Cosmology: A Religion For Atheists? | William Lane Craig critiques "The Theory Of Everything" movie

well welcome everybody it's a great delight to have William Craig in town again in Southampton on his way back to Atlanta this past week he's been in Birmingham where he has delivered the Cadbury lectures in the philosophy of religion at the University of Birmingham they've been a fairly erudite set of lectures stretched my mind considerably sometimes I even understood parts of it we had a very different type of lecture last night where he there was a public lecture in Birmingham which was largely filled with sixth formers to hear him talk about the book that has really made him famous which is his research on the Kalam cosmological argument and he unpacked that wonderfully bringing it up to date with current issues before a very enthusiastic young audience builds association with Birmingham started in the 1970s where he did his first PhD under the supervision of the late John hick and he went on to do a second PhD in Munich under will thought panin berg the first PhD was in philosophy the second was in theology and under pannin berg he particularly studied the evidence for the resurrection of Christ and these two special interests have shaped his research and writing ever since now the original plan as the bill agreed he'd come give us a talk and we didn't really sort of fine-tune that idea we just let it hang and then this film came out ah ha ha you have you seen the film you'll know right early on this question of cosmology being defined as a kind of religion for intelligent atheists but I thought well that's a good provocative title for bill to address and the film is an interesting film it's a love story but it's also a love story with a tragic note romantic love meets compassionate love with this strange and debilitating illness of Stephen Hawking which eventually broke up their marriage but the film also embraced is the greatest science story of our generation concerning the origins of the universe and it's introduced early on in the film and it hangs the issues hang throughout the film and this has implications for all of us what is this universe about and who are we what our place in this cosmic drama so Bill's agreed to in this visit this week to address some of the scientific philosophical and theological issues raised by that film and many finnish-speaking there will be an opportunity to ask him questions so welcome to Highfield and let's now welcome so so tell us bill what did you make of that film all right that is the topic this evening before I begin let me just say that we have had a wonderful week in Birmingham giving the Cadbury lectures and speaking there and we are delighted to climax and finish our trip with this event in this beautiful setting here at Highfield and I'm looking forward to a stimulating evening with you this evening in the award-winning movie the theory of everything Stephen Hawking introduces himself to his wife to be Jane as a cosmologists when Jane asks what that is he replies it's a kind of religion for intelligent atheists that remark is both provocative and revealing cosmology is obviously not literally a religion it's a branch of astrophysics which studies the large-scale structure of the universe now if one is a naturalist that is to say someone who believes that all that there is is space-time and its contents then in a sense someone who studies the universe is studying the ultimate reality this is the same project in which the theologian is engaged except that for the theologian the ultimate reality is God not the universe the theologian has a wider more encompassing view of reality than the naturalist since he believes in a reality that transcends the universe the universe is a subordinate reality which is created by God for cosmologists who are theists for example George Ellis who is perhaps the world's leading cosmologists who is also featured in this film cosmology is the for not a kind of religion but rather the scientific study of a subordinate reality but for the naturalist it's easy to see how cosmology could become quasi religious now cosmology is divided into two sub disciplines which once again have intriguing parallels in theology the first sub discipline is cosmogony which is the study of the origin of the universe parallel to this is the theological locus or category or doctrine of creation particularly create Co or digging ons or originating creation Christian theology holds that God created the universe from nothing a finite time ago and therefore the universe is not eternal in the past but had a beginning the second sub discipline of cosmology is eschatology which is the study of the future fate of the universe now those of you who are familiar with theology will recognize immediately that this term is actually borrowed from theology for the theological locus or doctrine of the last things is called eschatology and once again theological eschatology is broader in its scope than physical eschatology for while physical eschatology studies the future fate of the universe given the laws of nature and present conditions theological eschatology also comprises broader themes such as the state of the soul after death the resurrection the new heavens and the new earth and heaven and hell once again we can see how the naturalistic cosmologists studying cosmogony and physical eschatology might think of himself as engaged in a sort of religious pursuit while physical eschatology makes a brief appearance in the movie the theory of everything it is cosmogony that dominates the film focuses on two cosmogonic theories which Stephen Hawking has defended the first being the standard Big Bang model based entirely on the general theory of relativity and the second being the so-called no boundary proposal which Hawking developed in collaboration with James hartal of the University of California Santa Barbara based on the incorporation of quantum physics into the standard model to yield a quantum theory of gravity the film explores the alleged theological implications of these two theories so that we might better understand these alleged theological implications let me say a bit about these two approaches to cosmogony first the standard general relativistic model prior to the 1920s scientists had always assumed that the universe as a whole was stationary and eternal tremors of the impending earthquake that would topple this traditional cosmology were first felt in 1917 when Albert Einstein made a cosmological application of his newly discovered gravitational theory the general theory of relativity to his chagrin Einstein found the general relativity would not permit an eternal static model of the universe unless he fudged his equations to offset the gravitational effects of matter during the 1920s the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann and the Belgian astronomer George LaMotta by taking Einstein's equations at face value came up independently with models of an expanding universe in 1929 the American astronomer Edwin Hubble through tireless observations at Mount Wilson Observatory made a startling discovery which confirmed Friedman and limitless theory he found that the light from distant galaxies appeared to be redder than expected this redshift in the light was most plausibly due to the stretching of the light waves as the galaxies are moving away from us wherever Hubble trained his telescope in the night sky he observed this same red shift in the light from the distant galaxies it appeared that we are at the center of a cosmic explosion and all of the other galaxies are flying away from us at fantastic speeds now according to the Friedman levanta model we're not really at the center of the universe rather an observer in any galaxy will look out and see the other galaxies moving away from him this is because according to the theory it is really space itself which is expanding the galaxies are actually at rest in space but they recede from one another as space itself expands the Friedman lamella model eventually came to be known as the Big Bang Theory but that name can be misleading thinking of the Big Bang as a sort of explosion could mislead us into thinking that the galaxies are moving to a pre-existing empty space from a central point that would be a complete misunderstanding of the model the theory is much more radical than that as you trace the expansion of space back in time everything gets closer and closer together eventually the distance between any two points in space becomes zero you can't get any closer than that space and time cannot be extended further back than that so at that point you've reached the boundary of space and time it is literally the beginning of space and time to get a picture of this we can portray our three-dimensional space as a 2-dimensional disc which shrinks as you go back in time eventually the distance between any two spatial points becomes 0 so space-time can be represented geometrically as a cone what's significant about this is it while a cone can be extended indefinitely in one direction it has a boundary point in the other direction because this direction represents time and the boundary point lies in the past the model implies that past time is finite and had a beginning because space time is the arena in which all matter and energy exist the beginning of space-time is also the beginning of all matter and energy it's the beginning of the universe notice that there's simply nothing prior to the initial boundary of space-time let's not however be misled by words when cosmologists say there is nothing prior to the initial boundary they do not that there is something prior to it and that is a state of nothingness that would be to treat nothing as though it were something rather they mean that at that boundary point it is false that there is something prior to this point the standard Big Bang model thus predicts an absolute beginning of the universe in the movie the standard model is described in the following exchange between Hawking and Jane Hawking says if Einstein is right if general relativity is correct then the universe is expanding yes yes so if you reverse time the universe would get smaller all right so what if I reverse the process all the way back to see what happened at the beginning of time itself the beginning of time itself the universe getting smaller and smaller denser and denser hotter and hotter as as we wind back the clock keep winding you've got to go all the way back to the beginning of time keep winding until you get a spacetime singularity the standard model thus predicted an initial singularity there were however suspicions that since the real universe is not perfectly similar to Friedman and lamellas ideal model their prediction of a singular beginning to the universe would ultimately fail perhaps the distribution of matter and energy in the real universe is not homogeneous enough for the universe to shrink down to a singularity in 1970 however Hawking in collaboration with Roger Penrose of Oxford University proved that the assumption of ideal homogeneity was irrelevant the Hawking rose singularity theorems showed that so long as the universe is governed by general relativity our past must include an initial singularity now such a conclusion is profoundly disturbing for anybody who reflects on it for the question cannot be suppressed why did the universe come into being Sir Arthur Eddington contemplating the beginning of the universe opined that the expansion of the universe was so preposterous and incredible that I feel almost an indignation that anyone should believe in it except myself he finally felt forced to conclude the beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agreed to look on it as frankly supernatural in a scene deleted from the final cut of the movie Jane and Hawking reflect on the implications of the Hawking Penrose singularity theorem Jane says this is amazing this is poetry well it's black hole theory time began at a certain point there was a moment of creation yes this is God's work I think you'll find the equations are mine but good point the standard Big Bang model thus predicts an absolute beginning of the universe if this model is correct then we have amazing scientific confirmation of the theological doctrine of creation out of nothing so is the standard model correct or more importantly is it correct in predicting a beginning of the universe despite its empirical conformation the standard Big Bang model will need to be modified in various ways the model is based as I said on Einstein's general theory of relativity but Einstein's theory breaks down when the universe becomes shrunk down to subatomic proportions we'll need to introduce quantum physics at that point and no one is sure how this is to be done the second cosmogonic model mentioned in the film is just such an attempt to marry quantum physics to general relativity to craft a quantum theory of gravity that will enable us to describe the early universe the so-called no boundary proposal developed by Stephen Hawking in collaboration with James Harden who enough is never mentioned in the film is known as the hartle-hawking model the hartle-hawking model eliminates the initial singularity by transforming the conical geometry of classical space-time into a smooth curved geometry having no edge so that space-time resembles a badminton shuttlecock this is accomplished by the introduction of imaginary numbers like the square root of negative 1 for the time variable in Einstein's gravitational equations which effectively eliminates the singularity the laws of physics thus do not break down at any point allowing a complete description of space-time in his best-selling popularization of his theory a brief history of time Hawking reveals an explicitly theological concern he concedes that on the standard model one could legitimately identify the Big Bang singularity as the instant at which God created the universe indeed he thinks that a number of attempts to avoid the big were probably motivated by a feeling that the beginning of time and I quote smacks of divine intervention he sees his new model is preferable to the standard model because there would be no edge of space-time at which one would and I quote have to appeal to God or some new law Hawking sees profound theological implications in the new model he writes the idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe so long as the universe had a beginning we could suppose it had a creator but if the universe is really completely self-contained having no boundary or edge it would have neither beginning nor end what place then for a creator Hawking does not deny the existence of God but he does think that his model eliminates the need for a creator of the universe in the movie the theological implications of the hartle-hawking model are raised in a conversation between Jane Steven and their friend Jonathan Jane begins Stevens done a u-turn the big new idea is that the universe has no boundaries at all no boundaries no beginning and no god oh I see I I thought that I'm you proved that the universe had a beginning and thus a need for a creator my mistake no mine steven is looking for a single theory that explains all the forces in the universe therefore God must die why must God die I don't see the two great pillars of physics our quantum theory the laws that govern the very small particles electrons and so and general relativity uh yes Einstein Einstein's theory the laws that govern the very large planets and such but quantum and relativity don't tell me they're different they don't play remotely by the same rules if the world were all potatoes then easy you could trace a precise beginning as Stephon once did a moment of creation hallelujah God lives but if you incorporate peas into the menu then it all goes a little haywire this all becomes a godless mess oh dear God is back on the endangered species list well I expect he'll cope as Jonathan rightly discerned the theological implications which Hawking seeks to draw from the model are highly suspect there is no reason at all that God could not have created a universe described by the hartle-hawking model when I spoke personally with James Hartle in his office at UCSB he saw absolutely no theological implications in the model indeed by positing a finite imaginary time on a closed surface prior to the plunk time rather than an infinite time on an open surface such a model actually seems to support rather than undercut the fact the time in the universe had a beginning such a theory if successful would enable us to model the beginning of the universe without an initial singularity involving infinite density temperature pressure and so on but as physicist John Barrow of Cambridge University points out this type of quantum universe has not always existed it comes into being just as the classical cosmologies could but it does not start at a Big Bang where physical quantities are infinite Barrow points out that such models are often described as giving a picture of creation out of nothing the only caveat being that in this case there is no definite point of creation Hawking's crucial misstep is his assumption that having a beginning entails having a beginning point ancient Greek paradoxes about starting and stopping of long since taught us otherwise imagine that a cannonball has a last instant at which it is R at rest before being fired from the cannon in such a case there is no point at which the cannonball first begins to move for at any point after its final instant of rest there will be a prior instant at which it was already in motion ad infinitum yet no one would say that the cannonball does not have a finite trajectory and a cause of its motion so having a beginning does not imply having a beginning point time begins to exist just in case for any finite temporal interval you choose there are only a finite number of equal temporal intervals earlier than it that condition is fulfilled for the hartle-hawking model as well as for the standard model moreover it's far from clear that on any realistic interpretation of the hartle-hawking model it does not in fact have a beginning point by using the mathematical artifice of imaginary time Hawking is able to read ascribe the universe in such a way that it has no initial singularity Hawking admits only if we could picture the universe in terms of imaginary time would there be no singularities when one goes back to the real time in which we live however there will still appear to be singularities Hawking's model is thus a way of reid ascribing a universe with a singular beginning point in such a way that the singularity is transformed away but it is the same universe with a beginning that is being described thus quantum gravity models like the standard model imply the beginning of the universe in his later book the grand design co-authored with leonard Mladenov hawking himself seems to endorse this interpretation of the model the authors write suppose the beginning of the universe was light the South Pole of the earth with degrees of latitude playing the role of time as one moves north the circles of constant latitude representing the size of the universe would expand the universe would start as a point at the South Pole but the South Pole is much like any other point to ask what happened before the beginning of the universe would become a meaningless question because there is nothing south of the South Pole in this picture space-time has no boundary the same laws of nature hold at the South Pole as at other places this passage is fascinating because it represents a rather different interpretation of the model than what we had in a brief history of time let me explain in his model Hawking employs imaginary numbers like the square root of negative 1 for the time variable in his equations in order to get rid of the initial cosmological singularity which is the boundary of space-time in the standard model the initial segment of time instead of terminating in a point like a cone is rounded off like a badminton shuttlecock the South Pole of this rounded off surface is like any other point on that surface and hence the idea that there is no boundary or edge since imaginary time behaves like a dimension of space hawking interpreted is no boundary universe to just be but in the grand design the South Pole is interpreted to represent the beginning point to both time and the universe Hawking allows the circles of latitude to play the role of time which has a beginning point at the South Pole when Hawking speaks of the problem of time having a beginning what he means is the age-old objection to the universe having a beginning an objection which his model removes so what is that age-old objection the objection he says is the question what happened before the beginning of the universe Hawking is right that this question is meaningless on his model but what he fails to mention is that the question is also meaningless on the standard Big Bang model since there is nothing prior to the initial cosmological singularity on either model the universe has an absolute temporal beginning so that it is meaningless to ask what happened before rather the real question is why did the universe begin to exist the hartle-hawking model doesn't address that question how could it physics only begins at the South Pole in the no boundary model there is no physics of non-being moreover there isn't anything in the model that implies that that point to be without a cause indeed the idea that being could arise without a cause from non-being seems to be metaphysically absurd thus both a standard model and the hartle-hawking quantum gravity model are united in predicting the finitude of the past and the beginning of the universe and Hawking's inferences about the theological implications of the model are based on philosophical mistakes it's sad that so gifted a scientist could have been led misled by such philosophical missteps both models are thus perfectly in accord with the judeo-christian doctrine of creation out of nothing I mentioned that physical eschatology makes scant appearance in the film the theory of everything it comes only in the poignant penultimate scene of the movie Hawking is asked you have said that you do not believe in God do you have a philosophy of life that helps you he answers by appealing to the religion of cosmology he says it is clear that we are just an advanced breed of primates on a minor planet orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies but ever since the dawn of civilization people have craved for an understanding of the underlying order of the world there ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of the universe and what can be more special than that there is no boundary and there should be no boundary to human endeavor we are all different however bad life may seem there is always something you can do and succeed at while there is life there is hope yes for this remarkable man's courage and perseverance in the face of almost impossible obstacles but even if it were true that while there is life there is hope the lesson of physical eschatology is that absent God there will someday be no life and hence no hope already in the 19th century scientists to realize that the application of the second law of thermodynamics to the universe as a whole implied a grim eschatological conclusion given sufficient time the universe will eventually suffer heat death Yale University astronomer Beatriz Tinsley described the fate of an expanding universe if the universe has a low density its death will be cold it will expand forever at a slower and slower rate galaxies will turn all of their gas into stars and the stars will burn out our own Sun will become a cold dead remnant floating among the corpses of other stars in an increasingly isolated Milky Way elementary particle physics suggests that thereafter protons will decay into electrons and positrons so that space will be filled with a rarefied gas so thin that the distance between an electron and a positron will be about the size of the present galaxy eventually all black holes will completely evaporate and all the matter in the ever expanding universe will be reduced to a thin gas of elementary particles and radiation there is no hope for a reversal of this descent into oblivion the universe will inevitably become increasingly cold dark dilute and dead reflection on this eschatological conclusion has led some philosophers to question the meaning of life its in a famous passage the British philosopher Bertrand Russell lamented that man is the product of causes which had no provision of the end they were achieving that his origin his growth his hopes and fears his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocation zuv atoms that no fire no heroism no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave that all the labors of the ages all the devotion all the inspiration all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins all these things if not quite beyond dispute are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand only within the scaffolding of these truths only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built Russell's keen philosophical mind saw more clearly than Hawking the correct implications of a godless universe Russell however was unaware of the evidence for a beginning of the universe and thus of the need for a cosmic creator when asked to explain the existence of the universe Russell replied the universe is just there and that's all this response is understandable on a pre Einsteinian view of the universe but it becomes inept when confronted with the fact of the universe's temporal beginning such a beginning points beyond the universe to its ground in a transcendent creator if such a creator does exist then he offers the best hope of delivery from the somber implications of physical eschatology other people do well that was an engagement of mind and emotion at a very deep level with very profound questions and so let's use this opportunity of having Bill here to tease him out further with your particular questions now don't be afraid the your question might be a silly question bill will adapt readily to the sort of varieties of questions that he gets and he'll be very happy to if you've got a question to ask you can be fairly sure somebody here will have an interest in the answer to your question we'll be thinking the question that you're thinking so I wonder if you like to UM join Timothy who is guarding the microphone and set us off with some questions to tease these issues out further for the next little while thank you rob thank you that was all I expected it to be would you please discuss the possibility that instead of a Big Bang it was a Big Bounce and that it was it's the result of the collapse of a previous universe and then into what we now see is a Big Bang and were that to be true what would be the theological implications of it let me say that this evenings lecture because it was motivated by the film is restricted to the discussion of just the standard model and the hartle-hawking model but obviously there are many other proposed models of the universe and the so-called oscillating model or models as there are many is one such that you've described these models were floated in the early 1970s and late 60s particularly by Russian cosmologists and they were an attempt to say that when the universe expanded to a certain point the gravitational effect of matter would overcome the force of the expansion and everything would suck back together again in a tremendous Big Crunch and if the matter did not coalesce correctly to a point the matter could slingshot past itself so that it would react spand to a new expansion and the hypothesis was maybe this goes on eternally like an accordion well these models did not outlive the 1970s in particular the hartle-hawking singularity theorems that we just been discussing we're really fatal for this kind of model because it showed that such a model if it did wreak elapsed would collapse back to a singularity and it is impossible for space and time to be extended through a singularity to another expansion so on a collapsing model the universe would simply expand rika lapse and end at a terminal singularity in addition to that scientists discovered that the density of the universe wasn't sufficient to generate the gravitational attraction sufficient to slow the expansion halt it and recon tracked the universe instead all the evidence indicated the universe would expand forever and in the most recent investigations it turns out that the expansion unexpectedly is actually accelerating there is a kind of dark energy that propels the expansion even more rapidly so that the prospect of recon traction is effectively ruled out so these oscillating models are not really widely discussed anymore good evening I'd love to try and equate how you feel about the time taken for the University of develop and the time period stated in Genesis I've just written written read a book by Professor Andrew Parker who wrote a book called Genesis enigma and he tries to explain the difference between the two or equate the two how do you explain it's striking when you read the first chapter of Genesis that the opening verse in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth is a cosmic description or perspective ancient Hebrew did not have a word for the universe when the ancient Hebrew wanted to say something about everything there is he would use the idiom the heavens and the earth so the first verse says in effect in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and then with verse 2 the focus dramatically narrows to this planet and the earth was without form and void and the remainder of the chapter describes how God transforms the earth into a habitable place for humankind and so I would see the origin of the universe described by Big Bang cosmology as consonant with verse 1 of Genesis 1 and then what happens from verse 2 and following is not part of cosmology that's part of Earth science or Earth history thank you very much mm-hmm surely if time is like a point with a moment before and a moment after then a Christian couldn't believe in the model of the creator of the beginning of the universe because the beginning of the universe talks about the beginning of time but if God made a decision at a point to create the universe and there must be in a moment before and a moment after this decision so surely God must have existed within time and so we cannot have created time after that well I think that a decision has to be taken after a period of indecision since God is omniscient he knows it the future he knows everything he's going to do so I think that God's being in decision in a state of indecision is ruled out by his Omni not just as timelessness so I would take it the decision to create a universe as an eternal decision that God makes he exists timelessly with the intention of creating a universe with a beginning and I see no reason to think that the idea of an eternal decision that is to say an eternal intention a free intention of the mind is incoherent and that you have to have a period of indecision existing before did that make sense that's pretty intact okay why there is such a big kind of conflict between people who believe in God and people who don't believe in God over the theories that Hawkins and other cosmologists come up with because to me what we seem to be discussing is not the evolution of the the bottom of the universe in itself but why did it happen yeah and is it you know the the things that they're finding out still fit quite happily if you interpret days to be millennia oh so why why is it that we have the big discussion of are they right or wrong as opposed to well obviously we're not having that discussion are we here this evening right that's not the topic this evening so I think the reason that people some people feel exercised to discuss this is they want to know what is the correct interpretation of the opening chapter of the Bible is it to be construed literally as describing six 24-hour consecutive days or are these days metaphors for long periods of time as you suggest and I personally think that the opening chapter of Genesis is open to a wide range of interpretations that are available for the biblically faithful Christian and so I'm not all worked up about this issue and that's why it's not on the table tonight but I guess my question really is is why is the media latched on to as being something to almost prove the non-existence of God to make it easier for people to know so do you think that the media tries to ridicule Christians because of six-day creationism no I believe that they they can use it as a way to make it easier to not believe I'd arise well maybe maybe you've just answered your own question I mean there are forces of secular culture that are bent on doing anything they can to make the Christian faith look silly to undermine it as much as they can to make it look anti intellectual to make Christians look stupid and if they can do this by painting us all as young earth creationists they certainly will do so so one shouldn't have any illusion about the neutrality of certain media outlets or reports that one receives there I think there are forces arrayed against a Christian world and life view that are deeply secular or even atheistic and our bent on making Christians look bad um it's sort of a wonder if we're taking the typical picture 50 picture of God's timelessness for the deikun image if both the models you were describing and acting within time and we want to see God as timeless surely it doesn't really matter which when we go for as if God is outside of time he could have created the universe or credit creation either way regardless of the model so surely in that that doesn't really matter which when we go for doubt what are the alternatives that it doesn't matter which one we go well if if we're acting on the sort of the standard Big Bang model or the Hawking model they're both acting under well they're dependent upon time and if God is timeless surely he could create it doesn't really work exactly and that was what I was arguing this evening is that these models are comparable in their theological implications because they both involve a finite past an absolute beginning of the universe and I think that is fully in accord as you say with the existence of a God who transcends time and space and brings space-time into existence by an act of his omnipotent power a theological II it's they don't really mess up which one of the two pictures we go for because right theologically I don't think it does matter both of them I think have the same theological implications so far as I can see okay hello my name is CJ this one's actually question is it don't you think that presented a feast idea like naturalism and materialism as a more reasonable idea than theology in the sense that with naturalist their deal with would Ottoman reality so the thing that things are finite and how to believe in things that just in the universe they can't believe in something beyond it because they really have no evidence for it I mean if you're going to go with the idea that you know God made made the universe then that's what you might want to believe that but it doesn't necessarily mean it's true because there you have to you have to argue with what God and how do you know that that is the God that made a universe rather we need to go with things that you do know and wait for when for when there's more evidence in he's actually God duh cause the universe to exist and also to Bible perhaps we could go um it's been rightly said that British and Americans are two people separated by a common language and just as I speak with an American accent I have difficulty understanding to our accent so I'm going to ask Peter May to help me interpret what you just said so that I can answer if I commit me okay can you try and express your question in a single symbol so you didn't understand it either I'm sorry I did have great time you're getting hold of that um basically my argument is based on like the gods the gas argument where we can all work out foggy yep so that's where I would that's the gist analyze it there's a translation of my argument it's very important to see that tonight I haven't argued for a god of the gaps in any way there's nothing I said in this evening's lecture that says here is a gap in scientific knowledge therefore let's appeal to God to explain it quite the contrary what I've said is that the findings of physical cosmogony are consonant or in accord with the doctrine that theology has of create do ex nihilo of creation out of nothing I've said that the conclusions of theology fit with what contemporary science is telling us about the origin of the universe now insofar as one might argue for the creator of the universe the scientific evidence that one is adduced here is not evidence for God it's evidence for the fact that the universe began to exist and you see that's a religiously neutral statement that can be found in any textbook on astronomy and astrophysics that the universe began to exist it will only be in the context of a wider philosophical the theological conclusions I think then will follow but there isn't any use of science here in an illicit way to prove or show God I think what science does is it helps to establish that religiously neutral statement that the universe began to exist maybe you didn't understand my answer that I did your question okay we have a bit of a philosophical question as far as some say if something caused everything then that implies that something caused itself which is paradoxical therefore the opposite must be true everything must come from nothing if this argument is valid do we need God the Creator you should have been in Birmingham this week to hear my cadbury lectures my topic was how God is the sole ultimate reality the creator of everything other than himself so that is the faulty premise in your argument is that there is something that is the creator of everything no the correct statement would be that God is the creator of everything other than himself but God Himself is uncreated he is a what theologians call a self existent being this is the property called a sanity the property of being independent of everything else of being self existent and so the argument is based upon a false premise and when it's properly stated then there is no incoherence hi my question follows on from that one actually philosophy religion textbooks in this country anyway suggest that Bertrand Russell when asked about the origins of the universe saw it as a brute given it was necessary it just was and what the textbooks often then say is why is the universe not any more nests even unnecessary being cool gold would you like to comment on that yes this is a wonderful question I don't think that those textbooks accurately represent Russell's view when he says the universe is just there and that's all he didn't mean that the universe exists necessarily what he meant is that the universe is just a brute fact it's just an unexplained given there is no explanation for why the universe exists rather than nothing he didn't think that the universe was necessary in its existence and I think with good reason to mention just one point what we've been talking about this evening a necessary being is a being which cannot fail to exist its non-existence is impossible and so as my doctoral mentor John hick showed a necessary being must have the essential properties of being eternal uncaused indestructible and incorruptible now if the universe began to exist it follows that the universe does not have the property of being eternal and therefore it cannot be a necessary being it is contingent and indeed contingent in a radical way it came into existence and that surely cries out for an explanation I can give Russell a run for his money when he says that the existence of an eternal universe is just a brute unexplained fact I don't believe that but I can understand that attitude but if the universe came into existence about fourteen billion years ago that sort of reply I think is just inept because it shows that the universe is contingent in a very radical way that points to a transcendent cause that brought it into existence if you're interested in following up on this issue in my book on guard there's a nice discussion of this argument in the chapter about Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and his argument for God's existence which was a sort of argument from contingency to God as a necessary being hello I actually had one question but your answer right now I have another question too if I could say what the one regarding the necessary being there's also this argument that the necessary being should be unique that there can only be one necessary pain because in a sense that there is two nicer beings then there's a continuous or a condition that makes them set them apart so we can only have one then how would you place Trinity into into that context I would agree with you that there's nothing about the attribute of necessity that implies uniqueness in fact many mathematicians think that numbers are necessary being and so there's an infinite number of them there are all the natural numbers for example plus all the other mathematical objects now I myself don't believe that but I don't think that you can simply deduce from the concept of something's being necessary that there's only one of it I think you need some sort of independent reason for that in the sense that it is the first cause the cause of causes so it should be one cause so then necessary being needs to be unique in that sense so being uniqueness if we have like the Trinity or two or three necessary beings at the same time what did you say the Trinity that that's those aren't three beings God God is three persons but it's one being one substance so there's only one God Christianity is monotheism yes not polytheism but let me address your question if I were offering an argument for an uncaused first cause I would appeal to Occam's razor to justify uniqueness Occam's razor is an explanatory principle that says you are only justified in positing those causes that are necessary to explain the effect do not postulate causes beyond assess and one first uncaused cause is sufficient to explain the effect so that the postulation of further causes would be unjustified and will get shaved away by Occam's razor the question regarding the time if we got quite a crotch okay hello hello I have read that if you an article that suggested that if you look at all the measurements of the speed of light that it appears to have been decreasing through time would you like to comment on that I didn't quite catch that Peter did you the speed of light is decreasing in time this is an attempt by certain young earth creationists to try to justify the view that the world is actually much much younger than it appears to be when you look at the Stars you see objects galaxies that are billions of light years away so if the light came to us from those stars it would imply the universe is billions of years old right so what they say is no the speed of light is slowing down it was faster in the past and so the light could get here very quickly from what I've read however this is based upon cherry-picking the scientific evidence to make it look like the speed of light is slowing down in fact when you look at the various measurements of the speed of light over the decades they pretty much averaged out to the same constant velocity if you're interested in this subject take a look at the website of Hugh Ross and his ministry reasons to believe Hugh Ross is a X astrophysicist who's now engaged in sort of science ministry religion and science reasons to believe and he is very much in conversation with young earth creationists and their various arguments and he has literature that addresses the question of the slowing down of the speed of light thank you for your talk really enjoyed it good I think that one of the issues that affects me when I hear about scientific explanations of any kind including cosmology and trying to relate it to the being of God and how we came to our existence I'd like to think about our interpretation of Genesis and the Bible not in a straightforward literal sense but looking at it from a literary point of view and when you look at Genesis one day for the Sun the moon and the stars are created after the earth and so we get something which obviously is out of sync yep with how science understands the beginning of our world so when we come to thinking cosmological terms about those two models that you gave and saying that there is a beginning on both a beginning of time on both those models and therefore they're not inconsistent with an idea of a transcendent creator god creating the universe that's fine as far as we can go but we don't learn very much about God himself in that sort of way of thinking so we need something else if we then go to the Bible as the source documents of the Christian faith and we look at Genesis we look at the Gospels and we see for example both Jesus well in the Gospels Jesus speaks about the creation story as if it had happened that Adam and Eve really existed similarly Paul in Romans will talk about Adam as a certain historical being one could say that's just for theological argument but it seems to me that he's saying this as though Adam were a real historical being what are we to do with trying to get an understanding of where we came from both from the Bible which seems to suggest that the Genesis story is something which is supposedly true and then cosmogony and other sort of cosmological theories and others scientific theories seems to suggest something else how do we match this all up from your point of view in order to get a really coherent view of where we came from and where we're going well what you've asked is an enormous questions exam and so what I want to do is to refer you to my online resources about this I teach an adult class at our church called defenders in which we do a systematic survey of the various areas of theology and their interaction with contemporary thought philosophy science and history and we have a section called doctrine of creation and there is a subsection on that called an excursus on creation and evolution and I would invite you to look at that on our website reasonable faith org and there are several weeks worth of lectures on this where I lay out I think seven or eight different interpretations of Genesis 1 that biblical Christians have offered there is a wide wide diversity of interpretations and then I offer some assessment of these as to their strengths and weaknesses and then when we get to the question of Adam we also explore the historicity of Adam and Eve whether these are historical persons and the challenge to that that issues from population genetics today which many claim do not allow the human race to ever get below about 2,000 individuals so these these are huge issues that you're raising and I would simply invite you if you're really interested go to reasonable faith or click on the section called defenders and you'll find there either videos of the lessons that you can watch and listen to or if you're in a greater hurry there are transcripts of the lessons all written out that you can read and I think you'll find they're a very responsible balanced and informed treatment of these questions that you're raising we'll learn something you every day hello on Friday there was a total solar eclipse of the Sun in the North Atlantic here in Britain because of our weather you could sort of barely notice it but thousands of years ago there was no explanation for this except to invoke supernatural powers but as our civil Asian civilisation has continued we've learned more and more we discard more science that we have found explanations for more and more of what happens so we haven't identified this point in modern physics the the Big Bang the origin of time and we don't have explanation for why that happened when and there but our knowledge of cosmology of physics in that area is very rudimentary we don't understand dark matter we don't understand dark energy and so you're jumping to the conclusion that there must be a supernatural reason seems to be based on the assumption there's no more to learn but as time goes on we will learn more about this and we may have a very possible answer no your do you understand that what you're posing is just the old god of the gaps objection that I've already addressed now I don't think he addressed it but but you do understand that that's the objection don't you that this is just god of the gaps accusation that I'm appealing to God or supernatural entity to plug up the gaps in our scientific knowledge are you assuming there will be no new knowledge that not at all means that not at all all I'm claiming is that the best evidence of contemporary cosmology supports that religiously neutral statement the universe began to exist and there's no God of the gaps involved in that at all if the evidence should suggest that the universe didn't begin to exist well and good but so far as I know the evidence lines up very very strongly in support of that statement which is a scientific statement not a theological one and so why do you resist the evidence of modern science and refuse to follow the evidence where it leads well it's not positive evidence that's negative evidence all ends of the gap no but it's one of negative the Hawking Penrose singularity theorems the board Guth the Lincoln singularity theorem the the redshift the microwave background radiation this is all positive evidence that the universe is not past eternal in fact Alex Vilenkin who is a very prominent Russian American cosmologists from Tufts University gave a talk at the 70th birthday celebration of Stephen Hawking in Cambridge two years ago in which he surveyed the models of contemporary cosmology and the Lincoln's conclusion was that none of these can be past eternal he said all the evidence we have says that the universe began to exist that's a direct quote and I was struck by that statement because it would be significant if he said the evidence for a beginning outweighs the evidence against a beginning but he didn't say that he said all the evidence we have says that the universe began to exist there isn't anything on the other side of the scale so why not follow the evidence where it leads you haven't mentioned the mouth the universe no I haven't tonight but that's only because I have their own God that's only because I was responding to the film the theory of everything and contrasting these two models the hartle-hawking model in the standard model but in my published work of course I address multiverse models and multiverse scenarios so I would refer you again to my published work on this where these issues are thoroughly discussed particularly the Blackwell companion to natural theology which is published by wiley-blackwell in Oxford I have an article in there with the physicist Jim Sinclair in which we discuss these sorts of models and whether or not they can be passed eternal so if you're interested in following it up take a look at the Blackwell companion to natural theology and the article that I've often co-authored there with Sinclair thank you for your question hi we kind of started out by considering cosmology as a religion and maybe we need to widen that to all of science and I reflect that it's actually quite a good religion in the term it has good and it provides an explanation of what we see around us and all those sorts of things that the religion does I wonder if you could just reflect with us where you think it particularly falls down as a religion because quite a few religions don't have a God your are all religions promised eternal life and so on right well I was bad for the naturalist I can understand how it would be a sort of quasi religion that was the opening part of my talk tonight but I'm not a naturalist so in that sense i i think it's an inadequate religion it doesn't really have a hold of the ultimate reality but even when assessed on its own terms i guess here's what i would say is that it lacks any explanation of why the universe exists rather than nothing and i think that its eschatology puts a question mark behind the meaning of human life in existence in the way that Bertrand Russell did so that it ultimately leads to despair and meaninglessness and absurdity so I guess I would see those as fundamental failings of the religion of cosmology good evening Gridley I'd like to pick up a bit on the Bertrand Russell quotation but in the context of the whole of your talk up to that point was about current scientific and the serious knowledge that support the need or the existence of a creator and then Stephen Hawkins had this question put to him where he ended up saying but whilst there's life there's hope basically and now I just wondered what your opinion was because to me there was a fundamental difference between the being of being if you see what I mean that created the universe and there being a God who cares about human beings and and and it seemed to me that Stephen Hawkins was going from a scientific statement to a humanist statement and are we not sometimes at being Christians tempted to assume that creator God would also be one that cared about human beings I don't know if we're guilty of assuming that certainly those of us who are Christian philosophers will not make that sort of leap what I've talked about tonight would be common property to Christians Jews Muslims even Deus who don't believe that God has revealed himself in any way if you were to ask me why are you a Christian theist then I would shift gears and I would begin to talk about the person of Jesus of Nazareth and who he was who he claimed to be and the credibility of his resurrection from the dead which as Peter said was the work of my doctoral thesis at the University of Munich and it would be on the basis of who you think Jesus of Nazareth was or is that will form I think the crucial transition to a Christian theism rather than just a Arik theism and I haven't talked about that tonight but again in my in my work like on guard a reasonable faith that work that I did at the University of Munich comes into play in trying to move beyond mere theism to Christian theism okay so I'm still not quite clear about your purpose in choosing the quotation from Bertrand Russell which seemed to and in the face of Stephen Hawking's humanistic statement you seem to give this this hopeless view yeah which to me doesn't preclude God as creator but does be clued God as Christians under sight here well you're absolutely right you see what I was trying to do there was saying that Hawking's statement while there is life there is hope it sounds very optimistic and cheery but I think honestly it's sort of like whistling in the graveyard I think Russell also an atheist like Hawking a keen philosophical thinker saw more accurately the implications of atheism and particularly of physical eschatology on an atheist worldview so that was the point that I was trying to make was that Hawking's optimistic view I think sits very ill very uncomfortably with naturalistic atheistic cosmology and that here Russell saw more courageously the real and hopeless implications of atheism and physical eschatology without God thank you it is now 8 o'clock and I think we have to I've see several people still standing let's take one more question and then we'll stop and hopefully you'll keep your choir and take them across to the hall afterwards and ask bill in a more informal way thank you thank you and my question relates to the motivations that scientists have for their research so do you think scientists like Stephen Hawking and indeed Christian science is not necessarily just a 'thus atheist scientists do themselves a disservice by going out - to try and prove a point that God is necessary or unnecessary or do you think they should do the science just to try and find more about the universe which we live in and then afterwards discusses implications okay now if I understood correctly was the question do I think that scientists are doing a disservice to us by going beyond their science and beginning to draw theological implications from their work yeah no I don't not at all what I think they do is a disservice is is not studying some philosophy before they do it but I envy them their physical expertise in cosmology and astrophysics I think it's wonderful and I want to hear from them but many of these men have a disdainful attitude toward philosophy in the great of the grand design with co-authored with Leonard belanov on the first page they declared that philosophy is dead and thereby have insulted all of their colleagues at Cambridge University in the philosophy department by saying this discipline doesn't deserve to exist and I think that's just enormous ly naive the the first third of the book then goes on to discuss the philosophical question of realism versus anti-realism in science so yes I value their input I want their input but they need to exert the same effort to understand philosophy that I as a philosopher have exerted in trying to honestly understand physical cosmology do you think that more productive as a scientist if he hadn't have been so obsessed in trying to prove that God wasn't necessary of it oh I would never say something like that because I can't speak to his personal motivations that would be inappropriate and I'm not a psychologist or psychoanalyst so I he does say that some other attempts to avoid the Big Bang were motivated by anti theological motives and Fred Hoyle was very candid about that and his own motivations but with respect to Hawking no I wouldn't say that oh and wouldn't presume to judge in that way bill thank you very much for a wonderful evening thank you I've been very much and thank you all for coming and particularly for those who have asked questions we've had some very good questions tonight and I've got a deep conviction that in our world dialogue is absolutely essential to try and understand each other's viewpoints and to weigh and consider we key the church for far too long has spoken from pulled bits six foot above contradiction and hasn't heard what people are saying and thinking bill is wonderful at engaging with the issues that are being expressed and considered by many people in the world so thank you again bill

Channel: ReasonableFaithOrg

Views: 47,879

Rating: 4.7154675 out of 5

Keywords: William Lane Craig (Author), Cosmology (Field Of Study), The Theory Of Everything, Stephen Hawking, Eddie Redmayne, Jane Hawking, Felicity Jones, Big Bang, atheist, atheism, theism, God, Christianity, universe, Einstein, Hubble, Relativity, Quantum, theory, The Grand Design, A Brief History Of Time, peas, potatoes, Reasonable Faith, science, religion, faith, reason, philosophy, theology, review, Genesis, creationism, naturalism, youtube, video, Religion For Atheists

Id: i08-gCue7Ds

Length: 83min 10sec (4990 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/nonpage]

William lane Craig is a Babbling fool. Someone asked him once if he believed in god and he said it would take him 40 hours or more to answer that question. If you need 40 fucking hours to answer a yes or no question there’s something wrong with the beliefs yiu are tap dancing around to protect.

[u/kingdomforfeit]

Just my two cents, but OP what I’m getting from your posts is that you automatically equate exJW to atheism.

[u/Blackzeek79]

I’ll have to check this out. Thx for the post, but what was your reasoning for posting this? Just wondering.

[u/Democritus__]

You make me suspect that you consider William Lane Craig superior in thinking than ... Tony Morris!

[u/Thundercatprime]

William Craig along with John Lenox were two man who I respected and made belief in God very logical. Realising JWs are wrong can damage the idea that God exists. I am still open minded to the idea of a creator. Thanks for this video.