Physics and Metaphysics 2: the Big Bang

Over the past 40 years, astronomers have come to a widespread agreement that the universe we see around us is about 14 billion years old, and started in a highly concentrated, almost-singular point they call the Big Bang. They have produced a coherent model of how the universe has expanded since that primordial beginning; the Big Bang is an elegant mathematical model that matches and predicts everything we can see using the most advanced telescopes.

One of the strange parts of this theory is that not only did the matter expand for this whole time, but the size of a finite space has also expanded. Space itself was tiny at the beginning. And even stranger, time itself started at the Big Bang. As Stephen Hawking said,

Asking what came before the Big Bang is meaningless, according to the no-boundary proposal, because there is no notion of time available to refer to. It would be like asking what lies south of the South Pole.

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Okay, that is fun science, but what does it tell us about metaphysics, about life, the universe and everything? Actually, this whole weird theory shines a little bit of light on the eternal philosophical question, that is, Why is there something rather than nothing? What the BB says is that either:

1.    the BB was uncaused; or

2.    the mechanism that led to the BB is not contained in space and time.

These two possibilities ought to make us feel uncomfortable as scientists, because

1. Although we grasp that some quantum events are stochastic and uncaused, we treat all large-scale physics as causal. However, if the largest phenomenon in all of history was uncaused, then anything could be uncaused, and the scientific assumption that events have causes is false; or
2. if the mechanism that led to the BB is not contained in space and time, then it is by definition transcendent:

tran·scend·ent /ˌtran(t)ˈsend(ə)nt/ adjective. Beyond of above the range of normal or merely physical human experience. Surpassing the ordinary; exceptional. (Google)

The metaphysical truth we get out of the Big Bang is that either the universe popped into existence for no reason at all, or that a transcendent reality exists.

Physics and Metaphysics are Entangled!

I have long felt that there is no common ground between science and religion. This idea is known as Non-Overlapping Magisteria. NOMA makes sense, because:

1. science specifically precludes non-physical phenomena (such as souls or free will); and
2. many questions previously answered by religion (such as the structure of the cosmos) have been shown to be utterly mistaken. This trend is known as God of the Gaps.

The world-view of keeping science to itself and religion to itself is very effective, because you don't get science telling you there is no God (it doesn't) and you don't get scripture telling you science is wrong (it isn't).

More recently I have been reading a series of famous historic papers on Quantum Mechanics, most of whose authors received the Nobel prize in physics. And there is an odd thing in these papers: not only do they undermine classic Newtonian physics, but they also challenge the philosophy of science. The foundational ideas of science, such as causation and objectivity are not as certain in the Quantum and Relativistic universe as they were in Newton’s universe.

This re-examination of the philosophy of science has had many unexpected twists and turns; it turns out that modern science says a great deal about religious ideas.

Somewhat ironically, Newton himself was a deeply religious man – he wrote more about theology than science – who saw a deep connection between science and religion. More than anything else, his motivation to understand natural philosophy was religious:

When I wrote [Principia Mathematica], I had an eye upon such principles as might work with [convincing] men [of] the belief of a Deity and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that purpose.

This is the first in a series of posts about the mutually reinforcing nature of science and religion.