Bernard Russell and the First Cause

4gold · Post by **4gold** » Mon Sep 17, 2007 11:17 am

In arguing why God was no better a reason for the First Cause than the Universe, famed atheist Bernard Russell said, “There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.”

This was said at a time when Hubble was only making preliminary observations about the expanding universe. Russell had died long before the Big Bang became popular and well-accepted scientific theory.

Now that it is well-accepted that our universe did indeed have a beginning, and it's not due to the poverty of our imaginations, do you think Russell would have changed his argument if he had lived long enough? Does Russell's first cause argument still have legs? Why or why not?

McCulloch · Post by **McCulloch** » Mon Sep 17, 2007 4:15 pm

4gold wrote:If something has a beginning, it has to have a cause.

How do you know that?

katiej49 · Post by **katiej49** » Mon Sep 17, 2007 4:20 pm

does anyone really believe that everything came from nothing? zero. zip . nada. "in the beginning there was nothing at all and then something happened and the universe began"....how could something happen if there was nothing for it to happen with?

QED · Post by **QED** » Mon Sep 17, 2007 4:28 pm

4gold wrote:
QED wrote: I can't fully agree with that as concepts like the Hawking Hartle no-boundary proposal demonstrate other possibilities.
But even this theory proposes that this universe had a beginning.

Stephen Hawking wrote:Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago. The beginning of real time, would have been a singularity, at which the laws of physics would have broken down. Nevertheless, the way the universe began would have been determined by the laws of physics, if the universe satisfied the no boundary condition.
The Hawking-Hartle theory begins moments after the Big Bang, because there are no deterministic laws of physics before the Big Bang. Russell made his comments at a time when there was no reason to believe the universe had a beginning. We now realize that it does.

But what boundary is Hawking referring to? He's talking about a singularity. For the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of physics, the laws must be preexistant. I think this is made clearer in a preceding paragraph:

Stephen Hawking wrote: Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang. Events before the Big Bang, are simply not defined, because there's no way one could measure what happened at them. This kind of beginning to the universe, and of time itself, is very different to the beginnings that had been considered earlier. These had to be imposed on the universe by some external agency. There is no dynamical reason why the motion of bodies in the solar system can not be extrapolated back in time, far beyond four thousand and four BC, the date for the creation of the universe, according to the book of Genesis. Thus it would require the direct intervention of God, if the universe began at that date. By contrast, the Big Bang is a beginning that is required by the dynamical laws that govern the universe. It is therefore intrinsic to the universe, and is not imposed on it from outside.

QED · Post by **QED** » Mon Sep 17, 2007 4:40 pm

4gold wrote: If God has no beginning, he has no cause. If the universe has a beginning, it has a cause.

Don't you see that you're also effectively saying that "if the cause of the universe itself has no beginning then the universe has no cause". One cosmological model called Eternal Inflation is exactly this kind of cause. This is why I keep pointing out that God has many other equivalences.

McCulloch · Post by **McCulloch** » Mon Sep 17, 2007 4:41 pm

katiej49 wrote:does anyone really believe that everything came from nothing?

Theists believe that God came from nothing. OK, I know, they say that God has no origin, God has always been. Isn't that the same as saying that God came from nothing.
Q. Where did God come from?
A. God did not come from anything.

katiej49 wrote:zero. zip . nada. "in the beginning there was nothing at all and then something happened and the universe began"

This is the accepted wisdom. But can you prove that?

katiej49 wrote:how could something happen if there was nothing for it to happen with?

That is the question. Maybe nothing is rather unstable.

QED · Post by **QED** » Mon Sep 17, 2007 4:41 pm

katiej49 wrote:does anyone really believe that everything came from nothing? zero. zip . nada. "in the beginning there was nothing at all and then something happened and the universe began"....how could something happen if there was nothing for it to happen with?

QED · Post by **QED** » Mon Sep 17, 2007 4:45 pm

katiej49 -- If I change just one of your words I think it will make clear the problem with what you're saying:

does anyone really believe that anything came from nothing? zero. zip . nada. "in the beginning there was nothing at all and then something happened and the universe began"....how could something happen if there was nothing for it to happen with?

QED · Post by **QED** » Mon Sep 17, 2007 4:57 pm

McCulloch wrote:That is the question. Maybe nothing is rather unstable.

Victor Stenger and others agree:

Then why is there something rather than nothing? Because something is the more natural state of affairs and is thus more likely than nothing-more than twice as likely according to one calculation. We can infer this from the processes of nature where simple systems tend to be unstable and often spontaneously transform into more complex ones. Theoretical models such as the inflationary model of the early universe bear this out.

Consider the example of the snowflake. Our experience tells us that a snowflake is very ephemeral, melting quickly to drops of liquid water that exhibit far less structure. But that is only because we live in a relatively high temperature environment, where collisions with molecules in thermal motion reduce the fragile arrangement of crystals to a simpler liquid. Energy is required to destroy the structure of a snowflake.

But consider an environment where the ambient temperature is well below the melting point of ice, as it is in most of the universe far from the highly localized effects of stellar heating. In such an environment, any water vapor would readily crystallize into complex structures. Snowflakes would be eternal, or at least will remain intact until cosmic rays tear them apart.

What this example illustrates is that many simple systems are unstable, that is, have limited lifetimes as they undergo spontaneous phase transitions to more complex structures of lower energy. Since "nothing" is as simple as it gets, we would not expect it to be completely stable. In some models of the origin of the universe, the vacuum undergoes a spontaneous phase transition to something more complicated, like a universe containing matter. The transition nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any external agent.

As Nobel Laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, "The answer to the ancient question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that 'nothing' is unstable."

The Corinthian · Post by **The Corinthian** » Mon Sep 17, 2007 5:21 pm

As an addition to QED's talk of Eternal inflation (though I have to admit that I don't know what I'm talking about)

4gold wrote:Now that it is well-accepted that our universe did indeed have a beginning, and it's not due to the poverty of our imaginations, do you think Russell would have changed his argument if he had lived long enough? Does Russell's first cause argument still have legs? Why or why not?

I have lately been reading up on Alan Guth's Big bubble universe theory, and I have just ordered his book The Inflationary Universe (there is a good review of the book here).

From what I understand of it (my knowledge of physics is pretty average I would say), by googling it, if there ever were a theory in cosmology that comes even close to disprove God, it certainly is this one. Or at least, there is very little place for a God in this theory.

This theory allegedly solves a lot a problems, and have very neat explanations for cosmological issues, plus it seems that it has become somewhat widely accepted. Extremely short simplified version: His theory basically pictures the entire cosmos (not only our local universe, which does have a beginning) as a huge fractal, with no beginning or end. Our visible universe was spawned from a bubble, and will itself spawn new bubbles. I like this theory, because the only answer I logically can see to the infinite regress, is infinity, i.e. the universe has always been, and will be.

So I think this theory corresponds well with what Bertrand Russell said.

4gold · Post by **4gold** » Mon Sep 17, 2007 5:33 pm

McCulloch wrote:
4gold wrote:If something has a beginning, it has to have a cause.
How do you know that?

If the string of causes were infinitely long, the term "beginning" would have no meaning. There would be no beginning in an infinite string of cause and effect.

If the string of causes were finite, "beginning", as we are using it in our debate, would be the first effect after the first cause.