I am myself. I am a self. What does it mean to be a self?
Remember yourself as a child, say, attending grade school. Look at an old photo. Then look in the mirror. Those two pictures are the same person, right? How so? They don’t look the same. Their memories are different. Virtually every atom that composed that child’s body has gone from the adult’s.
I do feel unity across time. Is my solidified self an illusion? How do people maintain their identity?
Dissecting personal identity means discerning individual consciousness. So I start with someone who takes consciousness as something real and puzzling, but not something nonphysical or religious: philosopher Colin McGinn.
“I think the self is something real,” McGinn begins. “But the self must be grounded in the brain, so that the self’s unity at a time and over time must be a function of what’s in the brain. We don’t know how the brain does it, but it must be so. And our imaginative adventures with the concept of self [as, say, a soul] reflect our ignorance about what the self actually is and what constitutes it in the brain. So we think all sorts of things are possible, which if we knew the truth about the self, we wouldn’t think were possible.”
He continues: “Our grasp on the concept of the self is very limited because we experience it from our first-person point of view—when we say ‘I’—but we don’t really know what that thing is at all except as the bearer of these mental states.”
Is the self, then, the sum total of, or an integration of, all my conscious states in some way? “That’s a Humean view,” McGinn says. “It’s another very natural view to take. Instead of thinking of the self as the substance or the entity which has these conscious states but separate from them [i.e., a soul], it is constituted by the conscious states. And because of those relations, we say there is a self that exists over time. The problem with this explanation is it seems too thin to ground the idea of personal identity, as you existed at an earlier time and ‘you the-self-same-thing’ existed at a later time. All we’ve got is the idea that you at a later time are causally connected to you at an earlier time. That isn’t the same thing as you persisting through time.”
McGinn reflects that “people imagine themselves to be capable of all sorts of strange things, even supernatural things, where they [or their soul] can exist independently of the brain, for example. I’m saying these ideas arise wholly from our ignorance of how the self is rooted in the brain.” But he admits that “the issue is extremely difficult because we don’t have any clear conception of what this thing, this idea of ‘I’, is. I can tell you what’s going on in a self at any moment, what ideas the self has, but not what the self actually is. (This is one of Hume’s famous points.)”
The point being that after describing what’s going on in the self, there’s nothing left over? “Right,” McGinn says, “there’s nothing left over. You don’t encounter it in introspection, you don’t perceive it in other people (you only perceive their bodies). The self seems a kind of receding transcendent thing that is capable of strange feats.”
I offer my own way of thinking, which seems somehow forced on me. The odd thing about the self, I say, is that the more I think about it, the more I feel pushed to the absolute extremes of explanation. Either there really exists some sort of mystical supernatural dualism, or there is no such thing as a self at all (it’s just an artificial construct of all the different perceptions that we have).
McGinn agrees, putting it more cogently: “We seem to be driven toward the supernaturalist irreducibility view to avoid the eliminalist view where there isn’t any such thing as the self. In fact, one can oscillate from one to the other. But they can’t both be true, of course.”
Another odd thing, I confess to McGinn (as if he were my Priest of Consciousness), is that I’m more comfortable at one extreme or the other than at any place in between.
“That is an odd thing,” he says, “and I’m trying to give an account of that unsatisfactory intellectual predicament by saying, well, the reason you feel that you have to have an irreducible self, a transcendent thing that can survive death, or eliminate it all together, is because you just don’t know what it is. Thus, our imaginations are liberated in a bad sense by our ignorance.”
Nice! To McGinn, the self is real, and although how the self persists over time is a mystery, it must be rooted in the brain. But how in the brain? By what mechanisms? I can’t even imagine what could count as an answer.
But some say there is no mystery because there is no self: The self does not exist! My old friend Susan Blackmore, with her lifelong interest in consciousness, is not bashful.
“There’s no reason to suppose that there is real continuity of ourselves,” Blackmore says, “because if you look at what a body and a brain is, there’s no room for a thing called a ‘self’ that sort of sits in there and has the experiences or decides what to do. So then the question becomes, ‘Well, why does it feel that way?’ And that, to me, is the really interesting question. If continuity of self and consciousness is an illusion, why do we think it is real?”
Blackmore admits that she takes “a really radical view on this. I do a lot of meditation,” she says. “In the normal way of thinking, it’s quite easy to think I’m here now and that was also me a few minutes ago. But if you look back, you can start to see that something was listening to that noise out there and something was talking. I think what happens is that the illusion of continuity is only created when you look for it. When you ask yourself what you did this morning, or when you were a kid, the brain can pull up memories and create this story of a continuous life. So you imagine this continuous stream of consciousness every day when you’re awake. But actually, it’s not like that at all. Actually, there’s just multiple parallel things going on. And every so often, we go, ‘Oh, that’s me,’ and invent the story.”
I lob Blackmore a softball question: So the implication is that this artificial unity has no possibility of living beyond bodily death?
“Absolutely not,” she says, several times, in case I didn’t get it at first. “When you realize the nonexistence of the self, which you thought was so important, then death has lost its sting. Because there never was a ‘you’ to die. Every moment is just a new story. There’s a similarity between chapters, but there’s nobody there to tie it together. This so-called ‘me’, right now, is just another reconstruction. There was another ‘me’ an hour ago, and there’ll be still another ‘me’ an hour from now. But they’re not really the same person; they’re just stuff happening in the universe. So there’s no one to die, and so there’s certainly no one to continue after death.”
“So you’re presenting this like it’s good news?” I ask her with mock misery.
“I’m smiling,” she responds, “because it’s so beautiful when you can let go and just accept that it’s all just the universe doing its stuff. It’s not ‘me against the world’ because there isn’t really me at all.”
To Blackmore, personal continuity is a mirage because personal identity is an illusion.
“That’s ridiculous, Sue!” I want to shout, but I hesitate. Here’s what I know: If my mind is just my brain, the science drives me to agree with her that the self is unreal. I’d be discomforted by the loss of personal status, but not displeased because I’d know truth.
But suppose the mystery of personal identity is not so simply solved. Suppose it’s founded on wholly different principles. Could artificial intelligence provide clues? Futurist Ray Kurzweil asserts that nonbiological intelligences will soon dwarf human intelligence, and that this “singularity” can help reveal what the self is all about.
The binding together of all our sensations into personal identity, Kurzweil says, “is only coherent if you consider yourself to be an information structure, a pattern of information that persists. I like to use the metaphor of the pattern that water makes in the stream as it goes around rocks. That pattern can stay the same, hour after hour, maybe year after year, but the water is completely different every millisecond. But it does have some continuity: The pattern stays the same. That’s really a very good analogy to what we are. The particles [that constitute us] change very quickly. Our cells die and are rebuilt, reconstructed on a regular basis. So I’m not the same stuff I was a matter of days ago. But I am very similar to the pattern that I was. So we are not physical stuff. Our identity is a pattern of information.”
What does this imply about the identities of nonbiological intelligences of the future? Will they have a similar sense of personal identity? A pattern is a pattern!
“Yes,” Kurzweil says, “we’ll eventually be able to capture all of the salient details that constitute ‘me’ and re-create that entirety in another substrate, and that [entirety-in-another-substrate] will have a personality just like mine and will have an identity. Computers will be able to simulate individual minds. And I use the word ‘simulate’ advisedly because they really will be able to re-create all of the informational processes that take place in the human brain. So those will be the equivalent of human brains. And if we say we have an identity, then that will apply to these entities as well.”
At that point, will there be any residue of the human personality—residue of any kind—that is not represented in that nonbiological entity?
“I don’t think so,” Kurzweil responds. “I think we are sets of information. If one were to say ‘yes’ to your question, you’re positing either something nonmaterial or some new type of physics in which consciousness resides, and I don’t think that actually makes sense. I think consciousness is an emergent property of a complex system. If you could copy me and then find out it’s not quite right, well, that’s because you got it wrong. But if you get it right, the copy is going to be precisely like me, and if I’m conscious, then it will be too.”
But I wonder: If the copy of you is precisely like the original you at that instant, it’s there and you’re here, it’s conscious and you’re conscious, there must be something different! They can’t be absolutely identical because they have independent existences and are located at different places. If you have two entities in two separate places, even if both feel that they’re exactly the same thing, there has to be some difference between them.
“This is something we routinely accept with our computers,” Kurzweil says. “Your computer can die, but you can revive it from backups. And you can completely copy the personality of your computer onto another computer—we just take that for granted. … We see that as a mind-blowing idea when we think about human beings and our sense of identity, but we routinely accept that with our machines. That’s because we don’t think machines are at human levels. But they will get there. And we’ll accept this quandary as well.”
Kurzweil has his own conundrum. “The deepest mystery of consciousness that I wonder about,” he says, “is not how I’m conscious or is another entity conscious, but why I wake up every morning and I’m conscious of certain feelings. I’m hungry and I eat breakfast. I’m thinking about the day. I’m aware of a certain person’s experiences. Why am I aware of this particular person’s experiences? Why am I me? Why am I not some person in Ethiopia? It may seem like a silly question, but that’s what I wonder about.”
To Kurzweil, the self is a “pattern of information,” and thus there is no difference in fundamental principle between a human and a machine. His logic is sound. If the mind is only the brain, nonbiological intelligences will have minds that surpass human brains.
Should I despair? Me who would wish for something more, something beyond the inevitable corruption of body and brain?
What of the millions who believe that personal identity is maintained by independent nonphysical stuff, like souls or spirits? I could ask a theist, one who is scientifically literate.
Who could be better than a physicist who became a priest? It is the grand mission of the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne to bridge science and religion. He agrees with fellow scientists that patterns of information carry the self. But as to what follows, he diverges radically.
“One has to ask the question: Can you make credible understanding of a destiny beyond death for human beings?” he says. “And when you begin to think about that, you see it’s going to involve two different requirements. First is continuity. It really must be Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who will live again in the kingdom of heaven, not new characters given the old names for old time’s sake. Second is discontinuity. There must be differences since there’s not much point in making Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob alive again if they’re going to die again. So you have to have both continuity and discontinuity.”
Polkinghorne continues: “When you think about the continuity side of the thing, what could make those people the same people that lived before? The traditional answer has been the soul—and very often, it has been understood in Platonic terms: There’s some sort of spiritual bit of us liberated at death that continues to exist and carry on. I think that’s a mistake. I think we are psychosomatic unities. We are not apprentice angels. We are embodied human beings. And that, of course, is essentially what the Bible both in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament envisions human beings as being. So if we discard the idea of the ‘spiritual soul,’ have we lost our continuity? I don’t think so, but we will have to reconceive it.”
Polkinghorne admits his struggle. “In fact, it’s quite difficult to understand what’s the carrier of continuity for a person in this life,” he says. “Here am I, an aging, balding academic. What makes me the same person as the little boy with the shock of black hair in the school photograph of many years ago? It’s not atomic material continuity: The atoms in my body are totally different than the atoms in that schoolboy’s body. It must be the pattern in some extraordinary, elaborate, and complex sense in which those atoms are organized. And that’s what the human soul is: It is the information-bearing pattern which is the real me.”
What about life after death? Polkinghorne is a believer. “My pattern would, of course, dissolve with the decay of my body at death; but if I believe in the faithful God, as I do, it’s perfectly coherent to hope that God will remember my pattern and will reconstitute that pattern in an act of resurrection. So if I am truly to live again, I have to be re-embodied because that’s what I am as a human being. That’s the continuity side of things. The discontinuity side of things is that I’m not made alive again in order to die again, so I’m going to have to be embodied in some new form of matter. And I think it’s perfectly coherent to believe that God can bring into being such a new form of matter.”
To Polkinghorne, this “pattern of information”—this self—is the mechanism by which God, in whom he believes, can remember the person in order to resurrect the person.
Ah, resurrection. Let me assume for a moment that I believe in God: Would resurrection be the natural extension of personal continuity?
That’s a question for philosopher and believer Peter van Inwagen. I start by asking him whether we distinguish between a human person and a human organism.
“You certainly could,” van Inwagen says. “If you’re Rene Descartes, then you think that the human person is an immaterial thing that causes things to happen in the human organism, which he would call the human body. If you take the position that I take, the human person and the human organism are identical—I am the very same thing as the living organism that is right here.”
Van Inwagen supports his position with a thought experiment he calls the “duplication argument.” In science fiction, he says, the perfect duplicating machine creates as output atom-for-atom perfect with the original. “If we put a cheese sandwich there, I’m sure everybody will agree we’ll get a cheese sandwich that we could eat. What about a simple living thing like a bacterium? Would it wiggle around and be fluidlike? I should think so; a bacterium is nothing but a complicated biochemical machine. Now we can move up the biological hierarchy, the great chain of biological being—a beetle, a mouse, and so on. I would think the mouse would be alive and behave just like the original mouse. If you had taught the original mouse to find its way through a certain maze, the duplicate mouse ought to be just as good at doing that. In fact, nobody could tell the two mice apart.”
He now makes his point: “Then what happens if you put a human being there? I would think that you would get a human being that would believe that he was the original, that nobody—if it’s a man, not his wife, not his confessor, not his psychiatrist, not his best friend, nobody—could tell him from the original. If you consider the story and you do believe that that’s what the outcome is, then shouldn’t you, like me, say that the person was identical with the living organism?”
You’ve created two independent, physical personalities, I say.
“That’s right,” he says. “They are two different people. Certainly, if you stick a pin in one, only one of them feels pain. There are two people there now.”
I get back to the resurrection.
“Paul says that something survives, a bare kernel of the original person,” van Inwagen says. “And it seems to be something material. There’s no dualism in Paul. As I see it, that’s about the only thing that Revelation has to tell us on the subject. So I assume that an omnipotent being [God] somehow achieves some sort of material continuity between the dead person and the resurrected person which is identity preserving.”
This continuity must be more than just reconstituting atoms. But what else can be material if it’s not reconstituting atoms?
“There may be features to the material world that we don’t understand,” van Inwagen speculates. “Who knows what avenues are open to a material being? Maybe space and time are much different from what we think. I don’t see any reason to think that this is impossible.”
Personal identity, and its continuity across time, characterizes our selves. How could this work? Consider four ways.

1) The self is not real; it is an illusion of brain systems.
2) The self is real, but it’s a psychological construct—and still the self is just the brain.
3) There is a spiritual aspect to the self; something nonphysical is needed to make a self.
4) The self is a soul or spirit—the brain is mere mechanism.

Personally, I reject 1 and 4. The self is real, and the brain is crucial.
But is some nonphysical component also needed? I’ve wavered on this, and still I’m bothered.
As for an afterlife of the self, is this possible?

• No—if the self isn’t real.
• Yes—if the self is a soul or spirit (a story I’ve never believed).
• And yes, if God—if there is a God—resurrects the person.

That our personal identity is patterns of information seems clear. But can such patterns exist beyond brain death, whether in the hardware of computers or in the memory of God? For now, only the question—How do people maintain their identity?—is closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with Colin McGinn, Susan Blackmore, Ray Kurzweil, the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, and Peter van Inwagen in “How Do Persons Maintain Their Identity?”—the 24th episode in the new season of the Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series (63rd in total).
The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Thursday, participants will discuss the current episode.

P.S. Click here to visit our Closer to Truth archive.

What “time” is it? How much “time” does it take to buy groceries? Time seems so natural: the flow of moments, the knife’s-edge present, the indeterminable past, the unknowable future. Time—the absolute standard.
But what seems so natural and absolute is in reality not so. Einstein shocked the world by showing that time was relative. What does “relative” mean? What new ideas do scientists have about time? What’s real about time?
Gregory Benford, a physicist and science fiction writer, admits, “Time has always puzzled me. One of my first novels was called Timescape because I tried to write about time as a landscape in which you can move instead of being marched through. The plot is about how physicists are trying to study the problem of time because they discovered a way of propagating information back in time. Not people, just information. The whole novel is about what this discovery implies. Usually, science works by making a discovery or inventing something, and then later ascertaining the implications—and that’s a good way to structure a novel. So toward the end of the novel, the physicists discover that they have successfully conveyed information backward in time about a disaster that will happen in their future [which had already happened in the physicists’ world]. But they’re still living in the same world [in which the disaster already happened]. So what’s the answer? How is this possible? How can it be reconciled?”
Benford says, “The answer is that when the information went backward, it caused the universe to split into two threads, and in one of them, the disaster was averted. The physicists saved the world, but it’s the ‘other’ world, and they are still living in their own world in which the disaster occurred. So other people are much happier elsewhere—and that’s the physicists’ reward, even though they themselves are still stuck in the same world.”
Benford explains that “according to the laws of the universe, particularly general relativity, one can, in principle, propagate information backward in time, and yet one never sees it happening. And the answer is quantum mechanics, which splits reality into branching universes.”
He speculates on the philosophical implications. “To me, this is the universe’s way of saying ‘nice try, but no cigar,’” he says. “The universe is set up in such a way that these things are not only conceivable, you can actually do them—but still you cannot change your world. And this is the deep lesson of reality: Even when you become God-like in that you are actually and literally creating a universe, you still don’t get to live there.”
How significant is it that, apparently, we have one dimension of time and three of space? “Are there universes in which there is no time?” Benford responds. “I guess the stand-up answer would be ‘yes, but not much happens there.’ You can conceive of a universe in which there are two axes of time. This would mean that you could make loops in time. You could create paradoxes immediately; it’d be no problem at all. How would such a universe function? You would have to abandon causality. There would be laws, but you could always go back and rig the results. What kind of universe is that? It’s not one where I would want to live—a universe with infinite many plot lines. Scary!”
Thus, it would seem that time being limited to one dimension is what gives the universe its intelligibility.
“Remember, we emerged from the universe,” Benford says. “We evolved in this universe, and the only way we could do so was that it had to make sense. Could creatures evolve in a universe with two axes of time? Well, they couldn’t be like us. This is a good example of something that’s beyond our conceptual horizon. We literally cannot conceive of such a world because it would literally make no sense. And maybe a universe with two time axes doesn’t exist because even God couldn’t figure it out.”
So time is not the static backdrop of events, but rather something active and dynamic. How does time happen? Can time expand and contract?
Kip Thorne, an expert on Einstein’s theory of relativity and the warping of the universe, explains that when time ticks, “what I see is not always what you see.”
How can that be?
“Galileo, Newton, and all of the great scientists before the 20th century thought of space and time as absolute and having no real intimate connection,” Thorne says. “But Einstein taught us otherwise. Einstein’s great insight in 1905 was to recognize that space and time are personal. Your time flows at one rate, my time flows at a different rate; you may see a space I may see as a mixture of space and time. In a very precise sense, it’s hard to grasp.”
Thorne likes to begin with time. “Einstein’s special relativity and general relativity tell us that if you move at a high speed past me and I watch clocks that you carry, those clocks will appear to me to tick more slowly than my clocks tick. But at the same time, you’re going past me, and of course you see me moving relative to you; you look at my clocks, you see my clocks tick slower than yours. So I see your clocks tick slower, and you see my clocks tick slower. It’s crazy!”
It sounds impossible. “It’s crazy,” Thorne repeats, “but it’s not impossible. It is possible because what you regard as two simultaneous events, occurring at the same time but at different locations in space, I don’t see as simultaneous. If you have two firecrackers and you carry them with you and you move at high speed and you set them off simultaneously, measurements that I make will show the firecracker in the back go off first, the firecracker in the front go off afterward. So there are weird things in how time seems to behave in simultaneity.”
The critical factor here is the absolute, inviolable standardization of the speed of light, which was Einstein’s great insight in his special theory of relativity. “Einstein intuited that the speed of light will be the same as measured by everyone, no matter how they move through the universe,” Thorne explains. “Now, in reality, if you go deeply into the philosophy of science, what’s really going on here, Einstein says, if you define the rate and flow of time in a manner that makes the laws of physics look simple—so that, for example, time is ticked in a regular way by atomic clocks, as atoms vibrate—then, having made that choice, the speed of light is the same as seen by everybody, which means that time is personal and that space is personal. It’s a very deep insight.”
The way this works is that, taken together, time and space are, in a sense, absolute, but each, taken alone, can vary. What this means, in a sense, is that what seems like time to me may seem like space to you, and vice versa.
Thorne says, “When Einstein recognized this weird behavior in space and time, the word he used was ‘relative.’ I prefer ‘personal.’ They are relative to you or relative to me. And that’s where the name ‘relativity’ comes from. Actually, it was one of Einstein’s teachers, Hermann Minkowski, who looked at Einstein’s laws and said, ‘I can write these laws in a much more beautiful mathematical form if I regard space and time as unified into a single thing called “space-time.”’ And this space-time, then, has four dimensions: one dimension of time and three dimensions of space. And I can formulate this unification in such a way that I can understand the personal nature of space, the personal nature of time, by envisioning, in some sense, slicing through space-time, so that each observer takes a different three-dimensional surface in space-time. What you take is different from what I take [though unobservable until relative velocities approach the speed of light]. But, taken together, there is a unified space and time. This means that we have the universe’s entire future history, its entire past history, all of space going throughout the universe, all of space and time—and each point in this four-dimensional structure, one dimension of time and three dimensions of space, is an event.”
Thorne continues: “If I think of time as going upward, the birth of Abraham Lincoln occurred down here; his death occurred up there. During his life, he went through space-time, through this ‘block universe’ where each point represents an event in space-time. With space and time unified, we describe his life in this geometric way by a curve in this four-dimensional space-time block universe.”
However, there is a difference between space directions and time directions, Thorne says. “They are distinguished in that you can always go out in space and come back. You can always go forward in time, but you can never come back. Time has this inexorable flow in the forward direction,” he explains. “So it’s a very rich block universe with these different kinds of behaviors.”
I ask Thorne if the future is really already “there.”
“In the block universe, as I step back and think about it, mathematically and geometrically, it’s already there,” he says. “The entire universe is there: the beginning, the end (if there is an end). It’s a little fuzzy in my mind because I don’t know what’s up there at the end, whereas I think I know what’s at the beginning. We do something like this all the time. In a novel, the whole story is there! It’s in the book; from beginning to end, it’s all there—but as you read it through, you feel the flow, you feel that it’s all in front of you. Everyone who lives in this block universe feels the flow of time from past to future, but I, as a physicist looking in from the outside, just see it as a unified entity.”
So, space and time, taken together, are absolute. But taken separately, space and time are relative. Thorne says “personal”—space and time are personal. We each have our own personal space and time, based on our relative movement (relative to each other).
I hear that what happens in particle physics—at extremely small distances—“dooms” space-time.
Nima Arkani-Hamed, an innovative string theorist, explains that “space-time is doomed as an elementary consequence of the existence of both quantum mechanics and gravity. If you think space-time is something real, then you should be able to meaningfully talk about separations of space and separations of time, of any arbitrary amount that you like. So we can talk about separations of time in seconds and separations of space in meters, but you should also be able to talk about arbitrarily short times and arbitrarily short distances, and we know that that’s impossible because of gravity. Because if we try to probe very, very tiny distances, we have to use a lot of energy (by the uncertainty principle), and when we get to tiny enough distances, we have to use so much energy that we collapse the little region of space-time that we’re trying to look at into a black hole, and that makes it impossible to probe what’s going on in that region.”
Black holes would form due to E=mc², Einstein’s famous equation, which shows that with the enormous energy comes sufficiently dense mass to collapse the mass-energy in the area and warp space-time. “It becomes impossible to see the region you were trying to look at,” Arkani-Hamed reiterates. “So this is a very simple thought experiment that takes together the two basic ingredients, quantum mechanics and gravity, to discover that it’s simply impossible to make sense of space and time separations that are smaller than a very tiny amount. The distances we’re talking about are the Planck length, 10^-33 centimeters, and the Planck time, 10^-43 seconds. Just from this simple argument, we know that space and time can’t really make sense because we can’t talk about arbitrary separations in space or time.”
This would mean that neither space nor time is continuous. There’s some sort of a separation or discreteness. But does this mean that space and time become quantized with discrete elements, just like electromagnetic radiation with its photons?
“That is the most naïve sort of idea for what might be happening,” Arkani-Hamed responds, “but there are approaches to quantum gravity which take that naïve idea very seriously. It’s very hard to lay down some kind of discrete latticelike structure on space in a way that’s compatible with the laws of relativity. So it’s not that. It isn’t that there are some particlelike elements of space and time; there’s something much more subtle and interesting going on.”
One “amazing idea,” he says, is how “holography can begin to give us a more radical idea of how this discreteness happens.” Holography, he explains, is where three-dimensional information is encoded in a two-dimensional hologram (so a drastically smaller number of bits of information are needed). This means that the required information to specify a space, he says, is related to “the boundary surface of the space, not to the volume of the space. It’s completely counterintuitive.”
Arkani-Hamed concludes that, “Without understanding emergent space-time, we don’t know how to address any of the really fundamental questions that quantum mechanics and gravity were supposed to address: What happens at the center of black holes? What is the origin of the universe? Emergent time is a clear intellectual bottleneck.”
That space and time are emergent means that they are not fundamentally existent, but form out of something deeper. Something deeper than space and time? What could that be? How far can this go?
Lee Smolin, an innovative and controversial physicist, suggests that reimagining time is key for explaining everything. “Here’s the big question,” he says: “Is space an arena in which things happen, in which things come on and off? Or is there no arena; is space just a network of relationships? If the whole universe entirely were moved 10 meters to the left, would it matter? Does it even mean something to say that because no relationships would change? Newton said, ‘Yes, it would mean something.’ Leibniz said, ‘No, it’s even wrong to ask the question because there’s no discernible difference between the universe here and the universe 10 meters to the left.’ This very question of whether space is an absolute background or whether space is an aspect of reality that grows out of a network of relationships of causality is the fundamental question that has been around for 400 years.”
Smolin focuses on causal relationships, which can only involve events whose relative velocities are slower than the speed of light. He says, “The interesting thing is that if you write down a list of all the causal relations between all the events in the universe, you describe the geometry of space-time almost completely. There’s still some information that you have to put in, such as counting how many events take place, but then you have everything.”
Smolin believes that events themselves create the concept of space. “And that’s not just metaphor,” he says. “It’s the best way of understanding Einstein’s theory of general relativity. If you follow this point of view, then causality is the fundamental aspect of time; our experience with the flow of time is a product of that, a derivative of that.”
He continues: “For me, this is one of the profound issues: Is time really fundamental, so that it’s the one thing that’s not emergent? Or is time somehow emergent or a consequence of other things. Personally, I’m thinking more and more in the direction that time is fundamental, that it’s not emergent.”
Is Smolin differentiating time from space, teasing them apart?
Yes, he says.
Sounds quite radical.
“Sure it is,” he replies, “but maybe it’s also the most conservative solution to a set of conundrums that we face when we try to bring together quantum theory and gravity because the other alternative is that time goes away completely, that time is emergent, which would mean that the world is nothing but a vast collection of disconnected moments, with not necessarily any relation among them. The relationship between time and causality would dissolve. There comes a moment where you say, ‘Do we really have a technical problem, or do we just have a conceptual misunderstanding?’ and that’s what I think about time.”
Everyone feels time. No one knows time. The hidden metronome of happenings that seems to beat out the intervals of the cosmos and life belies the cryptic complexity of time. What’s real about time?
Einstein showed that time and space are not absolute. Separately, each is relative, personal. Collectively, they form a fundamental unity. Time energizes the core of reality, marks events, constructs the cosmos.
Some say that time is not real; it’s an illusion of events. Others say that time, not space, is most fundamental. Is time continuous or discrete? Or emergent in some strange new way?
As British biologist J.B.S. Haldane famously said, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” It’s time to get closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with Gregory Benford, Kip Thorne, Nima Arkani-Hamed, and Lee Smolin in “What’s Real About Time?”—the 23rd episode in the new season of the Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series (62nd in total).
The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Thursday, participants will discuss the current episode.

P.S. Click here to visit our Closer to Truth archive.

I want to believe in God, but “religion” stops me. I hope God has less to do with religion, and religion with God, than we usually think.
Some claim that religion needs nothing supernatural, that religion, without God, can form and flourish. To others, the claim is blasphemous: God exists and religion is God’s revelation. All agree that religion affects humanity profoundly.
Why is religion a force so powerful? Even those who believe in God should understand how personal psychology and group sociology drive religion.
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s book Breaking The Spell describes religion as a “natural phenomenon.” No one naturalizes religion better than Dennett, who defines it succinctly as “belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” He suggests that, “the question of whether God exists is actually of less importance to the modern world than maybe it once was.”
Dennett encourages us “to think not just historically, but biologically or evolutionarily.” He says, “We have to realize that Homo sapiens—us—descended from earlier hominids; we share a common ancestry with chimpanzees going back about 6 million years. Can we see what religion adds to the mix that makes us so different from all other animals?”
He thinks that we can. “I think we can discern religion’s origins in superstition, which grew out of an overactive adoption of the intentional stance,” he says. “This is a mammalian feature that we share with, say, dogs. If your dog hears the thud of snow falling off the roof and jumps up and barks, the dog is in effect asking, ‘Who’s there?’ not, ‘What’s that?’ The dog is assuming there’s an agent causing the thud. It might be a dangerous agent. The assumption is that when something surprising, unexpected, puzzling happens, treat it as an agent until you learn otherwise. That’s the intentional stance. It’s instinctive.”
The intentional stance is appropriate for self-protection, Dennett explains, and “it’s on a hair trigger. You can’t afford to wait around. You want to have a lot of false positive, a lot of false alarms [because you can’t afford even one false negative!]”
He continues: “Now, the dog just goes back to sleep after a minute. But we, because we have language, we mull it over in our heads and pretty soon we’ve conjured up a hallucinated agent, say, a little forest god or a talking tree or an elf or something ghostly that made that noise. Generally, those are just harmless little quirks that we soon forget. But every now and then, one comes along that has a little bit more staying power. It’s sort of unforgettable. And so it grows. And we share it with a neighbor. And the neighbor says, ‘What do you mean, a talking tree? There’s no talking trees.’ And you say, ‘I could have sworn that tree was talking.’ Pretty soon, the whole village is talking about the talking tree. The talking tree idea has entered the world. It has made multiple copies of itself. Everyone in the village has a copy of the talking tree idea. What’s it for? It’s for itself. It just happened because it could. It’s like a virus.”
He goes on: “When I first started studying religion, people said, ‘Oh, an evolutionary account of religion. What do you think religions are good for, Dan? They’ve got to be good for something [for evolution to have selected it for propagation]. After all, every human group that’s ever been studied has some kind of religion.’ And I said, ‘Every group that’s ever been studied has the common cold, too. What’s it good for? It’s good for itself. Similarly, these ideas are just good for themselves. They’re good at reproducing in minds.’ They start out, as it were, as wild superstitions that happen just because they can. They enter through cracks in our cognitive machinery. Then, they’re around; they can be used. People begin appreciating them; people begin to use them for other purposes—and now we’re on our way to organized religion. And the ones that we see today, the ones which have the big budgets and the big churches, the musical histories and all the rest, those are the hardy survivors of a very large competition.”
Dennett says that, “If we think about all the features of religions from an evolutionary point of view, we see lots of ‘design’ features that are otherwise a bit baffling. Were they consciously, deliberately designed by clever priests? For the most part, no. It’s just that the religions that happen to have this ‘mutation’ did better than the religions that didn’t. And so they were better able to spread themselves.”
To Dennett, religion is explainable by modern methods of social science. And there’s no residual, nothing left hanging: There’s no need, or room, for God.
I like his arguments; I buy them all. But still I wonder: Even if religion as we know it, particularly organized religion, is entirely of human origin, does it then follow that there is no God?
I speak with a theologian who appreciates religion as a social construct, but also believes in God. J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, an expert on “theological anthropology,” seeks ancient origins of religion. The core of religion, he says, is “how to make sense of our own vulnerability of death and suffering,” and religion provides “great incentives for ethical behavior … in spite of the many harms it has done.”
To van Huyssteen, “God is always going to be a deeply personal commitment.” He agrees that “we can make strong scientific arguments why religion can function perfectly well without God” and that “for getting God back into the picture, science is not going to be helpful.” And he is “deeply impressed and overwhelmed by science,” he says, “but at the same time, do I need to accept that empirical methodology should always have the absolute last word in explaining away religion? Science has no reach beyond the empiricism that it itself professes.”
This is indeed the core issue: In seeking ultimate truth, can we ever be epistemically justified in going beyond empiricism?
Van Huyssteen argues that “a very clear commitment to religious traditions and to the kind of God or gods that we believe in is not something that ordinary science, such as evolutionary psychology, can explain to me.”
On the other hand, he does not argue that “the more we find religion, the more likely for God to exist.” He admits that even though “our ancient ancestors had a clear sense of symbolic activity, ritual, religious faith,” this is not a good argument for the existence of God. Similarly, he says “people today, the world over, are still religious, and this, too, is not a good argument for God”—“but it is an argument for what it is that we humans, or most of us, feel we need,” he adds. He then says, “I’m willing to prune back all kinds of excessive or extravagant beliefs, but I don’t think this goes to the heart of the spiritual sense, which I find to be so important for many people.”
Van Huyssteen agrees with Dennett that religious belief is a natural and continuing human need. But they part ways in that van Huyssteen gives credence to the content of that belief, which, at its core, is a deeply personal connection to the divine. But to do so, he must reach beyond empiricism, venture beyond science.
To psychologist Susan Blackmore, that’s an egregious error. She is an expert on how certain cultural ideas, called “memes,” can grow and propagate and take hold of people’s minds. She proffers that religion originated with early cultures wanting control over an uncontrollable world. “Our ancestors invented spirits,” she says, “to explain the weather or certain events. That’s the ground of it all, and at some point, there were competing ideas about God—competing memes (which is any information that’s copied from person to person). The idea is to treat cultural products like biological products, all of them in competition. Take songs and jokes and playground games and clothes: The ones we know are the ones that won the competition.”
She continues: “Religions are like that, too. They compete to infect people’s brains and thus propagate into more people. What makes a successful religion? Originally, perhaps, one that seemed to bring the rain. But at some point, we started some major religions which evolved to have some really, really nasty tricks. So if you look at the major religions on the planet today, particularly the Judeo-Christian traditions, you see the most incredibly well-evolved complexes of memes that hang out together.”
Blackmore takes Christianity’s story of Jesus, from virgin birth to resurrection from the dead, as an example of “intrinsically unbelievable things.” Why do people go around believing these things, then? The “very clever packaging,” she answers, which is “basically a ‘copy me’ instruction backed up with threats and promises. If you’re a Catholic, you have to learn the catechism all at once. You put on your white dress, you attend the ceremonies, keep the traditions. This discourages people from picking and choosing because once you start to pick and choose, then memes loose their power. If ordinary rationality enters, these things look ludicrous, don’t they?”
Blackmore continues: “You are infected with these ideas when very young, when you have almost no mental immunity, no skills of argument—and it’s heaven if you believe and pass on these ideas to other people, and it’s the hell of toasting forks and pits of sulfur if you don’t. It’s the same in Islam: If you die propagating these memes, you’ll get so many virgins (I don’t know what women get).”
She explains that, “religious memes are very infectious. There’s room for only one per brain because it encompasses and regulates so much of one’s life. It takes over a whole lot of jobs in your brain—giving you meaning in life, a reason to get up in the morning, a social life. Once you understand how the memes of religion work, you can see the awful effects they have on people and how difficult they are to get rid of.” She concludes with her hope: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just let go of believing in those daft things?”
Blackmore sees religion as almost all bad—founded on false, silly promises and empty, vile threats. But because religion is empowered by memes—these infectious, parasitic ideas that lock minds and control belief—it can commandeer belief systems, institutionalize itself, and jump generations.
To explain religion without God, memes are crucial, so I’ll put them to the test. Because memes are analogized to viruses, I speak with Denis Alexander, a biologist and a believer. How does he defend religion against the explanatory onslaught of memes?
“The meme metaphor has no substrate,” Alexander says. “We don’t actually absorb ideas, especially complex ideas, as a sort of viral invasion of our brains. The anti-religious rhetoric of the memologists seems kind of like medieval ideas of demonology when people kept their windows closed for fear that demons would come in, infect their brain, and do terrible things to them without their knowing. But in reality, we have beliefs that we have to justify, that we have to give reasons for. And that’s why the memes rhetoric doesn’t work for me.”
Alexander admits that religion does fulfill psychological and sociological needs. “We are social animals,” he says. “When a bunch of skeptics and atheists get together to listen to a well-known speaker supporting their skepticism and their atheism, they’ll have group cohesion, they’ll feel good about it, they depart with their belief supported, they feel happier—their atheism has been nurtured by the group. It’s the same when football fans go to a football match. And when people go to church, the same processes are going on. But so what? At the end of the day, none of that tells us about the true status of what’s really going on.”
So whereas religion can be explained without God, the question is: Even though you are explaining it, could there still be a fundamental reality to it?
“All we can do is to give descriptions,” Alexander says. “We, as scientists, can measure the brainwaves of religious believers, but that doesn’t tell us whether those beliefs are actually true or not. We could do similarly with scientists. We could hook them up, observe their brainwaves, but that wouldn’t tell us whether their scientific theories are true. Truth is based on different kinds of evidence, whether for scientists or religious believers.”
A Christian and a scientist, Alexander agrees that the methods of science can analyze the activities of religion, but disagrees that the findings of science can adjudicate the reality of religion.
As for me, I respect the clarity of categories, differentiating religious behaviors from transcendent truths. But this internal consistency, which generally I like, here shields religion from any assault, making religion impossible to challenge. That I don’t like. Anything impervious to scrutiny troubles me. So in my anxiety, I turn to my favorite skeptic.
Michael Shermer is an expert on belief systems. “Religion is a social institution,” he says. “It can be explained like any other social institution, political institution, or economic institution. It’s just in that same category. You can believe that and still believe in God.”
He continues: “Where it gets interesting is to examine the reason for religion. What purpose does it serve? Here’s where we begin to see human construction, not only of religion, but of gods. To me, there’s just overwhelming evidence that humans constructed all of this, religion and God, as a belief system. Humans have what I call a ‘belief engine’—modules in the brain whose function it is to find causal connections between things in the environment. It’s called learning. Everybody does it. You have to do it to survive. All animals do it. We do it spectacularly well.”
But, he says, “not perfectly well. We are pattern-seeking animals—for example, keeping track of when migrating herds were going to return next year and when the fruit was going to be ripe. Those are patterns that help us survive. However, we also sometimes find patterns that don’t really exist. These are sort of false positives, superstitions. Maybe I believe that if I twirl around three times clockwise and twice counterclockwise, the rain gods will spare us the lightning. So a tendency toward superstition—‘magical thinking,’ we call it—is part of the baggage of being a pattern-seeking animal.”
I ask Shermer why, as science expands and religion contracts in their respective capacities to explain the world, the power of religion is still strong.
“Because the primary function of religion is not to explain the natural world,” he answers. “It is mainly a social institution. People don’t go to churches, temples, or mosques to hear a lecture about the big bang. They go for some other reason—for family, society, social group, often to hear a message of inspiration about helping other people, doing the right thing, avoiding sin, and so on.”
As for the future of religion, Shermer worries about “the negative side of religion and its intermixing with politics and social policy.” He says: “I don’t care what gods people believe in. I’m happy for them if that makes them happy.”
“In a patronizing way?” I ask my friend.
“No. In a respectful way,” he answers. “Because, ultimately, I can’t prove that my beliefs are absolutely true either. So, hey, you believe what you believe, I believe what I believe, let’s go our separate ways, and can’t we all get along?”
Go 10,000 years into the future, or 100,000 years. Assuming humans are reasonably similar, does Shermer see religion still existing in something akin to its current form?
“Yes, probably so,” he responds. “My secular humanist friends would disagree with me and say, ‘Oh, no! Someday we’ll move beyond religion.’ Yeah, well, maybe. But it sure doesn’t look that way. The trend is going in the opposite direction.”
Here’s my take. Religion, all of it, can be explained without God; nothing supernatural is needed. I’ve not much doubt about this. To account for religious beliefs and behaviors, even those who believe in God should accept this demonstrable truth.
While arguments about God are philosophical and cosmological, those about religion are biological, psychological, and sociological. Thus, the methods of science can analyze religion.
But is there residue? After doing all the science, does anything religious remain? This is the ultimate crux of the matter.
Frankly, I can hope, but I don’t know. This I do know: Even after explaining religion without God, nothing follows regarding the potential existence of an actual God. No analysis of human religion can ever disconfirm a supreme being.
Conversely, anyone hoping to convince me that God exists should not hold up “religions of the world” as an affirmative argument. For me, institutional religion offers scant help for coming closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with Daniel Dennett, J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, Susan Blackmore, Denis Alexander, and Michael Shermer in “Can Religion Be Explained Without God?”—the 22nd episode in the new season of the Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series (61st in total).
The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Thursday, participants will discuss the current episode.

P.S. Click here to visit our Closer to Truth archive.

I am haunted by consciousness: the great mystery of inner awareness, seemingly so commonplace, truly so astounding. When science finally finishes the puzzle of the universe, the riddle of consciousness, many believe, will remain largely unsolved.
I search for consciousness. Where to find it? Humans, obviously (though some, like solipsists, may not be sure). Animals? Which animals? Chimps, elephants, dolphins, dogs? Termites, snails, amoeba, bacteria?
What about nonbiological intelligences? Super-parallel, supercomputers of the future?
What things are conscious?
I start with science and naturalism, then seek some speculation, even a bit of the bizarre.
I ask philosopher John Searle, a strong advocate of “biological naturalism,” what is conscious.
“The principle on which one would decide is this,” he says: “Does the mechanism in question have relevantly equal casual power to the brain to cause consciousness? We’re pretty confident about primates and indeed mammals. I don’t really have any doubt that my dog is conscious. It’s often said that’s because he behaves as if he were conscious. I don’t think that’s the reason. I might make a mechanical dog that behaved as if it were conscious; well, I would know that it wasn’t conscious. The reason I’m confident that Gilbert, my dog, is conscious is because I know he has the relevant consciousness-producing mechanisms. No fancy dog neurophysiology is involved in this. I can see those are his eyes and those are his ears and this is his skin—look what happens when you pinch his skin.”
Searle continues: “At a first glance, we go on behavior; that’s our first clue. But what we really want to know is: What is the underlying mechanism of consciousness? And we don’t know enough about how the brain does it to know how far down the phylogenetic scale that consciousness goes.”
Is consciousness a gradient or are we dealing with a step function that at some point cuts off?
“There is a rheostatic feature to consciousness; there are different degrees of consciousness,” Searle says. “It can be more or less intense, like a light can be more or less bright. We know this from our own experience, such as the difference between being fully awake and alert and drifting off to sleep. But the rheostat also has an on/off switch that shows itself when we are totally unconscious. As for chairs and tables, they are totally unconscious—they’re not candidates.”
How to decide what’s conscious? “I’ll give you a test,” Searle responds. “Suppose that we had a perfect science of brain, so we know exactly how the brain produces consciousness, and suppose we found that consciousness-producing mechanism in all of the higher animals, so that we’re pretty confident that mechanism is sufficient for consciousness. We could then investigate really small animals, say, termites and snails, to search for that same (or similar) conscious-producing mechanism. If the requisite neurobiology exists in snails but not in termites, then that is evidence that snails are conscious but termites are not.”
He goes on: “Notice that you don’t have to have neurons in order to have consciousness. It’s like saying you don’t have to have feathers in order to fly. You can build a flying machine without feathers, but you must have enough causal power that you share with birds to overcome the force of gravity and the earth’s atmosphere. Analogously, if you build a consciousness machine, maybe you don’t have to have neurons—we just don’t know. Maybe neurons are like feathers: They help us be conscious, but they are not necessary for the production of the processes itself. But you would have to know that the system did have an equivalent causal power to produce consciousness. I see no obstacle in principle to producing a conscious machine because we are all conscious machines.”
To Searle, brains have a “consciousness-producing mechanism” that is sufficient, but perhaps not necessary, to generate consciousness. (“Sufficient” means that wherever the mechanism occurs—such as in biological brains—it will produce consciousness. “Not necessary” means that there could be other ways—in addition to biological brains—for consciousness to come about.)
Futurist Ray Kurzweil envisions other ways. “Nonbiological intelligences,” he says, “will far surpass human intelligence.” But will “nonbiological intelligences” be conscious with inner phenomenological awareness? That’s the question!
I ask Kurzweil: What things are conscious?
“Fundamentally, it’s not a scientific question,” he says. “We can talk scientifically about the neurological correlates of consciousness, but fundamentally, consciousness is this subjective experience that only I can experience. So I should only talk about it in first-person terms. Now, I’ve been sufficiently socialized to accept that other people are conscious, if they appear conscious. But my own consciousness is only aware of itself. There’s no way to measure the conscious experiences of another entity.”
He continues: “To go beyond that, I’d have to say consciousness is an emergent property. We’re not going to find a center of consciousness in the brain. I think an entity that is sufficiently complex and rich to embody the kind of phenomena that occur in the human brain will act in a way that’s conscious. It will talk about its own consciousness and its own feelings, and it will argue about consciousness just the way you and I are doing now.”
I ask Kurzweil if he is bifurcating the problem of consciousness into “apparent or behavioral consciousness,” where something acts as if it’s conscious, and “subjective or inner consciousness,” which is the private internal feeling that I am self-aware, a sense that only I can have.
“Then we have to make a philosophical judgment,” Kurzweil responds. “This really stands outside of science, but I do think it is an important judgment to make. And I do make the judgment that ‘apparently conscious’ entities are conscious. Animals, some of them, higher-order animals, certainly appear to be conscious. Maybe you can say that’s human-centric because we say they are conscious when they are exhibiting humanlike emotions, like protecting their young or showing fear, so we can empathize with them, but I do make the jump that if something appears to be conscious, I’ll accept that it is conscious. We’re hardwired to do this; we have these empathetic reactions.”
Kurzweil famously says that when nonbiological systems become sufficiently complex, they will be indistinguishable from conscious beings, leaving aside the question of whether there is true inner experience. “I would accept that they’re conscious,” he reiterates. “And that’ll be convenient anyway because they’ll get mad at me if I don’t.”
I don’t give up exploring the bifurcation between apparent consciousness and inner awareness.
Kurzweil responds: “If you limit yourself to science, which is objective observation, then there is a difference because while I can observe some other entity doing intelligent tasks (i.e., answering questions in a way indistinguishable from a human), I cannot know whether it is feeling something inside. I can’t experience that. I can only experience my own feelings. It’s a philosophical issue. So if you ask me what is my philosophy, I’d say, yes, I think other human beings are conscious and do have feelings, and by extension, therefore, if a machine exhibits human-level intelligence (i.e., passes the Turing Test), I will accept that it has feelings as well.”
He adds: “I don’t think substrate really affects consciousness. We have information processes running in our brains. They happen to run on this biochemical substrate of neurons. You could run the same processes, once you understand them, on some other substrate, like a massively parallel computer. We will do that, I believe, and it doesn’t matter that it’s not running on a meat machine; it’s running on electronics or nanotubes. But if it’s similar kinds of processes, if you believe that human beings are conscious, which I do, we’ll have to accept that these [advanced] nonbiological systems are as well.”
Kurzweil is ready for machines to be conscious, although the judgment is philosophical, not scientific, he admits.
Am I ready for machine consciousness? Apparent consciousness, sure, passing every test. But real inner experience? I think not.
Why not? Am I guilty of “carbon bias”? Or deluded by desire for something beyond body and brain? “No” to the former; I don’t care. “Perhaps” to the latter; I admit I do hope.
To test the other side, I jump to the opposite worldview: How might a Christian philosopher assess what things are conscious?
J.P. Moreland, who unabashedly believes in souls and spirits, says, “Something either does or doesn’t have a soul, but our degree of certainty as to whether something has a soul lessens to the degree that the thing is less analogous to us. Let me explain. If I’m stuck with a pin, before I grimace and shout out, I’m aware, in my own case, of feeling pain. Now, I notice that you’re very similar to me, so I assume that when you’re stuck with a pin, while I can’t observe your feeling of pain before you grimace and shout out, I ascribe to you a state called a ‘pain state’ because it is similar to the one I have had under similar circumstances. Likewise, I ascribe to you a mind very much like mine.”
Moreland continues: “To the degree that a living organism’s behaviors, in light of their inputs, is different from ours, we are justified in ascribing a differing soul to that organism. Are frogs conscious? Sure they’re conscious. There’s good evidence that they feel pain and are able to see flies. There’s no evidence that they’re capable of forming concepts and thinking thoughts, however.”
So, I ask (with some trepidation), do frogs and great apes and all such animals have souls?
“Yes, they do,” Moreland asserts. “They would all have an immaterial substance that contains consciousness and animates their bodies and makes them living. But the degree of complexity, the number of ‘faculties’ in each living organism, would vary, depending on the organism itself.”
How far down the scale of life do you go? Does every expression of life have a soul? Take one-cell bacteria or amoebae, which react with their environment. We know they’re alive. Do they, too, have very, very, very simple kinds of souls?
“That’s right, they do,” Moreland says. “They’re not conscious, but you can’t explain the interaction of their parts mechanistically. You have to have a whole that is prior to the parts.”
Does this mean that, in his system, while simple life forms all have “souls”—whatever they may be—all do not have mind or consciousness, since this “faculty” is not existent at such very low levels of life?
“Exactly right,” Moreland says.
“You mean I understand this?” I exclaim, not sure whether I should feel proud or chagrined.
“I’m not sure I understand it,” Moreland laughs.
Moreland differentiates between a “soul”—which he claims animates all life—and “consciousness”—which he says is one of various “faculties of the soul” and which animals have in differing degrees of complexity.
We all bring bias to our work. Moreland derives his views on consciousness from his belief in the Bible. Although not supported by neuroscience, there’s a kind of internal consistency there.
But how about those whose spiritual vision requires a wide-angle lens?
Marilyn Schlitz, president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, says, “Consciousness is a whole. I see consciousness as a process of reflection and correction and calibration and emergence—an emergence toward something. There’s a telos about the manifestation of life. It’s the wholeness of the planet. It’s the wholeness of every living creature that acts in a mindful way. Consciousness is that frame of organization. Think about the tremendous diversity of life forms and how there are synergistic relationships among them. I see consciousness in the system. A colony of ants has a capacity to be conscious, as they work together toward a particular outcome. Ant behavior is very intentional.”
I ask how consciousness differs up and down the phylogenetic scale.
“Part of the narcissism of the Western worldview is the assumption that we’re on the top of some hierarchy,” Schlitz says.
“I feel that way,” I whisper.
“So you represent that!” she says with mock horror. “Me, on the other hand, I have a more humble view of myself.”
“Your humbleness is your arrogance,” I offer gently.
Brushing off my feeble attempt at humor, Schlitz puts this question to me: “If you were to accept the idea that cows have consciousness, wouldn’t that alter your behavior toward meat eating? You start to see that they’re very social and playful and engaging, and they love to frolic with one another—if they were smaller, they’d probably be household pets. But because our worldview sees humans as the conscious class, we have created a way in which we can then send cows to slaughterhouses and eat them, without any reflection on the atrocity that we’re committing to their consciousness.”
Now less hungry, I ask: How far down the chain of life do you go?
“There are different levels of consciousness, different complexities of consciousness,” Schlitz says. “I believe that any living form has some aspect of consciousness.”
Every single living thing conscious? Consciousness is the whole? Many share Schlitz’s worldview, melding ancient wisdom traditions, New Age mysticism, and modern science.
Frankly, it’s not my way of thinking. But that doesn’t much matter. Whatever expands the footprint of consciousness, I must give a second look.
There’s another view even more extreme. It’s called “panpsychism” and claims that everything has something of consciousness—inanimate as well as animate, rocks as well as rodents. Mind is everywhere.
Rupert Sheldrake, a biochemist turned parapsychologist, proffers some highly unorthodox theories, which are handily dismissed by mainstream science. He remains unruffled, claiming to see a deeper reality.
“I think we have to ask: What does consciousness do?” Sheldrake says. “It enables different possibilities to be held together and chosen among. Therefore, any system in nature which has possibilities that are not fixed would have some measure of consciousness. Consider the sun or the galaxy. If consciousness emerges from patterns of electrical activity in our brains, as most materialists assume, since the sun has vastly more complex patterns of electrical activity than our brains, why shouldn’t that too be associated with consciousness? Why shouldn’t the sun have a mind? And if the sun has a mind, why not all the stars? If all the stars have minds, what about huge collections of stars like galaxies, which have vast plasma currents of electricity surging through their arms and central regions, linking together all parts of it?”
“So you’re building a hierarchy of different kinds of consciousness?” I inquire. “Each one you believe to be truly consciousness—not metaphorically conscious, but really conscious?”
“Really conscious,” Sheldrake stresses. “And with the same kind of consciousness—I think all things that have consciousness are in the same state. They have a physical reality like a brain, a body, the sun, its electrical fields, rhythmic patterns. These always relate to future possibilities that are closely coupled to the system in the present. And it’s those future possibilities that are the realm in which consciousness operates. So consciousness is not like a mysterious entity that somehow comes in and is sort of dualistically welded on to a body for a while. No, consciousness is more like a cloud of future possibilities that surrounds every physical thing.”
He adds: “There are obvious differences in consciousness. Human consciousness differs from dog consciousness, and, well, Chinese consciousness differs from American consciousness. There may be many, many forms and levels of consciousness. Even atoms and molecules may have limited forms.”
“So you have a nesting of consciousnesses?” I ask.
“Nature is nested in its organization,” he says. “My body, like yours, contains organs—heart, lungs, and so forth. Those contain tissues, those contain cells, those contain molecules, those contain atoms. Nature is nested in its structure. Let nature sort out the collected minds, the larger group consciousness, and so forth.”
Does that make Sheldrake a panpsychic, imputing consciousness at some level or other to everything?
“Yes,” he admits, not defensively. “I think there’s some kind of mindlike aspect to almost everything, but not necessarily consciousness as we know it. Consciousness is about choice. It’s about choosing among possibilities. It’s about holding together possibilities. And it’s the meeting through which creativity can come into being. Remember that the whole of the universe is evolutionary. The whole of the universe is creative in that sense, where new things are happening. Where does such novelty come from? I think there’s a kind of consciousness at all levels in the universe, or some kind of mind.”
I can’t help recalling how Searle, like most philosophers, rejects panpsychism, refuting the idea that “proto-consciousness” resides in every particle. “I’ve heard that hypothesis before,” he says. “I think it’s hot air because you’ve got to know what’s meant by ‘proto consciousness.’”
So, scanning broadly, what things are conscious? Here are six categories, arrayed in a spectrum from ultra-exclusive human-centric to ultra-inclusive panpsychic.

1) Only human beings are truly conscious—a position often driven by religious belief in an exclusively human soul.

2) Only animals with large brains are conscious—primates, elephants, dolphins.

3) All animals are conscious—with differing degrees of consciousness.

4) All life of any kind is conscious in some way—plant or animal, single cell or multicell.

5) Computational systems of sufficient complexity can become conscious—this means nonbiological systems.

6) All that exists—nonliving as well as living—has a kind of consciousness; every particle has something of proto-consciousness.

There are two key questions:

• Is biology required for the inner-experience phenomenology of consciousness?

• Is human consciousness inherently unique or in any way special (this means the raw consciousness itself, not counting the accumulations of human culture)?

If the mystery of consciousness is ever to be solved, “what things are conscious” will be a clue. Consciousness is a shortcut, to get closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with John Searle, Ray Kurzweil, J.P. Moreland, Marilyn Schlitz, and Rupert Sheldrake in “What Things Are Conscious?”—the 21st episode in the new season of the Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series (60th in total).
The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Thursday, participants will discuss the current episode.

P.S. Click here to visit our Closer to Truth archive.

I am staggered by multiple universes. What? More than one universe? Isn’t the universe everything?
According to current cosmology, we live in an immense “multiverse”—a limitless ensemble of disconnected regions of space-time, each alone a “universe,” each alone exponentially larger than all we see with our largest telescopes, each alone with different laws of physics. And all together, unimaginably vast.
I am dizzy. What would multiple universes mean?
Max Tegmark, the scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi), which explores frontiers of physics and cosmology, explains that “our universe is just a finite region of space, so it’s not that crazy to imagine that there would be more. The simplest space is just the one that goes on forever, and that’s also what our simplest theory produces.”
In that theory, there are a vast number of different universes, perhaps an infinite number of different universes, each one formed from an earlier universe by being squeezed out in some way. “If one piece of space can generate more, then those are going to go on and do their own thing and, much like bacteria, just keep doubling, doubling, and doubling,” Tegmark says.
Space like bacteria, doubling without end? Nice metaphor, but is this poetry or reality?
“I really believe it’s real,” Tegmark says. “I’m amazed by the fact that not only do we have good evidence for some kind of parallel universes existing, but also there are many different kinds of parallel universes. It’s just shockingly difficult to write down a theory that describes everything we see in the universe and nothing more.”
He continues: “We have a very beautiful theory for why the universe is so big. It’s called ‘inflation,’ where a very small amount of space stretches out and produces more volume. The problem is this inflation never stops. Perpetual inflation generates infinite space.”
There are several ways to generate multiple universes, Tegmark says. Quantum mechanics can create multiple universes due to quantum branching of fundamental particles that make “choices” based on the probabilities that lie at the heart of quantum theory. In addition, he says, “modern string theory provides a vast number of possible solutions to its equations so that the best theory we have for what made space so big ends up making different parts of space, which are these other solutions.”
Tegmark goes further still. “Ultimately,” he says, “there might even be an even more extreme kind of parallel universe. Assume we can figure out a set of equations that can describe everything fundamental about this universe—equations you can print on a T-shirt. There’s probably a different universe for every such set of equations, for every kind of T-shirt.”
Multiple universes would change just about everything we thought we knew, and Tegmark poses at least four radically different kinds of multiple universes: cosmic inflation of space; quantum branching; string theory; and, wildly, innumerable sets of mathematic equations.
I stand stunned by the reach of reality. I seek meaning—the meaning of it all. But meaning seems swallowed by interminable spaces. And if there’s no meaning? I mustn’t fake it, or even force it.
Anthony Aguirre, a theoretical cosmologist and FQXi’s associate scientific director, says that if a multiverse really exists, “it would alter the nature of reality in the most fundamental way. The multiverse is not just much bigger, it’s also much more diverse, with each universe having different properties—which is even more exciting. It would change the way we think about almost every question in cosmology and fundamental physics.”
Aguirre relates the multiverse to the profoundly baffling question, “Why does our universe seem so hospitable to life?” He says: “If fundamental parameters were changed just a little—the strength of the electric interaction or of gravity—life as we know it could not happen. So how did we get so lucky? It could have just been that the universe rolled the dice and we landed 30 sixes in a row and here we are. That seems hard to swallow, so you look for other explanations. Could it be that life forms naturally in any sort of universe? That would be pretty exciting. It would mean that, at least in theory, there are wildly different life forms, based on totally different physics.”
Alternatively, he continues, “it could be that there was some element of design, some supernatural agent, that created the universe or some kind of natural beings who traveled back in time to create the universe or who create universes in their labs. That’s another set of options. Or it could be that the multiple universes are real, and they are hugely diverse, so that [it is not at all surprising] we live in just the place where we can live.”
What intrigues me about this question is that it’s hard to imagine additional categories of explanation, and it seems as if the categories we have are universally exhaustive—wild luck, different life forms based on different physics, some kind of design, and multiple universes conspiring with self-selection. In other words, every possibility that can exist we have in one of these categories. And every “ultimate explanation” feels literally unbelievable.
The most accepted mechanism for generating multiple universes is cosmic inflation. Alan Guth is its originator. What meaning does he find in multiple universes?
“One of the lessons that one learns early on when starting to think about cosmology is that the universe is unbelievably large and, by any comparison, we are unbelievably small,” Guth says. “And if this theory called ‘inflation’ is right, there are probably an uncountable number of ‘pocket universes,’ each of which is vastly larger than the universe we observe. In fact, the number is very likely infinite, which would mean that any importance that we have has to be importance that we give to our own lives. We can’t look to the cosmos to find importance of human civilization.”
I say to Guth: What has always astounded me, and what can literally make me quiver, is the fact that all of this knowledge has been achieved in less than 5,000 years of recorded history and in about 500 years of science. That’s less then an eye blink in the totality of universal time.
“I completely agree,” Guth says. “It’s mind-boggling how successful cosmology has been. After I first posed inflation back in 1980, we discovered in 1982 that inflation made definite predictions for the nonuniformities in the cosmic background radiation. At the time we were doing these calculations, we didn’t think there was any chance in the world that these very minute variations would ever be observed experimentally. Here’s why this seemed so hard. The temperature of the cosmic background radiation is 3 kelvins and the walls of this room are 300 kelvins, so it’s 100 times as hot in this room as the temperature of the cosmic background radiation. Now, the intensity of radiation is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature. This means that the intensity of the radiation coming off the wall is 100 million times more than the intensity of the radiation in the cosmic background radiation. Yet astronomers can detect this cosmic background radiation, and they can even detect variations in it that are on the order of one part in 100,000. And then to see that the measurements actually agree with the prediction of inflation theory is just astounding.”
I ask Guth about inflation’s timeframe, going back, not to the first second of the universe 13.7 billion years ago, but to a minuscule fraction of a second, 10^-37th to 10^-35th seconds to be astonishingly precise.
“When I started this,” he recalls, “it seemed absolutely absurd, but the origin of most of these absurd numbers comes from the grand unified theories of particle physics on which this cosmology is based.”
Another incredible fact: To understand the origin and structure of the entire universe, we need to understand the quantum mechanics of the smallest things in the universe, and vice versa! And these two ends of the size spectrum are separated by more than 60 orders of magnitude.
To me, Guth’s insight of cosmic inflation is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Ever! I’m stupefied by what one ordinary human being has discovered. It’s exhilarating to appreciate the power of human thought.
But how to get from cosmic inflation to multiple universes?
Andrei Linde devised eternal, chaotic inflation, showing how myriads of universes are generated without end. And he, too, wonders what’s it all about.
Linde explains how two dominant theories—multiple universes in cosmology and string theory in particle physics—work together. String theorists no longer expect a single, unique solution to their equations, he says: “In the string theory ‘landscape’ (meaning many, many different possibilities), there are at least 10^-500 possibilities or ‘vacua’—each of which could generate universes” (based on the different ways of “compactification” of the 11 or so dimensions of string theory).
Whereas most physicists believe that multiple universes cannot be verified, Linde points to what he considers to be experimental evidence: the correlation of our existence with the exquisitely specific requirements of the constants of physics, such as the mass of the electron. “If the electron mass would be two times larger or smaller, we would be dead,” he says. “Our life is correlated with this particular value. So then why is it so that we have all of these unexplained numbers with very strong correlations with our existence? The only theory that as of now explains this experimental fact is the multiverse theory.” Each universe has different values for the constants of physics, he explains, so that “you can try them out: You can try to live here, you can try to live there.” And whichever works, apparently, works.
To Linde, the deep meaning of multiple universes is that they explain the incredible fine-tuning of our single universe, the so-called “anthropic principle.” Yet innumerable universes seem a hefty price to pay for explaining the one universe in which we find ourselves.
And not every cosmologist is a convert. Paul Davies equates the multiverse theory with the “God theory”—which for him is not a compliment—because, he says, both theories account for this universe “by going outside of it.”
He says “the simplest thing is to try to explain the universe we see from entirely within it, without appealing to hypothetical entities that exist outside of it. The problem about multiple universes is not that such things are scientifically unreasonable. They’re very reasonable. But how on earth are we going to know about them?” Eternally expanding universes would be branching off and expanding faster than the speed of light, so even in principle, they could never be seen.
“The main objection to a multiverse is philosophical, not scientific, in that what you’re doing is trying to explain the universe we see by appealing to an infinite number of universes that we don’t see,” he says. To him, that “is no better than traditional theology, which simply states that there is an unexplained God outside of the universe that is necessary to explain what we see within the universe.”
It may be the case, he says, that “a proper mathematics analysis would find that the complexity of the explanation of the multiverse, which is an infinite number of universes we don’t see, is about the same as the complexity of the explanation of traditional theology, which is an infinitely complex God outside the universe that we don’t see. Multiverse and God are really the same thing in different languages. And so my point of view is ‘a plague on both your houses’; we need to try to find the explanation for the universe from within it, from what we see. We should not appeal to anything external; we should not multiply these unseen entities.”
Davies rejects the idea that “any universe you like is out there somewhere. I think such an idea is just ridiculous and it explains nothing. Having all possible universes is not an explanation because by invoking everything, you explain nothing.”
So no multiverse, no God. OK, Paul, then what?
If multiple universes are real, an infinite number of universes, everything changes. Whatever you believe—no God, God—nothing‘s the same. If only the material world exists, the material world is inconceivably larger. If an infinite God exists, God’s infinity is amplified by astounding new meaning.
If multiple universes are real, Guth and Linde will be lauded as discoverers for all future history. Yet they are normal people. Normal people on an ordinary planet. Normal people envisioning multiple universes. Normal people seeing shadows of infinity.
I can’t imagine anything closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with Max Tegmark, Anthony Aguirre, Alan Guth, Andre Linde, and Paul Davies in “What Do Multiple Universes Mean?”—the 20th episode in the new season of the Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series (59th in total).
The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Thursday, participants will discuss the current episode.

P.S. Click here to visit our Closer to Truth archive.

If God exists, then God created everything. That’s the big idea, right? That’s what most people believe. But I’m bothered by questions.
Did God create out of “nothing”? Absolutely nothing? If so, what is absolutely nothing?
Suppose there was no beginning to the cosmos—the universe is a “steady state” or goes through endless cycles—what then?
How about the rules of logic? Or the existence of numbers, like 2 or 5? Philosophers call these “abstract objects”—and they seem to exist without any cause, not needing any creator.
So what does it mean to say God is the creator?
Christian philosopher William Lane Craig defines “the doctrine of creation” as meaning that “God is the source of all reality outside himself, that apart from God everything else has been brought into being by God.”
How does Craig define “everything else?” It would be “all physical concrete objects, and time and space as well,” he says. “It would also be any realms of spiritual realities that you might believe exist, such as angels and other spiritual beings. And it would include any sort of abstract objects, such as sets and numbers and propositions, if you think that those sorts of things exist. The primary point is that everything that exists owes its being to God and was brought into being by God at a specific time, which implies that the creation of the world or reality outside of God has not always existed.”
Craig adds that, “Most people don’t understand that the idea of creation is inherently bound up with temporal considerations. These things are not just dependent upon God for their being, but they were brought into being by God. Creation, as I’ve defined it, is bringing things into being from nothing.”
He continues: “Now in addition to that initial act of creation, theologians have typically talked about God’s conservation of the world in being; that is, he preserves all things in being. And were he to withdraw his conserving power, the world would be annihilated, it would vanish in the blink of an eye.”
With respect to the thought experiment of God eliminating the universe, what would be the deep difference between a passive act of withdrawal and an active act of destruction?
“By thinking of annihilation as the withdrawal of God’s sustaining power rather than as an act of destruction, it underlines the contingency of the world upon God in a way that exalts God’s power and majesty,” Craig explains. “On the other hand, if the world has some sort of positive inertia in being on its own that would require God to blast it out of existence, it would tend to make the world less contingent on God, more independent of God, and therefore might be thought to diminish God’s greatness and power.”
What do we learn from the claim that God, at least the God of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, created the world “from nothing?”
“The doctrine of creation out of nothing underscores the distinction between God and the universe,” Craig says. “It undermines all attempts to divinize the world, to say that the universe is necessarily existent, eternal, and divine. Surprisingly, this is a conclusion of momentous significance because apart from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, there is no doctrine of creation out of nothing in the other major world religions. Think of the pantheistic religions of the East: Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, or the polytheistic religions of ancient Greece and Rome and other societies. In none of these is there a robust doctrine of creation out of nothing—so that if the doctrine of creation out of nothing is true, it serves to distinguish the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition from that of all of the other world’s religions, including pantheism.”
What else would it say about God’s own eternal characteristics? Craig answers: “It’s hard to imagine any other doctrine that would underscore God’s omnipotence, his self-existence, his necessity, his distinction from the world, in a way that the doctrine of creation out of nothing does. If there is good reason to believe in creation out of nothing, either through philosophical argument or scientific evidence, this provides evidence for the existence of God that would otherwise be lacking.”
Craig continues: “Typically, atheists have affirmed that the universe is eternal and uncaused and it’s just there and that’s all [i.e., the universe is either necessary in its existence or in some way caused itself]. The demonstration that the universe is not eternal in the past points to the contingency of the universe and to its grounding in a supernatural cause which transcends space and time and which brought it into being.”
All created things have existed for a finite time. No thing, other than God, has existed forever. (But what about those abstract objects? I won’t forget them!) The claim is that God is the creator of everything. All that exists came to exist because of God. Furthermore, Craig asserts, God created from nothing. But what does “from nothing”—ex nihilo—really mean?
Robert Russell says that “modern cosmology, big-bang cosmology, talks about t=0, which means that there was an absolute beginning of time. If that’s true, would it be relevant to an ex nihilo creation? Some say it’s directly relevant, almost a proof. Others have a completely opposite view, saying that it is totally irrelevant because science and religion are in separate worlds—they simply don’t relate, and to try to relate them is to confuse both.”
Russell is chary to take any scientific theory as supposed proof of God. “Married today, widowed tomorrow,” he says. “The science changes and you’ve lost your connection.” In the context of creation ex-nihilo, he says, “What it really means is that without God, there wouldn’t be anything in the first place, no matter how the science turns out. For St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, the basic meaning of ex nihilo was this philosophical contingency that the universe couldn’t exist without God. Aquinas was dealing with Aristotelian cosmology, which held that the universe was eternal—finite in size, but eternal in time. And he said, ‘That’s fine because an eternal universe is not a self-explanatory universe.’ Just because the universe is eternal does not say why it exists. How it exists is eternal, but why it exists is another matter.”
For Russell to defend God as creator, his priority is, first, the universe exists—with or without a beginning. And then, second, if there is a scientific beginning, this fact would strengthen the argument for God by “adding more support, more layers.” If the debate were held in a court of law, Russell says, the fact that the universe has a scientific beginning would be “a character witness, not an eyewitness.” He says t=0 would “provide evidence that this universe looks like the kind of universe that a God would create,” but adds, “it is not the reason why I believe the universe was created by God. I believe in that because I believe in God.”
To the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, a quantum physicist who became an Anglican priest, “The first important thing is to recognize that calling God ‘creator’ isn’t answering the question, ‘Who lit the blue touch paper, or triggered the big bang, and started the universe?’ Creation is about why things exist, not how they began. When Stephen Hawking produced his speculative cosmology, he suggested that although the universe has a finite age, it has no datable beginning; he went on to say, ‘What place, then, for a creator?’ That was being pretty naïve, I have to say.”
Polkinghorne continues: “God’s role is to hold the universe in being. God is as much the creator today as God was 13.7 billion years ago when the universe we observe today sprang forth from the singularity of the big bang. At the end of his book, Hawking says, ‘What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?’ That’s the question that is answered by saying: The will of God lies behind the order of the world. Thus, to speak of God as creator is to say that there is a divine mind and a divine purpose underlying the whole of cosmic history. And that would have been true even if the universe, in fact, turned out to be a steady-state universe without a beginning of any observable kind. I believe that if God did not will the world to remain in being, the world would disappear.”
Does this mean that Polkinghorne sees no theological difference between a big-bang theology and a steady state? “No fundamental difference,” he asserts. “I think that’s right. I think that was never an issue.”
He expands his understanding of God as creator: “I think God interacts with his creation in two ways. One is simply holding it in being. That’s the transcendent aspect of God, if you like, the God who is the ground of all being. I also think that God is immanently active. God isn’t just holding the world in being waiting to see what happens, but God interacts with the unfolding history of the world, God acts through history. There is a God of providence as well as a God of creation.”
I pose to Polkinghorne one of the arguments against God as creator. If one considers the rarity of life on Earth juxtaposed with the vastness of the universe—hundreds of billions of stars in hundreds of billions of galaxies—it seems that only a profligate God would create all of this just for our little isolated island of self-consciousness.
“Well, one can stand that argument on its head,” Polkinghorne responds. “One can say: ‘Gosh, because it’s so important to have self-conscious beings—God-conscious beings—God is prepared to lay all that out to make it happen. One of the insights is that if all those trillions of stars weren’t there, we wouldn’t be here to be possibly upset at the thought of them. Because it’s only a universe that’s as big as ours, and lasts as long as ours (13.7 billions years), which can generate self-conscious life. There’s a natural timescale for it. So even if we are the only self-conscious life (or the only life) in the universe—which we don’t know, of course—it would still mean that those stars aren’t redundant; they are a necessary part of the whole process.”
And then the argument becomes: So God made all of that just for us?
“That might be so, or God may have made it for little green men as well,” Polkinghorne says. “I don’t think there’s a theological stake in saying that human beings are the only self-conscious/God-conscious beings in the universe. We can allow God a certain generosity, both in the resources that God utilizes and the purpose that God is trying to fulfill.”
I persist: Wouldn’t the vast periods of time and the vast quantities of matter and energy be way out of proportion to what has been created?
“Who’s to say what’s in proportion?” Polkinghorne exclaims. “Pascal was thinking at the time when people were just beginning to realize how big the universe is, and he said that he was frightened by the thought of those eternal spaces. But he also said that human beings are just reeds—insubstantial beings in this vast world—but we are thinking reeds, and that makes us greater than all the stars because we know them and ourselves and they know nothing. Size and significance are not the same thing.”
God sustaining the universe, Polkinghorne says, is more significant than God starting it, and God participates actively in the unfolding of God’s creation.
But I’m still bothered by those “abstract objects”—as philosophers call the general form of things, or “universals,” such as numbers, logic, properties, even the presence of possibilities (e.g., “It is now true that I might quit my job.”). Or ideas like morality and goodness (e.g., “It is never good to torture babies.”). Abstract objects would seem to exist even if no concrete objects ever existed, which would mean that abstract objects exist independently from God. So wouldn’t “abstract objects” disqualify God as a complete creator of literally everything?
Craig agrees that if abstract objects exist necessarily—meaning that God didn’t create them—God would be undermined. “Right,” he says. “It would be incompatible with the Judeo-Christian concept of God, which has God as uniquely self-existent.”
So if we have something else that’s self-existent, then God is just one of an innumerable number of self-existing things and God is part of this panoply. “It would literally be innumerable things, infinities of infinities of infinities of things, all of which would exist independently of God,” Craig says. “This would compromise both God’s unique self-existence and his creation of everything else out of nothing. It would mean, in fact, that most things are not created.”
I ask Craig whether this means that, as a Christian theist, he has a problem.
“I remember when I first encountered this issue, it struck me deeply,” he says. “I thought this was a dagger at the heart of my faith in God.”
Christian philosopher Brian Leftow says, “Absolutely everything comes from God; absolutely everything depends on God. Nothing was a given for God. For us, there are always things we just inherit. For God, he inherited nothing. It all comes from him in some way or other. This would obviously include the concrete things—matter, energy, space, time. But what about abstract things or abstract objects? Abstract objects are not material, not involved in causation, not located in space, probably not located in time either. It’s plausible that there are these abstract things as well as concrete things. And so when you believe that God is the source of absolutely everything, you have to ask the question: Is God also the source of abstract objects?”
He continues: “Now one obvious response to the question is, ‘Who cares?’ Well, if God didn’t create abstract objects, if God is not in some way behind them, then they stand independent of God and in a way they’re superior to God. Why? God has to learn about them. And God has to depend on them. For example, if there were no property of being divine, God couldn’t be divine because God wouldn’t have the property to be so. If there were no property of omnipotence, God couldn’t be omnipotent because there would be no such thing for him to be. So God derives his very nature from the abstract realm, if it’s out there independent of God. So, if this were the way of the world, God would be a pawn, if you will, in thrall to these perennial concepts, which in some causal sense would have existed prior to God.”
There is more. “One of the properties that God has by virtue of his nature is perfect goodness,” Leftow says. “Perfect goodness puts severe constraints on what God can do. So if perfect goodness is something independent of God, something imposed on God as part of God’s nature, it and the rest of the abstract realm comes first, and God comes second. It’s as if abstract objects put grooves in reality and God has to roll along them. It’s really not up to God what God does except within narrow limits.”
Leftow seeks a solution. “If God is really the ultimate reality, if everything somehow traces back to God, then abstract objects trace back to God, too. They’re not outside of God; they’re rooted within God.”
I suspect circular reasoning. Leftow’s fundamental assumption is that God created everything, so it would then “follow” that God in some way “created” abstract objects. To probe, I ask: If there were no God, if God did not exist, would two plus two still equal four?
“If there were no God, absolutely nothing would exist,” he responds. “That’s what’s involved in the saying that God is the creator. If you want to trace even mathematics back to God, then you would have to say, yes, if there were no God, two plus two would not make four. They wouldn’t make anything else either. There wouldn’t be anything for the number 2 to refer to. There would be an absolute nothingness. But notice we’re talking about an impossible situation here. For two plus two not to make four is an absolute impossibility. It is equally an absolute impossibility that God doesn’t exist because I believe that God exists necessarily. Thus, the one impossibility is rooted in the other.”
Leftow concludes: “If God exists, God has implications for every part of reality, and all those implications have to hang together and make sense if the idea of God is going to hang together and make sense.”
What do I make of all this? The question of “God as creator” is rich and vast. If God does exist, it explores the essence of God. If God does not exist, it reveals incoherence, perhaps contradiction, in the concept of God.
There’s the factual question of whether God created from nothing, whether there was a point when, other than God, nothing else existed. Next, if God as sustainer is more fundamental than God as creator, then both God and cosmos change.
What about those pesky “abstract objects”—like numbers and logic—whose necessary existence seems stronger than God’s existence! Do abstract objects sabotage a sovereign and totally free God? I like thinking about this.
Imagining how God could be creator helps inform whether God could exist, and if God does exist, how God works.
Is any of this closer to truth?

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with William Lane Craig, Robert Russell, the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, and Brian Leftow in “How Is God the Creator?”—the 19th episode in the new season of the Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series (58th in total).
The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Thursday, participants will discuss the current episode.

P.S. Click here to visit our Closer to Truth archive.

My whole life, I’ve wondered about this: Are human beings purely physical? Evolved at random and destined to die, extinguished forever? Or are we something more? A spirit or a soul with existence beyond?
Which? Most people are sure. Me? I’m perplexed.
Philosophers call this great question “the mind-body problem.” What’s the relationship between our brains and our consciousness, between the stuff in our skulls and the sense in our minds? What are solutions to the mind-body problem?
Philosopher Ned Block provides a road map. “There are three solutions that have been offered,” he says. “One is perhaps the most commonsense solution: dualism, the idea that we have some kind of immaterial soul and the mind is a state of that soul. If dualism is true, then the science of the mind, at least as we now see science, cannot succeed. A second solution is what’s often called ‘functionalism’: the idea that the nature of the mind is a matter of the role that mental states play in causal relations to other mental states, sensations, and behaviors. The idea is to see the mind along the lines of a computer program, or of a computer state, which is defined by and characterized by its relations to other similar states and to sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. A third solution is the one that I favor,” he continues. “It’s ‘physicalism,’ at least for consciousness: the idea that you can construct the mind, at least the conscious part of the mind, in terms of its biological realization in the brain.”
Block rejects dualism quickly “because if dualism is right, then the study of the mind is more in the domain of religion than of science. The functionalists,” he says, “are the computer people. According to the core functionalist idea, the biological substrate is just one of many potential substrates (which could instantiate mental or conscious states). We could make a mind out of silicon just as we could make it out of carbon because the important thing is the functional relations that are embedded in the computer description of it.”
So Block defends the physicalist solution, which asserts that “it’s the biological realization that’s really important”—and which, in the case of consciousness, “looks like it is on the right track,” he says. “All the advances that have been made in the last 20 years in the study of consciousness have been in the study of the brain.”
I ask Block what, fundamentally, is different about a biological substrate from any other substrate, which enables him to favor a biological realization over functionalism.
“This is the most difficult problem about the study of consciousness,” Block says. “It’s the problem of how we can understand why the biological basis of a given phenomenal quality is the biological basis of that quality rather than some other one or none. It’s that problem that makes people dualists because they don’t know how to think about it.”
I continue: What is the difference between mental states based on carbon (organisms) or silicon (computers)?
He responds: “The fear is that you could reproduce the function and so you’d have the same system—which is the functionalist approach—but you wouldn’t reproduce the phenomenal ‘feel’ of it. You’d have made what some people call a ‘zombie,’ which is something that’s functionally like us, but physically and phenomenally different, maybe phenomenally like nothing.”
I persist: But what is left over in the biology, which, after you’ve created all the functions in some other media, accounts for the phenomenal feel or inner awareness? What is this residue? If it’s physical in the biology, why couldn’t you, in principle, reproduce it in the silicon?
“Right,” Block says, “so the two different possibilities are that it’s biological or that it’s functional. If it’s biological, maybe you could reproduce it in silicon, but maybe you couldn’t. The more biological, the more physical, the substrate turns out to be, the more likely it is that a zombie could be made.”
“No, I’m not talking about a zombie,” I protest. “I think a zombie can be made [i.e., fully functional mental states and behavioral output indistinguishable from a sentient organism, but without inner awareness]. I’m talking about a real sentient organism with all the phenomenal internal feeling because that’s what we have to duplicate in order to make it real. If you say we can’t make it, what is the residue you have in your biology that’s preventing you from making it in my silicon?”
“The problem will be if we make a silicon version of human consciousness, how will we know whether we’ve left out something essential,” Block explains. “How do we know what level of description of the human biology of consciousness is essential to consciousness? Furthermore, we do not know now whether we will find a ‘similarity metric’ which will allow us to tell whether another kind of being of this sort really is conscious.”
Here’s where I seem to find myself: If consciousness is purely physical, biological, I can’t imagine why, ultimately, it couldn’t be reproduced in other physical structures, including nonbiological systems.
Block certainly rejects dualism, as do most philosophers, which is why I should speak with a dualist philosopher. I ask Dean Zimmerman how he can defend what most of his colleagues dismiss.
“Anybody who thinks, ‘Well, maybe I can survive the destruction of this body,’ is on the road to some kind of ‘substance dualism’—the belief that the ‘real person’ is not made out of physical kind of stuff so that he or she can somehow exist independently of it,” he says. “Not many philosophers hold this view; there are still a few of us left.”
Zimmerman articulates what it means to be a substance dualist. “A substance dualist is a person who thinks my mental states are possessed by, or they’re exemplified by, a thing that doesn’t have a mass,” he explains. “Such a person has a lot of questions to answer, obviously, one being just how different is this thing that’s thinking from ordinary matter? On the extreme end, people have said: ‘I’m a thinking thing, I know that. I’ve got mental states. They can’t be identical with any mere physical state of physical matter and [so] they belong to a thing that exists outside of time, outside of space; the thing that’s responsible for mental states is totally alien, very unlike any ordinary material objects.’ Others have said, ‘Well, that’s just too different.’ So Descartes is sort of the paradigmatic dualist: He thinks that, ‘I’m certainly in time—I have one thought and then I have another thought and another thought, right, so I’m as temporal as a clock—but I’m not in space [i.e., thoughts do not reside in a place]. Now, I interact with one particular body in space, but I’m not literally there, somehow.’ But other dualists have said, ‘No, I’m more like ordinary material objects than even that. I’m located where my brain is, and I interact with it.’”
In this last formulation, where the stuff would be located where the brain is, I assume that the stuff would still be nonphysical, right?
“Right,” Zimmerman says, “because although the stuff is located in space and pushing things around, as it were, so long as it’s not made out of the same kind of bits as tables and chairs and rocks, it’s nonphysical. This still seems like a respectable kind of dualism to me.”
He adds, “The thing that’s really important is: Do you believe in a soul, and if so, why? Why do you believe in this extra something or other?
I look Zimmerman in the eye and say softly, “What do you believe?”
“So you’re calling me out,” he responds with a smile. “Well, let’s say I feel quite convinced that phenomenal states really are distinct from any material goings on inside this body. So then I wonder: Well, what is their subject? Is it my brain, or part of my brain? I confess that I’m sort of hopeful that it’s not, that it’s something else.”
Fair enough. While most philosophers eviscerate and discard dualism, Zimmerman is hoping for “something else” beyond the physical.
I’m hoping, too, but hope can thwart reason and distort belief. That’s why I speak with Colin McGinn, who has been labeled a “mysterian” in that he doubts human minds can ever comprehend consciousness. So why is he not a dualist?
“Dualism is the view that there are two kinds of substance in the world,” McGinn begins. “There’s matter: Descartes understood matter to be defined by extension—matter is extended substance—which is a spatial notion. And there’s a mental substance, or spiritual substance, which is nonspatial substance. And the essence of the latter, according to Descartes, was thought.”
McGinn continues: “Then Descartes had the question of how these two things are connected to each other. He thought the brain would cause events in the mind. And events in the mind would cause events in the brain. This is how perception worked; this is how action worked. Mind was its own special kind of stuff, existing somewhere. He was rather vague about where it might exist because if it doesn’t have extension, it can’t be in space. So he had the problem of how the two interact. By what conceivable mechanism could a substance whose definition is to be extended in space [brain] interact with something whose definition is to be unextended and not in space [mind]? So that was the classic problem with dualism and the problem of interaction.”
There were other problems, too, McGinn explains. “Where does the mind come from? What’s its origin? If you can join dualism to a theistic view of the universe, then at least you can say that God is the cause of the mind,” he says. “Descartes was a mechanist about how the brain develops: From embryo to childhood to adulthood, the brain develops on its own track by physical processes. But parallel with that, the mind is developing, too. How is it changed? Where does the mind’s change come from? Not from the brain because, according to Descartes, the mind doesn’t have its being derived from the brain, so God is somehow propelling the whole process. What other explanation could we have? So one must bring God in to explain how the mind comes into existence, and even how it develops.”
God brings no satisfaction to McGinn. “As soon as God is invoked,” he states, “all the problems of God come in to haunt you. You have to have a theory in which you explain the existence of God. To most philosophers, and to me, that’s not an acceptable way to go.”
But McGinn also rejects physicalism or materialism. “The problem here really is one of definition,” he says. “If tomorrow physicists discover some completely new force, some completely new dimension, of the natural world, will they say they’ve discovered something nonphysical? Some at first may say, ‘This is nothing like what we know, so it’s immaterial, nonmaterial. Others will say, ‘Well, we discovered it; we’re physicists, so let’s call it ‘material.’”
So physics becomes open-ended, I ask?
“Yes,” McGinn says, “which means that the answer to the question ‘Is physicalism true?’ is ‘vacuously yes’ because the mind is part of the natural world—resulting from biology, evolution, and so on. So in a very broad sense, the mind is part of the material world. I myself think there’s no objection to describing consciousness as a form of matter because, the way I see it, matter has many forms.”
I ask McGinn if he is then using the term “matter” as a synonym for “everything.”
“Yes,” he says. “All there is.”
So McGinn is a physicalist in the broadest sense of the term. And he posits a radically new kind of physical stuff to account for consciousness.
The old brain scientist in me recoils, “Rather extreme, Colin, don’t you think?”
But then I reflect: Maybe current explanations of consciousness are not extreme enough! Perhaps what’s needed is a radically new kind of mental stuff?
For that, I see Charles Tart, a pioneer in parapsychology and altered states of consciousness. He’s an unabashed dualist—but not your daddy’s dualist.
“The place you start is the very commonsense observation that what goes on inside our minds seems to be somehow different from the solid stuff that happens out in the world,” Tart says. “Then things get complicated. For example, after Descartes defined mind as totally different from material stuff, people worry about how they can interact. But mind and brain were defined as noninteracting, so of course it’s a problem.”
He goes on: “I’m a pragmatic dualist. I emphasize the pragmatic because it’s not a philosophical position so much as an attempt to deal with actual events that you can observe. In parapsychological experiments, the mind does things that we don’t know how to make matter do, such as sending mind-to-mind messages (telepathy) or apprehending things at a distance (clairvoyance) or affecting physical matter by mental intention alone (psychokinesis) or healing someone when there’s no physical intervention. And sometimes it works. It works often enough that you know that it happens. Even after you filter out all the noise of unsuccessful experiments and wishful thinking [and fraud], sometimes the mind can do this. Well, the mind is obviously interacting with the material.”
Tart gives his view, which is certainly idiosyncratic. “My take on what’s going on is that clairvoyance and psychokinesis are actually going on in the mind, normally, all the time, but they’re used for what we might call internal communications. The senses feed into the physical brain, and the mind picks up this information by some kind of inner clairvoyance by which the mind reads the state of the brain so that the mind is informed of what the brain is doing. Then the mind influences the brain by means of psychokinesis. I think this is the normal, regular, everyday use of clairvoyance and psychokinesis. And it’s the irregular, abnormal, unusual use of clairvoyance—going outside the body to something totally different in the physical world—which even tells us that clairvoyance exists.”
This is a radically different approach to the mind-body problem. Scientists, philosophers, even theologians, would reject Tart’s hypothesis with world-class swiftness.
“Right, yes,” Tart agrees. “Philosophers usually focus on the mechanism for interaction. Well, these parapsychological effects are the mechanism for interaction. This is what experience and the experimental data force me to conclude. But I’m not offering some absolute philosophical position. I don’t know what the ultimate nature of reality is. But using parapsychological or extrasensory perception (ESP) phenomena to understand the mind-body problem makes the best sense to me. A philosophy of mind that doesn’t take parapsychological data into account is woefully inadequate. It’s leaving out a whole important section of reality.”
Tart calls himself a “pragmatic dualist” because dualism, he claims, is the only way that fits the facts. His wild idea of “internal ESP” to explain brain-mind interaction is double-dose bizarre. That’s why I like it. Though almost certainly wrong, such far-out theories from serious thinkers highlight the inscrutable essence of consciousness.
Even physicalism offers up its own radical explanations of consciousness. To physicist Henry Stapp, the key to consciousness is quantum mechanics.
”For most neuroscientists,” Stapp says, “the mind isn’t doing anything; in fact, it’s difficult to understand why it exists at all.” This materialistic way of thinking, he says, is rooted in “tremendous inertia from the philosophers of the past, philosophers of the classical world, a world that was deterministic and in which the mind played no role. But that physical theory is no longer true; it’s known to be untrue. In the new physics, quantum mechanics, consciousness plays an actual role: The laws of quantum mechanics are not formulatable; one cannot get any predictions out of the theory unless one allows what Niels Bohr calls the ‘choice’ on the part of the experimenter.”
Whereas in classical mechanics “you started with a deterministic understanding of what happens at the lowest level, and this determinism just builds up,” in quantum mechanics, “there is already uncertainty at the lowest level and it builds up as it would in any nonlinear system,” Stapp says, adding, “It explodes.” The point, he stresses, is that the whole brain becomes a single quantum mechanical system. “The core reality upon which quantum mechanics is based is the collapse of wave function, some action in the physical world,” he says. “But it’s associated with a psychological element such that there’s a close connection with the pattern of neurological activity that’s sending out all these nerve impulses. In your mind, there is intent, so that the psychological aspect and the physical aspect are linked together.”
He continues: “In quantum mechanics, but not in classical mechanics, the laws of the physical realm only determine potentialities for something to happen. They do not answer this question of what question is going to be asked. You need something else outside the known laws to determine what the question will be. And once you ask the question, the laws of quantum mechanics determine how the system is then going to evolve. In actual practice, these choices are determined by psychological process. So you have need for psychological processes to make the quantum mechanics work. Bohr had a famous quote: ‘When searching for harmony in life, one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators.’ In the classical worldview, we were just spectators; we could only watch what was happening, but couldn’t do anything. In quantum mechanics, we are needed as actors. If neuroscientists would really understand how quantum mechanics works, I think they would recognize that something is missing here.”
Are we all “missing something” here? I hope so. I hope there’s more to me than my brain. But hope, I know, is a great deceiver, and it’s gotten me before. Neuroscience, however, is honest: We know how the brain works, and we’ll know lots more.
But as for the inner, raw sense of personal awareness, I still doubt we’ll ever explain consciousness by neuroscience alone. If physicalism is correct, if I’m just my brain, then, ultimately, consciousness will be reproduced in nonbiological substrates. I do not think it’s possible for the following conjunction to be true: (i) the mind is realized solely in the physical brain, and (ii) the mind cannot be realized in nonbiological substrates. Still, it will be impossible, even in principle, to ever know for sure whether other minds—human, biological, or nonbiological—truly have inner experiences.
Here’s my bottom line: Explaining consciousness will require something radically new—either finding physical stuff beyond current boundaries or revealing the reality of nonphysical stuff.
Which is why trying to solve the mind-body problem edges us closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with Ned Block, Dean Zimmerman, Colin McGinn, Charles Tart, and Henry Stapp in “Solutions to the Mind-Body Problem?”—the 18th episode in the new season of the Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series (57th in total).
The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Thursday, participants will discuss the current episode.

P.S. Click here to visit our Closer to Truth archive.

When we speak of people’s future, we mean after college, the next election, their career, their retirement. When we speak of the universe’s future, we mean when the sun burns out, when galaxies collide, when everything flies apart, when all that exists evaporates.
The untold billions and trillions of years, you say, make it all irrelevant. Not so. The far far future of the universe conveys great meaning now.
Sir Martin Rees, the United Kingdom’s astronomer royal, explains that “our sun will run out of fuel after 5 or 6 billion years; it will swell and become a red giant, engulfing the inner planets, vaporizing any life remaining on earth. It will then settle down as a white dwarf to a quiet death. But any creatures who witness the death of the sun will be as different from us as we are from bacteria.”
He says, “The end of the earth won’t be the end of the universe of course. Many stars will go on shining for much longer. But the galaxy will eventually get much dimmer because eventually all stars will die and all that will remain will be the dead remnants of stars. The universe will also become a much emptier place because other galaxies which are accelerating away from us with the expanding universe will disappear beyond our observational horizons. So if you were an astronomer in, say, 100 billion years from now, the only thing you would see would be the remnants of our galaxy, Andromeda, and a few other neighbors. All the rest would have disappeared completely beyond your horizon.”
Rees goes on: “On longer time scales, even atoms don’t live forever. We suspect that the individual atoms that compose the stars will gradually erode away, in probably 1,035 years or so. Black holes themselves don’t live forever: They evaporate by a very slim process, so that after 10,100 years, even the biggest black holes probably won’t exist anymore. And so after that time, all that is left is a universe that is filled with very, very dilute radiation, and maybe some stable particles that make up the dark matter. That will be all there is.”
To him, “That’s the simplest story, but it could be wrong for many, many reasons of course. One possibility is that the force which drives the accelerating expansion may be more complicated than we think. It may change. But the current forecast does seem to be for an ever colder, ever emptier universe. To paraphrase Woody Allen, ‘Eternity is very long, especially toward the end.’”
But, Rees adds, “this end could lead to a new beginning. Some speculate that the end of our universe could in some sense be linked to the beginning of a new universe.”
Going further, could radically advanced intelligences, biological or nonbiological, be able to alter space and time in the far far future and thus prevent the ultimate dissolution?
“Science fiction writers can conceive of it and that’s all we can hope for,” Rees muses. “It would have been almost impossible for people 1,000 years ago to conceive of the present concept of the universe—and we’re now talking not about thousands of years, but about billions of years. So when we imagine what might happen in the very long future, we can’t do better than the science fiction writers.”
So the sun exhausts its fuel, galaxies fade away. All, eventually, is gone. The universe dissipates after trillions of years, and I feel empty now. Alone. Cold.
Why? An existential vacuum of meaning and purpose? A brutal confrontation with indifferent reality?
That human beings, so terribly limited by space and time, can conceive of the universe in the far far future by measuring its expansion today is astonishing!
Astronomer Wendy Freedman, who determined the rate of universal expansion (with the Hubble Space Telescope), says, “The expansion of the universe is actually speeding up; it’s accelerating over time. We’ve made measurements that show that very bright objects, supernovae, are farther away than we would have expected if the universe were slowing down.”
This means, she continues, that we’re living at a unique time when we can see many galaxies in the universe that will eventually go beyond our visible light horizons, so that the universe will appear to get emptier and emptier with time. But, she adds, “I don’t think we can predict with confidence because we don’t know the properties of this so-called ‘dark energy.’”
So is our time really special? With innumerable galaxies within sphere of view? With understanding cosmic expansion? We’re heading, inexorably, to the far future.
But what’s the next big event? Over the horizon, what’s coming?
Avi Loeb, an expert on galactic structures, tells of a galactic collision with our closest cousin galaxy, Andromeda. “Andromeda is approaching us right now,” he says. “Within 2 billion years, the two galaxies will come very close to each other. There is some chance that the sun will be stolen by Andromeda so that, subsequently, we would see the Milky Way as an external galaxy. A couple of billion years later, Andromeda will return again. Eventually, the two galaxies will mix. [There is so much space in galaxies that the likelihood of stars actually crashing into one another, even when galaxies collide, is very small.] Tens of billions of years from now, there will be no other object in the sky for us to observe. There will be just this merged product of our Milky Way and Andromeda.”
Don’t let the flowery words lull you. The far far future is utterly bleak. But guess what? Our future could be bleaker still!
Cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin, who has proposed how the universe might have begun from literally nothing (through “quantum tunneling”), also thinks that the ultimate end of our universe might happen more swiftly.
“The very end is going to be somewhat different,” he says casually. “The reason we have now this accelerated expansion is because our vacuum has nonzero energy and the energy of the vacuum creates repulsive gravity and the universe expands with acceleration. The cosmology now suggests the picture of a multiverse, which suggests that in addition to our region, there are other regions where the vacuum energy has different values. What’s important for our discussion here is not the existence of those other regions, but the possibility for a vacuum to have different energies; in physics, when there is a possibility to lower the energy, this happens sooner or later, in one way or the other. The way this is likely to happen is that a tiny bubble of negative energy vacuum will pop out somewhere in space, just like a bubble of vapor pops out in boiling water. And this bubble will start to expand, accelerating in its expansion so that it will approach the speed of light. The interior of that bubble will collapse to a big crunch. This bubble eats everything in its way, consumes everything and grows in power. In fact, the more it eats, the stronger it gets. We will be hit by that bubble and annihilated. Perhaps not us because we will be long gone; indeed, our sun will likely be dead by then. The probability for such bubbling nucleation is extremely small; there is nothing immediate to worry about. But at some point, this will be the end of our region, but it will not be the end of the entire universe.”
Even if every universe in an infinity of universes is hit by a bubble of its own making, the generation of multiple universes continues forever—and the generation wins. So there’s ultimate hope of a sort. Even though there’s certainty that each observable region will eventually get eaten, there is also certainty that many more will always exist.
Bleak. Bleaker. Bleakest. Pick your poison: That’s the scientific certainty. As of now, our universe is headed for oblivion—whether “freezing” through everlasting expansion or “frying” in a big crunch collapse. Unless, of course, there’s a radically different kind of future in store for us. A future conceived by hope, though ridiculed by science.
This is the uncharted territory of Robert John Russell, an ordained minister with a doctorate in physics, the founder of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. (I’d love to believe as Russell believes … if only my wishes had powers.)
“The heart of the message,” Russell says, “is that God’s creation isn’t complete—there’s death, disease, trauma, tragedy, sin. It must have a future in which those will be gone. That’s the hope shared by Christians, Jews, and Muslims—that there really will be a future for all of earth and not just for humankind. The lion and the lamb lying down together; a true New Jerusalem.”
But even assuming God exists, how could God transform the world?
Russell starts by stating that “God is always involved in the world because God is the creator of the world.” He then explains that, “If God is acting in a regular way, we can predict the future on those actions, but if God chooses to act differently, God doesn’t violate the laws of nature, and the predictions of science aren’t wrong. It would just be a new ballgame: God acting in a new way. Now, for Christians like myself, the resurrection of Christ is the beginning of the new creation. In Christ’s death and resurrection, death itself is died.”
How, then, does Russell generalize from his prototype to a creation of a new heavens and a new earth?
“It’s not a totally new creation,” he says. “It isn’t the second ex nihilo (out of nothing) creation. It’s a continuation of this world: After all, Jesus was Jesus. He could be recognized, he could be touched, he made breakfast; but he was also this transcend lord who is sort of beyond space and time, yet within it. So if that’s the future, and the future is sort of in the present, then this must mean that something about this universe will be continuous with the future universe. It’s not snatch and grab, it’s not walk off to heaven and forget the universe. God loves God’s creation, everything about it. It will be cherished forever in the new creation. So somehow, you deploy that. The transformation of the world involves both continuity and discontinuity. After Jesus was resurrected, he didn’t die again (like Lazarus)—that’s radical change, discontinuity. But Jesus was still Jesus—continuity.”
Russell extends his argument: “Now, if Jesus’ death and resurrection is real, and it relates for the future of the universe, then there must be parts of the universe now that will be continuous with the future universe, and there are parts that will be discontinuous. And this is where science might come in, to offer us clues as to what’s continuous—like true values, such as agape love or the Pythagorean theorem, or appreciating sexuality and earthiness. All these are grounded in God’s current creation and will exist in God’s new creation. But all things evil or tragic—suffering and disease, inhumanity, predator-prey cycles—all things that do not reflect God’s grace and goodness, these could not be in God’s new creation. All things good about this creation—the physicality we enjoy as real creatures, not as a trapped soul and not just as an animal—will continue over into the new creation.”
So, Russell concludes, “the universe itself has a destiny.”
“If you’re right,” I mutter, “I hope I get to see you there.”
“You will,” he assures me.
How much we know about the far far future! Observing in advance, as it were, billions and trillions of years to come. The likely scenario is that the universe will expand forever, stretched apart by an increasingly powerful dark energy, so that the ultimate future is random radiation, nothing more.
Yet the science is still young. But either way, freeze or fry—expand into frigid, infinite emptiness or collapse into the torrid singularity of a big crunch—the universe’s future seems bereft of joy and devoid of hope.
Religion offers alternatives. A great transformation. A new heavens and new earth.
I yearn to believe. But facts fight faith.
I turn again to Rees: “Science fiction writers are our best guide at the moment and, more generally, I would say that in discussing these issues, first-rate science fiction is a greater stimulus than second-rate science.”
No matter what, seeking the far far future brings us closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with Sir Martin Rees, Wendy Freedman, Avi Loeb, Alexander Vilenkin, and Robert John Russell in “What Is the Far Far Future of the Universe?”—the 17th episode in the new season of the Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series (56th in total).
The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Thursday, participants will discuss the current episode.

P.S. Click here to visit our Closer to Truth archive.

From Robert Lawrence Kuhn, host and creator of Closer To Truth:

I like arguing God: whether God exists, what God might be like. For me, God debate is good fun.
But God debate is not a game. And when I get serious about God, I wonder about God—critically, whether there is a God; philosophically, about God’s essence and traits. I wonder about all the ways that God could be. Or could not be. I seek those of different views, whose Gods have different shapes and stripes.
Divinity philosopher Keith Ward seeks the essence of God, beyond the specific doctrines of traditional religions. “God is not a thing,” Ward says. “God is not an object, not a person in the sense of one person among others. But you can’t just say God is so mysterious you know nothing at all about God. But still, God is not anything you can easily imagine. God is always beyond that.”
“Beyond” in what sense? Ward says, “In asking about God, one is asking about the ultimate reality which accounts for the existence of the universe, and that’s going to be very different from anything within the universe. But one has to take analogies from somewhere. One can’t just say God is a great blank. And of course, persons are the most developed forms of beings that we know about in the universe. So starting from persons, at least one is saying, ‘Well, this is the best I know about.’ God must be infinitely better than that, but it can’t be worse.”
He continues: “God is infinitely more because God is the cause of everything, the being who conceives all possible worlds and actualizes this specific world. God is not subject to the sort of moral demands that humans are subject to because God is the source of all moral demands. He is goodness itself, not just good. God is the source of everything that exists. But again, not in a very straightforward way.”
Ward goes on: “It’s not only that God starts things off. It’s rather that everything somehow depends on something that is beyond time, something on which all finite things depend for their existence, their nature. So that’s one strand of God. Another strand is that God is, in the words of St. Anselm in Christian tradition, that than which nothing greater, nothing more perfect, can be conceived. So God is a maximum of value. In fact, the way of getting to state what the word ‘God’ names is to ask what would be the most perfect possible sort of being. And that’s what God would be.”
I seek logical boundaries for God, so I ask Ward: “Is it logically necessary to require God to be the greatest conceivable being? I can conceive of a minimal kind of God—which would not be the great conceivable being—by naming God as “the minimum requirement for a being to create this universe.”
Ward responds that “the pressure in the theological tradition is to look for something which is somehow self-explanatory. But if you hypothesize that there could be something that explains itself, then it certainly wouldn’t be just something which happens to be powerful enough to create a universe. Because you’d say, well, why is it that powerful and not more or less powerful?”
Self-explaining is perhaps the toughest test to meet. “For anything to be self-explanatory, two conditions are required,” Ward says. “One is ‘necessity.’ It has to be the way it is; there is no other possibility. But that’s not enough. One also needs to add ‘value.’ That is to say, the self-existing entity exists because it’s good that it exists.” For something to be self-explanatory, he says, it must “bring together necessity and value.” Hence, God would be something “which necessarily exists and is the greatest possible value. And part of the reason it necessarily exists is precisely because it is the greatest possible value. God is the best thing there could be.”
Necessity and value. To Ward, these are the core characteristics of God. If God exists, God is so overwhelming, and God’s traits so broad. I’ve seen so many portraits of God, drawn by theologians and philosophers from the grand religious traditions and from no religion at all. Why such diversity? Multiple dimensions of the divine creator? Or intrinsic contradiction and utter confusion?
The Islamic God is radically transcendent—ineffable. To Islamic philosopher Mahmoud Ayoub, “God is.” God is that powerful and that simple. “God is not a body, not a form, not a thing limited in space or time,” Ayoub says. “God in his essence is unknowable. We know God only through his attributes. These attributes have been conveniently divided by Islamic mystics into two basic categories: the attributes of beauty and the attributes of majesty. The attributes of beauty deal with God as creator—merciful, forgiving, and so on. And they are embodied in a concentrated way in paradise. God’s attributes of majesty manifest God as divine judge—punishing, conquering, dominating. And they are expressed in a concentrated way in hell. There is then nothing in creation that is not a manifestation of one or the other of the divine attributes.”
To Rabbi Neil Gillman, trained in philosophy, “the Jewish God is wholly engaged with humanity, even struggles with human beings.” Gillman is transfixed by “the chaotic.” He asks, “What do we do with those endless stretches of time in our everyday experience of the world when terrible things happen, when God seems to be sleeping or on a coffee break or away or whatever? How do you put the whole thing together? How do you ascertain an ultimate pattern? Indeed, is there an ultimate pattern?”
Gillman is convinced that “there is an atheist at the heart of every believer and there’s a believer at the heart of every atheist. And the thing that separates them is the frequency of beliefs. What’s the overriding pattern? Atheists have to deal with moments of awesome cosmos, of coherence of meaning. Believers have to deal with moments of chaos, absurdity, craziness.”
So “I guess you have to make your choice,” Gillman says. “It’s a leap of faith. Where do you want to cast your lot? As for me, I want to cast my lot with the prevalence of meaning, coherence, order. And then I struggle with the chaos and incoherence. But that’s the ‘fun.’”
Ananda Guruge is a leading Buddhist thinker. “I used to assert that Buddhism was a religion without dogma,” he says with a smile, “until a friend pointed out that my assertion was itself a dogma.”
The Buddhist “god” is, well, as if there is no God. “The Buddha,” Guruge says, “is not prepared to accept that everything happens because a God created it. The Buddha wants you to be the creator of your destiny. So human beings must take responsibility for themselves.”
Guruge says that Buddhism has “functional atheism” as its basis, an interesting term. It suggests that no matter how one views God, God plays no role in our lives. When a tsunami kills thousands, Buddhists do not say “God did it.” At the same time, Guruge says, “we wouldn’t say that the devastation happened entirely because of chance. We say that the people who suffer may be suffering for some action of their previous lives, or present lives, for which some kind of moral punishment, or moral retribution, was required of them. But having some kind of God functionally responsible, either as creator or as supervising the human race, is a concept that is missing in Buddhism.”
Pantheism is the ancient idea that God is all and all is God, that the universe and God are one. To philosopher John Leslie, “Pantheism of the sort which I think makes most sense is the view that everything which exists is part of God. Some people think of God as a divine mind which carries in itself the structure of our universe. I take that theory very seriously. I have been working on the Platonic view that the reason why the universe exists is that it’s ethically demanded that it exist. It’s a good system. And its goodness is responsible for its existence. The fact that it’s good sets up the requirement that it should exist. And it has existed eternally because of that. This can only make sense, I think, against a background of pantheism.”
Leslie contends that “many people believe that in order to understand the divine existence, one must base it on the divine goodness. That is the reason why God exists. It is good that God should exist.” But he goes further. “I believe in an infinite series of minds,” he says, “each of which knows everything worth knowing. You could call the whole collection God. Or you could use the word God just for the infinite mind in which you exist. Or you could say that the word God shouldn’t be used here at all.”
There is a classic tradition that we can only know God in the negative (called “apophatic”). We can never know what God is. We can only know what God is not. Metanexus founder William Grassie says that “most theologians today take it for granted that God exists. This is the difference between what was previously called ‘natural theology’ and a theology of nature. So we’re not trying to identify divine action in any particular causal sequence to prove that God exists.”
Grassie continues: “But if God exists and this is God’s universe and these are God’s Scriptures, how do we understand it all? Recently, there has been a revival of what’s called ‘apophatic theology’ or ‘negative theology,’ the idea that if God is infinite, then nothing that humans can say in human language is adequate for describing God. So the only affirmative things one could say about the attributes of God is what God is not. For instance, to call God a ‘father’ is purely metaphoric speech. God is not literally a father. If God were a father, he wouldn’t be God.”
To get God to be “that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” this idea of the negative space is essential, Grassie concludes. “If you eliminate all attributes,” he says, “what you’re left with is God.”
Some modern theologians believe that God—at least the human concept of God—needs updating, refining, re-understanding. Christian theologian J. Wentzel van Huyssteen recounts the “complex history of dealing with the diverse characteristics notion of God, which has evolved through notions of Trinitarianism and is today being rethought in many ways. So the idea of God has to be taken up within a very specific tradition, within a very specific faith, so that it breaks down into very clear and differentiable kinds of theologies. Otherwise, the conversation becomes so abstract and generic that we always end up with these highly personal belief systems.”
Van Huyssteen does not think it possible to get to God by “weaving little strands together. I wish reality were like that,” he says, “but I don’t think it is like that.” He expects that various religions “will keep on evolving, refining the concept of God so as to feed back into the way we live our lives and hopefully make this world a better place. But beyond that,” he concludes, “who knows?”
To cosmologist-philosopher Paul Davies, “the word ‘God’ means different things to different people. And so we have to be really careful that we just don’t use it in a sloppy manner.”
The popular image of God, according to Davies, is “a sort of a super-being up there in the sky, or beyond the universe, who, like a cosmic magician, could bring the universe into being, who keeps the universe going, who watches over things, and who intervenes from time to time to work miracles.”
He says, “When I became a scientist, I hated that idea. I rejected the notion that the laws of nature could be overruled or suspended in some way, that God was in essence just another force of nature—‘Well, we’ve got gravitation; we’ve got electromagnetism; and oh, from time to time, we’ve also got God, prodding atoms around with additional forces and then disappearing for long periods of time.”
To Davies, “the idea of God as a fitful being living in time, a cosmic tinkerer who intervenes from time to time, is offensive. All horrible.” But then, he says, “we have a more sophisticated concept of God as perhaps a timeless being who is the ground in which the rationality of the universe is rooted. This idea has a lot of appeal. I think it’s really what many physicists actually believe, even though they may not use the word ‘God.’”
Davies explains that he has recently come to “a completely different point of view in which we should try to get away from the notion of a universe which has meaning and purpose imposed on it by some external being. In fact, I would rather get away from the word God altogether and focus on this intrinsic meaning or purpose within the universe.”
What do I think about God? I am taken by wonder, though sometimes I’m also taken by guilt. On occasion, I can feel intellectually backward, embarrassed, for wondering about God without arguing about God, for enjoying speculations of the nature of God without pursuing analysis of the existence of God.
Can I believe without reason? Would that be “faith” or excuse?
God is not a game. Am I playing a game? Am I justified in wondering about God?
To find out, I ask Alvin Plantinga, a towering figure in the philosophy of contemporary religion. He explains what it takes to believe in God.
“First of all,” Plantinga says, “let’s suppose, initially at any rate, that belief in God is justifiable. That is, you’re not going contrary to any intellectual duties or obligations by accepting belief in God. Secondly, let’s suppose that it’s also rational. It’s not a manifestation of some malfunction of your mind if in fact you believe in God, as presumably it isn’t, given that so many people do in fact believe in God. Thirdly, let’s suppose that it holds at least enough of which separates knowledge from true belief. There is a difference between a lucky guess on the one hand and knowing something on the other. Let’s call that difference—whatever exactly it is, however we want to characterize it (which is another large question)—‘warrant.’ And let’s suppose that belief in God also has warrant, at least some degree of warrant initially.”
Plantinga then examines the “proposed defeaters” for such a belief in God. “A defeater for a belief,” he says, “is when some other belief you acquire is such that given that you now have that second belief, you cannot anymore rationally maintain the first belief.”
Among the classic defeaters for belief in God, he says, “is, first of all, the argument from evil. There is always evil in the world—all the suffering and pain, much of it caused by human beings. The world is full of evil. So isn’t evil a defeater for belief in God?”
No, Plantinga explains. “Evil is not obviously a defeater because God might have a reason for allowing evil in the world,” he says. “Philosophers and theologians have suggested a wide variety of reasons for God allowing evil, many of which have to do with free will.”
Plantinga classically comments that, “if God did have reasons for permitting all this evil, it’s not at all likely that we would know what those reasons are. Put it like this,” he says: “From the fact that we don’t know what God’s reasons are, it doesn’t follow that it’s unlikely that God has reasons. The distance between us and God—between our cognitive, epistemic situation and God’s—is just too great for such a conclusion.”
I do wonder about God. I admit it. Wondering can reveal the richness of God’s existence. Or expose the bankruptcy of God’s nonexistence.
I like Ward’s “necessity and value.” Necessity: It’s impossible for God not to exist. Value: Goodness drives existence; God is the greatest possible being.
Islam’s god transcends existence. Jews struggle with God’s polarities—good and evil, coherence and chaos. Buddhists’ “functional atheism” removes God from human affairs.
Davies is offended by an interventionist-magician God who would violate the laws of nature. As for Leslie’s vision of infinite minds, what could be bigger?
Knowing God only in the negative; evolving concepts of God—these too add breadth to what God may be about.
I’m taken by Plantinga’s expositions, but I remain skeptical in banking my belief on the prevalence of human practice. Many exhort me that to know God is to experience God, to sense the feelings and emotions of belief and worship. But I distrust feelings and emotions, sadly perhaps.
I’ll keep wondering about God, profoundly unsure whether I’ll ever get closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with Keith Ward, Mahmoud Ayoub, Rabbi Neil Gillman, Ananda Guruge, John Leslie, William Grassie, J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, Paul Davies, and Alvin Plantinga in “Wondering About God?”—the 16th episode in the new season of the Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series (55th in total).
The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Thursday, participants will discuss the current episode.

P.S. Click here to visit our Closer to Truth archive.

We go our ways and live our lives. All seems ordinary, normal. Yet all is extraordinary, astonishing. We human beings sit roughly midway between atoms and galaxies, between the infinitesimally small and the immensely large. And both—atoms and galaxies—must be so perfectly structured for them—for us—to exist.
It’s called “fine-tuning,” and it’s all so breathtakingly precise that it cries out for explanation. To some, it may seem obvious that “God designed it,” that fine-tuning leads to God. But “obvious” can mislead, and there are other explanations.
“Fine-tuning” is perhaps modern theology’s strongest “design” argument for the existence of God. That’s why I start with a leading proponent, Robin Collins, a young Christian philosopher trained in physics.
“Scientists have discovered that the basic structure of the universe has to be just right in order for life to occur,” Collins says, “particularly intelligent, conscious observers like ourselves.” He highlights three basic sources of fine-tuning: 1) the fine-tuning of the laws of nature, 2) the fine-tuning of the constants of physics (those numbers, or “free parameters,” needed to make equations fit the physical world), and 3) the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe.
According to Collins, “the laws of nature have to be just right in order for life to occur. For example, without gravity, or a universal attractive force, then matter in the universe would never clump together into stars and planets. Without the strong nuclear force (the force that holds neutrons and protons together), then all protons would repel each other and atoms with atomic numbers greater than hydrogen could not exist. Without the electromagnetic force, complex chemistry would be impossible.”
Regarding the second source of fine-tuning, the constants of physics, Collins uses Newton’s law of gravity, where its force equals g times the first mass, times the second mass, divided by the distance between the masses squared. That “g” is a critical number. If it were one half of what it is, we would weigh one half of what we do.
The most extraordinary case of fine-tuning of the constants of physics, Collins asserts, is the cosmological constant, which seems to be a pressure-like force of empty space that opposes gravity. Though extraordinarily weak, it is not zero, and it seems to be fine-tuned to about one part in 10¹²⁰. (Collins explains this astounding fine-tuning by drawing an analogy: “If you had a ruler stretched across the entire universe and thought of it as a radio dial, it would have to be fine-tuned to much, much less than 1 trillionth of an inch.”)
As for the third source of fine-tuning, the initial conditions of the universe, Collins claims that they had to have been just right in order for life to occur—specifically, very low entropy to have usable energy.
He comes to the conclusion that fine-tuning provides “strong evidence of a Designer, a being who set the universe up, structured it in just the right way, in order for conscious, intelligent beings to come to exist.”
The laws of nature. The constants of physics. The initial conditions of the universe. Collins makes a threefold “fine-tuning case” for God.
Sure, I’d like God to exist. But I shy from defending God with “design.” I’d feel ever vulnerable to scientific discovery.
Ernan McMullin, a philosopher of science trained in physics and a Catholic priest, envisions fine-tuning as a radically new kind of argument for God. “In order to get a life-bearing universe,” he says, “the laws of nature have to be pretty much what they are. Now the question is, what do we make of that?”
McMullin sees only four possible answers: luck, premature science, the multiverse theory, and a Creator God. He rejects “luck” as being wildly unlikely. He rejects premature science because “there are so many coincidences in the laws of nature that it’s not very likely that they could all follow from a simple, single theory.” He rejects the multiverse (of perhaps an infinity of universes) as requiring “an enormous additional postulate” and being “quite extreme.” He says: “To postulate something so totally new, something for which there is no evidence at all, is wishful thinking.”
So he concludes that “there is only one other alternative as far as I can see and that is to hearken back to the ancient tradition of creation theology, the idea that the universe is the work of a Creator, and that the Creator has a special role for humans within this universe.”
What about what the “God hypothesis” has to assume? “Not only do we have to postulate some ethereal spiritual being for whom there’s no evidence whatsoever,” I say, “but we also have to postulate that being to be so complex that it can create whatever complexity we find here.” So doesn’t conjuring up God, I ask McMullin, make the problem doubly worse?
“No, I don’t agree with that at all,” he shoots back instantly. “First of all, it’s by no means necessary that a being sufficiently powerful to create our universe would have to be complex. Scientists themselves are accustomed to finding simple answers to very complex questions. More importantly, we can ask whether there should be a universe in the first place. The question of existence is a unique question. It’s a question which the scientists can’t address and shouldn’t address. This is not a shortcoming of science, this is not a gap; this is simply a question that is of a different sort. And the religious believer has always asked it and has always given an answer to it: There is a being responsible for the fact that the universe exists, even if there are an infinity of universes or a universe which has always existed.”
McMullin says: “You have a choice between two alternatives: You either stop with the universe as given, as physicists do. Or you take the one step further and you postulate a single being and a single act of creation.”
But this doesn’t answer why there should be that kind of God in the first place?
“There has to be a stopping point,” McMullin asserts. “The question is: Which is the better stopping point? I myself think that it’s an issue that has never come up before in the history of this discussion because, previous to this, the way in which God entered into it was as an answer to some specific of the universe, like design, for example. My argument has nothing to do with this. It is not saying, ‘Look, there’s something science can’t explain which we can explain with God.’ That’s not it. What is being postulated here is a reason why there should be anything at all for physics to study in the first place.”
To McMullin, fine-tuning is different in kind from traditional arguments from “design”—and it bores to the core of the essence of existence itself.
I’m exhilarated by profound insight, but I fear superficial semantics. McMullin’s first a priest, I remind myself, then a scientist. What about someone first a scientist, sensitive to spiritual ideas, but not wedded to them?
Physicist Michio Kaku, whose religious background includes both Buddhism and Christianity, tells a story. “When I was in second grade,” he says, “my teacher made a statement that shocked me to the core. She said that God so loved the Earth, he put the Earth just in the right place from the sun. Not too close because the oceans would boil; not too far because the oceans would freeze. I was floored! That’s right! The Earth was in just the right place relative to the sun! Venus did have a scorched surface. Mars was a frozen desert. We are just right from the sun. Every planet discovered is either too hot or too cold. How to explain Earth’s great fortune, the so-called Goldilocks paradox?”
Kaku continues: “How many Goldilocks zones are there? You start to count them, and you realize that we are just right in so many different areas of physics. It’s like a jet airplane being ripped apart by a hurricane and then suddenly reassembled intact after the storm. That just doesn’t happen by accident. So we have this paradox: Why are we in so many Goldilocks zones?”
He goes on: “There are two philosophies you can take. First, the Copernican principle says that there’s nothing special about humans, nothing special about our piece of the universe. We’re very ordinary. We exist, as do trillions of stars and planets. We’re insignificant. We’re nothing. We’re less than nothing. … Second, the anthropic principle says we are special. We are so special that we’re perhaps the only universe among a whole collection of universes that has intelligent life. Our universe, in some sense, knew we were coming.”
Does this line of argument lead to God? “There’s another way to explain it,” Kaku says. “It could be that universes evolve—that as some universes die, baby universes are created by advanced civilizations, and the DNA of these new universes is precisely the physical constants of our universe. Of course, they would have to be unimaginably advanced, but this controlled evolution of universes is consistent with the laws of physics. It would then be no accident that our universe has these conditions because it was a spin-off of another universe. In some sense, we would then not be winners of a cosmic jackpot, but simply winners of survival of the fittest.”
But even if super-advanced civilizations were creating universes, there had to have been a first universe—and there the fine-tuning problem would reassemble itself and re-emerge, stronger than ever. No?
No one knows the non-God, nonsupernatural explanation of fine-tuning better than physicist Victor Stenger, who makes an aggressive case for atheism. Stenger is raring to refute the fine-tuning argument for God.
He begins by agreeing that “there’s no doubt that if many of the constants of physics were changed, we would have a different universe—we would not have life as we know it. However,” he adds quickly, “one has to realize that life is just basically organized systems, and it’s perfectly possible to conceive of life forms totally different from ours. We can’t use our limited knowledge of our own universe to predict how some other universe might look.”
Stenger claims that when he played “a little game with the constants of physics” by changing them randomly over 10 orders of magnitude, he still “got over half of the stars living the same billion years or more.” This indicates, he says, “that the age of stars is not all that fine-tuned, and that once you have long-lived stars, you have fulfilled a primary requirement to have some kind of complex life form because, after all, complexity does arise out of simplicity pretty naturally.” Stenger concludes that “the fine-tuning argument for God fails right away because it only applies to one form of life, and we have no way of ruling out all conceivable forms of life.”
He gives another argument against the fine-tuning argument for God. “If God made the universe and God is perfect,” Stenger says, “why would he have to fine-tune it at all? If God designed the universe for life, especially for human life, then why wouldn’t God have humans able to live anyplace? Live on every planet! Live in space! God could have done that.” Further, Stenger adds, “our planet itself is not exactly such a great place: It’s mostly water, sunlight causes cancer, disasters are commonplace. So if God really created the universe for us, he didn’t do a very good job.”
He continues: “The argument for the creation requiring outside forces was a good one until cosmology came along in the 20th century and showed that it could be perfectly natural. We don’t know exactly how it happened, but we certainly have plausible explanations that solve the ‘God of the gaps’ problem.” (“God of the gaps” is the argument that if you can’t explain something with science, you therefore invoke God to explain it.)
The typical atheistic refutation of the fine-tuning problem postulates that there are many universes, Stenger says, “which would mean that we just happen to be in the universe that was suited for our form of life because that’s the only place we could possibly be. But even within a single universe, there’s nothing that requires that only our particular form of life is possible.”
Stenger offers five natural reasons why the fine-tuning of the universe does not lead to God: life need not be like us; fine-tuning is not that fine; new theories, like cosmic inflation, solve mysteries; God of the gaps never lasts; and, after all, our life on earth isn’t so great!
The “fine-tuning problem” demands explanation. Here are four.

1) Brute fact and luck: The one universe that just happens to exist also just happens to support life.
2) The universe can be only one way, one set of equations that explain all. (But even so, why would this “one way” generate life?)
3) Multiple universes: such that everything will happen “somewhere”—including us.
4) A Creator God who designed the universe.

Here’s what I think. Multiple universes would explain the fine-tuning of our universe, but a fine-tuned “universe generator” for the vast ensemble of multiple universes is still needed.
As for supernatural explanations, a traditional God is but one of many untold options. Moreover, new kinds of physical laws may seem supernatural.
Where do we stop? What’s the terminus of explanations? That’s the question!
Our universe? Multiple universes? Or something beyond?
For the riddle of existence, fine-tuning is our biggest clue. That’s why it edges us closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with Robin Collins, Victor Stenger, Ernan McMullin, and Michio Kaku in “Does a Fine-Tuned Universe Lead to God?”—the 15th episode in the new season of the Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series (54th in total).
The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Thursday, participants will discuss the current episode.

P.S. Click here to visit our Closer to Truth archive.