Richard Dawkins, famous atheist and now “cultural Christian,” is a funny guy. He’s been known for his witty quips about silly religious people in the past. For instance, he wrote in his book The Selfish Gene, “Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.” And of course, he’s lambasted Christians before for saying that God created everything without being able to explain who created God.
The irony is that Richard Dawkins is a big fan and adherent of Lawrence Krauss, the controversial theoretical physicist who is the chief Apostle of Nothingness, the creator of the Universe. Indeed, the promotion of Krauss’s 2013 book, A Universe From Nothing, summarizes Dawkins’ afterword thusly: “As Richard Dawkins has described it, this could potentially be the most important scientific book with implications for supernaturalism since Darwin.” I find it hilarious that he demands an answer for where God came from—a Being who is by nature beginningless—but is content with “Nothing” being the ultimate answer to why there is something rather than nothing in the natural world of contingency.
In sum, Dawkins demands an answer about beginnings from a definitionally immaterial, beginningless, and transcendant being, but not from a definitionally material, finite, and of-this-contingent-natural-world phenomenon. Um … okay. Note that this does not require Dawkins to agree that God exists. It would just require him to understand basic definitions.
In his recent Netflix special, comedian Pete Holmes pointed out the, shall we conservatively say, massive lack of self-awareness from people like Dawkins and Krauss who make these claims.
But it doesn’t matter if you’re an atheist, you’re a theist, I actually think we’re all kinda in the same boat. Really, I do. Some people think God created the universe. Some people think nothing created the universe. Which is the funniest guess? The “nothing” people make fun of the “God” people. They say, “God doesn’t exist.” I’m like, “Okay, maybe.” But you know what definitely doesn’t exist? Nothing. That’s the defining characteristic of nothing, is that it doesn’t exist. So what are we talking about? Either you think it’s God, something you can’t see, touch, taste, photograph, and science can’t prove, or you think it’s nothing, something you can’t see, touch, taste, photograph, and science can’t prove. But I think we can all agree [that] if your nothing sometimes spontaneously erupts into everything, that’s a pretty [expletive] magical [expletive] nothing, you guys.
In a recent interview, Richard Dawkins discussed the difference between being a cultural Christian and a believing Christian. He is a cultural Christian, he says, because he likes the aesthetics and ethics bestowed upon England by its Christian past. But he is not a believing Christian because you have to believe in absurd, biologically impossible things like the virgin birth.
Does he not see the problem? I find it fascinating that he would choose the virgin birth as his example of ridiculousness since, in essence, he believes in something even more miraculous than the virgin birth: he believes that everything was born from nothing.
Let’s start from the beginning.
The Fine-Tuning “Problem”
Scientific literature typically refers to the observed fine-tuning of the universe as the “fine-tuning problem.” But why is it such a problem?
Fine-tuning arguments are commonly used as “proofs” for the existence of God. These arguments posit that the conditions which allow the universe’s existence, and especially the existence of a life-supporting planet, are so precisely tuned (read: an unfathomably tiny sliver of a miniscule fraction of a hair’s breadth away from nonexistence) that the odds of this life-permitting universe coming about by chance are astronomically unlikely to the point of becoming impossible.
Non-believing scientists find fine-tuning quite loathsome and pesky since it supports arguments for God’s existence and refuses to go away quietly. I remember sitting in an astronomy class in 2011 when my professor told the rapt lecture hall about Lawrence Krauss’ Theory of Quintessence, remarking that “the advantage is that it does not require the ‘fine tuning’ that we required in the original theory [of vacuum energy].” Likewise, theoretical physicist David Lindley wrote that Alan Guth’s theory of the inflationary universe had a major advantage over other theories: it did away with “a lot of fine-tuning of the initial conditions at or soon after the beginning.”
What is the “problem” with fine-tuning? Essentially, it makes religiously-skeptical scientists feel uneasy about what it points to: the need for a Fine-Tuner. Other reasons for the rejection of fine-tuning have been posited, including the “unnaturalness” or “ugliness” of its associated numbers. In her book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, Theoretical physicist and philosopher of science Sabine Hossenfelder has rightly criticized these criteria as aesthetic rather than scientific. Furthermore, she says, they create a systematic bias, which seems to confirm Werner Heisenberg’s caution: “What we observe is not Nature itself but Nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
To avoid the God hypothesis, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel wrote in Forbes that fine-tuning is a problem that has a simple solution: assume that there is a mechanism that explains the universe’s finely-tuned values and wait to find it. Esteemed physicist Leonard Susskind spilled the beans on the “avoid God” agenda when explaining the hope and concern for String Theory. “If, for some unforeseen reason, the landscape turns out to be inconsistent—maybe for mathematical reasons or because it disagrees with observation … [then] as things stand now we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of nature’s fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the [Intelligent Design] critics.” [emphasis mine]
So, there you have it. Someone finally said the quiet part out loud. Science has entered the religious wars.
And they found their own divine messiah: the Multiverse.
Multiverse of the Gaps
Some scientists, such as NASA’s Sten Odenwald, have posited the multiverse theory to get out of the fine-tuning problem, and the whole universe seems to have begun in time with a “Big Bang” issue. By suggesting that we are merely one of a possibly infinite number of universes, then our universe is no longer “special” but merely a statistical likelihood, no matter how rare or unique it may seem. In other words, even if a life-permitting universe is only a one in a billion probability (in fact, it would be much lower odds than that), then given that there are an infinite number of universes, then at least one life-permitting universe must surely exist by now. Right?
There are fatal problems with this approach. On the statistical level, something being “one in a billion” is not like how winning the lottery is “one in a billion” and yet people do win. Proponents of the multiverse have stated this, but they are incorrect. First, that assumes a benevolent multiverse pump that keeps going until it gets one that will create and support life. Second, it is not like the odds increase when more universes exist. For example, it’s not like saying “find the Ace of Diamonds” from a 52-card deck and starting with 1/52 chances, then getting better chances with each wrong card that is eliminated (1/51, 1/50 … 1/24, 1/23, etc.). Rather, it would be like trying to pick the Ace of Diamonds if there was only one in a trillion card deck where the Ace of Diamonds has been buried underground, people stronger than you are physically restraining you from getting close to where the Ace of Diamonds is located, and each time you pull a wrong card it is replaced with another wrong card and your odds never improve.
But the larger problem is that multiverse theory does not appear to be science at all. Rather, it is metaphysics.
Plugging the Gaps
“If it’s true that the laws of physics are so carefully adjusted as to make the universe and life within it possible,” writes Lindley, “and if there’s only one universe made by those laws, then we are right to be suspicious” about the origin of the universe. “Almost inevitably we seem to be driven to the multiverse hypothesis,” he declares.
But why?
Former academic chemist Jim Baggott, highlighting a common train of thought exemplified in Leonard Susskind’s The Cosmic Landscape, explains: “We’re encouraged to accept the anthropic multiverse because this is the best solution to the fine-tuning problem. Reject it and we’re stuck with intelligent design as the only alternative explanation for the universe we inhabit.”
So, you don’t have to take it from a Christian Apologist that multiverse theory simply was designed to provide an alternative to the uncomfortable conclusions of Intelligent Design proponents. You can hear someone from that community admit as much. Does anyone else get the impression that sometimes certain scientists are less concerned with observing the data and more concerned with, in the spirit of OJ Simpson’s lawyers, simply providing alternative theories to create “reasonable doubt” about a situation that is quite clear to all rational people?
Unfalsifiable
Again, you don’t have to take my word for it. Other scientists have grown increasingly concerned with an ideologically-driven scientific enterprise that is even beginning to throw off the shackles of scientific sobriety that have guided it for so long.
“Let’s just check to see if we’ve understood this correctly,” writes Baggott.
We live in a multiverse ‘surrounded’ by parallel universes that by definition we cannot experience directly. We can never verify the existence of these universes, and must look instead for evidence that betrays their existence indirectly in the physics of our own universe.
Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin agrees. He professes that these “untestable scenarios” concerning “unobservable multiple universes or extra dimensions” are symptoms of a larger problem which he terms a “cosmological fallacy.” This is a type of fallacy that makes “the mistake of taking a scientific methodology … outside of the domain where it can make contact with experiment and observations.” The lack of recent advancements in the more speculative fields of physics is precisely because of this fallacy.
Lindley is likewise concerned about a scientific theory—if indeed one can call it such—that can never be falsified. Scientists were, since the 1950s, greatly influenced by philosopher of science Karl Popper, who taught that “the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.” This criterion essentially protects the scientific process from becoming yet another speculative metaphysical approach to reality.
More than Unfalsifiable
The unfalsifiability of multiverse theory is one of the reasons some scientists object to it being called a scientific theory at all, but it is not the only one. Paul Steinhardt, one of the founders of inflationary cosmology, calls multiverse theory the “accidental universe theory” and states that it is “scientifically meaningless because it explains nothing and predicts nothing.”
Not all scientists have such an issue with the unfalsifiability of the multiverse, however. In fact, some like theoretical physicist Sean Carroll view this as a rather simplistic and naive objection since, he believes, certain frontiers of the natural world will require more creative thinking to understand. Indeed, as fellow theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser points out, “there are different ways to infer that something exists, even if we cannot see or touch it,” which we readily admit in the cases of Black Holes, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy. And any theist would find it hard to deny Gleiser’s claim.
But according to Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit, the problem is not simply the testability of multiverse theory. The problem is that it is based on the desire to prove an already-failed hypothesis (String Theory). And so, it is bad science. He explains,
No one thinks the subtle ‘demarcation problem’ of deciding what is science and what isn’t can simply be dealt with by invoking falsifiability. Carroll’s critique of naive ideas about falsifiability should be seen in context: He’s trying to justify multiverse research programs whose models fail naive criteria of direct testability (since you can’t see other universes). This is however a strawman argument. The problem with such research programs isn’t that of direct testability, but that there is no indirect evidence for them, nor any plausibly way of getting any.
For the record, Woit does not fault them for speculating. All science tends to start with measures of standing on the shoulders of giants and boldly going where no human has gone before. Most good ideas begin, in Woit’s characteristic phrase, “not even wrong.” But, as Woit explained to Scientific American’s John Horgan,
The problem with such things as string-theory multiverse theories is that ‘the multiverse did it’ is not just untestable, but an excuse for failure. Instead of opening up scientific progress in a new direction, such theories are designed to shut down scientific progress by justifying a failed research program.
Faith in the Multiverse
“The multiverse theorists know that they are on weak ground regarding the Testability Principle,” Baggott writes. “Rather than admit that their theories are not science, they argue instead that the rules of science must be adapted to accommodate this kind of metaphysical speculation.”
Indeed, as Woit says concerning the program of Carroll and similar scientists, “They appear to be making empty claims and engaging in pseudo-science, with ‘the multiverse did it’ no more of a testable explanation than ‘the Jolly Green Giant did it.’”
Lindley here laments the trajectory some physicists have taken. “When physicists hoped to find a single theory that would explain everything, they at least had a grand ambition, if admittedly an implausible one. But now,” he admits, “the multiverse hypothesis serves as a cosmic excuse of last resort” founded on mathematical elegance rather than any empirical criteria.
The argument for multiverse theory can be summarized thusly: The Multiverse did it, I believe it, that settles it!
The Cult of Multiverse
Lee Smolin is correct: the “cosmological fallacy” (see above) is indeed a corruptive seed in science, which we have now seen. Like a snake seeking to confuse children in a garden, this fallacy seeks to transform scientists from observers of nature into definers of reality. We see this most readily in the rise of multiverse theory.
“The notion of a multiverse is surprisingly close to that of a religious belief,” writes Marcelo Gleiser. But, he says with the characteristic optimism of an apologist, “This is not necessarily a bad thing. Different approaches can expand the range of explanatory power in cutting-edge physics.”
Fair enough. And far be it from me to deny anyone religious faith. Yet, as other scientists here have likewise questioned, is that really science?
David Lindley gives an emphatic no. He doesn’t go so far as to call it religion, but declares instead that “it is better thought of not as science but as philosophy.” He continues,
It’s philosophy of a very modern style, in that it demands deeply specialized knowledge of mathematics, but it’s also philosophy in a very ancient sense, because it presupposes that introspection, driven by logical argument, will suffice to reveal in full the workings of the natural world.
Nothingness Almighty
There is another “problem” of scientific discovery co-morbid with fine-tuning that has led to blind faith in multiverse theory, and that is the Big Bang. That the universe may have had a beginning is another one of those uncomfortable conclusions of science for the religiously-avoidant among them.
Many reputable scientists today and their popular apologists argue that before the beginning of the universe, there was Nothing. And Nothing created everything. Now this “Nothing” is not the absence of everything, but something like a vacuum of energy where only the fundamental laws of nature existed. This, of course, is not Nothing.
This is the tact that Lawrence Krauss takes, and it has been a controversial one. In a public dialogue on “The Existence of Nothing” hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson and featuring other scientists and science philosophers, Krauss was taken to task. Krauss believes the universe exists here because the laws of physics demand it. Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott calls this a magic trick, an explanation without explanatory power. It is merely a circular tautology: “Why are we here? Because we are.”
The most biting remarks, however, came from philosopher Jim Holt. Holt, contra Krauss, believes that physical laws are “effective descriptions of what’s out there” but not pre-existing entities that cause anything to happen. In fact, Holt basically accuses Krauss of being a Christian of some sort:
You’re still in thrall to Christian metaphysics. You see the quantum field theory as divine commands. It used to be that nothing plus God equals universe. You replaced God with the laws of nature. You are insufficiently enlightened.
Oof.
Holt is not alone in his criticism of Krauss’s theory. As medical physicist Scott Symington and Quantum Physicist Michael Butler both explained to Abdu Murray on his All Rise podcast, the “nothing” isn’t “nothing,” but is something, albeit something non-physical perhaps. The “nothing,” Butler remarked, is a field, with values, with properties, it’s certainly “not this sort of creation ex nihilo” idea.
By appealing to this form of nothingness, Krauss merely kicks the can down the road. As Columbia University philosopher of science David Albert asked of Krauss in a The New York Times review of Krauss’s book on the subject, “Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from?” Quantum field theories have no answers, Albert reminds us. South African mathematician George FR Ellis was equally critical, telling John Horgan,
[Krauss] is presenting untested speculative theories of how things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities, including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did. And he gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can’t. Thus what he is presenting is not tested science. It’s a philosophical speculation, which he apparently believes is so compelling he does not have to give any specification of evidence that would confirm it is true.
Krauss’s response is typically to dismiss. Albert is dismissed as a mere “philosopher,” even though he has a PhD in theoretical physics from Rockefeller University. Ellis, Krauss relayed to Horgan, used to be a real physicist, but is now a “theologian.” Yet Ellis, who is a Quaker, was and still is an accomplished physicist, even coauthoring a book with Stephen Hawking in 1973.
Krauss really shouldn’t be so quick to disqualify scientists with a Christian faith.
Before the cosmological evidence was in, many scientists had assumed that the universe was eternal and had no beginning. In fact, Cosmologist Fred Hoyle—who coined the term “Big Bang” as an insult to the theory—rejected the Big Bang because it sounded too much like Creationism. That it was discovered by a Catholic priest and scientist named Georges Lemaître probably did not help.
Christians had for centuries proclaimed a universe with a beginning because their Bible had rather uniquely described such an ex nihilo creation. And though they found Plato helpful, here they rejected the Platonic notion of an eternal universe. But even before that, in the Ancient Near Eastern context of the early Israelites, in a cultural landscape where the “gods” were created from pre-existing matter being brought into order, the Hebrew notion of a God who just is and created everything by his word without pre-existing matter was a true one-of-one.
The Heart of the Matter
Jim Holt is right. When Krauss and others like him posit a beginningless beginning like they do, they are merely proposing an alternative theological vision of the world. And it starts, just as the Christian New Testament does, with a miraculous virgin birth. And these scientists are not wrong to seek these answers. They are human, and doing what humans do, what they should do: seek and discover the light. And they are unavoidably circling the Christian story. But they do so with self-applied blindfolds.
Read More
The Religion of Scientism, Part 2: Anthropology Myths
The Religion of Scientism, Part 3: A Faith in Peril
