Time Immortal

He’s been reading Cicero again. And, being a science fiction author, finds a way to relate it to modern cosmological theories and, in particular, Stephen Hawking’s hypothesis about time and space.

Stephen Hawking asks us to imagine the universe as a four-dimensional plane through which a four-dimensional sphere is passing. The first moment of contact between this hypersphere and hyperplane is the Singularity: as the sphere intersects the plane, the dot becomes a small circle becomes a larger circle, which represents our timespace continuum suffering Hubble expansion.

For Hawking, there is no such thing as before the Big Bang because timespace is represented by the expanding circle. One cannot speak of one second before the Big Bang any more than one can speak of one inch to further north of the North Pole.

The paradoxes of a cause of the first cause still exist in Hawking’s image, merely at one remove. If the hypersphere is drifting through the unimaginable medium of inter-cosmic nonbeing, what set it in motion? If there is such a thing as the state of being closer and farther from the hyperplane it eventually intersects, then there is something like time, or some sort of sequence of events. Where did this hyper-objects come from and how were they set in motion?

It answers nothing to say that these events proceed from no cause, because to assert that something comes from nothing undermines not merely science, but reason itself.

(However, let me suggest that a distinction can be made between Boethius’ answer and Hawking’s, because Boethius has a metaphysical underpinning to his answer that Hawking lacks. Hawking cannot explain how a natural event arose from a condition of pre-universe non-being-ness where nature had no laws because it did not exist. For a natural universe to arise from a non-natural pre-universe by a natural and mechanical process of physics is a paradox. The law that ‘Nothing Comes from Nothing’ cannot arise from nothing. For Boethius, however, a Necessary Being can perform an intelligent and deliberate act of will to create a universe where cause and effect can rule, without itself being bound by mechanical causation. The Creator of a universe can write into the foundations of that universe that ‘Nothing Comes from Nothing’ without Himself being bound by that law. There is no paradox to postulate a Supreme Being with the ability to create ex nihilo a large arena of timespace in which nothing can be created ex nihilo. To use an analogy, Susan Calvin of US Robots and Mechanical Men does not herself need to be bound by Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.)

I’ve often wondered why I find this sort of thing fascinating, but there it is, and I love it. Wright has brilliance to spare, and is a prime example of the sheer philosophical power that erupts from a marriage of Catholic insight to cosmological analysis.

Inigo Montoya’s phrasing just never gets old, does it? In this particular case, I’m applying it to a list of 20 “reasons” why evolution and the Bible are not compatible, published by Apologetics Press. The list seems, at first, to be quite persuasive…but as will become obvious, it should only be persuasive to those who know very little about both evolution and about the Bible.

I confess that such lists amuse me, if only because they again prove right the Augustinian teaching that “[u]sually, even a non-Christian knows something about the Earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the Sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men…. Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by these who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

Most lists of this nature are comprised of entries that reduce to one (or both) of two basic fallacies: ignorance of Scripture or ignorance of science. As we move through the list, then O Reader, let’s see if we can spot which error is the more prominent in each entry.
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…just like sometimes we do not. None of us is perfect, and some of them make legitimate points.

But, their indoctrination is not different than ours, so if we are wrong to do it by their standards, then they ought not to, as Ken rightly notes. And if pursuing the truth is a worthy ultimate aim, the aim expressed in the article of using “all the tools of science and humanity” is good, if incomplete in its application because it denies some basic parts of humanity and is not ’science’.

A short response to a few of the dumber statements concerning that summer camp for skeptics:

“It seems kind of like an accident almost, like the Big Bang that created the universe was an accident…It was a beautiful mistake or something.”

Aside from the multiple uses of subjunctive or probabilistic phrasing, the thought behind this is interesting. To think that the Big Bang (or, whatever the physicalist will call the originating moment of the universe, be it the explosion or the proximal excitement of quantum fields before the explosion or whatever first cause they posit) was an accident or a mistake indicates a few possibilities. First, that the claimant is of the opinion that, despite the flawed nature of humanity and our understanding of the universe, that somehow the origin of the universe was somehow wrong. This is very presumptuous and puts the claimant in a “god’s point of view” or an onmiscient third party position. That any human is not knowledgable of all the knowledge humanity knows let alone all that is knowable and can never fully detach oneself from the first person persepective undercuts this possibility if one is to be rational.*

Another possibility is that the claimant, in a similar fashion to the above, can distinguish random chance from other possibilities. Other than the presumption, given that, when tested, people generally can not generate truly random sequences of coin tosses (perhaps experts in statistics can) it is improbable that humans can determine whether the confluence of variables, that we theists sometimes call anthropic principles, which operate in the origin and continuation of the universe are random or not. By what methodology can we, for example, determine whether the explosive force at Planck time (which, if fractionally more or less powerful, would not have resulted in the universe) was random. I know of none, but to claim our existence a result of chance we would have to be able to have such a methodology and test it, as we can with coins, if we are to be rational.*

“but the thrust of the camp is to teach children to think skeptically about everything, including Religion and the supernatural.”

But not science or the human intellect it would seem. To be a true skeptic, whether Academic or Pyhronhic, one must doubt the truth of anything that can be doubted. A classic example is Descartes‘ First Meditation in which the agent is unable to trust the workings of his mind or her senses. The only truth that remains is that the agent exists because he exists if his thinking is true and she exists if her thinking is false because in either case the agent is thinking something. If they do become true skeptics, they, technically, would not fear anything, including stepping in front of a bus, since they can not trust their senses.

What the camp is actually doing is training them to think, at best, empirically and, more likely, scientistically. They are supposed to trust their senses and only those statements issued by the senses are to be held as true, so long as they can be tested by others. Personal experiences, such as the presence of God as He forgives, heals, unites, or feeds an agent are not acceptable because they are not testable.

Thus, the author is not well versed in the actual meanings of words as opposed to their colloquial misuse.

“People are like, ‘Oh, fossils are planted and they aren’t really real’…Well, if the whole theory of evolution is just like a ruse or a prank, we’ve done a really good job. We’re really good at pranking people.”

Ad hominem. The article later seems to pick on Catholics a little bit and Christians in general, but the Catholic magisterium and many well educated Christians across denominational lines recognize the legitimacy of evolution. That all theists are grouped together under “people” is very disingenuous of the camp leaders and the author as it places the weakest position in theism (both scripturally/theologically and scientifically) as representative.

“As soon as someone mentions faith in an argument, the argument is over,” says 15-year-old Ryan Lee, who skipped high school and is entering his junior year of college in Arizona. “Faith and the scientific method can’t be combined in the same argument.”

So, the scientist’s argument is over once he admits to his faith in the empirical process or in the veracity of his sense experience? And why does faith end an argument? Is faith always right? Does it invalidate everything else said? And does faith need to be used or merely mentioned? If I say “Socrates was a man, men are mortal, God is good, thus Socrates is mortal” is my argument unsound or invalid?

Why is a junior in college going to summer camp? And, does the fact that he is a junior mean that his statements are more sound? Does having a doctorate mean that someone is more intelligent than someone else? Or simply more prosperous and educated? If he is speaking outside of his experience and education, he is no better than anyone else.

Well, if we grant that the universe is random chance (which seems unlikely) then from where do we get our assumption that the universe is such that we can study it and yeild fruitful results? Such results are less likely to be found in a universe ruled by chance (and by chance, I do not mean the indeterminacy of, say, quantum physics in which the specific outcome of event X is unknown but its probability is known, but where indeterminacy is more broadly and deeply present — QM still has a sense of order, but not determinacy) than in an ordered universe. Can “God orders the universe” be a sound assumption in a scientific process? I think so. Thus, science and faith can coexist in an argument.

“Bupp says polls show that people who believe in reason, not God, are among the fastest growing groups in America. And this camp is designed to teach children to investigate and question everything. They study fossils, they learn about Morality without religion, they meet an expert who debunks mysteries like weeping icons and ghosts and crop circles.”

Hmmm…God in Christ is Logos - Reason - made flesh. Why do ‘rational’ people seem to think that God and reason are, and only can be, mutually exclusive? Should they be skeptical of dichotomies? If they are skeptical about everything, then yes. But, they are not skeptics, only scientistics.

Also, if ’skeptics’ are among the fastest growing groups, a) are, say, Muslims growing faster? but more importantly, b) a group growing from 10k to 20k or 100k to 200k or 1m to 2m may be growing at a rate of 100% in the time period, but if Christians were to grow at that rate, they would go from ~240m of a 300m population to 480m of a 300m population. Theists can not grow as fast because they are a supermajority of the population. But they may grow 5m members for every 1m skeptics. They are still growing bigger.

Again, do they question their senses or the scientific method?

Also, what sort of morality? Utilitarianism, which objectifies people? Kant’s deontology? But why should I follow what reason tells me or what the utlity calculus prescribes? From where does anything other than me get worth?

Yeah, weeping icons and crop circles are so the same thing. And ghosts and cropcircles are believed in by all theists. Just because a scientific explanation can be given for something does not mean that that something is not mysterious. An icon that weeps a red-purple chemical due to a reaction of parts of its composition with water does not explain why the water and the parts reacted on, say, the feast day of the figure described in the icon on which the country the figure is a patron for was brutally attacked by an enemy.

“As an educator, I like to teach critical thinking at a deep and erudite level, because it’s not embedded in the curriculum as much as I’d like to see,” McQuaig says. “And this provides a place for kids to talk about deep questions that many into adulthood don’t even consider and contemplate.” Are they trying to create little atheists? “Absolutely not!” McQuaig says. “We want to create little thinkers. Little thinkers that explore their own capacity and the external world, with all of the tools of science and humanity. That’s why we’re here.”

I am all for deeper and more erudite education. But when students in the age group of the camp sometimes have trouble finding the answers to questions like “what was the French reaction to the American Revolution” in a short text that reads, in part, “The French saw the advancement of liberty in America and decided to fight for it” there is, perhaps, a reason, especially with our currently mainstreamed educational practice, to have a ‘dumbed down’ curriculum.

Oh, and why is ’skepticism’ or empiricism automatically assumed as the only legitimate form of deeper and more erudite education? Questions like “What happens after death?”, “What is and why should I be good?”, “Why am I here?”, “What is the ultimate nature of the universe?”, “Who am I?” are routinely addressed, at least in my experience, in religious schools before students reach adulthood. Again, why assume science = thinking? Is not faith a “tool of humanity”?

“As soon as they read Richard Dawkins,” he counters, “I win.”

How? I could just as easily say “As soon as they read Thomas Aquinas, I win.” but it is not nearly so simple.

“If God really, really wanted us to know he existed, he’d make daily appearances: Like ‘It’s 3:15. Oh, it’s God time!’”

Well, it is all His time, but…how can one know that the gentleman who helped you pick up your groceries or the lady who offered a comforting smile on the bus was not God mimicking a human being or a human being representing god through his or her own agency? Why do some need the whiz-bangery of miraculous appearances to even begin to contemplate God’s existence?

Why be scared of not existing? As the ancient Epicureans postulated, you are not there to miss yourself after you are dead. And budding philosophers would know something is askew with the arguments they are using, if not to my detail (which may be completely wrong) or my conclusion.