Polemics

Alexander Vilenkin: “All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning”

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I’m hearing from atheists that the universe did not begin to exist, so I thought I’d explain why physicists can’t avoid a creation event – or rather, I’d let famous cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin do it.

From Uncommon Descent.

Excerpt:

Did the cosmos have a beginning? The Big Bang theory seems to suggest it did, but in recent decades, cosmologists have concocted elaborate theories – for example, an eternally inflating universe or a cyclic universe – which claim to avoid the need for a beginning of the cosmos. Now it appears that the universe really had a beginning after all, even if it wasn’t necessarily the Big Bang.

At a meeting of scientists – titled “State of the Universe” – convened last week at Cambridge University to honor Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday, cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston presented evidence that the universe is not eternal after all, leaving scientists at a loss to explain how the cosmos got started without a supernatural creator. The meeting was reported in New Scientist magazine (Why physicists can’t avoid a creation event, 11 January 2012).

[…]In his presentation, Professor Vilenkin discussed three theories which claim to avoid the need for a beginning of the cosmos.

The three theories are chaotic inflationary model, the oscillating model and quantum gravity model. Regular readers will know that those have all been addressed in William Lane Craig’s peer-reviewed paper that evaluates alternatives to the standard Big Bang cosmology.

But let’s see what Vilenkin said.

More:

One popular theory is eternal inflation. Most readers will be familiar with the theory of inflation, which says that the universe increased in volume by a factor of at least 10^78 in its very early stages (from 10^−36 seconds after the Big Bang to sometime between 10^−33 and 10^−32 seconds), before settling into the slower rate of expansion that we see today. The theory of eternal inflation goes further, and holds that the universe is constantly giving birth to smaller “bubble” universes within an ever-expanding multiverse. Each bubble universe undergoes its own initial period of inflation. In some versions of the theory, the bubbles go both backwards and forwards in time, allowing the possibility of an infinite past. Trouble is, the value of one particular cosmic parameter rules out that possibility:

But in 2003, a team including Vilenkin and Guth considered what eternal inflation would mean for the Hubble constant, which describes mathematically the expansion of the universe. They found that the equations didn’t work (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.90.151301). “You can’t construct a space-time with this property,” says Vilenkin. It turns out that the constant has a lower limit that prevents inflation in both time directions. “It can’t possibly be eternal in the past,” says Vilenkin. “There must be some kind of boundary.”

A second option explored by Vilenkin was that of a cyclic universe, where the universe goes through an infinite series of big bangs and crunches, with no specific beginning. It was even claimed that a cyclic universe could explain the low observed value of the cosmological constant. But as Vilenkin found, there’s a problem if you look at the disorder in the universe:

Disorder increases with time. So following each cycle, the universe must get more and more disordered. But if there has already been an infinite number of cycles, the universe we inhabit now should be in a state of maximum disorder. Such a universe would be uniformly lukewarm and featureless, and definitely lacking such complicated beings as stars, planets and physicists – nothing like the one we see around us.

One way around that is to propose that the universe just gets bigger with every cycle. Then the amount of disorder per volume doesn’t increase, so needn’t reach the maximum. But Vilenkin found that this scenario falls prey to the same mathematical argument as eternal inflation: if your universe keeps getting bigger, it must have started somewhere.

However, Vilenkin’s options were not exhausted yet. There was another possibility: that the universe had sprung from an eternal cosmic egg:

Vilenkin’s final strike is an attack on a third, lesser-known proposal that the cosmos existed eternally in a static state called the cosmic egg. This finally “cracked” to create the big bang, leading to the expanding universe we see today. Late last year Vilenkin and graduate student Audrey Mithani showed that the egg could not have existed forever after all, as quantum instabilities would force it to collapse after a finite amount of time (arxiv.org/abs/1110.4096). If it cracked instead, leading to the big bang, then this must have happened before it collapsed – and therefore also after a finite amount of time.

“This is also not a good candidate for a beginningless universe,” Vilenkin concludes.

So at the end of the day, what is Vilenkin’s verdict?

“All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.”

This is consistent with the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem, which I blogged about before, and which William Lane Craig leveraged to his advantage in his debate with Peter Millican.

The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) proof shows that every universe that expands must have a space-time boundary in the past. That means that no expanding universe, no matter what the model, can be eternal into the past. Even speculative alternative cosmologies do not escape the need for a beginning.

Conclusion

If the universe came into being out of nothing, which seems to be the case from science, then the universe has a cause. Things do not pop into being, uncaused, out of nothing. The cause of the universe must be transcendent and supernatural. It must be uncaused, because there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. It must be eternal, because it created time. It must be non-physical, because it created space. There are only two possibilities for such a cause. It could be an abstract object or an agent. Abstract objects cannot cause effects. Therefore, the cause is an agent.

Polemics

Do most cosmologists accept the reality of the cosmic fine-tuning?

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I don’t know how I missed this, but apparently Dr. Richard Carrier, a historian, wrote a critique of the fine-tuning argument a while back, and Dr. Luke Barnes, a cosmologist responded to him.

Much of what is said by both of them in their contributions is beyond me, but I did want to quote one part from a blog post by Luke Barnes about whether most scientists accept that our universe is finely-tuned for complex embodied life.

First, Dr. Carrier writes this:

[Dr. William Lane Craig] claims “the fundamental constants and quantities of nature must fall into an incomprehensibly narrow life-permitting range,” but that claim has been refuted–by scientists–again and again. We actually do not know that there is only a narrow life-permitting range of possible configurations of the universe. As has been pointed out to Craig by several theoretical physicists (from Krauss to Stenger), he can only get his “narrow range” by varying one single constant and holding all the others fixed, which is simply not how a universe would be randomly selected. When you allow all the constants to vary freely, the number of configurations that are life permitting actually ends up respectably high (between 1 in 8 and 1 in 4: see Victor Stenger’s The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning).

And Dr. Barnes replies (in part): (links removed)

I’ve said an awful lot in response to that paragraph, so let’s just run through the highlights.

  • “Refuted by scientists again and again”. What, in the peer-reviewed scientific literature? I’ve published a review of the scientific literature, 200+ papers, and I can only think of a handful that oppose this conclusion, and piles and piles that support it. Here are some quotes from non-theist scientists. For example, Andrei Linde says: “The existence of an amazingly strong correlation between our own properties and the values of many parameters of our world, such as the masses and charges of electron and proton, the value of the gravitational constant, the amplitude of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the electroweak theory, the value of the vacuum energy, and the dimensionality of our world, is an experimental fact requiring an explanation.” [emphasis added.]

  • “By several theoretical physicists (from Krauss to Stenger)”. I’ve replied to Stenger. I had a chance to talk to Krauss briefly about fine-tuning but I’m still not sure what he thinks. His published work on anthropic matters doesn’t address the more general fine-tuning claim. Also, by saying “from” and “to”, Carrier is trying to give the impression that a great multitude stands with his claim. I’m not even sure if Krauss is with him. I’ve read loads on this subject and only Stenger defends Carrier’s point, and in a popular (ish) level book. On the other hand, Craig can cite Barrow, Carr, Carter, Davies, Deutsch, Ellis, Greene, Guth, Harrison, Hawking, Linde, Page, Penrose, Polkinghorne, Rees, Sandage, Smolin, Susskind, Tegmark, Tipler, Vilenkin, Weinberg, Wheeler, and Wilczek. (See here). With regards to the claim that “the fundamental constants and quantities of nature must fall into an incomprehensibly narrow life-permitting range”, the weight of the peer-reviewed scientific literature is overwhelmingly with Craig. (If you disagree, start citing papers).

There’s more, too.

I wish I understood cosmology enough to understand everything Dr. Barnes says, but it seems to me that this much is clear. If you’re an atheist and you’re reading stuff by these very far-out atheists, then you need to be very careful. Dr. Stenger and Dr. Carrier are both highly-intelligent and have great credentials, but it’s probably better for all of us to be interacting with the other side when we form our worldviews.

I noticed that respected atheist Jeff Lowder has a post up where he looks at both sides and comes down more with Barnes than with Carrier.

News

UK authorities ignored gang of Muslim pedophiles who raped more than 1400 children

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This is the latest news from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

More than 1,400 children were sexually abused over a 16 year period by gangs of paedophiles after police and council bosses turned a blind eye for fear of being labelled racist, a damning report has concluded.

[…]Senior officials were responsible for “blatant” failures that saw victims, some as young as 11, being treated with contempt and categorised as being “out of control” or simply ignored when they asked for help.

In some cases, parents who tried to rescue their children from abusers were themselves arrested. Police officers even dismissed the rape of children by saying that sex had been consensual.

[…]Details of the appalling depravity in the town and the systemic failures that allowed it to continue were laid out in a report published by Professor Alexis Jay, the former chief inspector of social work in Scotland. Victims were gang raped, while others were groomed and trafficked across northern England by groups of mainly Asian men.

[…]Prof Jay wrote: “No one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham over the years. Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited over the full inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013.

“It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated.”

She added: “There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone.”

[…]Prof Jay said: “Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers. At an operational level, the police gave no priority to child sex exploitation, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime.”

It emerged that there had been three previous reports into the problem which had been suppressed or ignored by officials, either because they did not like or did not believe the findings.

Tuesday’s report concluded that by far the majority of perpetrators were Asian men, and said council officials had been unwilling to address the issue for fear of being labelled racist.

The report stated: “Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”

So, political correctness stopped people from speaking out, for fear of being branded “racist”. The accused came from a certain ethnic group, therefore the police refused to prosecute them, lest they be branded “racist” by the secular left. And now we can see what follows when the mainstream media and her allies on the left make enforcement of the law conditional on such concerns. Children are raped. No one stops them.

More from another UK Telegraph article on the same topic:

When in 2010 five Asian men from Rotherham were jailed for grooming teenage girls for sex, it was regarded as a feather in the cap for South Yorkshire Police and the local social services which had doggedly pursued the prosecution.

Sentencing Adil Hussain, Razwan Razaq, Mohsin Khan, Umar Razaq, and Zafran Ramzan, the judge described them as “dangerous sexual predators” and said Rotherham would be a safer place for youngsters with them off the streets.

But Tuesday’s damning report into sexual exploitation in the South Yorkshire town revealed in stark and horrifying detail how their appalling crimes were merely the tip of the iceberg.

For at least 16-years gangs of mainly Asian men were able to target, groom and abuse girls as young as 11, with little to fear from the authorities.

In one of the most shocking cases highlighted in the report, Professor Jay described how in 2001 a 15-year-old girl was doused in petrol by her abuser who threatened to set her alight.

The teenager had been groomed by an older man who trafficked her from Rotherham to Leeds and Bradford where she was forced into having sex.

When social services attempted to intervene the girl was threatened and beaten by her abuser in order to warn her off identifying him.

She was later stalked by him, doused in petrol and warned that she would be burned alive if she told the police anything. She made several attempts on her own life and eventually ended up homeless.

No action was taken against her abuser.

The report also described how social workers and council chiefs were quick to dismiss the concerns of parents who were attempting to protect their children.

In one case in 2002 a mother contacted social services to voice concerns that her 14-year-old daughter was going missing regularly and was being plied with drink by older males.

Her mother said she was worried that her daughter had become sexually active with members of the group.

But despite showing signs that she had been sexually exploited from the age of 11, the case was closed and the social worker’s assessment was that the mother was unable to accept the fact that her daughter was growing up.

While the police often failed to take action against the abusers, there were cases where concerned parents were arrested for trying to protect their own children.

The report identified two separate cases where fathers who had tracked their daughters down and were trying to remove them from houses where they were being abused, were themselves arrested.

n 2008 an 11-year-old girl came to the attention of the police after she disclosed that she and another child had been sexually abused by a group of adult males.

Despite the fact she was identified as being one of a group of girls who was associating with a known sex abuser, her file was closed and she was deemed as being not at risk from sexual exploitation.

Less than a month later, she was found in a derelict house with another child, and a number of adult males.

She was arrested for being drunk and disorderly (her conviction was later set aside) and none of the males were arrested.

In one of the most staggering passages in the report, Professor Jay revealed how a police officer dismissed the case of a 12-year-old girl who had been having sex with up to five Asian males, because he said she had been “100 per cent consensual in every incident”.

The only person to resign for this so far is a Police Commissioner, and former Labour Party candidate. You’ll recall that it was the Labour Party who created the immigraion policies that would achieve their goal of “multiculturalism” – which is another word for importing voters from poor countries who who will vote for the policies of the political left. Policies of bigger government and more dependence on government programs. You can bet that the left isn’t pushing for more immigration from countries like Hong Kong or Singapore.

I think there is another lesson to this story, and it’s this. All religions are not the same. They really do teach different things. Some religions support pedophilia and polygamy, and some religions support protecting children and romantic, monogamous love between men and women. They are not the same. Although we seem to have embraced this very feminized notion of compassion and non-judgmentalism in the West, we need to remember that right is not wrong, and when we refuse to make more judgments and set moral boundaries, people get hurt. Especially little children who have no mothers or no fathers to care for them.