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Was the Universe
Created, or does it exist purely by chance?
Notes from a lecture delivered in London,
December 2007
[These are rough notes, used as a basis for the lecture. They
may be used by individual students and copied within a single
institution for study, but not commercial, purposes. Copyright
remains with the author.]
The basic questions: Why is there
anything at all?
Science gives explanations of things
within the universe, but can the universe as a whole
have an explanation? And does the existence of the world
suggest the existence of a creator God? – the Cosmological
Argument.
Given that the world is here, there
are reasons to believe that it can develop itself naturally.
But why is it here? Is everything dependent on everything
else? Is there nothing beyond this circle of interdependence?
This is absolutely
fundamental. If you believe that there is some sort of reason,
cause, first principle – then you count yourself a theist. If
not, then the world is self-contained, and needs no external
explanation – it may indeed be here by chance, or as one of many
millions of similar worlds.
In looking at the argument, keep in mind
that the relevant question to ask may not be 'Does this prove
that God exists?' but 'What sort of "God" does this argument
present? Does this argument point to what religious
experience or organised religion mean by the word "God"?'
Ockham's
razor: 'Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.'
Keep this principle in mind: Do we need
‘God’ as an explanation, or is there a simpler one? If God
is an explanation (if one is needed) for why the world is, we
may not be justified in giving God qualities other than those
required for the purpose of creation.
The original
ideas that lie behind this argument come from Aristotle.
But the first to set it out in the form we recognise now were
two Muslim philosophers al-Kindi (9th century) and al-Ghazali
(1058-1111), in what is knows as the Kalam argument.
It may be set
out like this:
-
Everything that begins to exist has a cause for its
existence.
- The
universe began to exist.
- Therefore
the universe must have a cause.
Basic question: If you have a sequence of
events, stretching back in time - can that sequence be
infinite?
Although a
theoretical infinity (as used in maths) may seem
straightforward, actual infinities cause all sorts of problems.
(e.g. Infinity plus one, equals infinity; infinities cannot
grow.) Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers have argued
that an actual infinity cannot exist, and if it did, how
could we know? It is not the same as being without discernable
limit.
You can
therefore present the argument like this:
- an actual
infinite number cannot exist
- therefore
there must be a finite sequence of causes for the world
- therefore
the world began to exist at some point in the past
BUT A
circle provides an infinite journey. The surface of a sphere
provides for infinite movement in all directions. (Hamster in a
Perspex ball!)
Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 74) -
probably the most important philosopher of the medieval period -
sought to reconcile the Christian faith with the philosophy of
Aristotle, which had been ‘rediscovered’ and was taught in the
secular universities of Europe.
Aquinas
presented Five Ways in which he believed the existence of
God could be shown. They are:
1. The
argument from an unmoved mover.
2. The
argument from an uncaused cause.
3. The
argument from possibility and necessity.
4. The
argument from degrees of quality.
5. The
argument from design.
The first three of these are Cosmological.
The first may
be presented like this:
-
Everything that moves is moved by something.
- That
mover is in turn moved by something else again.
- But
this chain of movers cannot be infinite, or movement would
not have started in the first place.
-
Therefore there must be an unmoved mover, causing
movement in everything, without itself actually being moved.
- This
unmoved mover is what people understand by 'God'.
Aquinas was
not thinking of physical movement, but change – everything
changes because of something else (fire causing something
potentially hot to become actually hot). But whatever does the
changing must itself be changed by something else. Now, this
must stop somewhere, otherwise there will be no first change,
and, as a result, no subsequent changes. This first cause of
change, itself not changed by anything, is what he understands
by God.
The second
argument has the same structure:
-
Everything has a cause.
- Every
cause itself has a cause.
- But,
you cannot have an infinite number of causes.
-
Therefore there must be an uncaused cause, which causes
everything to happen without itself being caused by anything
else.
- Such an
uncaused cause is what people understand by 'God'.
Don’t think of a
sequence of causes going back into the past (as the Kalam
argument) but a sequence moving outwards in the present – like
ripples on water.
The third
argument follows from the first two:
-
Individual things come into existence and later cease to
exist.
- Therefore
at one time none of them was in existence.
- But
something comes into existence only as a result of something
else that already exists.
- Therefore
there must be a being whose existence is necessary, and that
all would understand to be 'God'.
Everything is only
fully understood in terms of the whole. But how is the whole to
be understood? THAT is the cosmological question.
Some challenges to the argument:
David Hume
(1711-1776). All knowledge is based on observation; we generally
see cause and effect following one another
But, in
the case of the world as a whole, we have a unique 'effect', and
cannot observe its cause. We cannot get 'outside' the world
to see both the world and its cause, and thus establish the
relationship between them.
Perhaps
attempting to think about an uncaused cause beyond the world is
something that our minds are not designed to do. The philosopher
Kant (1724-1804) argued that the whole notion of cause and
effect was one of the ways (along with the concepts of space and
time) in which our minds interpret the world - we cannot help
but impose causality upon our experience. If Kant is right,
then an uncaused cause is a mental impossibility.
Bertrand Russell – the world is just there, a brute fact.
Wittgenstein –
the world is all that is the case. Whereof we cannot speak,
thereof we must remain silent.
In other words, if we
can only know what we can experience, how can we talk about what
causes that experience?
The Cosmological
argument may not be sound, but it points to the sort of reality
that a religious person is thinking about when he or she uses
the word 'God' - not a particular thing within (or,
imaginatively, outside) the universe, but a reality that
underlies and sustains everything. It guards against the idea of
a limited ‘God’.
But could all this happen by chance?
The Anthropic Principle
The modern
scientific view of the universe throws up many fascinating facts
that point to the origin of things – and it is not surprising if
some of these are taken up by believers and used as arguments
for the existence of God.
The Anthropic
principle is one of these – so outline it briefly.
The structure
of the universe is determined by some fundamental constants – of
which the most significant for our purposes is the Gravitational
Constant.
IF gravity
were a fraction less powerful than it is, the universe would
have expanded outwards in a way that would have prevented the
formation of galaxies. If a little more, it would have collapsed
back in upon itself without having got to this point.
Leads to the
‘weak’ form of the argument (or the ‘sensible’ form!)
‘The universe
you observe = the one that permits you to exist.’
(from Barrow
and Tipler ‘The Anthropic Cosmological Principle’ 1986)
In other
words, the properties of the universe are self-selected by the
fact that we are here to observe it. If the universe were
different, we wouldn’t be here; but we are here, so it
wasn’t different. Properties are ‘self-selecting’ based on that
fact. It must have been like that, or we wouldn’t have been here
to observe it.
‘Strong’
version – the universe must have been such as to make it
inevitable that observers would have been created within it at
some stage. (Brandon Carter, 1974) – in other words, the
universe could not have failed to be life creating.
(Bit like the
‘design’ argument.)
But ‘must’
the universe have been like that?
Example – ‘If
you were here on time you must have caught the 8 o’clock train.’
(If you didn’t
catch it, you wouldn’t be here. But you didn’t HAVE to catch
it.)
Another one –
‘In order for you to exist, your parents must have had sex at
least once. But that does not mean that they were forced to have
sex.
Past events
can be necessary in order to explain the present – that’s what
the Anthropic Principle is about – looking at the whole range of
options in the past, some are self-selected by the fact that the
world is as it is today, with us in it.
BUT, if the
universe were different, it wouldn’t be our universe. How do we
know that this is not just one of billions of universes. We
happen to be in it, because we happen to be a product of just
exactly this kind of universe.
Just as you
happen to be you because of a unique genetic code from your
parents. But you didn’t HAVE to have that unique code.
The Anthropic
Principle does not prove that there is any external or prior
cause to the universe. The most it can show is that the
universe is as it is. And because it is as it is, we are as we
are.
So did the
universe come about purely by chance? That’s a crazy question –
everything happens by chance, and nothing happens by chance.
Given the billions of people in this world, each with his or her
own genetic code, and given the infinite number of circumstances
that led to your parents, grandparents etc meeting, it is
utterly unlikely that you are born. You are completely the
product of chance. On the other hand, if I knew all about
everyone in your past, you are absolutely inevitable.
It’s much
the same with the universe, except that we can’t get outside it
to take a look at the other possibilities.
© Mel Thompson 2007
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