¶1To me, teology brings more religious uh connotations than purpose does. So I I typically hear the word teology and philosophy associated with the teological or design argument for the existence of God. Looking at the world, discerning there some kind of order, purpose, complexity, beauty, and reasoning back to a designer who set that purpose. And I I was interested to hear you use that phrase built in. You said this this purpose is built into the universe.
¶2And my question is, if you don't believe in God, who's the builder? >> Yes. Um, this is where we need the X that I was talking about. >> It's quite an important missing step. >> Bill, you had an exchange recently with Emily Careshi Hurst.
¶3Uh, now there's a video of her in dialogue with astrophysicist Paul Davies on Justin Bryley's channel. You know, you've quoted Davies several times in your work. He's well respected. >> Yes, indeed. Uh, one of his early works when he was going under the name PCW Davies was entitled the physics of time asymmetry and it was about the arrow of time and uh the thermodynamic properties of the universe uh as a whole.
¶4very helpful to me in my early work on the calam cosmological argument and since then he's become a very popular science writer publishing numerous popular level books on science and delving into religion as well. He wrote a book called uh god and the new physics in which he explored the uh relevance of uh physics for the existence of god. You know, Bill, by the way, I I can't help but bring up your dialogue with Emily. Now, I'm obviously intrigued by the look on her face when you suggested that she was misunderstanding relativity theory. Now, were you being too hard on her, Bill?
¶5Um, what what was her misunderstanding? What was uh what was your impression of that exchange? >> Well, I think that I could have eased into it better, Kevin. Uh I think I should have said something like this. Now this may come as something of a shock but and that would prepare then for my remark or to say now I I don't mean this to be insulting but um and that would have kind of prepared the ground.
¶6But uh as it was I just said I think you're confused which was perhaps too abrupt. >> Well maybe maybe not. I mean, uh, people like sometimes the direct approach and you have a limited time. You just kind of have to, uh, get after we we >> we don't need to be walking on eggshells around each other, you know, as much as we can. So, but, uh, overall, uh, it was a good exchange.
¶7Yes. >> You thought, okay, >> let's look at some clips then. In this first clip, Justin Briley asked Davies to summarize what he thinks is Hurst Careshi's overall view on purpose in the universe. Here it is. >> I wonder whether firstly Paul you could have a go at summarizing what you roughly think Emily's position is on this big question of purpose in the universe and then we'll see what how Emily thinks you did and and she can nuance that.
¶8Well, to contrast it with my own position, which is sort of romantic really. I think that that Emily uh doesn't deny that purpose is a useful concept, but it's almost entirely restricted, if not the human beings, at least to uh living organisms. uh and that any notion that there's something sort of bigger in the universe uh pro probably you might be open-minded to it but you don't see any evidence that the universe as a whole has any sort of purpose or meaning or uh any of these grander terms would would that be right I have I >> that's broadly right yeah I think um in order to say that the universe has purpose you're suggesting or implying that there's some purpose giver someone who's orchestrating that purpose purpose on a grand cosmic scale and I I don't >> it could be emergent though couldn't it come out of the system it could be an intrinsic property of the system rather than imposed from the outside >> it still uh seems to me that somebody would have to have constructed because purpose isn't um purpose seems to be an agent centric um and I I don't see agency underlying things at the most fundamental level so I don't want to say that we live in a purposeless meaningless universe but You're right to say I think that purpose is ultimately constructed by uh life by consciousness. I don't know if I don't think I'd want to restrict it to to just human beings even on Earth. I think there's purpose and meaning in animals as well.
¶9Um and if there's conscious alien life, which I I imagine there probably is, then there's purpose and meaning there as well. >> Okay. So, in brief, she argued that purpose can't be a feature of the universe unless there's some purpose giver behind it. Davies pushed back suggesting purpose might be emergent uh an intrinsic property of the system rather than something imposed from outside. Does she have a case bill?
¶10Do you think uh purpose can coherently be emergent or uh does talk of purpose always smuggle in agency? >> Well, here Kevin, I have to say I agree with Emily. I think she's right. uh and I would say not only is purpose agent centric but that purpose cannot emerge in the way Davies suggests what can emerge from the evolutionary process is a direction but not a purpose. So for example, evolutionary biologists uh have noticed that the evolution of life on earth is uh overall in the direction of increasing diversity and increasing complexity.
¶11But they would not say that therefore that is the purpose or the goal of the evolutionary process that requires an external agent to set that goal. Purpose or teology uh is an intentional property of an agent. Now on the other hand I do think that her idea of subjective purpose is just illusory. This amounts to nothing more than human beings or extraterrestrials making up a purpose for the universe. And it's clear that the universe doesn't actually acquire a purpose just because I happen to give it one.
¶12Uh I think this is obvious. Suppose you give the universe one purpose and I give it another one. Who's right? Well, neither one. The the universe in itself remains purposeless uh regardless of the way in which we subjectively regard it.
¶13>> Yeah. And now it's Emily's turn and she gives what she thinks is Davey's view on this topic. Here it is. >> If you could try to summarize where you think roughly Paul falls on this question of purpose in the universe. family.
¶14>> So, as I understand it, you're not conventionally religious as you've said. Uh, but you do see some kind of purpose or I think the word you used earlier was teology in the universe. Um, so there is some uh my best understanding of what teology is all about. There is some kind of end or goal to which the per the universe is directed and um in a sense there's a the purpose of the universe might be driven towards that kind of goal. Is that about right?
¶15Right. I I I struggle myself to sort of articulate my position because I don't want it to give the impression that there's um a a preassigned goal and that we're all sort of trapped and going down it along a railway track. Davies elaborates in a moment, but notice he clarifies that teology doesn't necessarily mean determinism, Bill. uh we're not trapped on a track as he put it uh in a deterministic universe. And that's interesting uh in that many materialists or atheist philosophers think that everything is mechanistically uh determined and we we don't have free will and things like that.
¶16>> Davies might be referring here, Kevin, to quantum indeterminacy rather than human free will. Uh it might be that he thinks that the teological end to which the universe is tending is not deterministic because of indeterminacy but nevertheless it's real. He he seems to affirm that there is a goal toward which the universe tends. And I do not see how that's possible unless there is a cosmic designer who has established such a goal. Otherwise, at best, as I say, you would get mere directionality, but you would not get a teology or a goal or purpose.
¶17You know, Davies has spent his career struck by the intelligibility of the universe. He calls it astonishing in this next clip. Here it is. >> For me, the most striking thing about about being a scientist, but about the way the universe is put together is not just that it's ordered in a rational manner, but that it's intelligible to us. We we can understand we come to understand the universe through uh this wonderful thing called science and the use of mathematics.
¶18And it's it the universe is not just sort of arbitrary or absurd. it's uh ordered in this intelligible manner and I think it's truly astonishing that human beings can do it and because I'm a professional scientist I'm surrounded by other scientists and when I say well isn't it just stupendous that we can figure out what's going on inside a black hole or um you know the the nature of matter and quantum physics and so on. It's just incredible. Um and a lot of people would say well that's just what we're paid to do. So you know that's that's our job.
¶19What's what's so amazing about it? But the fact we can do it that the human mind which has evolved after all just to survive in the proverbial jungle is there's nothing to say you've got to understand quantum field theory to >> well it's almost an extravagance it feels like on on that but I'd love to hear your thought on that Emily does has that ever struck you as kind of strange unusual astonishing in a sense that we should have have this capacity to be able to do this extraordinarily deep science and understanding of the universe. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the evolutionary point is an interesting one. We've evolved to be able to navigate the world um and survive in particular set of conditions.
¶20And yet the through the development of human culture, intellectual history, we have been able to build on um the discoveries of those who went before us and develop more and more sophisticated ways of understanding the world in a way that animals who don't have a way to write things down or maybe don't have the sophisticated ways of thinking that we do. Uh but it seems like it's something to do with culture and history that has allowed us to build upon the work of each other in a way that um I I find I find that astonishing. I also find um the I've heard it called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics before quite uh quite astounding as well. Yeah. >> Well, that last line should get your attention, Bill.
¶21The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Uh Davies calls our evolutionary journey that allows human beings to contemplate something like quantum mechanics astonishing. But he he stops short of drawing a theistic conclusion. It seems I think there are two different arguments here. Both of which I think have significant theistic implications.
¶22The first argument is that argument of Eugene Vner for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Uh why is it that mathematics is applicable to the physical phenomena? This is the argument that Emily picks up uh at the very close of that clip uh and which I've defended um as best explained by God's existence. And then the second argument is the one that Davies is pressing about the capacity of the human mind. Isn't it extraordinary that the human mind which has evolved simply out of the necessities of survival should come to have such extravagant capacities to understand the mathematical structure of the universe and I think these two arguments go handin glove in support of a theistic perspective >> in this next clip Davies explains why he avoids the word purpose when it comes to the universe.
¶23>> So that I see the universe as starting off, you know, with this sort of the big bang and not uh nobody around. Um and then uh through a long sequence of evolutionary steps, the emergence of complexity, of life and of mind, and then of comprehension of which we are not necessarily the the last word, but we are representative of comprehending beings. And I think that that is for me just not a happy accident. It's it's somehow built into what the universe is about. And I don't like the word purpose, but I'm happy to say that the universe is about something, >> right?
¶24>> Uh and why do you like the word purpose? Because we've used a different word, teology, and I've always thought they're somewhat, you know, equivalent. But but what's what makes you nervous about the word? Well, it it's just um because it's such a culturally loaded term and that that humans have purposes and that's all fine. Um and projecting that sort of humanlike purpose onto nature I think uh is a >> right but but there is something going on that's that a directionality a sort of >> yes a link I would say it's a link between human existence and cosmic existence.
¶25So there there that sounds I said romantic at the beginning. I mean that sounds a very strong statement. >> I wish I had the accent of Justin Bryley. Bill, he's so good and smooth. My East Texas keeps, you know, kind of sneaking through from time to time.
¶26But um the universe is about something. Is he using that right? Is aboutness a better or less loaded term than purpose? >> No, I'm afraid this is confused. Aboutness is what is called intentionality.
¶27And my thoughts have intentionality or aboutness. I can think about uh my summer vacation. I can think about my wife. But no physical object has aboutness. A chair or a desk is not about something else.
¶28Intentionality or aboutness requires a mind. And similarly, you can't have teology without purpose. You can have an end. The universe is tending towards some end. But that end is not a goal.
¶29uh unless there is some sort of cosmic mind that has pre-established uh that goal toward which the universe tends. >> Emily has a similar complaint in this next clip. Check this out. >> To me, teology brings more religious uh connotations than purpose does. So I I typically hear the word teology in philosophy associated with the teological or design argument for the existence of God.
¶30Looking at the world, discerning their some kind of order, purpose, complexity, beauty, and reasoning back to a designer who set that purpose. And I I was interested to hear you use that phrase built in. You said this this purpose is built into the universe. And my question is, if you don't believe in God, who's the builder? >> Yes.
¶31Um this is where we need the X. No, let's talk. >> It's quite an important missing step. >> Okay. The teological argument.
¶32And in case someone missed it, Davies calls the missing option X. >> Yes. >> In this interview, he talks about the options of intelligent agency, mindless mechanism, and then he says perhaps X. Any good candidates for X, Bill? >> Yes.
¶33uh for someone who believes in a creator of the universe, the idea of purpose is unproatic. I think the reason that Emily is willing to talk about purpose rather than teology is because she thinks of purpose wholly in subjective terms that human persons can make up purposes for their lives and for the universe. And these are not objective in the way teology is. So these two uh interlocutors uh Emily and and Davies are floundering about how to express teology or purpose without the missing step X. Emily gets into personal purpose versus a grand purpose.
¶34Here's the next clip. I think I would come down tentatively in favor of a kind of naturalism. >> Okay. >> But what I reject is the idea that that makes for a totally meaningless life. >> I think we construct profound meaning and profound purpose in our own lives.
¶35And in a way I find that very liberating. We don't have some on my view overarching grand purpose set by some external rational being. we have the freedom to create meaning in our own lives and to um then follow those systems of meaning, engage in deep relationships with each other. So I I do see meaning and purpose as being emergent perhaps in a different way to the way that you do emergent within the human person within the conscious rational free agent. And so for me, for me it's a very it's a deeply meaningful way of seeing things even if it's not uh meaningful in the sense of like some grand cosmic purpose.
¶36>> Okay. Yeah. Yeah. You know I hear that a lot, Bill. The need for um a sense of autonomy.
¶37Uh I'm free to be me without the imposition of an all powerful God. two questions that I have and I'm sure you have several comments but first isn't this just a psychological consideration involving the extent to which one wants personal freedom personal autonomy and secondly does the follower of Christ give up his autonomy or interest or sense of self we should not be fooled by her flowery language here uh Emily is just talking about wholly subjective meaning and purpose. It's no different than saying that you can pretend that your life has meaning. You can make believe that the meaning of your life is to have deep and meaningful relationships. But by the same token, you can make believe that the meaning of your life is to cleanse society of racial minorities as in national socialist Germany.
¶38And there is no distinction between these two because there is no objective meaning or purpose to your life. It is all an illusion. Davies talks about how he's been influenced by John Wheeler's view of quantum physics in this next clip. >> I fell under the uh spell of John Wheeler who was a very distinguished American theoretical physicist and famous for coining the term black hole. Uh and um Wheeler was the sort of big the ghost in the room at the at the meeting I've just been at uh because he was uh the person who really wanted to take quantum physics to the extreme and involve the observer in a fundamental way called it a participatory universe uh in which um acts of observation uh were we are like co-creators of uh of reality.
¶39Now, this is getting a bit deep rather too quickly. That's right. But what what I'm what I'm saying is that uh Wheeler developed an idea in which that you didn't need to have a sort of pre-existing agent or plan or anything that it was somehow uh something that came out of the system. uh but uh that's because now it's I don't want to get too technical but there's a sort of retrocausality that that is to say that the existence of observers now and what they measure reaches back into the past not in a way that can change the past um but in a way that uh can uh if we could get into a little bit of quantum mechanics uh quantum physics says that there is uncertainty built into nature at the most fundamental level and we normally think of that stretching into the future that you can set up an experiment and that there's probability this will happen and that will happen so on. You can assign the probabilities but you don't know for certain what can happen.
¶40But the same is true actually going back in time. Uh the whole idea that there isn't just a single history. There's a a blended amalgam of alternative histories that have led to to the present. Uh and when we do an observation uh interrogating a past event, we cull all of those possibilities that exist in an amalgam which is called a superposition. >> I've got a lot of reading to do on this bill to to try to get it.
¶41A participatory universe where observation somehow plays a role in bringing reality into being. You'll have to help me understand that. For the life of me, I can't understand how the mere act of observing a particle at the quantum level can affect its measurement. And I I know I need to read John Wheeler, but until then, maybe you can shed a little light. What Davies is talking about here is a hypothesis of John Wheeler that is so bizarre, it's so wacky that I think it's impossible to affirm.
¶42The idea is that the universe evolves over time to the point where there are observers in the universe and the the universe then is able to observe itself and so it brings itself into being in the past. Well, this is clearly viciously circular uh because the universe would have to exist prior to itself in order to bring itself into a be into being. So, as Davies said, and I hope you caught the word. He says it involves retrocausality. That is to say, backward causation, a causal loop where the present brings into being the past.
¶43But of course, the present wouldn't exist unless the past were in being. So, this is really uh just a crazy idea um that I think is unaffirmable. they get into another topic and Davies talks about his problem with the multiverse in this next clip. >> Uh but if you have this multiverse which has always existed, um you don't really explain anything else because to say things are the way they are because they always were doesn't explain why they are as they are as opposed to some other way. Um >> so you don't find that a particularly satisfactory explanation in the end.
¶44two cheers for the multiverse is what I normally say because it's it's it's you know it's >> it it has some value >> uh and after all if you think that the origin of the universe was a natural event uh it's either a supernatural event or a natural event if you want to go down the natural path well then if something can happen once naturally surely it can happen an infinite number of times so you're sort of led to that but where I think it goes a bit wrong is that if you look at specific models of the multiverse And there's one due to Andre Lindy for example. Um the way you do this you're there frenetically inflating sort of overall space. Uh and then you get these bubbles that the term that we use is nucleate and there's a a physical process whereby a a bubble universe can appear and and have matter and so on and all that can be described by quantum physics. So what you've got is quantum mechanics actually quantum field theory and the general theory of relativity and so on and people do the calculations they work out how these bubble universes can appear but these are metal laws in this multiverse and so then you say well why where have they come from why why couldn't you have some different metal laws and this would be >> it keeps kind of pushing the thing further back >> yeah so it's the tower of turtles problem >> metal laws yeah the multiverse just pushes the issue back a step is that right Bill >> what Davies is saying here is that you can explain away the unbelievably improbable finetuning of the universe for embodied conscious observers like ourselves. by saying that there are an infinite number of universes in a kind of ensemble of worlds and these are randomly ordered in their constants and quantities.
¶45And so if by chance alone a finely tuned universe will appear somewhere in the ensemble, then it will appear infinitely many times in the ensemble. And he appeals to inflationary theory to generate his many universes. Now what he doesn't mention is that inflationary theory doesn't do anything to randomize the constants and quantities which are at issue. You have to marry inflationary theory to string theory and that is now widely disfavored in the scientific community. uh and therefore this hypothesis uh is really not a credible one.
¶46Moreover, the inflationary theory though it can be infinite to the future as these bubble universes continue to nucleiate, it cannot be extended to the infinite past. That is the implication of our famous Borg Guth Valenan theorem that inflation cannot be past eternal which means that you've still got an origin of the multiverse at some point in the finite past to explain. Secondly, even positing a multiverse with randomly ordered constants and quantities does not explain why we observe a finely tuned universe. And the reason for that is that there are observable universes in the ensemble that have what we might call freak observers in them. uh say a brain that simply comes into existence by a fluctuation in the vacuum and has the illusion of an external world around it.
¶47These are called Boltzman brains after the famous physicist Ludvish Boltzman. So if we live in a randomly ordered uh multiverse, we could never know it because we could never know that we are ordinary observers rather than freak observers and therefore could never trust our sensory information. So that the multiverse hypothesis turns out to be literally selfdefeating. If it's true, you could never have any reason to know that it's true because it defeats itself. So, this is really a quite hopeless gambit to try to explain away the finetuning of the universe.
¶48But wait, there's more. Davies explains another reason that uh he doesn't like the multiverse interpretation. I in some ways it's it's because I feel it's a missed opportunity and we've been dancing around this this uh notion of consciousness and does it need a conscious being and that that's there's a nuance about that I'd like to get into in a moment but basically I felt that um seeing as as we are conscious beings consciousness is part of nature it's part of uh the world that we experience and it's the job of science to explain that we can't just say well it's bolted on uh I think it's you know it's a scientific phenomenon and it needs an explanation and if we think quantum mechanics is uh the wonderful theory of the world then it ought to somehow incorporate consciousness in it it will to have something in there uh but I like to call it um the ghost in the design uh that although we don't actually literally have to have a conscious being performing the experiment the apparatus is designed to tease out a certain aspect of nature a very very special aspect of nature you're measuring the momentum of a particle or something. Um, uh, these bits of equipment don't just appear in the universe. They're designed by conscious beings for a purpose.
¶49Uh, we're back to that. And so I think um we're we're never going to eliminate entirely the the the hand of agency of some sort because we're trying to in doing quantum mechanics and doing experiments we're trying to get uh information about knowledge about we're learning something about the world but in a way that we have designed in in advance. So we are the designers of interrogating a particular facet of nature. Uh and all that seems to go away if you go to the many universes interpretation. >> H okay consciousness and the fact that we as intelligent beings exhibit design is bypassed so to speak and multiverse or many worlds theory.
¶50Davis says you can't leave those considerations out. Bill, the expression the ghost in the machine was the philosopher Gilbert Riyle's way of mocking the idea of an immaterial mind or soul uh that we possess uh body soul dualism. Now Davies adapts this expression because he wants to have a ghost in the design uh as he says whatever that means. Uh it seems he wants to say that we are minds who have designed machines. Um but from this clip Kevin I don't understand why he thinks that goes away under the multiverse interpretation.
¶51Uh quite the contrary, as we saw with the Boltzman brains, there could be freak observers throughout the uh multiverse. Uh I think it could be that he's confusing the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics with the hypothesis of the multiverse. And those are two entirely different things. Emily spells out one of her concerns with what Davies just said in that last clip. Here it is.
¶52>> My concern is that you are taking the nature of the human experiment or the the the limitations of um the way that humans can interact with the world and then taking that as something revealing something fundamental about the world itself rather than the way that our results, our findings are going to always be filtered through our own experience. And through our own limitations as conscious observers, of course, there will be um a relationship between conscious observation and um the results that we get if we are conscious observers making those results. But I I I guess it goes back to this concern I have with anthropocentrism. And I worry that we're putting ourselves in a way that we like to do hub heristically as humans right at the center of things in a way that feels to me um without quite enough justification. >> Sounds like uh her main objection is that Davies makes an unwarranted extrapolation from human design to design in the origin of the universe.
¶53Bill, it's anthropocentrism as she put it. I frankly don't understand what Emily's talking about here. Kevin, um Mark Steiner, uh the philosopher wrote a wonderful book called the applicability of mathematics as a philosophical problem. And what Steiner argues is that our universe is anthropocentric uh in the sense that it is one in which mathematics is applicable to the description of and the discovery of new physical phenomena. And he says this requires some sort of explanation.
¶54Why is it that we live in an anthroposentric universe? one in which uh mathematics is useful in describing and discovering physical phenomena and it doesn't seem that either of these two dialogue partners have really faced that problem. >> Emily has asked why there is something rather than nothing in this next clip and here's what she says. >> Yeah. >> So yeah, I think it is one of the most important questions >> that we face.
¶55I don't think any of us really know the answer. I am not persuaded by arguments like the cosmological argument which says if you go far back enough in time, you must reach a first cause. That first cause starts the universe off and is what people call God >> and upon which physical reality itself somehow depends. >> Yeah. So a creator and sustainer of the universe and everything in it.
¶56What we are hitting up against is a boundary question. So science can only take us as far as the boundaries of the universe that we live in because we use laws of physics or physical regularities to model what happens. And so physics breaks down at the very beginning of the universe. So we can't look to purely science. Well, we can't really look to science at all to answer that question.
¶57That's where philosophy and theology comes in. And for for religious theologians, the answer is God. For me, I am quite sympathetic, I think, to the idea that we're living in an infinite multiverse, which can ultimately just be explained by saying it's always existed. There's there has always been something rather than >> And that's your brute fact, as it were. >> Yeah.
¶58If you will. And it seems to fit for me in the trajectory of um of the development of our understanding of ourselves and the place with our place within the world in that we used to believe that the earth was at the center of everything that we lived in a very small cosmos. Everything revolved around us. Then we realized actually we on our planet are orbiting a star, our sun, and in a solar system with other planets. And then we realized we're in a galaxy with many of these other systems.
¶59Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies with billions of these star systems in. It seems to me not unreasonable to make that next step and say, well, maybe our universe is one bubble in an infinite cosmic foam and these universes pop into and out of existence and we can explain why there's something because there's always been something. >> Well, she really embraces the multi-universe bill multiverse. Uh she says the multiverse fits the trajectory of what we've discovered in the past that is that the earth is not the center of the universe and there are billions of stars and galaxies. The universe keeps getting bigger.
¶60So on that trajectory, why can't it be so big that it exists eternally from the past and speaking of extrapolation that sounds a little like a big one to me, Bill? >> Yeah, it is pretty large. I think as an argument for the existence of a multiverse, this is extraordinarily weak. There is no evidence uh that there is such a thing as the multiverse. On the contrary, there are good reasons to think that there is not.
¶61First, as I already explained, it cannot be infinite in the past. As Emily suggests, it must have had a beginning as required by the Bourgalen theorem. Second, if there were a multiverse, then we could never know that we are ordinary observers who can trust our observations rather than freak observers like Boltzman brains. So that her hypothesis is literally selfdefeating. If it were true, you could never have any reason to think that it's true.
¶62>> If I ever start another rock band, I'm going to call it Boltzman Brains. Yeah. >> Which I think it'd be great. >> One more clip today. Davies presents the image of a tower of turtles.
¶63>> And and here we connect with theology because mostly these arguments and Eony was talking about the cosmological argument for the existence of God. Um, and these various arguments have been dropped, I think, mostly by theologians these days. >> Not all of them, but yeah, lots of them. >> But you know, this tower of turtles that we're talking about, the question is, you've either got infinite regress or you've got a sort of super turtle that can support the whole tower. Um, and you could say, well, that super turtle is the laws of physics, and it we don't know.
¶64It just magically is there. A brute fact. It >> just happens to be a brute fact. Um, how could you ever get around that? The only way you could get around that is by uh the old concept of a necessary being that that is that the super turtle exists necessarily that its non-existence would not just be a fact but would be a logical impossibility.
¶65>> Okay. The only way to actually stop the infinite regress is to posit a necessary being whose non-existence would be a logical impossibility. He then insisted this necessary being needn't resemble anybody's god. You I know you agree with him about a necessary being, Bill, in general, but is he right that a necessary being can be cleanly separated from anything like the god of classical theism? >> Not at all, Kevin.
¶66The god of classical theism is a necessary being. And the God of the Bible is wholly compatible with his necessary existence. I am that I am, God told Moses. So, the God of classical theism, the God of the Bible, perfectly fits uh as the candidate for this metaphysically necessary being that explains the contingent universe that we observe and inhabit. Yeah, I know it's we we've done many podcasts on this uh next topic, Bill, and we could go off uh on a trajectory, but for our own part, Koreshi Hurst said that uh what would move her most toward theism isn't really the cosmological or design type arguments.
¶67It's a persuasive answer to the problem of evil, which she currently thinks outweighs the evidence for a good God. And you know, you and I both know that's a very common sticking point. Um, maybe you can just respond to her directly on that point a little. >> Sure. I would respond in two ways.
¶68First of all, I would respond by defending the various theistic arguments which are much stronger than Emily seems to realize. Secondly, I would respond by asking her to prove that evil and suffering are somehow incompatible with the existence of an all powerful and all good God. It is the atheist who bears the burden of proof here to show that evil and suffering are incompatible with God's existence. And there's just no way for the atheist to shoulder that burden of proof. >> You know, Davies ended by saying that he's looking for a genuinely new conceptual framework, something beyond agency and mechanism, to make sense of purpose and existence, and that he's hoping thinkers like Emily or perhaps future AI, he said, will help find it.
¶69And Bill, you you pointed out that classical theism already supplies real explanatory resources here. For some reason, Paul Davies, he he just will not go there. He he doesn't want to embrace theism. What's your reaction to that? It it calls for speculation.
¶70But uh what do you make of this search for the undiscovered X? In his earlier work such as God and the new physics, Davies affirmed the existence of what he called a naturalistic God. That is to say, a God who didn't transcend the universe, but is in the universe and subject to the laws of nature. But I want to know why do they consistently overlook classical theism? Classical theism explains why there is something rather than nothing.
¶71It explains the origin of the universe at a point in the finite past. It explains the uh unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics uh with regard to physical phenomena. It explains the finetuning of the universe and it explains other things as well such as the objectivity of moral values and duties um and meaning and purpose in life. Classical theism provides everything they're looking for.