Dr. Stephen Barr, "God and the Universe: Modern Physics, Ancient Faith"

just again everybody hear me okay good thank you Brian and thank thanks to the handsome house for inviting me and for you to you for coming out to hear me tonight so uh in this talk I'm going to discuss a very large subject the physical universe was it created did it have a beginning will it have an end and does it have any discernible purpose I'll discuss these questions both from the point of view of traditional Christian teaching and from the point of view of modern physics and cosmology naturally enough I'll start at the beginning that is the beginning of the universe for Christian doctrine the fundamental text about the beginning of the universe is the first verse of the Bible Genesis 1:1 in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth this verse affirms both that the universe is created by God and that it had a beginning in time it's quite important to recognize that these are two logically distinct ideas even though they're tied together by this scriptural verse creation refers to the fact that the universe depends for its existence upon God who is the source of its being beginning refers to the universe having a temporal starting point rather than a having a history that stretches infinitely into the past or that goes around in a loop the catechism of the catholic church in explaining Genesis 1:1 quite properly treats beginning and creation as distinct components of its meaning in its section 290 it says three things are affirmed in these first words of Scripture the eternal God gave a beginning to all things that exist outside of himself he alone is creator and the totality of what exists expressed by the formula of the heavens and the earth depends on the one who gives it being now although being created and having a temporal beginning a beginning in time are distinct ideas many theologians philosophers and ordinary people have seen them as connected in a necessary way for example many religious people see the presumed fact that the universe had a temporal beginning as proving that the universe was created some people refer to the Big Bang as the moment of creation for their part many atheists think that if the universe was shown to have always existed or in some other way not to have had a first moment it would disprove the need for a creator both are making the same mistake of simply identifying a temporal beginning with creation but as I said these are distinct notions some analogies will perhaps make this clearer a piece of music has an internal sequence measured by Beats or notes the beginning of a symphony is the set of notes located first in that sequence whereas the creation of the symphony he is the conception of the entire symphony in the mind of the composer the composer is not a part of the symphony and his or her creative thoughts have no location in the sequence of the symphonies notes though they are the cause of the notes and of their being organized in sequence similarly a novel has an internal sequence of words the beginning of a novel consists of the first words in that sequence whereas the novel's creation takes place in the mind of the novelist in other words one can distinguish between the beginning or opening of something which has to do with its internal sequential structure and its origin in the sense of the ultimate cause of its existence if someone were to ask why a certain novel exists it would be silly to point to its first words someone asked you why is there a novel A Tale of Two Cities it would be silly to say oh the reason is it was the best of times it was the worst of times if somebody asks you why is there a sub why is there this symphony Beethoven's fifth symphony you wouldn't say oh the reason there's that symphony is that uh you know now in fact when it comes to a novel that could be a novel whose plot went around in a circle in fact it could be printed on a scroll that looped around and that novel would have no first words and yet one presumes that it would still require an author in a similar way if one asks why the universe exists it would be silly to point to the Big Bang or whatever its first events were rather one should point to the bind of its divine author and even a universe that was cyclical in time were or were passed infinite that has had infinite past and had no first events would still require such an author divine creation creation in Christian teaching is the act by which God confers being upon the universe and all that it contains as st. Thomas Aquinas put it God is too all things the cause of being God's creative act is the reason that the universe is a real universe one that actually exists rather than just a possible hypothetical or fictitious universe creation is the conferring of reality it follows that God equally creates all things and events whenever and wherever they are located within the internal spatio-temporal structure of the universe God is the source of being of this pen right here and now this is analogous to the fact that a composer is equally the source of every note of his or her symphony and that a novelist is equally the source of every word of his or her novel God's creative act therefore is not something that happened once upon a time a long time ago being an act of the divine mind it has no location in space in time it is a single eternal timeless act by which God wills the existence of the whole universe and of all of its parts from beginning to end God is therefore the creator of what is happening here and now just as much he is the creator of what happened 13.8 billion years ago now admittedly Genesis 1:1 speaks of God creating creating in the beginning and theological tradition also distinguishes God's act of creating at the beginning and from his act of conserving were sustaining things in existence later but theological tradition also says that this distinction is only verbal or notional not real according to Catholic theology God's creating and his conserving are really one and the same eternal act the foregoing is the traditional Christian understanding of divine creation using one seized from it that physics can actually have nothing to say about the creation of the universe even though it may be able to tell us whether the universe had a temporal beginning and about the physical events that happened at or near that temporal beginning some religious people have the notion that the events act the temporal beginning of the universe must have been miraculous in the sense that they cannot be described by science or that they violated the laws of physics this notion may be due in part to the fact that cosmologists and particle physicists often speak of the universe having an initial singularity what does that mean if one attempts to describe the evolution of the universe at its using Einstein's theory of gravity but ignoring quantum mechanics one finds that as you go back to the that in time there is a first instant of time at which various physical quantities would have been infinite including the density of energy and the romani and curvature of space-time because of these mathematical infinities at that point in time the laws of physics would break down at that point at that singularity it's known however that it is invalid to ignore quantum mechanics when energy density and space-time curvature are as large as they must have been near the time of the Big Bang most fundamental physicists expect for good physics reasons that if quantum mechanics were properly taken into account in describing events near the Big Bang the singularity would go away and the equations everything would be finite and the equations of physics would be found to apply and as far as theology goes there's no reason to expect otherwise just as one would expect the first sentences of a novel to obey the same law of grammar and syntax as the later sentences one would expect the events at the beginning of the universe to obey the same physical laws as all later events it's absurd to suggest it would be absurd to suggest that if the laws of grammar apply at the beginning of a novel it means the novel has no author it's equally absurd to suggest that if the laws of physics apply at the beginning of the universe it means the universe has no author and yet many atheists make exactly this argument including the late Stephen Hawking toward the end of his life he suggested quite properly that the full equations of physics may whatever they are may both require the universe to have a temporal beginning and also described the physical events that occurred at that beginning which is perfectly reasonable I would expect the same thing but he went on to assert that this would render a creator superfluous now the first thing to say about that is that he's made he is making that was making the very mistake we've been talking about namely confusing creation with temporal beginning but there's another reply to his argument and strangely enough it was given by Hawking himself many years earlier in his 1988 bestseller a brief history of time Hawking noted that a theory of physics is quote just a set of rules and equations mathematical rules and equations and then went on to ask quote what is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe the usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the question of why this would be a universe for the model to describe unquote and that's just as true today as it was then and it is also just as true of quantum gravity theories as any other theories the point that he at that time grasped which is actually the essential point which he grasped in 1988 and seems to have forgotten later can be perhaps be made clear by a simple other simple analogy one may possess a book that contains the rules of baseball those rules describe the various kinds of things that can happen in a baseball game they even describe how baseball games begin and how they end they tell you what kinds of things happen under what circumstances they happen what order they happen and so on but those rules in no way can tell you whether an actual game of baseball is being played or has ever been played or will ever be played the rules could be describing merely hypothetical or possible or fictitious games a mere set of rules does not have the power to make real the events they describe just as the rules of baseball describe how a baseball game would begin but do not cause there to be any real baseball game so to the rules of a possible kind of universe the mathematical equations that would govern one may describe how a universe of that type would begin but they could not cause there to be a real universe of that type the laws of physics have no power to create universes in the sense of giving reality to them so physics itself cannot answer the question of why there is an actual universe for the laws of physics to describe for the laws of physics so the laws of physics cannot answer the question of why there's a universe God maybe the answer to why there's a universe or maybe there is no answer to why there's a universe but physics is certainly not the answer to why there's a universe okay now that's all I'm going to say about creation I'll now turn to the distinct question of whether the universe had a temporal beginning or was past infinite what does Christian revelation say about that what can philosophy or Pure Reason tell us about that and what does empirical science tell us that is physics and cosmology revelation in particular Genesis 1:1 is generally understood has generally been understood by Christians to imply that there was a temporal beginning the beginning referred to in Genesis 1:1 this has been understood to be a temporal beginning now some though there are actually other interpretations other meanings can be found in that verse I'm not denying that now some pagans in antiquity mocked this idea st. Augustine in his confessions tells us that some pagans would ask Christians the following question what was your God doing for all that infinite time before he finally got around to making this world why did he wait infinitely long before doing it now st. Agustin gave a very profound answer and famous answer to that question in the 11th chapter of his confessions he pointed out that time is a measure of change and therefore presupposes the existence of changeable things and thus created things therefore time is a feature or an aspect of the created world and is therefore itself something created from this it follows that if time has passed something created already exists I guess I should go to that slide if something if time is passing something created already exists and creation has already taken place it is therefore nonsensical to speak of a time before creation it's a contradiction in terms so st. Augustine answered the pagan taunt in these words but if there was quote if there was no time before heaven and earth why do they ask what you O Lord did then there was no then where there was no time unquote in other words the beginning at what he understood is that the beginning the temporal beginning of the created world was also the beginning of time itself now others had spoken of a beginning of time before st. accustomed life it seems that he was the first to understand and articulate that concept clearly the beginning of time modern physics came to the same concept fifteen centuries later by a parallel route st. Agustin had started with the insight that time is something created whereas modern physics started with the insight coming from Einstein's general theory of relativity that time is something physical space-time is something physical if time or space time is something physical then if the universe had a beginning if the physical universe had a beginning that beginning must also have been the beginning of space and time so just as Saint Agustin profoundly realized that it makes no sense to speak of a time before creation when God could have been waiting around to create the world modern physics says that it makes no sense to speak of a time before the universe began so if say the universe began 13.8 billion years ago it would be meaningless to speak of twenty billion years ago there would be no such the notion of the beginning of time is is enshrined in Christian doctrine both a fourth Lateran Council and in 1215 and the first Vatican Council in 1870 taught that God created the universe of an NCO temperance from the beginning of time st. Augustine's insights have an important corollary God in His divine nature is a temporal or non temporal if time is something created by God a feature of the created world then temporal categories cannot apply to the divine nature God dwells and in an eternal that is timeless present in st. Augustine's word words God dwells in the sublimity of an ever present eternity and st. Thomas Aquinas spoke of God dwelling in the new stands the now that stands still this of course fits well with the perspective afforded us by modern physics if space-time is the fabric of the physical world as general relativity tells us then the divine nature could not be temporal without also being spatial and physical a notion that has always been rejected as absurd by Christian tradition God is outside of time and space not geometrically outside but beyond the categories of space and time do not apply to God we've seen that the Christian doctrine based on divine revelation arrived at the conclusion that the universe has a temporal beginning that is also in the beginning of time itself what can reason alone unaided by divine revelation say about the question a very important Christian philosopher st. Thomas Aquinas said that there was no compelling philosophical argument at least none that he was aware of that proved that the universe had a temporal beginning he did think that one could prove philosophically that the world is created but he said that it was within God's power to create a universe that is past infinite and he said with you know we only know that the universe is not past infinite because God has revealed that to us in Genesis 1:1 and then we saw we know by revelation that God in fact chose to create a universe with a temporal beginning now some other philosophers have claimed contrary to st. Thomas that it is actually demonstrable by reason alone that the universe had a temporal beginning apart from anything they might have been revealed this is claimed for example by the proponents of the so-called Kalam argument for the existence of God yes the so-called Kalam argument for the existence of God the most well-known proponent of width of which is perhaps the Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig the Kalam argument which is named after some Islamic philosopher of the 11th century al-ghazali who was it Kalam ISM as an Arabic word and so the argument is named after the Islamic philosophers who developed it the Kalam argument purports to show philosophically the a the universe must have had a temporal beginning and be any entity which has a temporal beginning must have a cause outside of itself several medieval scholastic philosophers Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages also believed that the finite age of the universe can be proved philosophically a notable example is Saint Bonaventure a contemporary of st. Thomas Aquinas one hour Bonaventure used a number of philosophical arguments all of them fallacious to argue that the universe had to have a temporal beginning one argument he made was that if the universe were infinitely old they would have to have been some particular past days or times there were infinitely remote from the present but the day after such an infinitely remote day would still be infinitely remote from the present as would the day after that and the day after that and by mathematical induction all subsequent days which means the passage of time could not have led from that infinitely remote day to the present which means it's not really in our past the fallacy here is immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with some modern mathematics the past can have an infinite extent without any particular past day being infinitely in the past this is just the familiar mathematical paradox that while there is an infinite sequence of natural numbers one two three four five that sequence goes on forever this while that sequence has an infinite is an infinite sequence every particular natural number is finite so even if the past had an infinite extent all particular pastimes are a finite time ago so that's the fallacy Bonaventure fell for it and there's another argument to use but I'll skip that for reasons of time where it's equally fallacious argument and to his credit st. Thomas who saw through these arguments and made defective answers to them and that's impressive since he lived six centuries before mathematicians such as boson oh and Cantor clarified thinking about infinite sets and infinite quantities as I said since st. Thomas's view it is not was it is not pot logically or philosophically well it is not logically or philosophically impossible for a temporal sequence to proceed to infinity either into the past or into the future he said explicitly you could have a man who's caused by his father who is caused by his father and by his father and so on infinitely into the past and there's no logical or philosophical problem with that okay so philosophy I would say I would agree with st. Thomas doesn't really answer the question what about empirical science until modern times science was not in a position to say anything on this question but by the late 19th century several discoveries had been made that seemed to bear upon it and most of those discoveries had been and most of those discoveries seemed to go against the idea of a cosmic beginning in Newtonian physics for example it seemed natural to assume that time extended infinitely in both directions just as space was assumed to stretch infinitely in all directions moreover in the middle of the 19th century physicists discovered the law of conservation of energy which said that energy cannot be created or destroyed but only change from one form to another and chemists discovered that atoms are never created or destroyed in chemical reactions so it began to appear that matter energy space and time had always existed and always would in 1911 svante arrhenius Nobel prize-winning chemist said the opinion that something can come from nothing it is at variance with the present-day state of science according to which matter is immutable the Nobel prize-winning physicist Volta Nernst declared that quote to deny the infinite duration of time would be to betray the very foundations of science of course it was realized even back then that the earth must have had a beginning since the Earth's interior is still hot and it would have cooled off had it been infinitely old and some scientists used the second law of thermodynamics which I'll mention later again to argue that the universe itself must have had a beginning but it was hard to make scientific sense of a cosmic beginning at that time and the view began to prevail among scientists at least those who are not religious that the universe had always existed to many the idea of a beginning came to seem like they're a relic of religious mythology and contrary to modern science as we can see from these quotes but thinking on the subject took a dramatic turn early in the 20th century it started with Einstein's theory of gravity called general relativity which was published in 1916 in Einstein's theory space and time form a four dimensional manifold which one can think of as a physical fabric that can bend and Ripple in response to the matter and energy that fill it in 1920s a Russian mathematician named Alexander Friedmann and a Belgian theoretical physicist George Lamech or as many people calling Lemaitre III used to call him Lemaitre until a French friend of mine told me it should be said something like the met but anyway George Lemaitre was also not only a theoretical physicist he was a Catholic priest and both Friedman Friedman and ylim and limit and lumetri showed independently of each other that the equations of Einstein's theory of gravity could describe a universe that is expanding that that is not just a universe in which matter is moving apart through space but a universe in which space itself is stretching to make the universe larger lumetri was aware of astronomical observation Friedman died in the late died young and sort of left the picture Lamech wrote was aware of astronomical observations that showed that distant galaxies are receding from us on the basis of those observations and his own theoretical calculations based on Einstein's theory he proposed that the universe is indeed expanding from an initial explosion which he called the primeval atom and which is now called the Big Bang joram F was the founder was really the one who proposed the Big Bang Theory and I should say as his last November I think it was the International Astronomical Union voted overwhelmingly to recommend that's the law describing the universe's expansion which has been called the Hubble law should be should be named the Hubble lumetri law because actually lameta predicted this in 1927 predicted the law two years before Hubble in observational II discovered it so in the 1960s cosmic radiation left over from that explosion was discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert W Wilson and since then evidence for the Big Bang has accumulated rapidly there's now no doubt among fundamental physicists and cosmologists that there was a big bang about 13.8 billion years ago in the standard model of cosmology the Big Bang is assumed to be the beginning of the universe and thus of matter space and time itself that does not resolve the question definitively however as many speculated extensions of the standard model of cosmology have been proposed and in some of these scenarios they're not yet testable theories the Big Bang was not at the beginning of the universe but rather one event in a history that stretches back further some of the more important speculative scenarios in which the universe had a pre Big Bang history are called the bouncing universe the echo periodic universe and eternal inflation in the bouncing universe scenario which is considered by Einstein back in 1930 the universe is supposed to be gone undergoing an endless cycle of expansion and contraction with each contracting phase ending in a bounce that becomes the Big Bang of a new cycle the Big Bang's would merely the Big Bang that was 13.8 billion years ago would merely have been the latest such bounce in the echo Radek universe scenario our universe is one of two parallel universes each three-dimensional three spatial dimensions that move toward and away from each other through a fourth spatial dimension big undergo endless cycles in which they crash into each other and then move apart again and then crash into each other and move apart the Big Bang would have been the latest such crash in the eternal inflation scenario bubble universes are constantly forming within a larger universe that is perpetually expanding the Big Bang would have been the formation of our bubble these scenarios are very interesting and one of them might turn out to be correct nevertheless there are strong theoretical reasons to think that even in such scenarios the universe as a whole probably would have to have had a temporal beginning in a bouncing universe that would probably have had to be a first bounce and in an internally eternally inflating University would probably have have to be a first bubble and in a neck periodic universe probably have to be a first collision there are two reasons to think this the more fundamental reason is the second law of thermodynamics which I already mentioned this says that entropy which is a mathematical measure of physical disorder always increases on the whole which causes physical systems to run down to wear out to decay and so on it's this is what makes perpetual motion machines impossible and it's also why we're mortal the point is that a universe that has lasted for an infinite time would in essence be a perpetual motion machine the second reason is a theorem proved in 2003 by the physicists Arvind borde Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin which says roughly speaking that if one traces the history of an expanding universe backwards in time one must come either to a beginning of time or to an era where classical concepts of time no longer apply because of quantum mechanical effects for these and other reasons it's turned out to be difficult to construct a reasonable and viable mathematical model of a past infinite universe so even though he cannot be certain from a scientific from the scientific evidence that the universe had a temporal beginning it nevertheless seems most likely that it did given everything we know at present this can be seen as a vindication of Jewish and Christian revelation the idea of a cosmic beginning was mocked by ancient pagans as absurd and rejected by many modern atheists as unscientific but nevertheless it now appears to be most probably correct ok does the cosmos have a purpose or a point an answer to that that as long seemed reasonable and even obvious to many people is that the universe does have a purpose and that the well more than one purpose in Christian tradition the main purpose of the universe is to manifest God's glory but another purpose is to be a habitat for creatures such as ourselves human beings are after all the highest productions of nature that we know about so that's always seemed reasonable to people that the universe perhaps was made for our benefit and yet the discoveries of modern science have led some to conclude that humanity is a fluke Bertrand Russell wrote that the human race is merely quote a curious accident in a backwater unquote of the universe and the famous Nobel prize-winning physicist Stephen Weinberg the great physicist Stephen Weinberg made this statement in his popular book the first three minutes written in 1977 quote it is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe that human life is not just a farcical outcome of a chain of accidents but that we were somehow built in from the beginning it's very hard for us to realize that we are just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe the more the universe seems comprehensible the more it also seems pointless in the 40 years since Weinberg wrote that much has been learned that undercuts that claim in particular it's been found that the laws of physics as we know them and the very structure of the cosmos give every appearance of having been crafted to make complex organisms such as ourselves possible physicists have asked themselves how the universe would have turned out had the laws of physics been slightly different in various ways for example certain particles having slightly different mass or forces having slightly different strengths and so on in many cases what they find is that small changes in the basic laws would have had drastic effects that would have made the emergence of life as we know it impossible though this was ohm once almost taboo to speak about among physicists it's now quite widely admitted even by scientists were atheists Stephen Hawking made no bones about it in his 2010 book the grand design he says very plainly that many features of the laws of physics as we know them are just right to make life possible Edward Witten one of the top theoretical physicists alive today some many people in my field regard him as the smartest person physicist alive and possibly the smartest person on the planet I think the strong case could be made for that he calls himself a skeptical agnostic he's not religious a skeptical agnostic maybe a polite way of saying an atheist but he calls himself a skeptical agnostic he was in an interview some years ago he said many interesting things and one of them was this there's really a feeling of wonder about the strangeness of the laws because the laws of nature to the extent that physicists have been able to unearth them are extremely beautiful and harmonious but also strange and there's a second love of puzzlement about why these laws have such delicate properties just with physics we already know the fact that galaxies stars and planets roughly like ours could have formed and that living things roughly like us could have formed depends on many details of the laws of physics as we currently know them being just the way they are and not being slightly different I think we'll never resolve the sense of wonder about that such fortuitous features of the laws of physics are often called in throbbing coincidences there are many examples some very famous if this famous one is that if the strong force one of the four known forces of nature a strong nuclear force that holds atomic nuclei together we're about 20 or 25 percent weaker a crucial nucleus called deuterium would not would be unstable it wouldn't be able to hold together and that would have the consequence that almost none of the elements of the periodic table except ordinary hydrogen would have formed and with only hydrogen and with only hydrogen chemistry based life would not be possible another very famous example it concerns a certain excited state or energy level of the carbon-12 nucleus had that energy level been different by a few percent its energy been if different by a few percent in either direction almost no carbon or elements heavier than carbon would exist in the universe which would mean a disaster as far as the possibilities of life there's a parameter in the standard model of particle physics that you've heard of the Higgs field the strength of the Higgs field in an empty space and it is called the the technical jargon is it's the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field and symbolized by the letter V in a widely cited paper that I wrote with some colleagues back in 1998 we showed that V has to lie in a very narrow range of its of the mathematically allowed values and a fantastically narrow range if life is to be possible in our universe had a hard time getting that paper published but now it's actually become very highly cited in the literature by many people including Steven Weinberg and many many top theorists so so it's as I said this is now no longer a taboo subject lots of papers are published on these anthropic coincidences nor is it just a question of certain parameters having precisely quote fine-tuned values certain gross qualitative features of the laws of physics and of the structure of the universe are also very important for the possibility of life such as the fact that the number of macroscopic space dimensions is three that time has an arrow or a direction which is still not understood by physicists and that the universe obeys the very strange and highly non-trivial principles of quantum mechanics now it should be noted this is very important that there is a speculative hypothesis called the multiverse that could explain some and maybe most of these entropic coincidences in a naturalistic way especially the fine-tuning ones the multiverse idea is that the fundamental laws of physics allow certain quantities that were traditionally thought to be constants of nature such as the masses of particles and the strengths of forces to vary to take from place to place in the universe that are very distant from each other so for example the mass of the electron is a certain value in the entire part of the universe that we can see but in parts of the universe outside our what's called horizon maybe the mass of the electron takes different values if enough values of these fundamental quantity of these basic quantities are tried out so to speak by the universe there might be regions of the universe just by chance where all of these important quantities have just the right values for life to be possible the multiverse hypothesis is not far-fetched as it may sound to non particle physicists from the particle physicists point of view it's a perfectly it's a perfectly reasonable idea but it would require that the fundamental laws of physics because even in multiverse scenarios it's assumed that there is some deep down underlying fundamental laws of physics that govern the whole multiverse but the fundamental laws of physics would have the vari have to have the very special characteristic that they allow many important quantities to vary from place to place in other words one can say and that's a highly non-trivial property for the fundamental laws of physics to have in other words one can say that for complex organic life to arise in a universe it must be governed by fundamental laws that are special in some way either in having many basic quantities and qualitative features chosen just right or in having that characteristic the right characteristics to allow all these quantities and features to vary from place to place the possibility that the universe might be a multiverse does not therefore vitiated the force of the argument that the existence of life is evidence of a cosmic purpose the lesson would seem to be that the ability of the universe to generate beings such as ourselves is not something to be taken for granted as though it were to be expected of any universe whatever its laws might be rather as Witten said it should arouse wonder let me say something about the size of the cosmos which Brian mentioned in introducing me as Pascal said the eternal silence of the infinite spaces frightens me and before him others have expressed the same feeling many have seen the VAT scale of the cosmos in both space and time as evidence of the insignificance of human beings if we are part of the purpose for which the universe was created why so much empty space as Weinberg pointed out in the passage above we are just a tiny part of the universe the same point was raised as a question by the psalmist in he said quote when I look at your oops do I have it on here no when I look at your at the heavens the work of your fingers the moon and the stars that you have established what are human beings that you are mindful of them mortals that you care for them that Psalm 8 I like the King James translation better but this one well maybe this one's a little more intelligible why in this vast universe we don't seem to amount to a hill of beans interestingly cosmology has something to say about this we know that biological evolution requires billions of years to produce beings such as ourselves and before biology can even start the chemical elements required for life the elements of the periodic table must be synthesized by Astrophysical processes that also take billions of years moreover Einstein's theory of gravity relates the longevity of a universe to its size if one required if one said you know the universe is way too big you know why couldn't God have created a much nicer human scale cosmos maybe the size of North America or or maybe the solar system well a universe that never got larger than a few thousand miles across a comfortable human scale according to general relativity would not last more than a few hundredths of a second conversely if the universe is to last for billions of years as is required for life to arise it must attain a size of at least billions of light-years across which is we observe in other words far from pointing to human and significance the vastness of the universe both in time and space is a necessary precondition given the kinds of laws that we have is a necessary precondition for us to be here so let me sum up what I have said and so far and to say that we've learned from Auden physics and cosmology if the evidence strongly suggests that the universe had a temporal beginning that's not the same thing as saying it was created but it had a temporal beginning as Christians have always believed on the basis of Revelation and it has shown us that many features of the universe's laws and structure including it's astounding size and age are just what is required for life such as ourselves to exist in it which is suggestive not doesn't prove anything but it's suggestive that we may very well be quote built in from the beginning as to use Weinberg's words and that there is a point to it all and that we are part of that point now I've come to the end of my 45 minutes so I'm going to drop the last part of my talk which is will the int universe come to an end you'll have to come back next week to find out but the short answer is the Christian revelation says yes and actually let me just read show you some scriptural passages long ago this is from Psalm 1 or 2 long ago you laid the foundation of the earth and the heavens are the work of your hands they will perish the heavens and the earth they will perish but you endure they will all wear out like a garment you changed them like clothing and they pass away Christ himself said heaven and earth will pass away but my words will not pass away st. Paul tells the Corinthians the present form of this world is passing away the first letter of John says and the world and it's desire are passing away the second letter of Peter foretells that the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire as the head the heavens will pass away with a loud noise and the elements will be dissolved with fire now modern cosmology gives us two possibilities the world the universe will keep expanding eventually reached a maximum size and REE collapse into what's called the Big Crunch at which time was probably presumably space time the universe and time itself will come to an end or the universe will keep expanding forever in which case we'll get colder and darker and emptier eventually the stars will all burn out all usable energy will be used up and the universe will become approached absolute zero this is traditionally called the heat death of the universe so the universe will exist but any possibility of life in it will vanish disappear at some point so you might say the world in that sense will come to an end and long before those things happen the Sun is going to blow up and become a red giant in about 5 billion years and incinerate everything on the earth so the earth is certainly so on that happy note I will so there seems to be an agreement between revelation and science that the world basically is coming to an end but it's a little more complicated but I don't have to time to talk about that because Revelation also talks about Christian tradition and doctrine also talks about a new heaven and a new earth and and that's a long discussion which I'll skip thank you [Applause] Thank You professor Barr we are gonna have a chance for your questions now to follow up on the lecture and before we do so I just want to lay out some ground rules for our conversation so I only have three of them they are be curious be brief and be civil so be curious please do have a question and not just a long comment to share with us so keep it in the form of a question be brief keep it a short question so that we can get as many questions in as possible and be civil it's fine to disagree but let's model respectfulness incivility here today and we want to start actually by prioritizing student questions so if you're a student whether you're from there you or from anywhere else we would love to give you the first questions here we've got a microphone that's gonna be coming around Natalie and Kyle are gonna be keeping an eye out for people so if you could just stick your hand up if you've got a question hi my name is Dalton so could you talk more about the or just elaborate a little bit on the second law of thermodynamics and entropy there are more ways to be disordered disorganized and disorderly than there are ways to be orderly and organized okay so that's why you see you you might see imagine a game of pool you not if you play pool you know that you can start off with the pool balls in a nice orderly triangular array and then you shoot the cue ball in and they scatter and roll around aimlessly if you're going from order to disorder you never see pool balls milling around on the pool table and then ending up unless somebody reaches in and does it they never end up in an orderly array so you never you never go from the disorder to order now why is that because there are more ways to be just it's it's a probabilistic thing it's it's not impossible for the balls to to rearrange to arrange themselves go from be disorder to it or arrey it's just extraordinarily improbable and the reason it's extraordinarily improbable is there lots they said there are a lot of ways to be disorderly and there's very few ways to be orderly and so the pool balls never find the orderly arrangement so that raises an interesting so the you tend always to go from order to disorder now that raises a very profound and mysterious question we that by the way is the reason that there is an arrow of time that's the general belief among physicists what what what causes time to have a directionality or events really to have a directionality is this growth of disorder in the universe but of course that means the universe started a very low end or entropy is disorder so it started very orderly early on very low entropy why that is is not yet understood that's a as far as I know no the physics can't the reason for that is not yet known but that's that's in a nutshell why entropy is always increasing and on the whole you can have entropy in one it region go down but it always grows by even more somewhere else so you can put a glass of water water is more disorderly than ice crystals you can put a glass of water in your freezer and it will freeze and become ice so it's going from dis sort more disorderly to more orderly but disorder grows more somewhere else okay so on the whole this disorder always wins out anyway and that's why we die I'm so cheerful today is there a question up here yeah um this is a physics question I guess or um you said at some point that when you're describing like which constants had to be really important you said like it's really important that we're in three dimensions three dimensions okay if again there's always a sum so if you assume in three dimensions you can have planet stabili or orbiting stars there's a kind of balance between the gravitational attraction and the centrifugal force or a pseudo force is pushing the planet out if you're in more than three dimensions and you keep this the laws of gravity of the same form basic form in more than three spatial dimensions the the gravitational force would depend on distance in a different way and in such a way that either centrifugal force wins out and the planet shoots off to infinity or gravity wins out and the planet plunges into the star they say there are no stable orbits and actually the same is true for atoms atoms if you kept the same laws of electrodynamics electrons would either plunge into the nucleus or they'd where they'd fly off in more than three dimensions other things there's bad happen in less than three dimensions if there's two dimensions there are certain difficulties that arise that I won't go into but so three is a very special number of dimensions and thank God we live in freedom you maybe you're gonna touch on this after but I was curious is there modern theory regarding kind of a new creation like that parallels revelation but like after this were earth passes away that something will come up that gets the part of the talk that I'm dropping but the you know it's it's a very interesting I and I wish I'd had time to take the ten minutes to talk about it there is a problem with having so we believe there is a new heaven and a new earth whatever that means we do believe as Christians that we will have a next life and it is that we will have real weak corporeal will have some kind of bodily Nassif in the next life will in some sense be the same ones we have now and that's implied by the word resurrection which means to rise again however what that means doesn't it what the means to say the same body is disputed and there's no authoritative teaching on that it could be that they're the same bodies in the sense that they're animated by the same soul that they're the bodies of the same person doesn't necessarily mean that they're bought the resurrected body has the same material constituents as the body that died but there's a problem with trying to thinking that the next world or the new heaven and the new earth will be very similar to ours and that is that they would be subject to the second law of thermodynamics in that case the second law of thermodynamics actually doesn't depend too much on what the laws of physics are because as I said it's a statement about probabilities if you have a universe which is very complicated as a lot of things in it and which is governed by mathematical laws the way ours is I don't know if prove a theorem about this but the chances are that they're the second law of thermodynamics will apply in that universe which means things will tend to decay to wear out and so on die the things will be perishable and that is a problem and that's a problem that st. Paul understood and let me go to the quote st. Paul discusses this in first Corinthians chapter 6:15 where people asked what kind of bodies will we have in the next life how can it even be and he understood that he said flesh and blood cannot inherit flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable and so bodies we have perishable bodies in the next life we won't be perishable so whatever our bodies are they won't be flesh and blood like this because that would mean they would be perishable and could not inherit the imperishable and these their forces concludes we will all be changed in a moment in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet not a literal trumpet Necedah for the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable and we will be changed for this perishable body must put on in Paris ability ability and that's why for example Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict wrote in his introduction to Christianity to recapitulate Paul teaches not the resurrection of physical bodies but the resurrection of persons and this not in the return of the fleshly body that is the biological structure an idea he st. Paul expressly describes as impossible the perishable cannot become imperishable but in the different form of the life of the resurrection as shown in the risen Lord so how would that work we're told by scripture that is something we cannot even begin to imagine what we shall st. John says what we shall be has not yet been revealed and first Corinthians what no eye has seen nor hear ear heard nor the human heart conceived what God has prepared for those who love him so it's not something that we can even begin to imagine but it can't be too close to what we have now for the reasons I stated so I get the rest of my talk so there we go are there any more student questions on the other end of the last question could you speak at all to physics or the nature of nature when God first created before the fall and then perhaps to how that could have changed post-fall original sin preternatural gifts - okay or or how you view the fall temporally okay alongside physics alright now this is not necessarily where you're coming from but I mentioned anyway there's some people there are many Christians it is a traditional it's a scriptural teaching and a teaching of a Christian doctrine the death is a consequence of the fall of the fall of man now some Christians take that to be meaning that all death plants and animals included is somehow a consequence of human sinfulness that of course presents problems because animals with implants with dying for hundreds of millions of years billions of years before humans appeared on the scene it's not a Catholic teaching that all death is a consequence of sin only human death and the traditional teaching is that God offered the first humans in some mysterious way a choice he offered them bodily immortality but that was in the traditional terminology a preternatural gift because the traditional idea was humans are animals and as animals are subject to death death is natural for plants and animals and as animals we are subject to bodily death by Nature but God offered the first humans an exemption from that on the condition that they didn't sin they didn't Rebell but that was a preternatural gift a gift beyond nature however they did sin and that gift was withdrawn and humans reverted to the more bodily mortality that was their lot as animals and so in a sense it was a possibility that was never realized but death there's never the unive the laws of physics there was not at a period of time in history the universe where there was no where they were living things where there was no death or there was some unfallen state of the universe in the sense that had different laws now that laws that we know we have very good evidence applied all the way back to the beginning certainly to the first three minutes and even beyond the first so we've had the same laws all along there weren't some set of laws and then there was a fall and then the universe got corrupted in the sense of getting different laws that that doesn't work but it's there's no crisp there's no Catholic doctrine that requires one to think that anyway hello I'm John Davis I'm from Bethlem called in seminary and I was wondering and you're talking about creation you were saying that it didn't need to be miraculous in the sense that the laws of physics didn't apply because in quantum mechanics every creation I said the beginning of the universe oh yes sorry yes the beginning of the universe so how would you then view what what is the relation between physics and the miraculous a miracle I would define different people have defined it in a different way I would define it and I think this is fairly traditional a miracle would be an extraordinary event that goes beyond what is naturally possible and I would say the way I would say is what it goes beyond what is naturally possible either in violating a law of nature or in violating what I would call natural probability I mean there are things for example for example there's a legend that no one believes but there was an old legend that when the Bible was translated the Old Testament the Hebrew Bible was translated from Hebrew in the few centuries before Christ into Greek which happened in Alexandria to form what was called the Sept would accept two urgent translation the legend was that 70 scholars or maybe was 72 scholars were each asked to translate the Old Testament into Greek and independently of each other and they all ended up with exactly the same word-for-word translation now that's not violating a law of physics but it's obviously improbable so improbable that that would be miraculous or I would say something that violates a law of nature or is violates what you might call natural probability natural randomness and natural probability and how would I that it seems to me this there's nothing as a physicist I believe that nature is lawful and orderly and that actually is one of the traditional arguments I'm glad I brought it for the existence of God if you go back in in throughout Christian history what was the argument for the existence of God that was used to convince pagans or first if universe exists there has to be a cause of its being and second that it is orderly and lawful and it must be a cause of that order so the lawfulness of the universe is very important and it points to a lawgiver which is God but if God is the lawgiver to nature and then even in Scripture it says God is not just the lawgiver to the to the Israelites he's the lawgiver to the cosmos in Jeremiah 33 25 I think it is says God says when I have given no laws to heaven and earth so God is a lawgiver to the universe but the lawgiver can suspend the laws the one who established the laws can suspend them for a sufficiently grave reason and in Christian in the Christian belief the miracles happen they're higher reason for which God is willing to suspend the laws of nature is the salvation of human beings because of human being one human being one human soul is worth more than a billion uninhabited galaxies right so that is that is the vital motivation that he might say for God at times to suspend the laws of nature it has to have all miracles in the Bible and since have a self ethic purpose all right we've got one more student question and then we'll open it up to general questions after that yeah so you use the example of affinity a number of times what you use the example of infinity a number of times and I was just wondering like how do what would you say is a way we could know like infinity is like a lot and not just someone getting lazy I'm like sure what you mean by in the beginning wouldn't in like the first part of you when I talked about the initial singularity right and you're talking about that well well actually what I said is that if you were to do the calculate if you were to do cosmology using Einstein's theory of gravity but leaving quantum mechanics out of it which is the wrong thing to do so you use what's called classical general relativity you would conclude and this is a famous theorem that was proven by Hawking and Penrose you get to an initial singularity which in which certain quantities become infinite but nobody or hardly anybody believes that's the way things were because that only is what you find if you leave quantum mechanics out and most physicists believe that if you were to do things properly and nobody knows how to do them properly at this point but if you were able to do quite if you knew how to do the quantum gravity calculations there's an expectation value that expectation there's an expectation that those infinities would not show up they're an artifact of doing the calculation wrong that's the general belief but so so actually I don't I'm not saying there are infinities anywhere okay I'm not sure where people are cuz the lights in my eyes yeah generally in the back here yeah next question is back here Stephen okay oh wait this way here we are this is Chris has a question in what ways does your study of physics strengthen your faith in God or is for you more that your faith in God is a given and you find it compatible with physics the latter though it does I faith isn't and I as a binary thing you have it you don't you can have greater or lesser faith uh it does um what impresses me and I think it's a tremendous privilege to have worked in to work in a field like theoretical particle physics where you get to see the fundamental laws of physics at least as we know them today see see the physical world at a very fundamental level and what you see is in remarkable Witten talked about how remarkable the laws were they're amazingly beautiful and mathematically deep and rich and that suggests not just to me but to many people that a great mind conceived of those laws the deeper and the deeper we go into nature the more mathematically sophisticated the deeper and the more beautiful and rich the mathematical structures that we uncover and I use an example a Kepler's laws of planetary motion very beautiful his three laws of planetary motion are mathematically beautiful but there are actually not very deep in you could explain them to a a mid a middle school student or a bright sixth grader in about ten minutes they're not that deep mathematically they're based however on a deeper laws which are newton's laws of mechanics and gravity which require you to know calculus to understand Newtonian laws of mechanics but Newton's theory of gravity is now understood to be arresting upon a yet deeper law which is Einstein's theory of gravity well that's much more sophisticated you need usually you learn that in graduate school takes a semester usually to learn Einstein's theory you have to learn about curved non Euclidean four-dimensional space-time differential geometry tensor analysis and a lot of stuff a lot more than to understand Newton's laws of gravity it is now believed by many very bright people that that well almost everyone believes that Einstein's theory of gravity is really just an approximation to a yet deeper theory very likely super string theory and super string theory is so deep mathematically that even though hundreds of the most brilliant theoretical physicists and mathematicians in the world have been studying it intensively since at least 1984 they still don't understand its mathematical structure so the so the universe is based on very deep mathematical ideas and I cannot I that leaves me in awe really frankly and I would say it increases my admiration of the of the author of of this universe got a question right here thank you um would you care to say anything about evolution what well God created man and God created woman um I think evolution happened it's a fact is that a problem yeah okay no I mean the evolution I think there's no problem let me go back to my I think this actually raises a larger question I think a reason why many people see a conflict between science and religion is that they see God in nature as in competition with each other God and nature are competing causes so if if you have a natural explanation for something then God is not involved and if God is the cause of something well it must be supernatural and miraculous that's not the traditional Christian view going back to the early church fathers the early Christian writings the traditional view is that God is the author of nature so again think of the analogy of a book or a play let's say a book or a play and and let's consider say Hamlet Hamlet in the play Hamlet there's a character character Hamlet kills the character Polonius by stabbing him through a curtain and I often ask audiences when I talk about these kinds of things I say okay I'm gonna give you a choice we're gonna vote how many people think that Polonius died because the character Hamlet stabbed him through a curtain raise your hands and then I say okay now how many of you think that the character Polonius died because Shakespeare wrote the play that way okay now it's absurd because there's no that's not it no choices needed they're both true because within the plot of the play which I would call the horizontal cause the plot the cause within the play is Hamlet stabbing but Shakespeare is the vertical vertical cause he is the cause of the whole play of the fact that there is a play that there are certain characters in it and certain events and of all the relationships among those characters and events including the causal relationships within the play he is in theological life so when it comes to the universe the causes within the plot of the universe the natural causes that scientists and everybody studies are called by theologians secondary causes the vertical cause that is the author of the of the universe of the plot is called the primary cause God is the primary cause he is analogous to Shakespeare that so to ask for example did this species of animal a giraffe crocodile did it arise by natural causes within the universe or because God wrote this plot of the universe that way it's a absurd question just as absurd as the question about Hamlet it's a false choice God is the cause of all events in the universe he wrote the plot and and he wrote it in most cases that plot follows certain laws internal laws that God has established though he has the power of course to have a day or sex machina he has the power to have something extraordinary happen in the plot that violates the laws an author can write grammatical prose and then decide it some point to put something ungrammatical in his in his story to violate the laws of grammar that he can choose what laws he right to get right in French right in Russian right in English you can choose the the laws the grammatical rules of his play with other rules that apply within his play that's in the power of the author and some tea might choose at some point to violate those for some reason okay but anyway that's my answer about evolution it's a false choice between creation and evolution well then it's gonna have to be it I know there's more questions but we can save those for the reception which I will say a little bit more about in just a moment here but let's conclude by thanking dr. Barr for being here with us [Applause]

Channel: Anselm House St. Paul Study Center

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Length: 80min 21sec (4821 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2019