There is a trend among some physicists to argue that “the laws of physics” make it logically necessary that the universe exists. An example of such an argument is the following quotation from Alex Filippenko, an astrophysicist:
“The Big Bang could’ve occurred as a result of just the laws of physics being there. With the laws of physics, you can get universes.”
(Article from space.com: “The Big Bang Didn’t Need God to Start Universe, Researchers Say”)
Even a physicist as respected as Stephen Hawking said something along these lines:
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
(Quoted from article on cltruth.com: “Can the Universe Create Itself?”)
There is a serious category error here. The laws of physics are descriptive, not prescriptive. They are abstractions arrived at from observation and deduction. As such they cannot make anything do anything.
We can think of reality as having levels. One level is the concrete—the level of actual things and actual events. Experiences arise from our interaction as actual things with other actual things. As we observe patterns in these experiences, we hypothesize regularities of the events we perceive. We see these regularities over and over and conclude that certain things always happen.
We may express our hypotheses using a formal notation such as mathematics. For example, Newton’s Law of Gravitation can be expressed as
F = GmM / r^2.
That is, the gravitational force between two objects is proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between their centers of mass. The constant of proportionality is represented by G and is called Newton’s Universal Gravitational Constant.
Now there are a lot of questions that can arise from this formula. One might ask, “What is force?” Force is defined as follows:
F = ma.
That is, the force acting on an object is the product of the mass of the object and the acceleration the object experiences. And what is acceleration? It is the instantaneous change in velocity the object undergoes.
If we consider the first object, m, and combine the formulas to see what acceleration that object experiences, we arrive at the following:
a = GM / r^2
This says that the acceleration a given object experiences from another object is proportional only to the mass of that second object and the square of the distance between the objects. The mass of the first object doesn’t enter into it. This implies the counter-intuitive result that all masses falling from a given height will fall at the same speed in a given gravitational field, a fact that was observed by Galileo.
These formulas apply to any object that has mass, anywhere in the universe, and they allow us to make predictions about their behavior.
Oops, I lied. These formulas do not apply in certain high-speed, high-gravity conditions, conditions that turn out to be both common and highly important. The truth is actually more complex, both conceptually and mathematically. But given that we are all likely starting to experience the MEGO effect (My Eyes Glaze Over) I’ll quit while I’m ahead and move on.
The point of the above is to give an example of another level of reality than the concrete, namely the abstract. Abstractions are generalizations of patterns that we observe at the concrete level. The fact that we can make such generalizations shows that concrete reality is ordered. Otherwise there would be no patterns to experiences. Knowledge would be impossible since it involves relating concrete experiences to one another.
So we can say that these abstractions are essential for any possible understanding of reality. The fact that we can talk about, for example, “chairs,” and be understood, implies that there is some objective ontological status for the concept of “chair” as an abstraction applying to all things that we ordinarily recognize as chairs.
Now I’m not arguing here for the existence of Platonic forms—a metaphysical ideal chair that all concrete actual chairs are instances of. However, the question I intend to ask is one to which the idea of Platonic forms is one possible answer: namely, “What is the relationship between the actual, concrete object and the abstract concept?”
I’m considering a variant of that question: “What makes the concrete objects act the way they do?” What makes objects attract one another with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them (more or less, with hat tipped to Einstein)?
Hawking’s claim boils down to an intensification of this question: “What makes the law of gravity so compelling that not only does every object in the universe obey it, but it even calls universes into being so that there will be objects to obey it?”
If the law of gravity is an abstraction, then how can it have prescriptive force? If it is a generalization of many observations of how things behave, how can it cause those very things to behave the way they do?
The Platonist, of course, would say that things do that because they are instances of ideal forms. They obey these laws because the ideal prototypes that empower their being cause them to be things that obey the laws. But this cannot be satisfactory to someone who seeks a materialistic explanation, or even someone who sees the ground of all reality in the concrete. The abstract describes the concrete; the concrete does not obey the abstract.
Another question that arises is “How do things stop being what they are?” How does a chair stop being a chair? How does a person stop being a person (say, when he dies)? The opposite question is also relevant: “How do things persist recognizably through time, even when their constituents change?” We are familiar with the notion that the human body replaces itself, at least most of itself, regularly. Why is the mostly different person I see after several years recognizably the same as the one I formerly knew? And why does that person think of himself as the same person, in spite of the many experiences and changes he may have gone through?
It seems we are compelled to posit another level of reality: the dispositional. There are concrete actual objects that we perceive and that act in certain ways. We observe regularities in the way things act. We then create abstractions that capture these regularities and call them laws. But because the laws are derived from observations of the concrete objects and not the other way around, they do not explain why the objects act the way they do. They just assert that they so act.
The new level of reality I propose would be prescriptive but not concrete. Things have a disposition to be what they are. As they change, the degree of change is circumscribed by the possibilities inherent in the things themselves. These possibilities embody the ability of things to continue to be what they are as things to which they are related change, and to themselves change in response to change, or lack of change, of the things they are related to.
Clearly these concepts—possibility, disposition, relation, and so on—are accompanied by a large number of questions themselves. But they seem to be a necessary ontological mediator between concrete things and the abstractions that we use to characterize them.
Physical laws, then, are really statements about dispositions. But dispositions are qualities of concrete things. If there are no concrete things, there is nothing for physical laws to be about.
The conclusion I draw from this is that physical laws cannot of themselves bring anything at all into being, much less a universe.