Ron Rosenbaum presents his offering
Well, Templeton got its money’s worth out of overpaid Ron Rosenbaum. He’s already hard at work saying how horrible “new” atheists are. Man, $15,000 and two weeks in Cambridge all expenses paid and a library’s worth of new books, all to kick the “new” atheists, when so many people are willing to do it for fifty bucks! Templeton is nothing if not generous.
I think it’s time for a new agnosticism, one that takes on the New Atheists. Indeed agnostics see atheism as “a theism”—as much a faith-based creed as the most orthodox of the religious variety.
Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)
Isn’t it sad? He could have said that without setting foot in Cambridge. One wonders exactly what Templeton is paying for.
Faced with the fundamental question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing.
And so on and so on and so on – the usual boilerplate. It’s all like that, and it’s a long piece. Ho hum.
I’m sure you have/will come across it, but PZ’s post dishes out the usual blend of scorn/solid rebuttal which such a piece merits. Most interesting to me are the very non-evasive answers given by Krauss. Of course, saying `nothing is unstable’ would be religious, wouldn’t it? It’s much less religious to preach ironically about group mentality and tribalism.
I haven’t yet. See that’s what I get for gossipping about YNH; I run out of time for a solid rebuttal! I just say how familiar it is and then run away.
What about, “How the fuck should I know?”
The conflation of atheism with some kind of faith in science just reveals a profound ignorance on the part of Rosenbaum. Or rather, I suspect, a profound degree of dishonesty.
The weird thing (maybe not), as with Robert Wright, is that theists will love this, even though Rosenbaum makes it clear that he disagrees with them fundamentally. He wants the atheists to shut up; he must be our friend.
I personally don’t know any atheists who are certain that science will eventually tell us why there is “something rather than nothing” — certainly not the big-name atheists that his post is likely aiming at. Perhaps there are a few atheists like that, but all the ones I know believe there are questions we’ll simply never have the answer to, this likely being one of them. I think the most that’s fair to say is that atheists (in general) believe if an answer is to be found, it will come from science. And given how successful science has been at providing answers, I don’t think that’s so dogmatist…
Adam: an atheist needn’t even think that if an answer is to be found, it will be from science.
All an atheist need think is that the answer ISN’T found in any normal idea of God. “God” just pushes the answer back one step. So god created the universe? Ok. Why is there god rather than no god, then?
Like Ken said, the appropriate answer is “I don’t know and neither do you.” Some people call this agnosticism rather than atheism; I think it can be called either. The point is that “God” isn’t an answer, it’s an avoidance of the fact that there is no answer.
The intellectual dishonesty of the anti-atheist knows no bounds.
He’s confusing deliberately conflating optimism with certainity and mixing in a little god-of-the-gaps, since if atheists answer a question with ‘I don’t know…’, the theist/faitheist immediately interjects with ‘well then, god must be responsible!’; if the atheist continues what he/she was trying to say with ‘…but we’re working on it’, the theist says, ‘oh, now you’re certain you’re going to find an answer – that’s religious talk! Atheism is a religion!’
As pathetic and despicable as it is transparent.
It is interesting to consider why more people don’t identify themselves as agnostic inasmuch as, by Huxley’s (and, to be honest, Rosenbaum’s) description, it’s what most of us are. I think it’s because, in the cultures we inhabit, if I say that I’m agnostic, it is taken to mean that I think it’s alright for you to continue to promote anxiety in children. I don’t, hence I’m an atheist.
<blockquote> if I say that I’m agnostic, it is taken to mean that I think it’s alright for you to continue to promote anxiety in children.</blockquote>
What gives you this impression about agnostics?
I think what he meant was is that is what he believes the religious think agnostic means – i.e. they won’t criticise them when an atheist might.
What I normally say to theists who, basically, claim “existence, therefore god,” is that I don’t know why anything exists at all, but that neither do they. I also tell them that it may be impossible for us to know. And that that is perfectly OK and not scary at all.
But that is vastly different to claiming that god exists: it’s not incompatible to reject the concept of god while also not knowing why anything exists at all. God is an answer to a question: I’m not answering the question, just rejecting that particular answer. This makes me an atheist, not an agnostic, because I’m definitively rejecting the god answer, even though I don’t have anything definitive to replace it with (although I have ideas and half-baked speculations).
Atheism is not a theism. It’s so ridiculously obvious, Rosenbaum must be engaging in sheer politics, not genuine debate.
@Wowbagger
We meet again ? (or is WobaggerOM different from Wowbagger).
Well he should ask this off my wife(who is religious) :).
No, it’s the same Wowbagger. I had login problems at Pharyngula so I ended up creating a new account with the OM attached to the name.
Rosenbaum is one of my favourite journalists. I’ve read him avidly for years. On Shakespeare and Nabakov through to political Islam, nuclear weapons and even Joni Mitchell he’s just terrific. His book of essays is truly one of my prized possessions. I’m actually dismayed to see him produce something so tendentious and unnuanced, not to mention unoriginal. I haven’t been following him all that much recently – has he been banging on about “New Atheists” for long? How did the Templeton foundation get it’s hooks into him? I mean this is practically sub-Eagleton inanity!
I guess it’s a warning against valorizing writers as intellectual heroes (which is probably a bad habit at the best of times) because I haven’t felt this let down since reading Nussbaum’s new stuff (you know, all these assertions, which on inspection are underpinned by psychoanalysis and little else? Disappointing).
I do hope Rosenbaum returns to his fabulous lit crit without too much delay.
I’m not sure if this has already been discussed, but we do know that the so-called “New Atheists” are anything but. There’s a famous BBC interview with Bertrand Russell on YouTube, for instance.So, why are the faitheists deliberately making up this fake straw-man of the “NA” so that they can attack something that isn’t there?
Time and again, Dawkins and PZ and our own dear Ophelia, and everyone else points out that they are attacking something that doesn’t exist. They take no notice, and carry on attacking “NA”. Why?Is it that they can’t see, because they believe that “everyone must have faith”?Or is it that they won’t see, because they have a product to sell?
Or is it because they know what they are saying is untrue, but don’t care that they are lying, because “god” is telling them to?
I suspect some combination of the above, depending on which specific apologist for fairies is speaking at the time ……
I read Rosenbaum’s comment rather quickly, so I might have missed something, but he seems to have plenty of direct quotations from critics of the NA, and no quotations from the NA themselves. Since he misrepresents what atheist bloggers I’ve read actually say on these issues, and it’s easy enough to find and quote them, I’m going to assume both strawmen and bias.
It would be genuinely miraculous if we were asking why there is nothing rather than something.
Therefore not God. ;-)
Indeed, the whole article is pretty humdrum. What I would like to know is whether the following comes directly from the Templeton conference.
It sounds like it to me. This is a programmatic utterance, and is out of context in Slate. It has no basis in what any number of well-known atheists are saying, and it sounds like a tag line picked up at a lecture vaguely overheard while taking in the ambiance of an ancient city. Aside from being ‘cutesy’, it makes no sense.
Notice, this isn’t about the ‘new atheism’. It’s about atheism as such. And the odd thing is that this is something that the ‘new atheists’ have addressed directly, namely, the question of the kind of certainty it takes before a person can rationally claim to believe that god does not exist. Dawkins does it in The God Delusion, Grayling in To Set Prometheus Free. Hitchens speaks of Darwin’s agnosticism as a carefully guarded atheism. Dennett even argues that most religious believers don’t believe in god, but instead believe in belief in god.
Unlike Ken Pidcock, I think there is an important question of principle here. The idea of agnosticism lies in the idea that since we can’t “know for sure”, that is, know absolutely, we have no right to the belief that god does not exist. But this isn’t the way that knowledge works, except in religion; and why should we adopt religious standards of absoluteness in a world where only empirical standards are available? It’s not only about creating anxiety in children; it’s about rational standards of belief, and William James was wrong.
I believe the best answer to ‘Why is there something rather than nothing’ is provided by Dennett in, I think, ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’. The more I think about it, the more it seems to me the only possible answer, and truly satisfying it is, too. It is this:
‘Why not?’
the fundamental question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
No-one asked the question before Liebniz, which raises questions about just how fundamental it is, psychologically at least. The religious answer- that something made the something that is there rather than nothing- is both more complex and more dishonest than “We don’t know.”
“the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence.”
What makes him so certain, contrary to what we know very well, that the universe *came* into existence?
In Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, the clergyman Prendergast loses his faith in God because he couldn’t understand why there was something instead of nothing:
“You see, it wasn’t the ordinary sort of Doubt about Cain’s wife or the Old Testament miracles or the consecration of Archbishop Parker. I’d been taught how to explain all those while I was at college. No, it was something deeper than all that. I couldn’t understand why God had made the world at all.”
Seems logical enough to me. A brilliant and very funny novel, by the way — his first and one of his best.
Does a god count as “something”? If so, how does postulating one answer the question?
Wow. He sounds exactly like Ray Comfort. Next Rosenbaum will be holding up a picture of crocoduck.
*SEETHES* oh, physical theories of the universe based on evidence and research aren’t “persuasive” enough for you? Not that they are incomplete, or need more evidence, or “other theories work better”, but they’re not “persuasive”. To quote a video game, you’re not a scientist! That’s not in and of itself a problem, but to display such a complete apathy about how science works… *walks off muttering about “freakin’ english majors”*
At the risk of being misunderstood, I think that attempts to answer the question of “something” with physical theories is making a category error. Talking about “vacuums filled with quantum potentialities” doesn’t answer the question of why there are quantum potentialities, or even vacuums. “Multiverses” presume changing various physical parameters, without explaining why those parameters are the only ones that can be changed, or are the only ones available, or even why there are parameters in the first place. The problem is that the question of something isn’t answerable by physics, since doing so just begs the question of why that physics, or why there is even physics to begin with.
To be completely clear, the question of something is also not answered by postulating a god or gods, at least not without similar question-begging.
Eric McDonald said:
It’s worse than that. It is disinformation. Deployed by an organization devoted to a conservative, puritanical mission that is anti secular. An organization whose leader has close ties to, and is a major financial contributor of, the reactionary right and who is a decided and politically-active anti homosexual. The idea that the Templeton Foundation is an institution that is philosophically and financially independent from its President is ludicrous.
Make no mistake about it. Every dime that this Foundations spends, and that some gullible receives, is money shrewdly dispersed that furthers an emphatically non progressive agenda.
I differ with Michael at 13 – Rosenbaum has never been one of my favorite journalists, because I find him too rambling and structure-averse, and too mixed – good insights jumbled up with thought-free platitudes. I didn’t think his Shakespeare book was terrific – though to be fair, that’s because I read a lot about Sxhpr at one point, so I read him comparatively; it might be terrific as a stand-alone book. (That’s not a professional or academic “I know better” thing; the reading was strictly amateur.)
There is like a 90% overlap between the atheist believe-o-sphere and that of agnostics, and I always see them painted as being distant, incompatible groups. Is there a term for people who don’t claim to know the nature of the universe EXCEPT to say that every major religion is BS? Then mix in about 20% “don’t care anyway” and you’ve got a large group of people who might not necessarily call themselves atheist or agnostic (but atheist would probably fit).
Can you be an agnostic and an ANTItheist?
If you can – I’m your man.
Can you be an agnostic and an ANTItheist?
Most people who call themselves atheists probably are, even if they haven’t thought it through. I’m perfectly willing to accept the deist “prime cause” hypothesis as an unimportant and irrelevant hypothesis, but I’m an atheist of the same kind and for the same reasons that Shelley put forward in The Necessity of Atheism. Like Kingsley Amis: “It’s more that I hate him.” Theism is a vile and preposterous belief and that’s all we need to know about it. whetehr it’s “true” is irrelevant.
I know people are saying this already, but my response to this is simply: WHY does there have to be a WHY? The Universe simply IS. That’s all that we need to know and maybe all that we can know because maybe there is no purpose of reason. Reality just IS.
That’s pretty liberating, in my opinion.
Rosenbaum doesn’t seem to be aware that most atheists, like most scientists, think probabilistically about solutions to questions about the origin of the Universe. Since a requirement of such thought is that proposals ought to be consistent with the evidence of physical law, the concept of creation, either by a god or self-creation out of nothing, looks like a useless idea.
Nor does this approach involve faith-based reasoning. I don’t have to assume that science will answer all questions, I only need to observe the history of answered questions and the role science has played. If an answer is produced it’s likely to be a result of the kind of investigation that science has conducted. The difference is between warranted faith based on an assessment of the scientific record and a blind faith based on itself.
Roger! Dude! I’ve quoted that Amis line about 90 times here. You’re my new best friend.
[…] and Wheels has more. This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Agnosticism, New Atheism, Rosenbaum, Slate. […]
WHY does there have to be a WHY?…Reality just is.
But what is reality? As your own question shows, Btian- human minds and brains always ask “Why?” or “What for?” Philosophers and psychologists have argued that there are ideas and ways of thinking humans can’t imagine; equally, it’s likely that humans can’t help thinking in particular ways whether or not they’re useful or relevant to the circumstances.
He is getting lots of correcting remarks on Slate. I think those make a lot of sense. The problem with this article is that Rosenbaum hardly shows an understanding of agnosticism, let along atheism and it really is just a thinly veiled and poorly articulated polemic against New Atheism, in the stereotyped version that we all know.
All the landmark of those kinds of pieces, doesn’t actually cite anything they say but heaping on lots of condescensions and false claims about their supposed certainties and dogmatisms.
Someone who actually understands agnosticism how Huxley meant it could give Dawkins some actual debate. But this is embarrassing. It really reads like he read Huxley for the first time when he started researching the article and now writes a whole manifesto that supposedly supplants a shelf of “smug ” books.
It’s funny, my main criticism of Dawkins book is actually how he handles agnosticism. But after this article, Dawkins is much closer to Huxley than Rosenberg, and that even though Dawkins (at least in his book) largely rejects agnosticism, while Rosenbaum claims to accept it. I hate to say it but the problem is that Rosenbaum doesn’t understand what he is talking about. Atheism is not science explains everything. And agnosticism, at least in Huxley’s thinking, is not the middle way to belief, the position where both sides are equally in a “don’t know” position.
Hey, Roger. I agree with what you posted above. Still…the very fact that human minds operate this way, demand a “reason” or “meaning” for existance does not mean that there is such a thing, a “reason” that our minds can necessarily comprehend or even conceive of. And, our minds’ operating software does not mean every facet of existance has to have a “Why.”
One of my favorite smart ass bloggers is bringing up many of the same points as we are all discussing here. Check out WhoIsIoz.
Why hate to say it? Rosenbaum apparently had no qualms about laying down the law on a subject he knows little about, misrepresenting the people and ideas he’s writing about, and adding yet another lump to the massive pile of “hate those new atheists” doggerel. Given that atheists are the last great despised minority in the US, as surveys keep reporting, that’s a vicious thing to do.
Oi, I forgot the link! Nobody told me…
@Roger: I will agree with you on the whole “prime cause” idea as soon as you agree that my idea about cosmic smurfs and unicorns had a lot of homosexual sex (unicorns are the tops of course) and that our planet is simply a chance break in their cosmic condoms that caused a bit of leakage to spring forth from the cosmic smurfs and it eventually grew into our planet, is just as valid.
As long as people exist we’re going to be asking how and why, and as long as we don’t fight the base hypothesis of a deity being the cause, we’re going to continue to be subject to different men in different robes trying to control us and our lives. It’ssad but it’s true. We’ve got to take this a bit more seriously if this kind ofthing is going to be slowed down even a little.
One of the biggest problems we have is how much we let religions frame the discussion with ideas like the ones this article craps out. We really need to take it back, and say wait a minute, how do you know what atheists believe? We don’t have a book with all sorts of our own fairy tales, we don’t have a concrete set of views that can always be summed up in a small paragraph, especially by some one who hasn’t even stepped into the realm of thinking for one’s self. It’s sad really, we grant the the presupposition of a god even being a possibility and they run with it and stay in power because of it. So stop it. Stop it right now.
I mean why are we even going to allow those fuckers to keep arguing things like the earth being flat, science being evil, condoms being bad, abortions being absolutely unforgivable…
I mean I know Dawkins and Hitchens and manyother folks say the Catholic church is making aids worse, and I’d go a step further, the catholic church is worse than aids. They help aids and have killed millions of people too. It’s awful. Until we stop giving into them in the public square, they’ll keep winning because they’re scary and we are not.
Atheists- all atheists- don’t believe anything, Caseyhov. Atheism is a nonbelief. Some atheists have believed in all sorts of things, including things like the earth being flat, science being evil, condoms being bad, abortions being absolutely unforgivable. There have even been atheists who believed in immortal souls. Prople often hold different sets of beliefs for different reasons and in different ways.
That is also true of belief in god. Belief in god as a “first cause” is interesting because it reveals something about human psychology because humans have had this belief more often than the equally [il]logical belief in infinite regression and because it shows that complete absence of evidence doesn’t stop humans looking for explanations. However, it has no more effect on behaviour than belief in the aether had on nineteenth century physicists- it’s actually a way of avoiding thinking about an irrelevant topic. It’s a different kind of belief to belief in christianity or islam or an activist morally-prescriptive god. It isn’t a matter of giving into them in the public square or being scary; it’s a matter of honesty. “Winning” by being more scary is a defeat because it means winning as defined by religions and their followers. Winning here means persuading people to think in a different way, not just believe something different in the same way that they once believed sinners should be tortuted to death.
Talking about “vacuums filled with quantum potentialities” doesn’t answer the question of why there are quantum potentialities, or even vacuum.
Compare:
“Why should there be something rather than nothing?” and
“Why should there be nothing rather than something?”
Despite what you’re saying, the notion that “vacuums are filled (sic) with quantum potentialities” is actually an answer to the first question. The error in the quote is that “vacuum,” as classically conceived, is not possible under most (possibly all) quantum field theories. Even in a universe with no big bang and no persistent matter/energy density, one expects quantum fluctuations rather than vacuum (nothing). There is a great deal of metaphysical content to this argument in addition to the empirical arguments buttressing the conclusions of QM. This is why I talk about science being continuous with philosophy — you can’t do physics without a few metaphysics.
The question “why should there be nothing rather than something,” needs to be answered at least as convincingly for “doesn’t answer why” question to have any teeth. Otherwise, we have two mutually exclusive propositions and what amounts to a good philosophical and scientific argument for “something rather than nothing.” Has there ever been an answer to “why should there be nothing rather than something”?
“Multiverses” presume changing various physical parameters, without explaining why those parameters are the only ones that can be changed, or are the only ones available, or even why there are parameters in the first place. The problem is that the question of something isn’t answerable by physics, since doing so just begs the question of why that physics, or why there is even physics to begin with.
This is also incorrect. Some multiverse theories do tell you which parameters you can change; the “why”s for these are mathematical reasons following from the premises of the theories.
I also disagree with what seems to be your fundamental premise behind this line of reasoning. “Why is there even physics to begin with,” seems to me to have a rather obvious answer (though one that would be very difficult to make philosophically rigorous). We could have a universe with completely unfamiliar natural laws and still have physics as a study of those laws — so different natural laws aren’t a bar to having physics. But could we have a universe — or a nature — with no natural laws at all? What would this even mean?
Sorry, don’t mean to beat up on you. Yours is an important line of argument and struggling with it is helping me clear up a few things.
Clarifying my last post:
The conclusion that there cannot be a true vacuum follows from the uncertainty principle — the uncertainty in time of a measurement multiplied by the uncertainty in energy of that measurement must be greater than or equal to Planck’s constant. So really, we might more properly read it as “a true vacuum can never be detected” rather than “a true vacuum can’t exist.”
But what is existence apart from the ability to confirm it? What sense does it make to say, “there are true vacuums, but we cannot show that they are true vacuums”?
Of course, one can still find “why” questions to ask: “why is QM the correct theory of mechanics” stands out. But there are reasons to think it should be the correct theory, some empirical and some philosophical. The only reasons to think it shouldn’t be the correct theory of mechanics that occur off the top of my head is that they’re not intuitive. But what reason is there to think that the laws of nature should be intuitive?
Ultimately, you’re correct in that at some point in trying to do fundamental physics, one has to take a particular ontology as given. But this doesn’t mean that there won’t be reasons to believe that the ontology is the correct one — i.e. that there won’t be an answer to the question “why”. These may be philosophical reasons, but I don’t think that means they’re not also scientific reasons. Read Physics and Philosophy by Heisenberg for an example of scientists doing philosophy as part of doing science.
There may be a deeper philosophical answer to “why something rather than nothing” bound up in the fact that we imagine nothing as empty space. But QM shows that if you have space, it can’t be empty. OK, then, what if we didn’t even have space? But that implicitly assumes that space is a thing that can either exist or not exist in some higher-order metaspace. This is problematic for the obvious reason of a potential infinite regress (why not an empty metaspace? well, we’re assuming that it is a thing inside a metametaspace…). I suspect there’s an even deeper problem here, which is why I think this line of argument is so interesting.
Dan, I appreciate you engaging with my argument, but I respectfully suggest that you’ve missed my point. Saying that there is something rather than nothing because of QM is simply question-begging — it doesn’t answer why there is QM in the first place. Again, I’m not talking about specific physics, but instead why there is physics at all. Why, for example, isn’t the universe like Abbott’s Flatland, devoid of anything actually material and in purely two dimensions? Surely such a universe is logically possible, so why is that logical possibility not realized in our universe? Indeed, there is an infinity of logically possible states of the universe, yet ours operates on only one finite set of laws. Why that set? Why QM? I’m not asking about why the universe is as it is given the laws of physics, but rather why these laws? This is simply not a question that any amount of empirical investigation or theorizing in physics will solve, since it is not a question about physics, but about meta-physics.
As an analogy, imagine someone asked why baseball is as it is. You could explain why there are three strikes for an out instead of five or eight, or why the pitcher’s mound is at the distance and height it is, and those explanations could rely on empirical observations of how the game has been optimized over time. But that is an explanation that presupposes baseball as we currently play it. It doesn’t explain why, say, the batter doesn’t cut a deck of cards to see where his hit goes, or why the outfield isn’t filled with water, or why the bases aren’t on 20 foot stakes. All of those are logically possible arrangements for a game, and no amount of explanation about baseball from “inside” baseball can explain why those possibilities are not actualities.
Likewise, using QM to talk about vacuum is talking from “inside” our current physics. It isn’t an explanation from “outside” our current laws, and as such, it doesn’t explain where those laws come from.
(To be clear, I am by no means suggesting that some supernatural explanation does the trick — it simply moves the question backward to why is there something supernatural.)
Tulse,
If I might continue from the other comments, the “why is there QM?” does not serve as a counter. For, as I understand it, “why is there something rather than nothing” is explained by QM with “nothing is unstable.” In other words, reality has a fundamental tendency toward existence. The question reduces to “why does reality work the way it does?”, and this has different implications. There are several possible answers:
1) This is a fundamental property of nature.
2) There is an as yet undiscovered underlying theory that explains why the equations of QM are so accurate. This is obviously an open field.
Now, rejecting (1) as unsupportable even if true, (2) will reduce to the same question. In other words, the objection becomes one of infinite regress. Consequently, no physical answer will ever be considered satisfactory because the nature of the question rejects all physical answers. If the chain ever stops, we are at some point asking a meaningless question (“why” ceases to be applicable if any part of nature is fundamental). However, never allowing the chain to stop excludes physical answers automatically, again, <i>regardless of whether or not they are true</i>. This gap created, god will be inserted, even though similar questions apply to gods.
This ties into your comments about the number of logical possibilities. Note that it still admits “something,” because as before, the question has been successfully reduced to “why does reality work the way it does.”
So, as for answering “why does the universe work the way it does?”, we can continue on a chain of logic that, as I noted before, will exclude physical explanations (leaving us with conjecture) or admit that at some point, the question might cease to be meaningful.
That is true, but it was also my point. To say that something is simply “a fundamental property of nature” just begs the question as to why that property is fundamental, or even exists at all. As I said earlier, the question can’t be answered by physics because the question is one of meta-physics, why we have this physics rather than that physics, or any physics at all.
I guess what I am ultimately saying is that the theist question of “why is there something rather than nothing” is actually a pretty darn profound question, and responses based on our understanding of our actual physical laws don’t answer it. (Of course, postulating a god or gods doesn’t answer it either.)
<blockquote>
I guess what I am ultimately saying is that the theist question of “why is there something rather than nothing” is actually a pretty darn profound question, and responses based on our understanding of our actual physical laws don’t answer it. (Of course, postulating a god or gods doesn’t answer it either.)
</blockquote>
The question is one of stacking turtles. I don’t find it particularly profound, because it’s repeating “and why’s <i>that</i>” until the answerer says “no clue.” As you note, postulating a god doesn’t help, but in practice, this question is used to form arguments from ignorance.
My question is whether or not it is even a meaningful question. It doesn’t leave a physicalist reeling, unable to respond. Rather, the only acceptable answers to the question presuppose the falsity or inadequacy of any physical explanation.
In other words, it’s a loaded question.
It is possible that the question will receive a satisfactory answer analogous to answering the “stacking turtles” question. We’ve found that the Earth doesn’t have to directly rest on anything to keep it from falling downward to oblivion.
As we’ve agreed that physical answers and god answers are inadequate, can we envision any possible acceptable answer that ultimately ends the chain? I don’t think so. We can always repeat “and why’s <i>that</i>?” If the chain forms a self-supportive circle, we can ask why the self-supportive circle exists. This doesn’t end.
Is it a question with no answer? Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
Some additions:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nothingness/#WhyTheSomRatThaNot
I found this from Googling the question: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2007/08/30/why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing/
I’d like to add that another consideration (as elaborated further at the Stanford link) is that at each step in the chain, “why not” applies equally as well as “why.” For example, given X, we may say “why X” or “why not X”. Now, each logically possible “not X” is itself a world we can denote by Y.
Now, absent a chain of logical necessities (presupposed to not exist by Y a logical possibility), we may say
1) X and [Y is logically possible] for any given X,
but we can not derive
2) X and [all Y are not possible].
Note that two things have happened. First, we’ve established that other logical possibilities exist at each step in the regress. Second, we’ve agreed that no causal model preferring X to any Y avoids the problem. The argument then becomes:
a) Logical possibilities for different universes exist in every possible universe.
b) Causal explanations for the universe are themselves possibly different, therefore no universe is necessarily preferred to another.
c) By (a), no given universe necessarily exists, and by (b), no given universe is necessarily preferred to exist in place of any other given universe.
d) By (c), there can be no answer to “why is the universe the why it is.”
Basically, by admitting that other logically possibilities exist and that no preference among the possibilities can count as an answer, we force the question to become meaningless.
Just a start.
Edit: I’ve cleaned up the argument in my previous post and placed it <a href=”http://zachvoch.blogspot.com/2010/07/something-or-nothing-is-that-meaningful.html”>here</a>. I think it’s interesting, at least, so feedback would be appreciated.
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2010/07/rosenbaum.html
Off topic, but I found another treat:
Yep, as long as the attacks weren’t counter-ecumenical, they don’t contradict my “God is all about love” hypothesis.
Yep, the catholic/protestant divide in Ireland has nothing to do with religion. Yep, the Shias and Sunnis just want to have political power over each other for some reason completely unrelated to theological disputes.
I think that’s enough for now.