From: watson@sce.carleton.ca (Stephen Watson)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: opinions on the big bang needing a external cause
Date: 6 Oct 92 04:38:10 GMT
Organization: Home for Indigent Bit-Bashers

In article <Oct.4.22.02.29.1992.5938@geneva.rutgers.edu> schlegel@cwis.unomaha.edu (Mark Schlegel) writes:
>Could people on this channel post some opinions on whether they think the
>universe can be self sufficient (i.e. does it have to have a specific cause)
>or did it have to be externally created (by God).

There are many Christians (and not all of them ICR supporters, either)
who seem to want God to have left fingerprints all over Creation.
Personally, I don't find this necessary: I'm reasonably happy with a
Universe which arose spontaneously out of a vacuum fluctuation, a la
E.P.Tryon.  In this view, the Universe is quite self-sufficient.

Some people have noted a number of 'coincidences' (mostly relative values
of fundamental constants) which, if they had not happened, would have
prevented intelligent life from existing.  From this, they argue either
for a Judeo-Christian-style Deity (some Catholic philopher whose name
escapes me), or for an impersonal "Anthropic Principle" (Carter et al).
("It is necessary that the Universe be the way it is, since, if it were
otherwise, we wouldn't be here to argue about it")

A related (or sub-) question is: is the Universe logically necessary, or
contingent? (Definition: Necessity: everything can be shown to be a logical
consequence of some set of First Principles, which themselves can be shown
to be necessarily true.  Contingency: at least some things can be shown not
to follow logically from other things.  They could be true or false without
making any difference to the rest of the system.)

If the everything in the Universe is necessary, then apparently there is no
need (nor any room) for a God (although it can also be argued that the
structure of Logic itself would be divinely ordained).  If at least some
things in the Universe are contingent, then it could be argued that these
are "free variables" set (arbitrarily) by God.

I recommend the book "The MInd of God" by Paul Davies for a very readable
exploration of the issues.  Among other things, he presents an
intriguing proof that the Universe is at least partly contingent.  He
draws a parallel between the Universe and a mathematical system, with
fundamental physical laws and initial conditions playing the part of axioms,
and all the observed features of the Universe being the "propositions".

If the Universe is logically necessary then all observed features can
be shown to follow from the laws and intial conditions (in math. terms,
they are all "theorems" which can be derived from the axioms).  However,
according to Godel's Theorem, any system of more than a critical degree of
complexity must contain propositions whose truth value cannot be decided
from within the system.  The Universe is almost certainly sufficiently
complex to meet this criteria (I'm not sure, but from reading Hofstadter
my impression is that the threshold occurs when the system begins to be
able to make statements about itself.  Since we are part of the Universe,
and since we make statements about the Universe, it would appear that the
Universe meets the criterion for Godel undecidability).  Such undecidable
propositions, if found empirically to be true, would be "contingently
true".  Disclaimer: this is Davies' proof.  I offer no warranty on its
robustness.

Well, that should be enough to get discussion rolling.... :-)





-- 
==Steve Watson: watson@sce.carleton.ca===Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario==
| The above is the output of a 7th-order Markovian analysis of all posts on   |
| this group for the past month.  Not only is it not Carleton's opinion, it's |
| not even *my* opinion: it's really just a mish-mash of all YOUR opinions!   |