Lawrence Krauss Doesn’t Know Nothing–Literally

One of the things the New Atheists have trouble coping with is the fact that they don’t really have a decent answer to the really basic questions. That’s why so much time is spent on the shell game of evolution as a “proof” that God doesn’t exist (though some, like Dawkins, are still smart enough to recall that you can’t prove a negative and therefore fall back on the less than clarion-like call to arms, “God probably doesn’t exist.”

The reason evolution (with which the Church has little difficulty, properly understood) is so popular as a sort of Founding Myth for the New Atheism is that is appears to combine within itself the two (and only) decent arguments for atheism. Thos arguments are (to quote St. Thomas):

Objection 1: It seems that God does not exist, because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word “God” means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.

Objection 2: Further, it is superfluous to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many. But it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle which is nature; and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose God’s existence.

In short, 1. Bad crap happens like death ‘n stuff, so there’s no God and 2. Everything seems to work fine without God, so there’s no God. Devotees of the cult of reason, worshippers of the intellect, and similar braggarts about the three pound piece of meat behind the eyes love to ring the changes on these points and imagine they have thereby proven something. So we get mountains of verbiage from the Dawkinses of the world arguing in various ways that given the laws of time, space, matter and energy, living systems organize themselves, so there’s no God. And that’s beautiful–except at convenient times when the brutality of Nature red in tooth and claw shows the cruelty and idiocy of the Christian Creator, who doesn’t exist and is very horrible for making such an awful natural world.

Perhaps you’ve noticed the weak spot in that argument (okay, the *main* weak spot). It’s that word “given”. Given by whom? Why is there time, space, matter and energy? Why are there laws governing these things? Why are they intelligible to us? That the little problem facing the New Atheist, and in his unseemly haste he papers it over by declaring that SCIENCE can answer not just scientific questions, but all questions about everything in the universe, including philosophical and theological ones. This seems to invariably lead New Atheists away from sticking to the only two really good arguments for atheism and into the boondocks of really silly fallacies by which they hope to pad the case for the new atheism. The results can be most unfortunate.

Exhibit A: Lawrence Krauss, Apostle of Scientism with the latest attempt to deal with the essentially philosophical problem “Why is there anything?” He writes a new book which purports to explain how you can get Everything from Nothing without that pesky God. And so, of course, Richard Dawkins, who just gets dimmer every time he opens his mouth on these matters, trumpets from Zion:

“Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to super­naturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is ­devastating.”

To which Mike Flynn drily replies:

This encomium alone should be sufficient clue that there is less here than meets the eye.

How much less? Well, I’ll refer you Flynn for the whole autopsy on Krauss’ philosophically illiterate (and common sense impaired) book, but the money quote is here:

And indeed, Krauss does not tell us that the universe — the collection of everything that exists — comes from nothing. He tells us that it comes from arrangements of relativistic quantum fields. The alert reader will recognize that the fields are therefore the matter and their arrangement is the form. And that therefore there was not nothing.

The way it works is this. In relativity, physical matter (particles) are simply states of the field of Ricci tensors. Quoting Albert’s review:

According to relativistic quantum field theories, particles are to be understood, rather, as specific arrangements of the fields. Certain ­arrangements of the fields, for instance, correspond to there being 14 particles in the universe, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being 276 particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being an infinite number of particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being no particles at all. And those last arrangements are referred to, in the jargon of quantum field theories, for obvious reasons, as “vacuum” states. Krauss seems to be thinking that these vacuum states amount to the relativistic-­quantum-field-theoretical version of there not being any physical stuff at all. And he has an argument — or thinks he does — that the laws of relativistic quantum field theories entail that vacuum states are unstable. And that, in a nutshell, is the account he proposes of why there should be something rather than nothing.

Shazaam! The vacuum state being unstable, it will spontaneously decompose into a state with particles and — hey, presto! — we have something rather than nothing.

Of course, a vacuum state is not nothing. It is a quantum state. (And you cannot have a “state” without a thing to be in that state. A state of confusion implies that someone or something is confused. It’s the old medieval thingie “no white without a white thing.” No form without a matter to be informed.)

Krauss is confusing zero with nothing. Physicist Stephen Barr compared this a couple of years ago to a bank account.

There is a difference … between a bank account with no dollars in it and no bank account at all. To have a bank account, even one with a momentarily zero (or negative) balance, requires having a bank, an agreement with that bank, a monetary system, a currency, and banking laws. Similarly, to talk about states with various numbers of “universes” requires having a quantum system with different possible “states,” and laws determining the character of those states and governing the transitions among them. The term “the universe” should really be applied to this whole system with its laws, and not, as is misleadingly done in such discussions, to “space-times” that are coming into and going out of existence.

In short, Krauss says that there was Something (i.e. quantum fields) from which Everything comes. Something is not Nothing. And the question, “Why are their quantum fields, Ricci tensors, and vacuum states?” is not so much as touched.

Realizing this at some level, Krauss (who unlike Dawkins, at least perceives there is a problem) explains, “Shut up!” to theists with a marvelous bit of table-pounding sophistry. Flynn continues:

Krauss is aware of the argument outlined by Albert and by Barr and others; and he thinks it’s no fair. He complains that “some philosophers and many theologians define and redefine ‘nothing’ as not being any of the versions of nothing that scientists currently describe,” and that “now, I am told by religious [sic] critics that I cannot refer to empty space as ‘nothing,’ but rather as a ‘quantum vacuum,’ to distinguish it from the philosopher’s or theologian’s idealized ‘nothing’.” He feels that philosophers are trying to move the goal posts.

The problem is, it was the post-Cartesian scientists who moved the goal posts and that they “currently describe” “various versions” of “nothing” incorrectly does not change the fact that “nothing” means precisely what it says: no thing. That is, nothing is not a particular sort of thing any more than “no one” is a particular sort of person.

And how can there be “various versions” of nothing? I mean, c’mon!

Sorry, Charlie, but the folks who started the whole discussion of creatio ex nihilo used a particular and straightforward definition of nihil. If scientists are now equivocating on the term, confusing an analogous usage with a proper usage, that is the fault of their own imprecise thinking.

So, in the end, the worshippers of SCIENCE! are faced with the fact that just because all they have is a hammer does not render every question a nail. Science is very useful for measuring and forming judgements about time, space, matter and energy. The moment you start asking questions about things beyond that (and “Why is there anything?” is emphatically such a question) you need new tools. But sin makes even the cleverest people stupid, so guys like Krauss and Dawkins (and Stephen Hawking) manage to foolishly persuade themselves that there is no God, while simultaneously invoking a Law (one might even call it a Word) by which all things come into existence. Flynn remarks elsewhere:

So according to Hawking, there was a beginning; and in the beginning was the Law and the Law was all there was; and without the Law nothing came to be. And the Law was an immaterial being that was pure λογοϛ. And this Law gave form to the void of pure potency, prime matter.

Wait a minute…..

Something about that sounds awfully familiar. Didn’t someone say all that and say it more poetically a long time ago?
“In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was *with God,
and the Word *was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came to be through him,
And without him nothing came to be.”

But I don’t think Hawking realized he was paraphrasing that.

Every knee shall bow.