Can something occur without a cause in time?

Question

The reason I use the term in time is because time supposedly had a beginning or was finite in the past and started at t = 0. So perhaps one can reasonably argue that at that point it wasn’t within time or atleast marked the boundary of time and so perhaps the initial conditions of the universe occurred without cause.

Now, has anything after that occurred without a cause? More importantly, can something occur without a cause within time?

Note that by cause I mean a full sufficient cause or a full reason outlined for why it happened starting from the initial conditions of the universe.

The problem I am having is that once you are within time, it not only seems to be vague and mysterious how something could happen without a cause, but I’m having trouble even thinking of it as coherent.

Let’s take the example of a radioactive atom that decays at time t. Let’s assume it has no full cause for why it decays at that time instead of another time. Now, the entirety of the radioactive atom’s existence was within time in the sense that it occurred well after the initial conditions of the universe.

Now, there is a moment where it hasn’t decayed at t - 1. And then a moment t + 1 where it has decayed. If it decays at time t without a full cause, it means that there is some step along the way that seems to have occurred without a previous step determining it. No matter how you slice it, if it occurred without a complete causal series of events starting from the beginning of the universe, it is ultimately decaying at that time t for no reason. But decay is a physical process. It has a certain stimulus that occurs. What I’m being asked to believe is that a stimulus of some sort of physical nature is ultimately occurring…for no reason. The problem with this is that once you imagine a physical stimulus occurring you imagine a series of physical steps occurring. How can any of those physical steps within time occur without the preceding physical step determining it?

Now of course intuitions can go haywire but I can’t tell whether it is that or whether the lack of being able to imagine this in a coherent way should tell us something. A comparison I can think of is the notion of a timeless being like god. It may be impossible to sort of rule out as impossible but the whole notion of it seems so meaningless and vague and hard to imagine that even entertaining the idea seems like sophistry and evidence against it.

How does one navigate through the idea of something occurring without a cause in time?

Answer 1

There is a result by Thomas Breuer who have shown that no probabilistic or deterministic theory can predict the future of the system in which the observer is properly included. In other words, there are events, which cannot be predicted by a stochastic physical theory, even probabilistically.

The root cause for this is that the observer cannot fully know the state of the system in which he is properly included, there are states indistinguishable from inside.

In other words, there is some information, which is not accessible by physical means until it affects some physical events.

Since this information can have arbitrary value or no value at all before the event which it affects, the nature and origin of this information is subject of interpretation.

Particularly, it is compatible with physics that this information comes from "free will" of the observer, from outside of the universe (as in someone playing in our world as a game), from God's intervention or from initial conditions of the universe.

Moreover, Breuer have shown that since the observer does not know his present, he cannot know his past as well. Even if the observer can measure the past state of his own body, he cannot account for the past state of the measurement apparatus, and every other factor that led to the current state of the observer.

This boils down to the conclusion that the observer cannot know the initial conditions of the universe.

So, in conclusion, there are indeed events without physical cause. This is a mathematical fact. But they can be caused either by the in principle unknown initial conditions of the universe or somewhere on the way from those unknown initial conditions to the present moment. Or we can say that the initial conditions of the universe can be modified or added until they manifest as a physical event (observed).

So, to answer your question: there are states (informantion) that could appear without cause at the time of the appearance of the universe, but that physically manifest only long time later. Since in the time between the appearance of the universe and the time of the manifestation of the event that initial condition could be modified, replaced or be undefined, it is only a matter of interpretation whether this information is part of initial conditions or was added or modified later.

Particularly, de Brogle-Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics postulates that this information comes from the initial conditions of the universe and stays dormant since then until it gets manifested in a measurement.

Answer 2

I would keep an open mind about it. Quantum theory can model physical phenomena to very precise agreement with values observed in experiments, but it is completely hopeless in the sense of providing an intuitive explanation of what, if anything, is 'really' happening at a quantum scale, which is why you find so many competing interpretations of it. Given that, I think that any philosophical speculations relating to quantum theory are liable to totter owing to inadequate foundations.

That said, there can be a difference between happening for no reason whatsoever and happening randomly. In my day we were taught that radioactive decay was explained by quantum tunnelling. Our prof encouraged us to imagine a particle bouncing around randomly in a box. If there is a finite chance that the particle can breach the wall of the box, then at some point one of the collisions with the wall will result in the particle escaping. It make take countless trillions of collisions or it might take just a few. You could then take the view that it didn't happen without a reason- it was just that the timing was impossible to predict. The obvious limitation of that analogy is that it doesn't explain what differentiated the collision with the wall of the box that allowed the particle to escape- how did it differ from all the preceding collisions? Quantum theory doesn't answer those questions. Which takes me back to my opening point.

Answer 3

The "cause" is just an intellectual representation of the sequence of events in time. Things are in fact teleological and nature is bound be entelechy. If you want to achieve something, you will, and a seed is going to be a tree. Of course there is a sequence of events that will cause the thing to be accomplished and the seed to become a tree, but besides these causes being subjective (or objectified inside a framework) the "real cause" - logos for the outcome is embedded in the beginning (teleology) and accomplished by entelechy.

Answer 4

Note that by cause I mean a full sufficient cause or a full reason outlined for why it happened starting from the initial conditions of the universe.

Any true randomness would break the ability to track an event back to initial conditions. Randomness however is not the same as being without cause.

In physicalism, events without cause so far have not been proven to exist, but they would be difficult to prove to be without cause, as a method science has a much easier way of finding out the causes than finding something without cause.

In dualist philosophy, every thought or sensation humans have could be regardes as events without cause, as science cannot yet explain consciousness and qualia defy scientific definition.

Answer 5

Maybe this will help:

The fundamental physical laws don’t mention causes nor do textbooks on them. That’s because the laws are about patterns, they work forewords and backwards. Quantum mechanics is a red herring since the uncaused nature of physics is already salient. Russell famously said causation is at the macroscopic level. We can describe patterns in such a way that occurrences make sense but leaves out causes. So yes.

Answer 6

Nothing occurs without a cause within time. The decay of a radioactive atom was caused by the event that made the atom radioactive.

There is always a cause but in a probabilistic world the causes never determine their effects with absolute precision. Only the probability distribution of the effect is determined. Thus, all effects are partially random.

In quantum events the effect properties (e.g. decay time) may vary widely from here to eternity, but macro scale objects behave like billions of atoms on the average. That is why we can apply classical physics in macro scale events to predict their behaviour with sufficient (but not absolute) precision.

Answer 7

Time supposedly had a beginning or was finite in the past and started at t = 0

Really?

Modern science is based on the principle: Give us one free miracle and we’ll give you all the rest
Terence McEnna

The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing.
Rupert Sheldrake

The above is a tart and cute shortform. The blogger John Piippo expands on this into more philosophical language:

I, like David Bentley Hart, find phlilosophical atheism to be, at its core, irrational. Hart writes:

I do not regard true philosophical atheism as an intellectually valid or even cogent position; in fact, I see it as a fundamentally irrational view of reality, which can be sustained only by a tragic absence of curiosity or a fervently resolute will to believe the absurd. More simply, I am convinced that the case for belief in God is inductively so much stronger than the case for unbelief that true philosophical atheism must be regarded as a superstition, often nurtured by an infantile wish to live in a world proportionate to one’s own hopes or conceptual limitations

By "philosophical atheism" Hart, and myself, mean "some version of “materialism” or “physicalism” or (to use the term most widely preferred at present) “naturalism”; and naturalism— the doctrine that there is nothing apart from the physical order, and certainly nothing supernatural." Hart sees this as

an incorrigibly incoherent concept, and one that is ultimately indistinguishable from pure magical thinking." (Ib., 17)

Why? Because:

The very notion of nature as a closed system entirely sufficient to itself is plainly one that cannot be verified, deductively or empirically, from within the system of nature. It is a metaphysical (which is to say “extra-natural”) conclusion regarding the whole of reality, which neither reason nor experience legitimately warrants. It cannot even define itself within the boundaries of its own terms, because the total sufficiency of “natural” explanations is not an identifiable natural phenomenon but only an arbitrary judgment. Naturalism, therefore, can never be anything more than a guiding prejudice..." (Ib.)

In other words: philosophical atheism-as-naturalism cannot provide a warrant for its worldview.

And "if, moreover, naturalism is correct (however implausible that is), and if consciousness is then an essentially material phenomenon, then there is no reason to believe that our minds, having evolved purely through natural selection, could possibly be capable of knowing what is or is not true about reality as a whole." (Ib., pp. 17-18)

Among other things this means all that "freethinking" and "bright" stuff is fundamentally incoherent, what Hart refers to a "pure magical thinking."

Hart writes that "this yields the delightful paradox that, if naturalism is true as a picture of reality, it is necessarily false as a philosophical precept; for no one’s belief in the truth of naturalism could correspond to reality except through a shocking coincidence (or, better, a miracle)." (Ib., 18)

Or in Nietzsche's characteristic indication

You say you don't believe in God, yet you believe in grammar.

Which can be expanded:

Just as one cannot talk intelligibly without grammar, or think clearly without logic, one cannot philosophize meaningfully without God.

^{If one would be philosophically punctilitious, we may call Nietzsche a strong deist + antitheist}

tl;dr

Creation ab nihilo is absurd whether it be 6000 ago in Eden or 14 billion at the 'Big Bang'.

^{My dear grandfather would simply, innocently ask me: When people use a word like BigBang are they being serious?}