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Topics / Faith and God

The challenge

“The universe came from nothing by chance”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

Chance didn't make the universe, because chance can't make anything. Chance isn't a cause. It's a word for odds, and zero things times any odds is still zero things. Second, the nothing in the popular physics books isn't nothing. It's a quantum vacuum with fields and laws. The philosopher of physics David Albert said exactly that when he reviewed Lawrence Krauss's book in the New York Times. Third, look at the settings. The astronomer Martin Rees counted six numbers that had to land just so for a universe like ours. I look at that and see intention, not a lucky roll. That's my inference, and I'll stand on it. You'll ask who made God. Whatever begins needs a cause, and God never began. Let me ask you this. Where did the laws of physics come from? Nothing has no ingredients, no recipe and no oven.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. The nothing in popular physics books is a quantum vacuum with fields and laws. That is a lot of something.

    In his 2012 New York Times review of Lawrence Krauss's A Universe from Nothing, philosopher of physics David Albert argued that relativistic quantum fields are not nothing, and that the book does not explain where the laws and fields come from.

  2. Chance doesn't do anything. It describes odds among things that already exist. And the finely set numbers of physics look to me like intention, which is an inference, not a measurement.

    Astronomer Martin Rees argued in Just Six Numbers that six physical constants had to be finely set for a universe like ours to exist.

  3. Serious physics points to a universe with a beginning. A beginning raises the question of a cause.

    In 2003 Borde, Guth and Vilenkin showed that a universe which has on average been expanding cannot be extended infinitely into the past; its past has a boundary. It is a classical result, and physicists debate how quantum gravity might affect it.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: In quantum mechanics, things like radioactive decay happen without any determining cause. So maybe the universe just happened too.

Nate: Radioactive decay is unpredictable in its timing. But it happens to an atom that already exists, inside fields that already exist, under laws that already exist. That's uncertainty inside something. It isn't something coming from nothing.

What he grants the other side

Physics hasn't settled what happened at the very first moment.

The lines

Sources

  1. Lawrence M. Krauss, Free Press, A Universe from Nothing (2012)
  2. David Albert, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, On the Origin of Everything (2012)
  3. Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, Alexander Vilenkin, Physical Review Letters, Inflationary Spacetimes Are Incomplete in Past Directions (2003)
  4. The Bible, Genesis 1:1 (ancient)
  5. Martin Rees, Basic Books, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe (2000)

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