Why The Universe? Critiquing Sean Carroll

When answering the question of why something exists one can certainly first appeal to the mechanism or cause for its existence. A painting exists because a brush applied paint to the canvas. By carefully observing how the paint is applied to the canvas we can learn quite a bit about technique and why the painting looks the way it does. Using radiation we can probe what lies underneath the paint to see rough sketches and changes to any underlying pigments. To some scientists, the mechanism of how the paint is applied to produce the finished product is the limit of what observations from science can tell us since science deals with laws and mechanism. But of course, there is much more to the story of a painting because there is an artist behind the brush strokes who created the painting with purpose, the real "reason."

When cosmologist Sean Carroll discusses "Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing" he claims, "The best we can ask is whether we can imagine laws of nature that fully account for how the universe behaves, even at the earliest moments."¹ As pointed out in my previous post Carroll's search for the cause of the existence of our universe has certain constraints and presuppositions that will restrict any conclusions. These include (1) his answer will be limited to mechanisms and cannot include reasons, (2) he is incorrect in assuming that finding a mechanism eliminates the need for a creator (3) he makes the false assumption that laws and mechanisms have the causal ability to implement, (4) he constrains all answers to the natural realm thus eliminating any supernatural creator, a priori. Despite these problems, I find Carroll's writings to be thoughtful and insightful and worth reading and critiquing. I also find that his ultimate answer requires a transcendent creator despite his insistence that it does not.

Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

If you search on the internet for the phrase, "Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?" you will find a host of articles, many by philosophers but some by scientists, that discuss this profound question. The book by Lawrence Krauss, A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something From Nothing, which I have discussed in a previous post will probably appear near the top of your search engine. Last June, the cosmologist Sean Carroll added his name to the list of those writing about this subject with the article "Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?"¹ and a reader of my blog asked me to comment on Dr. Carroll's article.

In general, although Sean Carroll is an atheist, I find his writings to be quite reasonable and thoughtful, unlike some other atheist scientists whose writings and lectures indicate that they have done little research regarding the vast history of dialogue among deep thinkers in regards to these important philosophical and theological questions. In a previous post I highlighted one of Dr. Carroll's talks in which he honestly pointed out that almost all hypothetical ideas about the origin of our universe do not solve the problem of the initial low entropy state at the big bang, except for a small class of models that he favors. He objectively shows that most of the proposals that attempt to remove God from the origin of our universe flatly fail because they do not give the correct initial conditions.

At the beginning of the recent article Carroll points out that there are at least two ways to interpret the question of "Why there is something rather than nothing?" That question could be asking either for the mechanism or for the reason for our universe. On the web site philosophytalk.org a similar idea is developed when the author writes, "To get us started thinking about it, let’s distinguish between reasons and causes. When we ask why something is the case, depending on our purposes and what kind of explanation we seek, we might be asking for a reason, or we might be asking for a cause."²

Some Proposals about the Beginning of our Universe

The theoretical physicist from Caltech, Sean Carroll gave a talk to the American Astronomical Society in January 2017 on the topic of what we know and don't know about the beginning of the universe. He has generously posted a copy of his presentation on his blog, preposterousuniverse.com. In this talk, Dr. Carroll speculates about how the gaps in what we don't know may be filled in by presenting a systematic classification of the main ideas developed over the last few years about what may have occurred before our universe began and brought our universe into existence. (Dr. Carroll does point out that to say our universe "came into existence" sounds like a process within time, but that time as we know it actually had a beginning with our universe.) In previous posts I have already discussed many of the things Dr. Carroll covers in his talk including (1) that our universe was in a state with very low entropy at its beginning, (2) that something like the Big Bang occurred about 13.8 billion years ago but we don't know what actually happened in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second because (3) we don't have a quantum theory of gravity which may describe the initial conditions of our universe, even though (4) the equations of classical general relativity predict that our universe had an actual beginning.

Let's review what we do know: (1) About 13.8 billion years ago the universe was very hot and dense and was expanding rapidly while decelerating; (2) classical general relativity predicts that there was an actual beginning of our universe in a singularity; and (3) our early universe was in a very low entropy state which is quite hard to explain since low entropy is associated with an ordered, and improbable state. The last point presents tremendous challenges for any naturalistic proposal about how our universe came into existence.

In regards to what we don't know, Dr. Carroll presents four different classes of models about the space-time origin of our universe: (1) a bouncing model, (2) a cyclic model, (3) a hibernating model, or (4) a reproducing model.