Explaining the universe

1. Explaining the universe Michael Lacewing enquiries@alevelphilosophy.co.uk

2. What we need to explain • Why does the universe exist at all? • Why do we exist? (Why is the universe set up so that life is possible?)

3. The Kalam argument • Of anything that begins to exist, you can ask what caused it. For example, what caused me (my birth)? In a sense, my parents. But then, we can repeat the question: ‘what caused my parents?’ And so on. We can go back to the beginning of the universe, and then ask ‘what caused the universe?’. If • the universe began to exist, then it must have a cause of its existence. Something can’t come out of nothing. • What we need is something that causes things to exist, but the existence of which isn’t caused itself. • Only God could be such a thing.

4. Science is inadequate • Science can’t explain the origins of the universe. It uses causal explanations, so it has to assume the existence of something to explain anything. • Of anything science assumes to exist, we can ask ‘what caused that?’.

5. Objection 1 • Must every event have a cause? David Hume famously argued that we cannot know this. It is not an analytic truth (by contrast, ‘every effect has a cause’ is an analytic truth; but is every event an effect?). • ‘Something cannot come out of nothing’ is also not analytic. • But our experience is that everything so far has a cause. • But can this principle can be applied to the beginning of the universe?

6. Objection 2 • Because time came into existence with the universe, the universe didn’t ‘happen’ at a time, so in a sense, it has no beginning. • True, but science suggests the universe has a finite past (it is about 15 billion years old). Whatever has a finite past must have a cause of its existence. • In the case of the universe, that cause can’t exist in time if time didn’t exist before the universe. • But that doesn’t mean there was no cause, only that the cause must exist outside time. Which God does.

7. Objection 3 • Even if this universe has a beginning, perhaps it was caused by a previous (or another) universe, and so on, infinitely. Something has always existed. • Does this make sense? • The universe gets older as time passes. But this couldn’t happen if the universe was infinitely old, because you cannot add any number to infinity and get a bigger number: ∞ + 1 = ∞. So if the universe is infinitely old, it is not getting any older as time passes!

8. Objection 3 cont. • To have reached the present, an infinite amount of time would need to have passed. But it is not possible for an infinite amount of time to have passed. • If we have an infinite series of causes, although each cause can be explained in terms of the previous cause, we may wonder what explains the whole series.

9. Richard Swinburne: an inductive argument • The Kalam argument does not prove God exists. But the hypothesis that God exists is the best explanation. • Again, science can’t offer a good explanation. • We should not simply say ‘there is no explanation’. This is not good science nor good philosophy.

10. Personal explanation • We can explain the universe if we give a personal explanation in terms of God: God wanted life to exist, so created the physical laws to make this possible. • We use explanations in terms of persons - what we want, believe, intend - all the time. • These are not explanations that make use of scientific laws.

11. Is this a good explanation? • Does it improve our understanding? Or does introducing God just invoke one mystery to explain another? • ‘What explains God?’ is no better than ‘What explains scientific laws?’ • Swinburne: that we can’t explain God is no objection. A good explanation may posit something unexplained. This happens in science all the time, e.g. subatomic particles.

12. Does the universe need explaining? • The lottery argument • It’s incredibly unlikely, before the draw, that whoever wins will win. • But someone will win. • With enough chances, the incredibly unlikely can become inevitable. • If there are lots of universes, one of them would have the right conditions for life.

13. Why us? • Why this one? No reason: but if it wasn’t this one, we wouldn’t be here to ask the question! • It’s all a big coincidence.