To do that, he posits an “acausal, indeterminate, random Universe”:
It remains possible that the Universe does, at all levels, obey the intuitive rule of cause-and-effect, although the possibility of a fundamentally acausal, indeterminate, random Universe remains in play (and, arguably, preferred) as well. It is possible that the Universe did have a beginning to its existence, although that has by no means been established beyond any sort of reasonable scientific doubt. And if both of those things are true, then the Universe’s existence would have a cause, and that cause may be (but isn’t necessarily) something we can identify with God. However, possible does not equate to proof. Unless we can firmly establish many things that have yet to be demonstrated, the Kalam cosmological argument will only convince those who already agree with its unproven conclusions.
Ethan Siegel, “Does modern cosmology prove the existence of God?” at Big Think (November 3, 2021)
Physicist Brian Miller replies at Evolution News and Science Today:
Siegel begins his piece by outlining the Kalam cosmological argument for God that Meyer detailed in The Return of the God Hypothesis:
“Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
The Universe began to exist.
Therefore, the Universe has a cause to its existence.”
Siegel then attempts to challenge the first premise by arguing that quantum phenomena appear to occur without causes:
“…there is no cause for the phenomenon of when this atom will decay. It is as though the Universe has some sort of random, acausal nature to it that renders certain phenomena fundamentally indeterminate and unknowable. In fact, there are many other quantum phenomena that display this same type of randomness, including entangled spins, the rest masses of unstable particles, the position of a particle that’s passed through a double slit, and so on.”
This claim is highly misleading since it confuses determinism with causality. Quantum mechanics is not deterministic since it describes only the probabilities that certain events could occur such as the paths a photon could take in the double slit experiment. But the laws of quantum mechanics act in our universe as the causal agent for all such events.
Brian Miller, “Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel Again Desperately Attempts to Avoid a Cosmic Beginning” at Evolution News and Science Today (November 8, 2021)
Siegel may be confusing the Kalam Constant with the Shazzam! Constant. What’s really interesting is that he thinks he must answer Meyer’s arguments at all.
As to Siegel’s claim that “…there is no cause for the phenomenon of when this atom will decay. It is as though the Universe has some sort of random, acausal nature to it that renders certain phenomena fundamentally indeterminate and unknowable.”
First off, to claim that something happens without a cause, ‘reasonlessly’, is to make, as Paul Davies pointed out, “a mockery of science”, i.e., “If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.”
Besides Siegel’s claim that there is “no cause for the phenomenon of when this atom will decay” anti-scientific in that it makes “a mockery of science”, the claim is also simply false.
Which is to say, we are able, via science and reason, to infer the exact cause as to why any particular atom will decay.
An old entry in wikipedia described the Quantum Zeno effect as such “an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay.”
Likewise, the present day entry on wikipedia about the Quantum Zeno effect also provocatively states that “a system can’t change while you are watching it”
Atheistic materialists have tried to get around the Quantum Zeno effect by postulating that interactions with the environment (i.e. decoherence) are sufficient to explain the Quantum Zeno effect.
Yet, the following interaction-free measurement of the Quantum Zeno effect demonstrated that the presence of the Quantum Zeno effect can be detected without interacting with a single atom.
In short, the quantum zeno effect, regardless of how atheistic materialists may feel about it, is experimentally shown to be a real effect that is not reducible to any materialistic explanation. And thus the original wikipedia statement of, “an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay”, stands as being a true statement.
Moreover, on top of that rather startling finding, advances in quantum information theory have now shown that, “an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer.”
And as Renato Renner, a professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, stated in the following article, Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,”,,, “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
The reason why I am very impressed with these experiments demonstrating that “an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer”, is that the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, is very foundational to any ‘scientific’ definition of time that we may have.
As the following article states, “Entropy explains time; it explains every possible action in the universe;,,”,, “Even gravity,,,, can be expressed as a consequence of the law of entropy.,,,”
On top of the fact that “(Entropy) explains time; it explains every possible action in the universe”, entropy is also, by a very wide margin, the most finely tuned of the initial conditions of the Big Bang. Finely tuned to an almost incomprehensible degree of precision, 1 part in 10 to the 10 to the 123rd power. As Roger Penrose, (a staunch agnostic who is VERY reluctant to ever appeal to God as an explanation), himself stated, “This now tells us how precise the Creator’s aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123.”
In the following video, Dr, Bruce Gordon touches upon just how enormous that number truly is. Dr. Gordon states, “you would need a hundred million, trillion, trillion, trillion, universes our size, with a zero on every proton and neutron in all of those universes just to write out this number. That is how fine tuned the initial entropy of our universe is.”
And yet, to repeat the last sentence from the quantum information paper, “we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”
That statement is just fascinating! Why in blue blazes should the finely tuned entropic actions of the universe, entropic actions which also happen to explain time itself, even care if I am consciously observing them, (and/or describing them), or not unless consciousness really is more foundational to reality than the finely tuned 1 in 10^10^123 entropy of the universe is? To state the obvious, this finding of entropy being “a property of an observer who describes a system.” is very friendly, if not outright proof, for a Mind First, and/or for a Theistic view of reality.
And it is not as if the Bible did not anticipate the discovery of entropy.
For instance, Romans chapter 8: verses 20 and 21 itself states, “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”
And as Psalm 102:25-27 states,
Even Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, whose “research into the nature of heat led Kelvin to his formulation of the second law of thermodynamics”,,,,
Even Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin himself, whose “research into the nature of heat led Kelvin to his formulation of the second law of thermodynamics”, (and long before the quantum Zeno Effect, quantum information theory, and the initial entropy of the universe were even known about), even Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, himself was not reticent in inferring God as the cause for the entropy of our universe:
Thus Ethan Siegel may, via his atheism, be forced to make a ‘mockery off science” and claim that “…there is no cause for the phenomenon of when this atom will decay”, but science and reason itself could care less what Siegel is forced to believe because of his a-priori adherence to atheism. As far as our best science can now tell us, God, specifically the infinite Mind of God, must be the cause for all the entropy of the universe, including being the cause for why any particular atom may decay.