Re: Apparent Age: Rethinking Creatio ex Nihilo

I read your paper... but still I am unconvinced! Even your domino analogy
seemed inaccurate... your dominos are the same back to the beginning, but
the properties of the universe seem to have changed going back in time...
(density, for example). A better analogy might be to picture the dominos
getting blacker and blacker as you go back toward the beginning. If at some
point in the sequence you find a domino that is "absolutely black", you
would have a good idea that you'd reached the beginning even before looking
to the next one (you can't get any blacker). If you tried, and found some
sort of observational barrier that prevented examination, you might conclude
that your theory of a beginning was on track.

I have inserted other comments below.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Josh Klose" <mrbond@hlfallout.net>

...
> First, the concept of "showing past events". Here, the distinction is
> often
> drawn between "age" and "maturity" (or in your words "evidence of history"
> and "just fully formed things") -- in that only "age" is said to show
> specific past events. But the distinction is a false one. In terms of
> implying a causal physical history, the two are indistinguishable. The
> very
> presence of teeth is no less evidence of "past events" than are cavities.
> Teeth do not simply appear without a specific physical formation any more
> than cavities. Any physiologist can tell you that teeth require a
> meticulously specific process of formation.
>
What you are saying above is only true for "universes with histories". For
a recent creation that has no true history, there would be no need for
cavities, or any of the processes normally associated with development (or
history in general). As long as something functioned, that was all that
would be strictly necessary, even if the life forms had the DNA instructions
that allowed future generations to develop as we see today. There is no
reason to impose our experience of things "as they are now" onto the past
creation methodology. There is nothing to prevent God from creating a
hippopotamus with shorter teeth just right for a mature hippo to use without
having them show evidence of having worn down. And certainly there's no
need for one to be broken!

> Second, the question of essential vs. non-essential apparent age. Indeed,
> God could have created a functioning universe without non-essential
> apparent
> age (e.g. without belly buttons, radioisotope decay, fossils etc). How can
> we tell whether non-essential apparent age should be expected? Usually,
> this
> question is resolved by appealing to "maximal honesty". If every
> implication
> of apparent age is deceptive, then for God to be maximally honest he would
> have included only the bare minimum of deception in creation (i.e. only
> essential apparent age). My argument is that the entire notion of apparent
> age as deceit is mistaken. Apparent age is not deceptive at all if one
> counts the possibility of miraculous creation. For if we have reason to
> believe that creation has just occurred, it doesn't matter what the
> specific
> content of the apparent age is -- no combination more strongly implies the
> reality of the implied past than any other. If God miraculously created a
> bike, would it be more deceptive if it had a little rust than if it were
> polished? It makes no difference -- neither suggests the reality of the
> implied history if one counts the possibility of creation.
>
I just don't follow your logic at all here. Why would evidence for past
events of a non-essential historical nature be something that doesn't bother
you? It implies a history that never happened. It really gets close to the
idea that maybe everything was created last week, we'd never know if our
memories were created intact. And the presence of the testimony of the
Bible as evidence against that is good... but then I would counter that God
created the physical universe also, and the testimony of the physical
universe is that it had a long history. It's just as reliable if it had the
same author. And God would surely want his creation to testify to the truth
as much as possible, and knowing our limitations, I would expect him to do
it in a way that would communicate that truth as clearly as possible.

> "When Adam saw the world at the moment of creation, he did not think it
> suggested the physical reality of its implied past. The biologist may
> mistakenly infer the past of the first hawkmoth, but only in ignorance of
> the possibility of creation. For Adam, the moth's apparent age did not in
> the least suggest the reality of the hawkmoth pupa, for '[t]he law of
> creation supersedes the law of nature'." (see p.10 for the fuller argument
> there)
>
> On this basis, I argue that the deception criterion must be abandoned. In
> its place is a presumption of general causal consistency -- for this is
> the
> only precedent we have in observed history. Under this presumption,
> creation
> with essential apparent age implies a causal past which would have
> produced
> non-essential age. As creation is the product of this apparent causal
> chain,
> it would have possessed such non-essential features as well.
>
> If this sounds incomplete, that's because it is! See the essay for details
> and the rest of the argument.
>
> -Josh
>
It seems like you are saying that creation of a universe that operates under
"a presumption of general causal consistency" would require both essential
and non-essential apparent age evidence because that is what we see... that
is, it is the only example we have. Isn't this circular? You could say
that I suppose, but there is no reason to believe that is the only way it
could be done. And it still seems deceptive. You make the analogy in your
paper of running a simulation until getting to the point of interest, and
then creating the universe in the state present in the simulation at that
time. Such a thing could in theory be done. But the whole point of a
simulation is to model a reality that would be otherwise too complicated or
difficult to actually create. But for God, anything is possible. Why not
just actually create the history, all of it, from the beginning?

Or, am I still missing something?
-Paul
Received on Mon May 22 16:38:03 2006