Salvaging the Past Eternal

In WLC 2 – Cosmological Argument (“God Did It”), I wrote about Craig’s Argument from First Cause, focussing more on where he goes with assumption that the universe has a beginning rather than on that assumption itself.  In A Little Expansion on the Lightness of Fine-Tuning, I presented a perspective in which the expansion of the universe is time (that is not a typo, I mean “is time” not “with time”).

Now I understand that not everyone will be on-board with the idea that what we perceive as time is the expansion of the universe, so just take what follows as an explanation as to why I personally reject Craig’s claim that the universe began with the Big Bang (or if he’s sufficiently honest with himself, shortly before the Big Bang).

If universal expansion is time, then it would seem to make sense that if you ran everything backwards, you’d see the universe shrinking from its current size back to about something the size of a grapefruit.  There wouldn’t be a constant speed of shrinkage though, because the rate of expansion of the universe is inversely proportional to the age of the universe.  You’d see the shrinkage increasing in speed as you wound the clock back, right up until you got to the grapefruit and then … nothing.

Now, when I say “nothing”, I don’t mean that the grapefruit would have sprung into existence and if you continued winding the clock back there’d be nothing.  Remember that expansion of the universe is time, so if there is no universe there would be no time to wind back on the metaphorical clock.  Instead what I mean is that the universe would still be there, grapefruit sized and you could "wind the clock back" as far as you liked and the grapefruit would be there.

The expansion that we see in the universe is due to the fact that expansion is retarded around concentrations of mass-energy (we call this phenomenon “gravity”).  If the universe was not lumpy, but smooth instead, the expansion would be impossible to see – not only because we would not be here to see it, but because our rulers would be expanding at the same rate as the rest of the universe and the universe would always be a given number of cubic ruler lengths in size.  Time would still exist, since we’d still be expanding, but time as well would be impossible to detect – if the universe is smooth, there’d be no appreciable difference between moments.  Time would only become meaningful once change manifested, such as during an event such as the one that led to the Big Bang (let’s call it the Before Big Bang Event – 3BE).

So, sure, it makes sense to consider time as originating at 3BE and ignore all time before that, but it does not mean that time (or rather expansion) really commenced at that event.

I posed a puzzle in Hugging the World which may not have appeared to have been particularly relevant at the time.  In the answer (in the comments) Hausdorff and I note that if you increase the radius of a circle by 1 unit, you increase the circumference by 2π units.  This works if the units are attometres (very small) or exametres (very big).  In fact, you could take a circle of radius 1 attometre and increase the radius by 1 metre changing the circumference from about 6.283x10^-18m to about 6.283m.  To all intents and purposes, the expanded circle has a radius of 1m and it is as if there hadn’t been an original circle at all.

The expansion of the universe is analogous, it might not be strictly true to say that there was no time before 3BE, but to all intents and purposes it makes no difference if we assume there wasn’t.  Well, that is apart from a minor problem we get with this sort of flexibility, which is the fact that people like Craig come along and try to poke their gods into the very tiny gap.

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If you don’t like my argument, you are welcome to try Victor Stenger’s (he has the benefit of being a published physicist).  Alternatively you can look at the document on which Craig hangs his argument (at least in his debates).  Note that the authors don’t draw the same conclusion that Craig does, they write:

What can lie beyond this boundary? Several possibilities have been discussed, one being that the boundary of the inflating region corresponds to the beginning of the Universe in a quantum nucleation event. The boundary is then a closed spacelike hypersurface which can be determined from the appropriate instanton.

They merely mention the quantum nucleation event as one of the options.  There are several other possibilities some of which are described by Stenger.  In some of these there is a discontinuity at the 3BE, which in my model isn’t as extreme as for some of Stenger’s options.  In my model, it’s just the transition from a(n effectively) smooth universe to a lumpy universe – which might cause a bit of a bang, but does not require any change to the underlying processes.

Penrose's Conformal Cyclic Cosmology model is also worth a look.

Luke Barnes Decloaks a Bit More

In Luke Barnes (Partially) Decloaks, I discussed how Barnes has provided hints that he is a theist.   What he hadn’t previously done is provide anything conclusive on whether he is an apologist, or intentionally giving succour to apologists.  But in a recent, very short blog post, he has now done so.

When I say "very short", I mean really, really short.  Here it is (my emphasis):

A very interesting essay from Alex Vilenkin on whether the universe has a beginning and what this implies. If you want my opinion, "nothing" does not equal “physical system with zero energy”.

This was followed by a list of related articles written by Barnes (again, my emphasis)

Of Nothing

More Sweet Nothings

A universe from nothing? What you should know before you hear the Krauss-Craig debate

Did the Universe Have a Beginning? – Carroll vs Craig Review (Part 1)

When you search Vilenkin’s essay, you will find that he mentioned the word "nothing" eleven times, once in the section "Eternal Inflation" and ten times in the section "God's proof" (two are in footnote 18 which relates to this section).

So, of all that Vilenkin had to write, Barnes only objected to the section that contains an explicit defeater to William Lane Craig's cosmological argument from first cause:

Modern physics can describe the emergence of the universe as a physical process that does not require a cause.

Noting that this section leads inexorably to Vilenkin's conclusion in "An Unaddressable Mystery":

When physicists or theologians ask me about the BGV theorem, I am happy to oblige.  But my own view is that the theorem does not tell us anything about the existence of God.

And the objection that he raises?  Almost precisely the objection raised by William Lane Craig when discussing Lawrence Krauss' A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing:

Now that is absolutely fundamental to this claim by Lawrence Krauss. He ignores the philosophical distinctions between something and nothing, and says science is going to define these terms; it's going to tell us what nothing is. And what he winds up doing is not using the word nothing as a term of universal negation to mean not anything, he just uses the word nothing as a label for different physical states of affairs, like the quantum vacuum, which is empty space filled with vacuum energy, which is clearly not nothing as any philosopher would tell you. It is something. It has properties. It is a physical reality.

So what we have is a couple of physicists on one side, explaining how something can actually come from "nothing" and, on the other side, William Lane Craig and Luke Barnes quibbling about the definition of "nothing".  I'd actually add a few more physicists to the list, for instance Barnes' late nemesis Victor Stenger:

Suppose we remove all the particles and any possible non-particulate energy from some unbounded region of space. Then we have no mass, no energy, or any other physical property. This includes space and time, if you accept that these are relational properties that depend on the presence of matter to be meaningful.

While we can never produce this physical nothing in practice, we have the theoretical tools to describe a system with no particles.

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… many simple systems are unstable, that is, have limited lifetimes as they undergo spontaneous phase transitions to more complex structures of lower energy. Since “nothing” is as simple as it gets, we would not expect it to be completely stable. In some models of the origin of the universe, the vacuum undergoes a spontaneous phase transition to something more complicated, like a universe containing matter. The transition nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any external agent.

Note that the physicists have (at the very least) theoretical physics on their side, equations with data taken from observation and experiment to support their case.  William Lane Craig and his ilk, despite the support afforded to them by Barnes, have nothing more than pseudo-sophisticated wordplay and equivocation over the term "nothing" (together with hidden equivocation over the term "everything" - which in their argument means "everything with the exception of god").

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I'm pretty sure that I've made this point before, but it's worth making a few times.  In the article that Barnes addresses so briefly, Vilenkin provides a simple summary of the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) theorem, the same theorem that William Lane Craig calls on all the time (my emphasis):

Loosely speaking, our theorem states that if the universe is, on average, expanding, then its history cannot be indefinitely continued into the past. More precisely, if the average expansion rate is positive along a given world line, or geodesic, then this geodesic must terminate after a finite amount of time.

Sure, the universe is expanding now, and there are indications that that expansion is accelerating now.  But what about on average across the whole history of the universe?  It's possible that this expansion rate has been positive throughout, but it's also possible that it hasn't or that another assumption of the BGV doesn't hold (note the comment "their model avoids singularities because of a key difference between classical geodesics and Bohmian trajectories", the BGV relies on classical geodesics).  William Lane Craig never addresses these issues; he takes it as granted that the universe has always been expanding and, to extend him some credit, the Ali-Das model was only published relatively recently (but, retracting the credit, I don't actually expect Craig to ever acknowledge the difficulties that this model presents to his argument).