Creation and Contingency

Posted by JC Sanders | 3 comments

Would it be strange if I said that one of the people who helped to strengthen my faith in God is himself an atheist [1]? And that he strengthened my own mental “case for God” by attempting to weaken the case for a Creator? It might be accurate to say that Dr Hawking helped me to see the importance of a particular “way” which we can know that God exists by doing his best to disprove another “way.” This all happened about a year ago, and actually Hawking’s argument against the “Cosmological Argument” for God’s existence was exploded by both apologists and professional philosophers (not to mention the occasional physicist); nor was Hawking the first (or last) to make such claims, only to have them refuted. Leaving these refutations aside, I’d like to look at the hypothetical (if somewhat farcical) scenario in which the universe could create itself from nothing.

Suppose that the universe actually could come into existence without external cause. The next question which immediately arises in my own mind is, “If it can come into being without an external cause, then why can’t it drop back out of being without external cause?” A single particle which appears from nothing can just as easily disappear into nothing. The same might be said of a collection of particles, however they organize (or disorganize) themselves: yet we do not observe this kind of thing happening on a large scale. We do not, in fact, observe it happening on a small scale (say a star or nebula), since the only type of particle which effectively appears and disappears is the virtual particle, which acts as an exchange particle between two real particles (and even that requires the existence of fields which are generated by real particles). The claim, in any case, is that the universe as a whole (meaning the unimaginably large number of particles and their associated energies, momenta, fields, etc which comprise the universe) created itself from nothing.

What, indeed, is there to keep it from un-creating itself, from vanishing from existence? Surely not a merely that entropy must always increase, since a disappearing universe could also re-appear with a greater level of entropy. For that matter, entropy would also increase within this universe if new matter was constantly popping into existence in so many secondary “New Bangs.” We do not see new mass appearing throughout the cosmos, yet there is, after all, no reason why a second Big Bang couldn’t occur somewhere within our universe, if our universe really did come into existence from nothing. There are thus at least two observational problems with the claim that the universe could create itself from nothing: 1) the lack of secondary Big Bangs, and 2) the fact that the universe is still here, period [2].

These two problems point back to a common thing–that the universe itself is a contingent and not a necessary thing. It need not exist, and its existence is tenuous: both of which statements remain true regardless of whether or not the universe actually could create itself from nothing. Something from outside the universe Whose existence is not merely contingent but rather necessary must be acting to sustain the universe. In terms of quantum mechanics, the universe can be seen as a wave function (a claim made by Hawking, but popularized by Professor Quentin Smith) which must be constantly collapsed it it is to have definite existence. There must, therefore, be an Observer outside the universe to constantly collapse this wave function, lest the whole thing revert to “non-universe-ness” or lest it become at the very least an universe with ever different properties. In other words, there must be a Creator Who sustains the existence of the universe, which includes preventing additional “universes” from popping up inside our own universe.

That is to say, in his attempt to kick the feet out from under the “First Cause” argument, Hawking has only strengthened the contingency argument by giving it some meaning expressible in physical and not only philosophical terms. Professor Edward Feser once used the analogy of God as the musician (or orchestra) Who creates the music which is the universe. I would like to say that God is also the Divine Observer who keeps the universe’s wave function in a collapsed state. It is an admittedly flawed analogy, in that the regular scientist-observer cannot observe all the properties of the object he is observing; God can not only observe these, but control them.

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Footnote [1]  The image is taken by the Hubble telescope.

[2] In his own essay Cosmology: An Empirical Science? (republished as a chapter in his The Limits of a Limitless Science and Other Essays) the late Fr Stanley L Jaki notes that the uncertainty principle yields only a virtual universe. Such a universe would be

Similar to other virtual particles that can exist only within the time limit set by Heisenburg’s formula. But eve that existence assumes the existence of at least two real universes between which the virtual universe can act as an exchange particle. In other words, even in good physics, to say nothing of good philosophy of knowledge, the first step is truly real matter and not merely virtual matter or universe.

That is to say, a non-virtual universe cannot spring into being, no matter how short is the increment of time observation. Moreover, virtual particles are very short-lived. Thus, if we inhabit a virtual universe, the whole thing should be coming and going, with somewhat random properties each time it does so.

JC Sanders, OP is a cradle Catholic, and somewhat of a traditionalist conservative. He is currently a physics Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas, where he studies high-intensity laser-plasma interactions and Raman processes. He is a lay member of the Order of Preachers, with a three year commitment to the Order. He has been happily married since June of 2010. He has at times questioned – and more often still been questioned about – his Faith, but has never wandered far from the Church, nor from our Lord. “To whom else would I go?” His websites are Equus Nom Veritas and The Nicene Guys.