Cosmology, Theology, and Meaning

Tim Maudlin

Why are we here? I would like to discuss this from two perspectives. First, why are we gathered here in New Orleans, under the auspices of the Greer-Heard Forum, sponsored by the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, to discuss the topic of God and Cosmology? Why not, for example, God and Fluid Mechanics, or God and Macroeconomics, or God and the Electrical Conductivity Properties of Carbon Nanotubes, or God and . . . fill in with whatever paradigmatically scientific topic you would like here? Cosmology is the study of the cosmos, that is, the universe as a whole on the largest scales of space and time. We have made tremendous progress in the last century in this particular subject. The increase in our observational access to the large-scale structure of the universe in just the last two decades far exceeds that of all of humanity previously. Our basic theoretical understanding of cosmology found a firm footing in the General Theory of Relativity, and the particular topics of galaxy formation and the evolution of the observable universe since the Big Bang period have made spectacular strides in the last half century. Theology has not played any role in this progress, nor would one expect it to. If the audience here were interested in a clear and accessible presentation of the state of modern cosmology, we have on hand people splendidly adept at providing it. But that, of course, is not why we are here.

The second sense of the question calls out for capitalization: Why Are We Here? When so capitalized, the question seems to leave the precincts of science and enter the precincts of theology, or ethics, or morality, or philosophy. What is the purpose of my own existence, or of the existence of humanity as a whole, or of the other species, or of the earth as a whole, or of the solar system, or the galaxy, or the local cluster of galaxies, or, indeed, of the whole of material existence? What, after all, is the point of it all? And if it has no point, does it follow that our own life and efforts have no Meaning, with a capital “M?” Should we just curl up and wither away?

The scientific enterprise since at least Galileo has tended to either eschew questions such as these or to suggest a somewhat nihilistic answer. Galileo himself famously proposed a neat separation of scientific inquiry from religious text: “The Bible tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”^[1] Galileo insisted that one should not look for cosmological fact in Scripture: that just isn’t its purpose. One can see this as a self-serving gambit meant to preserve Galileo’s freedom of scientific inquiry from interference by the Church, which it was. But it can equally be taken as an attitude that might protect the presumed authority of Scripture from the corrosive effect of scientific discovery. If the Bible is understood as claiming to say how the heavens go, then it is vulnerable to being proven flatly inaccurate: the heavens just don’t go that way. As it turns out, the Vatican would have done better to take Galileo’s advice for its own sake rather than for his.

Sometimes, though, this proposed separation between scientific theory and questions of meaning and significance is breached from the other side. Steven Weinberg famously remarked, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” If one concludes from this that the universe as a whole is meaningless, and then, further, that our lives, as part of the universe, must be meaningless, then the scientific quest for understanding threatens to rob our lives of Meaning. Similar remarks could be made concerning morality too. From this perspective, it appears that a scientific account of the world, such as that provided by modern cosmology, is intrinsically antagonistic to a desire for Meaning and a foundation for morality.

At this point, we have introduced four or five players into our melodrama: scientific cosmology, Scripture, theology, and Meaning-cum-morality. I want to spend the rest of my time investigating the tensions, or lack of tensions, between these. I do not think that the relations are all that obvious, and believe that some of them are commonly misunderstood.

The most obvious tension—indeed, flat contradiction—is between scientific cosmology and Scripture, insofar as Scripture contains a cosmological account that could be taken literally. I will confine my remarks to the Bible since that is the only religious text I know very well. If we read the biblical account of both the creation and structure of the universe in the most obvious manner, we come to the conclusion that the entire material universe is about 6,017 years old (give or take a few centuries), with the earth at rest at the center. It was that tension that landed Galileo under house arrest and Dialogues on the Two Chief World Systems on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. But anyone who chooses to believe this account now is simply not interested in finding out about the structure and history of the universe. Literal interpretation of biblical cosmology is irreconcilable with scientific cosmology, and therefore, given the evidential base for scientific cosmology, irreconcilable with the actual structure of the universe.

Of course, few people whose primary interest is cosmology would choose to study the Scriptures in order to learn more about it: a trip to the planetarium would be more apt to such a person’s taste than a trip to the church. So, let’s just leave this direct conflict aside. What about the more indirect worry—that the scientific refutation of literally interpreted scriptural cosmology might undermine the authority of Scripture on the more central questions of Meaning and morality: what matters and how should we act?

If that’s the worry, then the immediate response is simple: the most direct threat to the authority of scriptural assertions about morality does not derive from scriptural assertions about cosmology; it derives from the scriptural assertions about morality. Some of what the Bible says about morality is as absurd and unacceptable as its cosmology. There is no need to multiply examples: it suffices to point out that the Bible reports God as explicitly condoning slavery, but only of foreigners (Leviticus 25:45–46). Fortunately, humanity has made moral progress just as much as it has made scientific progress. The condemnation and elimination of slavery was one of the great moral triumphs of humanity, and the scriptural acceptance of slavery undermines its pretense to infallible moral authority much more powerfully than any cosmological considerations could. The very same moral progress is evident today, as people awaken to the fact that human dignity is not dependent on sexual orientation, so the LGBT community should be afforded equal rights, rather than (as the Bible would have it) put to death.

For the moment, then, let’s leave Scripture aside entirely. I take it that the topic here is not intended to connect cosmological discovery directly to Scripture, but rather, to natural theology. Natural theology attempts to establish (or at least make plausible) the existence of a deity or somehow God-like entity through the use of reason and observation without reliance on faith. There have even been attempts to prove the existence of a deity through pure logic (such as Anselm’s “ontological proof”), but our understanding of the nature of logic has improved to the point where we now comprehend that this could not be possible. In any case, if purported purely logical proofs were our topic here, then no mention of cosmology would have been needed. Natural theology, in contrast, must invoke some input from nature. Biology has sometimes played this role via the seemingly intentional design of living organisms, but that also is not our chosen topic here. So, one sharp statement of the question before us is this: is there anything in the modern understanding of the large-scale structure of the universe that might scientifically suggest the existence of a God-like entity?

It is sometimes suggested that to answer this question, we don’t even need to consider the actual physical structure of the universe. Rather, one need only reflect on the nature of scientific evidence and scientific method. In a greatly simplified form, the idea is that science, by its nature, can only postulate natural causes, and a God would be (by definition) a super-natural cause, so science can’t possibly provide grounds for a theistic view. I have no sympathy for this sort of argument. It is easy to imagine empirical discoveries that would provide strong grounds for belief in a God-like entity, for example, a conscious entity that intentionally created the material world we inhabit. If the Apollo mission had found, on the moon, a polished granite monument with the Decalogue inscribed in Hebrew, that should give us pause. And similarly (but also differently!), if it were a copy of the Koran in Arabic, or the Vedas in Sanskrit. It is relatively easy to describe empirical findings that would upend our overall scientific picture of the world, including making the existence of a God-like entity plausible.

Our first question, then, is whether any actual empirical discoveries of cosmology are of this nature—somehow suggestive of a sort of entity completely unlike those postulated by contemporary physics and similar in some way to the traditional conception of God. I will take up this question presently. But there is a second, even more important, question I want to address. Suppose, contrary to what I will argue, there were empirical evidence of this kind, evidence of (say) a conscious and intentionally acting creator of the entire familiar physical world. Suppose empirical inquiry does not, in fact, turn out the way I will argue it is turning out. (After all, who knows what the future will bring?) What significance would such a discovery have for the problems of Meaning and morality, for the questions of what matters and how we should act? I will argue that the significance would be essentially none at all. That is, even if natural theology succeeded in arguing from empirical evidence for the existence of a god (in the sense just given), that would make no difference at all with respect to these other questions. So, if your real concern pertains to these other questions, if the reason you are reading this now, is not out of an intrinsic interest in cosmology per se, but rather, because you suspect that cosmological findings may have some ramifications for questions of Meaning and morality and how we ought to live our lives, I want to convince you that you are mistaken.

The second question is the more important of the two because if questions of the existence of a God-like entity are unrelated to questions of Meaning and morality, then much of the supposed friction between cosmology and everyday concerns evaporates. Not, mind you, because cosmology must be irrelevant to theology, but rather, because theology is irrelevant to matters of Meaning and morality. To put the point succinctly, even a god could not legislate either moral fact or Meaning into existence. If there are moral and immoral, just and unjust, ways to act, they have that status, irrespective of whether any cosmological God exists. If our lives ultimately have no Meaning, even a god cannot invest them with one. Perhaps God’s own existence seems pointless to Him as well. And conversely, if our lives and actions do have Meaning, then even a god cannot deprive them of that. I want to spend more time discussing this second question than the first, in part because others will focus on the first. So now, here are some brief comments on whether cosmological discoveries to date support any theological hypothesis.

There are two chief strategies for trying to wring theological conclusions from cosmological considerations: first cause arguments and fine-tuning arguments. The first cause or prime-mover argument does not actually depend much on the detailed results of cosmological investigation at all. Rather, the idea is that the cause-effect chain by which scientific explanation proceeds must terminate somewhere in the past direction of time with at least one cause that is not itself an effect. It is often presumed that such an uncaused cause must be unique, but there is no logical necessity for this—if there is one uncaused cause, there is nothing preventing the existence of many (Aquinas seems to have overlooked this). One could even say that many interpretations of quantum theory posit innumerable uncaused causes—if the outcome of a quantum mechanical experiment is a matter of pure chance, then the outcome has no determining cause, but can itself be the cause of later events. Saint Thomas argues for the necessity of various sorts of uncaused causes, which he says “everyone gives the name God.” But if quantum mechanical chances lie at the end of the cause-effect chain, few people would be inclined to call them “God.”

This is where cosmology may seem to help: suppose there were a cause of the entire familiar physical universe. Surely, that would deserve the name “God.” Does cosmology somehow point to such a thing?

The short answer is that cosmology, in its present state of development, really has nothing at all to say on the matter. We have very good grounds to believe that the whole of our visible universe evolved from an inflationary “Big Bang” state some 13.8 billion years ago. Any attempt to push the physical story further back in time requires a quantum theory of gravity, and no such theory exists at present. The singularity theorems derived from General Relativity, which are commonly presented as proving that the entire universe, all that physically exists, “began” 13.8 billion years ago do not take quantum mechanical considerations into account. Indeed, one natural reading of the singularity theorems is that they indicate the breakdown of General Relativity in regimes of extremely high temperature and density. Einstein himself famously characterized his Field Equations as “similar to a building, one wing of which is made of fine marble (left part of the equation) but the other wing of which is built of low-grade wood (right side of the equation). The phenomenological representation of matter is, in fact, only a crude substitute for a representation which would correspond to all known properties of matter.”^[2] In the General Relativistic Field Equations, the state of matter is represented by the Stress-Energy Tensor, and Einstein fully appreciated that matter has much more structure than that tensor could capture. It might work well enough for many predictive purposes, just as treating the planets as point masses works well enough for predictions of their positions in the Solar System, but a complete treatment of matter would require fundamental adjustments to General Relativity.

In sum, at present, we have no well-confirmed theory to consult about whether there was anything before the Big Bang, and if so, what it was, and what (if anything) came before that, and even whether the concept of “before” has any useful application here. Speculations abound, including eternal inflation, bubble universes, appeals to string theory, and so on, but none of this is as yet on a firm empirical footing. Maybe there was a straightforward first uncaused cause, maybe there wasn’t a straightforward one, and maybe, the terms “first” and “cause” just don’t apply to the situation. If natural theology depends on answers to these questions, then it just has to be patient and wait. But no matter how it all comes out, it remains that Aquinas is just wrong about the colloquial use of the term “God.” Even if there is a first uncaused cause, it does not follow that everyone would be happy to call it “God,” irrespective of its other properties. Nothing in its status as first uncaused cause would require it to be conscious, or have intentions. If it did not, it would not qualify as a traditional deity who makes the physical world with some aim or intention in mind.

The second line of argument, from “fine-tuning,” seems to be superior on this issue. Here, the issue of origins is put aside. Whatever the causal sequence by which the physical universe came about, whether or not there is an unending previous sequence of cause and effect, the universe we find around us appears to be special in some way. In particular, the “constants of nature,” such as the fine-structure constant and the ratio of mass between up and down quarks, it is argued, take particularly fortuitous values. Change them just a little, one way or another, and all of the spectacular physical complexity of the universe would become impossible. In place of stars, and planets, and galaxies, one would have only a thin gas of elementary particles. Even given an initial supply of hydrogen and helium, stars would not form in whose fusion-powered ovens carbon and oxygen are forged. In such physical conditions, no life could form, and a fortiori, no human race.

The basic form of this argument contends that this special constellation of values for the constants cannot be “just a matter of chance.” Rather, it is claimed, these particular values must exist by design. If so, the designer must have had the power to set the values, and an intention to set just the right values to produce . . . what? Stars? Planets? Volcanoes? Earthworms? The Sombrero Galaxy? Dinosaurs? Humans? Me in particular? None of these answers is particularly more compelling than any of the others; all of these items require that the values fall in the same range. So, even if we manage to argue our way to a designer, we would still be far from fathoming the design. But can the argument even get us that far?

As with the first-cause argument, the state of empirical science is simply not developed enough to support any design argument. For the design argument, as just presented, depends on the identification of some constants of nature whose values are somehow fortuitous. But we are not in any position, at present, to feel confident about which, if any, of the observed values really are universal constants. What appear to us as constants (because they are locally constant, constant around this place and at this time) may well not, from a truly universal standpoint, be constant at all. This could happen is several ways. One is illustrated by the “bubble universe” cosmologies of eternal inflation. In this picture, overwhelmingly, most of physical reality does not support stars and planets and earthworms; most of physical reality is in a condition wildly inhospitable to any stable physical structures, and hence, inhospitable to life. But by the blind operation of physical law, a multitude of “bubbles” forms out of this background, like bubbles in a pot of boiling water. And in each “bubble,” the physical parameters we call “constants of nature” take randomly determined values. Most of the bubbles, therefore, are also inhospitable to planets and galaxies and volcanoes. But by pure chance, some of these bubbles will happen to form with just the right mix of values. Only in these rare locations can stable complex structures form. Only there can life emerge. And so, only in these special locations will living things, such as ourselves, find themselves. All without any plan or intention or design.

It may seem strange and disquieting that in this picture, overwhelmingly most of physical reality is inhospitable to life, so living things must perforce find themselves in highly atypical circumstances. But, of course, that is already exactly the situation with the observable universe—most of it is very empty and cold, and much of the remainder is too hot and chaotic for life. Precious little of what we see is hospitable to living beings, which, of course, argues strongly against the hypothesis that all of what we see was designed with life in mind. And it would further be a tremendously bizarre waste of resources to create even all of what we can see, and all of the billions of years of history of it for our sake.

Here, we may recur again to Scripture. Some of those who try to deploy a design argument in service of natural theology do not have just any old designer in mind; they hope to establish the existence of just the sort of designing deity depicted in Scripture. And, at least in the Bible, that sort of deity did have human beings in mind. That is why the scriptural cosmology takes the form that it does, with the Earth at the center of the physical cosmos, and the timeline of creation predating the creation of humans only by a week. This is exactly the sort of cosmology one would expect if the physical universe were created specifically as a stage for the drama of homo sapiens. The writers of Scripture understood perfectly well what sort of cosmos would be expected from the sort of designing deity that populates their tales. But we now know that their cosmology is wrong, and no further scientific advances can ever bring it back.

Bubble cosmologies are not the only way that physics can account for the particular mix of “constants of nature” that we see. Just as it is possible for the “constants” to vary between bubbles, it is also possible that they vary within bubbles. Once again, the only reason we treat certain parameters as constant is that they have been observed to have the same values as far as we can see. But there are limits to how far out in space, and, more importantly, how far back in time we can see. We certainly have no direct evidence for the values of these parameters before the time of primordial nucleosynthesis. It is possible that during the earlier period, during the inflationary epoch of our visible universe, the values of the “constants of nature” themselves were changing.

Here’s an example of how this might work. We have good reason to believe that the very early universe contained a period of hyperexponential expansion, which eventually slowed. We now seem to be in a period of a very slight “cosmological constant,” which makes galaxies recede from each other slightly faster than would be expected from Einstein’s original equations. It is as if in the early universe, the “cosmological constant” were extremely high, and then, evolved to be nearly, but not exactly zero. Why should it have evolved this way, settling down near (but not exactly at) the special value of zero?

Here is a completely speculative sketch of how such a result could be produced by the sort of physical feedback that leads to the condition called homeostasis. First, the parameter we call the “cosmological constant,” which produces accelerated expansion of the universe, is not a constant at all—it is variable. And the rate of expansion itself is connected by physical law to another parameter that tends to reduce the rate of expansion. For purely expository purposes, let’s imagine that this parameter determines the masses of quarks, and hence, the mass of ponderable matter. In this model, the accelerated expansion of the universe itself drives up the masses of the quarks, and the greater mass of the quarks then reins in the rate of expansion of the universe. In such a scenario, if the universe starts out expanding at a rapidly accelerating rate, the masses rise, which in turn, acts to slow down the rate of acceleration. Things naturally settle down to a “steady state” in which the masses have risen enough to (almost exactly) counteract the intrinsic tendency of space-time to expand. The counter-poised mechanisms automatically seek out a balance, and once the balance has been achieved, the fundamentally variable quantities (in this case, the “cosmological constant” and the quark masses) settle to “fixed” values. Observers take these equilibrium values of the variables to be “constants,” which seem miraculously tuned to one another.

I am not proposing a specific physical theory here, but rather, illustrating one of the many ways that physics could eventually turn out. Judgments of how exquisitely “fine-tuned” various constants are to one another always tacitly assume that the “constants” are indeed constant—universally valid over all of space and time. But no local observations could possibly establish that; it is a matter of theory rather than direct observation. Changes in theory, then, always hold out the possibility of revealing an apparently “miraculous” relation among observed parameter values to be the robust and automatic effect of underlying dynamics. These “fine-tuning” arguments, therefore, cannot possibly establish that any intentional, purposeful fine-tuning ever occurred.

But let’s now leave all of these observations to the side. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that the results of cosmological investigation somehow did strongly favor a design hypothesis—that what we take to be the constants of nature were intentionally and purposefully chosen by some agent to have the values they have. And let’s further grant that having such a power and consciously exercising it for this purpose is enough to justify calling the agent a “god.” In short, let’s pretend that natural theology were to work out just as the theist hopes it does, and that the empirical investigation of the cosmos strongly suggests the existence of a Creator of the visible physical universe. What, exactly, would follow from such a momentous discovery?

Actually, not much.

Science fiction already provides us with examples of such scenarios. As we create more and more detailed and complex “virtual worlds” using computers, questions naturally arise about whether we can thereby create actual self-conscious entities. This is a very complicated and vexed question, but for the sake of discussion, let’s suppose that this is correct—the right kind of computer simulation of a person (say, a physical simulation of the person’s body down to the level of the quarks and electrons) would clearly, in some sense, have the same abstract structure as the person. One can then argue that in virtue of this structure, the “simulation” would actually be a person, with its own self-awareness. (The recent movie Her provides an example of this sort of possibility.) This is a conceptually coherent possibility that we all understand.

But once this idea is on the table, it is natural to consider the possibility that we are the creations rather than the creators, that our world is just a “simulation” being run inside some sort of computer. If so, there is no necessity that the physics of that computer bears any resemblance to the apparent physics of our world. Our world has whatever physics the creators of the programming decided to give it. For example, maybe the physics of the computer we are running on more closely resembles classical mechanics than it does quantum mechanics, or maybe, it is something completely different.

So—for all we know—this might be the true state of affairs. In some fairly advanced computer programming class in a world we cannot even imagine, the students were set a take-home exam with the following task. They were given the basic laws of quantum physics and General Relativity (harmonized in some way), but with the “constants of nature” unspecified. Their job was to find settings for these constants that would yield the most “interesting” physical world, a world with various complex structures at the greatest range of scales. Maybe even a universe in which “life” (self-replicating and evolving structures) appears. They are to implement these laws on a computer and run the simulated universe for a (simulated) period that displays the evolution of complexity in the universe. And our entire familiar physical universe is one of these exam programs.

Clearly, this cosmology would qualify as a “design” cosmology in the strongest possible sense of the word. What we take to be the “constants of nature” would have been intentionally chosen by an intelligent agent with a specific purpose in mind. It is hard, but not impossible, to imagine how we, the inhabitants of this artificial universe, could ever discover our situation. (The computer that implements our universe would presumably have limited memory, so the artificial universe would have to be finite in extent; maybe we can eventually discover the “edge.”) Imagine the headlines in the papers: “Astronomers Discover We Are Living inside a Computer!” “Our Universe Part of Take-Home Exam for Computer Science 101!” “Deep-Space Probes Suggest Our Universe Is Only a B Effort!”

This would clearly be the single most momentous discovery in the history of science. Nobel prizes all around! People would be shocked, amazed, elated, depressed, skeptical, dumbfounded.

And then, we would all get up the next day and make breakfast.

For, after all, what difference would it make? Why should this discovery affect, to even the slightest degree, how we live life our lives? Our families are still our families. We still have to earn a living to put food on the table. Virtue is still virtue and vice is still vice. No one ever thought, for example, that the moral prohibition against murder carries an escape clause: “Void if you happen to be living inside a computer.” Even if we are living in such a world, your friends and neighbors are still just as conscious and self-aware, as worthy of dignity and respect, as they ever were.

There would, of course, be a few novel contingencies to obsess about: what if that kid who designed us accidentally trips over the power cord and wipes out our whole universe? But humanity has shown itself, over and over, quite capable of putting much more direct and pressing threats to our well-being out of mind (global climate change, for example). Anyway, unlike the more concrete problems we struggle with every day, we would have no obvious means to address these sorts of worries. Better put them aside and get on with life.

We might become acutely interested in the exact intention of our universe-creator: did he (or she, or it) pick these values of the constants to create just complexity, or more particularly, stars, or volcanoes, or black holes, or life? What exactly was the assignment? But again, at the end of the day, what difference does it make? Maybe our existence is an unforeseen by-product of the attempt to do something else, or maybe it was central to the whole effort. But whichever way it comes out, why should that make any difference to me? The designer’s goals and aims are not my goals and aims. And nothing in the scenario suggests, to the slightest degree, that they should become my goals and aims.

People often ask the question, “Why was I put here?” in a tone that suggests the existence and design of a creator. But they do not follow the question out. Suppose, in fact, you were intentionally created for a purpose. Steering away from our fanciful science fiction scenarios, let’s imagine a couple of mid-level chess players who strongly desire to have a child who becomes the world chess champion. They explicitly and intentionally set out to have a child for exactly this purpose. From infancy, the child is drilled in chess, and, in fact, becomes one of the strongest players in the world. At the age of 18, with a life that has been directed to this purpose and this purpose alone, she is well on her way to compete for the world championship.

Now, let’s also suppose—which is quite plausible—that the child herself has no particular interest in chess. She is, of course, very good at it, but she derives no pleasure from playing, and, in fact, the whole thing strikes her as rather a waste of time. She just sees no real point in it. Her life, lived from the inside, feels to her meaningless and empty.

Now, should it somehow change her position just because she knows—and we are supposing it is true!—that “the reason she is here” is to play chess. Her playing chess, indeed, her very existence, is the opposite of accidental; it was consciously planned and chosen for this purpose from the beginning. But, so what? None of that can make playing chess seem more significant or meaningful to her. She may feel some obligation to try to please her parents, but that motivation does not make the playing of chess itself intrinsically significant to her. And, in any case, we feel that she ought not to spend her life this way, that unreasonable demands are being made. Her parents’ desires, her parents’ intentions, her parents’ values and aims and goals in life simply are not hers. That is exactly why her life feels empty and meaningless. None of this is altered just because she was intentionally created to play chess.

Thus, even if the “constants of nature” were intentionally set by some agent for some purpose, and even if your own existence were the outcome of someone’s deliberate plan with a specific aim of how you should live your life, this would, in no way, have the effect of investing your own life or existence with Meaning in the relevant sense. The obvious thing to do in the cases outlined above is to simply ignore the intentions and desires of the creators. The chess prodigy should abandon the game in the one case, and we should not obsess about the grade given to the student in the other.

At this point, some might want to object that our computer-class student and our chess-obsessed parents would certainly not be gods in the relevant sense, even if they had the power to set our constants of nature in the first case and to bring the child into existence in the second. So, the fact that their intentions and desires would not invest their creation’s lives with meaning does not show that the desires and intentions of a real god would be similarly irrelevant. But recall that we were defining “god” exactly so as to give natural theology some chance of success. The “fine-tuning” argument, if it works at all, would—at best—show that the values of the constants of nature were determined by the choice of some intentional agent, exactly as happens in our science fiction story. If that is not enough to render the student a “god” in the relevant sense, then natural theology has no chance of success in any case.

It may seem depressing to recognize that even the desires and intentions of a creator cannot underwrite any real significance in our own lives. But the flip side of this moral is uplifting. For just as the desires and aims and values of the creator cannot be imposed on the creation, so too, the lack of desire or plan or intention of the creator does not condemn the creation’s life to meaninglessness. Suppose, for example, that there is some creator, but our own existence was no part of the creator’s plan. Suppose, for example, that our student wanted to create a virtual universe that contained volcanoes, and the production of living beings was just an unintended and unforeseen side-effect. Does that render our own lives somehow “meaningless” or “empty” or “pointless”? Again, why should it? Should looking after my own children’s well-being, for example, all of a sudden appear valueless to me just because the student-creator of our universe doesn’t care? If I have no obligation to value what the creator values, I similarly have no obligation to be indifferent to what the creator is indifferent about. And even if there is no creator at all, and hence, no aim of the creator, that does not mean that my own life can have no aim or value.

This observation brings us back to Steven Weinberg’s comment. Yes, the universe as a whole appears pointless—it is unimaginably huge and complex, with innumerable stars, planets, asteroids, black holes, nebulae, dust clouds, and galaxies, together with dark matter and huge expanses of essentially empty space. All of this complexity displays no marks of design or purpose. If it was all created with some intention, that intention is completely obscure, and our solar system, our planet, our species, and we as individuals are not marked out in any way as special or important. As far as we can tell, there is no ultimate aim of the universe. But it does not thereby follow that our own lives and actions have no value. To think that the pointlessness of the entire universe implies the pointlessness of everything in it is to commit the “fallacy of division.” From a logical point of view, it is as invalid as concluding that I consist mostly of hydrogen and helium just because the universe as a whole does and I am part of the universe. The meaninglessness of the universe as a whole just does not imply the meaninglessness of everything that happens in it.

Many people fail to appreciate this point. If the existence of the earth, the existence of human beings, my own particular existence is just a result of chance, of blind luck, then that is often taken to render my actions insignificant. But this result does not at all follow. Let’s take a concrete example. On July 20, 2013, Joseph Trapani was on his way to play golf in Hercules, California, when he saw a house on fire. Trapani jumped out of his car, kicked down the door, searched the rooms, found and rescued an elderly man named Khang Do. Clearly, it was entirely by chance—by accident—that Trapani found himself confronted with this situation. The fire itself seems to have started accidentally in the engine of a 1999 Honda. But all of this contingency and randomness in the circumstances detract not a whit from the moral and ethical significance of Trapani’s actions. He displayed courage and acted in a morally exemplary manner. Similarly, even if the existence of the entire human species is a product of blind luck, that has no evident bearing on the significance of our lives and our actions.

Why were Trapani’s actions meaningful and praiseworthy? He acted courageously and produced good; he saved a life. The fact that the situation was neither designed nor intended plays no role at all in this evaluation—if the fire were set intentionally, for example, that would not change the moral evaluation at all. Trapani certainly saw a point to what he was doing, and I’m sure that Khang Do would agree. How could the existence or non-existence of a creator of the physical universe have any bearing at all on this evaluation?

Exactly similar comments can be made about morality in general. The elimination of chattel slavery has produced moral progress on earth: the world is a better place for it. Why? Because chattel slavery is unjust. Why is the practice unjust and immoral? Does that moral evaluation somehow depend on the existence of a deity? Plato already made the key observation here over two millennia ago in the dialogue Euthyphro. Euthyphro claims to be an expert on how to act piously and justly—in his particular case, by prosecuting his own father for murder. Socrates asks Euthyphro to explain the nature of piety, and Euthyphro responds that the pious is what the gods love, or hold dear. Who could dispute that? But Socrates presses on—which is the cause and which is the effect here? Is an action pious, or morally praiseworthy, because the gods approve of it, or is it rather, that the gods approve of it because it is morally praiseworthy? More briefly, do the gods actually make moral law, or do they rather just recognize independent moral truths?

To make Plato’s point clearer, let’s consider a parallel case. There are infinitely many mathematical truths. If there is any omniscient being, then that being knows all of the mathematical truths; the being knows, to take a simple example, that 5 + 7 = 12. So, one might say that a mathematical claim is true just in case this being accepts it. Even so, this being did not make the claims true: 5 + 7 would equal 12, whether or not anyone ever knew it. And even a god would not have the power to make 7 + 5 equal anything other than 12. Similarly, even a god could not make chattel slavery morally acceptable or just. The foundations of morality are independent of theology. Just as it is beyond the power of a god to make our own lives meaningful or to render them meaningless, so to it would be beyond the power of a god to legislate (rather than just recognize) what is just and unjust, moral and immoral, virtuous and vicious.

I am not here addressing the first-order question of what is just and unjust. A moral nihilist might believe that there are no facts of this sort at all. I myself think that is nonsense; I think we all know that slavery is morally unjustifiable. The point is not what the facts of morality are, or even whether there are any such facts, but rather, that whatever the situation is, it is independent of theology. Or, even more precisely, it is independent of any sort of natural theology, any theological conclusions derived from the study of the cosmos. It is quite irrelevant to matters of Meaning or morality whether the physical world was intentionally created, and if so, for what purpose. The moral significance and the value of our actions will be the same, no matter how that comes out.

The notion that the origin and structure of the universe has any bearing on the fundamental issues of Meaning and morality, doubtless, derives from Scripture: there, God is portrayed as both creator and moral legislator. Scripture is almost certainly wrong on the first count, but more importantly, is demonstrably wrong on the second. All of this error should lift a weight from our minds—it is exactly because the value and significance of our lives and actions do not depend on how we, or humanity as a whole, or even the whole universe, came into existence that cosmological issues can be pursued without existential dread. It is because even God cannot legislate morality that we need not hope to find evidence for a god in the heavens in order to defend our moral judgments. Anyone who cannot articulate what is morally unacceptable about slavery without reference to God or to Scripture does not really understand why slavery is wrong. Further, as we already noted, appeal to Scripture can, in any case, be used to justify rather than to condemn the practice.

Anyone sincerely and deeply concerned about questions of right and wrong, virtue and vice, value and insignificance, already knows that these topics require careful and sustained reflection. There are no short-cuts or cheat sheets available. But that work of serious and prolonged moral reflection stands on its own; it can be neither helped nor hindered by cosmology. Not because cosmology could not, in principle, support theological conclusions, but because theology itself is not directly relevant.

The reason for studying cosmology is simple—because one is interested in cosmology. The universe is a fascinating and intriguing place. Images of the vast expanses of space bejeweled with galaxies may inspire a sense of awe or sublimity or dread or despair—but so too may listening to music, or observing wildlife, or contemplating a mathematical proof. Even the electrical conductivity properties of carbon nanotubes are quite interesting from a physical point of view. But that in itself is no reason to think that they shed any light on questions of morality, or Meaning, or on the existence or non-existence of God.

William Lane Craig’s Response

Tim Maudlin poses two questions: first, the practical question “Why are we here?” and second, the existential question (in capital letters) “Why Are We Here?” The answer to the practical question is obvious: we’re here, as he says, to discuss the topic of God and cosmology. And I suspect that the reason Bob Stewart chose this topic is that cosmology represents one of those areas of intersection between theology and science in virtue of theology’s doctrine of creation. We might wonder whether there is conflict or concord here? Does a theistic perspective on cosmology teach us anything? Could the evidence of cosmology increase the probability of God’s existence? These are all important questions well worth discussing.

But the second question is an irrelevancy to this year’s forum. We are not here to discuss Why We Are Here! The subject of the forum is “The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology.” Old Testament ethics, biblical reliability, the Euthyphro Dilemma, the meaning of life are all red herrings threatening to distract our attention from the topic of this year’s forum, which is already vast enough to consume our time and attention. To say that these issues are red herrings is not to say that they are unimportant or uninteresting, but merely that they are irrelevant, as Maudlin himself admits, to the topic of this forum. The independence of these issues from the topic at hand is evident from the fact that Maudlin seeks to demonstrate, not the irrelevance of cosmology to the existence of God, but rather, the irrelevance of the existence of God to questions of meaning and value! I, along with many other Christian philosophers and theologians, have addressed those questions elsewhere, and I refer you to that work.^[3] I refuse to follow the hounds in feverish pursuit of these red herrings, but will remain resolutely fixed upon our quarry: the implications of contemporary cosmology for the existence of God.

Fortunately, Professor Maudlin does have some things to say of relevance to this question. Consider, first, the Kalām Cosmological Argument. Dr. Maudlin rightly points out that because we do not yet have a quantum theory of gravity, we cannot provide a physical description of the universe prior to the Planck time. But from this, he concludes that we do not have good evidence that the universe began to exist. That inference is far too hasty. Charles Misner once remarked to me that it is as if a tiny window shade were drawn across the first split second of the universe’s existence so that we cannot describe what is going on behind the shade. Nevertheless, he insisted, we know that it doesn’t come out on the other side. As I explained earlier, the BGV theorem and the Wall theorem give us good evidence that the universe began to exist, whether at the boundary of classical space-time or with the quantum gravity era. Recall Professor Carroll’s words: Science isn’t in the business of proving things; we can always construct elaborate concoctions to save the phenomena. But the evidence of contemporary cosmology strongly points in the direction that the universe began to exist.

Professor Maudlin has a second objection to the Kalām Cosmological Argument: there is no reason to think that the cause of the universe is personal. In my published work, I have defended three arguments for the personhood of the first cause: (i) Only a personal agent endowed with freedom of the will can provide an adequate explanation of how an effect with a beginning can arise from an eternally existing cause. (ii) A changeless entity which transcends space and time, matter and energy, is either an abstract object or an unembodied mind. But abstract objects do not stand in causal relations, from which it follows that the cause of the universe is an unembodied mind. (iii) A first state of the universe cannot be explained in terms of scientific laws and prior conditions, but it can be explained in terms of a personal agent and his volitions. Therefore, the cause of the universe must be personal. Notice that these are metaphysical arguments to which the data of contemporary cosmology are not directly relevant. Those data are relevant simply to the second premise of the argument that the universe began to exist.

Turn now to the teleological argument based on the fine-tuning of the universe. I should do well to clear up a confusion here. When one infers that the best explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe is design, he does not mean, pace Professor Maudlin, that the purpose for which the universe was created is human beings. One could run a fine-tuning argument for a designer using zebras; but that does not imply that the purpose for which the universe was created is zebras. Similarly, there could be other embodied, conscious agents throughout the universe, which fall within the designer’s purview.

You’ll recall that fine-tuning concerns both physical constants and arbitrary physical quantities. Here, Dr. Maudlin complains that “What appear to us as constants . . . may well not, from a truly universal standpoint, be constant at all.” He gives the example of an inflationary multiverse in which the values of these constants vary from world to world. This response strikes me as quite confused. As a matter of nomenclature, physicists refer to quantities that play a fundamental role in the mathematical expression of the laws of nature as constants, even if they might not be not the same throughout the universe. If a quantity does not play that role, then it will count as simply an arbitrary quantity. The very point of the fine-tuning argument is that the observed values of these constants and quantities are not fixed by the laws of nature. So, we want to know why they all fall within the narrow life-permitting range.

Maudlin is not really denying that the observed constants and quantities are fine-tuned for our existence; rather, he is championing a multiverse hypothesis-cum-observer self-selection effect as the best explanation of the observed fine-tuning. But then, he owes us some response to the Boltzmann Brain problem, which I shared earlier.

Maudlin also offers what he admits is a “completely speculative sketch” of a way of explaining fine-tuning, not by chance, but by physical necessity. The problem here is that we have absolutely no reason to think that such a sketch is true. The multiplicity and variety of the constants and quantities that have to be fine-tuned in order for embodied, conscious agents to exist is so great that it is extremely unlikely that they will all turn out to be physically explicable. Moreover, it would still be highly surprising if the one physically necessary theory turned out to have all its constants and quantities fine-tuned for life.

So, as with the Kalām Cosmological Argument, I do not think that Professor Maudlin has given us any good defeater of the second premise of the teleological argument, to which the evidence of contemporary cosmology is relevant, that the fine-tuning of the universe is not due to physical necessity or chance.

As for his closing reflections on our inhabiting a virtual reality, this suggestion seems no more significant to me than the old brain in a vat scenario. In the absence of some sort of a defeater, we are perfectly rational to trust the deliverances of our senses. We have good arguments to think that a transcendent Creator and Designer of the universe exists. What existential implications this conclusion might have for our lives is a topic for another day.^[4]

Carroll’s Response to Maudlin

Thanks. It’s great to be back here this morning. I think that much of what Dr. Craig has said amounts to very similar things that were said earlier. I don’t want to spend time, yet again, repeating the arguments there. I just do want to make one point because the single comment I got was, “We really wish you guys had explained what a Boltzmann Brain was.” So, maybe I can take thirty seconds and explain what this is. That might be an actual educational moment here.

The idea is that we are, right now, according to the best theories of modern cosmology, evolving toward a state where the universe will live forever, but it will be empty space. The universe is expanding, accelerating, and all the galaxies are going to fly away, our galaxy will evaporate into radiation, and there’ll be nothing left but empty space. But, according to Stephen Hawking and Gary Gibbons, even empty space has quantum mechanical fluctuations. So, we have a future of our universe that will last forever, but is not completely quiet. There are bubbling virtual particles, appearing and disappearing. So, if you wait long enough, all sorts of things will fluctuate into existence: atoms, molecules, viruses, people, observers, solar systems, galaxies, and so forth. Most of the conscious observers in the future of the universe, under this telling, will be individual brains—because you don’t even need a body to be an observer—but individual brains that just randomly appear as quantum fluctuations long enough to look around and go, “Ha! Empty space, thermal equilibrium,” and then die.

And the argument is that if your cosmology predicts that most universes are like that, your cosmology is not every good. And I agree with that argument. I tried to say on multiple occasions earlier: it is easy to avoid that conclusion. This is not a necessary conclusion. All you need to do, for example, is have our future universe not last forever with exactly the same conditions. This is a generic prediction of the particular models that we look at. So, individual cosmological models play a game of balancing the number of random observers (Boltzmann Brains) versus the number of ordinary observers that arise after the Big Bang. And it’s not at all difficult to find models that don’t have a Boltzmann Brain problem. So, that whole discussion is a red herring in this issue.

Given that, I want to actually turn to what Tim Maudlin was just talking about because I think what he’s been saying is really important, and I agree with 98 percent of what he said in his talk, which never happens when I listen to anyone else give a talk about anything. I actually disagree a little bit with what Dr. Craig’s point of view was about what our topic is, because I agree with Tim that our topic is more vast than we’re admitting in public. The reason why—it is true that on the view graph it says “God and Cosmology” on the slide—but the reason why we’re talking about God and cosmology does ultimately come down to these questions of meaning, morality, purpose, and so forth. Just as I said earlier that theism needs to be connected to science, I also think that science—that theism and science—need to be connected to these bigger issues of morality and meaning that Tim brought up.

And I agree with Tim that even if we knew that there was a designer who created our universe, no necessary moral implications would follow from that right away. I think those arguments are quite solid. I am less convinced than Tim is that there are objective moral values out there to be found. But, like Tim, it doesn’t really bother me, even if there weren’t. I think that what matters is how we act as human beings. If I act in a moral way because I feel it is moral, even if I recognize that other people might feel other ways, I think that most human beings do share common moral intuitions.

I think there’s a place for rationality and reflection and ethical philosophy. And I think that the switch from a worldview where moral guidance is handed down or given to us from something external, to one in which we are creators of our ultimate moral guidelines, is not really a scary one. I analogize it to looking at a painter with a blank canvas. You can image the painter saying, “How do you expect me to put a painting up here? There are no lines with numbers saying where the colors should go!” But great art does not actually come from painting by the numbers; it comes from fundamentally creative activity.

Tim Maudlin’s Response

At the Greer-Heard Forum, I did not present my prepared paper at the forum, but rather, some more general remarks based on my paper. This book contains the paper that I wrote for the forum, but did not read to the people assembled. Nonetheless, at the Greer-Heard Forum, Dr. Craig chose not to respond to what I actually said, but rather, read his prepared response to the written paper, which both he and Dr. Carroll had. This choice speaks volumes about the way Dr. Craig approached this event. There is an artificial formal game of debate—with allotted minutes to each side—that bears no living relation to actual philosophical dialogue and philosophical inquiry. The aim of formal debate is to score points, not to carefully and openly explore difficult matters. The dialectical investigation of hard questions is flexible and open-ended, and one certainly does not enter into the process with an assigned “side.” Formal debate bears the same relation to live philosophical inquiry as playing scales does to musical improvisation. No one would want to go to a concert just to hear scales being played, which is why I tried to speak to the deep concerns of the audience rather than play the debate game. Dr. Craig’s written response hews closely to the idea that there is some formal debate topic, any deviation from which is not even to be considered—such open inquiry will not win points.

I wrote a paper for the conference and intended to read it. I chose not to read the prepared paper because I wanted to speak to speak to the deep concerns of those who came to the conference. I honestly didn’t think the deep concern of anybody was Boltzmann Brains. I don’t believe anybody said, “My views about God and the nature of the universe will change if only the Boltzmann brain issue comes out some other way.” I therefore reasoned, “I have this opportunity. I should make use of it in the best way I think is possible.”

Dr. Craig insisted that my talk to the audience was a red herring. He did not listen to what I was saying, and try and think and respond to it.

Now, you may have your beliefs so fixed that no argument will shake you out of them, no matter what. Most people are like that. It’s hard not to be like that. It’s very hard to be open to an honest investigation of the world, and to put your most deeply held beliefs on the line.

One thing that’s scary about the world today is that for very bad reasons, stellar scientific research is opposed and derided for non-scientific reasons. For example, the research telling us that smoking causes cancer was derided and attacked by the tobacco industry. They had their reasons—they were not scientific reasons—to influence people not to believe that smoking was bad for their health. It was part of their bottom line. Climate change serves as another case in point. The reason why the coal industry does not want you to understand that the climate is changing and the causes of climate change is that it affects their bottom line.

There is a difference between reasoning and rationalization. Honest reasoning is a case in which you don’t know in the beginning what the right answer is and you’re following the best evidence and arguments you can find. Rationalization is when you’ve decided the answer at the beginning and you’re just looking to find any little bit of something that looks like an argument that comes to the conclusion you’ve already reached. Many people feel that they are in a position where they can only rationalize—they have certain beliefs that they cannot—they literally will not—question. They would do well at least to realize that such is their plight. But they ought not pretend that they’re reasoning when they’re rationalizing.

In his response, Dr. Craig presses several technical issues. Here, I will briefly make a few technical responses.

Dr. Craig believes that the problem of “Boltzmann Brains” is a very severe one for various proposals about the structure of the universe, and particularly, about whether the universe has a beginning in time. The term “Boltzmann Brains” refers to Ludwig Boltzmann, who developed and defended the atomic theory as an explanation of the behavior of gases and other thermodynamic systems. Boltzmann modeled gases rather like elastic billiard balls colliding, and in such a model, the system undergoes fluctuations, meaning that as time goes on, just by chance, the collisions result in the gas becoming somewhat denser or hotter in some places and colder in others. Indeed, under certain mathematical conditions (the technical name is “ergodicity”), one can prove that a closed classical system of particles will, just by chance, eventually randomly fluctuate into all possible physical states. So, for example, if there were enough hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and so on in the gas to make a brain, and if the system were perfectly isolated, and if one waited long enough, then just by chance, eventually, a brain would fluctuate into existence. And given infinite time, brains in all possible states would fluctuate into existence infinitely many times. Given Boltzmann’s calculations, one would say that such a closed classical system would produce many more Boltzmann Brains (brains unattached even to a body!) than the sorts of regular human brains we are familiar with.

Is this really a problem? Well, no. First of all, actual physics is not the classical physics that Boltzmann was using. It is quantum physics. And what are called “quantum fluctuations” are not fluctuations in the sense Boltzmann’s argument needs. Further, the universe around us is not, in the relevant sense, a closed system. So, there is no technical problem of the sort Dr. Craig is interested in that can be founded on actual, verified physics.

Similarly, the so-called BGV theorem, that Dr. Craig is so fond of citing, is not a theorem of quantum physics. Insofar as we know that quantum physics is central to the actual world, we know that the BGV theorem simply does not apply to the actual world. So, we do not know, in virtue of that theorem, that there is a beginning of time.

What do we know with certainty about these issues? Essentially nothing. A final physical theory describing the whole universe has to incorporate quantum theory and General Relativity (or some other theory of gravity) and we simply do not yet know how that is done. Hence (as I mention), we do not know which magnitudes that we call “constants of nature” really are constant in the literal sense, nor how they are physically related to each other, nor how they might develop in time and vary from place to place if they are not constants. All of the “fine-tuning” arguments turn on the idea that physics cannot account for these values. But since the relevant physical theories do not yet exist, one can’t tell whether there is a problem or not!

One can’t draw any strong positive conclusions based on ignorance. Dr. Craig wants to appeal to the BGV theorem to draw a strong positive conclusion: that the universe is finite in time. But all we can properly say is that we do not yet know enough—we do not even have any good candidate theories—to draw any conclusions about whether anything predates the Big Bang, or what sorts of physical explanation there may be of the so-called “constants of nature.” The appropriate stance when we do not know is humility, the recognition of our present ignorance. In claiming that the BGV theorem somehow settles this issue. Dr. Craig parts company with all cosmologists I am familiar with.

Dr. Craig complains that the hypothesis I sketch is just speculation. Indeed, it is! That was the point: we have no more than speculation at this moment. Whether there is any “fine-tuning problem” about the “constants of nature” depends on the details of physics. And where there is no settled physics, there is no settled problem. All we have is speculation and sketchy gestures at theories. The honest attitude to take in such a situation is to recognize one’s lack of understanding, not to pick our one particular irrelevant theorem (irrelevant because the sort of physics it is based on is not complete or correct) just because it yields a conclusion one likes.

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