Here is a conversation between a theist, Philosopher A, and an atheist, Philosopher B. It’s relatively short given the nature of the subject, but they don’t want to take up too much of their time, let alone your time.
Philosopher A: “What’s that you say? You don’t buy into that ‘deity stuff,’ as you call it, that there is a god who is a capital G God? I’m guessing that means you are either an atheist or an agnostic, or maybe a better description is that you are an apatheist or apathist.
“You can tell me that I’m wrong and explain your more complex, dare I say, belief system. But I’ll anticipate that with regard to a capital G God, you will probably respond with two words: Myth and legend. Maybe you’ll say that God is the product of stories that fill in the blanks of human inadequacies or that assuage fear in the dying. I guess we’re all dying, right? You, too, but I assume you need no solace, no assuaging. Belief in God with a capital G does, I’ll admit, have a component of solace. I mean after birth, everyone has a finite life, and then everyone enters into a decline toward the great unsolved mystery, a bigger mystery than whether or not the universe stops at tiny quarks or even smaller hypothesized strings in the micro direction or at the boundaries of Infinity in the other, macro direction.”
Philosopher B: “Here we go again. You theists have a need to proselytize. If capital G God were so evident, why would you need to discuss the subject to prove that It—sorry, He or She—exists?”
Philosopher A: “Maybe for the same reason that atheists, agnostics, and apatheists need to argue against His—sorry, also, but for expediency, I’m going to use the masculine—as I was saying, against His existence. The irony, by the way, is that even so-called apatheists might take up the argument in contradiction to their proclaimed apathy. Nothing says ‘I care’ more than taking up a discussion about what one supposedly cares little.”
Philosopher B: “It’s just that the great number of vocal believers won’t stop proselytizng. We argue to get them off our backs. You believers need to get a life.”
Philosopher A: “I see you’re smirking. I hear your unspoken ‘Here we go again.’ I hear you. ‘No proof,’ you’re thinking, "but he’ll ramble on as usual." I know the argument that there’s no way to demonstrate in a lab the existence of God. Even if there were a way, the human brain couldn’t fully comprehend the associated eternity and infinity, has no way to determine omniscience and omnipresence, and has no way to determine to the satisfaction of an unbeliever the associated reward-and-punishment system associated with a personal God. We always run up against our limitations. We all seem to be descendants of Descartes who argued that only an Infinite Being could have put the thought of Himself into the finite mind. But we also have big imaginations, maybe not ‘big,’ I should say, ‘encompassing minds,’ rather. We try to visualize the un-visualizable, and the result you complain about is the anthropomorphic forms we imagine, like a patriarch or a matriarch. It doesn’t matter which, really, it’s always some human form or a symmetrical form that grates on your brain’s corrugated or crenulated surface. I understand that anthropomorphism is a turnoff for you. And even if theists try to describe an amorphous Deity, what they envision necessarily has boundaries, has edges because of their difficulty in describing or even imagining the edgeless. We can’t draw an edgeless infinity in our minds. Or, maybe you object because you see such cloud deities as analogs of fields of some kind, maybe like pervasive gravity or electromagnetism.”
Philosopher B: “Yes, something like the Force in Star Wars, which I find akin to animism, thank you George Lucas. But not a conscious Force. Who knows what that Star Wars Force is supposed to be, maybe not even Lucas himself? Did he ever define it as conscious?”
Philosopher A: “So, you see a problem in our need to visualize, don’t you? That’s the reason for the smirk on your face. No matter what we do argue, we always get locked into our need for analogs, for matter and life as we know it. We can’t divorce ourselves from the physical universe, from this place we call home to our collective existence.”
Philosopher B: “Even if your God were a pervasive presence throughout the universe, I would still have difficulty visualizing or understanding a personal God, one with whom humans could not only identify but also touch in some refined and definable human way. Take electromagnetism as a field model for God. I can run the elementary school experiment with a bar magnet, a sheet of paper, and some sprinkled iron filings to show the field, but only insofar as the field reveals itself in the shape of the limited filings I sprinkle on the paper over the magnet. Ever-weaker on its edges and impossible to show with an infinite number of tiny subatomic iron particles or even with quarks, the field we capture by its effects is only a rough or a very coarse representation; and it’s only in two dimensions. If I want three-dimensional imagery, I need to use computer graphics or holograms, or a sculpture, all of which have their own coarseness or rough resolution. Ordinary words and images fail us, thus our reliance on mathematical descriptions. So, if God were pervasive and omnipresent like a field, like an unobserved electron, I would be up against my need to collapse the field to some point or to some visualizable and bounded region by observing. As I see the problem, your capital G God is the cat in Schrödinger’s box. We look, we discover, but only after looking and only in the box. But my own analogy fails; it limps as all analogies do. You can say we know the electron or the cat by observing, but Schrödinger’s cat lives or dies in the presence of a single radioactive source, an identifiable cause for its continued life or imminent death. In your belief, you see a result, such as a person cured of cancer or the fall of the Soviet Union after years of devout praying by millions of imprisoned religious people, that prayer culminating in a Pope, a President, and a Premier that altered thinking. You can ascribe the cancer cure or the political cure to the actions of God, justifying the belief by the effect, arguing backwards, so to speak. If God fills all the universe, it’s only when He or She or It is expressed in our observing that He or She or It takes a form, usually an anthropomorphic one, and unfortunately, so the box is only a hypothetical one supported by faith in a circular argument. I assume the existence of the ‘cat’ before I look in the box. Then I see a live or dead cat and draw my conclusion.
“You know that common expression of Christianity, that ‘we are made in God’s image’? I suppose the atheist in me, my friend, could argue the other way ‘round, that theists make God in their image. And even if you or some other theist goes full science fiction fantasy, you still ascribe to God the familiar human properties or characteristics like emotions, for example, as in ‘an angry God’ or ‘a merciful God, and you ascribe human ways of thinking, like reasoning. You will probably say that theists still come up with a visualizable form of some kind, something to see that mimics what you already know.
“You religious people are all the same, doesn’t matter the religion, not that I’m thinking religion is the ‘opiate of the people’ ala Marx. No, I think you are all guilty of wishful thinking. I realize that you rely on your argument from design and on your ‘universe fine-tuned for life.’ But isn’t that just a tautology? Isn’t that argument as circular as Descartes’ arguing that finite beings couldn’t think of an infinite God without that Deity’s putting the thought in their heads? Isn’t the argument that the universe is fine-tuned for life circular because conscious humans have determined that they wouldn’t be here if it weren’t? What if the universe is eternal? What if this universe began from a former universe? The Big Bang stuff. Everything, according to Roger Penrose and others began in a state of thermal equilibrium, and then it followed a black-body curve of temperature toward entropy. When the last black hole evaporates, ala Hawking radiation, as it must according to the most recent hypotheses, we get back to thermal equilibrium and a chance restart of the next universe.”
Philosopher B: “About that. Don’t you see a similar circularity in the physicists’ views. So, as I understand their position, the universe started from something that was in thermal equilibrium and unfolded according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and that since heat moves from hot things to cold things, when the universe cools off below its current 2.7 Kelvins toward absolute zero, then the remaining hot black holes will give off the remaining heat into the surrounding ‘nothingness.’ They will evaporate as Hawking argues. This universe will die. But what guarantees that such widespread thermal equilibrium in a universe that has expanded for more than a 100 trillion years will produce a new ‘singularity’ like the one that the Big Bang represents. So, if thermal energy is conserved throughout the expanded universe, how does it bring itself to a crushed subatomic size? How does it organize itself from dissipation and chaos? How does it concentrate its energy for a new Big Bang? Oh! Wait! You’ll probably say that gravity will play some role even though you cannot really explain the source, that is, the ultimate source of gravity. Is Gravity with a capital G your physical God? But then you have that other problem.”
Philosopher B: “What other problem? The math works out pretty well.”
Philosopher A: “The contradiction problem.”
Philosopher B: “What contradiction?”
Philosopher A: “Okay. Let’s say Roger Penrose is correct. Now, as he and other physicists admit and as you yourself have said, time is dependent on matter. You say it’s dependent on place, that if there were no place there’d be no time, that before the Big Bang or before Creation, there was no time, and thus, no ‘before.’ Hawking likens it to the South Pole from which the rest of the world can be said to exist in an expansion toward the Equator. The concept of ‘below the South Pole’ is similar to ‘before the Big Bang.’ But back to that contradiction. Let’s say the universe lasts 10 to the 100 power years or until the largest black holes evaporate. I don’t even know what to call that number; I don’t think it’s a Googleplex. One followed by at the very least some 64 zeroes for smaller black holes and by 100 zeroes for the really big ones, still occurs in time. In other words, if this universe is supposed to evaporate to thermal equilibrium in a supergajillion number of years, it still does so in time. And if this universe is to start another universe that would mean that there would be a ‘before.’ There would be a before, a time before the next universe began. There’s the contradiction as I see it regardless of the complex math and the great minds that state otherwise.”
Philosopher B: “Oh! I hadn’t thought of that. I’m sure there’s a way around that. I’ll have to consult with the Roger Penroses of the world. Those guys have the numbers.
“I still prefer thinking that your other argument about the universe’s being fine-tuned for life is a faulty argument. I prefer the explanation that after randomly fiddling around with the evolution of life, the universe stumbled on awareness of itself. Since we’re made of the stuff of the universe, then we are the universe conscious of itself. But I think there was no consciousness until we came along and thus no conscious deity to make it. I don’t believe the universe has been around consciously preparing for you, me, and all conscious beings. I don’t find that argument convincing. So, what you’re arguing, well, not you, but most of God’s defenders is that the universe has a plan, and the plan is you. A bit arrogant, don’t you think?
“But then, I guess that’s appropriate. Wasn’t the first sin the root of all sin? You know your Adam and Eve, the couple who wanted to be like God. That’s pride, right? Eating fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was an attempt to be like God. And those Seven Deadly Sins, aren’t six of them just extensions in some way of the root sin of Pride?”
Philosopher A: “Let’s not confuse any particular religion’s belief system with the larger question about a universe without God. How did the universe start? That’s the question that gets to the heart of a belief in God.”
“Philosopher B: “You’re ignoring what the physicists say about Dark Energy and virtual particles. The vacuum is filled with virtual particles in a constant coming and going. The math supports the coming and going of virtual particles, so Nothing is the creator of Something. That empty space isn’t empty is the argument; you don’t need a Creator because the universe self-creates.”
Philosopher A: “Got a question for you about that physics stuff, Dark Energy, and empty space that isn’t empty. What are ‘virtual particles’? I want to know if they are as real as the matter we know or see evidence of in the Large Hadron Collider? Are they a soup of Higgs bosons or some other particle or field? So, what you’re saying is that the universe created itself or that the universe is eternal or that the universe is a brane among many branes, a universe in multiverse with my doppelganger out there somewhere in a different dimension or in a bubble universe that exists in the grand Nothing, even though according to your virtual particles, Nothing can really be Nothing. It’s always producing something. Nothing is nothing because everything is Something for a human brain, even the brain of a physicist. Modern physicists are so fond of the Michelson-Morley experiment that demonstrated the absence of the Aether, but they replace the ubiquitous Aether with a field of virtual particles that they cannot show in any way other than through math. Their vacuum filled with virtual particles coming into and going out of existence is a compensation. They speak of Nothing, but simultaneously fill it with something. And how do these virtual particles reconcile with a universe in perfect equilibrium? I think the physicists sometimes feign science when they are at heart metaphysicists. They struggle like Martin Heidegger looking to explain Being and No-thingness. So, when you fault a devout believer for accepting the presence of God in the universe and for ascribing a role of Creator to God, please take a look in the quantum mirror where all these virtual particles fill the vacuum field and pop into and out of existence.”
Philosopher B: “Look, I’ll admit that there are some puzzles to solve about the micro and macro worlds. Sure, I do have some reservations about virtual particles and about Nothing creating Something. But if I reject a God, I really don’t have much of a choice other than replacing all the religious explanations with mathematically sound ones and a finite universe with an eternal one, even though I know that with Dark Energy in the picture, the universe that we know will last a finite number of years counted, of course, in supergajillions of years.”
Philosopher A: “Eternal? The idea makes me come back to asking how that’s possible if it had a beginning? Oh! You’re thinking of eternal as in ‘if I start counting today, I’ll never run out of numbers.’ But isn’t eternal defined by no end points? Doesn’t the number line of eternal run in both directions forever? In fact, isn’t a number line a faulty analogy for either eternity or infinity. Or, maybe your eternal and also infinite universe is eternal or infinite the way the fractions between any two integers are infinite? You know, one half, one quarter, one eighth, one sixteenth, one umpteen gajillionth, ad infinitum. Is that what you envision for those virtual particles in the emptiness between That Which Is, between the bits matter or the pervasive fields that we can identify? I find your atheism filled with as much belief as any religion, with as much metaphor, and with as much need for visualizability.”
Philosopher B: “See, that argument about God always goes off on tangent. It’s always about a distraction. Can’t define God so you show me something I can’t fully explain or define. Can’t point to God, so you ask me to point to a virtual particle or a pervasive field that’s imaginable. Remember, those fields are describable in the language of mathematics. We have known fields since Maxwell wrote his equations.”
Philosopher A: “Come on; admit it; what you hold as a Creative Force, or Dark Energy, or the Vacuum as Creator, is just your way of providing a metaphor you accept. You want to fault me for saying there is a God, but you see nothing amiss in your universe’s having a beginning or in being created by a vacuum. You see nothing wrong in saying the universe has a far-off end. Sure, your math says it, but what if your equations are based on erroneous thinking or a math incapable of capturing a supposed reality like an infinitely stretched universe in thermal equilibrium somehow becoming a singularity to start a new universe? Your universe isn’t eternal, as I understand the term. So, are we dealing with semantics? And do you believe you have with mathematics eliminated all the errors that words engender?
“Sure, you predict the universe’s demise untold trillions of years hence, but you can run the numbers to 100 trillion, to a supergajillion and you still aren’t speaking in the language of infinity. The universe that ends even hundreds of trillions or supergajillions of years from now still ends. And if it is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, how does it renew itself? Does it ultimately become in the Big Rip so thin that it is totally virtual? When the argument was that the universe would end hot in a ‘Big Crunch’ because gravity would pull it together, you had some validity in a universe creating and recreating itself, but now? Now you have a universe ending not with a bang but a whimper. And even that is contradictory. If the vacuum, the Nothing, keeps producing virtual particles, then there is, in fact, no Nothing. Aren’t the physicists all over the map on this? Aren’t there contradictions? If you say the universe’s vacuum is in itself a ‘field’ of some kind that like waves in the ocean spit droplets from their crests and those droplets are models of the virtual particles that fall back into the Nothing-Field the way the droplets fall back and disappear into the sea, if that is what you are saying, are you not just giving me a universe that contains no vacuum?
“Your arguments remind me of two poems, one by T. S. Eliot and another by Robert Frost. Eliot wrote in ‘The Hollow Men,’ that ‘This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.” In ‘Fire and Ice’ Frost wrote ‘Some say the world will end in fire/Some say in ice.’ I suppose that the Big Rip ending of your accelerating universe will end in the whimper of thermal equilibrium or ‘in ice.’ In such a fading universe where everything is evened out by The Second Law, I see both whimper and ice, neither of which is hot enough to engender a new Big Bang.”
Philosopher B: “Nevertheless, you have no proof for a God. Just saying that my explanation lacks completeness isn’t a proof that God exists.”
Philosopher A: “Maybe not. And don’t get me wrong. I do understand the problems associated with a belief in God, especially a personal God, one that gets involved in human affairs. I know that tornadoes don’t hit some houses in the neighborhood because they are residences of the God-fearing. I know bad things happen to good people. I know evil is a persistent plague on humanity. I realize that the universe does have randomness and chaos. I know I cannot explain that evil occurs or why God would let bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. I can’t explain suffering or death. I can’t explain how a good God can allow dictators to rise and kill. But I can’t get past that fine-tuned universe in which I live.
“I keep going back to John Leslie’s arguments about fine-tuning the universe.* Take his take on gravity’s strength, for example. Leslie writes with regard to gravity that ‘it is roughly 10^39 times weaker than electromagnetism. Had it been only 10^33 times weaker, stars would be a billions times less massive and would burn a million times faster.’ (5) Ditto effect, he argues for the mass difference between protons and neutrons. ‘If the …mass difference—about one part in a thousand—had not been almost exactly twice the electron’ls mass then all neutrons would have decayed into protons or else all protoons would have changed irreversibly into neutrons.’ (5) And do you know what the effect of that would be?
Philosopher B: “No, tell me.”
Philosopher A: “Forget the periodic table. It wouldn’t exist. And that means all our chemistry and biology wouldn’t exist. Now think about that. Leslie also points out that force strengths of the so-called Four Fundamental Forces are also delicately balanced across a wide range. The nuclear strong force is (roughly) a hundred times stronger than electromagnetism, which is in turn ten thousand times stronger than the nuclear weak force, which is itself some ten thousand billion billion billion times stonger than gravity. So, we can well be impressed by any apparent need for a force to be “just right” even to within a factor of ten, let alone to which on part in a hundred or in 10^100—especially when nobody is sure why the strongest force tugs any more powerfully than the weakest.’”
“I can note that if there was a single act of creation, then all forms we now see exist simply reveal the unfolding of existence. I go back to my old standby, that creating in the image means simply bearing the stamp of existence. If you and your nonbelieving friends would consider this, you might reconsider your objection to a belief in God with a capital G.
Philosopher B: “Let me think about it. But you still haven’t covered that stuff about good and evil. Was the universe fine-tuned for evil, also?”
Philosopher A: “Let’s meet for coffee or beer sometime to discuss that.”
*Leslie, John. Universes. London. Routledge. 1989.
Philosopher A: “What’s that you say? You don’t buy into that ‘deity stuff,’ as you call it, that there is a god who is a capital G God? I’m guessing that means you are either an atheist or an agnostic, or maybe a better description is that you are an apatheist or apathist.
“You can tell me that I’m wrong and explain your more complex, dare I say, belief system. But I’ll anticipate that with regard to a capital G God, you will probably respond with two words: Myth and legend. Maybe you’ll say that God is the product of stories that fill in the blanks of human inadequacies or that assuage fear in the dying. I guess we’re all dying, right? You, too, but I assume you need no solace, no assuaging. Belief in God with a capital G does, I’ll admit, have a component of solace. I mean after birth, everyone has a finite life, and then everyone enters into a decline toward the great unsolved mystery, a bigger mystery than whether or not the universe stops at tiny quarks or even smaller hypothesized strings in the micro direction or at the boundaries of Infinity in the other, macro direction.”
Philosopher B: “Here we go again. You theists have a need to proselytize. If capital G God were so evident, why would you need to discuss the subject to prove that It—sorry, He or She—exists?”
Philosopher A: “Maybe for the same reason that atheists, agnostics, and apatheists need to argue against His—sorry, also, but for expediency, I’m going to use the masculine—as I was saying, against His existence. The irony, by the way, is that even so-called apatheists might take up the argument in contradiction to their proclaimed apathy. Nothing says ‘I care’ more than taking up a discussion about what one supposedly cares little.”
Philosopher B: “It’s just that the great number of vocal believers won’t stop proselytizng. We argue to get them off our backs. You believers need to get a life.”
Philosopher A: “I see you’re smirking. I hear your unspoken ‘Here we go again.’ I hear you. ‘No proof,’ you’re thinking, "but he’ll ramble on as usual." I know the argument that there’s no way to demonstrate in a lab the existence of God. Even if there were a way, the human brain couldn’t fully comprehend the associated eternity and infinity, has no way to determine omniscience and omnipresence, and has no way to determine to the satisfaction of an unbeliever the associated reward-and-punishment system associated with a personal God. We always run up against our limitations. We all seem to be descendants of Descartes who argued that only an Infinite Being could have put the thought of Himself into the finite mind. But we also have big imaginations, maybe not ‘big,’ I should say, ‘encompassing minds,’ rather. We try to visualize the un-visualizable, and the result you complain about is the anthropomorphic forms we imagine, like a patriarch or a matriarch. It doesn’t matter which, really, it’s always some human form or a symmetrical form that grates on your brain’s corrugated or crenulated surface. I understand that anthropomorphism is a turnoff for you. And even if theists try to describe an amorphous Deity, what they envision necessarily has boundaries, has edges because of their difficulty in describing or even imagining the edgeless. We can’t draw an edgeless infinity in our minds. Or, maybe you object because you see such cloud deities as analogs of fields of some kind, maybe like pervasive gravity or electromagnetism.”
Philosopher B: “Yes, something like the Force in Star Wars, which I find akin to animism, thank you George Lucas. But not a conscious Force. Who knows what that Star Wars Force is supposed to be, maybe not even Lucas himself? Did he ever define it as conscious?”
Philosopher A: “So, you see a problem in our need to visualize, don’t you? That’s the reason for the smirk on your face. No matter what we do argue, we always get locked into our need for analogs, for matter and life as we know it. We can’t divorce ourselves from the physical universe, from this place we call home to our collective existence.”
Philosopher B: “Even if your God were a pervasive presence throughout the universe, I would still have difficulty visualizing or understanding a personal God, one with whom humans could not only identify but also touch in some refined and definable human way. Take electromagnetism as a field model for God. I can run the elementary school experiment with a bar magnet, a sheet of paper, and some sprinkled iron filings to show the field, but only insofar as the field reveals itself in the shape of the limited filings I sprinkle on the paper over the magnet. Ever-weaker on its edges and impossible to show with an infinite number of tiny subatomic iron particles or even with quarks, the field we capture by its effects is only a rough or a very coarse representation; and it’s only in two dimensions. If I want three-dimensional imagery, I need to use computer graphics or holograms, or a sculpture, all of which have their own coarseness or rough resolution. Ordinary words and images fail us, thus our reliance on mathematical descriptions. So, if God were pervasive and omnipresent like a field, like an unobserved electron, I would be up against my need to collapse the field to some point or to some visualizable and bounded region by observing. As I see the problem, your capital G God is the cat in Schrödinger’s box. We look, we discover, but only after looking and only in the box. But my own analogy fails; it limps as all analogies do. You can say we know the electron or the cat by observing, but Schrödinger’s cat lives or dies in the presence of a single radioactive source, an identifiable cause for its continued life or imminent death. In your belief, you see a result, such as a person cured of cancer or the fall of the Soviet Union after years of devout praying by millions of imprisoned religious people, that prayer culminating in a Pope, a President, and a Premier that altered thinking. You can ascribe the cancer cure or the political cure to the actions of God, justifying the belief by the effect, arguing backwards, so to speak. If God fills all the universe, it’s only when He or She or It is expressed in our observing that He or She or It takes a form, usually an anthropomorphic one, and unfortunately, so the box is only a hypothetical one supported by faith in a circular argument. I assume the existence of the ‘cat’ before I look in the box. Then I see a live or dead cat and draw my conclusion.
“You know that common expression of Christianity, that ‘we are made in God’s image’? I suppose the atheist in me, my friend, could argue the other way ‘round, that theists make God in their image. And even if you or some other theist goes full science fiction fantasy, you still ascribe to God the familiar human properties or characteristics like emotions, for example, as in ‘an angry God’ or ‘a merciful God, and you ascribe human ways of thinking, like reasoning. You will probably say that theists still come up with a visualizable form of some kind, something to see that mimics what you already know.
“You religious people are all the same, doesn’t matter the religion, not that I’m thinking religion is the ‘opiate of the people’ ala Marx. No, I think you are all guilty of wishful thinking. I realize that you rely on your argument from design and on your ‘universe fine-tuned for life.’ But isn’t that just a tautology? Isn’t that argument as circular as Descartes’ arguing that finite beings couldn’t think of an infinite God without that Deity’s putting the thought in their heads? Isn’t the argument that the universe is fine-tuned for life circular because conscious humans have determined that they wouldn’t be here if it weren’t? What if the universe is eternal? What if this universe began from a former universe? The Big Bang stuff. Everything, according to Roger Penrose and others began in a state of thermal equilibrium, and then it followed a black-body curve of temperature toward entropy. When the last black hole evaporates, ala Hawking radiation, as it must according to the most recent hypotheses, we get back to thermal equilibrium and a chance restart of the next universe.”
Philosopher B: “About that. Don’t you see a similar circularity in the physicists’ views. So, as I understand their position, the universe started from something that was in thermal equilibrium and unfolded according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and that since heat moves from hot things to cold things, when the universe cools off below its current 2.7 Kelvins toward absolute zero, then the remaining hot black holes will give off the remaining heat into the surrounding ‘nothingness.’ They will evaporate as Hawking argues. This universe will die. But what guarantees that such widespread thermal equilibrium in a universe that has expanded for more than a 100 trillion years will produce a new ‘singularity’ like the one that the Big Bang represents. So, if thermal energy is conserved throughout the expanded universe, how does it bring itself to a crushed subatomic size? How does it organize itself from dissipation and chaos? How does it concentrate its energy for a new Big Bang? Oh! Wait! You’ll probably say that gravity will play some role even though you cannot really explain the source, that is, the ultimate source of gravity. Is Gravity with a capital G your physical God? But then you have that other problem.”
Philosopher B: “What other problem? The math works out pretty well.”
Philosopher A: “The contradiction problem.”
Philosopher B: “What contradiction?”
Philosopher A: “Okay. Let’s say Roger Penrose is correct. Now, as he and other physicists admit and as you yourself have said, time is dependent on matter. You say it’s dependent on place, that if there were no place there’d be no time, that before the Big Bang or before Creation, there was no time, and thus, no ‘before.’ Hawking likens it to the South Pole from which the rest of the world can be said to exist in an expansion toward the Equator. The concept of ‘below the South Pole’ is similar to ‘before the Big Bang.’ But back to that contradiction. Let’s say the universe lasts 10 to the 100 power years or until the largest black holes evaporate. I don’t even know what to call that number; I don’t think it’s a Googleplex. One followed by at the very least some 64 zeroes for smaller black holes and by 100 zeroes for the really big ones, still occurs in time. In other words, if this universe is supposed to evaporate to thermal equilibrium in a supergajillion number of years, it still does so in time. And if this universe is to start another universe that would mean that there would be a ‘before.’ There would be a before, a time before the next universe began. There’s the contradiction as I see it regardless of the complex math and the great minds that state otherwise.”
Philosopher B: “Oh! I hadn’t thought of that. I’m sure there’s a way around that. I’ll have to consult with the Roger Penroses of the world. Those guys have the numbers.
“I still prefer thinking that your other argument about the universe’s being fine-tuned for life is a faulty argument. I prefer the explanation that after randomly fiddling around with the evolution of life, the universe stumbled on awareness of itself. Since we’re made of the stuff of the universe, then we are the universe conscious of itself. But I think there was no consciousness until we came along and thus no conscious deity to make it. I don’t believe the universe has been around consciously preparing for you, me, and all conscious beings. I don’t find that argument convincing. So, what you’re arguing, well, not you, but most of God’s defenders is that the universe has a plan, and the plan is you. A bit arrogant, don’t you think?
“But then, I guess that’s appropriate. Wasn’t the first sin the root of all sin? You know your Adam and Eve, the couple who wanted to be like God. That’s pride, right? Eating fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was an attempt to be like God. And those Seven Deadly Sins, aren’t six of them just extensions in some way of the root sin of Pride?”
Philosopher A: “Let’s not confuse any particular religion’s belief system with the larger question about a universe without God. How did the universe start? That’s the question that gets to the heart of a belief in God.”
“Philosopher B: “You’re ignoring what the physicists say about Dark Energy and virtual particles. The vacuum is filled with virtual particles in a constant coming and going. The math supports the coming and going of virtual particles, so Nothing is the creator of Something. That empty space isn’t empty is the argument; you don’t need a Creator because the universe self-creates.”
Philosopher A: “Got a question for you about that physics stuff, Dark Energy, and empty space that isn’t empty. What are ‘virtual particles’? I want to know if they are as real as the matter we know or see evidence of in the Large Hadron Collider? Are they a soup of Higgs bosons or some other particle or field? So, what you’re saying is that the universe created itself or that the universe is eternal or that the universe is a brane among many branes, a universe in multiverse with my doppelganger out there somewhere in a different dimension or in a bubble universe that exists in the grand Nothing, even though according to your virtual particles, Nothing can really be Nothing. It’s always producing something. Nothing is nothing because everything is Something for a human brain, even the brain of a physicist. Modern physicists are so fond of the Michelson-Morley experiment that demonstrated the absence of the Aether, but they replace the ubiquitous Aether with a field of virtual particles that they cannot show in any way other than through math. Their vacuum filled with virtual particles coming into and going out of existence is a compensation. They speak of Nothing, but simultaneously fill it with something. And how do these virtual particles reconcile with a universe in perfect equilibrium? I think the physicists sometimes feign science when they are at heart metaphysicists. They struggle like Martin Heidegger looking to explain Being and No-thingness. So, when you fault a devout believer for accepting the presence of God in the universe and for ascribing a role of Creator to God, please take a look in the quantum mirror where all these virtual particles fill the vacuum field and pop into and out of existence.”
Philosopher B: “Look, I’ll admit that there are some puzzles to solve about the micro and macro worlds. Sure, I do have some reservations about virtual particles and about Nothing creating Something. But if I reject a God, I really don’t have much of a choice other than replacing all the religious explanations with mathematically sound ones and a finite universe with an eternal one, even though I know that with Dark Energy in the picture, the universe that we know will last a finite number of years counted, of course, in supergajillions of years.”
Philosopher A: “Eternal? The idea makes me come back to asking how that’s possible if it had a beginning? Oh! You’re thinking of eternal as in ‘if I start counting today, I’ll never run out of numbers.’ But isn’t eternal defined by no end points? Doesn’t the number line of eternal run in both directions forever? In fact, isn’t a number line a faulty analogy for either eternity or infinity. Or, maybe your eternal and also infinite universe is eternal or infinite the way the fractions between any two integers are infinite? You know, one half, one quarter, one eighth, one sixteenth, one umpteen gajillionth, ad infinitum. Is that what you envision for those virtual particles in the emptiness between That Which Is, between the bits matter or the pervasive fields that we can identify? I find your atheism filled with as much belief as any religion, with as much metaphor, and with as much need for visualizability.”
Philosopher B: “See, that argument about God always goes off on tangent. It’s always about a distraction. Can’t define God so you show me something I can’t fully explain or define. Can’t point to God, so you ask me to point to a virtual particle or a pervasive field that’s imaginable. Remember, those fields are describable in the language of mathematics. We have known fields since Maxwell wrote his equations.”
Philosopher A: “Come on; admit it; what you hold as a Creative Force, or Dark Energy, or the Vacuum as Creator, is just your way of providing a metaphor you accept. You want to fault me for saying there is a God, but you see nothing amiss in your universe’s having a beginning or in being created by a vacuum. You see nothing wrong in saying the universe has a far-off end. Sure, your math says it, but what if your equations are based on erroneous thinking or a math incapable of capturing a supposed reality like an infinitely stretched universe in thermal equilibrium somehow becoming a singularity to start a new universe? Your universe isn’t eternal, as I understand the term. So, are we dealing with semantics? And do you believe you have with mathematics eliminated all the errors that words engender?
“Sure, you predict the universe’s demise untold trillions of years hence, but you can run the numbers to 100 trillion, to a supergajillion and you still aren’t speaking in the language of infinity. The universe that ends even hundreds of trillions or supergajillions of years from now still ends. And if it is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, how does it renew itself? Does it ultimately become in the Big Rip so thin that it is totally virtual? When the argument was that the universe would end hot in a ‘Big Crunch’ because gravity would pull it together, you had some validity in a universe creating and recreating itself, but now? Now you have a universe ending not with a bang but a whimper. And even that is contradictory. If the vacuum, the Nothing, keeps producing virtual particles, then there is, in fact, no Nothing. Aren’t the physicists all over the map on this? Aren’t there contradictions? If you say the universe’s vacuum is in itself a ‘field’ of some kind that like waves in the ocean spit droplets from their crests and those droplets are models of the virtual particles that fall back into the Nothing-Field the way the droplets fall back and disappear into the sea, if that is what you are saying, are you not just giving me a universe that contains no vacuum?
“Your arguments remind me of two poems, one by T. S. Eliot and another by Robert Frost. Eliot wrote in ‘The Hollow Men,’ that ‘This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.” In ‘Fire and Ice’ Frost wrote ‘Some say the world will end in fire/Some say in ice.’ I suppose that the Big Rip ending of your accelerating universe will end in the whimper of thermal equilibrium or ‘in ice.’ In such a fading universe where everything is evened out by The Second Law, I see both whimper and ice, neither of which is hot enough to engender a new Big Bang.”
Philosopher B: “Nevertheless, you have no proof for a God. Just saying that my explanation lacks completeness isn’t a proof that God exists.”
Philosopher A: “Maybe not. And don’t get me wrong. I do understand the problems associated with a belief in God, especially a personal God, one that gets involved in human affairs. I know that tornadoes don’t hit some houses in the neighborhood because they are residences of the God-fearing. I know bad things happen to good people. I know evil is a persistent plague on humanity. I realize that the universe does have randomness and chaos. I know I cannot explain that evil occurs or why God would let bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. I can’t explain suffering or death. I can’t explain how a good God can allow dictators to rise and kill. But I can’t get past that fine-tuned universe in which I live.
“I keep going back to John Leslie’s arguments about fine-tuning the universe.* Take his take on gravity’s strength, for example. Leslie writes with regard to gravity that ‘it is roughly 10^39 times weaker than electromagnetism. Had it been only 10^33 times weaker, stars would be a billions times less massive and would burn a million times faster.’ (5) Ditto effect, he argues for the mass difference between protons and neutrons. ‘If the …mass difference—about one part in a thousand—had not been almost exactly twice the electron’ls mass then all neutrons would have decayed into protons or else all protoons would have changed irreversibly into neutrons.’ (5) And do you know what the effect of that would be?
Philosopher B: “No, tell me.”
Philosopher A: “Forget the periodic table. It wouldn’t exist. And that means all our chemistry and biology wouldn’t exist. Now think about that. Leslie also points out that force strengths of the so-called Four Fundamental Forces are also delicately balanced across a wide range. The nuclear strong force is (roughly) a hundred times stronger than electromagnetism, which is in turn ten thousand times stronger than the nuclear weak force, which is itself some ten thousand billion billion billion times stonger than gravity. So, we can well be impressed by any apparent need for a force to be “just right” even to within a factor of ten, let alone to which on part in a hundred or in 10^100—especially when nobody is sure why the strongest force tugs any more powerfully than the weakest.’”
“I can note that if there was a single act of creation, then all forms we now see exist simply reveal the unfolding of existence. I go back to my old standby, that creating in the image means simply bearing the stamp of existence. If you and your nonbelieving friends would consider this, you might reconsider your objection to a belief in God with a capital G.
Philosopher B: “Let me think about it. But you still haven’t covered that stuff about good and evil. Was the universe fine-tuned for evil, also?”
Philosopher A: “Let’s meet for coffee or beer sometime to discuss that.”
*Leslie, John. Universes. London. Routledge. 1989.
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