Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

My most recent articles these past several months have been in answer to a Calvinist Pastor/Teacher's assertion that determinism, literalism and ex nihilo creation is the only way to go when answering the creeds of the church and interpreting the church's many theological assertions. I have contended that this kind of thinking is closed-minded, subjective, and misleading in its struggles to grasp the newer contemporary theologies which have come forth over the past 170 years (c.1850 forward). For these reasons and more I have been detailing why process theology and process thought has been helpful in fundamentally rethinking how Christianity should behave, preach, and witness to the world about itself. If not, then for many Christians, they have artificially limited themselves, their faith, their God, and their Bible from any meaningfulness to this life or the next.

As such, I am very much interested in expanding the playing field while connecting contemporary articles to my own past articles I wrote many years ago under various topical listings (see right sidebar on blog). Below is an excellent article by Michael Shermer found on skeptic.com. It summarizes quite neatly the different arguments for God, for the creation of the cosmos, and allows a more open-ended conversation to the subject of biblical/evolutionary/cosmological teleology. Enjoy.

R.E. Slater

December 28, 2018

Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing/

By MICHAEL SHERMER

I

n my many debates with theists over the decades a handful of arguments for God’s existence are routinely articulated as “proofs” of divine providence. These include the cosmological argument (that all natural things are contingent on something else for their existence so there necessarily exists a being independent of nature), the ontological argument (that we can conceive of an absolutely perfect being means it must exist because existence is a necessary feature of perfection), the design argument (the universe is fine-tuned for life, and life contains design features, therefore God is the fine-tuner and intelligent designer of life), the moral argument (without God anything goes, with God there is objective morality), the consciousness argument (the qualitative experience—qualia—of consciousness cannot be explained by the activity of neurons, and abstract concepts like logic and mathematics exist separate from brains, therefore God must be the source), and others. All of these arguments (they are certainly not proofs in the mathematical sense) have counter-arguments made by philosophers over the centuries, but there is one that seems to trouble a great many thinkers of all persuasions, and that is why there should be anything at all. That is, all of the other arguments for God’s existence presume that something exists that needs explaining. The argument that asks why there is something rather than nothing underlies all the other arguments, and is cognitively challenging because it is simply not possible for existing beings to imagine not existing, not just themselves (which forms the cognitive foundation of afterlife beliefs), but to imagine nothing existing at all. Go ahead and try it. Picture nothing. When I ask myself this question I start by visualizing dark empty space bereft of galaxies, stars, and planets, along with molecules and atoms. But this picture is incorrect because if there were no universe there would not only be no matter, but there would be no space or time (or space-time) either. There would be absolutely nothing, including no conscious being to observe the nothingness. Just… nothing. Whatever that is. This presents us with what is arguably the deepest of deep questions: why is there something rather than nothing? In his 1988 blockbuster book A Brief History of Time, the late Cambridge theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking put it this way:

What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?¹

Even if it could be established that something must exist, this does not necessarily mean that the something must be our universe with our particular laws of nature that give rise to atoms, stars, planets, and people. There could be universes whose laws of nature permit time and space but no matter or light; such universes could not be perceived because there would be no one to perceive the darkness. Our universe has particular properties suited to planets and people. According to England’s Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees, there are at least six constituents that are necessary for “our emergence from a simple Big Bang,” including (1) Ω (omega), the amount of matter in the universe = 1: if Ω was greater than 1 it would have collapsed long ago and if Ω was less than 1 no galaxies would have formed. (2) ε (epsilon), how firmly atomic nuclei bind together = .007: if ε were even fractionally different matter could not exist. (3) D, the number of dimensions in which we live = 3. (4) N, the ratio of the strength of electromagnetism to that of gravity = 10³⁹: if N were smaller the universe would be either too young or too small for life to form. (5) Q, the fabric of the universe = 1/100,000: if Qwere smaller the universe would be featureless and if Q were larger the universe would be dominated by giant black holes. (6) λ (lambda), the cosmological constant, or “antigravity” force that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate = 0.7: if λ were larger it would have prevented stars and galaxies from forming.²

The most common reason invoked for our universe’s “fine-tuning” is the “anthropic principle,” most forcefully argued by the physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler in their 1986 book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle: “It is not only man that is adapted to the universe. The universe is adapted to man. Imagine a universe in which one or another of the fundamental dimensionless constants of physics is altered by a few percent one way or the other? Man could never come into being in such a universe. That is the central point of the anthropic principle. According to the principle, a life-giving factor lies at the center of the whole machinery and design of the world.”³ So we really have two questions to answer: Why there is something rather than nothing, and Why this universe? Here are a number of responses, ranging from the philosophical to the scientific, that I have compiled from a number of sources, including a comprehensive taxonomic work by John Leslie and Robert Lawrence Kuhn titled The Mystery of Existence: Why is There Anything at All? that catalogues all extant explanations without religious, scientific, or philosophical prejudice.⁴

EXPLANATIONS FOR NOTHING

1. Nothing is Inconceivable

First, as I suggested above, just as it is not possible to conceive of what it is like to be dead, it is impossible to conceptualize nothing—no space, time, matter, light, darkness, or even any conscious beings to perceive the nothingness. As Robert Kuhn conceives it: “Not just emptiness, not just blankness, and not just emptiness and blankness forever, but not even the existence of emptiness, not even the meaning of blankness, and no forever.”⁵ Inconceivable.

2. Nothing is Something

The analytical philosopher Quentin Smith pointed out to Kuhn that it is a logical fallacy to talk about “nothing” as if it were “something”; that is, to suggest that “there might have been nothing” implies “it is possible that there is nothing.” As Kuhn articulates Smith’s argument: “‘There is’ means ‘something is.’ So ‘there is nothing’ means ‘something is nothing,’ which is a logical contradiction. His suggestion is to remove ‘nothing’ and replace it by ‘not something’ or ‘not anything,’ since one can talk about what we mean by ‘nothing’ by referring to something or anything of which there are no instances (i.e., the concept of ‘something’ has the property of not being instantiated). The common sense way to talk about Nothing is to talk about something and negate it, to deny that there is something.”⁶ Here we are bumping up against the problem of defining what we mean by “nothing” and the restrictions that language imposes on the problem. The very act of talking about “nothing” makes it a “something,” or else what are we talking about?

3. Nothing Would Include God’s Nonexistence

In Kuhn’s taxonomy of “nothings” he lists what categories of things might be included in “something” that would be negated by “nothing”: physical, mental, platonic, spiritual, and God. Physical: all matter, energy, space and time, and all the laws and principles that govern them (known and unknown). Mental: all kinds of consciousness and awareness (known and unknown). Platonic: all forms of abstract objects (numbers, logic, forms, propositions, possibilities—known and unknown). Spiritual and God: anything that could possibly fit this nonphysical category (all forms of religious and spiritual belief).⁷ If by “nothing” is meant no physical objects or matter of any kind, for example, there can still be energy from which matter may arise by natural forces guided by the laws of nature. Physicists, for example, talk about empty space as seething with virtual particles, from which particle-antiparticle pairs come into existence as a consequence of the Uncertainty Principle of quantum physics. From this “nothingness” universes may “pop” into existence.⁸ But if by “nothing” is meant that there is no physical, mental, platonic, or nonphysical entity of any kind, then there can be no God or gods, which means that there cannot be anything outside of nothing out of which to create something. If God is proposed to be outside of or preexisting the “nothing” from which the “something” was created, then why can’t the laws of nature that give rise to “somethings” (like universes) be outside of or preexisting nothing? Some theologians argue that God is a “necessity,” by which they mean it is impossible for God not to exist. This is the famous Ontological Argument for the existence of God, first proposed by St. Anselm of Canterbury in 1078, which defines God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” The argument is that God is necessary because necessity is a higher form of perfection that can be conceived than is contingency.⁹ The argument has been refuted time and again. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, for example, the great Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume countered: “Nothing, that is distinctly conceivable, implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose nonexistence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no being, whose existence is demonstrable.”¹⁰ To my ears this is all just word play, armchair speculation of what we can or cannot conceive of without once looking out the window to see what is actually in nature that may confirm or disconfirm our imaginary ideas.¹¹ I can just as easily argue that the laws of nature are a necessity for existence because they give rise to the universe, which makes them “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Or that abstract objects like circles, squares, and rectangles and the geometric principles that govern them, or mathematical principles like 3 + 2 = 5, necessarily exist because the existence of a circle is a higher form of perfection than the nonexistence of a circle. If circles did not exist then what would the formula for the area of a circle, A = πr² , describe? In any case, the conception of “perfection” is once again bound by the cognitive restrictions of thought and language we faced with consciousness and nothingness. How can an imperfect being conceive of what perfection even means? Who knows what an extra-terrestrial intelligence with a brain ten times the size of ours would be capable of conceiving, or a post-Singularity AI with an intelligence capacity a million times greater than humans would be able to conceptualize?

4. God Did It Ex Nihilo

For the many millennia that people have been asking these questions the most common answer given was some version of “God did it”: a creator existed before the universe and brought it into existence ex nihilo—out of nothing. Revealingly, Genesis does not actually say that God created the universe ex nihilo—that is a later inference made by theologians. Genesis 1:1 reads simply: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” It does not elaborate on what God made the heavens and the earth out of, which theologians have presumed to be nothing, but that it is not stated in the Bible. As Skeptic magazine’s religion editor Tim Callahan notes, the Hebrew word for creation in Genesis 1:1 is “bara,” which can mean create but can also mean “choose” or “divide.” Callahan cites the Old Testament scholar Ellen van Wolde, who argues that the most accurate translation of “bara” is “separate,” so Genesis 1:1 should read “In the beginning God separated the heavens and the earth.”¹² This, says Callahan, better fits the context of Genesis 1, “in which the creation is presented as a series of separations: light is created and separated from darkness, the firmament of heaven is created to separate the waters above it from the waters below it, and the separation of land from water. This is followed by a series of creation events populating the separated realms—the land populated with plants, the firmament populated with heavenly bodies, the sea populated with fish and sea monsters, the air with birds, and the land, again, with animals—followed finally by the creation of humans in the image of God.”¹³ Even if one rejects this interpretation of Genesis 1:1 and opts for creation ex nihilo, this just begs the question of who or what created the creator? Theists retort that God is that which does not need to be created. But why can’t the universe be in the same ontological and epistemological category as God, wherein we could simply say that the universe is that which does not need to be created? Theists counter that the universe had a Big Bang beginning and everything that begins to exist has a cause. But not everything in the universe is strictly causal, such as some quantum effects, and even though our universe in its current state can be traced back to a Big Bang beginning that doesn’t mean there was not a previous universe that gave birth to our universe through the Big Bang. Theists also note that that the universe is a thing, whereas God is an agent or being. But don’t things and beings all need a causal explanation? Why should God be exempt from such causal reasoning? Because, rejoins the theist, God is supernatural—outside of space, time, and matter—whereas everything in the universe, and the universe itself, is natural—made up of space, time, and matter, so God and the universe are ontologically different. But if that is so, then how would we detect God with our instruments? If a supernatural deity used natural forces to, say, cure someone’s cancer by reprogramming the cancerous cells’ DNA, wouldn’t that make God nothing more than a skilled genetic engineer, along the lines of a sufficiently advanced ETI or far-future human in my earlier thought experiment? And if God used unknown supernatural forces to effect change in our natural world, how do they interact with the known forces of our universe? And if such supernatural forces could somehow stir the particles in our universe, shouldn’t we be able to detect them and thereby incorporate them into our theories about the natural world? If so, wouldn’t that bring God into the universe as a natural being and thus subject him to the search for a natural causal explanation for his existence? Finally, if God made the universe ex nihilo—literally out of nothing—then apparently it is possible for something to come from nothing, so this brings us back to searching for the best causal explanation for anything—natural or supernatural?

5. Natural vs. Supernatural Explanations of Something

The history of science has been one long and steady replacement of the supernatural with the natural. Weather events once attributed to the supernatural scheming of deities are now understood to be the product of natural forces of temperature and pressure. Plagues formerly ascribed to women cavorting with the devil are today known to be caused by bacteria and viruses. Mental illnesses previously imputed to demonic possession are currently sought in genes and neurochemistry. Accidents heretofore explained by fate, karma, or providence are nowadays accredited to probabilities, statistics, and risk. If we follow this trend to encompass all phenomena, what place is there for supernatural agents like gods and demons? Do we know enough to know that they cannot exist? Or is it possible there are unknown forces within our universe, or intentional agents outside of it that we have yet to discover? According to the physicist Sean Carroll, in his examination of The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, “All of the things you’ve ever seen or experienced in your life—objects, plants, animals, people—are made of a small number of particles, interacting with one another through a small number of forces.”¹⁴Once you understand the fundamental laws of nature, such as the thermodynamic arrow of time and the Core Theory of particles and forces, you can scale up to planets and people, and even assess the likelihood that God, the soul, and the afterlife exist, which Carroll concludes is very low. But isn’t the history of science also strewn with the remains of failed theories like geocentrism (the Earth is the center of the solar system), phlogiston (a fire-like element that causes objects to burn), miasma (the “bad air” source of disease), spontaneous generation (fully formed living organisms can abruptly arise out of inanimate matter), and the luminiferous aether (the medium filling outer space for the propagation of light)? Yes, and that’s how we know we’re making progress. The postmodern belief that the very existence of such discarded ideas means that there is no objective reality and that all theories are equal is wronger than all of the wrong theories combined. I have called this Asimov’s Axiom, after an observation by the science writer Isaac Asimov:

When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.¹⁵

There is real progress in science. Think of it as an expanding sphere of knowledge. As the sphere of the known expands into the aether of the unknown, the proportion of ignorance seems to grow—the more you know, the more you know how much you don’t know. But in this mathematical analogy note what happens when the radius of a sphere increases: the expansion of the surface area is squared while the increase in the volume is cubed. So as the sphere of scientific knowledge expands the volume of the known increases by a ratio of 3:2 over the surface area of the unknown. The more you know the more of the unknown becomes known. It is at this boundary where we can stake a claim of true progress in the history of science. Take the Core Theory of the forces and particles that make up the universe. This includes the four forces of gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, along with the Standard Model of elementary particles making up the nucleus of the atom: quarks, leptons, and bosons, plus the underlying Higgs boson. Carroll says this Core Theory is “indisputably accurate within a very wide domain of applicability,” such that “a thousand or a million years from now, whatever amazing discoveries science will have made, our descendants are not going to be saying ‘Ha-ha, those silly twenty-first-century scientists, believing in ‘neutrons’ and ‘electromagnetism’.” Thus, Carroll concludes that the laws of physics rule out supernatural and paranormal claims. Why? Because the particles and forces of nature don’t allow us to bend spoons, levitate, read minds, or perform miracles, and “we know that there aren’t new particles or forces out there yet to be discovered that would support them. Not simply because we haven’t found them yet, but because we definitely would have found them if they had the right characteristics to give us the requisite powers.”¹⁶ It is at the horizon where the known meets the unknown that we are tempted to inject supernatural forces to explain hitherto unsolved mysteries, but we must resist the temptation, for such efforts can never succeed, not even in principle. Humans have always filled in such gaps in our knowledge with gods, and it never leads to any useful or productive theory. Let us try to overcome this psychological propensity to fill in the gaps with supernatural forces and follow the path of science in searching for natural forces.

6. Nothing is Unstable, Something is Stable

Asking why there is something rather than nothing presumes “nothing” is the natural state of things out of which “something” needs an explanation. Maybe “something” is the natural state of things and “nothing” would be the mystery to be solved. As the physicist Victor Stenger notes in his book, The Fallacy of Fine Tuning: “Current cosmology suggests that no laws of physics were violated in bringing the universe into existence. The laws of physics themselves are shown to correspond to what one would expect if the universe appeared from nothing. There is something rather than nothing because something is more stable.”¹⁷In his 2012 book, A Universe From Nothing, the cosmologist Lawrence Krauss attempts to link quantum physics to Einstein’s gravitational theory of general relativity to explain the origin of something (including a universe) from nothing: “In quantum gravity, universes can, and indeed always will, spontaneously appear from nothing. Such universes need not be empty, but can have matter and [electromagnetic] radiation in them, as long as the total energy, including the negative energy associated with gravity [balancing the positive energy of matter], is zero.” And: “In order for the closed universes that might be created through such mechanisms to last for longer than infinitesimal times, something like inflation is necessary.” Observations have revealed that, in fact, the universe is flat (there is just enough matter to eventually halt its expansion), its energy is zero, and it underwent rapid inflation, or expansion, shortly after the Big Bang as described by inflationary cosmology. Thus, Krauss concludes, “quantum gravity not only appears to allow universes to be created from nothing—meaning…the absence of space and time—it may require them. ‘Nothing’—in this case no space, no time, no anything!—is unstable.”¹⁸ In his follow-up 2017 work, The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far, Krauss notes that “Einstein was one of the first physicists to demonstrate that the classical notion of causation begins to break down at the quantum realm.” Although many physicists objected to the idea of something coming from nothing, Krauss adds that “this is precisely what happens with the light you are using to read this page. Electrons in hot atoms emit photons—photons that didn’t exist before they were emitted—which are emitted spontaneously and without specific cause. Why is it that we have grown at least somewhat comfortable with the idea that photons can be created from nothing without cause, but not whole universes?”¹⁹

EXPLANATIONS FOR OUR UNIVERSE

The anthropic principle invoked to explain our universe troubles most scientists because of its antithesis known as the “Copernican principle,” which states that we are not special. The anthropic principle puts humans right back in the center of the cosmos, not geographically but anthropocentrically—it is all about us. There are a number of counter-explanations for our universe that continue in the scientific tradition of defenestrating humans from the Tower of Babel.

1. Inconstant Constants

The various numbers invoked in the “fine-tuning” argument for our universe as being special, such as the speed of light and Planck’s constant, are, in fact, arbitrary numbers that can be configured in different ways so that their relationship to the other constants do not appear to be so remarkable. As well, such constants may be inconstantover vast spans of time, varying from the Big Bang to the present, making the universe finely tuned only now but not earlier or later in its history. The physicists John Barrow and John Webb call these numbers the “inconstant constants,” and they have demonstrated how in particular the speed of light, gravitation, and the mass of the electron have in fact been inconstant over time.²⁰

2. Grand Unified Theory

In order to explain our universe we need a comprehensive theory of physics that connects the subatomic world described by quantum mechanics to the cosmic world described by general relativity. As the cosmologist Sean Carroll notes in his book From Eternity to Here: “Possibly general relativity is not the correct theory of gravity, at least in the context of the extremely early universe. Most physicists suspect that a quantum theory of gravity, reconciling the framework of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s ideas about curved spacetime, will ultimately be required to make sense of what happens at the very earliest times. So if someone asks you what really happened at the moment of the purported Big Bang, the only honest answer would be: ‘I don’t know.’”²¹That grand unified theory of everything will itself need an explanation, but it may be explicable by some other theory we have yet to comprehend out of our sheer ignorance at this moment in history. And as I repeat ad nauseum to audiences curious about unsolved mysteries and anxious to fill in scientific gaps with questionable pseudoscientific conjectures, it’s always okay to say “I don’t know” and leave it at that.

3. Boom-and-Bust Cycles

Perhaps our bubble universe is just one episode of an eternal boom-and-bust cycle of expansion and contractions of the universe, with the bubble’s eventual collapse and re-expansion in an eternal cycle. Sean Carroll argues that “space and time did exist before the Big Bang; what we call the Bang is a kind of transition from one phase to another.” As such, he says, “there is no such thing as an initial state, because time is eternal. In this case, we are imagining that the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the entire universe, although it’s obviously an important event in the history of our local region.”²² Although there does not appear to be enough matter in our universe to halt the expansion and bring it back into a big crunch that could launch it back into a new bubble out of another Big Bang, the relevant observation here is that something existed before the Big Bang, thereby obviating the need to invoke a supernatural creator.²³

4. Darwinian Universes

According to the cosmologist Lee Smolin, the evolution of the universe may include a Darwinian component in the form of a “natural selection” of differentially reproducing bubble universes. Like its biological counterpart, Smolin hypothesizes that there might be a selection from different “species” of universes, each containing different laws of nature. Universes like ours will have lots of stars, which means they will have lots of black holes that collapse into singularities, a point at which infinitely strong gravity causes matter to have infinite density and zero volume, which many cosmologists believe gave birth to our universe from the Big Bang singularity. Perhaps collapsing black holes create new baby universes out of these singularities, and those baby universes with laws of nature similar to ours will be fine-tuned to life, whereas universes with radically different laws of nature that disallow stars, planets, and people will go extinct. The result of this cosmic evolutionary process would be a preponderance of universes like ours, so we should not be surprised to find ourselves in a universe fine-tuned for life.²⁴

5. Multiple Creations Cosmology

In his 1997 book The Inflationary Universe, the cosmologist Alan Guth proposes that our universe sprang into existence from a bubble nucleation of spacetime. If this process of universe creation is natural, then there may be multiple bubble nucleations that give rise to many universes that expand but remain separate from one another without any causal contact between them. Of course, if these universes were truly causally-disconnected then there is no way to get information from them, which would make this an untestable hypothesis.²⁵ But, again, there is much we still don’t know about the cosmos, and I am encouraged by the startling discovery of gravitational waves, which could open up possibilities of obtaining information from other bubble universes, if they exist.

6. Many-Worlds Multiverse

According to the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are an infinite number of universes in which every possible outcome of every possible choice that has ever been available, or will be available, has happened in one of those universes. This model is grounded in the bizarre findings of the famous “double-slit” experiment, in which light is passed through two slits and forms an interference pattern of waves on a black surface (like throwing two stones in a pond and watching the concentric wave patterns interact, with crests and troughs adding and subtracting from one another). The spooky part comes when you send single photons of light one at a time through the two slits—they still form an interference wave pattern even though they are not interacting with other photons. How can this be? One answer is that the photons are interacting with photons in other universes! In this type of multiverse you could meet your doppelgänger, and depending on which universe you entered, your parallel self would be fairly similar or dissimilar to you, a theme that has become a staple of science fiction (see, for example, Michael Crichton’s Timeline). I am skeptical that this version of the multiverse will pan out, however, because the idea of there being multiple versions of me and you out there—and in an infinite universe there would be an infinite number of me’s and you’s—seems to me to be even less likely than the theistic alternative “God did it.” Still, as Richard Feynman famously quipped, “no one understands quantum mechanics,”²⁶ so who am I to write off this theory considered legitimate by many quantum physicists.

7. Brane and String Universes

Universes may be birthed when three-dimensional “branes” (a membrane-like structure on which our universe exists) moves through higher-dimensional space and collides with another brane, the result of which is the energized creation of another universe.²⁷ A related multiverse is derived through string theory, which by at least one calculation allows for 10⁵⁰⁰ possible worlds, all with different self-consistent laws and constants.²⁸ That’s a 1 followed by 500 zeroes possible universes. The number is so large that it would be miraculous if there were not intelligent life in a number of them. In his book God: The Failed Hypothesis, the late physicist Victor Stenger created a computer model that analyzes what just 100 different universes would be like under constants different from our own, ranging from five orders of magnitude above to five orders of magnitude below their values in our universe. Stenger found that long-lived stars of at least one billion years—necessary for the production of life-giving heavy elements—would emerge within a wide range of parameters in at least half of the universes in his model.²⁹

8. Quantum Foam Universe Creations

In this model, universes are created out of nothing, but in the scientific version of ex nihilo the nothing of the vacuum of space actually contains quantum foam, which may fluctuate to create baby universes. In this configuration, any quantum object in any quantum state may generate a new universe, each one of which represents every possible state of every possible object.³⁰ This is Stephen Hawking’s explanation for the fine-tuning problem that he himself famously presented in the 1990s:

Why is the universe so close to the dividing line between collapsing again and expanding indefinitely? In order to be as close as we are now, the rate of expansion early on had to be chosen fantastically accurately. If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been less by one part in 10¹⁰, the universe would have collapsed after a few million years. If it had been greater by one part in 10¹⁰, the universe would have been essentially empty after a few million years. In neither case would it have lasted long enough for life to develop. Thus one either has to appeal to the anthropic principle or find some physical explanation of why the universe is the way it is.³¹

Hawking’s collaborator Roger Penrose layered on even more mystery when he noted that the “extraordinary degree of precision (or ‘fine tuning’) that seems to be required for the Big Bang of the nature that we appear to observe…is one part in 10¹⁰¹²³at least.” Penrose suggested two pathways to an answer, either it was an act of God, “or we might seek some scientific/ mathematical theory.”³² Hawking opted for the second with this explanation: “Quantum fluctuations lead to the spontaneous creation of tiny universes, out of nothing. Most of the universes collapse to nothing, but a few that reach a critical size, will expand in an inflationary manner, and will form galaxies and stars, and maybe beings like us.”³³

9. M-Theory Grand Design, or Auto-Ex-Nihilo

Stephen Hawking continued working on this question, and he and the physicist Leonard Mlodinow presented their answer in their 2010 book The Grand Design.³⁴ They approach the problem from what they call “model-dependent realism,” based on the assumption that our brains form models of the world from sensory input, that we use the model most successful at explaining events, and that when more than one model makes accurate predictions “we are free to use whichever model is most convenient.” Employing this method, they write, “it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation.” The dual wave/particle models of light are an example of model-dependent realism, where each one agrees with certain observations but neither one is sufficient to explain all observations. To model the entire universe, Hawking and Mlodinow employ “M-Theory,” an extension of string theory that includes 11 dimensions and incorporates all five current string theory models. “M-theory is the most general supersymmetric theory of gravity,” Hawking and Mlodinow explain. “For these reasons M-theory is the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe. If it is finite—and this has yet to be proved—it will be a model of a universe that creates itself.” Although they admit that the theory has yet to be confirmed by observation, if it is then no creator explanation is necessary because the universe creates itself. Call it auto-ex-nihilo.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 23.1 Buy print edition Buy digital edition Subscribe to print edition Subscribe to digital edition

A SENSE OF AWE

By no means does this list exhaust the possible explanations for why there is something rather than nothing and why our universe is the way it is, but perhaps it gives one a sense that the questions are answerable through science, through natural and testable hypotheses and theories, without resort to supernatural intercession. It is good to reflect on the fact that the history of science is relatively young compared to the history of religion—roughly 500 v. 5000 years—so it is premature to say that because science does not yet have a definitive explanatory theory accepted by most scientists it means that one is not forthcoming. Despite the optimism derived from my expanding sphere of knowledge metaphor in which the known expands into the unknown at a ratio of 3:2, there is still much we do not understand about the cosmos and everything in it. But given science’s track record over the past five centuries this only means there are remarkable and exciting new discoveries and theories yet to come. As Carl Sagan expressed it in his 1985 Gifford Lecture Series titled The Search for Who We Are (published in book form posthumously in 2007 as The Varieties of Scientific Experience):

By far the best way I know to engage the religious sensibility, the sense of awe, is to look up on a clear night. I believe that it is very difficult to know who we are until we understand where and when we are. I think everyone in every culture has felt a sense of awe and wonder looking at the sky. This is reflected throughout the world in both science and religion.³⁵

About the Author

Dr. Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American and a presidential fellow at Chapman University. His latest book is Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia.

References

1. Hawking, Stephen. 1988. A Brief History of Time. New York: Bantam Books, 190.
2. Rees, Martin. 2000. Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe. New York: Basic Books.
3. Barrow, John D. and Frank Tipler. 1988. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. vii.
4. Leslie, John and Robert Lawrence Kuhn. 2013. The Mystery of Existence: Why is There Anything at All? Wiley- Blackwell. See also: Holt, Jim. 2012. Why Does the World Exist: An Existential Detective Story. New York: Liveright.
5. Kuhn, Robert Lawrence. 2007. “Why This Universe?: Toward a Taxonomy of Possible Explanations.” Skeptic, Vol.13, No.2, 28–39.
6. Ibid.
7. Kuhn, Robert Lawrence. 2013. “Levels of Nothing: There Are Multiple Answers to the Question of Why the Universe Exists.” Skeptic, Vol. 18, No. 2. http://bit.ly/1S7Mn9i
8. Vilenkin, Alex. 2006. Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes. New York: Hill and Wang.
9. O’Connor, Timothy. 2008. Theism and Ultimate Explanation: The Necessary Shape of Contingency. Oxford: Blackwell.
10. Hume, David. 1776. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Available online, p. 92: http://bit.ly/1sIsq4p
11. See also the clever take-down of the Ontological Argument in: Dawkins, Richard. 2006. The God Delusion. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 109–112.
12. Alleyne, Richard. 2009. “God is not the Creator, Claims Academic.” The Telegraph, October 8.
13. Callahan, Tim. 2012. “The Genesis Creation Myth is Not Unique.” eSkeptic, April 25. http://bit.ly/1UlVqbi
14. Carroll, Sean. 2016. The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. New York: Dutton, 148.
15. Shermer, Michael. 2006. “Wronger Than Wrong.” Scientific American. November, 40.
16. Carroll, 2016, 149–150.
17. Stenger, Victor. 2008. God: The Failed Hypothesis. Buffalo: Prometheus Books.
18. Krauss, Lawrence. 2012. A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing. New York: Free Press, 169–170.
19. Krauss, Lawrence. 2017. The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far: Why Are We Here? New York: Atria Books.
20. Barrow, John and John Webb. 2005. “Inconstant Constants.” Scientific American, June, 57–63.
21. Carroll, Sean. 2010. From Eternity to Here. The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. New York: Dutton/Penguin, 50.
22. Carroll, op cit., 51, 64.
23. Steinhardt, Paul J. and Neil Turok. 2002. “A Cyclic Model of the Universe.” Science, May 2002: Vol. 296. no. 5572, pp. 1436–1439.
24. Smolin, Lee. 1997. The Life of the Cosmos. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See also: Smith, Quentin. 1990. “A Natural Explanation of the Existence and Laws of Our Universe.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 68, 22–43. For an elegant summary see: Gardner, James. 2003. Biocosm. Maui, HI: Inner Ocean Publishing.
25. Guth, Alan. 1981. “The Inflationary Universe: A Possible Solution to the Horizon and Flatness Problems.” Phys. Rev. D 23, 347; Guth, Alan. 1997. The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins. Boston: Addison-Wesley; Linde, Andrei. 1991. “The Self- Reproducing Inflationary Universe.” Scientific American, November 1991, 48–55. Linde, Andrei. 2005. “Current understanding of inflation.” New Astron. Rev. 49:35–41; Vilenkin, Alex. 2006. Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes. New York: Hill and Wang.
26. Feynman, Richard. 1967. The Character of Physical Law. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 129.
27. Khoury, Justin, Burt A. Ovrut, Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok. 2002. “Density Perturbations in the Ekpyrotic Scenario.” Phys. Rev. D66 046005; Ostriker, Jeremiah P. and Paul Steinhardt, “The Quintessential Universe.” Scientific American, January 2001, 46–53.
28. Bousso, Raphael and Joseph Polchinski. 2004. “The String Theory Landscape.” Scientific American, September.
29. Stenger, Victor. 2007. God: The Failed Hypothesis. Buffalo: Prometheus.
30. Everett, Hugh. 1957. “Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics.” Reviews of Modern Physics 29, No.3, 1957, 454–462. Reprinted in DeWitt. B.S. and N. Graham, eds. 1973. The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 141–149. Wheeler, John Archibald. 1998. Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam. New York: W.W. Norton, 268–270.
31. Hawking, Stephen. 1996. “Quantum Cosmology.” In Hawking, Stephen and Roger Penrose. The Nature of Space and Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 89–90.
32. Penrose, Roger. 2005. The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. New York: Knopf, p. 726–732, 762–765.
33. Hawking, Stephen. 2002. “The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology: Stephen Hawking 60th Birthday Symposium,” Lecture at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, UK, 11 January.
34. Hawking, Stephen and Leonard Mlodinow. 2010. The Grand Design. New York: Bantam Books.
35. Sagan, Carl. 2007. The Varieties of Scientific Experience.

What Came Before the Big Bang?

Cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin has convincing evidence that we are surrounded by expanding, bubble-like universes. | Roen Kelly (Illustration); Mark Ostow (Photo)

What Came Before the Big Bang?

by Steve Nadis|Thursday, October 10, 2013

From the September 2013 Issue

Cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin believes the Big Bang wasn't a one-off event, but merely one of a series of big bangs creating an endless number of bubble universes.

It is cosmology’s most fundamental question: How did the universe begin?

The question presupposes that the universe had an actual starting point, but one might just as well assume the universe always was and always will be. In that case, there would be no beginning whatsoever — just an ever-evolving story of which we’re catching a mere glimpse.

“We have very good evidence that there was a Big Bang, so the universe as we know it almost certainly started some 14 billion years ago. But was that the absolute beginning, or was there something before it?” asks Alexander Vilenkin, a cosmologist at Tufts University near Boston. It seems like the kind of question that can never be truly answered because every time someone proposes a solution, someone else can keep asking the annoying question: What happened before that?

But now Vilenkin says he has convincing evidence in hand: The universe had a distinct beginning — though he can’t pinpoint the time. After 35 years of looking backward, he says, he’s found that before our universe there was nothing, nothing at all, not even time itself.

Throughout his career, including the 20-plus years he has directed the Tufts Institute of Cosmology, Vilenkin has issued a series of wild, dazzling ideas, though from the outside he looks neither wild nor dazzling. The 64-year-old professor is soft-spoken, trim and of modest build. He dresses neatly, in neutral, understated tones that don’t draw attention to him.

Despite a low-key manner bordering on subdued, Vilenkin is a creative force who has continually found ways of piercing the fog surrounding some of the densest quandaries imaginable — triumphs that have earned him the respect of scholars worldwide. “Alex is a very original and deep thinker who has made important and profound contributions to our notions about the creation of the universe,” says Stanford cosmologist Andrei Linde.

Yet this brilliant career might never have happened. Born in the Soviet Union in 1949 and raised in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, Vilenkin got hooked on cosmology in high school, after reading about the Big Bang in a book by Sir Arthur Eddington. That “obsession” over the universe’s origins, Vilenkin says, “has never left me. I felt that if you could work on this question, which may be the most intriguing one of all, why would you choose to work on anything else?”

As an undergraduate at Kharkiv National University, Vilenkin says he was advised to “do some real physics” rather than pursue his first love, cosmology. Although he was an excellent student, he could not get into any graduate programs in physics because, he suspects, the KGB blacklisted him for refusing to become a government informant. Instead, Vilenkin was forced to take a series of mundane jobs. For a while he taught night school for adults but left that position because his responsibilities included going to the homes of absentees, many of whom were alcoholics, to try and drag them to school — an unenviable task. 

He was a night watchman for about a year and a half, including a stint at the Kharkiv Zoo. To protect the animals (which were sometimes hunted for food), he was given a rifle that he didn’t know how to use and fortunately never had to fire. When he had time during those long nights, Vilenkin studied physics, an avocation that included reading the four-volume collected works of Albert Einstein. He got fired from this plum assignment when someone decided — perhaps based on his choice of reading material — that he was overqualified for the task at hand. 

With his employment prospects looking bleak, he decided to emigrate to the United States; he figured he’d start out washing dishes while trying to break into academia. But getting out of the Soviet Union required an elaborate plan: Jews like him were allowed to go to Israel in small numbers, determined by a quota, but one had to secure an invitation from Israeli relatives first. Vilenkin had no actual relatives there, so he contacted a friend who knew people in Israel and eventually found someone — a stranger to him — kind enough to write a letter on his behalf. 

After the letter arrived, he waited a year for a visa, but it came at great cost. Before Vilenkin and his wife could leave, their parents had to consent to the move. For giving their permission, his wife’s parents lost their laboratory jobs. His father, a university professor, later lost his job, too. The traditional stop en route to Israel was Vienna, but from there Vilenkin, his wife and 1-year-old daughter went to Rome instead, arriving in 1976. They met with the U.S. Consulate in Rome and, after a three-month wait, were finally granted a visa to the U.S.

Back to the Big Bang

In fall 1977, Vilenkin took a postdoctoral position at Case Western Reserve, where he was supposed to study the electrical properties of heated metals. Still, he found time on the side to theorize about spinning black holes and their mysterious magnetic fields. A year later, he got his lucky break when Tufts offered him a one-year visiting position. He took a gamble by poring himself into cosmology, an area considered fringe at the time. 

That would soon change. In late 1979, a Stanford physics postdoc named Alan Guth offered an explanation for the explosive force behind the Big Bang. Guth’s intellectual leap stemmed from theories in particle physics, which held that at extremely high energies — far higher than could ever be reached in a laboratory — a special state of matter would turn gravity upside down, rendering it a repulsiverather than an attractive force. 

A patch of space containing a tiny bit of this unusual matter could repel itself so violently as to literally blow up. Guth suggested that a tremendous burst of this sort triggered the Big Bang, swiftly enlarging the universe so much it doubled in size at least 100 times. This exponential growth spurt — called cosmic inflation — was short-lived, however, lasting just a tiny fraction of a second because the repulsive material quickly decayed, leaving behind the more familiar forms of matter and energy that fill the universe today.

The idea simultaneously solved a number of puzzles in cosmology. It explained where the “bang” behind the Big Bang came from and how the cosmos got so big. Rapid inflation in every direction also explained why the universe we now observe is so homogeneous, and why the temperature of the background radiation left over from that primordial blast is uniform, in every patch of the sky, to one part in 100,000. Inflation also revitalized cosmology, giving theorists like Vilenkin plenty to think about — and a bit more respectability to boot.

The Never-Ending Story

By 1982, a couple of years after Guth’s breakthrough, Vilenkin had a realization of his own: The process of inflation had to be eternal, meaning that once it started, it never fully stopped. Inflation might end abruptly in one region of space, such as the one we inhabit, but it would continue elsewhere, setting off a never-ending series of big bangs. Each bang would correspond to the birth of a separate “pocket” universe, which might be pictured as an expanding bubble — one of countless bubbles floating around within the “multiverse,” as it’s sometimes called.

As Vilenkin saw it, inflation’s eternal nature stemmed from two competing properties of the cosmic fuel, the gravity-repulsive material that caused the universe to rapidly expand. On the one hand, the material was unstable, much like radioactive substances, and was thus doomed to decay. On the other hand, the material expanded far faster than it decayed, so even though decay might stop inflation in certain regions, runaway growth would continue in others.

As an analogy, Vilenkin suggests a blob of bacteria that wants to keep reproducing and growing, while bacteria-killing antibodies try to curtail that growth. If the bacteria reproduce much faster than they’re destroyed, they will swiftly multiply and spread even though their reproduction may be thwarted in some quarters. Either way you look at it, the net result is that inflation (or bacterial growth) never ends everywhere at once and is always going on in some portion of the multiverse — even as you read this magazine.

To gain a better sense of the phenomenon, Vilenkin teamed up in 1986 with a Tufts graduate student, Mukunda Aryal, on a computer simulation that showed what an eternally inflating universe might look like. In their simulation, inflating regions, or bubbles, started small and steadily grew, while the space between bubbles stretched out as well. Each bubble — representing a mini-universe like ours — was surrounded by smaller bubbles, which were themselves surrounded by even smaller bubble universes, in turn.

Road to Eternity

In Vilenkin’s bubbling universe, inflation was, by definition, eternal into the future. Once initiated, it would not stop. But was it also eternal into the past? Was there ever a time when the universe was not inflating? And if the universe were always inflating, and always expanding, would that imply that the universe itself was eternal and had no beginning?

To address this question, Vilenkin joined forces with Guth and Long Island University mathematician Arvind Borde. Using a mathematical proof, they argued that any expanding universe like ours had to have a beginning. The thought experiment they posed went like this: Imagine a universe filled with particles. As it steadily expands, the distance between particles grows. It follows that observers sprinkled throughout this expanding universe would be moving away from each other until, eventually, they occupied widely scattered regions of space. If you happened to be one of those observers, the farther an object was from you, the faster it would be moving away. 

Now throw into the mix a space traveler moving through space at a fixed speed: He zooms past Earth at 100,000 kilometers per second. But when he reaches the next galaxy, which is moving away from us at, say, 20,000 kilometers per second, he will appear to be moving only 80,000 kilometers per second to observers there. As he continues on his outward journey, the space traveler’s speed will appear smaller and smaller to the observers he passes. Now we’ll run the movie backward. This time, the space traveler’s velocity will appear faster and faster at each successive galaxy.

If we assume inflation is eternal into the past — that it had no beginning — the space traveler will eventually reach and overtake the speed of light. A calculation by Borde, Guth and Vilenkin showed that this would happen in a finite amount of time. But according to the laws of relativity, it is impossible for any massive object to reach the speed of light, let alone exceed it. “This cannot happen,” says Vilenkin. “So when you follow this space traveler’s history back in time, you find that his history must come to an end.” 

The fact that the traveler’s journey backward in time hits an impasse means that there’s a problem, from a logical standpoint, with the assumption of an ever-expanding universe upon which this whole scenario is based. The universe, in other words, could not always have been expanding. Its expansion must have had a beginning, and inflation — a particularly explosive form of cosmic expansion — must have had a beginning, too. By this logic, our universe also had a beginning since it was spawned by an inflationary process that is eternal into the future but not the past. 

Something From Nothing

A universe with a beginning begs the vexing question: Just how did it begin? Vilenkin’s answer is by no means confirmed, and perhaps never can be, but it’s still the best solution he’s heard so far: Maybe our fantastic, glorious universe spontaneously arose from nothing at all. This heretical statement clashes with common sense, which admittedly fails us when talking about the birth of the universe, an event thought to occur at unfathomably high energies. It also flies in the face of the Roman philosopher Lucretius, who argued more than 2,000 years ago that “nothing can be created from nothing.” 

Of course, Lucretius had never heard of quantum mechanics and inflationary cosmology, 20th-century fields that contest his bold claim. “We usually say that nothing can be created out of nothing because we think it would violate the law of conservation of energy,” a hallowed principle in physics holding that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, Vilenkin explains. So how could you create a universe with matter in it, where there had been nothing before?

“The way the universe gets around that problem is that gravitational energy is negative,” Vilenkin says. That’s a consequence of the fact, mathematically proven, that the energy of a closed universe is zero: The energy of matter is positive, the energy of gravitation is negative, and they always add up to zero. “Therefore, creating a closed universe out of nothing does not violate any conservation laws.” 

Vilenkin’s calculations show that a universe created from nothing is likely to be tiny, indeed — far, far smaller than, say, a proton. Should this minute realm contain just a smattering of repulsive-gravity material, that’s enough to ensure it will ignite the unstoppable process of eternal inflation, leading to the universe we inhabit today. If the theory holds, we owe our existence to the humblest of origins: nothing itself.

One virtue of this picture, if correct, is that the spontaneous creation of our universe gives a definite starting point to things. Time begins at the moment of creation, putting to rest the potentially endless questions about “what happened before that.” 

Yet the explanation still leaves a huge mystery unaddressed. Although a universe, in Vilenkin’s scheme, can come from nothing in the sense of there being no space, time or matter, something is in place beforehand — namely the laws of physics. Those laws govern the something-from-nothing moment of creation that gives rise to our universe, and they also govern eternal inflation, which takes over in the first nanosecond of time.

That raises some uncomfortable questions: Where did the laws of physics reside before there was a universe to which they could be applied? Do they exist independently of space or time? “It’s a great mystery as to where the laws of physics came from. We don’t even know how to approach it,” Vilenkin admits. “But before inflation came along, we didn’t even know how to approach the questions that inflation later solved. So who knows, maybe we’ll pass this barrier as well.”

In the Clint Eastwood movie Magnum Force, Harry Callahan says, “A man’s got to know his limitations,” but Vilenkin’s work is a testament to pushing past traditional limits. If we persevere in the face of skepticism and doubt, as Vilenkin is often inclined to do, interesting and unexpected ideas may well emerge — just like a universe popping out of nowhere.

Eliminating the Loopholes

Loophole #1

To bolster his hypothesis, Vilenkin has studied other model universes, eliminating loopholes that contradict the idea of a clear-cut cosmic debut. In a 2012 paper with Tufts graduate student Audrey Mithani, Vilenkin examined the “cyclic” universe investigated by physicists Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University and Neil Turok, now at the Perimeter Institute.

In this model, there is neither a single Big Bang nor a single beginning. Instead, the universe continually goes through oscillating cycles of expansion, contraction, collapse and expansion anew. The catch is that the cyclic universe runs into the second law of thermodynamics, which says the entropy, or disorder, of a closed system will inevitably increase over time. 

For example, an ornate brick mansion is highly ordered, whereas a pile of bricks strewn across the ground — the result of the ravages of nature and decades or centuries of neglect — is more disordered. And brick dust, scattered by wind and water after the bricks themselves have deteriorated, is even more disordered. Left on its own, a system — even a bubble universe — will naturally go this way. We don’t often see a brick mansion spontaneously reassembling itself from dispersed dust. 

If our universe has been here forever and maintained a stable size, it, too, would have succumbed to the second law. Disorder would have inexorably increased to the point that the universe would now be a smoothed-out, featureless blur. But that’s not what we see at all. Instead, we see a universe filled with grand cosmic structures — galaxies, clusters of galaxies, clusters of clusters called superclusters, and clusters of superclusters called galaxy filaments — some of the latter stretching a billion or more light-years across.

For that reason, Vilenkin rules out the cyclic universe picture unless one makes the added assumption that after each cycle of expansion and contraction, the universe ends up somewhat bigger than when it started. The stipulation would leave us with another expanding universe, meaning that the original Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem would still apply: An ever-expanding universe must have a single beginning.

Loophole #2

Another possible loophole is the “cosmic egg” scenario, a model universe advanced by South African cosmologist George Ellis, among others. According to this view, the universe can sit forever in a stable configuration, with a fixed size and radius, until it suddenly starts to expand — like an egg hatching after an exceptionally long incubation phase. 

The trouble with this proposition, according to Vilenkin and Mithani, is that the small “stable” universe is not so stable after all. Sometime during the long waiting phase it would collapse to nothingness, before it ever reached the expansionist period — that is, if the laws of quantum mechanics are to be believed. 

Quantum mechanics, the prevailing branch of physics for describing how things work on atomic scales, is exquisitely well-tested, and exquisitely weird. Quantum mechanics holds that if there is even the tiniest chance of something happening, however absurd it may sound, that thing is sure to happen if you wait long enough. 

As it turns out, quantum mechanical formulas predict a slim (but nonzero) chance of the cosmic egg universe collapsing to zero size, at which point the erstwhile universe would completely disappear. Given an infinite time span, which is what the cosmic egg scenario calls for, such a collapse would be unavoidable — even though the odds of it occurring at any one time are small — implying that the universe could not have existed forever.

Indeed, says Vilenkin, among all the ideas we’ve thought of so far for a universe without a beginning, none of them seem to work. “So the answer to the question of whether the universe had a beginning is yes, it probably did.”

[This article originally appeared in print as "Starting Point."] 

How Panentheism Differs from Other Theistic Systems of God + Creation

How Panentheism Differs from Other

Theistic Systems of God + Creation

December 8, 2018

Panentheism (not pantheism, look it up) states God and creation are deeply and essentially related. I usually think of creation as the fourth member of the trinity sans the God-part. This speaks to the sublime idea of intrinsic fellowship where each finds identity in the other, defines the other, gives purpose and meaning to the other.

Asked in another way, does God and His creation depend on each other? Yes. Do each need each other? Yes. Can either exist without the other? No. Now this is not how traditional theism would answer each question. In fact, quite the reverse in its severe separation between God and creation where there is a deep uncrossable divide between the Creator and the created thing.

However, from a panentheistic viewpoint the ontic relationship is honored - not lessened - as any theistic system would do. What is different is how panentheism wishes to heighten the idea of "relationship" between the Creator to His creation. Not remove it into the cold abyss of divine transcendency.

Divine Aloneness Might Be Correct, But It is Meaningless

As such, if we were to follow traditional theistic teachings to their conclusion then the Creator God of the cosmos becomes wholly unknown to creation, wholly removed from it, wholly Other to Himself alone. Divinely alone except to Himself - without relationship, connectedness, or meaning except to Himself alone. As a panentheist I am fine with such a statement. But I also find it empties God of His meaning to us. If He wished to be God alone then fine. But He didn't and created the cosmos and all that is in it. And when He did everything changed. He "expanded" Himself, shared Himself, revealed Himself. Why? Out of Love. This is the "relational theology" piece of relational-panentheism.

 

As corollary, theism then teaches the Godhead to be a meaningless, empty, absent, un-presence to His universe. Meaning, God becomes sufficiently unrelatable. Which isn't what the Bible teaches when it states the Divine Encounterer has Divinely Encountered His creation. That is, God revealed Himself. And when He did, He did so from the basis of Love, not secondary Decree. Why? Because God revealed His personage, His essence, His being, which is love. He could not do otherwise.

Thus, the Godhead's relationship to a created cosmos is based wholly on love. He did not will Himself to relate to us but came to us in the fullness of His divine Being as relationship, one built from love. Not displeasure, not control, not judgment, not selfishness. But of Love.

Which then explains the basic substance of the cosmos... that in all its parts and entities it is highly, complexly related to itself as it is relatable. This is the observation panentheism would make over the self-excluding, self-hiding, nuanced statements of traditional theism built upon Hellenistic thoughts of gods and godliness. It might be right, but it is not biblical in the sense that God has come and revealed Himself. And for this Christmas season... in Christ.

God as the Definition of All Things

But how can it be otherwise!? Because if creation isn't, then we aren't. It is by, and through, and from, God's love that we are, that we might become, that we find wholeness to one another and to our Creator. Essentially, God's "is-ness" gives to us our "are-ness". As significantly - and this is where panentheism comes back into play - "even... as... we give to God His "is-ness" and "are-ness". Not in ontic dependence as theism rightly describes, but in relational dependence, which makes all the difference to us, God's creation. Thus, both creation and Creator need each other, depend upon each other, find meaning and identity in each other. It takes away the cold idea that God doesn't need us and only deigns to be present with us when He arbitrarily chooses. I'd rather have a God that is near because He is near, and present, and working with creation in all its aspects.

To argue idealized Greek philosophies of divine transcendence, of wholly Otherness, of divine purpose without object or subject to love, only teaches a God whom we can never know as Father-God, Redeemer, Lord, or Savior. These are specious church arguments which would separate us from our God - not bring to us a God who needs His creation deeply or is part of His creation essentially.

Now this should blow your mind up, if not dissettle your very soul. Bam! Say again!? Bam! It's like seeing color for the first time in a black-and-white world of theology! Restated another way, "Creation is not an unimportant thing to God." It is not a mere insect or meaningless grammatical insert or conditional side-effect of grace. Creation is of God as God is integrally "related to" it. 

Panentheism is therefore different from cold classic theism too focused on separating creation from God in clever syllogisms of wit or theological bombasity. God should never be thought so easily removed from us, so easily separated from His creation, or made so unlike who He is. This is the meaning of "I AM" when God declares "who He is". He is - not simply all-sufficient within Himself (though not denied) - but in "necessary cosmic RELATIONSHIP" to creation.

 

God is the God of Relationships

This latter idea then gives to God His definitive "am-ness" to creation - otherwise He is without meaning to us. It's easy to say we aren't in classical theism while God is - but it is not correct. If we aren't then God isn't - not in His ontic Being but in His essential role as Creator-God. 

For us, there is no God unless we are. But why would we be wrong to think otherwise? Because in traditional theology (if not logic itself) it sounds more profound to make God so great as to unlink Him from a creation He is forever tied to. The real profundity is that God is great because He is forever interlocked with creation. Forever bound to creation. Forever become a deep, deep part of creation. Not so with the Greek gods of mythology who treated men with scorn and disdain. Who, for purposes of defeating other competing gods, titans, or forces, ruthlessly used mankind.

The God of the Bible is never this. Never.

The God of the Bible is always present essentially, fully, and substantially bound to all that is. This is what stands behind the idea of "relational" panentheism. It is the fourth and last model drawn in the diagram below and distinctly different from all previous versions of panentheism which has preceded it. More so, relational panentheism is based upon "open and relation process theology." Which is why I've taken such pains over the years to describe what ORT is and means to us today.

The importance, or import, of this position is that it always tells us God is there for us. That He is in every moment recreating a broken creation in every possible way back to Himself as we allow Him. Thus Jesus, and thus the import of God's "Christmas" Advent to creation, which He entered into with Creation so purposefully, so personally. We call this moment of cosmic entrance God's divine incarnation who, born as man, paradoxically, was fully God even as He was fully man.

God's Advent into Creation

It was therefore at this first advent of the Spirit-God in a fleshly, physical, earthy presence in which we beheld God as Love beyond the words, statements, descriptions, visions, or actions of biblical narratives. This is who Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah is. Not a mere babe, nor mere man, but the God man - fully relatable, fully loving, fully suffering, fully tormented - in a world He must come to in the entirety of His Being. The Wholly Other is Here. And this makes all the difference in a world which would deny God's "Here-ness" not only spiritually, but physically in holy presence. I submit then that if it were not so then life isn't life, gives no hope, and loses its veracity in the absence of God.

Lastly, I leave the section in John below to finish my thoughts. Thank you.

R.E. Slater

December 7, 2018

https://biblehub.com/nasb/john/1.htm

1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. 4In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. 5The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

Describing Relational, Process-based, Panentheism

For myself and other process theologians creation is all about its relational existence, inter- and intra-mutuality, harmony, purposeful missiology, and any other -ology you can find as divinely driven stripped of all non-relational, isolating, excluding, others-denying versions of cosmology, anthro-pology, or creational aspects advocating the importance of individuality over group-awareness, connectedness, holistic teleology, or intrinsic wholeness to the other.

What follows is an explanation of the process-idea of panentheism emphasizing the "relationality" of creation to itself as a complexly networked "organic body" co-creating life together; empowering its future through allied mutualities; learning to listen to one another in transformational curiosity and imagination; and, exciting diverse and multiple possibilities for enrichment in supportive, mutual arrangements of sharedness of self to the other and the other to very life itself in empowering constructs and relationships. This is what we think might explain the universe we live in, depend upon, and must more fully appreciate in its majestic beauty and severe struggle of daily evolution continually creating new possibilities.

R.E. Slater

December 8, 2018

Panentheism: The Universe as God's Body

by Jay McDaniel
December 7, 2018

​Panentheism is the idea that everything in the universe is part of God but that God is more than everything added together. This way of thinking can be especially important to people with ecological sensibilities, because they can combine faith in God with a love of people, animals, and the earth. They can say that living with respect and care for the community of life is one way of contributing to God's own life and also that God is in some way in the community of life itself: on the earth, in the soil, in plants and other animals, and in us. Here God is not so far away, as if on a throne in the sky.

Two forms of panentheism

There are many forms of panentheism across the world's traditions. In the West one can be found in the philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). He sees the universe as a direct emanation of God's activity, such that everything that happens around us and within us is the outcome of a single divine activity. The hills and rivers, the trees and stars, our innermost feelings and decisions, are all God godding. We can call this emanationist panentheism.

​The other can be found in the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. He sees the universe and God as within each other and thus parts of each other, but also more than each other. The hills and rivers, trees and stars, and our feelings and decisions have their independence and integrity, even as God is also present in us and we in God. We can call this relational panentheism. Whereas emanationist panentheism has one creative power, relational panentheism has multiple creative powers.

A Multi-Religious Option

Both forms of panentheism have their wisdom. Both can help people live with respect and care for the community of life, finding wholeness within themselves and helping to build communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, ecologically wise, with no one left behind. And both can be internalized and enriched by insights and practices from the many world religions. You can be a Jewish panentheist, a Christian panentheist, a Muslim panentheism, a Hindu panentheist, and so on. Panentheism is a multi-religious option.

In what follows, then, I want to say a word about Whitehead's relational panentheism, often called "process philosophy" or "process theology." It has been developed by Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist thinkers in rich ways, some of whom are featured on this website. See, for example, Rabbi Bradley Artson's God Almighty? No Way!, or Bruce Epperly's Where is God in Alzheimer's Disease?, or John Cobb's Where is God in Earthquakes?, or Monica Coleman's Making a Way of No Way, or Patricia Adams Farmer'sThe Quaking and Breaking of Everything Many people find Whitehead's perspective particularly plausible because it is influenced by insights from science (early quantum theory, in particular) even as it is shaped by ethics, art, and religion, and because it helps us deal honestly with the question of how belief in God can be reconciled with the realities of tragedy and suffering.

 

Co-creativity without an absolute beginning

In explicating relational panentheism, I would say that we should start at the beginning, but from a process perspective there is no beginning. Process theologians believe that the universe unfolds in a beginningless and endless series of cosmic epochs, each lasting billions of years; and they see God as the encompassing life in whom the universe unfolds. Everything affects God all the time, and God is continuously present in the universe as an active influence; and yet the influence is that of compassion not coercion, of love not one-sided power. Process theologians speak of God as creator, but by that they mean that God creates the universe through love, and they recognize that the universe creates itself, too, as it responds and does not respond to God. Thus process theologians affirm the co-creativity of God and the universe.

The universe is the body of God

One way to further understand panentheism in process theology is to say the universe is the body of God. For process theologians the universe is not the body of God in the sense that everything that happens in the universe is a result of divine agency, but rather in the sense that God feels the happenings of the universe much like we feel the happenings in our own bodies: that is, as inside us yet more than us.

How can this be understood? We can compare the universe to an embryo within a womb of a mother, with God as the mother and the universe as the developing embryo. With this in mind the analogy of embryo within a womb is apt in three ways.

God does not and cannot exercise one-sided power

​First, the embryo has its own life, which means that things can happen in its unfolding that cannot be controlled by the mother. Similarly, say process theologians, things can and do happen in the universe, by virtue of the creativity of the universe itself, which cannot be controlled by God. This is how process theologians explain the tragedies of our world, both natural and humanly made. Cancer and murder, tsunamis and rapes, are not the product of divine agency, but the result of the power and creativity of the world itself. This creativity, already introduced in the core of this essay, is neither good nor evil in itself, but can unfold in many different ways, some tragic and some beautiful. God is an instance of this creativity, but not the only instance. All creatures in the world – including cancer cells and murderers – embody it, too.

God is the deep listening of the universe

Nevertheless, and second, what happens in the embryo is felt by the mother and is part of her. Similarly, say process theologians what happens to each entity in the universe – to every human being – is felt by God and affects God. This is how process theology begins to talk about prayers in which a person addresses God as a Thou and not an It. When humans address God, they often sense that their prayers are being received into a deeper listening as the prayer occurs, and that the listener who listens is affected by the prayer. Process theologians agree. God is the deep listening of the universe.

For many people, of course, the question is how God answers prayers. For process theologians God does not and cannot answer prayers by manipulating situations in a unilateral way; but the very act of praying can alter the situation of the one praying and also the ones prayed for, such that God is better able to act in their lives. It is important to emphasize, though, that petitionary prayer is but one kind of prayer, and also that prayer as understood in this way is one instance of the more general idea that all the experiences of all living beings – whether happy or sad, constructive or destructive – affect God and become part of God as they occur. No one suffers alone.

God is the spirit of creative transformation at work in the world

Third, the analogy of the universe within the womb of a Mother rightly suggests that God is active in the world in a non-coercive but perpetually influential way. In the case of a mother in pregnancy, this activity takes the form of amniotic fluid which nourishes the developing embryo and perhaps also the attitude of the mother. In the case of God, this activity takes the form of creative and energizing possibilities, which represent the way in which God is immanent in the universe, even as the universe is also immanent within God.

Needless to say, this image of God as mother and the universe as a womb can be controversial to at least two sets of people: very traditional Christians for whom male imagery of God is the only relevant imagery and feminist Christians who want to avoid stereotyping women as finding their fulfillment in, and only in, pregnancy. The good news among process-oriented Christians is that there are many feminist Christians who help critique these stereotypes and who offer alternative images.

Needless to say this image of God as mother and the universe as a womb can be controversial to at least two sets of people:people for whom male imagery of God is the only relevant imagery and those who want to avoid stereotyping women as finding their fulfillment in, and only in, pregnancy. The good news among process-oriented theologians is that there are many feminists who help critique these stereotypes and who offer alternative images. But the image of God as mother is indeed challenging to more traditional Christians, and this challenge, on the part of process theologians, is in some ways very intentional.

 

 

God is not a policeman in the sky

Process theologians employ such images in order to provide a constructive alternative to an image of God which too often dominates the monotheistic imagination. We might call it the externalist perspective, because it imagines God as completely external to the world; or the unilateralist perspective, because it sees God’s power as one-sided or unilateral and thus capable of molding the world according to divine will; or simply the patriarchal perspective, because it imagines God on the analogy of a powerful male ruler who wields power but is not empathic. On this view the relation of God to the world is analogous to that of a Potter and pot that he is molding. The Potter is external to the pot and the pot’s destiny is largely determined by the will and power of the Potter.

Process theologians in the Christian tradition reject this image of God the Potter. They think God is more loving and that the ministry of Jesus is one place where this love can be seen. For many Christians the image of a parent and child is much more relevant than that of a potter and pot. This is the beauty of envisioning God as Father or Mother. Process theologians understand and appreciate this preference for parental imagery but then add that, in an authentic Christian life, there is no need for Christians to always understand themselves as children in God’s presence. It is all right to be an adult in God’s presence, too, and thus to add one’s own voice to the ongoing life of God. This is the wisdom of the Psalms, where so often the Psalmist laments or protests, sometimes against God. For process theologians there is something right about this approach to God. It allows human beings to share with God the whole of their lives and to own their own feelings.

God is love

Still, it remains the case that, for process theologians, the ultimate nature of God is love. From a process perspective love has two sides: (1) an empathic side which listens to others and is affected and changed by what is heard and felt and (2) an active side which responds to what is listened to by providing possibilities for well-being. Jesus showed these two sides of love in countless ways: by listening to others and sharing in their suffering; by taking delight in the faith of others and the innocence of children; by comforting the afflicted, especially those who were despised by others; and by afflicting the comfortable, especially those who thought they were better than others. At the end of his life he also revealed a non-violent side of love by dying on a cross rather than responding to violence with violence. In these various activities he showed that a life of love is flexible and improvisational. It does not follow a perfectly scripted blueprint, because it realizes that each new situation requires a slightly different response. In seeking to walk in love, Jesus seems to have realized that each moment has its calling.

God acts through fresh possibilities

In process theology the callings of the moment are called the “initial aims.” These initial aims are the callings of the moment to which Jesus was responsive in his way. They differ from moment to moment, but always they are for the well-being of life relative to the situation at hand. The phrase “initial aims” is not especially melodious, but it does use a word that is very important to process theologians. The word “initial” is meant to suggest that God’s callings are present in the beginning of each moment of experience at an unconscious but powerful level. They consist of possibilities which people can actualize and they also contain within them the felt hope that they will be actualized.

For process theologians this felt hope belongs both to God and to the person. Thus the aims of God within human life are God’s hopes for the person but also the person’s hope for himself or herself. These aims are for the well-being of life, but the nature of well-being can change from one moment to the next. There is a time to laugh and a time to cry, a time to work and a time to play, a time to be awake and a time to sleep. In our waking moments, though, these aims are always for wisdom, compassion, harmony, and creativity. If we seek a single word to describe values such as these, some process theologians use the word “beauty.” Thus we can say that God’s lure within human life is a lure toward richness of experience, toward beauty.

The multiplicity and diversity of the universe enriches God's life

Even as God is at work in human life luring each person toward richness of experience, God is also present in the rest of the universe doing the same. On our small planet, the presence of God is found in plants and animals as they seek to survive with satisfaction relative to the situation at hand. To say that they seek to survive with "satisfaction" is to suggest that there is something like experience, and like an aim to be satisfied, in non-human life as in human life.

Process theologians believe this. Whitehead believed that there is something like "feeling" or "experience" all the way down into the depths of matter, and that other forms of life seek their own well-being, their own enjoyment. The lure toward richness of experience is in them as in us, and we rightly live honoring that lure, doing our best to live lightly on the planet and gently with other animals, for their sake and for God's sake. This very way of living adds beauty to the ongoing life of God, who likewise seeks richness of experience.

God's own experience is depleted by a diminution of diversity on our planet, as is our own. And God's experience is enriched by its enhancement. To struggle against global climate change, to protect animals from abuse, to safeguard wilderness areas, to develop green cities and strong rural communities -- all of this is oriented, not only toward the well-being of life on earth, but also the well-being of the Life in whom the world unfolds. Diversity and multiplicity, love and justice, are God's glory. This glory does not belong to a vain ruler who resides on a throne in the sky. It belongs to the whole of it, the universe itself, as unfolding within One in whom the world "lives and moves and has its being." (Acts 17:28). A One who is also a Many.