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Who Lies Sleeping?

The Big Bang—the Cosmological Argument for God? 3

As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
John Wheeler

So How Did the Universe Actually Begin?
A Theory of Everything
Anthropic Principle
The Christian Logic of an Astrophysicist!

Abstract

Christians are using the Big Bang as the cosmological argument but it is as usual empty rhetoric. Genesis bears no relationship to modern consmology. Near singularities, classical general relativity is not valid, and notions of space and time are inappropriate. Tunnelling does not occur in real time. Mathematically, the particle penetrates the barrier in imaginary time. Tunnelling would suppress a transition from zero to large size, and give highest probability for tunnelling to small size and high energy density. Inflation and the Big Bang occurred after the tunnelling. The no-boundary wave function does not have the general features normally associated with tunnelling. It gives high probability of a classical universe appearing with a large size and a low energy density. After quantum creation, the wave function gives the probabilities of different evolutionary paths. Both the no-boundary and tunnelling proposals seem to predict the conditions for inflation.

Life might have come from space, spread by a starburst.

So How Did the Universe Actually Begin?

Near singularities, the tunnelling and no-boundary wave functions tell us classical general relativity is not valid, and notions of space and time implied by the question are inappropriate. A universe with nonzero size and finite energy density appears from a quantum fuzz. After quantum creation, the wave function gives the probabilities of different evolutionary paths, one of which includes the inflation postulated by Guth. Both the no-boundary and tunnelling proposals seem to predict the conditions for inflation, eliminating assumptions about the scalar-fleld matter to drive the rapid expansion.

The inflation model assumes the inhomogeneous parts started out in their quantum mechanical ground state—the lowest possible energy state consistent with the uncertainty principle. But in 1985, Hawking and Jonathan J Halliwell (whose explanation of much of this appeared in the Scientific American of December 1991) showed this is a consequence of the no-boundary proposal. Suitable inhomogeneities emerge naturally from the theory. Everything must be smooth and regular on the bottom cap of the space-time tube. This condition implies that inhomogeneous fluctuations must be zero there. Evolving up the tube in imaginary time, the fluctuations grow and enter the real-time region as small as they could possibly be—as the quantum mechanical ground-state fluctuations demanded by the inflation model. The tunnelling proposal makes the same prediction, for similar reasons.

So, according to quantum cosmology, the universe appeared from a quantum fuzz, tunnelling into existence and thereafter evolving classically. The most compelling aspect of this picture is that the assumptions necessary for the inflationary universe scenario may be compressed into a single, simple boundary condition for the wave function of the universe.

How can one verify a law of initial conditions? An indirect test is to compare the predictions of the quantum models with the initial conditions needed for standard classical cosmological models. In this endeavor, quantum cosmologists can claim a reasonable degree of success. More direct, observational tests are difficult. Much has happened in the universe since its birth, and each stage of evolution has to be modelled separately. It is difficult to distinguish between effects that result from a particular set of initial conditions and those that derive from the evolution of the universe or from the modelling of a particular stage.

What is needed is an observation of some effect that was produced at the beginning of the universe but was insensitive to the subsequent evolution. In 1987, Leonid Grishehuk of the Sternberg Astronomy Institute in Moscow argued that gravitational waves may be the sought-after effect. Quantum creation scenarios produce gravitational waves of a calculable form and magnitude. Gravitational waves interact weakly with matter as they propagate through space-time. Therefore, when we observe them in the present universe, their spectrum may still contain the signature of quantum creation. Detecting gravitational waves is, unfortunately, almost impossible, and current attempts have failed.

As verifying quantum cosmology is difficult, no one can say whether the no-boundary or the tunnelling proposals are the correct ones for the wave function of the universe. An answer to the question, “Where did all this come from?” is still some way away, but, through quantum cosmology, cosmologists have formulated and addressed the question in a meaningful and interesting way.

A Theory of Everything

The Theory of Everything is the hypothesis that the four forces of Nature—the strong, weak, electromagnetic forces and gravity—are varieties of a single force that existed at the moment of the Big Bang. It is a hypothetical theory! No one has yet formulated it. The problem is uniting gravity with the other three, which can be united. When someone manages to unite all four, then physicists say we have a Theory of Everything!

The best candidate for developing a TOE is string theory. It tries to reconcile the two great theories of the twentieth century because they seem largely incompatible. Quantum mechanics said the world was statistical on a small scale, that behaviour depended on probability. General relativity described how space is warped by gravity on a large scale, and force is the response of particles moving in warped space. But these two concepts are not compatible. To answer some big questions in physics, such as what actually happened in the Big Bang, do you use the equations of general relativity because the scale is that of the size of the universe? Or do you use quantum mechanics because it is all began in such a small space? Solving the problem is the “theory of everything” (TOE), and has been the aim of cosmologists for the decades since Einstein. String theory has become the leading contender to fulfil Einsteins dream.

String theory was thought of in the late 1960s to describe the strong nuclear interaction, the force that stops protons flying apart in the nucleus of atoms. Protons are made of more fundamental particles called quarks held together by particles, called gluons, that transmit the strong nuclear force. Quarks and gluons were never found free, even when atoms were smashed apart in particle accelerators. String theory was intended to answer this. Gluons and quarks can be thought of as being the ends of a string of energy, and no string has just one end. Eventually quantum chromodynamics, a precise quantum mechanical description of the interaction between quarks and gluons was found more useful for the time being. Later, string theory was salvaged to explain not just the strong force but all the fundamental forces. Everything in the universe and all the forces acting upon them is made of tiny vibrating strings of energy.

In string theory, particles are not envisaged as little golf balls but little vibrating strings, 10^-33 meters long. A single string could seem to be any one of several particles depending on its state of vibration, particularly its vibrational frequency. The number of sustainable frequencies depends on how many half wavelengths can be fitted along the length of the string, so the range of possible frequencies is not continuous but goes up according to the whole number of half wavelengths that fit into the length of the string. The energy of the particle which manifests itself, then depends upon the frequency, and the energy goes up in quantum numbers corresponding to the half-wavelengths. One mode of vibration of a string yields an electron. Another yields a neutrino, and so on for the range of sub-atomic particles. The same is true of photons, bosons, gluons and would have to be true too of gravitons, these being the four binding particles of the four forces, exchange of which constitutes the force.

The trouble with string theory is that it gives too many particles, “far more than anyone wanted”, says Edward Witten of the IAS at Princeton. The possibilities exceed the number of particles in the universe, and the reason is that string theory, as presently conceived, needs 10 dimensions to work in, not the three, or four if time is included, that we observe. All of the dimensions not observed, are somehow hidden, or folded away. It is the large number of ways of selecting three from ten, and then the ways of folding up the remaining seven that gives the vast number of possible solutions to the equations of string theory. Any of this vast number could be a universe with different forces and constants from the one we live in, and different numbers of them.

Other solutions have other than three observable dimensions, and the numbers and types of bosons, photons and so on could be different. They might be lighter or heavier, or not even exist in some possible universes. Many of the solutions are unstable, so that the universe can never form at all, or does so, but collapses quickly. Of the stable solutions, they might have once existed, or yet might come into existence, or they might all co-exist in parallel with our own universe in what scientific speculators have called a multiverse. It means the universe is bigger than we thought because we only see our part of it, but much more is hidden from view, and this is called the multiverse to distinguish it from the older idea that the universe is what we see. The multiverse might be seething continuously with universes being spawned and dying like bubbles in a boiling pan of water. One of those bubbles is ours—the universe we see. This notion ties in with the idea in quantum theory of many virtual states which could appear according to the circumstances, but do not until something causes the wave equation to “collapse”, when the appropriate virtual state for the conditions will manifest itself. Virtual states seem to be possible universes.

The many possible states of the universe are all equally real. It explains the Anthropic Principle—that the laws and constants of our universe are so perfect for life. Physicists think even small changes in the value of constants would prevent life as we know it from ever forming. Atoms might not be able to form at all, or might be unstable and decay quickly, so starts would burn too fast, or perhaps not burn at all, or gravity would be too weak or too strong, or perhaps even negative making everything fly apart. The Anthropic Principle is simply that we live in a universe that is just right for us. Christians see the hand of God in it, but an almighty God ought not to be restricted at all, so such a constraint does not fit the idea of God being almighty. Quite literally, we would be like a fish out of water in any other universe. We could not live in it, and could not observe it. We see what we see because it was just right for us.

Countless billions of universes all unsuitable for life might have formed before ours was. Or, if we live in a multiverse in which other universes co-exist and spawn new universes, with slightly different physical constants, from black holes, then the universes could evolve until all of them were optimal. Short-lived ones would not produce enough universes like them, so that those with longer lives would predominate, spawning universes with longer lives. In an eternity, if that is how long the multiverse exists, all of the universes within it would tend towards the same type. Since ours must be one of the survivors, then all of them are like ours. All are able to make life and all can be observed when that life becomes intelligent. There is then nothing peculiar about our situation at all. It is the norm!

It [string theory] goes so far beyond our physical experience of the world that some critics say that it should be considered more as a work of philosophy than the ultimate scientific description of nature.
Alok Jha, The Guardian

A problem with string theory was that it came in five varieties, each of which seemed as good as any other, and it could not yield up space and time, as a proper TOE must. Space and time have to be assumed as being among the dimensions. Then in 1995, Ed Witten, a brilliant mathematics professor at Princeton, showed that the five varieties could be reconciled in a single hypothesis that encompassed all of them, and showed that they were just different views of the same basic theory—M-theory. String theory was a description in ten dimensions. M-theory simply added one extra one to give eleven, and by so doing extended the strings potentially into surfaces or membranes. An extension of string theory into eleven dimensions yilded a space containing two dimensional surfaces or membranes (branes) in the place of the one dimensional strings. The membranes still vibrate but now they are like the vibrations of the skin of a drum.

On the face of it, though, the extension is not attractive because it seems to extend the already huge number of possibilities. Then Witten took a further step by introducing twistor theory, an idea developed by another mathematical genius, Roger Penrose decades ago at Oxford University. It seemed to give similar results without the need for all those extra dimensions. It is, though, as yet imperfectly formulated. Work is still needed on it. Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) is an approach which does yield space and time, and also shows that space is not continuous at the scale of the Planck length of 10^-35 meters. The problem with it is that it is restricted to the quantum scale of things and cannot bring in gravity. Quantum Information Theory and Qubit Field Theory are also approaches. The universe might be simply the effect of a large number of on/off switches, like Conways game of life. It predicts that, at smaller scales than the Planck length, space gets smooth again.

To distinguish these different approaches more data are needed, but that means building vast and expensive particle accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, or looking more closely at the galactic universe where all of these forces are being exerted. The theory suggests that particles should have supersymmetric equivalents at higher energies—an electron has a supersymmetric “selectron”, a quark a supersymmetric “squark”, and so on.

String theory might ultimately prove to be the TOE. In quantum theory and relativity, space and time are givens, but string theory has no need for such assumptions. One of the tests of its success will be that it yields space and time. The theory will yield the fundamental basis of our material world, and so it will be the TOE. The analogy of strings might break down, but whatever the fundamental things are, they will be truly fundamental.

All of this might seem like the empty musings of the medieval scholastics, but as long as suitable data can be collected by cosmological observations or from high energy machines, the speculations can be tested. So far as believers are concerned, the physicists are learning what is in the mind of God! That is what they do not like.

Anthropic Principle

Physicists have discovered that the cosmos seems custom-made for life. A cosmologist, Brandon Carter, proposed (1974) the Anthropic Principle, according to which our place in the universe is privileged in that our presence allows us to observe it. If the constants of nature—unchanging numbers like the strength of gravity, the charge on an electron and the mass of a proton—were any different, then atoms would not hold together, stars would not burn and life would never have happened.

The possibility of life as we know it depends on the values of a few basic, physical constants and is in some respects remarkably sensitive to their numerical values. Nature does exhibit remarkable coincidences.
Martin Rees, Cambridge, UK

The philosopher, William Lane Craig, thinks he has an allegorical argument refuting the natural as opposed to the supernatural interpretation of the Anthropic Principle. The natural interpretation is that we could not be here if the world had not been suitable. The supernatural interpretation is that God made it so. Craig considers the case of a prisoner facing death by firing squad. They shoot off a volley but the prisoner is still alive. Why is he still alive? It could be good luck, but Craig thinks this is so unlikely that the prisoner has to conclude the outcome was deliberate. The prisoner is of course the universe with humans contemplating it.

Christians are fond of false analogies. They easily fool the Christian sheep. By focussing on this one case that Craig knows, because it is his tale, is going to turn out all right for the victim, the perception of the gamut of possibilities is distorted. It is the same trick as pulling out a dollar bill and noting what a unique number it has, and how unlikely it was that that number should have been on the dollar bill. Of course, it was not unusual because any other number of the billions possible would have been looked upon with equal amazement. Craig selects his victim as the one who is saved from all of the millions who died in the same circumstances. Since they were dead, they had no tale to tell!

Here Craig lets his victim escape because he is God and can do it, so we conclude it must have been deliberate. It was indeed. The author planned it. To put it in perspective, consider all the cases when the outcome was as expected. The prisoner was shot dead and could not think about his bad luck. But one day, all the rifles jammed, the victim could not be shot and was released. “It was an act of God”, they would all say, and the prisoner would, as Craig suggests, think so.

It was actually luck. This is the real parallel. To have escaped seemed so fanciful everyone assumed God saved the victim. Christians are just like that. Our universe seems so unlikely that God must have made it so, but all the others that were unsuitable had no survivors to think about it.

Besides inventing false analogies like this, Christians claim that life appeared on earth too soon. The Hadean period of the earth when it was hot and lifeless lasted a billion years and was followed by the Archaean, when there were bacteria on earth, which lasted another billion. Christians claim they can identify within 10 million years in this long period when life actually arrived, and it was too soon. Too soon for what? For life to evolve? The idea of panspermia is that life arrived from elsewhere in space. It did not have to evolve on earth, but mainly only Christians who refuse to accept evolution at all will categorically say it could not have done.

The Christian Logic of an Astrophysicist!

Hugh Ross in The Fingerprint of God, builds up a whole fatuous scenario on the assumption that the Big Bang supports the idea of a Creator. He is supposed to be an astrophysicist, but it must be hard to accept anything he says when this is an example of his reasoning.

• 1. A Creator must exist. The Big Bang ripples are clearly pointing to an ex nihilo creation consistent with the first few verses of the book of Genesis.

These are lies. The COBE ripples say nothing about a creator, but simply are evidence for a Big Bang, which, if anything, suggests that the First Cause could not have been God because the Big Bang was the first event that ever happened, and the most rational justifiable speculation on any supposed God is that the universe is God—pantheism. It is self-created, or uncaused, or creation is an illusion of our imperfect knowledge of reality.

Creation ex nihilo confirms that nothing existed before the start of the universe. But the Big Bang ripples do not necessarily imply that creation was ex nihilo. Nothing is known about the moment of creation or what it was out of. “Nothing” in quantum physics is a state with no classical space-time (A Vilenkin, 1983). It is not literally “nothing”. Nothing seems to mean that space, time, energy, entropy, etc, have lost their meaning, and quantum gravity might be the dominant force. In any case, the Big Bang is not even remotely like the first verses of Genesis. This is an even bigger Christian lie, because it is obvious to anyone who reads the relevant verses. That the lie is so prevalent and successful these days either proves that Christians do not read their bibles, or that the bible is irrelevant to what they believe.

• 2. The Creator must have awesome power and wisdom. The quantity of material and the power resources within our universe are truly immense. The information, or intricacy, manifest in any part of the universe, and especially in a living organism, is beyond our ability to comprehend. And what we do see is only what God has shown us within our dimensions of space and time!

The Creator is merely an assumption, and not well founded. These inconceivable powers are excellent reasons for rejecting the Christian idea of a personal God. There is no basis in the least except what Christians value so much—gullibility—to suppose an invisible entity as big as or bigger than the universe should exist, and be excessively interested in one transient creature with an inflated ego. It explains nothing and is contrary to Occam’s Razor, which would cut the unnecessary entities into half—Nature sufficing.

• 3. The Creator is loving. The simplicity, balance, order, elegance, and beauty seen throughout the creation demonstrate that God is loving rather than capricious. Further, the capacity and desire to nurture and to protect, seen in so many creatures, makes sense if their Creator possesses these same attributes. It is apparent that God cares for His creatures, for He has provided for their needs.

Again the Creator is assumed with no good reason. The qualities listed are all specially picked to suit the thesis and contradictory ones could be picked to counter it. Capricious is not the antonym of loving. Natural love often is capricious. God’s love seems to be capricious not constant or consistent. He does not care just as often as he cares. The feeding of every animal necessrily harms some other lifeform. The sex-lives and breeding of many animals are too horrible to contemplate deeply, as modern horror films like Alien, based on the ichneumon fly, show. This is all special pleading, and proves that something at least is not balanced—Christian opinions.

• 4. The Creator is just and requires justice. Inward reflection and outward investigation affirm that human beings have a conscience. The conscience reflects the reality of right and wrong and the necessity of obedience.

If this is true then it is something which has evolved to help us live socially. It differs then not a whit from a bee collecting honey or a dog rolling on its back before its master. In fact, though, it is probably largely socially conditioned by upbringing. We are social creatures and our mutual wellbeing and social cohesion are served by justice. Our rulers like us to be obedient to them. That has always been a prime purpose of religion.

• 5. Each of us falls hopelessly short of the Creator’s standard. We incur His displeasure when we violate any part of God’s moral law in our actions, our words, and our thoughts. Who can keep his or her thoughts and attitudes pure for even an hour? If each person falls short of his or her own standards, how much more so of God’s standards?

Each successive link of this Christian chain of supposed logic gets more incoherent. Is this a God of love or not? Why should a God of love be displeased that the possibility of doing something immoral should enter our minds, when He is supposed to have given us Free Will. He gives us Free Will, then sends us to Hell for exercising it. What is perfect about a God like that? No compassionate God could possibly impose such contradictory or impossible demands. Either God is actually a wicked God, or He is merely the invention of wicked and greedy people who want to control the lives and wallets of others. The latter is more likely!

• 6. Because the Creator is loving, wise and powerful, He made a way to rescue us. When we come to a point of concern about our personal failings, we can begin to understand from the creation around us that God’s love, wisdom, and power are sufficient to deliver us from our otherwise hopeless situation.

In this Christian thesis God made us this way. If it is possible for Him to make wicked creatures, then God cannot be Himself perfect. It is His fault that we have failings and need rescuing. Why then does He not accept His responsibility and rescue us instantly, since He is “loving, wise and powerful”. The truth is that this whole scheme is a scam to oppress people who are ignorant and unsophisticated.

• 7. If we trust our lives totally to the Rescuer, Jesus Christ, we will be saved. The one and only path is to give up all human attempts to satisfy God’s requirements and put our trust solely in Jesus Christ and in His means of redemption, namely, His death on the cross.

This is the ultimate cop out. We have been given Free Will but can only exercise it by giving it back. Then we shall be rescued by the Rescuer that we give our free will to, and those who do not will still fry for eternity. There is no need to worry about that possibility because when we die, we are dead and experience nothing at all, but the Christian sheep while they are alive will have to keep coughing up the readies to keep the professionals tormenting them with rubbish like this.

Anyone who could write as Ross does is completely cynical or deranged. They are confidence tricksters and should be locked up for fraud. One thing is certain. If they are right, and God exists and is perfectly good as they say, then they will not have the blissful time they expect post mortem. No good God could put up with such deceit, and justice demands that they should be punished for it.

«Note 1»—Christians like the idea of a point of creation, but they also like the idea that God lives forever. Since there is a time before time zero, an eternity of time elapsing in the virtual world before the world was created at time t_c, this is God’s time for the Christian. Then God created the world at time t_c, not at time zero! Of course, the virtual world requires no God, but Christians will find him in there all right. In truth, the idea of a virtual time before time began does tie in with the ideas of the Zoroastrians who had an eternal time and a historical time, and these can be perhaps vague intimations of t_v and t_o, here.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.