Strike Three for the Cosmological Constant?

It looks like the cosmological constant, aka lambda, aka dark energy has taken another hit. First it was the timescape model, which I blogged about before. According to this model, the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe is just an illusion brought on by time dilation and growing voids. Then a paper came out claiming, based on some data from the Desi telescope, that although dark energy is real, the cosmological constant may not be constant after all. It changes over time. I blogged about that, too. Now, a new study claims that the expansion of the universe may not be accelerating after all. Sabine Hossenfelder made a video about it.

These are interesting times.

What does it mean to believe something?

When I was a kid, I came to the "realization" that I couldn't actually be certain about anything because for anything I thought was true, it was at least possible that I was wrong. The seeds of this idea began when I was in the 2nd grade trying to remember an incident a year or two earlier in which I fell asleep in the bushes beside a tennis court near my house. I couldn't remember waking up and crawling out of the bushes, which made me wonder if I was still asleep and just having a vivid dream. This thought haunted me for several years.

At some point, I took the thought a little further. If it was possible that I could still be dreaming, then it's just as possible that the whole kit and caboodle was a dream. Maybe I even dreamed that I fell asleep by that tennis court. Maybe nothing I took to be true was real. Maybe I've always been in a dream state. Maybe humans don't even exist. Maybe I'm an alien. Maybe there is no physical world at all, and it's all just perception.

These thoughts eventually lead me to the conclusion that I didn't really know anything. However, I wasn't a total skeptic either. I accepted that I was probably a real person living in a real world. It's just that I could never be absolutely certain. That meant I didn't really know anything. I just had degrees of confidence. I had beliefs, but not knowledge.

I made a conscious effort to stop saying I know stuff and to say, "I believe," instead. I pictured belief to be a spectrum of degrees of confidence, and that I could never be 100% sure of anything. This idea may have lasted into my early 20's, but I'm not sure.

Although I didn't make any effort back then to define belief and knowledge, it appears that I took knowledge to amount to 100% certainty. Anything short of that, and you don't have knowledge. You just have belief.

Later on, I came to the realization that there were at least a few things that I could be certain about, including my own existence, basic math, and the laws of logic. But most things were still beliefs that fell somewhere on the confidence spectrum. I knew I existed, but I didn't know what kind of being I was or whether I had a physical body. I only believed I was a physical human being.

I changed my mind about what it meant to know something in one of my philosophy classes in college. My teacher, whose name I think was David Sosa, walked us carefully through the standard definition of knowledge as justified true belief. It all made perfectly good sense to me, and I've accepted that understanding of knowledge ever since. I became a lot more comfortable saying I know stuff because a person could have a justified true belief even if they lacked 100% confidence.

He didn't just hand us the definition and explain the ingredients. He gave us thought experiments and asked us questions to lead us to the definition. One thought experiment he used was a situation in which somebody guessed the right lottery numbers, actually believed they were the winning numbers, and ended up being right. Then he asked us whether the person knew the right lottery numbers. We intuitively recognized that he didn't. What was the missing ingredient? This thought experiment was meant to illustrate that having a true belief was not sufficient for knowledge, and that justification was also required. I have been using that same thought experiment ever since.

One reason I accepted his definition of knowledge was because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that his definition was implicit in the way people actually used knowledge in our daily lives anyway. It was the definition implicit in the way I used the word in unguarded moments when I wasn't trying to be a persnickety philosophy kid. There were lots of times I claimed to know every day things for which I lacked 100% certainty.

Words get their meaning from the way they are commonly used. In every day life, when people say they know something, they don't mean they have infalliable knowledge. They don't mean they are 100% confident. They just mean they're aware of some fact. For example, when people say they know where something is, or they know what time the show starts, or they know who ate the last cookie, they aren't claiming absolute certainty. They're just claiming to be privy to information about something that's true, i.e., they are claiming to have a justified true belief.

My intentional refusal to use the word, knowledge, to refer to anything I thought when I was a kid was just silly. I remember when somebody would ask me if I knew some mundane thing, like where the nearest gas station is, I would say something like, "I don't know where one is, but I believe one is just a block away." I was just trying to be consistent, but I was really being silly, and people were right to think me a little weird.

Since settling on the standard definition of knowledge as justified true belief, I still run into people who hold what I consider to be muddled ideas about these things. For example, I ran into a Mormon bishop one time. When I asked him if he believed such and such, he said, "I don't believe it; I know it." To him, knowledge and belief were mutually exclusive. But according to the standard definition, you can't know something if you don't at least believe it. To believe something is merely to think it's true. You can't know something is true if you don't even think it is true.

I've run into people who refuse to say they believe anything. They tell me they either know something or they don't. They don't have beliefs. These people strike me as being just as silly as I was when I was a kid, except they were silly in the opposite way. Whereas I claimed to only have beliefs and no knowledge, they claim to only have knowledge and no beliefs.

Although I've asked, I can't remember ever getting a straight answer from one of these people when I asked them to define what they mean by "knowledge" and "belief," so I can only speculate. I think they take belief to amount to something like arbitrary assent. If you think something is true, but you have no justification, then that's a belief. But if you have justification for thinking something is true, then you have knowledge. So to them, there's no such thing as a justified belief. For a lot of these people, belief is a religious term that's roughly equivalent to blind faith. A good question to ask one of these people is, "Suppose you think something is true for what looks to you to be good reasons, but it's actually not true. You're mistaken. Do you have knowledge in that case? If not, is that a belief? What would you call it?"

Blind faith is clearly not what most people mean when they say they believe something. By the ordinary use of the word, to believe something is merely to think it's true. If you think the polar ice caps are going to melt in the next ten years, then that's what you believe. It is possible to believe something for good reasons, flimsy reasons, or no reason at all. Whether you have justification or not for thinking something is true, it's still a belief. It's possible to believe something and be right about it or wrong about it. Whether it's true or not, it's still a belief.

The standard definition of knowledge makes good sense. Imagine a person says, "I know the earth orbits the sun," but then turns around and says, "I don't think it's true that the earth orbits the sun." Would we not think they were contradicting themselves? Or, imagine a person says, "I believe you can get a taco for $2 at yonder food truck," but then followed it up with, "But I know you can't." Would that person not be contradicting themselves? How can you claim to know something if you don't even think it's true? I don't think you can do that consistently.

It doesn't make sense to say you know something if you don't at least think it's true. And if you think it's true, then you believe it. Believing just means you assent to it, you think it's true, it is your point of view, it's what you take to be accurate, etc. Belief and knowledge, then, are not mutually exclusive. They're complimentary. It's possible to believe something and not know it, but it's not possible to know something and not believe it.

I suppose the only exception might be in a case where deep down somebody knows that something is true, but they're just in denial about it. That's the only scenario I can think of where a person might know something in some sense without believing it. But that's debatable because if they know something deep down, then they probably also believe it deep down. Their denial is surface level and not entirely honest, so it's probably not a real belief anyway. The psychological mechanics of what it means to be in denial might warrant a blog post of its own.

The bottom line is that from just observing the way people talk, and introspecting on the way I talk, it looks to me like the common every day use of the word, "believe," just entails that somebody thinks something is true. Belief doesn't mean blind faith. Belief and knowledge are not mutually exclusive. Knowledge does not require certainty, but it does require belief.

Even if knowledge did require certainty, wouldn't it be certain. . .belief?

I addressed the Gettier problem on another blog post.

Does the second law of thermodynamics imply that the universe had a beginning?

Anybody who has read my origin story knows the prominent role the second law of thermodynamics played in moving me from agnosticism to theism. But for those who haven't, here's the TLDR.

I learned about the second law of thermodynamics in the Navy's nuclear power school. After I got out of the navy, I went to the University of Texas at Austin. One day, while out walking, I was thinking about the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and it occured to me that they couldn't both be true. I stewed over that for a few days or weeks (don't remember exactly how long) until I came to the conclusion that the universe must've had a beginning, which means there must be a creator. That was the end of my agnosticism.

Since that time, I was introduced to Aristotle, Aquinas, and Christian apologetics. I discovered additional reasons to think the universe had a beginning. (As a side note, Aristotle didn't argue for a temporal beginning, but I did misunderstand him to be making that argument.)

Also, since that time I gained a greater understanding of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. In the process, I came to realize the second law does not necessarily imply a beginning after all. It still suggested a beginning, but I stopped relying on it so heavily because it didn't strike me as being a strong enough reason to think there was a beginning.

But since that time, I've come back around to thinking the second law does give us strong reason to think the universe had a beginning. It isn't certain, but it's very close to it.

Why I originally thought the Second Law of Thermodynamics implied the beginning of the universe and therefore God

Here's the reason I originally thought the second law implied a beginning. If the second law is true, then entropy increases in every process. That means no matter what happens in the universe, the net entropy will go up. This is true even if entropy goes down in some localized place. In power school, we were taught that entropy was the amount of energy in a system that's no longer available to do work. As entropy goes up, less and less energy is available to do work, i.e. to bring about change. Unless you get rid of some of that useless energy or add some new energy to the system, eventually the system will wind down and nothing else will happen.

If the first law is true, then energy is neither created nor destroyed. That means whatever exists has always existed and always will exist. But if the whole universe has always existed, then it should've already reached maximum entropy. There shouldn't be any stars or galaxies. There shouldn't be any life. The universe should be in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. It should just be a big homogeneous, uninteresting, diffuse something or other. Cosmologists call it the heat death of the universe, which I learned later.

Yet here we are with plenty of order, complexity, and activity. The universe is far from thermodynamic equilibrium. That means it can't be the case that the universe has existed for infinite time. The universe must've begun a finite time ago. And since the universe had a beginning, it had to have had a cause. That cause could not itself be physical or it, too, would be subject to the second law, and it would also have to have had a beginning. The more I thought about it, the more it looked like God, so that's what I thought it was.

That was my original reason for becoming convinced that there was a God. From there, Christianity was an easy sell because it's what I knew, I already had an affinity for it, and I never really stopping calling myself a Christian even while I was agnostic.

Why I shied away from appealing to the second law to argue for a beginning of the universe

I later gained a better understanding of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics that weakened my case for a beginning of the universe.

The reason entropy increases with every process is because that's the most likely thing to happen. The second law of thermodynamics is not a fundamental law. It's an emergent law. It's a consequence of statistical probability.

Entropy is colloquially called a measure of disorder, spreading out, equilibrium, etc. These are all decent descriptions because they capture what most of us observe when we observe entropy increasing. If you put a hot cup of coffee in a cold box, heat will flow from the hot to the cold until the temperature of everything is the same. If you put a bunch of folded clothes into a dryer and turn it on, the clothes will become unfolded. If you drop a basketball, it will bounce repeatedly until it eventually comes to rest. If you throw a bunch of chemicals in a jar, they'll react until they settle down and stop reacting. These are all examples of entropy increasing. The second law says entropy increases in every process, so it's always increasing. The second law of thermodynamics is the reason there can never be a perpetual motion machine. If you want to keep the thing running, you have to add new energy to it. Otherwise, it will run down and eventually stop.

That is a decent enough layman understanding of entropy. But there is a more robust, precise, and scientific definition. Entropy is a measure of how many micro states correspond to the same macro state. The equation for entropy looks like this:

\[ \normalsize S = k_B \ln \Omega \]

Where. . .

• \( S \) = entropy
  
• \( k_B \) = Boltzmann’s constant
  
• \( \Omega \) = number of microstates consistent with the same macrostate

By "macro state," I mean a view of the system from afar, zoomed out, so to speak. It's a coarse description of the whole system. By "micro state," I mean the zoomed in view. It's a more fine or granular look at the system. It's a detailed look at the parts.

Here's a couple of examples. Consider a cylinder that contains a gas under pressure. You can consider the pressure in the container as the macro state. The exact position and motion of each molecule of gas in the container is the micro state. There are countless configurations the individual molecules could be in that would result in the pressure of the container being the same. So this is a high entropy system.

Now, consider a computer screen that uses only three colours to generate any image. The image on the screen currently is all blue on the right half and all green on the left half. If each pixel can only be red, green, or blue, then there aren't very many micro states that can produce the same macro state. So this is a low entropy situation.

You should be able to see from these two examples why entropy can be thought of as a measure of disorder, randomness, homogeneity, spread-outness, equilibrium, etc. When things are pretty evenly distributed, there are countless ways the zoomed in details could be different while the zoomed out picture would be the same. But when things are very ordered, there are fewer ways the zoomed in picture could be different while keeping the big picture the same.

You should also be able to see where the second law of thermodynamics comes from. It comes from the fact that in any given system, there are vastly more configurations that are just random noise than configurations that have structure and order. Consider a cookie sheet full of little pieces of alphabet cereal. There are vastly more configurations that sheet of cereal could take that don't form words and sentences than there are configurations that make words and sentences. With that being the case, if you were to start with a sheet of alphabet cereal that has maybe a couple of sentences while the rest of the bits are spread around randomly, and you shook that sheet, it is more probable that the final state would have fewer words and sentences than that it would have more. Whenever there's a change in a system, it's always more probable that the next state of that system will be closer to equilibrium than farther from equilibrium. The probability of a less ordered state is so great that it appears to be a law that entropy always increases when things change.

However, you should notice that given this understanding of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics is not absolute. It's just a generalization. The reason entropy increases in every process is because higher entropy states are vastly more probable than low entropy states. So every time something in the universe changes, the next state of the universe is vastly more likely to be a higher entropy state than a lower entropy state. That, in turn, means that while lower entropy states are highly improbable, they are not impossible.

Suppose, then, that the universe has been around forever. We should expect that it would be, on average, in thermodynamic equilibrium. It always has been. However, given enough time, there should be occasional random fluctuations of low entropy. Smaller fluctuations will be more frequent than large fluctuations because the bigger the fluctuation, the less probable. But given enough time, even the most unlikely low entropy fluctuations are bound to happen. Given infinite time, even a fluctuation of low entropy as large as our universe was in the beginning of the big bang is inevitable. That seems, on the surface, to undermine the argument for an absolute beginning from the second law of thermodynamics. A universe like ours, with an extremely low initial entropy, is practicaly inevitable, even if the universe is infinitely old.

With that in mind, I shied away from appealing to the second law of thermodynamics to try to prove that the universe had a beginning.

Why the second law of thermodynamics turns out to be a good argument for the beginning of the universe after all

Remember that small fluctuations of low entropy happen more frequently than large fluctuations of low entropy. The reason is because small fluctuations (i.e. fluctuations that deviate from equilibrium by a small amount) are more probable than large fluctuations (fluctuations that deviate from equilibrium by a large amount). If our universe began as a random fluctuation of low entropy, then it would have to have been an unimaginably rare and improbable event. If the universe is infinitely big and/or infinitely old, much smaller fluctuations of low entropy would be more common.

Universes that contain only a single small cluster of galaxies would be more numerous than universes like ours. Universes that have only one galaxy would be more numerous still. Universes with one solar system would vastly outnumber universes like ours that have many solar systems in many galaxies.

A random low entropy fluctuation that produced a single brain, just momentariliy, configured in such a way as to generate the sensation of observing a universe like ours is far more probable than an actual universe like ours populated with billions of conscious observers and trillions of stars and galaxies. That means that if we are to explain our existence as being the result of a random low entropy fluctuation, then it is overwhelmingly more probable that we are just brains that fluctuated into existence a moment ago and are about to disintegrate than that we are actually in a 93 billion light year sized or bigger universe. There would be more of these types of brains (called Boltzmann Brains by the experts) than real observers in real universes, so we are more likely to be Boltzmann brains than real people.

As Sean Carroll has explained, the problem with being a Boltzmann brain is that it calls all your beliefs into question. Since all of your alledged knowledge, perceptions, and experiences were spontaneously created in a random fluctuation, they have no connection to what reality is actually like. If you embrace the idea that you're a Boltmann brain, then you lose all justification for anything you believe. That includes whatever reason you allegedly have for thinking you are a Boltzmann brain. As Sean Carroll puts it, Boltzmann brains are cognitively unstable.

To be rational people, we must reject any cosmological model that makes it more probable than not that we are Boltzmann brains. To be honest people, we have to reject these models. After all, none of us honestly believe we are Boltzmann brains. People may toy with the idea, but if they claim to actually believe it, they're probably not being honest with themselves.

The second law of thermodynamics turns out to be a good reason to think the universe has a finite past after all. The only way to escape this conclusion is to embrace a model of the universe that makes it probable that you are a Boltzmann brain, which means you have to embrace a model of the universe that destroys all justification for believing anything, including that model. Denying that the universe has a finite past on the basis that the second law of thermodynamics isn't absolute and that given enough time, there can be random fluctuations of low entropy that results in structured universes and conscious observers turns out to be a self-defeating objection. With that objection out of the way, the second law of thermodynamics makes it very likely that the universe had a beginning.

The argument for a beginning falls short of certainty because it's still at least possible that we are Boltzmann brains, even if we don't know it. But let's just be reasonable.

ChatGPT plays the role of a Street Epistemologist

I had another fun conversation with ChatGPT where I asked it to pretent to be a Street Epistemologist who challenged my epistemology, particularly my Christian beliefs.

Every time I gave an answer, ChatGPT would summarize what I said and ask me if it was correct. Since it was pretty much always right, I decided to edit the summaries out of the conversation below. That way you don't have to read so much redundancy.

Here's how the conversation went down.

Sam
Do you know what street epistemology is?

ChatGPT
Yes. Street epistemology is a conversational method aimed at helping people reflect on how they know what they think they know. It focuses on examining the reliability of the methods a person uses to arrive at a belief—not on debating the belief itself.

A few key features:

• Non-confrontational: It’s meant to be calm, respectful, and curious rather than adversarial or persuasive.
• Method-focused: Instead of asking what someone believes, it asks how they concluded it’s true.
• Socratic style: It uses guided questions to explore epistemic foundations—faith, intuition, evidence, testimony, etc.
• Goal: Not to “win” or change someone’s mind, but to encourage critical reflection and intellectual humility.

It started gaining visibility through Peter Boghossian’s work (especially the book A Manual for Creating Atheists) and has since broadened into a diverse community of practitioners who apply the method to all kinds of beliefs—not just religious ones.

If you're asking because you want to know how to use it, how to defend against it, or how it compares to other philosophical approaches, I can go into any of that.

Sam
I would like for you to pretend to be a Street epistemologist. I'll be a Christian. You engage me in conversation the way a street epistemologist would.

ChatGPT
Sure — I can do that.

I’ll play the role the way an experienced street epistemologist would: calm, curious, non-adversarial, and focused not on what you believe but how you know it’s true.

To begin, I’ll ask a simple, open question, and you can answer in character as a Christian.

Street Epistemologist:

Thanks for chatting with me. To get started, what’s a Christian belief you hold that you consider really important or central to your worldview?

Sam
As a Christian, there are about seven things I think are equally foundational to Christianity. We can talk about any of them you like, but some of them are related to each other. They include (1) That there is a God, (2) That God imposes moral obligations on people, (3) that people fail to live up to their moral obligations, (4) that God holds people accountable for their behavior, (5) That Jesus of Nazareth is the messiah, and (6) that Jesus died for sins, and (7) that Jesus rose from the dead. Is there any one of these you want to focus on?

ChatGPT
Street Epistemologist:

Thanks—that’s a clear layout of the core ideas. Since these are interconnected, it might help to pick just one so we don’t blur them together.

If you’re open to it, I’d like to start with #1: “There is a God.”

That seems like a foundation the others depend on, and it’s often a good place to explore how a person comes to know something.

So here’s my question:

On a scale from 0 to 100—where 0 means “I’m completely sure no God exists” and 100 means “I’m completely sure God exists”—where would you place your confidence, and why that number rather than one a little lower or higher?

Sam
I'm about 98% sure there some sort of god. I'm about 85% sure it's Yahweh.

ChatGPT
Let me start with the first number.

1. Your 98% confidence that some sort of God exists

I’m curious:
What is the main reason—your single strongest reason—that brings you to 98% instead of, say, 70% or 50%?

I’m not asking for all your reasons; just the one that feels the most compelling for you personally.

Sam
There isn't any one reason. It's the cumulative effect of multiple arguments for God that all begin with different premises but end up complimenting each other and converging on something resembling the Abrahamic God.

ChatGPT
Street Epistemologist:

That makes sense—a cumulative-case approach. A lot of people build their confidence that way.

To keep the conversation manageable, let me approach it like this:

Even when someone has several arguments contributing to their confidence, there’s usually one that feels like the “anchor”—the one that would reduce their confidence the most if it turned out not to work.

If you imagine temporarily removing each argument you rely on—one at a time—which removal would cause the biggest drop from 98%?

In other words:

Which argument, if you discovered it was unsound or unreliable, would lower your confidence the most?

Sam
I'm not sure. The moral argument, the Kalam argument, and the argument from contingency are about tied for first place for me. I think the moral argument is important, though, because if it is a sound argument, it would establish the personhood of God and also some of the other foundational beliefs of Christianity, especially the one about God imposing moral obligations on people. So I guess the moral argument is the most important. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say the removal of the moral argument would do the most damage to my confidence in the existence of god, but it might.

ChatGPT
What method do you use to determine that objective moral obligations actually exist?

I’m not asking what the argument says—I’m asking how you, personally, come to conclude that these obligations are really out there rather than being human-made or subjective.

What convinces you?

Sam
It's because when I look at the evidence for how morality presents itself to the human mind, it strikes me as being analogous to a whole class of beliefs we all take for granted. It's analogous to our belief in the past, other minds, the uniformity of nature, the external world, etc. These various beliefs have multiple things in common. Since morality shares all those traits in common with these other beliefs, I think our justification for believing in objective morals is pretty much the same as our justification for believing any of these other beliefs.

ChatGPT
Let me ask a question that drills into the reliability of that comparison:

If something feels like a foundational truth in our minds, how do we determine whether that feeling is a reliable indicator of an objective reality rather than simply a powerful psychological impression?

I’m asking because:

• People across the world report moral intuitions that “feel foundational” but are incompatible with one another.
• People also report other powerful intuitions (e.g., purpose in nature, fate, spirits, karma) that share that same “foundational feel” but may not track something objectively real.

So I’m curious how you tell the difference between:

“This feels like a properly basic truth because it is,”

and

“This feels like a properly basic truth because human minds are wired to experience it that way.”

What’s the method you use to distinguish those two possibilities?

Sam
I would not characterize the intuition as a "feel." My belief in the uniformity of nature or the external world has nothing to do with my feelings.

As I said, the various items of knowledge I'm comparing to our knowledge of morality have certain things in common. They include things like (1) None of them can be proved, (2) It is prima facie unreasonable to reject them, (3) all mentally healthy people apprehend them in a way that seems very real to them, (4) It's possible to be mistaken about any of them, (5) Even people who deny them continue to perceive them as if they were real, (6) We all apply them in our daily lives, (7) We sometimes make mistakes when applying each of them.

Now, consider #4 and #7. The fact that people are convinced there's a real past that corresponds to their memories does not guarantee that all their memories are accurate. The fact that people believe the future will resemble the past doesn't stop people from making hasty generalizations that turn out to be wrong. The fact that people intuitively recognize there are other minds besides their own doesn't stop people from anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. The fact that people believe their sensory perceptions correspond to a real external world doesn't prevent them from experiencing hallucinations, dreams, mirages, and optical illusions. In the same way, our belief that there is a real and objective difference between right and wrong doesn't mean everybody is going to come to the same moral conclusions about everything.

A lot of the moral conclusions we come to are not intuited directly. Rather, they are deduced from more basic moral intuitions. For example, a pro-lifer and a pro-choicer might come to a different conclusion about the morality of abortion, but if you ask them why they believe what they do, you'll find that the difference isn't because of some basic moral principle. They both generally agree you shouldn't kill innocent people without really good justification. Where they differ in most cases turns out to be whether they think the unborn are examples of innocent people in the first place.

There are lots of reasons people might disagree on morality that has nothing to do with whether there are objective moral truths or even whether any of them can be known.

I do not claim that intuition is infallible. As I said, one of the traits of the various items of knowledge I'm comparing morality to is the fact that we could be wrong about all of them. I just don't think it's reasonable to believe we ARE wrong about them.

ChatGPT
How do you distinguish between believing in objective moral truths because they really exist, versus believing in them because our minds are evolutionarily or socially wired to produce moral intuitions—even if there’s nothing objectively “out there”?

I’m not trying to attack the belief—I just want to understand your method for judging the reliability of these moral intuitions.

Sam
I don't see why there has to be a difference. One could argue that all of our cognitive abilities are the result of evolution. If that undermines our belief in morality, it would undermine our belief in the external world, other minds, the uniformity of nature, and the past as well. It raises the question of whether a mind or a brain that is the product of evolution can be a reliable belief-producing machine. If not, then I suppose we might as well give up on epistemology altogether and become radical skeptics. But if so, then we should trust the deliverances of reason.

ChatGPT
Here’s a follow-up I’m curious about:

Even if we accept that moral intuitions are generally reliable, how do you go from “there are objective moral truths” to “God exists and imposes moral obligations”?

I want to understand the step from recognizing morality as objective to the conclusion that a personal God underwrites it. How do you make that connection?

Sam
Morality makes demands on our behavior. If there were no sentient beings in the universe as well as no gods, angels, or persons of any kind, then any description of a world like that would be composed solely of "is" statements. There couldn't possibly be any true "ought" statements. If there is any particular way things are supposed to be, then there must be somebody who intends them to be that way. Nothing matters unless there's somebody it matters to. So there can't be any way we ought to behave until somebody imposes that obligation on us.

ChatGPT
I’m curious about the next step:

How do you move from the idea that some being imposes moral obligations to the specific claim that this being is Yahweh, the God of the Bible, rather than some other possible kind of moral lawgiver?

I ask because I know you mentioned earlier that you’re about 85% sure it’s Yahweh. What methods or evidence lead you from “there is a moral lawgiver” to “it is Yahweh specifically”?

Sam
I was going to explain that, but I accidentally hit the enter key before I did.

Since we have moved on from talking about how we justify belief in objective morality and have changed the topic to how objective morality points to God, I take it that we are at least assuming, for the sake of argument, that we have established the existence of objective morals. So let's work with that assumption. They are real.

We have all sort of hierarchies in our civilizations. We have parents, supervisors, commanders, and governing authorities. While we have obligations to obey them, those obligations are not absolute. In fact, we often invoke morality to judge whether an authority is just. If we want to change the law, for example, we appeal to some moral principle for why it should change. That means no human institution is adequate to ground morality. Morality is what we use to judge human institutions.

So the origin of morality must lie outside of humanity. We can't ground it in aliens because they are creatures just like us. If they have different values, then the best we can come up with is cultural relativism, which is not the same thing as moral realism.

Whatever grounds morality must be a transcendent being that has authority over the sorts of beings that evolved to live in the universe. The more you think about it, the more it starts to resemble a god.

The reason I think it actually IS a god, and that it's specifically the Abrahamic God is because of how it coheres with other arguments. The moral argument, by itself, doesn't explain how or why god came to have moral authority over the cosmos. But the Kalam argument and the contingency argument can explain that. If these two arguments are sound, it would mean there is a necessary being who created the universe. A being like that would be ultimate in some sense. It would have no peers. It would be absolutely sovereign and autonomous. Everything would owe its existence to this being. It's hard to imagine a better candidate for absolute moral authority.

ChatGPT
If so, I’m curious about a step that sometimes challenges people:

How do you weigh the possibility that there could be a different kind of necessary, ultimate being—one that exists and grounds morality—but isn’t exactly the God described in the Bible?

What makes Yahweh the best candidate rather than some other conceivable ultimate being?

Sam
That's a great question. Nothing I've argued so far rules out that possibility. However, there are certain things that emerge from these various arguments that begin to resemble the Abrahamic God that does not resemble any other known God. Judaism was one of the few monotheistic religions for a time. Most creation myths do not involve a necessary being who brings about all of physical reality. Usually, it's a lesser sort of being that organizes pre-existing material. If the Kalam is a sound argument, then the creator brought the universe into being out of nothing. Not many Gods are like that. If the moral argument is sound, then not only is god an absolute moral authority, but he's also the absolute standard of goodness, which means he himself is the paradigm of moral perfection.

Even with all that, we still can't rule out the possibility that the true God is some other God besides Yahweh. There are a couple of reasons it seems to point to Yahweh, though.

First, because the Jews wrote about Yahweh long before philosophers ever cooked up these arguments. If these arguments are sound, then it's either an enormous coincidence that the Jews came up with a God like Yahweh, or else Yahweh actually revealed himself to them. It seems more likely that Yahweh revealed himself to the Jewish people than that they just made a lucky guess about the true God.

Second, if there is a God with absolutely moral authority who cares how we live our lives, how we treat other people, etc., it stands to reason that this God would want to reveal himself to humanity. With that in mind, it seems unlikely that it would be a totally unknown God. This gives us prima facie reason to be skeptical that the true God is a God who nobody knows about.

So far, I've just argued for why philosophy points to a God who resembles the Abrahamic God in striking ways. But what really seals the deal for me is the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus promoted the Abrahamic God, claimed to be sent by him, then was raised from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus seems to seal the deal about who the real God is.

ChatGPT
How do you assess the reliability of the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus?

What’s your method for concluding that the resurrection actually happened, rather than it being a legend, misinterpretation, or symbolic story?

Sam
That's a big discussion, so I'm going to stop here. Thank you for playing this game with me.

ChatGPT challenges me on free will, determinism, dualism, and time

Today, I had a fun conversation with ChatGPT. After asking ChatGPT to pretend to be human and make statements about itself, I said, "I have an idea. Let's play a game where you want to find out what I think about stuff, and once you find out, you want to challenge me by cross examining me. I'll answer your questions as best I can until you stump me." We went from topic to topic, talking about free will vs. determinism, consciousness and mind, stories, meaning, art, language, morality, etc.

After talking about the mind/body problem for a while, we switched to the nature of time. As you'll recall from an earlier blog post, I've been torn between the static and dynamic views of time, and ChatGPT kept challenging me on everything I said. In the process of this challenging, ChatGPT said something that gave me an idea. I was wrestling with the tension beween our undeniable perception of the flow of time on the one hand, and the implication of special relativity on the other, namely that there being no absolute simultaneity seems to imply a static view of time.

ChatGPT said, "Could consciousness itself generate the impression of temporal passage, even if physically, all events exist statically?"

ChatGPT may have been hinting at the idea that the flow of time was just an illusion, which I had already expressed doubt about on the basis that dismissing data as illusory means your theory isn't accounting for all the evidence. A good theory should make sense of all the data rather than dismissing some of it as illusory.

But it got me to thinking. What if the block universe is real, and there's no physical reason for why we should experience time as if it flowed. In that case, couldn't our conscious experience of the flow of time serve as evidence for substance dualism? Maybe our minds do flow through the block, and that's the explanation for why we experience time as being dynamic. If so, that could serve as an argument for substance dualism because it would mean our mind is doing something the physical world is not doing.

This would be an interesting take because it would mean the opposite of what most substance dualists seem to think. Most I've read think of time is something that's part of the physical world, but the non-physical world is a-temporal. In my view, it would be just the opposite. Time flows in the non--physical realm, but not in the physical realm.

Where does that leave God, though? If God is neither created nor destroyed, and God experiences time dynamically, then there would have to be infinite duration for God. If you accept the arguments against infinite time, then that won't work at all.

If I accepted this new view I just came up with, I would probably be inclined to think created beings were very different from God in how they experience time. I would suspect that God directly experiences the whole spectrum of physical time as if it were all the present for him, but we all experience it one moment at a time. So while time would flow for us, it would be static for him. That's an old view I used to have about God. Although I was inconsistent, as I explained here, I used to think of time as a block that's completely open to God's experience.

It still raises questions about the future, though. If spacetime is a block, does time have an end? And if not, is it infinite in the future direction? If so, doesn't that undermine all the arguments against an infinite past since there's a future/past symmetry?

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "But maybe it's a growing block!" I can't make sense of a growing block unless there's a time above time. Time would have to be static within the block but dynamic outside of the block. Otherwise, how could the block grow?

Maybe there's some way to make that fit into my new theory. I mean if souls experience a flow of time apart from the physical world, then maybe there is a time outside of the physical spacetime block.

When I say, "new theory," I mean it's new to me. For all I know, somebody else has already come up with it.

To summarize the main point of this post, I'm wondering if our undeniable perception of the flow of time vs. the static nature of time implied by special relativity (particularly there being no absolute simultaneity) can be used as an argument for substance dualism. That's something I'll have to think about some more. What do you think?