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On the Alleged Causeless Beginning of the Universe: A Reply to Quentin Smith

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Thomas D. Sullivan
Thomas D. Sullivan
Affiliation:
University of St. Thomas
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Type
Interventions/Discussions
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , Spring 1994 , pp. 325 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1994

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References

Notes

1 Smith, Quentin, “The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe,” Philosophy of Science, 55 (1988): 39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

In his reply to me, “Can Everything Come to Be Without a Cause?”Dialogue, 33 [this issue] (1994): 313–323, Smith invokes Hawking's authority for his general conclusion. Hawking does indeed seem to lean in the direction of thinking that a creator can be dispensed with, but Hawking is considerably more tentative than Smith. Hawking says, for example, “An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!” (Hawking, Steven, A Brief History of Time [Toronto: Bantam Books, 1988], p. 9Google Scholar). He emphasizes on p. 136 that his idea of time and space “is just a proposal” (his emphasis).

Smith reads me as erroneously imputing to Hawking the view that the universe could not have begun without a cause. But this is not what I said. Rather, what I said was that Hawking resists a certain implication, i.e., the line of argument Smith himself had adopted. Smith had argued that the singularity had certain features that rule out divine causality. I was making the point that Hawking's authority cannot be invoked to support Smith's argument, since Hawking has reversed himself and now says there is no singularity. Smith wanted to move from “Since there is a singularity…” to “Therefore there is no cause of the universe's coming to be at all.” Hawking is not with him on the premise. “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” (Hawking, A Brief History, p. 50).

Smith seems to suggest that Hawking's new theory commits him to a non-supernaturalist account. “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” (p. 11, n. 13). What Hawking actually says, however, in the passage Smith cites to support the “excludes” interpretation of Hawking's theory is considerably weaker: “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” (Brief History, p. 136; reproduced as cited by Smith, p. 11, n. 13). To say that one cannot argue “There is an edge to space-time; therefore God exists” is far weaker than to say that one can argue “There is no edge to space-time; therefore God does not exist.” (“An expanding universe does not preclude a creator “) It should be recalled that theists such as Aquinas do not rest the argument from the contingency of the world on any assumption that the world had a first moment. (Aquinas thinks the temporal finitude of the universe is indemonstrable.) They rather argue from the world's contingency and PSR. Hawking or anyone else inclined to dismiss the need for a creator of a universe that supposedly arises without a cause must explain satisfactorily why we are to abandon PSR for this case. I do not see that Hawking anywhere directly takes on and disposes of PSR. Whether Smith does is the question we now face.

2 Sullivan, Thomas, “Coming to Be Without a Cause,” Philosophy, 65 (1990): 261–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 See note 1 above.

4 Smith tells us on p. 48 of “Uncaused Beginning” that the Friedmann equations and the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems “predict an uncaused beginning of the universe.” On p. 49, however, Smith puts the matter more circumspectly. “This effectively rules out the idea that the singularity is an effect of some prior natural process. A more difficult question is whether or not the singularity or Big Bang probably is the effect of a supernatural cause, God.” It is at this juncture that he begins to argue, as he must, against PSR. As I point out in “Coming to Be” and elaborate later in this paper, Smith's arguments against PSR in “Uncaused Beginning” depend on concepts of causality almost no defender of divine causality should accept.

5 Smith, “Uncaused Beginning,” p. 48.

6 Sullivan, “Coming to Be,” pp. 263–66.

7 Smith, “Can Everything,” p. 313.

8 Reid, Thomas, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, edited by Brody, Baruch (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1969), Essay 4, chap. 2, p. 267.Google Scholar

9 Smith, “Can Everything,” p. 313.

10 Ibid.

11 Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 4, chap. 3.

12 Despite his wording of his criterion, Smith may only mean to say about every self-evident proposition what Aristotle says about the PNC, that it is impossible for someone to believe the contradictory of the PNC. Even so, that is an exceedingly high standard for a proposition to meet in order to be obvious.

13 Chisholm, Roderick, Theory of Knowledge, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1989), p. 16.Google Scholar

14 Hawking,A Brief History, p. 106.

15 Smith, “Can Everything,” p. 320.

16 Smith has a direct argument for the plausibility of the claim that the singularity is the sole exception to PSR. I take this up in Part 2, since his argument presupposes points made in criticism of my argument for PSR.

17 Hume, David, The Letters of David Hume, edited by Greig, J. Y. T. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), Vol. 1, p. 187.Google Scholar Hume claims he only maintained that neither intuition nor demonstration, but some other source, roots our certainty.

18 For an excellent discussion of this point see Miller, Richard W., Fact and Method (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 60–64.Google Scholar Cosmologists often muddy the waters when discussing the need for a creator for the universe by assuming that an event is non-causal if it is non-deterministic. See, for example, Davis, Paul, The Mind of God (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 61–62Google Scholar. In “The Uncaused Beginning,” Smith at one point appears to depend on this assumption, but in “Can Everything” he clearly allows that causes may be only necessary and not sufficient conditions.

19 Smith, “Can Everything,” p. 320.I argue for this at some length in “Coming to Be.” See especially pp. 263–66.

20 I give a more formal, free-logic version in “Coming to Be,” p. 267, n. 9.

21 In “Coming to Be,” I avoided the language preferred by Smith of necessity in the “broadly logical sense” because I think the language, taken from Plantinga, requires a fair amount of explaining.

22 Smith, “Can Everything,” p. 317.

23 Sullivan, “Coming to Be,” p. 268.

24 I wrote in “Coming to Be,” p. 268: “One could say while some things cannot come to be without a cause, some things can.

“True, one could say that, but on what basis? Hume gives the best reason for thinking something could come to be without a cause—the separability in imagination of the cause from the effect. But as we just saw, that argument proves too much. The same reasoning shows that everything could come to be without a cause. And if that is possible, then there are no causes at all.”

25 Smith, “Can Everything,” p. 318.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., p. 319.

28 Notice how on the view complex things need causes, but not simple things, that complex things cannot be made up of maximally simple things. The constituents of everything must themselves have constituents. Electrons must have proper parts, and so must these parts endlessly. For let w be composed of x and y and x and y be maximally simple. Since w is not maximally simple, w needs a cause; since x and y, w's composing parts, are maximally simple, x and y do not need causes. But if all the parts of w can come into existence without a cause, it is possible for w to do so also, since no more is required for w to emerge than for all of w's parts to emerge.

29 Smith, “Can Everything,” p. 316.

30 I wish to thank Sandra Menssen, Russell Pannier and an anonymous referee of Dialogue for their helpful comments on this paper.