Quantum Fluctuations or Creator?
When the Big Bang theory was confirmed as fact in the middle of the twentieth century, many Atheist Scientists and philosophers recoiled from its Theistic implications i.e. that the Universe had a beginning, and this implied a Creator must exist.
Professor Christopher Isham writes:
Perhaps the best argument in favor of the thesis that the Big Bang supports theism is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists. At times this has led to scientific ideas, such as continuous creation [steady state] or an oscillating universe, being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his/her theory
Christopher Isham, “Creation of the Universe as a Quantum Process,” in Physics, Philosophy, and Theology, A Common Quest for Understanding (1988)
To my surprise some Atheist keyboard warriors are still trying to claim that the Universe is past eternal and requires no explanation.
They largely base their arguments on the ‘zero energy’ quantum vacuum model of creation advanced by Lawrence Krauss and other hardcore Atheist Physicists.
Let us examine what physicists make of these ad-hoc attempts to escape Divine creation.
Eternal Quantum Vacuum?
Some Atheist cyber-warriors attempt to argue that Quantum fluctuations caused the Universe. This Quantum vacuum existed Eternally.
Shockingly, even the most committed of Something-from-nothing Physicists do not actually claim this.
Lawrence Krauss admits that the laws of Physics remain unexplained, and the New Scientist (no friend of Theism) explains how his attempts at delivering a blow to belief in God completely fails:
Yet despite its clear strengths, A Universe From Nothing is not quite, as Richard Dawkins hopefully declares in the afterword, a “knockout blow” for the idea that a deity must have kicked the universe into being.
Krauss does want to deliver that blow: towards the end of the book, he promises that we really can have something from nothing – “even the laws of physics may not be necessary or required”. Ultimately, though, he has to perform a little sleight of hand. Space and time can indeed come from nothing; nothing, as Krauss explains beautifully, being an extremely unstable state from which the production of “something” is pretty much inevitable.
However, the laws of physics can’t be conjured from nothing. In the end, the best answer is that they arise from our existence within a multiverse, where all the universes have their own laws – ours being just so for no particular reason.
Krauss contends that the multiverse makes the question of what determined our laws of nature “less significant”. Truthfully, it just puts the question beyond science – for now, at least. That (together with the frustratingly opaque origins of a multiverse) means Krauss can’t quite knock out those who think there must ultimately be a prime mover.
Quantum Fluctuations Cannot Create the Universe
The Skeptical Enquirer makes this admission in their frank review of Lawrence Krauss’s book:
If one uses a natural scientific definition of Nothing, namely
the lowest-energy state of a system, then it is a simple consequence of Schrodinger’s equation that this state will never evolve in to any other state. Krauss suggests thatfluctuationsin the ground state can be the source of Something, but this is really just an artefact of using classical language which obscures the static and unchanging nature of the quantum mechanical ground state.The only way such so-called fluctuations can become real is through the influence of an environment consisting of additional degrees of freedom that, through a process called
decoherence, effectively measure the state of the original system. But decoherence will not occur if the environment is also in its ground state (C. Kiefer and D. Polarski, Adv. Sci. Lett. 2, 164-173 (2009)).So, as long as we are in the realm of conventional quantum mechanics, current science supports the theologians: Nothing will always lead to Nothing.
https://web.physics.wustl.edu/alford/reviews/Krauss_Nothing.html
The point here is clear, that the current science does not support the Quantum Creation scenario. Fundamentally such a system cannot by itself become a real, macro-universe. Rather it would have remained eternally static.
Indeed since Time came to be with the Big Bang, a quantum fluctuation outside of time would be timeless and thus the classical universe we know would never come to be.
Once again, as per the Kalaam Cosmological Argument only a Personal Being who could act with free will could cause the Universe from outside of time.
If ultimately a quantum system did preceed our macro-world, it did not become real in the absence of a Divine Mind.
As the legendary founder of Quantum Physics stated it is God who is the true source behind the illusion of matter:
As a physicist, that is, a man who had devoted his whole life to a wholly prosaic science, the exploration of matter, no one would surely suspect me of being a fantast. And so, having studied the atom, I am telling you that there is no matter as such! All matter arises and persists only due to a force that causes the atomic particles to vibrate, holding them together in the tiniest of solar systems, the atom.
Yet in the whole of the universe there is no force that is either intelligent or eternal, and we must therefore assume that behind this force there is a conscious, intelligent Mind or Spirit. This is the very origin of all matter.”
Max Planck, as cited in Eggenstein (1984)
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