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Can Everything Come to Be Without a Cause?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Quentin Smith
Quentin Smith
Affiliation:
Western Michigan University
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Abstract

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Type
Interventions/Discussions
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , Spring 1994 , pp. 313 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1994

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References

Notes

1 Craig, William Lane, The Kalam Cosmological Argument (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 For references, see Smith, Quentin, “Atheism, Theism and Big Bang Cosmology,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 69 (1991): 48–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe,” Philosophy of Science, 55 (1988): 39–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “World Ensemble Explanations,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 67 (1986): 73–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Sullivan, T. D., “Coming to Be without a Cause,” Philosophy, 65 (1990): 261–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Grünbaum, Adolf “The Pseudo-Problem of Creation in Physical Cosmology,” in Physical Cosmology and Philosophy, edited by Leslie, John (New York: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 92–112Google Scholar, esp. p. 107.

5 This is further discussed in Smith, Quentin, “A New Typology of Temporal and Atemporal Permanence,” Nous, 23 (1989): 307–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “On the Beginning of Time,” Nous, 19 (1985): 579–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Kripke, Saul, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

7 The distinction between narrow and broadly logical possibility comes from Plantinga, Alvin, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 1–2.Google Scholar

8 Berry, Michael, Principles of Cosmology and Gravitation (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1989), p. 156Google Scholar.

9 Davits, Paul, The Edge of Infinity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), p. 161Google Scholar.

10 Some theories of Inflation have modified the standard hot big-bang cosmology by supposing that a false vacuum emerged from the big-bang singularity and later gave rise to the particles in the universe. For a non-technical explanation, see Davies, Paul, “What Caused the Big Bang?” in Physical Cosmology and Philosophy, edited by Leslie, John, (New York: Macmillan, 1990) pp. 220–38Google Scholar. Quantum cosmologies have further modified the standard theory by rejecting the idea of a lawless, pointlike singularity that began the universe. For a non-technical explanation, see Hawking, S. W., “The Edge of SpaceTime,” in The New Physics, edited by Davies, Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 61–69.Google Scholar

For a non-technical discussion of various theories of Inflation, quantum cosmology and other current cosmological ideas, see Leslie, John's Universes (New York: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar. For a more technical explanation of the classical theory, see Smith, Quentin, “A Natural Explanation of the Existence and Laws of Our Universe,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 68 (1990): 22–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Did the Big Bang Have a Cause?,” British Journal of the Philosophy of Science (forthcoming). For a more technical explanation of Hawking's quantum cosmology, see the Appendix in Craig, William Lane and Smith, Quentin, Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993).Google Scholar

11 Hawking, S. W., “Quantum Cosmology,” in Three Hundred Years of Gravitation, edited by Hawking, S. W. and Israel, W. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 631–51.Google Scholar

12 Vilenkin, A., “Creation of Universes from Nothing,” Physical Letters, 117B: 25–28.Google Scholar

13 Sullivan believes that Hawking's quantum cosmology (which replaces his classical cosmology of the 1960s and 1970s) does not imply that the universe began without a cause. On p. 269 of “Coming to Be without a Cause,” Sullivan criticizes my “The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe,” Philosophy of Science (1988): 39–57, and writes (p. 269 of “Coming to Be without a Cause”): “Smith notes that some philosophers resist the implication of an uncaused beginning of the universe, but it is not only philosophers who resist the conclusion. Hawking himself now resists the implication. “It is perhaps ironic that, having changed my mind, I am now trying to convince other physicists that there was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe—as we shall see later, it can disappear once quantum effects are taken into account” (quoted from Hawking, 's A Brief History of Time [New York: Bantam Books, 1988], p. 50Google Scholar). With Hawking himself against the putative implication of the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems, why give up on causality?”

I think Sullivan misunderstands Hawking's quantum theory. Hawking's denial of the singularity is not a denial that the universe began to exist without a cause. It merely denies that the first state of the universe has the property of being lawless. Hawking's new theory is that there is an uncaused first state of the universe, but that it is governed by a law, the “wave function of the universe,” and therefore is not a singularity. His new theory is that “the ordinary laws of science… hold everywhere, including at the beginning of time” (A Brief History of Time, p. 133). Hawking emphasizes that there is not only no singularity but also no naturally unexplained boundary conditions that provide room for a supernatural causal explanation of these conditions. If his new theory were true, “there would be no singularity at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God… to set the boundary conditions for space-time” (A Brief History of Time, p. 136). Thus, Hawking's new theory does not count as evidence against an uncaused beginning of the universe, but as evidence for it.

14 Kripke writes in Naming and Necessity: “The question of essential properties is supposed to be equivalent (and is equivalent) to the question of 'identity across possible world'… But, it's said, the problems of giving such identity criteria are very difficult… It seems to me [this is not] the right way of thinking about possible worlds There is no reason why we cannot stipulate that, in talking about what would have happened to Nixon in a certain counterfactual situation, we are talking about what would have happened to him” (pp. 42–44).

Kripke's approach seems implausible. When we have in mind Nixon as he exists in different worlds, we have in mind something in addition to Nixon qua particular that is numerically distinct from other particulars. We have in mind a particular qua determined by certain essential monadic or polyadic properties that constitute its nature and/or origin and are criteria for its transworld identity.

15 See Q. Smith, “Our Knowledge of Metaphysical Possibilities” (in preparation).

16 John Leslie writes (Universes, p. 81) that in Hawking's model “time becomes more and more space like as the analogue of a creation point is approached; and this analogue, like a needle's so-called point, is really only a rounded tip on which many points are more or less equally qualified for the role of ‘being where it all began’.” The fact that time is spacelike at the analogue of the creation point may be thought to be a relevant difference between the first and later states that shows how the first state can be an exception to the causal principle. However, this interpretation of Hawking implicitly presupposes that the exponential part of his wave function is to be interpreted realistically, whereas arguably only the oscillatory part is to be interpreted realistically. Cf. Quentin Smith, “The Wave Function of a Godless Universe,” in Craig and Smith, Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology. On this later interpretation, the first state of the universe contains a temporal dimension that is not spacelike; the “rounded tip” part of the model, where time is spacelike, has no physical reality. Given this interpretation, there remains the problem of how the first state can be an exception to the causal principle.

17 I am grateful to William Vallicella and two referees for this journal for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.