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virus: Is The Universe Acausal, and Does God Exist?
« on: 2004-03-21 04:15:33 » |
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Is The Universe Acausal,
and Does God Exist?
---------------------------------------------
In the Vol. 10, No. 2 review of Taner
Edis’ The Ghost in the Universe Ronald
Ehert points out the author’s deficiency
in employing the consequences of
quantum mechanics against cosmologi.-
cal/ontological arguments for the exis-
tence of God. I would like to retort that
such deficiency is in fact non-existent
and that if formulated properly, the
argument may he invulnerable to the
implications of quantum mechanics. I
will start with a detailed outline of the
theistic argument (which in its present
form I attribute to Jeffrey Tiumak, pro-
fessor of philosophy at Vanderbilt
University):
1. Everything that exists has a cause(s) or
a reason(s).
2. Natural causes are temporally prior to
their effects.
3. So nothing is a natural cause of itself
4. There’s either a finite (F) succession of
natural events or an infinite (I) succes-
sion.
5. If (F), the first natural event would
itself require a cause or a reason.
6 This cause cannot itself be natural by
hypothesis (given 2 and 3).
7. So if nature is finite it has a reason that
is supernatural (5, 6).
8. If (I), the succession taken as a whole
requires a cause or a reason.
9. There can’t be a natural cause external
to the succession (by hypothesis also).
10. No natural event within the succes-
sion explains the whole.
11. The whole of natural succession is
not self-explanatory.
12. E.v nihilo nihil fit.
13. Invoking chance does not help here
(see below).
14. So nature has a supernatural cause.
15. This cause (Deity) exists necessarily,
since supposing otherwise invokes
contradiction.
The reviewer’s thesis that quantum
mechanics invalidates (1) does not hold
water in my opinion. However limited
my understanding of quantum phenom-
ena is, I do not consider a statement
that quantum events “just happen” with-
out a cause/explanation to he entirely
accurate. While negating strict determin-
ism, they do not negate the possibility
of explanation, insofar as a probabilistic
explanation is still considered to be an
explanation. Notice also, that antecedent
events do have a “collapsed” wave
function, i.e. are observable, and thus
can be used as a cause/reason of the
events that follow. An example may be
appropriate: the fact that lottery results
are expressed as probabilities does not
imply that a particular outcome “just
happened” and that no explanation for
it can be offered. If (1) was negated by
quantum mechanics, walking out of the
window of the 25th floor would have
an uncertain outcome (it isn’t even nec-
essary for me to fall down, as opposed
to up). Finally, Ebert’s conclusions that
the “universe is fundamentally acausal”
is rather vague in a sense that it is not
clear what is understood by “fundamen-
tally.” If the latter refers to the origin of
the universe, such statement has no
basis—we simply have no idea what
laws, if any, govern the origin of the
universe. Concepts of “cause,” “reason,”
or “chance” are hardly applicable here.
This does not, of course, mean that
the theistic argument above is valid.
One can attack (5) and (8) on the
basis that they extend ‘reason”
beyond, in Kantian terms, the possible
experience. One can attack (8) on the
basis that it does not follow from (1)
(compositional fallacy).
—Yaroslav Alekseyev, Vanderbilt University
Ebert Replies
Contrary to Alekseyev’s opening state-
ment, I pointed out that Edis was suc-
cessful and not deficient in employing
quantum mechanics against cosmologi-
cal/ontological arguments for the exis-
tence of God. Alekseyev’s arguments
are an attempt to use philosophy to tri-
umph over science, hut no philosophi-
cal argument can negate an experimen-
tal fact. The EPR experiments were
designed to force any hidden variables,
the causes of quantum phenomena, to
manifest. None were found. In the
decades since experiments of this type
have been run, a few imaginary alter-
natives have been proposed, but no
one has come up with any alternative
that is testable, even in principle with
technology we do not yet possess, a
crucial requirement in science. Unless
and until this happens, we have to
conclude that quantum phenomena do
not have causes.
There is a critical difference
between classical ignorance and quan-
tum ignorance. The example of not
knowing how a lottery number was
chosen is a situation of classical igno-
r’ance. If we follow every minuscule
force applied as lottery numbers are
put together and then drawn, we
could calculate the result. We could
indeed do this in principle, but as a
practical matter the information is too
vast and too difficult to acquire. For a
lottery draw the information is there,
but we don’t know what it is. In con-
trast, we could ask what caused a vir-
tual particle pair to come into exis-
tence. The answer is, there isn’t any
cause. It is not that the information is
there but we aren’t clever enough to
acquire it. The information is simply
not there to he acquired.
Although we do not yet have theo-
ries that fully describe singularities and
which could give us a full understand-
ing of the origin of the universe, any
such theory must incorporate the
known and well verified theories of
relativity and quantum mechanics, in
the same way that relativity incorpo-
rates Newtonian mechanics. That
means that any such theory is going to
be fundamentally indeterminate the
way that quantum mechanics is, and
we should not look to it to re-intro-
duce causes hack into the picture.
Finally, my statement that the uni-
verse is fundamentally acausal refers
to the fact that our macroscopic classi-
cal world is an emergent one from the
quantum realm. Determinism only
shows up in the classical world, and
so it too is emergent and not funda-
mental.
—Ron Ebert, UCR Physics Department
ron.ebert@ucr.edu
WWW.SKEPTIC.COM
--
Walter Watts
Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
"Pursue the small utopias... nature, music, friendship, love"
--Kupferberg--
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