Bicycles and Universes

I have often imagined debating William Lane Craig myself, and thought out the ways I would respond to his arguments. I have often, while listening to Craig's debates, wondered why his opponent didn't call him on some claim that was simply untrue. Were they just being polite, or did they not realize the falsity of the claim?

I think I may be cured of these fantasies. Sean Carroll did brilliantly in the debate - far better than I could ever have done. He didn't hesitate to say outright, "That's just false!" And his deep expertise in cosmology was the perfect counterpoint to Craig's quote-mining of partially-understood physics papers.

I have only a couple of comments on style and content. I thought Sean did a good job of pointing out where Craig failed to respond to the argument. (This is an area where Craig usually excels.) But instead of merely pointing it out, he ought to have taken the opportunity to summarize his argument again, for those who might not have understood it completely the first time.

Craig, as usual, excelled in his logical organization and presentation of his argument. His concluding summary nicely recalled his original point: not that he was out to prove God's existence, but that modern cosmology lends support to one of his premises.

Here Carroll really missed an opportunity. He ought to have said, briefly and succinctly, that modern cosmology lends no support at all the premise that the universe had a beginning. What we can say for sure is that the universe was a very different place 13.7 billion years ago. But any statement about what happened before that is very speculative and unfounded in established science. There are models in which time has a beginning, and there are models in which it doesn't: none of these models are established science, and so nothing can be deduced from them about a beginning.

One final missed opportunity: when Craig asked, quite reasonably, "If universes can just pop into existence, why not bicycles? What's the difference?" (from memory, not an exact quote) Sean could have responded that there is an obvious and crucial difference: bicycles are things that exist within time, while universes are not. On the contrary, time exists within a universe. For all Craig's bluster about simultaneous causation in the Q&A session, causality has to do with what brings about a change. And for there to be change, there must be time. Since a universe is not something that happens in time, the causality issue doesn't apply.

I think Sean probably had something like this in mind in his argument about the a cosmological model as a self-contained description needing no outside cause, but it would have been nice to respond to Craig's question with a specific difference that clearly matters.

Craig, Carroll, and Cause

Since I've been reading about causes, one part of the debate that stood out for me was the fact that neither Carroll nor Craig tried to define "cause." In terms of the debate, this was undoubtedly wise: a long digression on the different definitions of "cause" would probably have lost most of the audience. But it was bad philosophy. Carroll tried to explain that, for a physicist, having a consistent mathematical model that comports with the experimental evidence is all we need. Any discussion of causes and effects will proceed from that model. Craig simply kept repeating his argument from incredulity: a universe can't just pop into being without a reason.

But certainly, how we think about causation affect our ideas on whether a self-contained universe needs a cause.

(By the way, this issue is independent of whether the universe in question has a beginning or not. While it might seem intuitively that a universe that begins is more guilty of "just popping" into existence, it has often been argued that a universe that is infinite in time is no less in need of some sort of external cause or explanation.)

On Hume's regularity view, causation is a matter of constant conjunction: to know that A causes B, we need to know that A is always followed by B. So what we need to do is to make lots of observations of deities, and if "Let there be light!" is always followed by a universe popping into existence, then we can conclude that gods cause universes.

On Wesley Salmon's analysis, a causal process is one that can carry some sort of a mark that transmits from the cause to the effect. It would seem, though, that if God is perfect, God is impossible to mark. Thus, we could never tell if a mark can be passed to the universe.

Another modern approach is to take causation to involve the transmission of a conserved quantity, like energy or momentum. But neither the theist not the atheist would claim that a universe that has a beginning in time was initiated by a transfer of pre-existing energy, so in this case there is no possibility of a cause.

On the Aristotelian-Thomian analysis, causation involves a potentiality becoming actuality, and an external cause is necessary to tip something into actuality. A universe is obviously possible (if it were impossible we wouldn't be here), so on this analysis an external cause is needed to make the universe actual.

So it seems possible, in principle at least, that both Craig and Carroll are right: differing definitions of "cause" may yield different conclusions about whether a self-contained universe requires a cause.

Two Debates

There have been two very recent debates between high-profile Christians and scientifically-minded opponents.

I'm not that interested in the Ken Ham vs. Bill Nye the Science Guy debate, as Ham's creationist views have no credibility whatsoever. It would be interesting to see what approach Bill took. Some reviews have been positive, others not so.

I'm much more interested in the William L. Craig vs. Sean Carroll debate. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be video available for it yet. [ETA: Video now available here.] WLC is infamous in atheist circles for "winning" most of his debates. ("Winning" is of course very subjective in informal debates like these, but when the folks on the opposing side think you won, you probably won.) Carroll is not only a cosmology expert, he is one of the most philosophically astute scientists I know of - he's light-years ahead of Lawrence Krauss or Jerry Coyne, in my opinion. So Carroll is probably the ideal opponent for WLC. Props to WLC for taking on Carroll on his home turf: cosmology. This was either very brave or very stupid of him.

Carroll's own views on the debate are here. (I don't see any comments on it on Craig's website yet.) I think it's not just atheistic bias to assume that, where they disagree on the cosmology, the cosmology expert is probably right.

One new thing I learned from Sean's comments: Some cosmologies have a Boltzmann Brain problem and others don't. That's something I'll have to learn more about.

Craig has employed modern cosmology extensively in the past, both in debates and in his published papers. I was glad to see that Sean brought up the big problem with this: some cosmological models have an infinite past. Others don't. None of these models is considered established physics. So cosmology tells us nothing (yet!) about whether the universe had a beginning or not.

I really like Sean's five responses to the fine tuning argument - especially his #2, which is basically the same as my Fine Tuning Argument for Naturalism. Craig apparently had no response to this point.

There's been a lot of discussion about whether these debates are a good idea or not, from the point of view of promoting science and rational thought, much of it focussed on whose resume will be enhanced and whose pockets will be filled. From the purely intellectual point of view, I'm all for them. It's true that debates are a poor format for getting to the truth, but they're a great format for exposing folks to ideas  they might not have encountered otherwise.

Evolution and Entropy, Again

I just got an email from someone who had read my essay about evolution and the second law of thermodynamics and thought he had found a flaw in it. It made me realize that the discussion there is rather technical and mathematical, and I ought to write up the basic idea in a clear and non-mathematical way. So here goes.

The thermodynamic argument against evolution goes something like this:

1. Evolution involves an increase of order, and therefore a decrease of entropy.
2. The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy never decreases.
3. Therefore, evolution contradicts the second law of thermodynamics.

Let's first consider (1.). In order to establish this, one would have to show that the body of a human being has less thermodynamic entropy than an equal mass of bacteria  (for instance). Now, this may in fact be true, but no one has ever proven such a thing, to my knowledge. Without proving (1.), the argument can't get off the ground.

Secondly, even if (1.) is true, the argument fails, because (2.) is wrong: the second law of thermodynamics doesn't say that entropy never decreases.

In fact, entropy decreases spontaneously in lots of natural settings: for instance, when a pond freezes over in winter. Ice has much less entropy than liquid water - if it were impossible for entropy to decrease then it would be impossible for ponds to freeze over.



So what does the second law of thermodynamics say? It says that there can't be a decrease of entropy in one place without a compensating increase of entropy somewhere else. In the case of the pond, the heat escaping from the water during the freezing process causes an increase of entropy of the air over the pond.

If you wanted to prove that the freezing of the pond violates the second law of thermodynamics, you would have to calculate the entropy decrease of the water, calculate the entropy increase of the air, and show that the latter is less than the former.

In the case of evolution, you would have to calculate the entropy decrease due to cells being "organized" into higher life forms, which, we already noted, has never been done. Then you would have to show there was no compensating increase of entropy elsewhere. This second step is what I addressed in my essay. If we take the whole Earth as our system, then we find there is an absolutely enormous increase of entropy due to the radiation of heat energy into space. This entropy increase is so large that no possible decrease of entropy due to evolution would cause a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

Victor, Meet Ken

Victor Reppert's blog, Dangerous Idea, has been on my blogroll for a while. I try to look for blogs that express the theist's viewpoint in an intelligent manner, and Reppert is a Christian who has some philosophical acumen and whose  arguments have often seemed worthy of consideration. Recently, though, his posts have been declining in both length and quality. Now he has hit a new low. Here's a recent post, in its entirety:

Atheists often make the claim that the burden of proof lies with the believer, not the unbeliever. They would ask whether you can prove that the nonexistence of anything. Rather, it should be up to the person who makes the positive claim to provide proof, not the people trying to prove a negative. 

However, there are many things that are invisible that I might have trouble proving. Let's take electrons,  for example. I've never seen one myself. Many people believe in them simply on the authority of scientists. People also believe in God, even though they can't see God, because they take his existence on the basis of authorities. What's the difference?

Here's the difference, Victor: anyone who disbelieves the authorities can repeat the experiments on their own. Electrons, you say? How about the Millikan oil drop experiment, the Compton effect, the q/m experiment, the Franck-Hertz experiment? How about examining the fine structure of hydrogen? If you're unsure about electrons, try one of these experiments and see what you get. I've done several of them myself, and can vouch for the results.

Of course it's up to the person making the claim to provide the proof. And scientists have done that - and published their results - and repeated those demonstrations again and again for generations of students.

Please tell me, Victor, how do I go about repeating the results of the religious "authorities"? 

You can go to a Chinese physicist, a Russian physicist, a South African physicist, a Brazilian physicist, an Australian physicist, and ask them the charge of the electron, and they will all give you the same answer.

If I go to a Hindu religious authority, a Muslim  religious authority, a Roman Catholic religious authority, a Sikh religious authority, a Buddhist religious authority, and a Shinto religious authority, will they give me the same answer to my religious questions?

Whole industries now rely on our understanding of electrons. Every time you make a phone call, watch TV, or type a blog post, you are effectively performing an experiment that confirms the properties of electrons.  We trust that understanding enough to stake our very lives on it, every time we get on a plane, train, or automobile.

What discoveries or declarations of religious authorities are so reliable that people all over the world stake their lives on them?




"What's the difference," you ask?

One word: EVIDENCE

Against Cause

In an attempt to gain a better understanding of modern views of causation, I've been reading Causation and Explanation, by Stathis Psillos. So far what I've learned is this: modern views of causation are a mess. There are intrinsic and extrinsic views, reductive and non-reductive views, the "marker" view, and the "conserved quantity" view. There is no agreement on whether Hume's regularity view of causation needs to be improved upon, or abandoned and replaced with something quite different.

Over at The Edge, there is the annual Edge Question event. This year's question: What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Go read the responses, they're very interesting and very short.

Among the responses, W. Daniel Hillis suggests we retire the concept of cause and effect. Causes, he suggests, are just parts of a story we tell about the world.

Science is a rich source of powerful explanatory stories. For example, Newton explained how a force causes a mass to accelerate. This gives us a story of how an apple drops from a tree or a planet circles around the Sun. It allows us to decide how hard the rocket engine needs to push to get it to the Moon. Models of causation allow us to design complex machines like factories and computers that have fabulously long chains of causes and effects. They convert inputs into the outputs that we want.

 These stories can be very useful, but they can also be misleading.

It is tempting to believe that our stories of causes and effects are how the world works. Actually, they are just a framework that we use to manipulate the world and to construct explanations for the convenience of our own understanding.

So maybe the reason philosophers can't find a decent characterization of causes is that they are not really a part of the universe. Rather, they are something we invent - maybe in a rather haphazard and inconsistent manner - to help us track important aspects of the world around us. 

Where's Evil?

Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side.

(Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night)