Adolf Grünbaum and Paul Davies
line up on the side of creationism
by Vincent Sauve
Adolf Grünbaum provides the most sophisticated, yet faulty, arguments in defense of the Big Bang from nothing model that I know of. He eschews what many scientists refer to as “creation out of nothing,” because of the religious connotations. Yet, because of Grünbaum’s acceptance (without criticism) of the idea of t (time)=0 he is in effect accepting that the material universe can have a beginning, and therefore places himself in the same camp as the creationists by defending a creationist possibility. Replying to Narlikar's complaint that “The most fundamental question in cosmology is, ‘Where did the matter we see around us originate in the first place?’ This point has never been dealt with in the big bang cosmologies in which, at t=0, there occurs a sudden and fantastic violation of the law of conservation of matter and energy.” Grünbaum gets around to replying: “But in the Big Bang model under consideration, there were no such earlier instants before t=0 and hence no instants when the big bang had not yet occurred.” Grünbaum fails to see that this is a contradictory argument in that the concept of time, in fact, derives from motion of material things. To accept the idea of a beginning in time therefore means that the conceptual foundation of time, i.e., matter, also had a beginning.
One could state that matter always existed but motion did not. Yet, the idea of matter without motion is absurd and without all precedence. “Motion is the mode of existence of matter. Never anywhere has there been matter without motion, nor can there be. … Matter without motion is just as inconceivable as motion without matter. Motion is therefore as uncreatable and indestructable as matter itself.” --F. Engels,
(See bottom of page for details and further commentary.)Later in Grünbaum’s long article he continues to play games with semantics and logic by writing: "And in both cases, the nonexistence of time before t=0 allows that matter has always existed, although the age of the universe is finite in either case. This assertion is true because, here as elsewhere, the term always refers to all actual (past) instants of time." See "Creation in Cosmology," Adolf Grünbaum’s entry in the Encyclopedia of Cosmology, edited by Norriss S. Hetherington, (Garland Publishing, Inc., New York, 1993, pages 126-136.) For an easier to obtain look at Grünbaum’s defense of a creationist position, see his letter “Pseudo-creation of the big bang,” Nature, 344:821-822. Here he can be seen to argue against those who find it philosophically unacceptable to have an effect (the Big Bang) without a cause (causality, is after all, a principle that is fundamental to science):
But precisely this total absence of times earlier than t=0 also rules out the very existence of an earlier cause of any event that does occur at the hypothesized instant t=0. Hence, if the Big Bang is taken to have occurred at the putative t=0, that initial event is causally sui generis. It just cannot have any cause at all in the universe of the given model, nor, of course, can that paramount occurrence be the effect of any prior cause.
Grünbaum’s line of argumentation can only make some sense when it is assumed that at some period the universe, in all its forms and motions, just didn't exist. But where does this assumption come from? It cannot be a scientific assumption. (Hint: Religion) How can the reader help but to be befuddled by Grünbaum’s defensive arguments:
Here as well, the model lends no support to the doctrine of divine creation ex nihilo, but that teaching lingers on in the misleading overtones of the terms "creation" and "nothing". The former connotes the operation of a creator or external causal agency, and the latter a completely unstructured state.
Alas, the recent literature on some versions of quantum cosmology contain inappropriate uses of these locutions which may suggest that this theory abets creationism. For example, such physicists as Hartle and Hawking and Vilenkin speak misleadingly of certain primordial physical states as “nothing”, even though these states are avowedly only “a realm of unrestrained quantum gravity,” which is “a state with no classical space-time.”
In an article that appears to be based on the arguments that Grünbaum makes (“What Hath COBE Wrought?”, Sky & Telescope, January 1993, pp. 4-5.) Paul Davies informs us on how modern Christian theology is in consonance with the scientific [!] picture of the universe:
According to modern Christian theology, God did not create the universe at some particular moment as a temporal act. Instead, divine creation is understood as a timeless “holding in being” [!] of the physical world, permitting the world to be continually creative through its own laws. This more sophisticated, but abstract, idea of God adapts well to the scientific picture of a universe subject to timeless eternal laws.
Davies continues with more arguments that are similar with Grünbaum’s, then refers to what has changed in providing an explanation for the appearance of the universe:
What has changed this view is the application of quantum physics to the universe as a whole.
New and exciting theories of quantum cosmology seek to explain the origin of the universe within the framework of scientific law. Their central feature is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which permits genuine spontaneity in nature. As a result, the tight linkage between cause and effect so characteristic of classical physics is loosened. Quantum events do not need well-defined prior causes; they can be regarded as spontaneous fluctuations. It is then possible to imagine the universe coming into being from nothing entirely spontaneously, without violating any laws.
This is tragic this confused understanding of Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty. This idea that since we cannot exactly determine two conjugate variables, that nature therefore allows a loosening of cause and effect (this idea having led some modern physicists to the speculation that even the universe can come into being from nothing due to the principle of uncertainty) was shown to be a fallacy of equivocation many decades ago by J.E.Turner. The first and last few lines of his letter: “The implications of Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty are often seriously confused owing to the ambiguity of the expression ‘to determine’; [....] But every argument that, since some change cannot be ‘determined’ in the sense of ‘ascertained’, it is therefore not ‘determined’ in the absolutely different sense of ‘caused’, is a fallacy of equivocation.” --J.E.Turner, (Nature, No. 3191, Vol. 126, December 27, 1930, p. 995.)
Their philosophical arguments closely parallel those of Eugen Dühring of whom the dialectician Frederick Engels successfully critiqued in Anti-Dühring, in the chapter “Natural Philosophy. Time and Space.” The first printing of the book was in 1878 in Leipzig. The following is a selected passage from the chapter:
Let us continue. So time had a beginning. What was there before this beginning? The universe, which was then in a self-identical, unchanging state. And as no changes succeed one another in this state, the more specialized idea of time transforms itself into the more general idea of being. In the first place, we are not in the least concerned here with what concepts change in Herr Duhring's head. The subject at issue is not the concept of time, but real time, which Herr Duhring will by no means rid himself of so cheaply. In the second place, however much the concept of time may be converted into the more general idea of being, this takes us not one step further. For the basic forms of all being are space and time, and being out of time is just as gross an absurdity as being out of space. The Hegelian "timelessly past being" and the neo-Schellingian "unpreconceivable being" are rational ideas compared with this being out of time.(Copies of this book can be obtained cheaply at a university book store that carries used books. Look for the Peking 1976 edition. If the university town near where you live doesn't have it you should consider moving from such a reactionary place!)
To my essay on time and relativity theory