A.V. Nesteruk

Источник

5. Creation in Cosmology and Theology

Creatio ex nihilo and Contingency of the World – Creation and Incarnation: Intelligibility of the World and Scientific Advance –       Creation in Classical Cosmology: Cosmological Evolution and Initial Conditions – Elimination of

Real Time in Quantum Cosmology – Some General Comments on Hawking’s Model – Imaginary Time in Quantum Cosmology and Timeless Time in Christian Platonism – Quantum Cosmology: Diaphora in Creation versus Creation out of Nothing

Creatio ex nihilo and Contingency of the World

The Christian teaching on creation out of nothing, its doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, did not enter the cultural and spiritual environment of the ancient world in an empty background. The worldview asserted by Classical Hellenistic philosophy – that the world exists necessarily, that is, there is no need for justification of the very fact of the existence of the world – had had a deep impact. Greek thought could not cross this line of inquiry about the nature of things that was the foundation of all foundations in its philosophi­cal meditation about the cosmos. The world, according to the Greeks, was permanent, unchangeable, and, despite all internal movements, such as the origin and decay of things, the world as a whole was in a state of “etemal return”; its cosmology was cyclic. The endurance of the cosmos of the Greeks was ontologically necessary; the premise of its existence was an absolute fact, the last resort of all possible philosophizing.

The message of the Bible and its doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, which was developed first in the Christian context by Theophilus of Antioch and Irenaeus of Lyons, challenged Greek philosophy and cosmology by affirming that the cosmos cannot be regarded as a self-explanatory being.304 Rather, it is dependent on the existence of God and hence cannot be described as eternal, for its dependence on God means that the world is different from God and that its mode of existence, being different from the divine, is finite in all possible senses of the word (for example, temporal), for if God is infinite (apophatic definition), then the world is finite. The world is created by God and in its matter is radically different from God.

The Christian message affirmed the world’s radical contingency upon God, which implied that the laws of the world established in it are contingent and do not possess a status of an absolute necessity. This implied that the act of creation of the world by God out of nothing is a “free” act of God’s willing kindness to the world and, because of God’s freedom, the creation is not inherent in God’s own being. This produces a twofold contingency: contingency on the side of the orders in the universe, which could not have existed at all, and contingency on the side of the God-Creator, who could not have created anything at all.

The concept of creatio ex nihilo, which has its roots in the Hebraic tradition, was radicalized in the Christian context through the doctrine of the self-revelation of God in the incarnation of God’s son, the Logos of God, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The meaning of creation and its order was established by the divine Logos, the Word of God, who endowed the world with a particular rationality that is con­tingent on God’s “transcendent rationality.” The notion of contingency was developed by the Greek Fathers to express the nature of the universe as created freely by God, the universe that is utterly different from God yet dependent on him.

As a result of this development of Christian thought, the dualism of Classical Greek philosophy, in which there was a separation between the intelligible and the sensible world, was overcome: the whole universe, intelligible and sensible, heavenly and celestial, was regarded as creation, not as the Divine, but also as penetrated through with a unitary rational order of a contingent kind, which can be studied only in accordance with its own nature and yet is able through the order and harmony in the cosmos to point to the creator.305

The affirmation of creation in the Christian doctrine cannot be made in sepa­ration from the whole context of the Christian ethos, namely, the teaching and experience of the divine plan of salvation of man. Here Irenaeus, who pioneered the development of the doctrine of creation out of nothing, considered the mate­rial creation as the precondition for God’s saving work among men.306 The creation of mankind was at the center of Irenaeus’s emphasis, and he treated it as the beginning of God’s work of salvation. Irenaeus emphatically argued that the world was created by the will of God (the world was created freely because of the willing kindness of God to mankind) through God’s Word and that the world is made by God because of God’s original plan: “As soon as God’s mind conceived it [the plan of creation], the thing His mind conceived was made.”307 Despite this plan, which is rooted in the actual self-determination of God, grounded in God’s ousia, one affirms that the world is still contingent on God; in talking about the plan of cre­ation, one appeals to the “transcendent rationality” of God, which cannot be con­ceived from the perspective of the contingent world, which need not exist at all despite God’s plan. We experience here an inherent apophaticism of any teaching on creation, for creatio ex nihilo is a fundamentally mystical concept, for it is not so much a concept about the world as it is about God in terms of his relationship to his creation. This is why the notion of the “plan” of creation, on the one hand, and the contingency of the divine act of creation, on the other hand, require for their comprehension an antinomial logic, which by its function transcends the paradox of the “plan” and contingency and does not risk arguing about God too much. This point can be elucidated by an appeal to Athanasius’s distinction in God of his essence (ousia, substance) and his will and, consequently, the treatment of the cre­ated world as rooted in the will of God, not his essence.308 Athanasius argued that to be (that is, to exist) does not mean to act. Because the substance of God and God’s will are distinct in God, the ontology of the uncreated realm and that of creation are different. This led Athanasius to affirm the difference between God and the world in ontological terms, that is, that the ontology of the world is based on the will of God, not on God’s essence.

But the creation of the world Athanasius affirms, as does Irenaeus, is essential for the divine plan of salvation; “Nothing in creation had erred from the path of God’s purpose for it, save only man.”309 There was the divine plan of salvation (the transcen­dent rationality of God), and there was an act of free creation of the world by God’s will and because of God’s love (the contingency of creation). As Athanasius asserts in the quotation above, the creation was essential for God’s plan to save man. In other words, the act of creation, being contingent upon God, constitutes a step in God’s transcendent rational planning to save man. This makes it possible to affirm that the created world is necessarily contingent.310

The contribution of the Cappadocian Fathers to the problem of creation can be mentioned briefly. The first is the trinitarian theology of the Cappadocian Fathers, which affirms creatio ex nihilo as an act of ecstatic love of the Trinity. Because of the consensus of one will in all persons of the Trinity, and because of God’s freedom, the world was created as an act of ecstatic love of God – for without freedom, there is no love. The will of God hypostasizes the world, making this world ontologically based on the will of God, not on God’s essence.

The Cappadocian trinitarian theology can be considered as accomplishing the formulation of the ontological dualism between the inner life of God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and the creation, which is a deed of the divine will common to and identical in all three persons of the one God. The fundamental meaning of their contributions toward theological developments was, in fact, the overcoming of the closed ontology of the Greeks, who were monistic in their heart, either believing in the uncreated nature of matter in the world or identifying the cre­ator of matter with some supernatural deity in the world, which is rather the architect, the worker in the created order. Christian ontology represents an immense shift from Greek philosophical monism toward an ontology of the created being, which has its own foundation in its otherness, that is, in God, whose mode of existence is ontologically distinct from that mode of existence of the created world.

The second aspect of the Cappadocian theology, which was mentioned in chapter 4 in the discussion of Gregory of Nyssa’s teaching about the one-way diastema between God and the world, affirmed the radical distinction between God and the world, on the one hand, and the revealing presence of God through his energies in the world, on the other hand. Gregory’s theology distinguished between the essence of God and God’s energeia. It is in the energeia of God that the world has its ultimate ground. Everything in the world is formed by the divine energy, which is accessible to contemplation by human beings because of the gift of grace of God. This, however, brings another dimension into our discussion of the concept of creation, namely, the role of the Logos of God in creation, God’s incarnation in the logoi of things and God’s incarnation in flesh, in Christ.

As a preliminary conclusion, one can assert that, from a theological point of view, the concept of creation has sense as the concept of the relationship between God and the world, rather than about the world alone. This implies that if science (cosmology, for example) attempts to predicate about the creation of the universe, it can do so only from within the immanent aspects of the world, which are accessible to scien­tific investigation as a gift by the will of God. This means that it is doubtful from the very beginning that science can provide a model of creation of the world out of noth­ing that could compete with or simply be leveled to that of the Fathers’ teaching about creation. Indeed, the challenge for science is to try to uncover the transcendence, present in the world, by doing research from within the world. This transcendence would point toward the relational nature of the universe and its ultimate contingency upon the reality, which is beyond nature and is in its otherness, that is, in the Divine.

It is clear, however, that any analysis in this direction can lead one only to the detection of the rootedness of the world in the will of God, or God’s energeia, which can be technically expressed as the implicit presence of the logoi of creation in some scientific ideas.311 The important aspect of such a detection is that it is possible, not only because the world is available to us in its created givenness but also because the world, being created according to the plan of God, has in its contingent appearance some features of necessity that point toward the fact that creation has a purpose and an end. Contemplated by science as the universe’s order and structure, this is accomplished by God through the incarnation of the Logos of God in the logoi of things, as the agency that provides the guidance and sense to everything that is observed and contemplated. This means that creation in cosmology, understood discursively, refers to that aspect of the theological creatio ex nihilo that is associated with the hidden rationality of a contingent origin, the rationality that is inherent in God’s plan of salvation of man and realized through the incarnation of the Logos of God in nature and in the flesh of Christ. This leads to the conclusion that the understanding of cre­ation, if attempted from within science as a challenge to a theological view, should address not only the origination of the material universe, its evolution, and its sustenance but also the question of its rationality and ability inherent in humans to com­municate with the universe and to contemplate this rationality. This imposes a great demand for cosmology to reflect on the nature of the incarnation of the Logos of God as a step in God’s plan to create the world for the sake of man’s salvation.312

Creation and Incarnation: Intelligibility of the World and Scientific Advance

Since the creation of the world out of nothing was a precondition of the whole history of salvation, the Fathers of the church articulated clearly that the full meaning of creation could not be understood outside the context of the Christ-event. Indeed, when Irenaeus, for example, discusses the creation of man as made in the image of God (one should remember that for Irenaeus the making of man was a central point in the his­tory of creation-salvation), he says that the image of God was not shown, “because the Word, in whose image man was made, was still invisible.”313 The Son-Logos of God through his incarnation in flesh of the created world, according to Irenaeus, recapitulates the whole creation: “God recapitulated in Himself that ancient handiwork of His which is man,”314 and “When He became incarnate and was made man, He recapitu­lated in Himself the long history of mankind.”315

Following Irenaeus’s logic leads to the conclusion that the incarnation as recapitulation is the only definite thing in the affirmation of creation as a saving work of God with respect to mankind, for the sense of what God was planning when he conceived the plan of salvation becomes clear only through the Logos of God, who condescended into the created world in order to become a visible teacher to us.316 Ireneaus emphatically asserts that the truth of the incarnation is the only “real” and is definitive.317 He describes the dynamics of God’s revelation about creation in three stages: “Through the creation itself the Word reveals the Creator, and through the world the Lord, the world’s Maker… Similarly through the law and the prophets the Word proclaimed both Himself and the Father… Finally through the Word made visible and palpable, the Father was revealed.”318 The revelation about creation was granted to mankind in two stages: the first to provide the knowledge that there was a creator of the world, and the second, after the incarnation, to provide the meaning of creation as a precondition for the salvation history.

If we now turn to Athanasius’s thought, we find some similar ideas on the role of the incarnation of the Logos of God in flesh in order to elucidate the meaning of cre­ation. But Athanasius proceeds much further than Irenaeus, for the former not only asserts the incarnation as a pivotal element in the history of salvation but also links the incarnation of the Word of God with establishing a principle of intelligibility in the contingent creation.

Athanasius argues that it is through the inference of the Word of God from the created order that one can know that God is (that is, that the world is contingent on God), for it is the Word of God who orders the universe and reveals the Father (who is the creator with his transcendent rationality). Athanasius links the order in the cre­ated world with the incarntion of the Word-Logos of God. It was not enough for God just to create an ordered world to teach men about the Father: “Creation was there all the time, but it did not prevent men from wallowing in error.”319 It was the part of the Word of God, God’s Logos and only Son, who by ordering the universe reveals the Father (that is, reveals the hidden plan in contingent creation) “to renew the same teaching” through the incarnation, using another means to teach about God to those who would not learn from the works of God’s creation.”320

There is one particular problem that we would like to discuss in this context, namely, the problem of the contingency of the created realm on God and, at the same time, the presence of elements of necessity in the created world that make the incarnation principally possible.

Starting from Irenaeus, the Greek Fathers affirmed that God created the world freely, but from his plan. It is obviously expressed in the Nicene Creed that the “Son of God, the only begotten of the Father, begotten before all ages,” participated in the plan of creation and salvation before the world actually was made. At the same time, by planning the creation of the world and the salvation of man, God-Trinity planned the incarnation of the Son-Logos of God in the flesh of that world, which is supposed to be created.

The question then arises: did God plan the creation of the universe in some specially designed form in order to bring human beings into existence in such a shape as to make the incarnation of the Logos of God possible? Some Fathers (Origen, for example) are inclined to make a connection between the fall and the incarnation, while others (St. Maximus the Confessor, for example) are not. The main question still remains: if the history of salvation of man through the incarnation of the Logos in Christ and resurrection of Christ had been planned “before” the creation of the world, can we affirm that the world was created out of nothing by God’s will contingently (that is, freely and because of God’s love), on the one hand, and intentionally (in a shape that allows the history of salvation to be realized in this world), on the other hand? This means that the mode of existence of humanity in its fallen state, with its body, dependent on physical matter and biology, which was shared by Christ through the incarnation of the Logos, was a necessary element of the divine plan before creation. It implies, then, that the structure of the physical universe, which acts as the necessary condition for man’s physical and biological existence, was a nec­essary element of the divine plan before creation. In this, we face the problem of the freedom in God’s creation of the world out of nothing, on the one hand, and some inherent necessity underlying this creation, on the other hand. One can phrase this as the presence of “contingent necessity” in the world, which enables one to establish the meaning of creation as it was planned by God in his intent of salvation.

When one affirms the creation of the world by God, one means that the world, being created freely yet in its constitution contingent on God, possesses a kind of contingent rationality (this is reflected in the words constitution and contingency). The combination of the two words contingent and rational seems contradictory, for rational can be understood as structural and, hence, necessary. The genuine meaning of the phrase “contingent rationality” points toward the Christian assertion that the world is created by God because of God’s own plan, that is, because of God’s own uncreated “rationality,” so that the rationality of the created world, as intelligible and comprehensible, depends on the uncreated rationality of God. This implies that any attempt to comprehend the worldly structures by exercising the faculties of contin­gent rationality granted to man will inevitably appeal to something that transcends this rationality, that is, to the ground of the contingent world, which is relational upon God. The world is not self-explanatory; its comprehension will always depend on some meta-level of explanation, originating from the uncreated rationality of God. This makes it possible to assert that the created realm, being contingent on God, yet contains some features of necessity, which means that creation is dependent on God.321 One may speak about contingent necessity of the world, which expresses some freedom in its structures and their interactions and changes, on the one hand, and the limitedness of this freedom, which preserves the world from complete chaos and arbitrariness, on the other hand. Contingency and necessity combine to make the world unique: free in its self-expression and progression, granted by the freedom of the divine creation, and necessary, by being always dependent on the life of God, who maintains the being of the universe.

It is the concept of the incarnation of the Logos of God in flesh that clarifies the presence of the necessary dimension in the contingent creation. This dimension is associated with the intelligibility of the universe, its order and uniformity.322 In this, the incarnation of the Word-Logos of God provides us with a “vertical” dimension to everything that is involved in temporal flux in the created existence, treated as the horizontal dimension. Using the words of T. Torrance, the supreme axis of the incarnation is provided for the direct interaction with creation within its contingent existence and structure.323 The incarnation is not to be regarded as an intrusion into the creation or into the structures of space-time but, rather, as the freely chosen way of God’s rational love in the fulfillment of the eternal purpose of the universe. The incarnation thus functions as the re-creation and deepening of the order in the uni­verse, which is threatened by chaos and decay.

Being an eschatological act in its essence, as the affirmation of the kingdom of God, the incarnation of the Word of God establishes the goal of all movements in the universe as directed to their rest (stasis). In individual terms, it means the reaching of the union with God by involving the whole creation in the process of deification, through the liturgy of thanksgiving offered to the Father, the supreme creator and planner of human salvation.

Cosmology thus can be an instrument that helps reveal the necessary features in the contingent creation, which, theologically speaking, are associated with the cre­ation of the universe by the Word-Logos of God. As discussed in chapter 4, the Logos is present in the world through the logoi, whose immanent function is to hold the created things, to provide the purpose and end for their existence. Detecting the presence of the logoi of creation in the world by means of scientific investigation can, in some sense, provide the evidence for creation, not in a literal sense, as an explanation of creation out of nothing in causal terms, but rather as a contribution toward the understanding of the creative rationality of the uncreated Logos of God, God’s unfolding revelation to the world, which will be expressed scientifically in various forms of the never-ending advance of science.

From this Patristic perspective, one can guess that science, and cosmology in particular, cannot seriously challenge the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, for cosmology, being a worldly thing by construction, would rather attempt to “explain” the creation of the universe in terms of physical mechanism, which operates in matter as a priori given. The question about the existence of elementary matter as well as the laws that govern it cannot be properly addressed by cosmology at all, for the laws that manifest a particular existence do not justify the existence itself. In other words, the laws of nature provide us with some reference to the necessary aspect of contingent creation, as creation exercised according to the divine plan. It does not provide us, however, with the tools suitable for the explanation of the contingency of the world itself, that is, why the world was created in this particular shape but not in another.

Science, and particularly cosmology, can challenge the ex nihilo concept in a disguised fashion – namely, when it claims that there will soon be the end of science, that is, that the ultimate theory of everything is nearly built and there will be noth­ing to explain further. This claim was made, for example, by S. Hawking in his famous speech of 1980 titled “Is the End of Theoretical Physics in Sight?”324 The claim was later repeated by Hawking in his book A Brief History of Time, when he affirmed that the ultimate theory will make us capable of the knowledge of the mind of God.325 What was prophesied by Hawking is the end of scientific advance, that is, that science will come to a standstill by discovering all the laws that are to explain the universe without an appeal to any transcendent reference. This, according to Hawking, will be the knowledge of the mind of God, leading ultimately to God’s redundancy, for the idea of God is not needed anymore if the world is explained from within itself, and if the laws thus found form the absolute attributes of the world and sustain its existence. The world thus is not contingent at all; it is neces­sary in an absolute philosophical sense. The only viable philosophy that could sup­port this conclusion would be a scientific monism, the ancient ideal of the Greeks. If this were to happen, the Classical ex nihilo doctrine would be “disproved,” or, more precisely, abandoned, for the world does not need to be created – it just exists according to the inherent laws.

The knowledge of these laws would make humans the divine beings, for they would know the ultimate truth. Science itself, in its accomplished form, would probably also acquire nonhuman features, for it is through knowledge of the ultimate truth that mankind would deify itself in a fashion that was only dreamed of by Gnostics, who were fought by the early church fathers. But the ultimate truth is not a human product. According to A. Chalmers, truth is “preordained by the nature of the world before science is ever embarked on. Science… if it were ever to reach this end point, so conceived, would abruptly change from being a human, social product to being something that in the strong sense, is not a human product at all.”326

It is conceivable from what we have just said that science, being a human, social enterprise (that is, not being a divine activity), is in a state of infinite advance, an endless unfolding of the rationality of nature, which points toward its contingency, whose necessary features are being caught by science. As the deification of man is not possible through knowledge (being a kind of intellectual heresy similar to the Gnosticism of the second сentury), the ultimate theory of physics, whatever is meant by this, will never replace the theological doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, which affirms that the world is infinitely contingent on God, the presence of whose transcendent rationality can be revealed by human and social scientific discourse.

Along the lines of this approach to the problem of creation, we will now analyze what model cosmology can offer toward understanding the meaning of creation as it is conceived from within the world.

Creation in Classical Cosmology: Cosmological Evolution and Initial Conditions

We should start by recalling that classical cosmology (nonquantum cosmology), being a part of classical physics, takes for granted that the description of physical processes in the universe is made in terms of preexisting space and time. Cosmology uses Einstein’s theory of general relativity to model the spatiotemporal continuum of the universe. Space and time in general relativity are relational upon matter content, so that spatiotemporal dynamics in the universe is linked to matter. This implies that if cosmology were to attempt to explain the origin of space and time, it would also explain the origin of matter in the universe. It becomes even more clear in the light of the geometrical interpretation of gravitational field developed in general relativ­ity; to explain the origin of space-time would mean to explain the origin of all mat­ter, including the gravitational field itself.

This presents a real challenge for cosmology, for this kind of explanation would definitely transcend physics. To explain the origination of matter and space-time from “something” that is not matter and not space-time is probably an inconceivable task for physics, which is based on the classical concept of causation. Such an explanation would require cosmology to model the transition from a philosophical “nothing” (“no-thing” in an absolute sense, not a physical vacuum) to something (fields, particles, space-time); this modeling not only is an improper task for cosmology but also demands a philosophical and theological logic, when the creation of matter and space-time would be expressed in apophatic terms, that is, in terms of its relation to a transcendent source.

Despite this general understanding, classical cosmology experiences a serious difficulty when it has to speculate about the temporal origin of the visible cosmos. This problem is inherent for cosmology, which affirms that the universe experiences global expansion. Since the dynamics of this expansion is described by the Einstein equations, for example, by the equations for the universal scale factor a, which is a function of cosmological time t, the extrapolation of the solution of this equations for a(t) backward in time leads inevitably to such a point where t = 0 and a = 0. This point in the evolution of the universe is logically called the beginning of the universe, the point beyond which physics and cosmology cannot proceed, for most of the clas­sical concepts lose their sense.327

If cosmological theory, by extrapolating the expansion of the universe backward in time, were to predict that all physical matter and space-time disappear at the point of the “beginning”, then there would be a justified temptation to announce that the point of the beginning is the absolute origin of the universe in terms of both space and time – that is, no thing was before this point in terms of the cosmological time t. In reality, however, the situation is completely opposite; the values of all phys­ical parameters reach infinity at the point of beginning: density of matter (ρ), and the curvature of space-time (R) become infinite when a approaches zero:

ρ → ∞, R → ∞, as a → 0

It is because of this that the initial state of the classical universe is called the big bang or, cosmologically, the singularity. Both matter and space-time experience extraordinary behavior at this point, which is hardly to be described by physics, and there is no ground to claim that there was nothing at the singularity. On the contrary, all physi­cal quantities are infinite (that is, indefinite) there, so that no particular specification of the initial state is possible; all hypotheses leading to these infinite values will be untestable and useless even in terms of their heuristic function.

The appearance of infinities in cosmology is inevitable if one assumes the classical forms of matter in the universe, such as radiation and dust.328 As discussed before, cos­mology with classical forms of matter leads to a series of problems, which can be over­come if one invokes the presence in the universe of “nonclassical” matter, such as quantum fields described in modern parlance either as “inflaton” (ϕ) or “cosmologi­cal constant” λ. In these models, the dynamics of the universe is driven either by decaying inflaton ϕ or cosmological parameter λ. Formally, inflationary cosmology succeeds in removing the singularity at t = 0 and placing it in the asymptotic limit t → ∞, so that the problem of the beginning of the universe is converted into the problem of its preexistence in infinite time. The preexistent vacuum state decays in time, driving the evolution of the universe to its present state. The only advantage of this model is that the average energy of the vacuum state, which is given by λ, is finite at all times, including the limit t→ – ∞, so that inflationary cosmology allows one to avoid a bizarre conclusion about the apocalyptic state of matter and geometry at the big bang.329 It can clearly be seen that if one talks about “creation” of the universe in this case, this is the production of matter not out of nothing but out of matter described either by ϕ or by λ, whose preexistence is postulated.

In both cases – cosmology with classical matter as well as inflationary cosmology – physics fails to explain the nature of the initial condition for equations that drive cosmological evolution. The dichotomy between the laws of dynamics and the initial conditions that fix a specific outcome of these laws acquires some unique fea­tures in cosmology. Since we can speculate on the nature of these conditions only from within our universe by extrapolating backward the properties of the observable universe, the “knowledge” of the initial conditions thus achieved does not tell us any­thing about the genuine nature of these conditions, as if there were special physical laws responsible for these conditions, separated from us in the past and not being similar to laws of dynamics. Being bounded by the universe in which we live, we can­not know the laws of the initial conditions of the universe; for this would require us to transcend the universe, which is impossible.

The ideal variant for cosmologists wishing to describe the creation of matter in the universe would be to construct an initial state such that the total energy of matter would equal zero and that this requirement would be a meta-law, imposed on the matter of the future universe in the preexistent space and time. This kind of a model was offered by Tryon and was treated later from a philosophical point of view by Isham.330 The major feature of this model is that the universe originates in preexistent space and time as a result of a fluctuation of the physical vacuum (a physical state of quantum matter in which the values of all observables of particles are zero). Geometrically, the development of the universe can be presented as a future light cone, whose apex is positioned completely arbitrarily in preexistent space and time.

This constitutes a philosophical difficulty with this model: it is impossible to specify and justify why the universe originated at a specific point of space and time. In this theory, the spontaneous creation of the universe (as a result of a fluctuation) could occur anywhere and at any moment of time. This means that the variety of dif­ferent universes could originate at different locations of the preexistent space-time, driving cosmology to face the serious problem of the mutual influence of different universes. Definitely, this kind of model has nothing to do with creation out of noth­ing in a theological sense, for space, time, the meta-law, and the quantum vacuum are all assumed to be preexistent. It is reasonable to talk about the temporal origination of the visible material universe rather than about its creation out of nothing.

It is interesting to note that the first “scientific” ideas on the origination of the universe in preexistent space and time were proposed by Newton, who intended to reconcile the biblical account of creation, in which the world had to have a beginning, with his view that time could have neither beginning nor end. Newton asserted that the visible universe was brought into existence by God in the past, which is separated from us by finite time, but that this took place within the absolute and infinite space and time. The creation of matter is detached in his model from the creation of time. We see here a fundamental dif­ference from general relativity, where space and time are relational upon matter, so that the split in origination of matter and time becomes theoretically inconsistent.331

The logical difficulty with this kind of model is connected with our inability to locate the moment of time where the universe originated, from outside, by transcending the universe itself, into its imaginable preexistent “before.” One cannot know whether the big bang was preceded by a “big crunch” or not. We can argue about the absolute beginning of time within the visible universe by extrapolating its expansion backward in time, but this will never allow us to claim scientifically that there either was or was not preexistent time “before” our universe came into existence. This situa­tion was described by Kant in terms of his first cosmological antinomy:

Thesis: The world has a beginning in time and is also limited as regards space.

Antithesis: The world has no beginning and no limits in space; it is infinite as regards both time and space.332

In modern terms, the thesis corresponds to the view that the universe as we know it is unique and that the big bang is an absolute beginning of the universe as well as of time and space. There are no reasonable arguments about existence of anything beyond our universe and “prior” to the big bang; the latter is the absolute beginning of being. Any attempt to speculate about “outside” and “before” the universe would be, in the spirit of the Kantian philosophy, an ambitious attempt of reason to depart from the empirical series of causation, corresponding to the visible universe, toward purely intelligible series, which have no ontological significance.

The antithesis corresponds to the model of the universe with preexistent time and space, in which the visible universe is one particular realization of a potentially infi­nite number of existing universes, corresponding to different initial conditions at different moments of preexistent time. Because of the impossibility of locating the point of origination of our universe in preexistent time, and hence of making this point special, one cannot claim that there is no time and space beyond the visible universe. It can originate at any moment of preexistent time so that that could be, potentially, an infinite time before the visible universe came into being. All points of preexistent space and time are equivalent; space and time are uniform and infinite.

One can look at the same antinomy from a different perspective. For example, the thesis can be treated as an affirmation that the visible universe is unique, whereas the antithesis can be treated as the opposite – that is, that the visible universe, being finite in terms of its temporal past, is one particular representative out of the ensemble of the universes with different boundary conditions (that is, in different moments of their origination in preexistent time). In this setting, the antinomial nature of any propositions about the origination of the visible universe in preexistent time becomes evident: on the one hand, we cannot transcend our universe in order to assert scientifically that we are a part of the big ensemble of the universes; on the other hand, nothing can stop us from making a Platonistic assumption that there is the ensemble of the universes, which we cannot verify empirically but can affirm through an intellectual inference. In this case, the whole meaning of the antinomy reveals itself as predication about two ontologically distinct realities, the empirical visible universe and the Platonic ensemble of the universes.

The presence of such an antinomy in cosmology with preexistent time points, as understood before, to the fundamental ontological difference (diaphora) in the cre­ated realm, which is inevitably invoked by reason when it tries to speculate about the origins of the world. The antinomy analyzed here points toward the conceptual and ontological difference between empirical time in the visible universe and Platonic-like time in the preexistent but conceptual universe. The attempt to explain the orig­ination of the visible universe out of an ensemble of possible universes can then be interpreted as a conceptual causation from the world of ideas to the empirical world; this, according to our previous conclusion, indicates not the creation of the universe itself but, rather, a special aspect of differentiation as its constitutive element – the diaphora between empirical and sensible.

One can draw a preliminary conclusion that all models of origination of the universe in preexistent time will never explain the origination in empirical, scientific terms, and that, instead, they will indicate a problem of the dualism between the evolution of the observable universe (which follows the laws of dynamics, testable in principle) and its initial conditions (which are untestable in principle and which constitute instead the realm of metaphysics, or the physics of ideas). As E. McMullin commented, the spontaneous, uncaused origination of the universe, such as that proposed in Tryon’s model, strictly speaking cannot be a “creation” in a proper sense, for the cause of creation (that is, a creator), which must be outside the chain of spatiotemporal events in the universe, cannot be present in the physical theory. This means that the desire to justify “the creation” in cosmology, as causation in a rather philosophical sense, leads the scientist beyond physics into the realm of philosophical ideas or even theology.333

The unsatisfactory nature of the assumption that the universe was created in (preexistent) time was recognized as early as the Patristic writers, who defended the concept of creation of the world ex nihilo. Basil the Great, in his Hexaemeron (“The Commentary on Six Days of Creation”), distinguishes between the creation of the intelligible world with no temporal flux and no spatial dimension, and the creation of the visible universe together with “the succession of time, for ever passing on and passing away and never stopping in its course.”334 Basil asserts that the meaning of the biblical phrase “In the beginning God created” must be understood as “in the begin­ning of time,” that is, that God created the visible world together with time and it was the beginning of time in the visible world.335 To articulate the atemporal nature of “the beginning of the world,” and to remove any causation at the beginning in terms of time series, Basil affirms that “the beginning, in effect, is indivisible and instantaneous… the beginning of time is not yet time and not even the least particle of it.”336

Augustine, in his Confessions 11, addresses the problem of the origin of time directly, affirming similarly to Basil, while using quite contemporary words, that “the way, God, in which you made heaven and earth was not that you made them either in heaven or on earth… Nor did you make the universe within the framework of the universe. There was nowhere for it to be made before it was brought into existence.”337

The last sentence is a proper theological reaction to any cosmology with preexistent time. If we attempt to talk about creation of the universe out of nothing in cos­mology, it means that we cannot use for this the cosmological models in which the visible universe originates in the universe “at large,” preexistent with respect to the visible one. Similarly, Augustine asserts that the universe was not created by God in time but was created with time.338 Augustine affirmed the creation of the universe and of time within it as the only consistent expression of the Christian affirmation of cre­atio ex nihilo. The nihilo could not be something; it could not have any attributes of the created things. Rather, it must be absolute philosophical no-thing. In particular, it is not in time and space.

It is clear, then, that if cosmology hopes to challenge the theological teaching on creatio ex nihilo, it must at least refuse any models of the universe with preexistent time. In other words, time itself must be explained as a result of cosmological the­ory. This sounds suspicious at first glance, for any physical theory assumes time as a necessary background in which the dynamics and change take place. A reasonable starting point in this attempt, however, is to find such models of the universe in which the initial state will manifest a singularity similar to global space, so that it will not require any assumptions about preexistent time. The initiation of the visi­ble universe takes place at this singularity, so that empirical time originates at this singularity and the universe can be said to be created not in time but in the preexis­tent space of the singularity.

If one assumes that there is a variety of initial conditions at the global spatial singularity, then the “physics” of this variety is very problematic again. One can produce very exotic theories about the global initial space, but they will have a limited impact for the verifiability of this theory in the visible universe, whose initial conditions are posed only in a tiny domain of the global surface. This is why any proposal for the nature of a global singularity that covers all possible initial conditions would be untestable by definition, even with all the information available in the visible universe.339

At any rate, the model of the origination of the visible universe from the global space-like singularity assumes that there was a finite time back when the observable universe came into existence and started to develop to its present state. Time was brought into existence together with the universe, and the problem of the positioning of our universe in preexistent time is not present in such a scenario. At the same time, if the global singularity is assumed to be in existence prior to what we call our universe, it is difficult to assert that the universe was created out of nothing, for the point of origination of the universe is positioned at the initial singularity, which is not nothing in a theological sense but is preexistent space. It is clear, then, that one can apply the same argument, which we used before in the context of an antinomial proposition similar to the first antinomy of Kant, in which the word time is omitted. From a philosophical point of view, the difficulty of predicating on the origin of the universe in terms of different initial conditions in space is the same at it was before for models with preexistent time.

This implies that the next logical step would be to attempt to modify the theory in order to remove all preexistent entities, such as time or space, and to construct the model of the universe in which space and time would originate together with matter. Can this be done in cosmology?

To make clearer what kind of problem we face here, let us compare the dynamics of the particle in classical mechanics, on the one hand, and the dynamics of the uni­verse in general relativity, on the other hand. The difference can be understood easily from the diagram in figure 5.1:

Classical Mechanics            General Relativity

Figure 5.1

At the left-hand side, we have a trajectory of a particle in a configurational space, which describes the transition in a preexistent space and time from the original point (t0, x0) to some arbitrary point (x, t). At the right-hand side, we have a cone, whose vertical axis corresponds to what we call time, and two perpeticular dimensions to space. The fundamental difference between classical mechanics and general relativity is that there is no preexistent time in the latter case. Space in general relativity is a relational concept; its dynamics follows the dynamics of matter, and it is a three-dimensional space (3)G, which is the dynamical variable in relativity and cosmology. Time emerges in relativity as parameter, which describes the change of the three-space (3)G; it can be, for example, the changing radius of the section of the cone perpendicular to its vertical axis in figure 5.1. It is clear that there is no direct analogy between classical mechanics and general relativity theory, for the internal dynamics of (3)G can be described as “evolution” in the continuum with the dimension larger than (3)G, that is, in space-time (4)G only postfactum, or when the global dynamics of (4)G is defined. The fact that time is not a preexistent entity but is defined by the dynamics of space (3)G can be easily understood if one realizes that the spatial sections of the complex (4)G can be drawn arbitrarily with respect to the vertical dimen­sion of the graph, thus also defining the time variable arbitrarily.

The common feature of both the classical description of dynamics of a single particle and the evolution of 3-space (3)G is that both have a “point” of the beginning. In the case of space-time, it means that the three-space (3)G has a zero radius – for example, a zero radius of the universe, beyond which theory cannot be extrapolated and all concepts such as space and time lose their sense. From this point of view, one could argue that this is exactly the point at which space and time come into existence, at which they are created. The problem, however, typical for classical dynamics as well as for cosmology, is that there is a dichotomy between the laws of dynamics and initial conditions; there is a variety of solutions corresponding to the dynamical equations that drive the evolution and that contain a conical singularity, as presented in figure 5.1. The theory cannot select a particular solution that would be unique and would correspond to the visible universe.

We thus face a problem of how to remove this initial point from the solutions. In classical mechanics, it is impossible to do it at all, for time and space do preexist and form a background for development of a system. The initial condition corresponds to a choice, made by an observer when that person starts to follow the evolution of a particle. In the case of relativity, the situation is much more exciting, for the begin­ning of time corresponds to some particular properties of space, when the radius of the universe is zero, for example. This point forms a problem for classical physics, for all physical observables approach infinite values in the vicinity of this point; classical physics collapses at the singularity.340 At the same time, as was proved by S. Hawking and R. Penrose, the singularity in classical general relativity is inevitable. The pres­ence of the initial singularities in general relativity leads to the impossibility of formulating in physical terms the initial conditions of the visible universe. The dichotomy between the initial conditions and the laws of the evolution of the universe becomes unbridgeable in classical general relativity. If this is true, and we can­not specify in physical terms the “laws” of the initial conditions of the universe, we cannot fully answer the question of the nature of the visible universe. In this case, a deistic temptation enters the cosmologist’s mind; one appeals to a deity who did set up the initial conditions and the laws of universe but then left the universe to its own devices. Physics and cosmology provide us with the understanding of the laws of the evolution of the universe, but they do not teach us what was God’s choice in setting up the initial conditions.

In theology, which advocates that the created order is contingent on God (radically different from God) and that the laws of the world are free from any inherent necessity, originating from God, it would be very ambitious to pretend to uncover the “laws” that stand behind the initial conditions of the universe. This is because with the knowledge of these laws – that is, knowing that the initial conditions of the visible universe are conditioned by something that is ontologically necessary – we would enter the domain of the divine reason and attempt to apprehend God’s intentions in creating the world. This is, however, hardly to be achieved in cosmology on its own, so that theology enters the scene of speculation at this point.

Some cosmologists argue for the possible comprehension of the laws of boundary conditions of the visible universe in principle. Hawking, for example, appeals to the history of science to argue that this history eventually uncovers the underlying order of things and events that seemed to be incoherent and arbitrary before. He believes that the same kind of order can be found in the extreme physical situation at the cos­mological singularity: “There ought to be some principle that picks out one initial state and hence one model, to represent our universe.”341

This belief should in a way contradict the result on inevitability of the singularities in cosmologies with all pathological features of the theory, which we mentioned above (infinities of all classical physical variables). This, in turn, provides us with an argument that the “law” of the initial conditions must be nonclassical, different and new in comparison with what is known from general relativity. These laws, if they exist, should avoid the problem of temporal beginning, which has its root in the asymmetry between space and time. Indeed, the conical space-time of the universe has one particular feature, which makes the whole geometry (4)G singular: its bound­ary is formed by a conical surface plus a singular point, the apex of a cone. The new nonclassical laws of the singularity, if they exist, must change our view on space-time of the universe as a singular cone. This means that the geometrical presentation of the evolution of the visible universe, as presented in figure 5.1, must be replaced by something with a different, nonsingular boundary. In this case, the problem of the beginning of time, according to the proponents of the laws of the initial conditions, would be explained away and no theistic references would be necessary in order to explain the “temporal origin” of the world. How successful is this program?

Elimination of Real Time in Quantam Cosmology

It must be explained first of all that when Hawking advocates the existence of the laws of the initial conditions – that is, that the new physics of the singular state of the universe can be developed – he, in fact, assumes that the whole of cosmology must be transformed from being a classical view of the universe into the so-called quantum cosmology. The latter “theory” represents an as yet unfinished synthesis of gen­eral relativity and quantum mechanics applied to the universe as a whole. This synthesis is a big issue in modern physics and needs to be subjected to a long philo­sophical scrutiny, which is not a topic for this book.342 The very possibility of this syn­thesis is based on fundamentally nonclassical physical ideas that, it is believed, can contribute to the attempts at challenging the creatio ex nihilo concept scientifically. Our interest thus will be in analysis not of the logical consistency of the synthesis between cosmology and quantum physics but, rather, of some of its concepts that can indirectly contribute to the theology of creation of the world out of nothing, understood Patristically.

The challenge of quantum cosmology is to provide the “laws” of the initial conditions of the visible universe, that is, to describe the state of origination of the universe in such ontologically necessary terms as to condition the emergence of time in the universe. This means that in no way must time be an ingredient of these laws. At the same time, quantum cosmology does not deny the presence of space in these laws. In other words, space is considered a more fundamental ontological reference than time. The visible universe is in space and in time; the state that is prior to the visible universe cannot be in time, but it is accepted that it can be in space. The existence of space, which is devoid of temporality, is considered as existence forever, with no need for an explanation of “when” this space came into existence. The timeless state of the universe (as a pure space) can be considered an initial member in a series of tempo­ral causation, which itself is beyond time.

The conceptual transition from classical to quantum physics can be understood as a change of the description of physical objects as having some given positions in space – for example, let us say x, y at a given moment of time – to the description of the dynamics of objects in terms of the so-called wave function Ψ, which is a function of x, y and is subject to evolution in time according to the Schrödinger equation. It is important that the coordinates of the particle cannot be observed precisely, as occurs in classical mechanics, but one talks about the probability of the particle to be found in the vicinity of the point x, y, which is described by the square of the modulus of the wave function p(x, y) = |Ψ(x, y)|2. In general, p is a function of time, and its evolution is completely determined by the Schrödinger equation, subject to our knowledge of the initial distribution of probabilities p0 at some moment of time t0. The evolution described by the Schrödinger equation is reversible – that is, knowing the initial state, one can predict all other states in the evolution of a particle, and, vice versa, one can restore the initial condition if the state of the particle is known afterward. In this sense, the evolution, even in quantum mechanics, is ahistorical; no novelty is generated in the system since it started its development from the initial state. The specificity of the sys­tem is thus determined by the setting of particular initial conditions that are not sub­ject to dynamics. The most considerable conceptual change when one enters the sphere of quantum physics is that the description of physical processes is done in terms of the wave function Ψ, which is not a physical observable in principle. As a mathematical object, it belongs to the abstract Hilbert space, whose ontology is obviously detached from the empirical world and represents, rather, the world of Platonic forms.

The synthesis of quantum physics with general relativity, especially in its application to cosmology, leads to a novel feature of the resulting theory that did not exist in the quantum physics of micro-objects. Indeed, as mentioned in the previous section, relativity experiences some difficulties with the introduction of time. Time is not a natural parameter in the theory; rather, it is an epiphenomenon constructed upon the primary dynamical variable, which is three-dimensional space (3)G. This means that if one wants to construct a quantum state of the whole universe (that is, to describe this mathematically by the wave function of the universe), this function will not be a function of time explicitly; rather, it will be the function of three-geometry ((3)G) and matter (some field for example, which we denote as φ), which is linked to geometry according to general relavity. The state of the universe is thus described by the wave function Ψ [(3)G, φ] which is defined in the superspace of all possible three-dimensional geometries as well as all possible states of matter. Time is not pres­ent in this “frozen” formalism.

In a quasiclassical domain, where the function Ψ (t) follows from a Schrödinger equation with time t, the evolution of the universe follows a simple, reversible dynamics. This means that if one can predict the state of the universe at t2, knowing its state at t1 < t2, that is, Ψ(t2) = U(t1, t2) Ψ (t1), then one can reverse this formula and predict the past state of the universe (at t1) if one knows it at present (at t2), for exam­ple, Ψ(t1) = U-1 (t2, t1) Ψ(t2), where U-1 is the inverse transform that exists because the evolution is reversible. Now quantum cosmology says its decisive word in order to construct a wave function Ψ that would be unique and would satisfy the required boundary conditions. Since we want to find such a solution, which corresponds to the initial state in terms of time t, there must be such a solution Ψ(t*) for which dynamics toward the times less than t* would not be possible – that is, the transform U-1 could not be constructed and applied to Ψ(t*). This would be by definition the “origination” solution, which allows its quasiclassical continuation only for t that is greater than t*. This solution would correspond to such a state of the universe, which would not be itself in time. It nevertheless would provide us with the conditions for emergence of time as flowing in one particular direction from the “moment” of its origination.

As mentioned before, the solution for Ψ, which provides a conical singularity of a type as depicted in figure 5.1, and where the initial point of space and time (the apex of the cone) corresponds to the beginning of space and time together, is not a good candidate. This is because it represents a space-time with a boundary, which is the surface of the cone plus the point of origination. Thus the desirable solution for (4)G in the quantum domain should, rather, correspond to the geometry where the four-dimensional space-time has only one three-dimensional boundary. At first glance, this kind of solution does not relieve us from the presence of time, for the boundary of four-dimensional space contains a temporal dimension. The crucial step that has been taken in order to overcome this concern is a conceptual change in views on the asymmetry between space and time, which is an attribute of the macroscopic experi­ence. In simple words, one can say that time was considered an extra-dimension of four-dimensional space. The important feature of this new time is that it is not a real time, not a time of our everyday experience. Rather, it is a mathematical abstraction of time, such that it makes an imaginary time (in a sense of complex numbers) to be principally unobservable and nonmeasurable. The trick is simple technically but is not so convincing philosophically.

The idea to geometrize time in a modern physical context and in terms of a rigorous mathematical language dates back to the developments of special relativity, in which the unification of space and time in one complex was achieved through the concept of the interval between two events, which is usually treated as a metric (that is, the device that allows one to measure distances between any events in space-time, which is known as Minkowski space). The interval between two close events is usu­ally presented as

Δs2 = c2Δt2 – Δx2 – Δy2 – Δz2,

where c is the speed of light. There is an asymmetry between the temporal variable t and the spatial variables x, y, and z in the last formula, which has a deep philosophical meaning – namely, that despite being united into the complex with space, time is still fundamentally distinct from space, for the presence of time with a different sign in the formula for the interval makes it possible to talk about the motions of particles in time and about the evolution of physical systems in time in general. For exam­ple, according to the principle of special relativity that the velocity of physical objects cannot exceed the speed of light c, all physical motions are possible only if Δs2 > 0. This makes the graphical presentation of the propagation of signals in space asymmetric by definition, for it is only the motions within the light cone (defined as the loci of the equation Δs = 0) that are allowed in physics, which treats space and time as real measurable entities. In other words, if one treats time t as empirical time corresponding to our subjective experience of temporal flow, time is different from space physically and mathematically. Space-time as a whole, depicted with the help of the Minkowski diagram, is nonuniform, for there are regions in space-time, which are prohibited for physical processes. This implies that the very abstraction of unifying space and time into one Minkowski space must not mislead anyone about the empirically evident difference between space and time.

It is clear, however, that the formal trick of introducing a new imaginary time τ = ict, where i is a complex (not real) unit with a property i2 = –1, allows one to rewrite the metric Δs2 in the form

Δs2 = –Δτ2 – Δx2 – Δy2 – Δz2,

where the new temporal variable τ enters the metric of space-time on equal footing with space. If one introduces the notation τ = x4, x = x1, y = x2, z = x4, then the form of the interval becomes (up to the minus sign) Euclidean:

– Δs2= Δx1 2 + Δx22 + Δx32 + Δx42.

Time τ = ict acquires in this formalism the features of an extraspatial dimension, so that the difference between the temporal nature of imaginary time τ and space disappears completely. If now someone recklessly identifies the ontological status of the imaginary time τ with that of the real empirical time t, the temptation would be great to claim that there is no distinction between space and time in general and that, using the words of H. Minkowski, “space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”343 The philosophical danger of this claim, which, as we will see later, Hawking makes in his quantum cosmology, will be a subject of our special attention in the next section.

Now we must elucidate further how the geometrization of time – its actual removal – happens in Hawking’s model. The transition to imaginary time, which leads to the conceptual change of the whole theory, is dictated in quantum cosmol­ogy by two reasons: (1) It attempts to provide the description of the initial conditions of the universe with no reference to anything beyond the universe, which could con­dition the initial conditions from outside; thus it is believed that the initial condi­tions of the universe could be inferred as a part of a theory. And, (2) in calculating the main object of quantum description of the universe (that is, the abstract wave function), which is supposed to provide as a solution the geometrical configuration of the universe, the method, used by Hawking, involved the so-called path integral, the mathematical object, defined on the set of all possible universes (this set is called superspace, for the elements of this superspace are all imaginable three-dimensional spaces). This mathematical method, however, imposed a serious constraint on the form of those metrics (spaces), whose paths should appear in the integral. As Hawking writes: “It seems, therefore, that the path integral for quantum gravity must be taken over nonsingular Euclidean metrics” (that is, over the metrics with imagi­nary time).344 One should remember this statement for our further analysis, for it illustrates a remarkable inference in theoretical cosmology: the purely mathematical requirement for consistency and the nonsingular nature of calculations lead to a choice of the set of geometries with no obvious reference to the physical world. As Hawking expressed this in A Brief History of Time: “To avoid the technical difficulties with Feynman’s sum over histories, one must use imaginary time.”345

The crucial point now is to formulate proper initial conditions for the space-time of the universe, assuming that the universe in not pseudo-Euclidean (as depicted in figure 5.1), but Euclidean – that is, that time and space are equal and “there is no difference between the time direction and directions of space.”346 There are two “nat­ural” (mathematical) choices: the infinite Euclidean space, which incorporates time, and the compact (finite in volume) space, which does not have a boundary. Hawking provides some reasons in favor of the finite (compact) space, which con­stitute the essence of his and J. Hartle’s “no-boundary proposal,” which states that the path integral involved in calculation of the wave function of the universe must be taken over all compact Euclidean metrics.347 This removes the problem of the ini­tial conditions in the universe because, logically, the condition that is supposed to condition the initial state of the universe now reduces to a tautological statement that the universe must be initially with no boundary. In other words, the term ini­tial loses its ordinary sense, for there is no special location in the universe that could be taken as an ‘initial’ boundary: there is no boundary. This opens a way to a new, interesting situation in physics, the removal of the problem of boundary conditions in general. This implies that the classical solutions of the cosmological models with nonphysical infinities in the singularities no longer threaten physics, so that one could be tempted to say that the collapse of physics at the cosmological singularity, which has been discussed by J. Wheeler in so many papers, is overcome.348 There is no breakdown of physics at the edge of the universe, and hence there is no need to appeal to the “laws” of the boundary conditions, which, according to classical cos­mology, would manifest the transcendent plan of the divine design rather than any­thing physical following the laws and logic of the visible universe.349

If the no-boundary proposal is implemented in theoretical calculations, it leads to a wave function of the universe as a function of the radius a of a three-dimensional section of the four-dimensional compact space, which incorporates an imaginary time. The radius a of (3)G – that is, a three-dimensional section of the compact (with no-boundary) (4)G – satisfies the Einstein equation that involves the distribution of matter in the universe. The radius of a three-dimensional compact space a can extend indefinitely from zero to infinity. There is, however, a threshold in terms of a, which marks a radical change in the behavior of the wave function of the universe. Indeed, if the energy density of matter in the universe is nonzero and constant, ρ for example, then the maximum radius of the closed three-dimensional universe (3)G, as a boundary of (4)G, will be equal to amax= √3∕ρ. The wave function of the universe increases exponentially in terms of a if a ˂ amax and oscillates rapidly in terms of a if a ˃ amax. In order to illustrate the meaning of this transition in behavior of the wave function, let us make a simple analogy: consider the Schrödinger equation for a par­ticle whose energy E is constant, but negative. It is easy to show that the so-called stationary solution of this equation has a simple oscillating form Ψ = Ce(iE/h)t. What will happen to this solution if time t is imaginary, that is, t = –іτ? It is clear that the solu­tion will change to Ψ = Се(E/h)τ, acquiring the features of an exponentially growing function.

This analogy suggests that the transition in the behavior of the wave function of the universe corresponds to the transition from the quantum state of the universe as a four-dimensional compact Euclidean space (with imaginary time being a spatial dimension) to the classical evolving universe, whose geometrical structure corresponds in general to the curvilinear cylinder (a special case of this kind of a cylinder is presented in figure 5.1 as a conical space-time) where its vertical dimension corresponds to real, empirical time. The change from the quantum state of the universe to the “classical” universe, whose evolution leads ultimately to what we observe as the present-day visible universe, is accompanied by the transition from imaginary time to real time.350 Hawking proposes to present this transition graphically in the form shown in figure 5.2:

This transition is supposed to describe the “creation” of the visible universe. There is not, however, any point of creation, or origination of the universe, for it originates from space, which has no temporal properties (space simply exists). Thus it should be emphasized once more that the creation of the visible universe in Hawking’s model is not creation as “origination”; rather, it is a transition (in a sense that will be established later) from atemporal (timeless) Euclidean space to space-time, in which time is distinct from space and where one observes the temporal flux of events.

The major achievement of the scenario proposed by Hawking is the elimination of the singular states in the history of the universe, where the physical laws break down. The absence of temporal dimension in the boundary state of the universe removes the problem of preexistent time and offers a response to the paradoxes connected with the creation in preexistent time. One should remember, however, that the validity of this response is contingent on the belief that the world has an imaginary temporal dimension, that is, that the world is fundamentally nonempirical (as will be said later, nonphysical). Hawking suggests that if “the so-called imagi­nary time is really the real time, and that what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations,” then the entire universe is compact, with no boundary, so that the vision of the universe as having a beginning in the past (as well as the problem of original creation in general) is just an illusion of human consciousness.351 Hawking’s attempt to elucidate the meaning of the word reality, as he uses it, leads him ultimately to confusion, for, according to him, mathematical theory is just a model and there is no meaning in questions about the “reality” of time, whether it is imaginary or real: “It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description.”352 There is a positive asset of this quantum cosmology, however: the prediction/explanation of the behavior of the universe that when it gets off the quantum realm (that is, becomes classical), it will be like inflation of space. Inflationary cosmology is the popular model nowadays that is capable of solving some puzzles of the classical big bang cosmology.353

The model of inflationary cosmology, proposed by Hawking, resonated not only in professional physical and mathematical circles but also among philosophers and even theologians. This is because Hawking himself concludes his exposition of the “history of time” in the universe in a theological manner, stating that “the idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe.”354 Immediately after this “theological” claim, he exposes himself as a deist by asserting that one needs the idea of God in order to describe the initial conditions in the universe and to set up the laws of the universe.355 Finally, in order to refute deism, Hawking proposes to take his scenario of the “evolution” of the universe with an imaginary time not only as a model, which helps with explanation of observations, but also ontologically: “If the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning, nor end: it would simply be.”356 The ultimate manifestation of Hawking's triumph as a “religious thinker” is in his concluding phrase, which has caused so much agitation and controversies in scientifico-theological circles: “What place, then, for a creator?”357

Our response to Hawking’s proclamation will be established along two different lines. One line is critical, based on the analysis of logical and philosophical internal inconsistencies of the theory, which, by the virtue of public opinion established through the media, is treated as a picture of the real world. Our criticism will not repeat extensively what has already been said about this model in other sources; it will simply clarify some points and make further references to other papers. The sec­ond line is constructive for the purposes of this book; we will attempt to treat Hawking’s model as regards its usefulness for theology, especially Orthodox theol­ogy. In this case, our task will be to interpret Hawking’s model theologically, that is, to intentionally depart from Hawking’s grounds of thought and to look at his model as something that is natural and nearly obvious for a theological mind. In doing so, our major task will be to clarify one particular point: that Hawking’s way of thinking represents a stable pattern of any possible scientific attempt to affirm or deny God from within the created universe.

It should be repeated here that interpretation of Hawking’s model through the eyes of Eastern Orthodox theology has nothing to do immediately with what Hawking embedded in this quantum cosmology’s meaning and formalism. Rather, we would follow here the prescription of the theological methodology of science that we proposed earlier. The positive aspect of our evaluation of Hawking’s model is that it can be used in theology for a particular demonstration of how far in the direction of the Divine one can lift up one’s theistic insight, if one attempts to make an inquiry about God by using science.

Some General Comments on Hawking’s Model

When S. Hawking published A Brief History of Time in 1988, it had a significant impact on the development of the dialogue between science and religion358. As demonstrated earlier, Hawking proposed a concept of the universe in which the clas­sical cosmological understanding of the origin of the universe as an origin in time was replaced by a view that the visible universe represents a special phase of a generally atemporal scheme of being, which does not contain any reference to the “first moment” of origination of the universe. This view led Hawking to claim that the problem of the creation of the universe in a theological sense can be removed, for the universe simply exists and does not require any ground in its existence from “outside” – that is, it does not need a creator.

In fact, if we analyze thoroughly not only particular phrases quoted by different authors outside of the overall context of Hawking’s thinking but also the place of Hawking’s claims in his overall philosophy, we will find that Hawking, being an ide­alist of a positivistic kind, makes his claims on “no place of a creator” in a manner that does not provide any evidence that his claims refer to anything ontological (that is, hypostasized as existing in either empirical or intelligible reality). If our analysis is correct, then we can assert that the point of view Hawking follows is just a matter of his personal opinion, with no serious implications for theology understood as the experience of the God-Creator.

Hawking builds his cosmology on the grounds of positivistic (according to his own definition) methodology, in an approach that never makes inquiries as to the ontological meaning of those “realities” that are present in cosmological theories. He describes his understanding of the meaning of cosmological theories as follows: “Theory is just a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observations we make. It exists only in our minds and has no other reality (whatever that might mean).”359

If one reads this passage straightforwardly, one will be puzzled by the emphasized part of this quotation, for it follows from it that cosmology, being a theoretical enterprise, does not provide any realistic vision of what the universe is actually but, instead, supplies only the symbolic means for the description of what we observe here and now. If cosmology exists only in our minds, it is similar to any kind of sci­ence fiction, with the only difference that it pretends to describe the entire universe in a coherent way, which will be consistent with what we observe in the sky. If one fol­lows this view consistently, one must admit that such notions as the universe as a whole (for example, the big bang) are just mental constructs and have no independ­ent ontological status apart from their remote effects in the present-day universe.

Summarizing in different words, cosmology as a theory dealing with the remote tem­poral past as well as with remote parts of its space has no ontological references, according to Hawking. All its claims have a status of conventions useful for understanding the observable universe in terms of unobservable entities, such as equations and concepts. A particular cosmological theory is valued for its quality to provide a more effective description of our observations; there is no sense in asking wheter the constructs that constitute the theory referred to anything wecall “real”; they matter simply as useful tools of description and no more.

Later, Hawking reaffirms his positivistic approach to cosmology by juxtaposing it with the Platonism of R. Penrose.360 According to Hawking, Penrose is worried about the reality of those concepts that are involved in quantum cosmology, whereas it does not bother him: “I do not demand that a theory correspond to reality because I do not know what it is.”361 This last remark makes Hawking’s overall philosophical posi­tion controversial.

Indeed, if cosmological theory does not provide any evidence for ontological references of cosmological constructs (such as cosmological fluid, global space-time, the wave function of the universe, and the big bang), then any predication about God (in a positive or negative sense) as the absolute cause of the temporal beginning of the universe, as inferred from a cosmological theory, has only a rhetorical sense. This is because the construct of the early universe that Hawking proposes as a “true” the­ory of the state of the universe that preceded one we observe now is just a construct, not an ontological entity. This implies that if Hawking wants to use the beauty and elegance of this construct to deny the existence of the God-Creator (the original cause of the universe), he tacitly levels both constructs, “the universe” and “God,” making them uniform terms of the logical alternative, which, according to Hawking’s logic, must exist only in his mind. If this is true, one then immediately recognizes that the “God” that is meant by Hawking in his famous phrase “What place, then, for a creator?” is just a concept, an idea of God, a mental symbol of an uncertain deity. If Hawking thinks about God (as a genuine positivist) as a construct, then he can dis­miss one construct (God) in favor of another (timeless universe). But this operation of reason has no implication whatsoever for theology, which, as discussed in chapter 3, deals with the experience of the living God, who is ontologically present in the world, but not with any false, conceptual idols of God, which are strictly refused by apophatic theology.

But if Hawking believes that he can dismiss God in an ontological sense, then we should admit (by virtue of his philosophical inconsistency), first of all, that he falls into contradiction with himself, for there is no chance of comprehending the exis­tence of the living God while resting on a positivistic view of nature. In the concluding chapter of his book, Hawking exposes his controversial thought by making a correct distinction between two questions in cosmology: (1) “What is the uni­verse?” and (2) “Why does the universe exist?” He assumes that his response to the first question is provided by his arguments throughout his book – that is, the uni­verse has such a particular structure, which follows from the laws of physics and a special no-boundary condition (we remember that this is a positivist’s statement). But in the second question Hawking inquires not into the particular temporal ori­gin of the universe but into the fact of the very existence of the universe. Why does the universe, which is described by the Hawking’s model, exist at all? This question by its essence is an ontological question, a response to which cannot be made on posi­tivistic grounds. Hawking’s hope is associated with his vision of a complete theory of the world, which “would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God.”362 It is still unclear whether the knowledge of “the mind of God” in the last quotation is just a mental construction of a positivist scientist or whether Hawking is speaking about knowledge of God through ontological communion with God.

The dream of the final theory as a principle that could explain the structure of the universe in self-sufficient terms, without appeal to its contingency upon a transcen­dent source, assumes that the advance of science in its unfolding of nature must stop at some stage, so that the ultimate knowledge will give a divine power into the hands of human beings. This could make a real challenge to the creatio ex nihilo concept, for knowing the laws of the universe in full would imply no necessity for a transcendent creator. This implies that Hawking’s claims of dismissal of a creator of the universe in a sense of an original creation have a much more moderate impact on theology in comparison with his beliefs in the final theory, be it purely positivistic or not.363

It is obvious that positivism in science is hardly likely to be consistently compatible with genuine theology, which affirms the real and living God through commun­ion with God’s energies while God remains yet transcendent in his essence. As discussed before, theology, even in its exposition of Christian faith in concepts and linguistic formulas, is ultimately rooted in the mystical experience of God, which is not just hallucination and spontaneous perception but a systematic way of life and faith, receiving its evidence through the presence of the Spirit in the church and the community.

Despite the preceding criticism of Hawking’s philosophical presuppositions, the goal here is to demonstrate that Hawking’s model of creation of the universe out of nothing, which by no means dismisses the Christian dogma of creatio ex nihilo, can contribute in a sophisticated way to the Patristic understanding of the theology of creation out of nothing. This assumes that we undertake a theological interpretation of Hawking’s model and that we intentionally depart from a positivistic treatment of cosmology in favor of a Platonic vision.

The line of thought here resembles to some extent the arguments raised by W. L. Craig in his serious critique of Hawking’s model and its philosophical appraisal.364 Craig reveals a valuable distinction that is tacitly present in Hawking’s book between the attempts to refute God as the original cause of the universe, on the one hand, and God who is similar to sufficient reason in the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz. We entirely agree with this distinction in general, assuming that it has sense only if Hawking thinks of God in both cases as ontologically real. The major problem, how­ever, is Hawking’s ontology in general. The positivistic tone of his claims makes his analysis trivial and nonproductive; if the constructs Hawking employs are nonrealistic, there cannot be any problem with his “pseudo-theological” conclusions, which are also nonrealistic. The attempt to criticize Hawking on the grounds that the math­ematical constructs he involves in cosmology are “physically unintelligible”365 is also nonproductive, for Hawking states clearly that these constructs have no ontological references to anything in reality, for he does not know what reality is. What, then, is the meaning of all Hawking’s speculations on the universe and God? Hawking does not provide a clear answer. Craig, however, argues in his paper that despite Hawking’s “defunct positivism,” he is leaning toward scientific realism by “ontologizing” the mathematical operations, which, according to Craig, leads to metaphysical absurdity.366 Craig demonstrates persuasively, and we agree with him completely, that the abstractions and ideas Hawking develops in his model of the universe have no imme­diate references in terms of physical realities and that they are inconceivable as phys­ical entities. This, according to Craig, “contradicts Hawking’s realist expressions and intentions.”367

This is the point where our attitude to the Hawking’s model differs considerably from that of Craig. Craig builds his criticism of Hawking by assuming that he managed to demonstrate the realistic nature of Hawking’s pretensions in cosmology (realistic in a sense of “physical realism”). Then he successfully uncovers all contradictions between this realism and the nonphysical ideas involved in Hawking’s cos­mology. But this feature of Craig’s criticism is obvious for any philosophical scientist, especially a cosmologist. Since all cosmological models dealing with the early uni­verse, or its initial conditions, can be tested only in their remote effects in the present-day universe, most cosmological models have a provisional and rather methodological character with no serious hope of being tested in a visible future. That is why, for any sensible physicist, Hawking’s theory and his model of the uni­verse have, first of all, purely a theoretical and heuristic meaning, which implies that all constructs that Hawking invokes have an ontology of mathematical ideas only. Hawking himself does not recognize that he, in fact, follows instead a Platonic pat­tern in pursuit of truth about the universe; on the contrary, as we have seen above, he openly distances himself from Platonism.

The question then can be posed as to whether Hawking, from the point of view of an extemal philosopher, is a consistent Platonist. Here Craig’s criticism will be quite appropriate in order to affirm that Hawking is not a consistent Platonist, for he is attempting to attach to his constructs immediate physical meaning, which, as Craig has demonstrated, leads to serious philosophical problems and which makes all of Hawking’s claims on the nonexistence of a creator of the universe theologically unjustified.

It will be argued later in this chapter that Platonism is tacitly present in all of Hawking’s reasoning and that the Platonic treatment of Hawking’s model is the only viable option if one wants to save the content of this model from accusations of ontological inconsistency and physical unintelligibility. This option is denied by the positivist Hawking and is not recognized in Craig’s realistic apology. The vision of Platonic ontology behind all of Hawking’s constructs can potentially save his theory, giving this theory a chance to contribute in a tricky way to the theology of creatio ex nihilo. But in no way does the Platonic treatment of Hawking’s model justify his claims for the nonexistence of a creator. On the contrary, his model provides an interesting theoretical tool, which, if it is treated along the lines of Patristic theology, allows one to identify its theological meaning as an affirmation of the constitutive elements of creation and to point to a creator.

The task now is to analyze the key concepts employed by Hawking, in order to make a distinction among them in terms of their ontological nature: what is empiri­cal in his model and what is intelligible, what is the meaning of the mixing of the empirical and the intelligible that takes place in his model, and how can this interplay between empirical and intelligible be treated by Patristic theology in order to make use of it in the theology of creation.

In exercising the theological treatment of Hawking’s cosmology, we follow the scheme of mediation between science and theology that we have developed earlier. We are fully aware, however, that we intentionally interpret the theory in philosoph­ical and theological terms that are not present in the theory itself. The meaning of our analysis is not to access the value of this theory for theology but to articulate an idea that any scientific theory, attempting to argue on the origins of the world (including Hawking’s, as an example), will tacitly contain similar features of the dualism between the empirical and the intelligible, and that any theory will be inclined to overcome this dualism in favor either of empiricism (positivism) or of idealism (for example, Platonism). The problem from a theological point of view is not simply to overcome this dualism but to identify through its analysis the presence of the otherness of the dualistic universe in the theory, which points toward God as the ground for the universe both empirical and intelligible.

Imaginary Time in Quantum Cosmology and Timeless Time in Christian Platonism

The various critical comments about Hawking’s claim of no place for a creator within scientific cosmology, which are present in philosophical and theological literature, are unanimous in one particular conclusion: that the model of quantum cos­mology, suggested by Hawking, in no way dismisses the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.368 Neither four-dimensional Euclidean space nor matter present in the uni­verse represent no-thing in a philosophical sense. One can also add that the laws of mathematics, which allow one to formulate the no-boundary proposal, are also a part of the created order, so that if one assumes that these laws are working in the early universe – that is, that they do preexist the universe – this fact probably indi­cates that mathematics itself is God’s creation, so that the model itself does not change the status of the nihilo concept. This point brings us to the main theological stance of this book: the intelligibility of the universe because its ontology is rela­tional upon the Word-Logos of God, whom we know in the creation in God’s energy and through God’s logoi, which manifest the incarnation of the purpose and end of all creation in every particular thing. Hawking’s model is just an inquiry into the providential activity of God through the creation; the inquiry, based on communication with the logoi, implies that the meaning of Hawking’s model can be under­stood only as some particular indication of the unfolding of the logos of creation to mankind.

Hawking’s model provides an interesting example of the deconstruction of the temporal order of being in order to remove its temporal origination or, speaking philosophically, to make this being unoriginate, that is, unconditional with respect to temporal flux. As mentioned earlier, Hawking was heavily criticized for ontologizing the universe with the deconstructed time. This criticism is justified only if one assumes seriously that Hawking’s model can be correlated with physical reality. In fact, however, Hawking’s desire was to remove time as a condition under which the visible universe exists. By removing this time, he hoped to relieve the universe from time and to produce an “apophatic-temporal” model of existence, in which the apophatic stands for the unoriginate. Definitely his intention, as seen from a theo­logical point of view, is quite clear. The difficulty, however, is that the “removal” of time in Hawking’s model is not exactly what apophatic theology would expect from this procedure; for the geometrized time, time as space, is not exactly the apophatic deconstruction of time; rather, it is a disguise of time under a different name. But any name, even if it attempts to speak of the timelessness in an ordinary sense, is by definition cataphatic, and, as a result, it participates in the predicating of the ulti­mate reality from the side of the created. This indicates to us that the “apophaticism” used by Hawking to deconstrust the empirical temporality of the universe is not perfect enough. The genuine deconstruction of the cataphaticism in cosmology with the aim of raising it up to the theological level would correspond to the removal of all fundamental units of physical description or subjecting them to the relational status with respect to “realities” that transcend physical being. This kind of program was suggested many years ago by J. Wheeler, who was probably the only physicist who realized in full that the construction of the physical world is contingent upon the meaning, the intelligibility, that is not established on the impersonal level of particles and fields but originates from the community of human persons, observer/participants, whose rationality and ability to hypostasize the reality is rooted in transphysical agencies and which ultimately form the basis for the world as we understand it.369

This is why it is worth considering Hawking’s model as a model of the created order (but definitely one radically different from that associated with the empirical temporal order), with an ultimate aim to formalize our intuition about the relation of this model to the contemplation of the logos of creation. The nature of the differ­ence between the order in the universe with an imaginary time and the universe involved in temporal flux can be expressed theologically as the basic dichotomy in creation between the intelligible and the empirical. We intend to rearticulate the notion of the basic diaphora (difference) in creation in terms of temporality.

Recall the distinction between phenomenal reality and transcendent reality that was developed in Neoplatonism and was often used by Christian theologians to contrast the created and the Creator. At the same time, Christianity, through adapting and interpreting Neoplatonism, made a distinction between the intelligible and the empirical (phenomenal) in creation. This implied that the term transcendent in the Christian context was referred to the uncreated, whereas both the intelligible and the empirical were treated as immanent with and constitutive for creation.

Neoplatonists made a distinction between time and eternity that was based on the distinction in relationship between eternity and the intelligible universe, on the one hand, and between time and the visible (empirical) universe, on the other hand. In the Christian context, it can be affirmed that the realm of the intelligible has no time (in an empirical sense) – that is, it is timeless, not eternal – for it is still created, so that it has a beginning in a logical sense and cannot be called eternal in the same sense as one asserts the eternity of God. The empirical realm (the world of senses) is always in a state of temporal flux of events and the creation of novelty; from this per­spective, one can use the Neoplatonic terminology to speak about timeless time of the intelligible created domain as transcendent time. In this context, the adjective transcendent stands as a contrast to empirical time, which is measured by the flow of events.

What, then, is the meaning of timeless time (or transcendent time) at all if it is detached from empirical, living time? The response to this question can come from the observation that since all sensible things, involved in temporal flux, are “mirrored” in the intelligible realm through the immanent aspects of their inner essences (logoi), the flux of these things itself can be “mirrored” in the intelligible world as a definite structure (for example, a logical structure), so that this structure would represent itself as “frozen time,” as time with no succession or happenings of events, as a serial order stripped of process. This “frozen time” is called timeless time or transcendent time.

There is an interesting distinction, made by Proclus, between transcendent time as “unparticipated” time, on the one hand, and empirical time as “participated” time, on the other hand.370 Transcendent time is a fixed “monad” in distinction with empir­ical time; it can be thought as a number (in a Pythagorean sense), the number of cycles of the Hellenistic universe. The temporal flux of the empirical world proceeds according to this number – that is, temporal time is derivative from transcendent time. The ontological status of transcendent time is determined as its participation in the ousia of an intelligible being, which is timeless. Proclus used such adjectives as eternal, fixed, and unified when he referred to transcendent time. If one appropriates transcendent time as a feature of the created realm, it would be more suitable to use the adjectives timeless and immutable with respect to it.

Proclus considered time an integral concept that unites both aspects of one and the same being. He treated time as a two-sided unity: on the one side, time is in itself (that is, there is time’s inner being, which is stable, immutable, and timeless); on the other side, outwardly, with respect to the empirical world, time reveals itself as the temporal flow of events and things. The former aspect of time is unparticipated time; the latter is the time that participates in transcendent time.

Coming back to quantum cosmology, it is not difficult to catch some similarities between Hawking’s model of the universe and that of Neoplatonism. Indeed, Hawking’s attempt to distinguish between the reality of imaginary time of the quan­tum universe and the reality of empirical flowing time, which one experiences in a macroscopic visible universe, is based on his assumption about human cognitive fac­ulties. He asserts that what one experiences as real time is just a “figment of our imag­ination.”371 This is similar to the Neoplatonic distinction between two sides of the same time as unparticipated and participated time. Indeed, the imaginary time in quantum universe is undivided and unified time, which is, in fact, just a spatial dimension, given in its whole span across the Euclidean universe, and is described by some number, a radius of this universe, for example. This is the inner aspect of time; it is transcendent timeless time (timeless in a sense that the order of things in this time is not identifiable as the flow of events in real time). The outward aspect of this time, which is accessible to human perception, corresponds to temporal flow in pseudo-Euclidean space-time. It is because of human intellectual ability that one can speculate that the empirical time can be thought of as imagination of transcendent time; thus one can assert that the empirical time indeed participates in transcendent time (but we know about this only through an intellectual inference).

In analogy with Pythagorean metaphysical mathematics, one can argue that the wave function of the universe, which contains implicitly all information about the entire structure of the universe as a spatial and temporal continuum, can be considered a monadic property of the universe – that is, as an intelligible totality that is conditioned only by the laws of mathematics and by the metaphysical (nonempirical) no-boundary proposal. The visible universe, as a domain in the empirical part of the created realm, is predetermined somehow by the wave function in the quantum domain. In other words, the monadic wave function of the universe, as a part of the intelligible, contains, accord- ing to the ideology of quantum cosmology, the ground for a particular realization of the visible universe. We do not want to pursue this idea in order to claim that the ontology of the visible universe is rooted in the ontology of the intelligible transcendent time and presented monadically as the wave function of the universe. This would be the desire of Hawking, probably in his ontologizing of the imaginary time, and it is exactly the issue for which he was seriously criticized.372 Our interpretation, rather, follows a dualistic approach based on the basic dichotomy within the created world, that is, the diaphora between sensible and intelligible creation, with no desire to ontologize the imaginary time universe as existent on the same footing with the empirical universe. On the contrary, the comparison of quantum cosmology with the Neoplatonic treatment of time convinces us that the quantum Euclidean universe in Hawking’s model is an intellectual construction – that is, its ontological status corresponds to an entity from the intelligible realm of the created world.

This makes Hawking’s rhetoric on the place of a creator in the universe unsound. Indeed, the four-dimensional space of the Euclidean universe, being by its epistemological status an unobservable entity, can only be hypostasized by the reason as intel­ligible reality. The straight relation of this intelligible reality to the visible universe, which is made along the lines of the positivistic rhetoric of Hawking, is inconsistent.

One more note on the similarities between Hawking’s model and Neoplatonic views on time is in order. There is the distinction between the so-called first and second creation that can be found in Neoplatonism. The first creation is the creation of eternity itself, whereas the second creation is the creation of time. In Hawking’s case, it is difficult to talk seriously about his quantum, Euclidean universe as eternal and endless time, of the “greatest time,” for in terms of imaginary time, the universe is finite. It is certain, however, that an order in imaginary time is the timeless order from the point of view of real time. In this sense, it recalls the difference between eternity and “the whole time” in Neoplatonism.

The wave function of the universe can be said to encapsulate the whole time rather than eternity. Indeed, as we have seen before, the wave function satisfies the equation that does not contain time at all; time appears later as an internal parameter, derivative from some particular spatial degrees of freedom. But since by itself the wave function represents conceptual reality – that is, it is an object from an intelligi­ble creation – one cannot say that it describes in any plausible way eternity.

In analogy with Neoplatonists, who assert that the whole time is unity, which is fixed numerically (in a Pythagorean sense), and that the flowing time is derivative from the whole time – that is, its activity (energia) is caused by the whole time – one can see in Hawking’s model a similar tendency of thought (embodied in modern mathematical formalism). This thought is that the genuine ontological time is imaginary time, and that the wholeness of this time for us human creatures, whose senses adjusted rather to the pseudo-Euclidean temporal flow, is manifested either in the abstract idea of the wave function of the universe (which, in fact, contains as a variable the variety of different geometries containing in a codified form the wholeness of their own times) or in the image of the four-dimensional Euclidean sphere. The energeia of this timeless transcendent time (imaginary time) – that is, the “transformation” of the “whole time” into the temporal flow in real time – corresponds to the transition from intelligible timeless time to the empirical time accessible to our senses.373

The major question, then, is, what is the status of the transition from imaginary time to real time? Either this transition is physically real – that is, the timeless Euclidean universe is onthologized as physical reality (which seems to be Hawking’s claim when he argues as a physicist) – or this transition is purely subjective – that is, it plays merely a methodological role in justifying some observable data with no serious reference to the concept of reality that stands behind the scientific constructs involved (this is again Hawking’s claim when he reveals himself as a positivist).

With no further comments on this internal inconsistency of the quantum cosmology of Hawking, which we have already touched on in a previous section, and with the reference to Craig’s criticism,374 we are inclined to interpret the transition from the intelligible Euclidean universe to the visible universe not as “physically objective” or “psychologically subjective” but, rather, as an ontological differentiation between the intelligible and the sensible universes, which is identified by spiritual reason. The fundamental difference of this interpretation from the original Hawking’s model, as well as from that model’s critiques by other writers, is that the model of the intelligible Euclidean universe with imaginary timeless time (let us denote this uni­verse as IU, intelligible universe) and the visible universe with real, empirical time (denoted as VU, visible universe) are both hypostasized by human reason as two ontologically different realms of the created order. The transition

IU → VU (fig. 5.1)

which stands in quantum cosmology for the explanation of the origination of the visible universe from the quantum domain and which corresponds to the diagram in figure 5.2 receives a completely different interpretation as seen from within Christian Platonism.

The reader should remember that figure 5.2 is a typical picture reproduced in many books on quantum cosmology and its philosophical commentaries. It explains in visual terms what the model based on the no-boundary proposal attempts to say – namely, that the visible universe (VU) associated with pseudo-Euclidean struc­ture (that is, with clear distinction between time and space) does originate from the timeless Euclidean region (IU), in which time is spatialized, being an imaginary spa­tial coordinate.375 The Euclidean universe, not being in time, possesses existence with no point of origin: it just exists. The visible universe has its origin as the transition from the quantum domain to the classical domain. Both universes, IU and VU, are assumed to be on the same ontological footing in quantum cosmology, so that the diagram is supposed to present the process in the physical realm.

According to our interpretation, however, the diagram in figure 5.2 corresponds to the transition between two ontologically distinct domains, so that their linking together in one single complex, as is done in the diagram, has no more than an allegorical sense, for it unites together two ontologically different entities. The transition (5.1) then has meaning not as a causal transition from one physical stage to another but as a logical indication of the difference in the created domain between what is given to us as the visible universe and what is thought of as the intelligible explana­tion of what is visible.

The comparison of Hawking’s model, which affirms the universe as a closed one with imaginary time, on the one hand, and which provides the mechanism of the emergence of the visible universe involved in temporal flux, on the other hand, with the Neoplatonic model of time as a dialectics of transcendent timeless time and flowing time, has for the purposes of our analysis the following significance.

The Neoplatonic dichotomy between transcendent and empirical time is rearticulated in the Patristic Christian context as the polarity between the intelligible and the sensible realms of creation. In other words, from a Christian perspective, the ambition of quantum cosmology to describe by using Hawking’s model the creatio ex nihilo is unsound because, in fact, it describes rather the “origination” of that part of space-time that we associate with the visible universe, out of the timeless realm, which by its own genetic status represents an intelligible world, rather than anything physical, if one intends to ontologize it. If we refine this thought further, we must admit that Hawking’s model proposes a scenario of some “changes” in the created universe (be it the intelligible or the empirical universe) – that is, in the universe that is contingent upon the Divine – through the mathematical and physical laws. The fact of this contingency is not reflected at all in quantum cosmology, which, by its methodological design, is monistic, attempting to explain the structure of the uni­verse from within itself. The contingency, on the contrary, if someone were to reveal its presence in the cosmological theory, would mean identifying the transcendent ele­ments in the model, which point to the ground of the universe and its immanent physical and mathematical laws, which is beyond the universe and its laws.

If we use Christian Patristic terminology, we should say that the ontology of the universe, be it visible (classical) or intelligible (quantum), is relational upon the energeia of God and is manifested in the logoi of creation of all things. This implies that our next step in the analysis of Hawking’s cosmological model is to understand what it actually says in terms of the universe’s contingence upon the intelligibility of the Logos, which can be contemplated through the logoi tacitly present in our vision of the universe. This leads us again to the question as to what is the meaning of the distinction that appears in Hawking’s universe between the spatialized, imaginary time-universe, where time is effectively closed and finite, and the pseudo-Euclidean space-time of the visible universe, where the linear history of events (the irreversible flow of events) is contemplated by us.

One possible answer comes from the distinction between the Greek vision of the closed universe, in which there was no actual flow of time, and special dates in his­tory. As discussed in chapter 3, history was always problematic for Greek cosmology; history was considered an illusion in an endless cyclic return of the world. The Hellenistic universe is characteristically non-Christian, for it has no beginning and no end. This means that the cosmology with imaginary time is in serious conflict with Christian eschatology, as the progressive movement of time (kinesis) to its rest (stasis). The biblical view of time, in contrast to the Neoplatonic treatment of time, does not start from the universe as enclosed (that is, the universe existing as a totality, for example, as a four-dimensional spatial continuum); rather, it reflects the awareness that time is the succession of the individual events connected with the divine economy in the world, starting from creation and leading to the incarnation and resurrection toward the final goal of the union with the kingdom of God. This biblical understanding of time does not allow any theory of time, that is, some kind of laws of time, which underlie its empirical appearance through separate events. This is in strong contradistinction to the Neoplatonic view that the whole time can be described in spatial, overall terms. It is clear now that Hawking’s model – if one treats this model ontologically (that is, accepts that his imaginary time is real, so that the universe is closed) – stands for the ideal of Greek cosmology and provides the “schemata” of history as the sequence of possible events stripped of the temporal flow.

If, however, we look at quantum cosmology as a model initiating the classical universe, with, rather, a linear flow of time, the whole evaluation of Hawking’s model can change. For in this case, whatever was in the quantum temporal world can be treated as a kind of “typology” of what should happen later in the development of the universe in real time. It is important to realize, then, that the reference to the quan­tum state of the universe as to the “past” loses its strong sense, for from the “typological” point of view, the history of the visible universe can be treated as initiated not from the imaginary “past” but from the eschatological “future.” This implies that the “transition” from the quantum universe to the empirical classical universe, as depicted in figure 5.2, assuming intuitively that time is flowing to the top of the dia­gram, can be easily reversed as an upside-down diagram, in which time is flowing down from the future.

The analogy that we used while talking about the quantum universe as the concise image of the history of the universe in real time must not be transferred straightforwardly into the theological discourse, for we must remember that both the quantum universe and the classical historical universe are created and contingent upon the energeia of God, so that no simple analogy between the timelessness of the quantum universe and the eternity of uncreated God in his kingdom can be made. What we wanted to articulate is the created nature of the universe, which is differentiated into the intelligible and the empirical. From this perspective, the intelligible quantum universe as “giving origination” to the visible universe neither exists in the “past” nor in the “future” of the visible universe; rather, it exists as the parallel, intelligible cre­ation, which is hypostasized by the human person, participating in the effected words of God. In this, the whole meaning of Hawking’s model changes completely, leading us to the conclusion that this model can hardly deal with the creatio ex nihilo itself but rather with the constitution of the latter through the hypostasization of the difference in the created world by the effected words of God.

Quantum Cosmology: Diaphora in Creation versus Creation out of Nothing

In order to proceed to our main conclusion on the meaning of Hawking’s model from a theological point of view, we should refine the Patristic notion of the difference in creation, whose issue, as argued below, is implicitly present in quantum cosmology and other branches of physics.

In order to appreciate the importance of this notion in Christian doctrine, we recall the words in the beginning of the Nicene Creed, in which we affirm our belief “in one God, Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and all things visible and invisible.” What do we mean then by things visible and invisible? Are these terms purely “technical” words, with no deep theological foundation, or do they express the dichotomy in creation, its division into two distinct realms, which are both important in the context of religious belief? If the words of the creed mark an ontological difference between two realms of the created being, what would be a proper theolog­ical explanation of this dualism? If these two questions are attended to theologically and philosophically, one can hope to respond to the dualism in creation affirmed in the creed from a scientific perspective.

The affirmation from the creed reflects the Christian understanding of the creatio ex nigilo: God created this world out if nothing in such a way that there was an initial diatinction between two realms, the realm of intelligible forms and the realm of sensible reality. The intelligible realm is understood simply as the spiritual, intellectual level of created being. A good way of referring to this realm is as the noetic level of creation or kosmos noetos (this expression was used by Greek Fathers, whereas St. Augustine called it created wisdom made by the Word of God).376 On this level, God formed the angels, who have no material body. But this level contains also intellectual images of sensible reality, that is, ideas. This makes the noetic realm reminiscent of the world of Platonic ideas (which are created in a Christian context).377 Ideas as intellectual images of sensible reality are inevitable ingredients of scientific theories, such that it is arguable that scientific ideas have an immediate relation to the noetic realm, which complements the sensible realm, the material universe, with its physi­cal, chemical, and biological forms of matter and life. The objective existence of the intelligible realm lies in the fact that it contains the community of living minds, that is, from the experiential aspects of humankind’s existence and its ability to think, rationalize, memorize, and symbolize the sensible creation in intelligible forms. The only thing not so easily grasped by the empiricist or positivist type of thinker is that the world of intelligible forms has an ontology that differs from the ontology of the sensible realm. It is exactly at this point that some modern scientific theories of the universe follow the naive assumption that their mathematical constructs have the same ontology as the objects that they purport to describe.

Despite the dualism proclaimed in the Nicene Creed, there is a unity between the two realms of created being that is explained by the mystery of creation as whole; in other words, both the intelligible and the sensible are united in their common ground in the Divine, both realms being contingent on God. The dichotomy in cre­ation in general is manifested clearly in the constitution of humans, whose hyposta­tic origin in God unites the bodily and mental functions. It is because of this that only humans exist on two levels of reality, and only humanity can be a mediator between these levels and hence be a witness of their ultimate unity, as the unity of God’s creation.378

If one attempts to formulate the concept of creatio ex nihilo in cosmological terms, in terms of the traces of creation in the world, one can argue that there is a kind of structure that is imprinted in the created world through the difference between intelligible and sensible. In other words, the distinction between the sensi­ble and the intelligible can be used to affirm that the world is created (that is, its ontology is relational on God). The Greek Fathers used the word difference as a cos­mological, theological term to articulate the creatio ex nihilo from within the world.

This term comes as the translation of the Greek word διαϕορα (diaphora) and has theological reference in christological discussions in contradistinction to the Greek word διαιρϵσισ (diairesis), which means “division.”379

We, however, are more interested here in using the term diaphora in a wider, “cos­mological” sense as characteristic of the general difference of being. Dionysius the Areopagite first used the term beyond the christological context, applying it to the differences of all things in creation.380 Maximus the Confessor followed him and used the term as a characteristic of created being, its constitutive and distinctive feature. The diaphora is the ontological feature of the created being. This implies that the dif­ference in creation will never disappear. The diaphora plays a constructive role in cre­ation because it provides a common principle of all created things: all things are differentiated in creation, and at the same time, the principle of their unity is that they are differentiated. In particular, it provides a common principle for the unity of intelligible and sensible creation through its constitutive meaning in the creatio ex nihilo. From this perspective, the issue of the creatio ex nihilo can never be separated from the issue of differentiation in creation between intelligible and sensible; the diaphora in God’s creation is an established order, the principle of variety and unity in creation, which is distinct from the Creator. This principle as imposed on the cre­ated realm through creation by Word-Logos is the logos of creation itself. This logos was confirmed in Christ.

The immediate implication of the ontological category diaphora in creation, as applied to a scientific quest for the creatio ex nihilo, is that any physical or cosmo­logical model trying to imitate the creatio ex nihilo in scientific terms should deal with the fact that it is not enough just to produce a reasonable scenario of how the empirical visible (sensible) universe came into being from “nothing”; one must real­ize that there is a “parallel” creation of the invisible world, the world of intelligible forms or the noetic realm. But the theory of creation of the noetic realm would be quite problematic because it assumes a theory of meaning, or a theory of the intelligence, that is responsible for the models of the sensible creation in physics. Some attempts to incorporate the formation of intelligence into the global genesis of physical reality, based on the transcendent applications of quantum principle, have been made in numerous papers of J. Wheeler.381 The importance of this attempt is rooted in an explicit appeal to factors of modern scientific discourse that transcend the boundaries of “normal,” established physics. This demonstrates in turn that while providing the genesis of the physical picture of the world, one needs to appeal to realities that are not quantifiable in the rubrics of physics. One needs philosophy or even theology.

Indeed, the creation (understood theologically) of meaning for things sensible is the work of the Logos through God’s uncreated logoi, which, by definition, constitute the principles of existence and meaning of all things, including intelligible forms themselves. But the logoi, being uncreated by their ontological essence and being transcendent and immanent with respect to the world, are not accessible to scientific inquiry, for contemplation of the logoi relies much more on spiritual intellect than on discursive thinking. The latter is able only to establish the presence of the logoi in scientific research, to affirm that the logoi of things are, but not what they are.

Science therefore can responsibly argue only for “half” of creation (the empirical realm), assuming that the meaning of this half is provided from outside, from the noetic realm, which is not itself a subject matter of science (but rather of philosophy and theology). This is why the maximum that science can claim in the analysis of the genesis of the world is that it found the mechanism of differentiation in creation between empirical (sensible) and intelligible (noetic) as seen from the sensible per­spective. This results in the fact that the creatio ex nihilo is accessible through science only up to the extent of ontological differentiation in creation, not as theological cre­ation out of nothing. This idea can be illustrated with the help of the diagram shown in figure 5.3:

Figure 5.3

The contemplation of the ontological difference in creation leads one, however, through the mediation between the sensible and the intelligible (as discussed in chapter 4) to the discovery of the common principle of existence for both the sensi­ble and the intelligible realms, the logos of their creation (that is, that the logos of cre­ation is).

The discovery of the existence of the logos of creation requires one to follow the antinomial pattern of demonstration that was discussed in chapter 4. To reveal this pattern in the context of quantum cosmology, we should revise some steps in its logic in light of its interpretation along the lines of Christian Platonism used above.

The pivotal idea of cosmology is to explain the observable cosmos. The idea of the universe as a whole is invoked in cosmology in order to operate mathematically with equations applied to the universe beyond the horizon of its visibility for us. Yet it is assumed that the universe, being a uniform and isotropic continuum of matter and space-time at large, is subject to a scientific grasp. This universe as a heuristic idea can be denoted as VU, visible universe. The specific features of this universe are supposed to be explained in terms of simple principles of unity, providing the explana­tion for the whole variety of things in the universe, which seems to be completely contingent at first glance. The contingency of the observable universe becomes a final target of cosmology, which hopes to replace the contingency by some “necessary law” that itself will need no further explanation. In quantum cosmology, it is believed (as discussed earlier) that this kind of law should exist, and the law is sought in the remote past of the universe, when classical physics must be replaced by a quantum description of matter and space-time. This implies that the universe that we observe here and now as a contingent state of affairs was not so in the past – that is, it followed a pattern of behavior that excluded the contingency of its further evolution and, consequently, its appearance to us as it is.

The fundamental difficulty with this attempt is that the law of the initial conditions of the universe, discussed before, does not belong to the temporal series of causations in the visible universe VU – that is, by definition it transcends the universe VU. In Hawking’s model, this transcendence is achieved explicitly by breaking the ordinary temporal series of causations in the VU and by appealing to the modified state of affairs, which does not contain time (that is, to the Euclidean four-dimensional space, which, being beyond temporal flux and not subject to any origination, yet initiates in a tricky way the “classical” universe, the universe VU, with the temporal flux). This primordial universe was qualified previously as the intelligible universe and denoted as IU. The invocation of the intelligible object IU to “explain” the empirical universe VU can be subject to a criticism analogous to the Kantian critique of the physico-theological argument for the existence of God. Since IU cannot be found as an element of the empirical series in VU, its invocation as an explanatory element has sense only as a construct. This means that IU, which is to explain the structure of the universe VU, in fact departs from the field of empirical realities and the temporal series in the universe VU by acquiring the properties of the pure constructs. This is the logic of the transition in quantum cosmology from VU to IU: VU → IU. The logic is quite nat­ural, for one ascends from the variety of data to a unified principle that is to explain this data.

The situation changes completely, however, when the transition from VU to IU is reversed, that is, when the quantum universe is now treated as a level of reality that is more fundamental than VU, giving rise to the visible universe from the underlying quantum structure.382 According to the logic of quantum cosmology, the transition IU → VU describes the actualization of the visible universe VU out of IU; how­ever, we must understand it, in view of our interpretation of the quantum universe IU, as a causation in a conceptual space. This implies that the mechanism that actualizes the universe VU out of IU is itself seen by us also as a construct whose ontol­ogy is, however, the intelligible one.

We observe here a kind of intellectual inversion, from causation in the temporal series (VU → IU) to causation in the purely intelligible series (IU → VU), the completeness of which is based on the existence of an absolutely necessary cause (that is, the quantum universe). This jump in reflection is based on an inability to build the empirical content of the concept of the unconditioned condition (IU) in the series of empirical causes. According to Kant, however, from the structure of the visible universe VU, one cannot conclude via the empirical analysis to the existence of such a necessary cause (IU) that would not be contingent itself. This is why one can state that there is no absolutely necessary cause or being that would explain VU. This means that the quantum universe has no ontological references in the empiri­cal realm. It exists as an intelligible object, which functions in thought only as the purpose of the logical justification of the theory of the visible universe VU as a con­tingent state of affairs involved in temporal flux. Hawking, as we have seen, believes, however, that IU has the same physical ontology as VU, and that is why the causa­tion that brings VU into existence out of IU is sought as a physical law (we men­tioned before that Hawking claimed that there must be laws of the initial conditions in the universe).

The clash between the realistic treatment of IU promoted by Hawking despite his generally positivistic metaphysics, on the one hand, and the opposite claim on the same treatment following from a simple Kantian analysis, on the other hand, leads us to an antinomial puzzle. This puzzle points to the only justifiable formula for dealing with the situation: to treat Hawking’s intention to justify the visible universe as originated from quantum level – that is, the transition IU → VU – as an anti­nomial reasoning, which is similar to the Kantian reasoning on an absolutely neces­sary being briefly expressed in his fourth antinomy.383 The antinomy about the origination of the visible universe out of intelligible quantum universe can now be formulated as follows:

Thesis: There belongs to the world the quantum universe (Euclidean four-sphere) IU, which provides the boundary condition for the visible universe VU and whose existence is absolutely necessary for the visible universe VU to exist; this is a causal condition for VU to be as it is.

Antithesis: There nowhere exists the quantum universe IU in the world as the cause of the visible universe VU (there is no connection between IU and VU: they belong to the different ontological realms – intelligible and empirical – correspondingly).

As mentioned above, Kant would use this antinomy as a negative conclusion about empirical evidence for the existence of an absolutely necessary being as a cause of the visible universe VU. His argument probably would be that the quantum uni­verse IU belongs to the intelligible realm and does not have an independent ontolog­ical being (ousia), apart from the thought, which brought the ideas of IU into being. This Kantian denial of substance behind the idea of a necessary being (that is, its ontological existence in the intelligible world) leads ultimately to the denial of any theoretical evidence of the existence of God, of the possibility to ascend to God through the observation of his economy in the created realm. This is an inevitable result of the Kantian agnostic monistic substantialism. The need to overcome this monism, as we have seen before, leads us naturally to a change in the anthropology of a subject of knowledge, understood now in terms of personhood. It also leads to our previous epistemological assertion that any reasoning on the underlying causes of the created being brings us to the antinomial monodualism as a natural and inevitable result of inherent apophaticism in the attempted knowledge of God from within creation, as well as the fact that the epistemology is fundamentally open about God. This means not that we think of antinomies as puzzles for human reason, as something that is fallacious on its own, but rather that we consider an antinomy as a natural difficulty in relating the ontology of the sensible world to the ontology of the intelligible world and vice versa.

The main lesson we have learned from the Kantian analysis of antinomies and his skepticism about the proofs of the existence of God is that antinomies reflect an epistemological situation such that we cannot find the ontological ground of what is affirmed or negated by thesis and antithesis in the created being. The resolution of the Kantian antinomies in a theological perspective comes from the observation that antinomy reflects the process of mediation between the sensible and the intelligible realms, which is performed by humankind and leads ultimately to the detection of the presence of the common logos of the two realms in creation, the immutable and uncreated principle of their differentiated existence (that is, the logos of creation).

We now clearly understand that the presence of antinomies in the cosmological discourse, in which one attempts to speculate on the creation of the universe out of nothing in a theological sense, points to the fundamental difference in the contingent creation, that is, the diaphora between the intelligible and the sensible realms. It makes it possible for us to guess whether this tendency of a split in theory between empirical realities and their conceptual images, if taken in its extreme, will always lead a scientist to the detection of the ultimate frontier in attempting to synthesize the variety of physical experience in a single principle of unity, namely, to the unbridgeable ontological diaphora in the created domain. The mediation between intelligible and sensible, which is theologically justifiable within Christian anthropology and whose manifestations are clearly seen in modern scientific advance, reflect, rather, the unification of the divisions in creation (that is, the division between intelligible and sensible realms) that take place not ontologically but on the level of cognition.

The antinomial structure of the proposition about the causation between the intelligible quantum universe and the visible, combined with our analysis of the intelligible ontology of the quantum realm with an imaginery time, leads us finally to the conclusion that quantum cosmology is dealing with the differentiation in the contingent creation (that is, with the basic diaphora in creation), rather than with creatio ex nigilo in a theological sense. Since the presence of the difference between the intel­ligible and the sensible reflects a general tendency and specific feature of all scientific attempts that try to provide the genesis of the attributes of the empirical universe in a single unified theory, it becomes evident that these scientific models can be theo­logically interesting in terms of their particular schemes that allow one to detect the presence of the diaphora.

The antinomy formulated above in the context of Hawking’s model can be now rephrased as an affirmative proposition on the constitution of creation: God, creating the world out of nothing, sets up the difference between IU (quantum universe with a compact topology of a four-dimensional sphere and imaginary time) in the realm of intelligible creation, and the visible universe VU in the realm of sensible creation. Interpreted from this perspective, Hawking’s model can be seen as an attempt to describe this diaphora between IU and VU, as it is seen from within the VU (that is, in terms of physics and mathematics). This thought can be illustrated with the help of the diagram in figure 5.4:

Figure 5.4

As argued earlier, the diaphora, being a constitutive element of the creatio ex nihilo, provides the indication that there is the logos of creation, that is, the transcen­dent source of the whole contingent creation. This is the common logos of both IU and VU; the meaning of what we say about the presence of this logos can be expressed in the formula that both IU and VU have nonbeing as the ground of their being.384

This leads us in turn to the conclusion that quantum cosmology, and Hawking’s model in particular, provide the tools to reveal the relational ontology of both the intelligible (mathematical) and the empirical (visible) universe. This means, in turn, that the models of creation out of nothing in physical cosmology can be used in a theologically mediated way as indications of the divine rationality, which yet stands behind the contingent creation.

* * *

304

May, Creatio ex nihilo.

305

See, e.g., Athanasius of Alexandria Contra gentes 8, 34, 38, 40 [ET: p. 7, p. 22, p. 24, p. 25].

306

Irenaeus of Lyons Against the Heresies 3.5.3, 3.24.2, 4.5.1, 5.29 [ET: ANF p. 418, pp. 458 – 459, p. 460, p. 558].

307

Irenaeus of Lyons Against the Heresies 2.3.1 – 2.3.2 [ET: Scandal, p. 28].

308

See, e.g., Florovsky, “St. Athanasius’ Concept of Creation.”

309

Athanasius of Alexandria De incarnatione verbi Dei 43 [ET: p. 68].

310

Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order, ch. 1.

311

See chapter 4.

312

We will deal more with this issue in chapter 7.

313

Irenaeus of Lyons Against the Heresies 5.16.2 [ET: Scandal, p. 56].

314

Irenaeus of Lyons Against the Heresies 3.18.6 [ET: Scandal, p. 58].

315

Irenaeus of Lyons Against the Heresies 3.13.1 [ET: Scandal, p. 59].

316

Irenaeus of Lyons Against the Heresies 5.1.1 [ET: Scandal, p. 56].

317

Irenaeus of Lyons Against the Heresies 5.1.2 [ET: Scandal, p. 58].

318

Irenaeus of Lyons Against the Heresies 4.6.6 [ET: Scandal, p. 50].

319

Athanasius of Alexandria De incarnatione verbi Dei 14 [ET: p. 42].

320

Athanasius of Alexandria De incarnatione verbi Dei 14 [ET: p. 42]. It is similar to the thought of Irenaeus on recapitulation of the whole creation in the incarnation.

321

It is exactly this necessity that is revealed in the science of the contingent world order. The difficulty of science, however, is to recognize that the necessity of the laws and processes it investigates is not absolute in itself, that is, to recognize that the necessary laws are yet contingent.

322

Athanasius uses various means to demonstrate that from the order in the world one can conclude to the existence of the maker of this order, the Word of God. See chapter 2.

323

Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order.

324

Hawking, “Is the End of Theoretical Physics in Sight?” pp. 15 – 16.

325

Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 160.

326

Chalmers, What Is This Thing Called Science? p. 156.

327

This issue was a matter of interesting discussions in the papers of J. A. Wheeler in 1960s through the 1980s. The full bibliography can be found in his At Home in the Universe, pp. 351 – 354.

328

One should remember that dust stands here for the uniform distribution of clusters of galaxies, which are treated as noninteracting particles (similar to the concept of the ideal gas).

329

The list of references on inflationary cosmology is astronomical. A simple model of what has been said in the text can be found, for example, in Gunzig et al., “Inflation and Thermodynamics”; and Gunzig et al., “Inflationary Cosmology.”

330

See Tryon, “Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?”; and Isham, “Creation of the Universe as a Quantum Process.”

331

E. McMullin points out that the position of Newton was a departure from the medieval Aristotelians, who were not inclined to separate creation of matter and time. McMullin, “Is Philosophy Relevant to Cosmology?” p. 44.

332

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 396.

333

McMullin, “Is Philosophy Relevant to Cosmology?” p. 46.

334

Basil the Great The Hexaemeron 1.5 [ET: p. 54].

335

Basil the Great The Hexaemeron 1.5 [ET: p. 55]. In a different passage, Basil argues that the creation of the world was not a spontaneous origination (that is, conception by chance) but, on the contrary, the world was created with a purpose and a reason. See Basil the Great The Hexaemeron 1.6 [ET: p. 55].

336

Basil the Great The Hexaemeron 1.6 [ET: p. 55].

337

Augustine Confessions 11.5 [ET: Chadwick, p. 225].

338

Augustine City of God 11.6 [ET: pp. 435 – 436].

339

J. Barrow argues that the global initial conditions do not provide much use for conclusions about the visible universe. See his “Unprincipled Cosmology,” pp. 116 – 134; and Between Inner Space and Outer Space, pp. 26 – 27. He mentions the “no boundary” condition proposed by S. Hawking and J. Hartle (we discuss this theory in detail later in this chapter); the “outgoing quantum wave condition” by A. Vilenkin, “Quantum Cosmology and the Initial State of the Universe” (see the discussion of this proposal in C. J. Isham “Quantum Theories of the Creation of the Universe”); and a minimum “gravitational entropy” condition of R. Penrose (which we will discuss in chapter 6).

340

See, e.g., Wheeler, “From Relativity to Mutability.”

341

Hawking, A Brief History ofTime, p. 123. See also p. 133.

342

See, e.g., Isham, “Creation of the Universe as a Quantum Process” and “Quantum Theories of the Creation of the Universe.”

343

From the address delivered at the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, Cologne, Germany, September, 21 1908. See Minkowski, “Space and Time,” p. 65.

344

Hawking and Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time, p. 66.

345

Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 134.

346

Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 134.

347

Hartle and Hawking, “Wave Function of the Universe,” pp. 2960 – 65.

348

See, e.g., Wheeler, “From Relativity to Mutability.”

349

One should remember, however, that, according to Hawking himself, the no-boundary proposal is merely a proposal; it is not a principle that is deduced from a more fundamental theory. In a way, it is (using the language of Clement of Alexandria) the ultimate premise, which cannot be demonstrated syllogistically. As Hawking affirms: “Like any other scientific theory, it may initially be put forward for aesthetic or metaphysical reasons” (A Brief History of Time, p. 136). One can only add that this is exactly true, that is, the no-boundary proposal is a metaphysical (nonphysical) proposal that is dictated by some undemonstrable belief in reality as “self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself” (A Brief History of Time). How similar this intention is to the long-standing pretensions to monism professed by numerous defenders of the sovereignty of the universe against God.

350

Hawking and Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time, pp. 84 – 86.

351

Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 139.

352

Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 139. It is appropriate to ask, however, for the description of what entity Hawking is talking about – in other words, what is his ontological position? As we will see below, the answer to this question will contain a mixture of positivism, deism, and, as we will argue, Platonism.

353

See, e.g., a good review paper of D. Coule, “Quantum Creation and Inflationary Universes.” In this paper, the healthy criticism of the creationist pretensions of quantum cosmology is developed. The author rightly affirms that the issue of “creation” is overstated in quantum cosmology and that its aim is to pro­vide “quantum determination of the cosmological state” rather than to claim the “creation.”

354

Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 140.

355

Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 140.

356

Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 141, emphasis mine.

357

Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 141.

358

See, e.g., Drees, Beyond the Big Bang; Craig, “‘What Place, Then, for a Creator?’”; and Le Poidevin, “Creation in a Closed Universe or, Have Physicists Disproved the Existence of God?” See also Worthing, God, Creation, and Contemporary Physics, ch. 3.

359

Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 9 (emphasis added). See also a similar affirmation at p. 139.

360

Hawking and Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time, p. 121.

361

Hawking and Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time, p. 121.

362

Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 175.

363

In his book The End of Science (ch. 4), J. Horgan discusses the implication of Hawking’s cosmolog­ical model in the context of his claims about the end of physics as soon as the ultimate theory of everything will be built. Horgan accepts a view that cosmology in the form as it is developed by theoretical physicists such as Hawking departs from any experimental base (in comparison with astronomy, for example). He calls this cosmology ironic rather than scientific, concluding that the trend it takes in its extreme speculation provides not an end of science as ultimate knowledge of everything but, rather, the “epitaph” for cosmology itself as a scientific discipline.

364

Craig, ‘“What Place, Then, for a Creator?”’

365

Craig, ‘“What Place, Then, for a Creator?”’, p. 300.

366

Craig, ‘“What Place, Then, for a Creator?”’, p. 293, pp. 291 – 292.

367

Craig, ‘“What Place, Then, for a Creator?”’, p. 293.

368

See, e.g., Craig, “‘What Place, Then, for a Creator?”’; and Worthing, God, Creation, and Contempo­rary Physics.

369

See Wheeler, At Home in the Universe.

370

For details, see Plass, “Timeless Time in Neoplatonism.”

371

Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 139.

372

See again Craig, “‘What Place, Then, for a Creator?’”.

373

Damascius offered an interesting geometrical analogy in explaining the nature of empirical time as the radiance that circles the intelligible center, the unity of all time, which preserves the order of time in the empirical world. See Sambursky and Pines, The Concept of Time in Late Neo-Platonism, pp. 64 – 93. Intelligible time in this picture is the cause of the coherent continuity of the temporal flow. This makes the empirical time united with the intelligible one as the radii are united in the center of a circle. Damascius argues, then, that the whole time exists at once as all radii exist at once at the center of a circle. He then concludes that the whole time exists simultaneously in the same way as the whole space of the cosmos (it is interesting that this intuition is very similar to the spatialization of time that is often done in the con­text of relativity theory). The Hawking model of imaginary time offers something similar, for its finite universe covers the whole span of all possible real times in a single spacelike structure, whose existence, according to Hawking, is not in the flux of time but, rather, represents a hidden form of time, its encapsulated form.

374

Craig, “‘What Place, Then, for a Creator?’”.

375

The physico-mathematical problems that arise in this matching are discussed in Hawking and Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time, in particular ch. 7.

376

Regarding the term noetic, see K. Ware, The Orthodox Way, p. 49. Regarding kosmos noetos, see Armstrong and Markus, Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy, p. 28, and the references therein.

377

Armstrong and Markus, Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy, ch. 3.

378

We have already discussed the role of man as mediator between intelligible and sensible creation, in chapter 4.

379

Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, pp. 51 – 56. It was stated in the context of christological debate on the Chalcedonian Creed that there is the remaining diaphora (that is, the difference of the two natures in Christ after their hypostatic union) but not the diasiresis (the division).

380

Dionysius the Areopagite The Divine Names 5.8 [ET: pp. 138 – 139]; and The Celestial Hierarchies 4.1 [ET: p. 32].

381

See, e.g., Wheeler, “Genesis and Observership”; “The Quantum and the Universe”; “Physics as Meaning Circuit”; and “World as a System Self-Synthesized by Quantum Networking.”

382

This is the meaning of Hawking’s claim that the quantum universe with imaginary time can be a more fundamental and genuine level of reality, whereas the visible distinction between space and time in the classical universe is merely a figment of our imagination.

383

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 415.

384

We have already mentioned this formula of Maximus the Confessor many times before.


Источник: Light from the East: Theology, Science, and the Eastern Orthodox Tradition / A.V. Nesteruk - Minneapolis : Fortress Press, 2003. - 287 p. ISBN 0800634993

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