Quantum Cosmology – Part 2
[Excepted from our series “The New Scientific Evidence that Points to the Existence of God – Part 1.” Edited for publication. See our store at jashow.org to order this entire series.]
(Continued from Part 1)
Dr. John Ankerberg: Why does there have to be an intelligent designer that transcends space, time, matter, and everything?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Because prior to the beginning, because remember, it’s time itself that begins,…
Dr. John Ankerberg: That’s hard for people to grasp. But the fact is, it’s true.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: It’s actually also a biblical concept, interestingly. But in any case, at the beginning, matter comes into existence; energy comes into existence. So you can’t invoke pre-existing matter or energy to explain the origin of matter. That’s a contradiction in terms, because by origin we mean where it first began. So before that you cannot offer a materialistic explanation. The universe has to be explained by reference to something which is not bound by time and space, and which is not material or energetic in the physical sense.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Let me ask you this. Why did Stephen Hawking not like his own theory?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, Hawking realized the profound theological implications of the discovery. It wasn’t a theory, it was actually a proof. It was a mathematical proof of the existence of a singularity. It was predicated on the truth of general relativity and the observation of an expanding universe.
But assuming a few conditions like that, it was a very solid proof in mathematical physics. And he realized—and this is brought out in the little film, The Theory of Everything, about his life—that this had profound theological implications. And he was much more inclined towards a materialistic or atheistic worldview. And that became very apparent late in his life, when he actually wrote some of the books that are part of the New Atheist genre. But he had this kind of internal tension over this. And so eventually he formulated another theory, which goes by the name of quantum cosmology.
Dr. John Ankerberg: And what is it?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, this is based on the realization that we can only back extrapolate with the universe so far; that when the universe becomes very, very tiny, then what are called quantum effects,… Quantum physics is the physics of the very weird that applies to the very smallest realms of our physical experience.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Can you remember the number that you put in your book?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: When the universe was 10-43 of a second old, after that point we could understand it solely by applying general relativity. Before that point, the physicists suggested that we would need to take into account quantum effects, the weird world of the quantum where most elementary things act like waves and particles at the same time, and things like that. And so, inside that realm, the physicists weren’t sure that general relativity would apply, and that there might be a different kind of gravity acting in that tiny little smidgen of space, in that tiny little bit of time, after the beginning.
And so Hawking and a colleague, James Hartle at University of California-Santa Barbara, first developed a theory of quantum gravity or quantum cosmology in 1983. Hawking later popularized it in 1988 in his little book, A Brief History of Time. I was fortunate enough to hear some of the lectures which were the basis of that book. And Hawking’s version of quantum cosmology attempted to eliminate the singularity. It was only for popular consumption where he conveyed the idea that maybe you could get rid of the beginning, but in his technical work on quantum cosmology, he presupposed with Hartle a true singularity at the beginning. But the idea was if we can get rid of the beginning, then we don’t need to worry about what could have caused the universe to come into existence.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. What I love about your book, Return of the God Hypothesis—I got this idea from your book—is that before you got everything back to the singularity, which is less than a second, it’s the number that you’re talking about.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: It’s a tiny, tiny, tiny, unimaginably tiny fraction of a second.
Dr. John Ankerberg: It’s so small you can’t even believe it. And that’s where quantum cosmology comes in. But everything after that, you show has design with it. So you have the universe that we’re in that we know about, and that one says there’s an intelligent designer that did it all. The guys didn’t like that one. So they went to a theoretical idea, not real universes, but universes that they made up with mathematics about what was in this tiny space of time that happened; that there’s no universe that we’ve ever seen like what they’re talking about, but they made it up with theoretical mathematics.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Yes, well, let me make a run at explaining this. This will be the hardest thing we talk about in the whole series we’re doing.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Okay.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: But I think we can get the main ideas across. And that is that, in order to describe gravity in that tiny smidgen of space just after the beginning, and in that tiny bit of time where quantum effects would have been important to take into consideration, Hawking and Hartle and other physicists attempted to bring together ideas from Einstein—his theory of general relativity, his idea of gravity—with a kind of quantum idea of gravity. And they developed an equation that would kind of describe all the possible universes that could come into existence out of the singularity, and also, in so doing, describe how gravity might have been functioning in that early part of the universe. And they believed that if they could solve that equation, and if their solution implied that a universe like ours was a possible or reasonably probable outcome of all this mathematics—the mathematics of quantum physics—then they would have explained the origin of the universe without reference to a transcendent,… a God hypothesis. And this was very much in the background of everyone’s thinking.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Right.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: And so that was what was attempted. And there have been two versions of quantum cosmology: One which, at least for popular consumption, claimed to eliminate the singularity, and that was Hawking’s version; and another version that assumed the singularity, affirmed the singularity, but claimed that the origin of the universe could be explained from literally nothing physical by reference to this mathematical apparatus of quantum physics or quantum cosmology.
(Discussion will continue in Part 3)
