Oh God, There Might be a God!

[ Music ] Congratulations. You've just discovered the reluctant theologian podcast. I'm your host, Dr. R. T. Mullins. In this podcast, we're going to be looking at all sorts of questions related to theology, philosophy, science, heavy metal, and the occasional delectable cheeseburger. Every now and then, I'm going to bring in some of my friends who are also researchers on these topics, and will be able to debate and discuss lots of different things. But since one of the big themes that I want to look at, one of the things I want to explore are rival conceptions of God and different models for thinking about the nature of God. But before you can do that, it seems like it might be good to ask the question, "Does God exist?" It's already reason for thinking that God exists. And so in today's episode, we're going to hear a conversation between myself and Dr. Imassani on the very beginning of the universe, and whether or not that gives us reasons for thinking that God exists. Enjoy. Yes, you do. Sometimes I say meaningful things. You always do. I try. Well, sometimes you get lost in your story, so. Right. We don't know what happened there. Well, let me tell you a little story about the very beginning of everything. Okay, how far we're going here? Back to the very beginning. Okay, so before Earth's got created? Yeah, so 13.5 billion years ago. But the universe was about? Well, the universe supposedly began at that point. Okay. Now, whatever begins to exist has a cause for its existence. Do you think that's the case? Hmm. No. No. Can you think of something that began to exist but did not have a cause? Why everything has to have a cause? No, not everything has a cause. Only things that begin to exist have a cause. Well, if you have a baby, sometimes happen you have a baby. There's no causation there. There's definitely causation there. Oh, wow. There's some experiments and eggs. It wasn't permitted to eat it. Well, right. I didn't say that cause had to be intentional. I just said it had to be a cause. Okay. Right, right, right. I guess. Okay, so you'll allow me that whatever begins to exist as a cause for its existence. Fine, let's go for this. Sure, okay. Well, the universe began to exist. So therefore, the universe has a cause for its existence. Mm-hmm. And then what? Well, then what caused the universe to exist? Oh, right. Mm-hmm. I don't know because it was nothing before. And you say there is a causation for things. You need someone to cause something. Right. See them go with this. I hate you because you go with your god idea. That's why you didn't have to convince me with that. Well, here's a way to convince you. So it can't be all the physical stuff, right? Because all the physical stuff began at the big bang. Oh, so there is no. There is actually no matter. Nothing. Right. So it can't be a physical thing. Well, then what's left? A non-physical thing. Mm-hmm. Like what? Like solar? Well, yeah, like a soul, like a mind. A mind. Yeah, a soul or a mind. Because I think the mind and the souls are the same thing. Okay. And so a soul or a mind is just a thing that has the capacity for thought and the capacity for action. They can intend to do something. So when you're talking about the babies, you know, sometimes you don't intend for a baby to come about. But a soul could make that. It could intend to bring something about. It says, "It's some kind of free will." Oh, okay. So if you've got some sort of non-physical, so it's an immaterial thing, a soul, it's a mind and has free will, then it could bring about the existence of a universe. Yeah, but I mean, how. You have to be able to. It's a soul. Is it a not physical object? How can create physical object? Oh, right. I guess I don't see any worry here. Why? I thought, you know, it's an unphysical thing. Yeah. With just create thing that don't have any physical property. It might do that too. It's like me. I cannot create things that don't have physical property. Yeah, again. You can create thoughts. That is weird. You can create mathematical equations. Okay. You could write a book. Well, that's physical. Well, the book is a physical representation of the story. Right. But the story itself. Those are all thoughts. Okay, I never thought in that way. Right. Right. So on the base of these, I guess. But why should we create in the first place? Oh, well, okay. That's that. Well, the argument I was grunting doesn't give you that. It just tells you that there's got to be something. There's an impossibility. Yeah, there's something that is not caused to exist. It doesn't begin to exist. It's an eternal thing. It's not physical. It's got some sort of ability to perform actions that it intends to perform. So it's always been there. It's always been there. Because if it began to exist, then it has a cause. Yeah. And then we're right back where we started. And so we need something else to cause it. How can you think that that way? That there was a thing that always it was? Yes. Well, the argument forces you that way, right? So if it's the case that whatever begins to exist as a cause for its existence, and well, then I'm pushed back to, well, okay, well, that thing, if it began to exist, it had a cause. Yes. I understand the logically way you're doing it. It's just I cannot think of something that it always been there. Oh, okay. So it just feels weird. Yeah. Hmm, maybe I can make it less weird. The number two exists. Yes. Did it ever begin to exist? I don't know. I don't think so. I want to say no. So, see, here's why. So 2 plus 2 equals 4. That seems true. When did it begin to become true? Okay. And I want to be like, well, no, it's always been the case. Yeah, but this is like kind of a law of a mathematical thing. But here you're talking about something that has a mind on his own can create things just never always existing. Right. Just crazy. Well, okay. I agree. You're right. I agree. It's weird, right? It's only weird. But I don't see what is like, there's nothing you can go here and to about it. I know. It gives me a nice neat explanation for how the universe came about. Yes. It's just very strange. It was definitely strange. Yeah. Philosophy gives you lots of strange things. I guess it will always be there. Mm-hmm. I definitely, yeah. So, when I resist to exist? Yep. That's what eternal means without beginning without end. Oh, God. Well, yeah. And this all men call God. That's what they have. There you go. Right. Right. Okay. Well, is this strange, but I can accept that. Okay. Well, there we go. God exists. Well, wait. Okay. But because here when people start thinking, when people start to talk about God, they always get attached to many other things. This is true. And all I've given you is a non-physical thing that's eternal. It's got the power for thought and the power of before actions. It's not a very thick God like you're used to and growing up in Italy. It's not a Catholic God. And I'm fine with that. Because I only need to give you that some semblance of a God with this argument. Okay. Yeah. Other arguments might give you other evidence for some different attributes like some really great ness or something like that. But this one, yeah, yeah. Something that's kind of personal that has the ability to like freely create stuff. Okay. Yeah. But what if you want to go to the other way? Which other way? Well, if you do not believe that. Is there another way? Well, if you don't believe that God exists or. Oh, well, oh, so how else would I try to explain the existence of the universe if I wanted to reject God? Yes. So here are some options that I'm aware of. One option is to say there was a universe before this one. But, okay. Well, what happened? Who created the one before? Right. This is the problem. You get into this infinite regress of these universes that go big bang. And then they go big crunch. And that crunch. Yeah, yeah. That's why we are talking about here that there was nothing of nothing before. Right. So how that came about in the first thing. Exactly. And so these models not only do they not fit the standard of gang theory, which is what most the evidence points towards. They also don't give you an explanation where all this stuff came from in the first place. Because it's just positing more universes that didn't have to exist, that began to exist. and that gets right back to that first premise, which is whatever begins to exist as a cause for its existence. So these prior universes, they all begin to exist at some point. So we don't really get anywhere with those. So there's no gift as the ultimate explanation. That's one way you could try to go. It's not good anywhere. Here's another way you could try to go. You could say the point of singularity, which is the thing that all of, like, matter and energy, like, goes bang from. That is eternal. The singularity is eternal. The singularity never began to exist. It began to go bang, but the singularity itself never began. So, okay. Just to clarify here, what was the singularity? Is like everything condensing one point. Infantestimal points. But that's mean that everything is there. So there is stuff, even if infinite, infinitesimal as you like, is there. So who would it be there? Well, that doesn't give you an explanation for that. This theory just says, I don't need an explanation because it just is. It's a brute fact. A brute fact that it's always been stuff around. There's always been stuff in this infinitesimal form. Test, no. I don't like this one. I don't like it either. Not for the reasons you don't like it. Because I was willing to grant, like, okay, fine. Let's say it's been around forever. But why did it go bang? That's true. Why did this didn't stay like this? Right. And there's no explanation there. Whereas if you've got something like God, like a personal being that has free will, you could say, well, it doesn't have to do anything unless it wants to. And so you can have an explanation for why this being wasn't doing anything and then all of a sudden decides, now I want to do stuff. It has a reason for doing stuff. What that reason is, I don't know, but at least you could say, it's possible for it to change. There's an explanation for why it changes. It changes for a reason. Whereas if you have this singularity, it's like eternally just sitting there. Why would it change? And I can't think of anything. It's not like it can act for a reason. Because it's not the sort of thing that has reason. So I don't know why it goes bang. So that's why I don't really like that explanation. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Another way you could try to go is just say, well, I'll just reject the claim that whatever begins to exist has a cause for its existence. But then you get some weird entailments though, because then you could say, why doesn't, why don't babies just pop into existence without cause? Why aren't there giraffes and lions and tigers and bears, oh my, just popping into existence? For no reason, no cause whatsoever. Why isn't this happening more often? It seems like those are all possibilities. If we say things could pop into it, things could begin without a cause. Those are all possibilities. And that seems really hard to swallow. Well, okay. I might go with that for a minute, because let's put the case that thing that are on this planet, on Earth, on this universe, now that are in existence now, they have to observe some laws of nature now. They do now, yeah. Yes. But maybe they didn't have to before. Oh, so say they were okay. So now you have like a constraint of how things have to go. So it's true that something can be, they don't need a cause to come to existence, because but now they have to. So maybe, so there's a woman named Nancy Cartwright who says, maybe the universe is a dilapidated universe. And what she means by that is it might be the case that the laws of nature are not uniform across the entire universe. Like maybe it's the case that when you get far enough along in the universe that they just kind of, the laws are completely different. And so maybe you could say something like this. Some particle pops into existence elsewhere in the universe. And then it comes into our portion of the universe. And so now it has to obey our laws, because it's here. Yeah. Is that kind of what you're thinking? Yeah. Something like that. That kind of makes sense. Yeah. So here's why I don't think it makes sense. So when I'm looking at laws of nature, what I have to have, if I've got two different systems and I don't know how they fit together properly, I have to have what are called bridging principles or bridging rules. The something that bridges the gap from one set of laws to the, to the next. Otherwise, I don't see how there could be any interaction. So how could that, that particle, say a particle pops into existence in another part of the universe where the laws of nature are just completely crazy, completely wacky to all compare to ours. How is it going to be able to get into ours? There has to be some sort of mechanism for that to take place, some sort of laws that make it, make it be able to get there. Well, maybe some laws are kept, that they work in both places, like some, I don't know. Some sort of deeper laws. Yeah, like, I don't know, speed, so you can think it can actually travel from there to here. Yeah, right, right, right. So the way they are applied in the other portion of the universe is different. So whatever those deeper laws are, what these bridging principles are, those are going to be at least some kind of uniformity across the different regions of the universe. So I think what, what that gives me then is that the universe isn't as dilapidated as Nancy Cartwright wants it to be. Because if, if I can actually cause, so if the particle can travel from a way over there to our portion of the universe, there's some kind of causal continuity. Because it's traveling through space. And so there's some kind of continuity, at least between our two. And there's a before and after between the two. So there's some sort of temporal continuity as well. So I got spatial continuity because it can travel from there to here. Yeah. Temporal continuity because it was, it was back there and now it's here. And it seems like there's some sort of causal continuity because it caused things over there, supposedly. And it somehow caused its way over here. So the causation, I don't think it could be that radically different to the way it is here. Yeah. I think you're right. Yeah. So I find it really hard to reject the claim that whatever begins to exist, you know, has a cause for its existence. So it got exist. Maybe. Maybe. Okay, let's put the case exists. Right. It could be any, I mean, okay. I'm just saying as far as I can go, it's a malady new that is a mind created everything. It's a turn of mind, non physical, creating everything. Sure. But does this thing have the property? Any other properties? Yeah. Oh, right. So this argument is not going to get you too many other properties. Because you might want to know, like, is this a good thing? Yeah. Does it love, does it care about me? Right. Right. Yeah. Okay. Well, this was just start. Yeah. Do you have to convince me that who created everything, basically? Yeah. And all I've done is an internal, non physical mind. Yeah. I'm fine with that. But that doesn't give you all the things you typically associate with God. Yeah. And that's fine. So yeah, this argument doesn't give you all that. It only gives you the things I already gave you some light out. So I'd have to give you some other thing, which other arguments would focus on different features of the universe. So for instance, there's an argument from morality. Why are there moral facts that exist? And so moral fact is, well, it's kind of in the name. Sort of some sort of moral statement about what's right or wrong or what ought to be the case. And it's true regardless of what in the event's thing. So it's wrong to stomp on babies just to hear them squeak. Oh, God. Right. I don't know why this is a common go to example, but you know, it's not horrible. Right. But you think it's wrong, don't you? Yeah. And even if we all like try to convince ourselves that you know, oh, no, no, we all agree. Like it's okay. It's still just like, no, no, that's wrong. It's wrong. Don't do that. Yeah. Right. So this is a moral fact. And so one kind of argument would be something like this. I have the ability to know moral facts. And that seems kind of weird because the evolutionary story could have gone in lots of different ways. And it could have created my mind such that it wasn't able to ascertain these sort of moral facts. So why is it the case that evolution went the right sort of way that I could grasp these moral facts? And that I have some sort of sensibilities about what the moral facts are. I feel urged to have these moral facts. Because again, the evolutionary story could have gone loads different ways. So what would explain why the evolutionary story went the way that it did such that I have the ability to think in moral categories, to grasp moral facts, and to perform moral actions, and feel gross when I don't do the right thing? Yeah, well, that is true because also animal seems to have kind of, like, they don't eat each other. Right. And they have kind of some basic thing. But I was also associated with a way to preserve their own, and a way to pass their genes. Right. So that's why you can have some limitation that would be imprinted in you. So that would just like make you move forward. Right. So what you're talking about is, how does this go? This is called the 4Fs in evolutionary theory. Yeah. There's fleeing, fighting, feeding, and reproducing. That's not a 4Fs. Well, but that's how the joke always goes. Yeah. Right. That's how the joke always goes. You know that joke. Right. That was those are the 4Fs. And so like that, like, those aren't moral, right? So fleeing, you might say, like, well, the self-preservation. And you could say that's related to morality, but self-preservation by itself does it, isn't a moral claim. You need something stronger to get a moral claim. So I have moral worth. And so I ought to preserve myself. And you ought to care about my preservation. It's a moral claim, whereas just self-preservation might solve it's a very moral feeding, I think particularly moral about that unless it's connected to something like, you want to feed a baby, right? Why? Well, because I want to take care of this baby. I think this baby is a thing that's valuable that's worth taking care of. And so feeding is a non-moral claim, but it's connected to a moral fact, I should think. But evolution doesn't care about that, it just cares about the feeding part. Evolution doesn't have cares or concerns because it's just a mechanism, right? It's just a lot of nature. It's not like, yeah, that's do anything. So fighting, you know, again, it's not really a moral claim, but it could be connected to some moral claims, seems like it is, but the evolution of stories not connect doesn't necessarily have to be connected to that. And then reproducing, again, that's just passing on your genes, your genetic material. There's nothing particularly moral about that. You could connect it to some moral claims if you want, but nothing about the evolutionary story by itself necessitates that you should connect it to those moral claims. Okay. So here's the hypothesis. So evolutionary story can't by itself give me all these moral intuitions I have, and I can't explain how I'm able to ascertain moral facts. But if this non-physical, eternal mind that has free will, if it wanted to, I would say, maybe it could get me connected to the moral facts, maybe it could guide the evolutionary process in the right sort of way such that I have the ability to ascertain these moral facts. Why would it do that? Well, maybe because it's a moral agent itself, maybe it cares about morality to some extent. And so it thinks that I too should care about morality. And so that would raise the probability that we'd find the world like the one we do where there are all these human persons who have the ability to grasp moral facts. So it's not as like airtight as the previous argument, but it's just, it's something that just, it's a hypothesis that raises the probability that we'd find the world like the way we do. Does that seem at least somewhat plausible? It does. It does. But I don't know what you want to go with this. I'm sorry. It gives me a being. Yeah, exactly. And you're pushing me towards a Christian God, which is like, yeah, you are doing that. I'm all I'm giving you as a God that kind of cares. But you're not going that way. Maybe. Which I'm not sure about that. Well, I don't have to give you the whole Christian story. Well, I think these sorts of arguments I can run only give you just a God that is somewhat like the God of Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, somewhat in that neighborhood. I know. Which specific religion? Oh, that's a whole kettle of fish, different kettle of fish. Yeah. So all I've given you is an eternal being, an eternal mind that might possibly care about moral facts. My possibly cares. Might possibly care. So does also cares about the people here or not? Well, if it cares enough to make sure that evolution goes the right sort of way that they can, you know, develop like a mind that's capable of grasping like the mental or the moral facts. And it might care in a deeper way about these human persons. It might have other reasons for why it wants these human persons to, you know, know morality. It seems like, and that's, I find that plausible at least. Because if it's going to go to all the bother of trying to guide the evolutionary story in the right sort of way that humans can have like moral knowledge, it's probably going to a deeper reason for why it's that case. Rather than, wow, wouldn't be cool if they had moral knowledge. Yes. Yeah, my guess is this is probably like, well, I want them to have moral knowledge because I want them to be moral people. I want them to be like virtuous people. Okay. So there's probably some sort of plan to make these people virtuous. You gave me a lot of the thing tonight. Right. That's what I do. Philosopher. Yeah, right. Sometimes. Well, there you have it. That's the very first episode of the Relept in Theologian podcast. Tune in next time when we'll talk more about God, time, and Busta Rhymes. (upbeat music)