Physics Guy wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 5:46 pmWhat does “simply emergent from prior conditions” mean?honorentheos wrote: ↑Mon Nov 22, 2021 12:13 amFor theism to be a viable explanation for the universe, it MUST describe a universe that is better explained by its own hypothetical conditions that differ from one that is simply emergent from prior conditions. God as first cause of an otherwise naturally evolving universe is no theism at all.
As far as I know, “emergent” in this kind of context is a vague term. In expressions like, “consciousness emerges from neurology” or “thermodynamics emerges from mechanics,” I construe “emerges from” as “somehow comes out of”. Emergence in this sense isn’t any particular thing that anyone understands. When we say, “Humans evolved from small mammals,” we mean by “evolved” a certain class of processes of differential gene proliferation. When we say, “Consciousness emerges from brain chemistry,” in contrast, we don’t mean anything comparably specific by “emerges”. There probably is something comparably specific that we could mean, but we don’t currently know what it is. So “emergent” is just a vague placeholder term.
(Speaking of evolution: to clarify a possible misunderstanding, when honorentheos speaks of a “naturally evolving universe” he is not referring to Darwinian evolution in particular. Physicists say “evolving” to mean nothing but changing over time under the laws of nature, in whatever way that happens in the context being discussed. The Earth flying through space around the Sun is an example of time evolution; so is the absorption of light by a molecule in your retina. I’m not disagreeing with honorentheos here, just defining a jargon term that other readers might not know.)
Anyway, what about initial conditions? If a few photons had been tweaked a bit at the Big Bang, our entire solar system would never have existed. Sure, most likely some other form or sense of intelligent life would have existed instead, not here but somewhere. It remains true that the laws of nature as we know them literally cannot explain at all why our solar system exists instead of a different one, because that issue is decided by initial conditions, about which the laws say nothing at all. The laws of nature we know are all differential equations, and it is the basic nature of differential equations that they do not specify the starting point. They only tell us what will happen next, given the initial input data.
Something determined the actual initial conditions of everything in the universe. Whatever that is or was, its power to choose those initial conditions was in fact tantamount to a power to intervene in the universe in an ongoing way.
Lots of remarkable events are perfectly possible in principle, if only a lot of tiny particles were to come together just right at a certain place and time. The differential equations apply backwards in time as well as forward. So for any such a miraculous conspiracy of particles one can run the film backwards to the beginning of time and find an initial condition of the universe that would, billions of years later, produce that miraculous conspiracy—with the perfectly unerring certainty of a differential equation.
Furthermore, there would in most cases be no obvious sign, before that remarkable but predestined event finally occurred, that anything like it was going to occur. The series of perturbations in the Oort cloud that would eventually send a comet to hit the Earth would be undetectably remote and unremarkable in their implications until the event was underway. The twitch of a proton in one of my zillions of DNA strands would be completely unremarkable until after it had led to a tumor—or prevented one from forming. Yet that proton twitch would have been predestined, either way and with inevitable certainty, by the initial conditions of the universe all those billions of years ago.
Whatever it is or was that set the initial conditions of the universe, our lives are in its hands in every moment even now. Naturalism under the currently understood laws of nature is not an alternative to this feature of theism. It shares the same feature.
I thought the emergence idea or concept may be visualized by the analogy of neuron count and emergence of consciousness. It was once thought there was a threshold of neurons that would express consciousness. Was it 100? Was it 1000? Does 7 billion people communicating with cell phones have an emergence of consciousness? Is the World Wide Web conscious? Would the boiling/freezing point of water be an emergent phenomenon?
