LOL, I’ve heard those circles many times: Jesus can pray to God because he isn’t the same as God but he is the same as God but he isn’t the same as God but…. Or Heaven doesn’t depend on what you do, but it does depend on what you do, but it doesn’t depend on what you do, but…

My debate tactic was always to ask questions to help them see their beliefs were contradictory. But it usually led to circles. And then, when they were tired of circles, regardless of the topic, I would hear, “If there is no God why is there a universe”? Hence, I too had to ask questions about nothing.

For if laws require a law giver, and there was no law giver, then they must admit that, in a state of nothing, there could have been no laws of thermodynamics.

That is indeed the insight that started my research on The Argument from Nothing (which has culmimated in The Other Problem with Nothing).

In truth, this is Whack-a-mole Apologetics, where they defend one position, get destroyed, and retreat to a contradictory position, get destroyed, and retreat back to the first position as if it were never destroyed, and get destroyed, then retreat to the contradictory position again, and get destroyed, and so on, round and round, a cat chasing its tail. This is probably one of the most common failure modes of Christian apologetics. Anything that requires more than two steps of reasoning they can always evade by forgetting one of those steps and thus forgetting the results of a previous chain of reasoning.

If they argue that the laws of thermodynamics simply always exist, then they have lost the argument that a law requires a lawgiver. And then, why can it not be that something akin to quantum effects just always exists also without anybody causing it? And if something akin to quantum effects just always exists and can eventually bootstrap quantum effects, that, in the right conditions, could occasionally create big bangs.

The laws of thermodynamics have been studied in detail on Earth and appear to be the same throughout the known universe. But it is a huge leap for people to say that those laws outside our universe just have to exist and act exactly the same way they do in our universe.

Indeed. That’s all spot on.

It’s just that that is more layers of thinking down than the maximally naive “laws require a legislator” stage of “why are there still monkeys” apologetics. It’s more at the level of “bacterial cells have motors designed to kill us; therefore, God” apologetics. Still stupid. But it takes a few more steps of explanation to see why.

I think it can be a version of the same exact problem, though.

It’s precisely parallel to the difference between Aristotle and Newton.

Our brains evolved in a world of entropy and friction, where stuff (seemingly) stops moving. (In reality it’s all still moving all the time, just not accelerating). So we have a thought that you need some default explanation for things moving. Hence Aristotle reasoning toward two different physics of motion.

It clearly takes a really massive transformation in one’s default assumptions to think as Newton did, that in fact the lack of motion requires explanation, not motion. That things can just keep moving unless something stops them.

So the idea that God has to be some kind of background enabler or passive mover isn’t just bad theory because of a lack of parsimony and all of the fine-tuning and special pleading it entails. It’s also that it fails to get at the elegant understanding of a universe where you ask why things happen and try to get explanations based in those things and explanations first, and actually trust that you’re being given consistent information. In a way Aristotle didn’t when he wasn’t able to look past what seemed like two kinds of motion and try to find one principle that can explain both.

There’s also an element of equivocation fallacy going on here, and I think this too is just better dressed-up (often) in the “sophisticated” versions. You hear people asking, “Why doesn’t water suddenly becomes H4O5 instead of H2O?” And the scientifically literate person responds, “Then that’s not water”. H2O is not a coincidence. It has the properties it does, not just empirically but in a sense logically, because of what it is. So if you start asking about a hypothetical alternate world where all objects behave chaotically, you’re actually talking about different stuff. We are just so good at abstraction and reification that we pretend otherwise, and try to think that a hypothetical H4O5 in another universe that had nearly-identical apparent properties to water would “be water”, but it wouldn’t be.

And so a lot of “laws” end up being literally descriptions of what an object and its properties are.

Which really only leaves the question, “Okay, why can’t objects have way more chaotic and weird properties?”

And the answer is, “Because that’s way more finely tuned. A universe with seemingly random laws is effectively a universe with tons of regime of laws that it cycles through by some rule. That’s informationally vastly more complex than an orderly universe, and so you wouldn’t expect it”.

Just FYI, it is true this is where most Christians trip up, but some theologians have thought this through enough to argue that God’s doing it is the relation, i.e. things act as they do simply because God is constantly telekinetically making them do that, such that if he dosed off, everything would stop working and dissolve. This runs into a number of problems of its ow, and is, really, patently ridiculous and scientifically illiterate. But it at least gets passed that first level of naivety.

Sort of? There are a lot of assumptions in there. My answer could only apply to some specific examples of things some people say about that, not all. And you were a bit vague about exactly what you are talking about.

But I think what you mean to ask is regarding the popular lore that, like Bumblebees Can’t Fly, quantum events require a mind “to observe them” to collapse them, therefore God must exist to collapse the wave function before humans did. That’s two confusions in one.

First, humans can collapse a wave function into the past. People who think this popcorn nonsense don’t realize physics at that scale is time invariant, and that block theory is the standard physics of time now. So even if you needed a “mental” observer to collapse all wave functions, we could be that observer. It doesn’t matter that the function collapses in both time directions at once. Which means, yes, QM entails we could have caused the Big Bang in this obscure sense.

But more relevant to your question, the idea that minds are needed at all is popcorn physics. In actual physics anything that disturbs a quantum state is an observer—a stick, a star, an atom. “Observer” is just figurative for “anything that produces an observation,” which need never be a mind.

Consider the example of Schrödinger’s Cat. That was an example Schrödinger invented to make fun of people adopting this popcorn view, yet ironically—turning him in his grave—it now keeps getting used to sell the popcorn view he was making fun of, and even attributes it to him, when he was it’s most infamous opponent.

In that experiment, a cat is in a box, with a detector that breaks a vial of cyanide when the atomic nucleus of a nearby unstable atom decays. The “joke” is that if you need an “observer” then the whole cat is somehow both alive and dead until you open the box. Schrödinger’s point was that this is stupid and therefore obviously false.

He was right.

First, the cat is an observer. It has a mind. It knows whether it’s dead or alive. So we don’t have to open the box for “its” wave function to collapse.

But more importantly, per Schrödinger’s point: the detector of the atomic decay is also an observer. By sticking that object in the box, you have poked a stick into the quantum system that itself will collapse it. So the cat doesn’t even have to be in the box. There is no state of the box being simultaneously full of cyanide or not. Because the detector is collapsing the wave function all the time just by being there.

In fact, the walls of the box, the air in the box. It’s all a bunch of sticks poking the radioisotope in the eye. They are all observers.

To get an actual state of some volume being “both” cyanide and not cyanide, you would need to create something like a Bose-Einstein state of the transition phase of Nitrogen, Hydrogen, and Carbon into molecular cyanide, where it’s somewhere between free nitrogen and carbon and hydrogen and molecularly bound HCN (cyanide). That is so exceedingly difficult to do it may even be impossible. But there are simpler systems we can do it with. It’s just that you have to keep the BE glob perfectly balanced so nothing, absolutely nothing, shakes or comes into contact with it, because almost any interaction with it collapses the state.

This is what it means to say that anything is an observer. “Observer” here does not mean “mind.” It means any physical interaction with the balanced state large enough to knock the state off balance and thus into some more definite state. It’s just that in experimental physics, it’s usually humans poking the sticks in, hence “observer” stuck as the rubric, even though it doesn’t mean what ordinary people mean by that word.

But when no minds existed, plenty of sticks did. So quantum collapse routinely happened all over the place. Indeed, the Big Bang may itself be the first example of that happening, a balanced quantum state too unstable to stick around collapsed under its own weight and exploded. It was its own stick.

If God lays down laws as patterns of behavior and possibility, that’s a process. Some mechanism allows for a relationship between objects, phenomena, etc. So why is God necessary, then?

Even prescriptive human laws require some causal mechanism to enforce them and make them consistent descriptions.

I always point out in evolution and intelligent design conversations that the valid extrapolation we should make seeing complexity beyond what humans can do with life is to assume that that may be telling us that no designer can accomplish it. That is a live possibility. Our own data are showing us that there’s some kind of fundamentally distinct complexity in those life forms, which actually should tentatively rule out design.

I think the same applies here. What we see is that any prescriptivist law fails to be fully descriptive because there are fundamental informational and methodological gaps.

And just like the best computer to run a simulation of an object is that object, so too does it make the most sense that fundamental, invariable laws actually (inductively) disprove intelligent design.