I’ve long defended an argument theists seem to have no ability to escape: The Problem with Nothing: Why The Indefensibility of Ex Nihilo Nihil Goes Wrong for Theists. Robert Koons couldn’t get around it (Koons Cosmology vs. The Problem with Nothing). And now, even a peer-reviewed (?) monograph by Andrew Loke fails to escape it, and indeed has to resort to lying instead: The Teleological and Kalam Cosmological Arguments Revisited (Palgrave-Macmillan 2022). It’s open access, so free to download.

I won’t address the rest of Loke’s book—it’s just a boilerplate apologetical defense of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which does not really shore it up against quite decisive refutations already in print, like Raphael Lataster’s The Case Against Theism: Why the Evidence Disproves God’s Existence (Springer 2018), James Fodor’s Unreasonable Faith: How William Lane Craig Overstates the Case for Christianity (Hypatia 2018), and Jonathan MS Pearce’s Did God Create the Universe from Nothing? Countering William Lane Craig’s Kalam Cosmological Argument (Onus 2016); even the YouTube take-down by actual scientists in Debunking the Kalam Cosmological Argument. I myself have addressed it conclusively enough, if succinctly, in my debate with Wallace Marshall. There is nothing more that really need be said. Anything “new” in Loke is generally dishonest or impertinent or crazy, on the same terms as you’ll see in his treatment of me.

Hence what I do want to illuminate is the weird way Loke tries to “bypass” the arguments I myself have made on some points at issue, in particular the self-defeating problem the positing of “nothing” creates for theists. What I showed is that once you actually allow for there to be nothing—nothing whatsoever—then a quasi-infinite multiverse is the inevitable, in fact unstoppable outcome. Because removing all barriers to what there can be or what can happen entails allowing all potential outcomes an equal chance at being realized (given only a single constraint: that logically contradictory states have a zero probability of coming to pass). There is nothing there to prevent that, nothing around to keep “nothing” a stable absence of everything. “Nothing” is, by its own defining properties, unstable. Scientists have been pointing this out for ages. But my favorite analysis is by Maya Lincoln and Avi Wasser in “Spontaneous Creation of the Universe Ex Nihilo,” published in Physics of the Dark Universe 2 (2013), as it comes nearest to corroborating my own analysis, and by the same line of reasoning; and does that in quantifiable scientific terms. And this operates both temporally (if there ever was at some time past nothing) and existentially (if there has always been something—since even then, if nothing exists to decide what that would or would not be, it could indeed be literally any possible thing; which has been argued before, by Peter van Inwagen and Robert Nozick, as oft discussed in The Puzzle of Existence).

Loke never really addresses this argument. He just pokes at the periphery of it with almost comical apologetical assertions. And only once (on pp. 110–14). He mentions me only two other times, to make an unrelated stab at my refutation of the Argument from Mathematics (pp. 146–47; although he missed my most recent version, All Godless Universes Are Mathematical), and again to make an even weirder Argument from Newton & Einstein (pp. 336–39). I’ll dispatch those before continuing, because their Ken-ham-fistedness is indicative and illustrative: you’ll then see a common theme once we get to his attempt at the Argument from Nothing.

Side Show One: The Argument from Mathematics

In the Mathematics argument, Loke correctly describes the fact that many philosophers (myself included) have noted that it is impossible to even have a universe that isn’t describable with mathematics. Because every universe will by definition be a geometrical space filled with quantities and ratios of things, and that’s what mathematics describes. Loke wants to get rid of this inconvenient fact. So he complains that this does “not explain how physical entities could be of such a nature that allows a large number of phenomena to be mathematically describable and explicable in such a way that requires highly advanced intellect to work it out” (p. 147).

Like everyone who ineptly deploys this argument, Loke fails to operate like a scientific or critical thinker, but solely as an apologetical theologian: he hasn’t done what he should do—work out how the alternative would even be possible, and then how likely that alternative would be—but rather simply “assumes” that alternative must be a more likely chance outcome (or rather, tries to bluff his way into the pretense of having actually shown this, when he hasn’t), so that he can then point to the fact that we don’t see that handwaved-into-existence but never-described-or-evaluated alternative entails “design.” This is, indeed, Ken Ham style thinking (see Three Common Confusions of Creationists). It’s structurally the same kind of thing as trying to make evolution go away by just declaring that “the Devil planted all the fossils.” But…would he? And why would God let him? Does this arbitrary, ad hoc, bullshit “evidence remover” actually make any sense? Can you present any evidence for it? No. Its function is to make evidence go away. Its function is not to be logical, defensible, or—God forbid—correct.

By contrast to that bogus approach, the reason our refutation of this Argument from Mathematics is conclusive is that we did it properly: we worked out that, in fact, the alternative he is imagining is impossible. That’s why, contradicting themselves, the Lokes of the world are so dazzled by the fine tuning argument, which hinges entirely on the opposite premise: that the only way to randomly get a universe with observers in it is if it is sufficiently complicated to produce them. There isn’t any “simple universe” that can do it. And that much is true. The reason the “mathematics” to describe the actual universe we observe has to be so hard is that only a truly vast and complex pile of junk could even produce observers randomly in the first place. There is no possible alternative universe. Loke no doubt would play the usual hypocritical whack-a-mole game here, switching premises when it suits him, adopting “but it has to be simple” here, then ditching that for “it has to be complex” there. But, “survey says,” it has to be complex. Full stop.

This is also why brains are so mind-bogglingly complicated: because without the supernatural, they have to be. Without gods to invent souls, there is literally no other way to generate a consciousness than by an extremely complicated machine. Which, incidentally, proves there is no god around to invent souls: we evolved by chance accident, else we’d have souls and not brains, and we’d just exist, and not at the end of billions of years of evolution from endless chance tinkering. But I’ve covered all this before. When you put the evidence back in that apologists conveniently leave out, all their arguments for God reverse into arguments against God. That includes the Argument from Consciousness (only godless universes would stick us with brains), as well as the Fine-Tuning Argument (only godless universes would need such complex tuning: see Why the Fine Tuning Argument Proves God Does Not Exist; indeed gods, being far more complicated, are far less probable: see A Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument).

The same thing happens here. There is no way to have the “simple” universe Loke wants, one where the math to describe it is all easy, and then also have that universe be large and complex enough to produce observers by chance. Thus, all godless universes will not only be mathematical, they will always be extremely complicated. Hence to describe them mathematically will not be easy. This is in contrast to god-made worlds, which actually could be simple. Because God could just “make them work” without any of the complex machinery and random kludginess a godless world requires; for example, God simply has no need of quarks, or even atomic physics of any kind. Whereas godless worlds can’t produce observers by chance accident without such gigantic, convoluted complexities. Indeed, pick any world at random from all possible worlds that can produce observers, and odds are, you’ll be picking a gobsmacking mess, not a simple streamlined wonder. The mathematical complexity of our universe is therefore evidence against God, not the other way around. It looks chosen at random, not by design.

Ironically, most theists argue from the opposite premise, that the world is surprisingly easy to describe, “therefore, God.” It’s not. But neither is that being false evidence for God, either (you can’t have it both ways anyhow). So Loke is just upchucking poorly analyzed nonsense in the hopes that it sticks. Hence he even hints here at other arguments I’ve dispatched (like The Ontology of Logic and The Argument from Uniformities), but it’s all the same: every single time, as here, the alternative he handwaves into existence as somehow more likely absent design, turns out to be literally impossible; and the converse ends up the case: the messy world we find ourselves in is exactly what we expect if there is no God, and not at all what we expect if there is.

Christians like Loke always screw this up because they are apologists, not philosophers: they need to handwave into existence unexamined excuses to make evidence go away; rather than actually test their hypotheses. Proper method would be to ask how the universe could even be different and still likely produce observers to remark upon it. This is not what theists do. Hence they need to leave evidence out, not put it all in; and they need the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy (to make God fit what happens to exist) rather than the Hypothetico-Deductive Method (asking what do the God hypothesis or the Godless hypothesis actually predict we should see).

This is why I classify almost all apologetics, like Loke’s, as pseudophilosophy now. It’s not legitimate reasoning. It’s bullshit in guise.

Side Show Two: The Argument from Einstein

Loke, like many an apologist, strawmans something else I said by taking it out of context. Referring to my earlier article on the Argument from Mathematics, Loke says:

Carrier claims that ‘scientists have consistently found physical explanations for every phenomenon they have been able to thoroughly examine …. There is not a single instance on record of any fact that has been thoroughly examined by scientists that turned out to have no identifiable physical origin’

Loke, Cosmological, p. 336.

I recommend one set aside that older, clunkier article and rely on my more recent All Godless Universes Are Mathematical. But since Loke is janking my argument to queue up his apologetical nonsense, we’ll look at the original so you can see the game he is playing.

Immediately after misquoting me, Loke says “In reply, the conclusion of the KCA,” the Kalam Cosmological Argument, “is not based on ignorance” (p. 337). I never said it was. The argument he is quoting does not say anything about ignorance. Nor is it made in reference to the KCA. Loke is misquoting something I said in objection to the Argument from Mathematics, not anything to do with the KCA. This kind of game, of dishonest quote-mining, is what characterizes pseudophilosophy. Loke plays the same game again with his second “reply,” that “contrary to Carrier, scientists have not found physical explanations for the ultimate origin of our universe.” I never said they did. Loke has fabricated an argument I never made. This kind of dishonesty in defense of theism is an admission that theism cannot honestly be defended. It can only be defended with lies. Which means theism itself is a lie.

Truth is not relevant to the likes of Loke. Only that you believe what the conman is selling. This is manipulation, not scholarship. Here is what I actually argued (Loke’s quote-mine now in bold):

[W]hen we wipe away every argument in [Mark] Steiner’s book [The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem] that is based on the false assumptions outlined earlier, his book stands with only one formally valid but still incorrect [i.e. unsound] argument left: scientists have not been able as yet to provide a physical explanation of certain observations in areas like Quantum Mechanics and Particle Physics, therefore [he argues] there is probably no such explanation, ergo Naturalism (or at least Physicalism) is false.

…

But Physicalism is not actually in danger from Steiner’s only valid argument. Why? Because it is met with another valid argument that carries greater weight: scientists have consistently found physical explanations for every phenomenon they have been able to thoroughly examine, constantly and without exception, for millions of physical facts and attributes of our universe, and have not found such explanations only where they have not been able to thoroughly examine the facts (and as it happens, though still hypothetical, Superstring theory now offers a complete physical basis for the success of matrix mechanics, something Steiner seems to think is impossible). Therefore, that scientists have yet to explain such facts has much more probably to do with their inability to “get to” those facts than with those facts somehow being fundamentally different than all the millions and billions of other facts scientists have gotten to in the past three thousand years.

In other words, the trend of history is entirely against Steiner, and offers no support whatever for his conclusion. There is not a single instance on record of any fact that has been thoroughly examined by scientists that turned out to have no identifiable physical origin. That is why almost all of Steiner’s examples are on the fringes of science, not the settled facts of science: he can only find his “failures” where scientists have been unable to make the needed observations to resolve the matter. 

Note what I actually said here: I am not talking about the KCA, but a completely different argument; I did not say scientists had “solved” everything like cosmogenesis; and I did not propose any argument from ignorance. I said, to the contrary, that, given the fact that every completed result in science found a physicalist cause, the probability favors any uncompleted result being the same (see Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them). In other words, I am making an argument from prior probability to the most likely explanation. So if we applied that reasoning here: when comparing the KCA with non-KCA cosmogenic models in the actual scientific literature (not a single one of which is the KCA, which has consistently failed to pass peer review in any pertinent science journal), the prior odds so far strongly favor the latter. What is Loke’s response to this, my actual argument? Nothing. Because he lied about what my argument was, refuted that “fake” argument I never made…and moved on. This is disgusting. But it’s what passes for apologetics now. Morally bankrupt. “Thou shalt not bear false witness” is evidently a command from their own beloved Lord they have no interest in obeying (like pretty much everything else He said).

It’s after that fiasco that Loke gets to his last “reply” to my non-existent “argument” that he faked-up:

Contrary to Carrier (2003), who claims that all physicists would find a non-naturalistic conclusion to be quite absurd, many of the greatest physicists throughout history (e.g. Newton, Einstein … ) have recognized God as the ultimate explanation for the existence and order of the universe. They do not regard this conclusion as anti-scientific because they do not hold to the fallacious ideas of scientism.

Neither do I. But then, neither did I ever say any of this. Loke has completrely fabricated claims I never made. Here is the actual argument I made (using bold again to ping Loke’s quote-mine):

And as a matter of fact, scientists all remain committed to finding physical causes of the very observations Steiner uses as his examples. No physicist has thrown up his hands and said “Hey! We’re wasting our time! There is no physical basis to these effects, it’s just a mathematical fact of the universe!” Indeed, all physicists would find such an approach, entailed by Steiner’s argument, to be quite absurd, even antiscientific. You can say “I can’t get into that cave, so there must be nothing in it” if you want to, but you would be betraying the very principles of science if you did. And going against all the evidence and precedent of history as well: scientists have always found things in the caves they’ve gotten into. Why lose confidence in their tactics now?

Set aside Newton (who wasn’t a modern but an antiquated religious nut with a lot of weird ideas about the world, and who had no knowledge of the ensuing three hundred years of science I am arguing from and thus cannot have had any relevant opinion about it). Let’s focus on Loke’s claim about Einstein (which is in fact also not true, produced by similarly dishonest quote-mining). Einstein also never once proposed anything like the KCA, and never advanced any scientific theory involving God. He would certainly have balked at it. “Work that up into a model that makes testable predictions, please” would have been his reply if ever presented it. He would have favored the non-KCA cosmogenies actually in science journals today. But that’s all moot, really, since Loke lied about what I actually said anyway. What I said was that “no physicist” would give up looking for a physical explanation of anything on the reasoning that “we haven’t found one yet, therefore there isn’t one.” It is that line of reasoning I declared “all physicists” would find “absurd,” even “antiscientific.” Does Einstein evince a counter-example? Hell no. Einstein agrees with me on this. There is always an explanation to be found was always his starting assumption in everything. And his science was always physicalist (“God does not play dice”).

In any event, as my real argument was that scientific precedent sets the priors well against supernatural explanations and in favor of the physical, and no scientist would countenance giving up on finding an explanation simply because one hadn’t been found yet, and nothing Einstein or any modern physicist has said contradicts these actual statements of mine, Loke has not responded to me at all, or to my point. He instead faked an argument I never made, and rebutted that instead—not only ignoring, but in result concealing from his readers the actual points I made. This is the dishonest enterprise called apologetics. It’s pseudophilosophy, top to bottom.

The Nothing Problem: Objection One

So now you get a picture of what we are dealing with here. Loke is a liar and a conman, not a real philosopher, and nothing he is arguing is legitimate. So when we get to his supposed response to my Argument from Nothing, you know now what to expect.

Loke begins (on p. 110) by quoting my point that “the very reason we do not observe a violation of [the principle of] ex nihilo nihil” now “is that” our universe’s “extant properties and laws now prevent ‘just anything’ from happening,” that “the only nihil we observe is actually a thing: propertied spacetime,” and “that thing, being existent, now limits what can happen” (I expand on this point in All the Laws of Thermodynamics Are Inevitable, which pertains here since the kind of spontaneous assembly Loke is desperately trying to argue naturalism should entail is a violation of the Second such law, which actually emerges from logical necessity, and thus requires no further explanation).

Loke tries to respond to this with three arguments. All are batshit crazy. None even address the actual argument I make in the Problem with Nothing—not even the argument he just quoted, which is not the argument of the article but a mere passing side-point in it.

First, Loke asks (emphasis mine)…

[C]onsider … a moving battery-operated toy car entering the room. One can make the circumstances incompatible with this event by filling the room with hard objects, because the car necessarily occupies space. However, an increase in strength of [an] electric field does not necessarily occupy more space; in fact, the spaces around us are compatible with different levels of strengths of electric fields. This indicates that there is in fact no existing thing which makes it the case that the circumstances of our universe are such that it is incompatible with [an] increase in [the] total level of strength of [an] electric field and hence increase in total mass-energy if something can begin uncaused. Rather, as I have argued, the reason why the law of conservation holds is because the causal principle (something does not begin to exist uncaused) holds. My argument is that, if this principle is false, as the sceptic suggests, then the law of conservation would not hold, but the consequent is not the case.

Loke, Cosmological, p. 111.

This is lunacy. I can’t even begin to diagram by what logic he goes from “I, Andrew Loke, do not know how electric fields obtain the strength they do, therefore I can conclude there is nothing at all about the physical structure of the universe that determines that.” That’s crazy talk. It is, though, an example of the Argument from Ignorance he claimed he wouldn’t make, and an example of the argument of Steiner that I refuted—in the argument we just saw Loke misquoted and lied about and never responded to. In other words, the argument he evaded. Now we see why.

Besides thus making a completely illogical argument (the very kind that should never pass peer review), Loke also advances here an unintelligible conception of physics, confusing “how much space a physical constant occupies” which is semantically meaningless (it’s like asking how much space the speed of light occupies) with “what would physically have to change about space or its contents in order to change that constant.” And for that, science knows a good chunk of the answer. What Loke must think he is referring to is the alpha constant, which is unitless (it is just the ratio of 1 to roughly 137), but that is only due to the way we choose to measure it. The thing being measured is most definitely some geometric fact about space or its contents (see vacuum permittivity and absolute permittivity).

Look at every equation for calculating alpha, and you can see you cannot change alpha without changing something about the physical universe. That we do not yet know precisely what supports no argument that alpha is just “magic,” and has no underlying physical cause anchoring it to its present value. Every physical interpretation relates its value to some geometric fact of space or matter. That’s why changing it would have corresponding effects. Although in one formulation, whereby the mass of the electron is set at 1, for example, alpha equals simply 1/c, meaning it is merely the converse of the speed of light, which cannot differ in any possible universe (see Three Confusions). Which may mean alpha can never be different, and thus neither can the strength of a magnetic field. But if somehow it could be increased, this would clearly require changing something physically about spacetime or its contents. Which in string theory could be simply the same thing: see Superstring Theory as Metaphysical Atheism; hence it’s notable that in that 1/c configuration, what also has to be set equal to 1 is the value for 4πε₀, which is, curiously, a geometric relation, just like the reduction of Planck’s constant, or ħ = h/2π, which like the speed of light also equals 1 in natural units.

So we cannot get to Loke’s principle this way. To change the alpha constant, you would have to change something very fundamental about the shape and structure of spacetime and/or the fields occupying it. And there simply is nothing around here that can cause such a change to happen. This is only not the case when nothing is around to prevent such a change happening. This is why our spacetime can go on conserving its structure and properties, which structure and properties prevent “just anything” from happening willy nilly (by the same existential inertia that would be required to keep even God from dissolving). But when you take that away—and only when you take that away—is anything else allowed to happen. Thus, you cannot maintain that some law of causation or conservation exists when nothing exists. You are then literally contradicting yourself. But you can maintain that some physical fact exists that limits what can happen when some physical fact exists that limits what can happen. Loke is not responding to this, our actual point. He’s just vigorously waving his hands around.

The irony is that Loke completely missed this point when elsewhere he quotes it approvingly! Loke argues (p. 259) that, when discussing why Stephen Hawking didn’t “really” describe a universe-from-nothing model, nor Krauss nor Vilenkin nor any other physicist who has claimed this, because they depend on citing quantum mechanics as a precedent, he (they) “failed to mention that at the subatomic level quantum particles do not come into existence from absolutely nothing; rather, … quantum particles are manifestations of pre-existent quantum fields which act according to pre-existent quantum laws.” Indeed, most scientists now say this is how spacetime itself comes into existence as well, that all its properties are an output of the causal properties of fields. It could be the other way around, the properties of fields being an output of the causal properties of spacetime (see, again, Superstring Theory as Metaphysical Atheism). But either way, the alpha constant is one of these properties, as are all the other properties fixing the thermodynamic Law of Conservation (All the Laws of Thermodynamics Are Inevitable), and probably any other.

For example, if the conservation of electric charge or subatomic spin is a thing, it is clearly being caused by the properties of fields or spacetime; whereas many conservation principles don’t manifest in our universe, indicating our spacetime or fields don’t have any causal properties to manifest those (e.g. there is no conservation of mind—minds can arise and decline and vanish—there is no conservation of biomass—the quantity of life by mass can vary from zero to any number and back again—there is no conservation of shape or continguity or love or justice, and so on). Loke’s own point about Hawking is my point about spontaneous creation: once you have stuff constraining what can happen (like “quantum fields which act according to pre-existent quantum laws”), what can happen becomes thus constrained.

Since there is nowhere, no place in space, that we can go and observe the absence of quantum fields (they literally occupy, and many scientists would say create or define, every fraction of space that exists), we cannot speak to what “the absence of quantum fields” would then cause—except when, if we define that absence as total, hence the absence of all laws defining and constraining what can happen, we can speak to that: in that strange point in space (which exists nowhere around here for us to observe), literally anything can happen. In fact, there, every single thing that could happen has an equal chance of happening; and the one single possibility of it continuing to be nothing is then literally the least likely outcome (at odds of some infinity to one, because maintaining that state requires an impossible balancing act of contraries as described by Lincoln and Wasser). In short, a Nothing-State has different properties than any Something-State, which differ precisely and solely because of the presence of nothing, and therefore those properties cannot be shared by a Something-State. It’s literally a logical impossibility.

Loke clearly doesn’t understand any of this (or concertedly doesn’t want you to). Hence, for example, when he complains about Graham Oppy making exactly this same point to explain “why can’t tigers pop into existence” (p. 101), Loke focuses entirely on some convoluted semantics about the ontology of spaces (and still gets even that wrong)—rather than the more obvious problem: that, actually, tigers can pop into existence (there is a roughly calculable nonzero probability of this, anywhere in spacetime, derivable from quantum mechanics); the reason we don’t see it is because tigers are so absurdly complex, the probability (the conjunction of gazillions of quantum coincidences) of “a tiger popping into existence” anywhere is so low that we cannot expect to see it even once in trillions of years. This would be true even without quantum mechanics: always what you are proposing is a series of transformations, from a space occupied by air, let’s say, to a space occupied by a tiger. The number of chance coincidences this requires is astronomical. Loke cannot grasp basic concepts of probability. He acts like someone who thinks “a tiger” is just as simple an object as “a photon,” and that random uncaused creative forces would be “just as likely” to pop out a tiger as a photon. But that literally makes no logical sense. An extremely complex set of coincidental events cannot be “just as likely” as a simple, singular coincidence. And what I am saying here is logically necessarily the case. This is why “tigers” normally require such long and complicated causal histories to exist in the first place (Oppy’s point).

It is to no avail to complain that, then, universes must be even less probable than tigers, because even if that’s true, we have trillions of years to wait around for that. Because we won’t exist until that, so the conjunction is then not a chance coincidence. Indeed, a Big Bang has an inevitable, calculable quantum probability and thus statistically will inevitably occur in our universe sometime in the very distant future (somewhere around once every 10^10^10^56 events, and hence that long from now); which means our Big Bang could well have been the same outcome in a previous long-dead universe. But the premise is also not true. While our Big Bang was huge, it was not all that complex in the relevant sense—it was, rather, extremely randomized. It’s more like tiger soup than a tiger. The specified complexity of a tiger is enormous (the specified complexity of a God, even more so); but in most first-cause Big Bang models (like spontaneous eternal inflation), the specified complexity of the initial inflation event spawning the chaos that is our universe was actually not so much.

True, that specified complexity was certainly high enough to be extremely rare (that’s why we won’t see one but every umteen zillion years); but the specified complexity of a tiger is even larger than that, and thus random tigers will be even rarer (this is the Boltzmann problem theists have a hard time grasping correctly). This is because the appearance of the requisite energy for a tiger, unlike a Big Bang, has to be extraordinarily structured in precisely the right way (so as to be, actually, “a tiger” and not “a tire” or, indeed, “tiger soup,” or just a randomly configured inflaton). Just think of the molecular complexity of a single tiger cell—and now recall, you need trillions of those, all connected and arranged in exactly the right way, and each different in precisely the way required. Just to get the DNA sequences right from already-existing material, we’re looking at odds of 1 in 4^2,000,000,000^20,000,000,000,000, which already adds some trillion zeroes to the odds against a spontaneous Big Bang, and that doesn’t even start to account for all the other components of those cells, all the atoms needed to build those components, and all the bonding events needed to get all of those things into the right positions. That is vastly more specifically complex than any proposed initial inflationary state of the universe. Again, the latter is more like tiger soup than a tiger. In spontaneous inflation theory, there are vastly many organizations of the originating inflaton that lead to functionally similar outcomes (just like there are infinitely many ways to configure the stars in the sky that equal functionally the same general distribution); not so, a tiger. The specificity required there is far greater. There are far more ways to arrange a tiger soup and still have a delicious tiger soup than there are to rearrange that same material and have an actual living tiger.

Hence Loke reveals he doesn’t know what he’s talking about (or doesn’t want you to know what he should be talking about) when he quotes Craig and Sinclair saying (p. 72):

Why do bicycles and Beethoven and root beer not pop into being from nothing? Why is it only universes that can come into being from nothing? What makes nothingness so discriminatory? There cannot be anything about nothingness that favors universes, for nothingness does not have any properties. Nothingness is the absence of anything whatsoever. As such, nothingness can have no properties, since there literally is not anything to have any properties. Nor can anything constrain nothingness, for there is not anything to be constrained.

Quite right. This is my point exactly. No constraint, means every logical possibility is equally likely. Nothing cannot stay nothing because nothing exists to keep it that way. But the error they (and Loke) are making here is that you can’t have “bicycles and Beethoven and root beer” without a universe (another of Oppy’s actual points that Loke keeps ignoring). Logical necessity constrains what can be. Each of those concepts implicates an entire infrastructure: they have to occupy space, so there has to be a spacetime; they have to be composed of something, so there has to be matter-energy, and indeed even a specifically similar matter-energy regime (think of the complex chemistry entailed just by beer, much less Beethoven), which entails all the underlying properties (like all the laws of quantum mechanics or something comparable; all the physical constants required, and whatever is physically needed to fix and manifest them; and so on); and there have to be appropriate causal laws (preventing these things from instantly dissolving, for example, and making the difference between, say, just a fleeting bicycle-shaped cloud, and an actual working bicycle).

Well. Guess what? You’ve just described a whole universe. It would have to be a pretty big one, too, since a small universe would contain too much heat or gravity or curvature to realize such complex objects. And you can’t say “but maybe the conditions could be different,” because “bicycles and Beethoven and root beer” implicate relevantly the same conditions: there has to be gravity in much the same way, to be in the same ratio to the electromagnetic force, so as to realize atoms, and hence such complex objects as you are attempting to describe. And so on. So, no. An unstable nothing-state will never produce just “beer” (much less bicycles or Beethoven). All it can spontaneously produce (and thus inevitably will) are universes. Will that entail some Boltzmann cases? Like “Beethoven” spontaneously assembling in a stellar dust cloud and immediately being irradiated to death; or a lake on some forlorn moon suddenly becoming beer and soon being eroded away by its environment; or a bicycle-shaped rock on a planet, complete with working gears? Sure. Maybe. If it’s logically possible. Any of these things might even happen in our universe. But since all these things are extraordinarily improbable, their relative frequency will be so low that we have no reason to expect ever to see one. Which is why we don’t.

All of this (minus the probability stuff) was well argued already by Graham Oppy in his famous paper “Uncaused Beginnings,” which Loke attempts to address as well, but only in the same inept or even dishonest ways as he addresses me—even despite being aware that Oppy already defended his point against more competent critics in “Uncaused Beginnings Revisited.” In either case, Loke never really responds to Oppy’s actual point. Likewise mine. In my Argument from Nothing, it is not the case that “every” possibility will arise; rather, a random number of possible things will arise. Because without constraint, what has an equal probability to every other is the number of discrete universes that will arise; but a random selection from among all possible numbers of universes will not be transfinite, just very large (and even if it would be infinite, infinities are weird: you can have an infinite collection of different things and still not have every logically possible thing).

This is because, to maintain logical consistency (and thus be possible at all so as to even have a nonzero probability), the number of discrete universes has to be resolved before (or in concert with) the content or configuration of each universe. For example, the probability (hence frequency) of a Beethoven universe—a giant empty space filled with randomly assembled (and sadly, asphyxiated) Beethovens—is logically necessarily a function of how many universes there are. And in any purely random development, such hyper-specific universes will not be “just as likely” (i.e. just as numerous) as simpler ones like ours. Even when every logically possible universe is as likely as every other, most universes by far still lack such bizarre features, just as most universes lack life altogether; whereas those that do contain life will by far be chaoses producing it by rare chance, and not abundantly generative and habitable (just like the solutions for entropy in a thermodynamic system: every individual state is equally likely, but most of those states describe high entropy, and therefore low entropy states are rare, ergo relatively improbable). Molecular biogenesis is vastly more probable, and thus frequent, than random Beethoven assembly—and thus likewise for universes producing either. Because it’s vastly simpler: fewer coincidences are needed to get it, and therefore logical consistency requires such assemblies be less frequent in any random array. And any initial Nothing-State entails its collapse into a random array, precisely for want of anything to stop it or to produce any other outcome.

This is thus the same mistake as Loke thinking you can just “have” physical constants with a fixed value, as if by magic, and not because of the underlying physical structure of a universe causing that value to form instead of some other. You don’t just get things by magic. Even a Nothing-State’s logically necessary instability is not magic. It’s logically necessary, and therefore cannot “not” obtain. But the same is true even in contingent cases: if this universe has a property, it comes from something; it is a part of this universe. So to change it would require changing something about this universe. But once this universe has the fixed properties that it does, changing it (at all, much less its fundamental properties) can only be accomplished in either of three ways: with an inevitable physical-causal process (maybe alpha is just a consequence of the radius of an atom, which dark energy’s expansion of space causes to increase over time, thus also shifting alpha), or an extremely complex and arduous directed effort, to “redirect” all the inertias of the system causing that constant to hold the value it does (e.g. maybe someday humans can change the alpha constant, but that would be a cosmically gargantuan construction project beyond even Dysonian in conception), or by some incredibly rare chance accident (accomplishing the same thing). But the latter would require an even rarer system of coincidences than a spontaneous tiger or a Beethoven. Our universe will explode into another random Big Bang long before that ever happened. And that might change the alpha constant. But we won’t be around then to notice.

In short, Loke is completely ignoring almost everything about the logical necessities of probability theory. Which is a common observation I have made of Christian believers: they suck at probability. Which may have something to do with why they are Christians.

The Nothing Problem: Objection Two

So, that’s a loser. Second, Loke says (prepare yourself)…

Second, [my proposed] law of conservation of energy would not prevent energy-conserving events from beginning uncaused (e.g. without causal interaction) if ISOR [the Initial State of Reality] begins to exist uncaused. It should be noted that there is no law or spatial considerations that now prevent energy-conserving changes from beginning. Indeed, such events happen frequently in the present, which indicates that the present circumstances are compatible with such changes happening. For example, hydrogen is currently being fused into helium in the sun, and in the process of the causal interaction some of the mass of the hydrogen atoms is converted directly to energy according to E = mc^2. Now if [the Initial State of Reality] begun [sic] to exist uncaused, then given (I) the beginning of [the Initial State of Reality] does not have [a] causally necessary condition which makes it the case that only the beginning of [the Initial State of Reality] rather than certain other events y begins uncaused, (II) any difference between the beginning of [the Initial State of Reality] and the beginning of y would be had by them only when they had already begun to exist, and (III) the compatibility of the circumstances with the beginning of y, we can likewise expect these energy-conserving events (let these = y) to begin to exist uncaused now. These events would not be preventable by the law of conservation of energy given that they are compatible with it. But we do not observe these energy-conserving events/changes beginning uncaused now; on the contrary, scientists have described the causal interactions that brought about events such as the fusion of hydrogen into helium. Thus, the antecedent is false.

If you can make any sense of that rambling, convoluted gobbledygook of a paragraph, you must have a much higher Cthulhu Mythos score than me. I am skeptical that this book’s peer reviewers (if it had any) even read this paragraph, much less understood it. If I were a reviewer I certainly would have required a rewrite before passing it. But as best I can tell, Loke wants to have said something about it being possible for a world to arise uncaused that also, as one of its properties, allowed complex spontaneous changes uncaused to continue within it. But (a) that’s doubtful (see, again, All the Laws of Thermodynamics Are Inevitable) and (b) it is clearly not what happened around here. So, yeah, maybe a random world exists somewhere that just endlessly generates spontaneous rabbits, and is just a giant stellar mass of rabbits, expanding forever. But why would we expect to find ourselves there?

But the real problem here is that Loke wants it to be the case that somehow the property of “there being nothing to prevent it” can survive the creation of “there being something to prevent it.” But that makes no sense. When there is nothing to prevent random rabbits, you can expect random rabbits (to within whatever probability). But as soon as something comes into being that prevents that, why would you expect it? The whole effect of an ordered spacetime arising uncaused is that the condition that allowed it to arise uncaused no longer exists at that point. An ordered spacetime exists instead. That will then dictate what can and can’t arise, and how often. The reason this principle does not apply in the absence of such an ordered spacetime is that there is then nothing to manifest that principle—with no ordered spacetime, you get no effects of an ordered spacetime. Duh. The effects of the total “absence” of a causal system is not going to be maintained in the presence of a causal system. The only condition in which uncaused events can occur is in the absence of a system preventing it, not in the presence of a system preventing it.

“I could have tumbled down any side of this mountain” and “I can only be tumbling down the side I am now tumbling down” are not contradictory statements. As soon as you fall, what happens is fixed by that choice, even if a choice had once existed as to which side to fall down. Loke is like someone who is at the top of a mountain, then randomly falls down one side, and then all the way down keeps complaining about why he isn’t randomly teleporting from one side of the mountain to another, because “I could have chosen which side I’d be falling down at the top, so what’s keeping me falling down only one side now!??” Therefore, God. I’m serious. This is the insane structure of his argument.

There is simply no intelligible argument here.

The Nothing Problem: Objection Three

Finally, Loke argues (in an albeit confusing way, pp. 112–15) that if there were a condition in which uncaused things can arise unimpeded, we should expect all sorts of uncaused worlds to exist. He then acts surprised that I actually agree with this. This is finally where he sort of articulates my actual Argument from Nothing. But then he doesn’t respond to any of it. He instead just falsely claims “there are several problems which Carrier fails to note,” and makes up a bunch of problems, none of which are faced by my argument.

First, Loke claims “on such a hypothesis in which every possibility is actualized, the probability of any universe in which we can more or less continually and consistently understand through induction would have been infinitesimally small, but that is not the case.” This is in no way a consequence of my argument, and he never explains why it should be. It’s also a fallacy: if all possibilities are infinitesimally probable, then their being infinitesimally probable can be no argument against them, since the total probability that one of them would materialize is 100% (or as near to as makes all odds, being the sum of all possibles)—and we only need one to explain how we got here. Loke is here like someone claiming the exact configuration of stars in Earth’s sky is vastly improbable, therefore the stars could not have been in any configuration, so only God can explain how they have one. That’s not how probability works.

In any event, my argument neither entails “every possibility” is actualized, nor that worlds like ours would be improbable (whereas if Loke is attempting some inept Boltzmann argument here, that doesn’t work either). Nor would either conclusion affect my conclusion: that we’d be in some world is still guaranteed (see Why the Fine Tuning Argument Proves God Does Not Exist); and we’d never have any contact with all those other worlds, so their being infinitely variegated will have no effect upon us, nor could we empirically deny they existed. And since All Godless Universes Are Mathematical, there is no such thing as a universe with observers in it that can’t be studied inductively. No matter how random a world is, mathematics can always describe it, because even randomness has measurable mathematical properties (just look at the mathematical descriptions in Quantum Mechanics, for example; or how random sampling generates knowledge in the statistical study of literally anything). Sure, too random a world, and we couldn’t exist. But that’s why we aren’t in one of those. Once again, Loke just asserts a type of universe would be overwhelmingly common that is in fact entirely impossible.

“Second, for any spacetime block x, it is possible that there are y, z, … and so on which expand and collide with x and leave behind detectable effects.” Here Loke is confusing completely different cosmological models. In the model my argument entails, there would be no “extra other spacetime” universes occupy in which to collide; while configurations where that would happen would be quite relatively rare, thus explaining why we don’t find ourselves in one. Many multiverse cosmologies do not posit “additional meta-spaces” for universes to occupy in which they could collide. In these (including the one most directly entailed by my argument), multiverses cannot—because there is no space “between” them to cross over and thus hit each other. Even in models where it’s possible, it will be extraordinarily rare, because again, it requires an extraordinary conjunction of coincidences. We also can’t adopt Loke’s assumption that we haven’t seen any—such a collision could even have formed our universe, and there may even be evidence of collisions aplenty. Which Loke admits, but…

This is where Loke’s objection gets full-on loony-tunes (emphasis mine):

[I]f (instead of being caused by inflation) our universe began to exist uncaused alongside an actual infinite number of universes which also begun [sic] uncaused as Carrier suggests, a huge number of universes would collide with one another and with our universe in an unconstrained manner, and the huge number of collisions would generate huge amounts of radiations and would leave behind much more obvious traces rather than a few disputed ‘scars’ [as some scientists claim].

Loke, Cosmological, p. 114.

What evidence does he have that these collisions would even occur in my model, much less be “huge” and there be “huge” numbers of them? Nada. Loke totally just fucking made this up. My Argument from Nothing does not entail any spatial relation whatsoever between possible worlds. So the number of them expected to collide could be effectively zero. But even if we consider that, by random chance accident, every resulting world will continue to materialize random “Big Bangs” (as we know ours will) that will mess things up, (a) we already know the concentration of such events will be extremely low, not “huge” (remember, just think of all the chance coincidences required), and (b) we could hardly expect to find ourselves in the even rarer sub-section of sub-multiverses where it was huge, because a “huge” number of “huge” collisions would melt local spacetime, preventing any observers from arising there. So we know we aren’t in one of those spaces; we can only expect to find ourselves in universes that weren’t destroyed. Again, duh.

Loke’s argument here is thus just dumb. In fact, I think it might even be dishonest, and not merely stupid. Because he produces no argument whatsoever by which he derives from my (or any) model anything at all warranting the adjective “huge.” He literally just “declares” this. That peer reviewers did not notice this is appalling. But you can’t just “declare” conclusions. You have to actually demonstrate how those conclusions follow from something. What in my Nothing model warrants this leap of logic? Loke doesn’t even fabricate an answer. He literally just expects no one to notice that he didn’t even give one. This is a confidence grift, not a legitimate philosophical argument.

Conclusion

And that’s it. That’s all Loke has against any argument of mine.

Honestly. This garbage should not exist. Loke’s book’s only virtue is to demonstrate by example how completely bogus and intellectually and factually bankrupt Christianity is as a philosophy. Even it’s peer review is an evident sham. He lies, repeatedly. He ignores all substantive points. He attacks straw men with patently dumb arguments. He makes shit up. And he even blabbers out whole unintelligible paragraphs. It really is hard to take believers seriously when this is the shit they produce.

-:-

Loke has replied but nothing in his reply requires any further response. This article of mine already rebuts every argument he makes even in his response. He simply pretends it has not, with a litany of false claims of misrepresentation, which compound his misrepresentations already documented here.

This also happened when we subsequently debated the matter in a professional forum. For the outcome of that see We Should Reject Even the First Premise of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. I won’t be addressing Loke further. For my last discussion (and why I’m done with him) see my video with Godless Engineer.