Christian historian Dr. Wallace Marshall and I are debating whether or not enough evidence points to the existence of a god. For background and format, and Dr. Wallace’s opening statement, see entry one. For subsequent entries, see index.
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That the Evidence Points to God (III)
by Wallace Marshall, Ph.D.
I thank Dr. Carrier for his thoughtful engagement with the Kalam Cosmological Argument (including in his latest response). I’ll start by responding to his five points at the beginning (also outlined his opening summary).
Regarding assertions (1) and (2), that a cause is “by definition located in time” and “cannot exist nowhere,” this is to beg, rather than argue for, the question under debate.[1] Since time and space are constituent elements of the universe, if there are good reasons to believe the universe began to exist and has a cause, then that cause, whether it is God or something else, will obviously not be located in time and space. So the question is whether the universe beginning to exist and having a cause is more plausible than not.
Regarding assertion (3), “Evidence that our universe began is not evidence that time began”—it most certainly is given the standard and widely accepted model of how the universe began, which includes space, time, matter and energy. As Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose have written about that model, “Almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang.”[2]
This applies to multiverse models as well. Vilenkin was well aware of such models (indeed, he himself espouses one) when he recently wrote, “We have no viable models of an eternal universe. The BGV [Borde-Guth-Vilenkin] theorem gives reason to believe that such models cannot be constructed.”[3]
The Hartle-Hawking (HH) no-boundary model does not avoid the absolute origin of the universe. Vilenkin made his emphatic comment that I quoted long after Hartle and Hawking developed that model.[4] The reason Vilenkin can say what he does is that on Hawking’s model, the universe still begins to exist. Hawking himself, in his 2010 book The Grand Design, describes the model as the universe originating at a “south pole” rather than in a singularity as he and Penrose originally proposed (visualize the difference between the bottom of a sphere and the point of a “cone” one often sees in Big-Bang-model illustrations).[5] Whether there is a singularity or simply a “rounded edge” (as in the HH model), the universe still comes into existence and (as Sean Carroll says about HH) “there was a time such that there was no earlier time.”[6]
The fact that cosmologists are “exploring” past-eternal models (Guth’s word concerning the “bi-eternal” model he and Carroll are thinking about) does nothing to overturn the standard consensus.[7] Only when such theories are amply demonstrated and gain broader acceptance can they be considered legitimate rivals to the consensus. This applies to Ahmed Farag Ali’s model, as well as to Christoph Wetterich’s radical proposal that the universe is 5,000-billion years old, is not expanding, and originated from an “eternal light vacuum” that he himself says is inherently unstable.[8]
As Carroll, himself an atheist, has written: “Unsuccessful theories are never disproven, as we can always concoct elaborate schemes to save the phenomena. They just fade away as better theories gain acceptance.”[9] One searches in vain for emphatic statements by physicists affirming past-eternal cosmologies that would parallel statements to the counter I have provided;[10] and note that these statements come from scientists who are atheists or agnostics.
Regarding Carrier’s objection (4), “Causal laws cannot exist in the absence of a structural cause of such laws,” I will ask him to define what he means by “structural.” If he means “physical,” this is again to beg, rather than argue for, the question under debate.
Regarding Carrier’s objection (5), that there is no evidence for disembodied minds, the Kalam provides specific evidence and argument for precisely such an entity.
As an explanation of the origin of the universe, the God hypothesis is a remarkably simple explanation, and far more plausible than the universe popping into existence from nothing with no cause whatsoever.
I will ask Dr. Carrier to provide a brief articulation of his “Nothing as Cause,” argument, as I would exhaust my 1,100-word limit replying in detail to his linked article. It is not even clear to me, from reading that article, that he and I have a disagreement on that point. Nor do I find any description in that article of what he means by a “lawless minimum state,” which he believes to be the most plausible cause of the origin of the universe. I will evaluate that hypothesis after receiving some clarification. That clarification is also necessary before I respond to Dr. Carrier’s objection that my four reasons given in defense of the causal principle reduce to one, and that that one reason is irrelevant on his hypothesis of the origin of the universe.
I would also ask Dr. Carrier to clarify what he means by “virtually infinite universe.” If “virtually” simply means a gigantic but finite number, then this would be irrelevant to the absurdities resulting from the instantiation of an actual infinite.
I am well aware that quantum vacuum models are past-finite. That is precisely why, being merely an early state of the universe, the quantum vacuum cannot be the cause of the universe. On a related matter, I listened again to the 55:50 timestamp Dr. Carrier referenced in the Krauss-Craig debate and do not see where Krauss “explains why Vilenkin is wrong.” As already pointed out in my previous entry, Krauss affirmed at that debate that he agreed with Vilenkin’s strong statement, “All the evidence we have says the universe had a beginning.”[11]
Regarding my philosophical arguments against an actual infinite, Dr. Carrier has yet to respond to the second philosophical argument I offered for the finitude of the past.
Regarding my first philosophical argument for that point:
- Dr. Carrier seems to confuse infinite-set theory in mathematics with the question of whether infinite quantities can actually be instantiated.
- I quoted Herb Silverman verbatim;[12] Dr. Carrier references a different source where Silverman says something similar.
In addition to Hilbert’s Hotel (see here for a 6-minute video presentation), there are numerous illustrations of the absurdities resulting from the actual existence of an infinite number of things. Many of these revolve around the problem of subtracting identical quantities from identical quantities and coming up with non-identical results. Imagine the Federal Reserve having an infinite number of sequentially numbered bills and giving away either (1) all the odd numbered bills (infinite quantity), or (2) all the bills from #500 upward (also infinite). Case 1 leaves the Fed with an infinite number of bills [∞ – ∞ = ∞]; case 2 leaves the Fed with 499 [∞ – ∞ = 499]. Yet in each case it gave away an identical number.
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Such is Dr. Marshall’s second response.
Continue on to Dr. Carrier’s reply here.
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Endnotes
[1] For the benefit of our readers, it’s worth clarifying that in popular culture and the media, the phrase “begging the question” is frequently misused as if it meant raising or implying an additional question (for example, “What you’re saying about the futility of the war in Iraq begs the question of whether we should be in the Middle East at all”). The proper meaning of “begging the question,” however, has to do with a question that is being debated, and it means to assume—usually implicitly—the answer you are trying to argue for as a premise in your argument. The idea is that one is thereby “begging” to be judged correct rather than “working” (arguing) to show that he is in fact correct.
[2] Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time, The Isaac Newton Institute Series of Lectures (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 20 (emphasis mine).
[3] Alexander Vilenkin, “The Beginning of the Universe,” Inference: International Review of Science, Vol. 1, Issue 4 (23 October 2015). Accessed 4/16/2017. Vilenkin obviously means past-eternal, not future-eternal. “Everlasting” (having no end) is a clearer designation than “future-eternal,” and we should simply use “eternal” for models that have neither beginning nor end.
[4] “All the evidence we have says the universe had a beginning.” From a talk Vilenkin delivered on January 8th at Cambridge University to a group of scientists gathered to honor Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday, as quoted in Lisa Grossman, “Why Physicists Can’t Avoid a Creation Event,” New Scientist (Issue 2846) 11 January 2012. You can view a scanned PDF of the story here.
[5] Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam Books, 2010), 135.
[6] Sean Carroll, “Does the Universe Need God?” in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, eds. J.B. Stump and Alan G. Padgett (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell), 190.
[7] Interview with Alan Guth in “Before the Big Bang 4: Eternal Inflation & The Multiverse.” Carrier linked this interview in his previous reply. I do not even view the “bi-eternal” Carroll-Guth hypothesis as truly eternal in the past. It rather seems to consist of two different arrows of time moving forward in different universes, not a single arrow stretching into both the infinite future and the infinite past. As Vilenkin pointed out to the late Vic Stenger, their model still has a “t=0 moment.”
[8] Ali’s paper, incidentally, does not even mention, much less address, the problems the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem poses to such models. For a detailed presentation of Wetterich’s model, see his “Expanding Universe or Shrinking Atoms?” (March 2019); see slide 49 on the instability of his “Eternal Light Vacuum.”
[9] Sean Carroll, “Does the Universe Need God?” in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, eds. J. B. Stump and Alan G. Padgett (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 196.
[10] “All the evidence says the universe had a beginning” (Vilenkin and Krauss) is a remarkable statement. Vilenkin expresses it still more emphatically when he writes, “It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.” Alexander Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 176.
[11] It’s worth mentioning that in the Craig-Krauss Debate, Krauss seriously misrepresented Vilenkin’s views by quoting to the packed audience from a personal email he received from Vilenkin and carefully omitting Vilenkin’s specific remarks in that very email about the difficulties faced by past-eternal models. This was revealed when Craig corresponded with Vilenkin after the debate and asked him about this email. Vilenkin responded and gave Craig permission to publish both his email to Craig and his email to Krauss. Readers can access that material in Reasonable Faith Question of the Week # 336, “’Honesty, Transparency, Full Disclosure’ and the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem” (Sept. 23, 2013). Note also Vilenkin’s comment to Craig about the accuracy of his (Craig’s) presentation of Vilenkin’s theory, as well as his humble recognition that his scientific expertise does not extend to the question of what theological implications might be drawn from the theory: “I think you represented what I wrote about the BGV theorem in my papers and to you personally very accurately. This is not to say that you represented my views as to what this implies regarding the existence of God. Which is OK, since I have no special expertise to issue such judgements.”
[12] “The most important lesson I learned was that … the number ‘infinity’ does not exist in reality.” The source again (same as I referenced in my first entry): Laura Paull, “South Carolina’s Secular Crusader,” Tablet Magazine, 21 June 2012. Accessed 9/18/2012.
Interesting stuff. Looking forward to Dr. Carrier’s formal reply, but in the meantime:
Objection to [1] and [2] – Wouldn’t acceptance of that objection require us also to reject premise 1 of the Kalam? The objection essentially says that causation entailing time and space may only be true in our universe, and therefore begging the question of whether it applies outside the universe. But of course, that entirely applies to premise 1 of the Kalam as well. This objection appears to be a double-edged sword.
Objection to [3] – I’m likely not well read enough on these theories to properly address the full scientific claims, but the latter half appears to be a non-sequitor. Dr. Marshall rejects past eternal models as not being the consensus. But that was never the claim being proposed. It was Dr. Marshall who claimed there were no “viable” past eternal models, and therefore he has to show that those models are mathematically impossible, not just less than consensus. Further, it always confuses me when theists try to claim grounding in scientific consensus given the consensus of actual scientists is that god is not the most probably explanation for these big issues (this is potentially even true of philosophers, a double-whammy).
Objection to [4] – Seemingly the same as first objection. Accepting Kalam premise 1 is to assume this objection is incorrect.
Objection to (5) – For someone throwing around “begging the question,” this feels disingenuous. The Kalam is the thing in question, so clearly it is not evidenced yet. But further, for an argument that relies on so much induction, it is absolutely valid to point out that the conclusion drawn requires a complete break from general observation. All direct observations of a mind also observe a brain (brain in this case need not be biological, but it is physical).
In the case for the rest, I await Dr. Carrier’s reply. But goodness, do theists not understand the word “simple”? When they say it, they seem to mean “anything that post-hoc perfectly explains what I want to know.” But it’s like they have not idea just how complicated the conjunction of all their beliefs/reasons MUST be.
Keith,
Not entirely sure I follow your first paragraph, but if you read my 2nd entry (one just previous to what’s above) where I lay out the Kalam argument, you’ll see that I provide four specific reasons why we should believe that if the universe began to exist, the universe has a cause. So I did not “beg” that question.
Re. [3], see my quotation from Sean Carroll above about how the scientific community assesses cosmological models. Mathematical viability is hardly the only criterion (though even on this score, see my quotation from MIT cosmologist Alan Guth in my 2nd entry). Scientists also assess whether the physical mechanisms of the model are plausible. Re. the 2nd premise of the Kalam, “the universe began to exist,” all that is necessary (as far as the scientific evidence goes) is to show that the scientific evidence makes that premise more plausible than not.
Re. [5], there are other reasons besides the Kalam to believe in disembodied minds. But even apart from that, it would be an absurd epistemological rule to never believe in something there’s good evidence for, merely because one has no other or prior evidence for. Just think of the strange new entities physicists posit all the time! (dark energy, anti-gravity).
I don’t follow the reasoning of your final paragraph. What would you propose as a definition of “simplicity” in explanations?
Thank you for replying Dr. Marshall! I will try to explain my objections better.
First paragraph – This seems to be rejecting (or not accepting) the premises that causation must take place within time and space. That is, essentially, a recognition of the problem of induction. That we only see causation in time and space doesn’t necessarily tells us that causation MUST happen in time and space. But, that same logic would apply to Kalam premise 1. That we see causes preceding effects within our local universe does not necessarily imply this would be the case outside. By rejecting equally valid inferences (time and space being connected to causation), it seems we must also reject that all effects must have a cause when stepping outside the universe.
Re. [3] – I can accept that. As I said, I am not as well versed in the actual science. And I can see where it was corrected earlier that you were speaking of most plausible, not “only possibility.”
Re. [5] – There may be other reasons besides the Kalam to posit/accept disembodied minds, but I could just as easily say there are not GOOD reasons to do such. I don’t think this is the place to have an entirely new argument, but I accept that you may not consider a disembodied mind unobserved. But I believe my point still stands. Part of this debate is showing the link between “The universe had a cause” and “that cause is a mind.” You’ve certainly made that attempt, but I am not persuaded your logic is sound. And indeed that is the point. You’ve asserted ex nhilo nihil fit, but cannot demonstrate it (you have not refuted Dr. Carrier’s argument that nothingness would be unstable and thus likely to produce something). You’ve asserted a god of the gaps (these scientific models don’t match the argument you are presenting, thus your formulation of a God is more probable – though you have not established those are the only options per the instability argument above).
I would define simplicity as the lower end of scale that measures the conjunction of properties and abilities that a thing has. God, by definition, has greater abilities and a longer list of properties than any other thing in existence. It seems ridiculous to imply such a thing is “simple.” That the explanation is one word, or perfectly matches all the assertions (indeed what seems to be the point of being ad-hoc) does not imply it is simple.
Keith,
Of course I do reject the idea that causes have to precede their effects in time. As you’ll see in my next entry when it posts, philosophers have long pointed out that causes can be simultaneous with their effects. Some contemporary philosophers argue that ALL causation is simultaneous because causes always coincide exactly in time with their effects. Moreover, as I pointed out in a previous entry, in the case of the origin of the universe, in the very nature of the case, the cause cannot be in time. The alternative would be the absurdity of being arising from absolute non-being.
My next entry also address how Dr. Carrier’s idea of the instability of “nothingness” (it’s actually the quantum vacuum, which is emphatically not ‘nothing’ from a scientific point of view) supports the temporal past-finitude of the universe.
Re. [5], I’m happy to accept that there are reasons (even “evidence”!–see my definition of that in my very first entry) to disbelieve in disembodied minds. My only contention is that one can’t beg that question one way or the other.
You say you’re not persuaded that my logic for arguing from the “the universe has a cause” to “the cause of the universe is mind.” Could you specify precisely where you think my logic runs askew there? (see my second entry, where I lay out the case for the Kalam: https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/15276).
In that same entry, I provide no less than four reasons in support of “ex nihilo, nihil fit.” Where specifically do you disagree with those?
Finally, re. “simplicity,” thanks for taking a stab at a definition. A couple of things: First, I said that the explanation was simple, not that God himself is simple. I mean, who would expect to come to the be-all, end-all, fountain of existence (as God must be if he existed) and find something with no mystery?
Second, I don’t think it’s correct that God has “a longer list of properties than any other thing in existence.” The classical lists of essential divine attributes probably numbers around five (necessary existence, goodness, eternity, omnipotence and omniscience). And it has for centuries been a significant part of the monotheistic tradition that even these collapse into a single “Actus Purus” or divine “simplicity” (that’s actually one of the classical divine attributes going back to the Middle Ages).
Third, when it comes to the role of simplicity in evaluating alternative explanations, the question is whether multiple components are present in the explanation, and especially components that further compound the problem one is trying to explain. Obviously God is not a complex entity in that sense.
Fourth, simplicity is hardly the only factor in evaluating competing explanations, so one can’t automatically rule out an explanation on that basis (just think of how a multiverse would fare on that score).
Fifth and finally, all of the above aside, in the case of the ultimate origin of things, it’s essential to recognize that if the preponderance of evidence is against the past-eternity of the universe (and about that–I mean the preponderance–I frankly don’t think there’s any legitimate doubt), then we have just two options before us: a transcendent cause, OR, as I said above, being arising from absolute non-being. And if one has to compare those options, it seems an easy decision as to which makes sense, and which is absurd.
I’m barely following this but am trying really hard to anyway. This is all above my pay grade, but one thing I don’t understand is this: how does any of this get us any closer to a god as cause? A causal creator could just as well be a magic monkey in a fez sipping a mocha latte through a crazy straw stuck in a coconut shell as it could be the petulant genocidal wizard of the O.T. There should be no issue with uncertainty nor with science not yet having all the answers given science’s track record for solving a lot of what ails & mystifies humanity. If I could paste a meme to lampoon the logic here, it would be a putty knife holding a dollop of taping compound as its readied to be applied to an empty joint in newly installed wall board. No disrespect Dr. Marshall-you’re obviously more educated, well-read and credentialed that I-but the only people first cause arguments tend to convince, are the already convinced.
The magic monkey would either be a god (satisfying the argument) or would require a cause (and thus be ruled out by the argument). So that it could be a magic monkey is not itself a valid objection to the argument.
There is a sounder way to argue that it doesn’t get us to a god. But I’ll make that clear later this week with my next reply (though my previous replies already provide the tools one would need to guess).
“Since time and space are constituent elements of the universe, if there are good reasons to believe the universe began to exist and has a cause, then that cause, whether it is God or something else, will obviously not be located in time and space. So the question is whether the universe beginning to exist and having a cause is more plausible than not.”
So is Marshall suggesting that our universe was created in a different universe with time/space?
Otherwise, what he’s suggesting doesn’t make sense. He’s saying that this universe started at no time and no where. What does he actually mean when he says the above? If it’s not located in time/space, then what does he mean? Accusing Carrier of begging the question is fine, but it doesn’t actually make his position coherent. If he can’t make it coherent then we can’t say it’s true or false – it’s just nonsense.
“He’s saying that this universe started at no time and no where.”
Indeed. That’s precisely the problem. Either time and space already existed when god created, and therefore require no creator, or a god who existed nowhere and at no time caused space-time; but the latter is a logical impossibility. By definition that which exists nowhere does not exist. And if there is no time at which it exists, it cannot exist to cause anything else (like time).
“Indeed. That’s precisely the problem. Either time and space already existed when god created”
you mean time and space an independent thing like God?
There is no verb in your question so I don’t know what you are asking.
Vincent- A monkey is a physical entity and thus wouldn’t meet the criteria for a cause of the cosmos. See my 2nd entry (one just prior to this) where I present the case for the Kalam.
Dr. Marshall, you say “As an explanation of the origin of the universe, the God hypothesis is a remarkably simple explanation.”
In an earlier post, you suggested that the hypothesis of creation by God and the idea of an impersonal cause of the universe make different predictions: “If the cause of the universe were an impersonal entity (in the philosophical sense of lacking will or intelligence)—as an abstract object obviously is—we would expect the effect (the universe) to be eternally co-existent with the cause, since there would in that case be no will to bring the universe into being at a definite point/boundary in the finite past.”
In other words, a creative eternal entity without “will or intelligence” ought to have yielded a universe with no temporal boundary, contrary to what we observe. By this reasoning, the existence of a temporally bounded universe is evidence for a disembodied mind’s will to bring the observable universe into existence.
But this displaces any explanation of the origin of the universe from “God” to “the will of God” — presumably, to some vector or alteration of that “will,” resulting in the temporally bounded universe we observe. (If this “will” were unchanging and eternally co-existent with God then, as you suggest, we ought to observe a universe with no temporal boundary).
But that vitiates the explanatory power of the hypothesis, since the creation of the universe is now identified with an unexplained change or vector in a poorly-defined attribute of a hypothetical eternal entity.
Whatever else you might call this hypothesis, I don’t think “remarkably simple” is entirely accurate.
I don’t follow your line of reasoning here, Robert. We posit “will” all the time as an explanation of human actions and decisions.
“We posit ‘will’ all the time as an explanation of human actions and decisions.” But we don’t commonly posit “will” as a proximate cause for the origin of the observable universe, so that’s going to need some unpacking. And even in the human context, “will” has been a contentious issue and the subject of much philosophical debate. Any cosmological model that deploys “will” as a explanatory component can be taken seriously only to the extent that it carefully specifies what it means by that term.
Robert- Of course ‘will’ is a contentious and difficult philosophical subject. My point is that the thing itself is common and beyond dispute. God’s will has very commonly–since antiquity!–been posited as the cause of the observable universe.
That of course doesn’t mean that the will of God actually is the cause of the universe, but it does mean that one can’t arbitrarily rule out the explanation on the grounds that “will” is some bizarre entity we have no experience of and has not been part of the traditional idea of God.
Finally, if it were true that God created the universe, his will to do so wouldn’t be “part of a cosmological model.” Cosmology, and all science, is concerned with the laws governing physical causes. By the same token, if the universe originated ex nihilo from non-being, how it did so would also not be part of a cosmological model, because there can’t be a physics of non-being.
Both hypotheses are metaphysical. Whichever were true, there would be a physical history of the cosmos on the other side of it, and that physical history, as described by whatever cosmological model ends up describing it, would be the same.
Dr. Marshall, you’ve already asserted that differing metaphysical hypotheses make testable predictions about what we ought to see in the observable universe. I’ll quote that again:
“If the cause of the universe were an impersonal entity (in the philosophical sense of lacking will or intelligence)—as an abstract object obviously is—we would expect the effect (the universe) to be eternally co-existent with the cause, since there would in that case be no will to bring the universe into being at a definite point/boundary in the finite past.”
In other words, “will” (or “intelligence”) is what explains the temporal boundary of the observable universe.
Whether or not you want to call that a cosmological model, it certainly functions as one. (It posits a hypothetical cause for the temporal boundary of the observable universe and cites empirical evidence in support of the hypothesis.) But it leaves the critical terms undefined, or defined only by loose analogy to human will and intelligence; it fails to establish how will or intelligence can be said to function in the absence of space and time; and by doing so it forfeits any claim to self-evident “simplicity” or, really, any substantive explanatory power at all.
The Big Bang Wasn’t The Beginning, After All via @forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/09/21/the-big-bang-wasnt-the-beginning-after-all/#62a11fa855df
That is a fascinating article. I would like to make a request to both Dr. Marshall and Dr. Carrier to review and respond to that article specifically. And they can do it right here in the comments section as to not use up their 1,100 word count.
There isn’t anything in that article we aren’t already discussing in the debate.
MChase Walker and OU812INVU:
Thanks for linking this article. Two comments: (1) Siegel (the author of the article) overstates the case. Inflation is a competing model to the traditional Big Bang theory, not a “certain” thing.
(2) Siegel is absolutely wrong that “whether inflation was eternal to the past — is still an open question.” Hear it from Alan Guth himself, the founder of the inflationary model, whom Siegel discusses in his own article. Here is what Guth says:
“We refer to it as eternal inflation, but the word ‘eternal’ is being used slightly loosely. Semi-eternal might be more accurate. It’s eternal into the future. We do not think it’s eternal into the past…. We’ve been able to prove, mathematically, that it’s in fact not possible to extrapolate arbitrarily far into the past.”
Alan Guth, Interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn on Closer to Truth (PBS program). http://www.closertotruth.com/series/did-our-universe-have-beginning, starting at about the 3:15 mark. Accessed 1/6/2015]
So I was able to get in contact with Ethan Siegel (the author if the referenced article “The Big Bang wasn’t the beginning after all”.
I posed this question to him:
So if the Universe didn’t have a beginning does it stand reason to say that it didn’t have a cause either? That is always existed?
Ethan Siegel’s response was as follows:
/quote
Hmmm I dont know that I would draw that conclusion.
We live in a quantum Universe. There are events that happen without a “cause” all the time. It’s part of the quantum nature of our Universe.
Why would we assume that beginning = cause, and that no beginning = no cause?
Also, we can go before the hot Big Bang to the inflationary state that preceded it, and we do not know whether that state had a singular beginning, a non-singular beginning, or no beginning at all. I don’t know that it’s fair to say “the Universe didn’t have a beginning,” only that it didn’t necessarily have a beginning.
And that the “trigger” for the end of inflation was no more “caused” by anything than the radioactive decay of an atom at a particular time gets “caused” by anything. It’s a random event.
/endquote
ou812invu-
Thanks for sharing these comments from Siegel. Again (see my comment just above) he takes an issue that is a completely open question and writes as if it were decided.
There are both deterministic and undeterministic views of quantum events, and they are both mathematically sound and empirically equivalent. One or the other may be correct. Sean Carroll has written a lot about this: he’s a scientist on the atheist side you can check out in this connection.
But more importantly, even IF quantum events are undetermined, they do not by any means originate ex nihilo. The quantum vacuum is a sea of energy with a rich physical structure. As Columbia University philosopher of science David Albert explains: “Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff.”
David Albert, “On the Origin of Everything” (Review of Lawrence Krauss’ A Universe From Nothing), New York Times, 23 March 2012.
The same issues that were present for me in Marshall’s First Reply are present here as well.
For starters “if there are good reasons to believe the universe began to exist and has a cause” is thrown out very quickly and never justified in any way. There is a lot of groundwork that is not laid in order to proceed from that point, and certain questions that must be asked about the notions of “began” and “cause” in this specific context.
I and others have said that our everyday model of the notion of causality is that it is a necessarily temporal event, and that the cause of a thing must precede it. If we hold that time began when the universe did (and this is a supposition fundamentally grounded in the concept of spacetime), then by definition we cannot meaningfully make sense of the notion of the universe “beginning” to exist. There is no time in which a cause could have acted to bring about that outcome. The only sensible rescue from this difficulty is to either assert that causality is not necessarily temporal, or that the universe was uncaused. How could you demonstrate the former as possible or disprove the latter as impossible, which are both requirements to accept premise 1 of the Kalam.
Marshall has said previously that he holds “Ex nihilo, nihil fit” to be an axiom of his metaphysics. I’m not sure how we could demonstrate the impossibility of something coming from nothing. Inductive reasoning is not helpful here, since we have a plethora of observations of things coming about because of other things, but we don’t have an example of nothing either producing something or failing to produce something. This is, I think, a consequence of defining various types of nothing, such as empty space, out of consideration of the proper kind of nothing, and leaves us with, as near as I can tell, an empty set as far as viable candidates on which to base our conclusions and inferences about the properties of nothing.
There is also an issue, I think, with the discussion of the use of the word infinity. Carrier seems to be using it in accordance with its proper mathematical definition, which I won’t get into here but to briefly say that infinity is best understood as an unbounded limit. Marshall is making a reference to infinity as if it was a discrete number, evidenced by the fact that he’s trying to highlight the absurdities that the concept of infinity produces. You only get those absurdities (such as proving that 1=0) if you treat infinity like a discrete number. Such as in a basic arithmetical expression like [∞ – ∞ = 499]. Using infinity like it was a discrete number is something they work very hard to break you of the habit of in upper-level undergraduate and graduate level math-classes. In short, infinity is not a discrete number, but 100% exists in discrete analysis, set theory, and topological space.
Dr. Marshall argues that time began with the universe and a cause for the universe would be outside of time, or non-temporal.
Dr. Carrier and others here have argued that a cause (if it exists) must precede in time the event of the beginning of the universe.
Why couldn’t we view time as consisting of two (or more) distinct timelines? Could it be like a race that is timed? The race begins when the starting pistol is fired and time for the race has started. The cause is the finger putting pressure on the trigger of the pistol. This exists outside the race time, but is located within our world time, like 2:12:23:33 p.m. P.S.T. So, it’s like nested times, one within the other. Universe Time is within Bigger Time.
I am not invested in this analogy, nor do I have any expertise, so feel free to rip this to shreds if it is nonsensical.
The problem with that is it requires a spacetime to exist that wasn’t caused. And if we can have that, then our spacetime can be that spacetime, the one that was uncaused. And then we have no need of god an explanation of anything. This is why the Kalam Cosmological Argument cannot be rescued by positing a second extra later of spacetime. Merely positing such a thing refutes the KCA.
Instead of kicking the question of the cause of the universe down the road, it’s like kicking it back up the road.
Dr. Marshall says: “the Kalam provides specific evidence and argument for precisely such an entity.”
The Kalam provides no evidence whatsoever for a god. It’s pure conjecture.
Below is some conjecture on my part:
Let’s say there is such a thing as ‘nothing.’ That would be infinity. Let’s say ‘nothing’ exists infinitely. Then something happens such as a fluctuation out of ‘nothing.’ A universe is created out of absolutely ‘nothing’ and time exists. No cause whatsoever. After a time, scientists evolve in this universe and they estimate that the universe is 12-13 billion years old. They postulate that there is ‘nothing’ outside of this universe. They come up with a theory that if this universe exists then just maybe outside of the universe, where infinity resides, that 999 billion, trillion, years ago (measured by this universe’s time) another fluctuation happened. And there was another universe where completely different laws sprang up. These universes (and others) after uncountable years disappear and others sprang up in the same manner. On and on and on. All different. ‘Nothing’ (infinity) lies outside all of these born universes forever. To me this sounds more logical than an omniscience god. And certainly more than the Kalam.
Benjamin- You write, “For starters, ‘if there are good reasons to believe the universe began to exist and has a cause,’ is thrown out very quickly and never justified in any way.” In my previous entry (which you say you read), I give specific lines of evidence and argument for both of those premises. You may disagree with those arguments and evidence, but It hardly seems fair to accuse me of “throwing them out there without any justification.”
Your subsequent paragraphs, though, do raise some specific objections to my argument, so let me address those:
Causes don’t have to precede their effects in time. A cause can be simultaneous with its effect. Indeed, this would have to be true of whatever the case of time coming into existence is.
I did argue that “ex nihilo, nihil fit” is a fundamental axiom of metaphysics, but I also gave three additional reasons for believing that. I’d encourage you to go back and read those and tell me what you think of them.
The philosophical arguments I gave against an actual infinite are perfectly consistent with infinity being a limit. That’s one of the points of those arguments: infinity is a limit that actually existing things can forever approach but never reach. If the number of past events or moments in the history of the universe is infinite, then you do have a discrete number of infinite events, and that is precisely where the problem lies.
Dr. Marshall,
To focus only on a single element of your reply, you state that cause and effect can be simultaneous.
It is a fact that simultaneity is relative to the observer because of the structure of the universe. It is not an absolute that two events observed by Mr A to be simultaneous will be observed by everyone as simultaneous. There is not such thing as an absolute clock which can be used to measure these things or determine simultaneity.
Einstein showed that the order of cause and effect is preserved no matter where the observer is because causes cannot propagate faster than the speed of light. This preservation of the order of cause and effect is again necessary in physics. If it were not so we could have effects occurring before causes. I would reference you to the Minkowski Diagram.
Cause and effect order are not relative to an observer. The order holds in all frames of reference.
Therefore: It is a fundamental that simultaneous cause and effect is impossible. The relativavistic nature of simultaneity conflicts with the fundamental requirement that effect cannot precede cause.
Benjamin,
I replied to your previous comment in some detail. Why address only “a single element” of my reply, and that with an unattributed copy-and-paste from StackExchange? (https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/622/what-distinguishes-cause-from-effect-when-they-are-simultaneous).
But that aside, my argument for the coherence of simultaneous cause and effect has nothing to do with their observation, and you’re confusing temporal order with causal order.
Moreover, whatever one thinks about the usual temporal order of cause and effect, in the case of the beginning of space, time, matter and energy, the cause has ontological priority but in the nature of the case will be temporally simultaneous with its cause. The alternative is being arising from non-being, which is absurd.
It seems unusual t posit yahweh/jesus etc as ’cause’ –
ther’s summat queer about this, is ther not?
Jesus is suppost t be the ‘creatr’ or ‘urijinatr’ uv the univurs – not its ‘causatr’ surely.
Now, in the bibl, in jeremiah 19.9, jesus (ie yahweh etc) CAUSES mums and dads t eat their own childrin.
Dus Wollis believ Jesus CAUSES the univurs t ixist in the as he dus perunts’ cannibalising their childrin?
Did the jesus causation act on singularity boll entity ie summat that’d OLREDY been ixisting?
(It is sed that Jenisis 1:1 implies this.
if ‘in the beginning’ refurs tu the story not the ivent).
Cheers.
PS Did ‘Energy’ begin t ixist? E=mc2 [ie Einstein’s theurum ot Big Audio Dynamite’s] means it can’t be distroid.
E=mc^2 doesn’t say anything about whether energy can or can’t be destroyed.
I think you are thinking of the first law of thermodynamics. Which is only true of macroscopic systems. At the quantum level, matter and energy are spontaneously created and destroyed all the time. And many quantum cosmological models use this or similar phenomena as a mechanism for the creation of all observed matter and energy today (e.g. on some inflationary models, a virtual particle sea combined with rapid expansion results in “condensing” a mass sea of virtual particles whose net energy is zero into stable “real” particles whose net energy is far above zero, indeed Vilenkin himself has developed one of these models).
See Sean Carroll’s discussion.
On any hypothesis, the ultimate cause of the whole shebang is mysterious. Either it is personal (god) or impersonal (energy). However, no matter how we spin it linguistically, a bodiless personal cause is more problematic than an impersonal cause. And, if a god can be uncaused, then why not a universe?
One thing I’m noticing is that religious people, more and more, are including science in their lectures. During Galileo’s time he couldn’t even say that the earth orbits the sun without being put under house arrest for the rest of his life (Wikipedia). Then he had to recant the statement or else. Now Dr. Marshall uses statements like “the big bang” “space time” “Hartle-Hawking (HH) no-boundary model” and quoting Hawking, Carroll, Vilenkin. It’s taking a long time but
“Religion has been impelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas, of those assumed cognitions which it could not substantiate.”
Herbert Spencer – First Principles (1862)
Dr Marshall, Dr Carrier replied to my earlier post claiming that the cosmological argument isn’t about showing that the origin of the universe warrants an explanation but rather that it purports to show the explanation must be a “magical disembodied supermind.” Are you appealing to magic? I’m don’t. Also, he claims that we make excuses for God when we suggest specific reasons God “could” allow evil, pain and suffering. I tried to explain to him that trying to identify those reasons in itself does not make God improbable. He claims these “excuses” have long been refuted as though it was settled law. He seems to think it’s pointless to try to repeat these “dead excuses” as he describes them. Isn’t there a fallicy there, sort of like when slavery was settled law at one time and to re-address that issue would be like repeating dead arguments. My black friends and co-workers would object to this kind of reasoning. My guess now is that Dr Carrier may ask if I’m calling him a racist. No, I’m saying his reasoning is weak as well as his ability to carefully read what I’ve posted and understanding the points I’m trying to make with brevity.
First, you can’t say god is not magical until you’ve defined “magical,” and the only legitimate way to define it is in such a way that the term encompasses all the things people have ever called magical. That set of things will always include gods. Whether people like that consequence of their own language or not.
Second, the fallacy is not in attempting to fix failed past excuses, but in repeating refuted excuses without rescuing them from their refutation. Just repeating old dead science does not make it true or even plausible again. Its obsolete. Done for. Maybe you can find some way to revive a dead claim, some way to fix it so it evades all its past refutations. But you have to actually do it. Just repeating the dead claim does not do that.
Well here’s a definition most people understand. Magic: (1) performances of illusion performed by illusionists, (2) spells, incantations and potions that are used by mythical characters. If that is what you are arguing against I and other theists would agree with you and say you’re wasting your efforts. The way you spew that word, among other descriptions of yours, is obviously meant to be insulting. I would’ve expected a more professional interaction from a man of letters like you. Now if I call your worldview a realm of magic can I now say “the term encompasses” your views because I “called” your view magical. That’s what you just said above.
Theists are simply trying to show that from the revelations in science, philosophical reflection and historical investigation that a real (not imaginary, mythical or magical) personal creative entity may be a rational conclusion and answer for why the universe and us exist instead of just nothing.
Next, both atheist and theist views/excuses are “claimed” to be refuted and dead. When someone makes what he or she believes to be a valid claim/view/opinion/ excuse/argument try to be respectful and address the point without the jabs and insults. To us on the side of theism it sounds like atheists want atheism to be true. Is this true of you? Even if you don’t like your perception of all the world’s religions and even if they were all false, that can’t make a creator God not exist if he actually exists. Would you at least agree with that?
Magic as a word is far more broadly applied than to just the two things you mention; and of course we are talking about the superset of the subsets you list in (2). But being subsets of the superset “magic,” the things you list do not exhaust all instantiations named “magic” in human imagination and record. Throughout all histories and cultures, “magic” and its cognate terms have been applied to any power to effect the world without physical mechanism (through spirits or direct will). The ability to “just make something happen” is by definition magical. If a mechanism is accomplishing it, it’s not magic anymore, but mechanics.
The reason I use this description of gods is because it is correct and has consequences. As I have linked to and explained repeatedly by now.
As to your calling my pointing out facts as “insulting you,” I can’t help you there. If facts insult you, the problem is with you. It is a fact that repeating refuted arguments does not restore them. If you want to restore them, you can’t just “repeat” them. You have to address the refutations of them. To many of which I have directed you to, several times now.
Dr Carrier, I was hoping Dr Marshall would chime in on at least the cosmological argument part of our conversation. I did however read the article you linked. Wow! Now I see why it’s difficult to find a way to a substantive dialogue with you.
First, facts don’t insult me. Don’t twist that.
You said magic is more broadly applied than the 2 examples I listed. I know that but you applied magic to God which is not a fact making it an insult to theists in general. If God exists His abilities wouldn’t be magical, it would be trans-natural/supernatural.
Your car example would be magical because you’ll only see it in the story of a fictional writer or as a deception. Reading your article shows your mind is limited to philosophical naturalism. You claim, w/out evidence, that minds need physical brains. Sure, our limited minds require physical brains – I suggest that’s the way we’re designed.
Where’s my evidence for design? Well, I don’t think you’ll allow me the space to teach biochemistry & microbiology (for starters) here. I would suggest all the gazillions of mixes of amino acids and nucleotide bases in the history of the earth (approx 4.56BY) will still not produce a single working cell with all it’s attributes (read Thaxton, Meyer, Rana and a good college level microbiology textbook).
So what’s God’s mind made of. I don’t have a clue but I doubt that it’s made up of the elements of this universe but I do recognize design in the universe (teleological/anthropic principle) and in cells and body plans. This impresses me with the necessity of a mind.
I’m still waiting for a refuted reason/argument God could allow EPS to respond to. BTW, what difficulty did you find in the one reason I gave of the 12 reasons I have that God could allow EPS? Or how has it been refuted? I’ve never seen it refuted.
That the most widely used definition of magic by people who believe in real magic applies to God is a fact. That this fact insults you is thus indicative of your having a problem with facts. That’s not me claiming that. That’s simply what you just demonstrated.
You then confuse your assumption that magic doesn’t exist with what magic would be if it did exist. That you think magical cars can’t exist is your own worldview conclusion, as it is mine. But you can’t argue that people who think they are magic think they operate without a mechanism. Because that’s what “magic” means. You conflate therefore your own conclusions as to what’s true, with what people mean by the words they use.
I do not claim “without evidence” that our minds do and all minds probably require physical mechanisms. I provide and cite extensive—and I seriously mean extensive—evidence of that fact.
As to your math, I actually published a peer reviewed article on why we can conclude there is more than enough mixing going on in the 10 billion years of 20 billion lightyears-diameter-universe to produce self-replicating molecules by accident. More than once even. All actual scientists alive today published under peer review in protobiology agree. And I know the science well and cite it extensively there. That you think the timeline was only 4 billion years and the volume only earth indicates you do not know this science at all. Catch up.
Indeed the mere fact that we are made of cells is evidence against design. As I demonstrate extensively in my chapter on design arguments in The End of Christianity.
And the problem, again, is not what God’s mind is made of (provided you are willing to admit it does have to be made of something, else it would dissolve into chaos), but that regardless of what it’s made of, its specified complexity is far beyond any credible probability of existing except as the product of someone else’s design…which would then not be a god. Just AI.
On the Argument from Evil, I’ve already told you where I discuss it in detail. If you want to engage with that, go read the material. I suggest starting with the summary in Why I Am Not a Christian. Any attempt to rehabilitate any excuse for God requires at minimum answering the refutations there summarized.
Note that Vilenkin has argued for a causeless universe as recently as 2015: https://inference-review.com/article/the-beginning-of-the-universe
While Penrose’s CCC has been trying to find evidence in micro-structure in the CMB. Interesting times! God unlikely.
And W.L. Craig has attempted to refute Vilenkin (ironically; he praises Vilenkin’s science when he says things he likes; them condemns his science when it says things he doesn’t like). Craig does not appear to correctly understand Vilenkin’s theory however. And Vilenkin isn’t the only cosmologist with peer reviewed quantum cosmological models in the literature that involve no ultimate causation (and certainly no gods).
Well, more than that it exposes the motivated reasoning that makes Premise 1 unassailable: insofar as there is a causal basis in the attempted explanation, it can always be refuted as not reflecting the nothingness that necessitates acausal explanation. So the background whatever that allows for random fluctuations to produce a universe can’t be the bottom of the turtle stack.
The requirement for this to hold is that logic transcends physical causality and warrants acausal causes, which seems an incoherent and unwarranted conclusion and goes back to my original complaint about the pointlessness of this exercise.
But I admire your perseverance! Repeating myself: interesting times! God unlikely.
I see nothing incoherent in acausal causes; by which I assume you mean uncaused causes. God is an uncaused cause; so you can’t think they are incoherent. If God can be an uncaused cause, so can anything even simpler than God.
Strange, no reply option below. I claim incoherent in that we construct arguments based on similarities with ordinary properties of things and, sometimes in science, by extended similarity and coherence with mathematical models. We have no such footing with uncaused causes or god things; they are just bags of properties like omnibenevolence, etc. that rely on intuitions to justify. One can substitute anything for them.
Simplicity as it relates to parts of gods is thus even harder than in scientific models. We know how hard it can be to establish success in the latter (see Sober and then Chaitn-Kolmogorov, but also Feyeraband). Why think it applies to uncaused causes and their prime movers?
(The replies only thread until they are too narrow. Just go one level up and reply there.)
Constructing arguments based on similarities is induction not deduction. You are confusing the two. Incoherence means logical impossibility. Not empirical improbability.
All cosmological models are collections of imagined things. All hypotheses are. That is not relevant to whether they are logically possible, or probably true.
Simplicity is not complicated here. It is well defined in information theory and philosophy of science; on all professionally relevant definitions of simplicity, god is far from simple.
It applies because of the logically necessary consequences of accumulating undemonstrated assumptions or uncaused information: Theories with more assumptions necessarily have lower prior probabilities of being true. Only evidence can convert a low prior to a high posterior. So in the absence of evidence for a proposed complexity, a proposed complexity is always more improbable than a simpler set of assumptions that makes all observations equally (or even more!) likely.
Ah, understood concerning the threading.
But Premise 1 (at least) is, in fact, inductive and, moreover, Bayesian updating concerning hypotheses about things that are incommensurate with ordinary, causal reality is of dubious value. We can certainly construct those arguments and even drive down/up probabilities but there is limited scope to determine truth or value from them.
We could do a compare/contrast with quantum interpretation models and how hard it is to pin down the underlying logic even when we have great experimental evidence.
Like I say, I admire your persistence but must be a radical skeptic that the arguments themselves are incoherent by extension of the definitional limitations of arguing about acausal stuff.
That we can’t update priors because of incommensurable analogs is precisely what I have been arguing. The priors therefore remain low. The KCA thus fails even inductively.
The compare/contrast is conceptual: in information theoretic space the lower prior probability of gods relative to quantum vacuums, for example, is an analytical fact, not an empirical one. It follows simply from the laws of probability and the necessary effect of dividing possibility space. Because informationally complex theories divide it more than simple ones, as a matter of inevitable geometric fact. Consequently they always have lower priors. Until evidence reverses that outcome. And there is no evidence reversing that outcome here.
I don’t think you understand what the word “incoherent” means here. You haven’t been using it in any correct or intelligible way, so I no longer know what you mean by it. It actually means “contains logical contradictions” (which entails logical impossibility). I don’t see you pointing out any logical contradictions. Just “things we don’t know.” And I am telling you what the analytical consequences are of that very lack of knowledge.
Just one additional note on this since the little block comment system is super hard to use: I wrote up the fairly mundane incoherence argument, here:
https://www.exunoplura.com/2019/05/09/causing-incoherence-to-exist/
I want to refute once and for all this ‘the universe has a beginning” argument. Our modem of the Big Bang is that of a singularity like a black hole. As you approach the bkack hole, there is a time dilation effect. Time becomes infinite as you approach the event horizon. So even if in the current model we account for all events after one millionth of a second of “existence”, that one millionth of a second is actually infinite. We have the impression the universe has an age because we are so far from what appears to be the beginning. The paradox of Zeno of Elea, while false now, becomes true when you deal with a singularity. The “beginning” of the universe is both finite and infinite in time depending at which end of the time arrow you are.
Of course time dilation collapses, not expands time as one approaches an event horizon. But yes, as particles hit or cross the event horizon they freeze in time while all remaining time for them collapses into a single instant, and thus the particle at that moment exists at all points of time simultaneously that may exist in that particle’s future. That’s technically infinite into the future, not the past.
Marshall says it’s okay to be infinite into the future. But only because he is (I suspect) an A-Theorist about time, which entails rejecting all known science about how event horizons and Lorentz transformations work. On what all mainstream physicists now concur is correct, B-Theory, indeed, a particle completes its entire infinite future in a single instant upon contact with the event horizon, but from it’s POV, it does not experience infinite but finite time. From our POV, it takes that particle infinite time to reach that event horizon. Marshall would thus say there is never a time when it does get there. But Relativity Theory says otherwise, because that is only true from his reference frame, not in the reference frame of the falling particle itself.
Although quantum mechanics complicates this. The particle is actually likely to quantum mechanically dissolve before it ever contacts an event horizon (it collapses into Hawking radiation; either spontaneously or by collision with other spontaneously formed matter and antimatter particles), and the black hole itself will dissolve (“evaporate”) in result before any particle lucky enough to avoid dissolving hits its event horizon (at which point those remaining particles still falling in will likely continue to collapse into a neutron star or something else short of a black hole, and then radiate away into space over time in the usual way). So actually, as best as I understand it, no particle, on current physics, can ever actually complete an infinite course toward contact with an event horizon. Because event horizons have finite lifespans.
“[8] Ali’s paper, incidentally, does not even mention, much less address, the problems the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem poses to such models.”
Lol. Is this serious? Of course it does address the BGV. But Marshall is too ignorant and biased to realize.
“It was shown recently that replacing classical geodesics with quantal (Bohmian) trajectories gives rise to a quantum corrected Raychaudhuri equation… [and] since it is well known that Bohmian trajectories do not cross, it follows that even when θ → −∞, the actual trajectories (as opposed to geodesics) do not converge, and there is no counterpart of geodesic incompleteness, or the classical singularity theorems, and singularities such as big bang or big crunch are in fact avoided… [which] predicts an infinite age of our universe.”
Dr. Marshall, what is the conclusion of the BGV?
“in a much more general context. Again we see that if Hav > 0 along any null or concomoving timelike geodesic, then the geodesic is necessarily past-incomplete”
“Whatever the possibilities for the boundary, it is clear that unless the averaged expansion condition can somehow be avoided for the past-directed geodesics, inflation alone is not sufficient to provide a complete description of the Universe, and some new physics is necessary in order to determine the correct conditions at the boundary. This is the chief result of our paper.”
The theorem proves a classical expanding universe is * geodesically incomplete.* But in the paper Dr. Carrier presented, it is explained that the classical geodesics are replaced, and therefore, inflation can be eternal in the past – since there is no convergence of wordlines in a point.
More recently (2019), a new solution has been proposed. In the paper titled “Birth of de Sitter Universe from time crystal”, japanese physicists Yoshida and Jiro stated:
“We show that a simple sub-class of Horndeski theory can describe a time crystal Universe. The time crystal Universe can be regarded as a baby Universe nucleated from a flat space… Inflation has succeeded in explaining current observations of the large scale structure of Universe. However, inflation has a past boundary… The incompleteness of the inflationary Universe strongly motivated us to explore non-singular scenarios in the very early Universe… Interestingly, once a cosmological constant is introduced, it turns out that de Sitter Universe can be created from time crystal. Thus, we have a completion of inflationary scenario, namely, the past boundary of an inflationary Universe is time crystal.”
Or here is another. In the paper titled “Island Cosmology”, the authors claim: “If the observed dark energy is a cosmological constant, the canonical state of the universe is de Sitter spacetime. In such a spacetime, quantum fluctuations that violate the null energy condition will create islands of matter. If the fluctuation is sufficiently large, the island may resemble our observable universe. Phenomenological approaches to calculating density fluctuations yield a scale invariant spectrum with suitable amplitude. With time, the island of matter that is our observable universe, dilutes and re-enters the cosmological constant sea,but other islands will emerge in the future, leading to an eternal universe.”
In the page 11, they say: “Our first assumption is that the dark energy is a cosmological constant. This is consistent with observations and moreover is the simplest explanation of the Hubble acceleration. We assume that the cosmological constant provides us with a background de Sitter spacetime that is. As de Sitter spacetime also has a contracting phase, the singularity theorems of Ref. [36 – BGV] are evaded.”