than a cosmologist). But this is not just some unfortunate parasite intruding on Krauss’s project. As fellow scientist (and atheist) Sean Carroll judiciously pointed out, this is at the core of Krauss’s project: as stated explicitly in this debate, Krauss believes that physics has demonstrated that the question of why is no longer more scientifically interesting than the question of why flowers differ in color. What Krauss is saying is that answering how, i.e. mechanical explanations, make irrelevant the question why, i.e. the question of meaning or purpose.

We can see the folly of approaching why as a how question in much smaller endeavors. If a man presented to his wife a beautiful oil painting he had created out of a spontaneous act of devotion to her, he would be wronged if she dismissed it as the ultimately meaningless result of oil smeared across canvas. In fact, the more brilliant and beautiful the painting, the more poignant its higher purpose would be to her.

More to the point, if my son were to ask me, “Why do I have to get a painful shot?” and I answered, “Because the needle triggers the pain receptors in your arm,” I have misheard his question as “what makes a shot painful?” rather than “why do I need to undergo this painful shot?” Similarly, answering “why does the universe exist?” as Krauss does is no different than if he had heard the question as “what makes the universe exist?” which of course an entirely different question than the one memorably posed by Leibnitz. Answering how manifestly does not render the question of why irrelevant. It is on this point that I agree with Gould’s NOMA principle: science seeks to answer how where philosophy and theology seek to answer why, and despite all of the efforts of Krauss and special creationists, both disciplines are ill-equipped to answer the other’s question.

This is why I’d be happy enough for Krauss’s book to completely decimate the cosmological argument. I don’t need it. I don’t need God to stand in that gap. But don’t try to tell me that knowing how something is accomplished in any way abolishes any attached purpose or meaning behind it, no matter how brilliantly or exhaustively you explain the how‘s.

I’ve been watching the back-and-forth between Jerry Coyne and Karl Giberson. Apparently there has been a video produced for USA Today that features them in a conversation answering the question, “Are science and religion compatible?” that has not been put online yet. I think we know their answers, though.

Karl Giberson of the BioLogos Foundation, of course, finds faith and science completely compatible. Incompatabilist atheist Jerry Coyne actually insists that he does also, at least provisionally: “…if and only if ‘compatibility’ meant only this: ‘can someone be religious and also be a scientist/accept science? ‘” He goes on to clarify by reiterating that people are capable of inconsistency and holding beliefs that are in tension with one another, which is what he thinks science and faith are. Ever the incompatibilist, Coyne attacks the common Christian claim that there are “two ways of knowing”, one that is empirical and discernable only by observation, and one that does not depend upon physical observability. Says Coyne, “This—the disparity in ‘ways of knowing’—is the true incompatibility between science and faith.” He accuses Giberson and other compatibilists of failing to address attacks on the validity of the kind of religious epistemology that is “immune to rational scrutiny”. Because rational scrutiny is indeed applied to theology by believing theologians and philosophers all the time, he appears to be defining “rational” as laboratory-driven, or perhaps motivated by empirical evidence alone. He makes a point to dismiss the validity of holding beliefs merely acquired by culture and tradition, which of course any believer would do as well, but he implies that any beliefs initially acquired by any means other than deductive reasoning or empirical observation is necessarily invalid.

Although I’m sure he doesn’t believe this in all areas of his life, Coyne argues as though the only information a reasonable person should permit himself to accept is that which is demonstrable beyond a reasonable doubt in the laboratory or, somewhat incongruously, demonstrable beyond all uncertainty through logic and reason. The incompatibility between Giberson’s view and Coyne’s view is not between a faith perspective and a scientific perspective but between a qualified trust that what we experience may be real even if not empirically demonstrable and an implicit and unquestionable trust in the validity of only those experiences which are empirically demonstrable.

My thought is that instead of insisting upon “two ways of knowing” as compatibilists are indeed fond of doing, perhaps we should emphasize distrust in the adequacy, reliability, and universal relevancy of observation and empirical verifiability. If post-modernism has taught us anything, it’s that “knowing” is merely happening to be convinced of that which is true, and it doesn’t altogether matter how we are convinced. To be sure, some ways of becoming convinced are more useful for science than for daily life – and Giberson et al. would agree - but being convinced that your wife loves you and that harming children is wrong are beliefs that, if not “immune” to reason, at least show “rational inquiry” to be not unfailingly relevant or adequate to inform our experience. As long as scientists like Giberson promote science in scientific endeavors, Coyne should be happy with the underlying purpose of BioLogos, which is at bottom to bring more Christians on board with the rationalist “way of knowing” when approaching science. But perhaps there are things beyond brute facts that influence incompatibilists’ behavior.