Science may depend on God for its existence
The false vacuum theory suggests that all things depend a necessary being.
Science is an empirical endeavor, based on evidence and logic. Because of this many scientists have come to believe that anything that cannot be answered scientifically should be discounted as unproven to be doubted or dismissed.
Most scientists believe in the scientific method and the effectiveness of science. This well-founded belief is based on the huge range of discoveries that have drastically changed human existence over the last several centuries.
On the other hand, many scientists and non-scientists alike point to the lack of evidence for God as proof that God does not exist or at least that they should doubt his existence.
One of the difficulties with this position is that science itself lacks evidence for its own existence because such an argument would be circular. You can’t prove that evidence and logical conclusions from evidence provide truth about the world because you would be relying on that very premise to prove your argument. Thus, to prove science is “true”, you would need to rely on something other than evidence.
There are essentially two ways out this bind, a theistic way and an atheistic materialist way.
Let’s start with the materialist approach: in this approach, we do away with concepts such as truth altogether, for truth would require something outside of the material world. Instead, all the concepts that human beings believe in are artifacts of our evolution. Rationality and morality are subjective features of the world that human beings evolved to help us to survive. Even consciousness may be an illusion.
From the materialist perspective, science does not find truths about the world. Rather, it is an evolved way of enhancing survival by discovering repeatable stimuli to our environment that result in reliable outcomes. The modern edifice of the scientific method is just a refinement of our natural, Pavlovian conditioning to the world. Our evolution of language allows us to pass on the results to those who have never run the experiments and our evolved social structure ensures that we trust those who provide such information.
Taken to its logical conclusion, materialism itself and all its arguments are also an evolutionary adaptation. You could even say they are just a way of keeping materialist philosophers fed and housed since by their own admission they cannot be considered “true”.
Some scientists, notably the late Stephen Hawking, subscribe to this rough philosophical stance. We do not ever understand anything about reality, in Hawking’s view. We simply learn what experiments generate what measurements. Any explanation we fancy to come up with is just a story we tell ourselves, a myth, not truth.
I suspect that many who subscribe to an atheist materialist philosophy do not even realize that they are signing up to deny the existence of logic itself. But, if you accept logic, rationality, and truth exist, you cannot subscribe to a purely materialist philosophy.
It’s not a surprise that great scientists such as Einstein and Newton were theistic. Einstein subscribed to Spinoza’s theology of an infinite but rather distant God. Newton was a Christian but a secret Arian (he denied the divinity of Christ at a time when it was a capital offense). Both strongly believed that their scientific work was leading them to understand the mind of God.
As with these two giants, theistic philosophy can take on different flavors. One is neo-Platonist where ideas, logic, truth, and so on exist somewhere out there, perhaps in another world, perhaps in a world that overlaps our own in some way. There is a God of sorts but God is simply the source of ideas and concepts, the pure forms that shape reality. God is not necessarily the active, conscious God of the Bible. Rather, he emanates our reality (and perhaps infinite other realities). Some people call this God “The Universe” or “The Source” to further distance from the Biblical description. Yet, they will speak of how the Universe wants this or that, imputing consciousness to it. Some take on a more pantheistic approach that everything is actually a part of this God. We are the universe trying to understand itself.
It is hard to believe that God or the Universe or the Source has no consciousness, no self-awareness, and no will when we have all these. Indeed, God would have to be the source of these things for them to even exist, a sort of infinite consciousness, unconfined by location in time or space.
Others take on a more traditional theistic view of an active creator God, one who speaks to people, creates prophets, anoints kings, directs the course of history, and even dies for us. Whatever you believe about God is a matter of faith because logic and evidence cannot tell you what to believe. While there are anti-science theistic beliefs such as the denial of evolution, theism itself is far from anti-science. One could even say that materialism is the anti-science belief because it denies the existence of truth and rationality.
Materialists might point out that there is absolutely no basis for these beliefs to which the theists point out that materialism denies the existence of bases to any beliefs including their own.
Suppose we, like most people, accept a theistic perspective. (Remember that we cannot prove either perspective but must choose based on what seems right to us.) Then, we, by implication, also accept that God predates the universe for the universe must come out of a God’s mind. That is, God is the Prime Mover, the Uncaused Cause, for every event in the universe has a cause except the first one.
This idea of God as a first cause is often maligned because people misunderstand what it means. They think that God must be the finger that starts the dominoes falling that resulted in the present universe. This idea of God is called a Demiurge and is a Platonic concept. Of course, there can be all kinds of reasons why the universe first came into existence at the Big Bang. It does not need a God to start it in motion. Nor do we even know if the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe. We just don’t have any evidence of something before that.
One of the problems with the idea of a Demiurge is that in order for the universe to exist it really needs more than just a Being to start it off. It needs a Being to make it exist at all. That is because the very notion of a thing’s existence is contingent on something else causing it to exist. That is what a First Cause means. It means something that has a non-contingent existence, a necessary Being.
A necessary Being is a Being that, if it exists, cannot not exist. Without a necessary Being to give it existence, the universe could not exist.
Another way of putting this is that everything has the property of non-existence except one thing upon which all other things depend on for their existence. If that one thing did not exist, then nothing would exist because eventually, at some point, all things would cease to exist.
Some materialists (Bertrand Russell for example) object to this idea and suggest that the universe can certainly exist of its own accord. More specifically, it is argued, matter and energy are conserved and therefore exist of their own accord, that is, they have that essential property that we attribute to God in that they cannot not exist.
Unfortunately, we know this to be false. Matter and energy can be neither created nor destroyed in general, but in cosmology they can be created and destroyed. This is because Einstein’s theory of General Relativity that governs such things doesn’t necessarily conserve them. Moreover, it isn’t clear that quantum field theory does, although it certainly does in experiments with matter.
Indeed, one of the primary theories about the origins of the universe suggests that it was created out of a region of false vacuum. The theory of eternal inflation, a contender for explaining the origin of our universe, depends upon it. A false vacuum is a region where matter and energy are allowed to exist because the lowest energy state of the universe is higher than a true vacuum, which is the ultimate ground state where nothing exists. This appears to be the primary state of quantum fields, non-existence.
Moreover, once you have some, energy is only conserved when you have a clear definition of time where physics only depends on the differences between events and not when they actually occurred. The universe has this property for most purposes but when you take its origin into account, that time symmetry disappears since the origin occurred at a particular and absolute point. Even if it did not, general relativity does not allow for a clear definition of either time or energy in its most general form. It really can create matter out of nothing.
So, yes, matter and energy are contingent things. If the false vacuum theory is true, indeed, all things are contingent on the false vacuum. This includes time and space which are properties of the gravitational field. Thus, all things have the property of non-existence. A bubble of true vacuum, should it appear anywhere in the universe, would expand outward at the speed of light and destroy everything, causing all things to vanish into nothingness, even subatomic particles. Since a true vacuum is just non-existence, it isn’t a “thing” with existence itself.
This suggests that something else must have necessary existence in order to provide for the possibility that all reality could cease to exist at any moment. Something or Someone has to be responsible for existence.
While materialists argue that this must be something other than God, if so, science cannot point to what that is.
Cosmological Argument
Although in Western philosophy the earliest formulation of a version of the cosmological argument is found in Plato's…plato.stanford.edu