If the Universe Was Created, Or if Everything Is Mental, Then We Do Not Know How Old the Universe Is

We have long been socially conditioned to accept as gospel truth any statements that scientists keep making again and again. We should not be following such a thought habit, because some of the assertions that scientists keep repeating over and over again are little more than speech customs of a particular belief community, rather than things that have been established by observations or experiments. 

One claim that scientists keep repeating with great confidence is a claim about the age of the universe. We are told repeatedly that the universe is 13 billion years old.  But there are reasons why such claims cannot be made with very much confidence.

Claims about the age of the universe are based on the Big Bang theory. But that theory has not been conclusively proven. One problem is that we can never observe the Big Bang, nor can we even observe the universe at any state within 300,000 years after the Big Bang. Our cosmologists tell us that for its first 300,000 years, the universe was so dense that all light photons were scattered and shuffled every minute. Only when this scattering of light photons ended, at a time called the recombination era, was it possible for light photons to start traveling without being hopelessly scattered. We are told that because of this scattering, it will always be physically impossible to observe what was happening during the first 300,000 years of the universe's history. But this means we can never have the direct observation of the Big Bang (or even very dense universe conditions) that we would need to have in order to be completely confident that the Big Bang theory is correct.

Philosophers of science refer to the underdetermination of theory by data. When data does not prove that a theory is true, and does not rule out possible rival theories that can equally well explain observations (called empirical equivalents), such a theory is said to be underdetermined. There is a serious question as to whether the Big Bang theory is doomed to be a permanently underdetermined theory, because of the impossibility of directly observing the first 300,000 years of the universe's history.

There are purely scientific reasons why we cannot be certain about scientist claims that the universe is billions of years old and claims that our planet is billions of years old.  The chains of reasoning used to reach such claims are complex, and involve some not-quite-certain assumptions. Claims that the universe is billions of years old depend on assumptions that the expansion rate of the universe has not changed very much over billions of years. Claims that the earth is billions of years old depend on claims that the decay rates of certain radioisotopes (used to date old rocks) have not changed very much over billions of years. We are not sure that such assumptions are true. 

What is very interesting is that such chains of reasoning depend crucially on a "assume that the physical rates have not changed" principle, but such a principle is not at all consistently followed by modern cosmologists, the scientists who study the universe as a whole.  Most modern cosmologists seem to believe in a cosmic inflation theory which tells us that the expansion rate of the universe has undergone the most drastic change, changing from an exponential rate at the beginning to a enormously lower linear rate after the universe's first instants.  So while the whole chain of reasoning used to establish a universe age of billions of years depends crucially on a "assume the physical rates have not changed" principle, such a principle is violated in the most spectacular manner by cosmologists, who postulate pretty much the most dramatic change imaginable in the universe's expansion rate.  If the universe's expansion rate changed so dramatically near the time of the Big Bang, why should we have any confidence that there have not been other changes in that rate, and in other physical rates such as radioactive decay rates? If either thing has occurred, we can have little confidence in current estimates of the age of the universe and the age of the Earth. 

There is another reason why we do not know for sure the age of our universe. One is that if the universe was deliberately created, then we absolutely cannot tell whether it is actually billions of years old or even older than a million years.  Our universe could have been created much more recently -- in fact, at any arbitrary point in the past. 

There is a line of reasoning that could be used to support belief in a universe 13 billion years old, regardless of whether it was divinely created. The argument would go something like this:

1. The universe appears to be 13 billion years old, based on factors such as the Big Bang theory, the expansion rate of galaxies,  and so forth.
2. A universe creator would not be a deceiver creating a universe younger than it appears to be.
3. So even if the universe was created, we should still believe it is about 13 billion years old.

This argument is not particularly compelling. It seems quite possible that a universe might be created that is younger than it might appear to be under certain calculations. I can give an example helping to support this idea.

Let us imagine a very simple creation scenario. Imagine a deity creates a very simple one-planet universe. The planet has nice grass, very tall trees, mountains and oceans. There is a sun in the sky that provides light. When people on this planet look up at the sky, they see a lovely star-filled sky, with some beautiful astronomical sights. The planet has various types of stones and rocks, including lots of attractive marble rocks. The deity creates a race of people to live on the planet.

Now, most of us would agree that there would be nothing deceptive about such an act of creation. But it could be argued that creating such a planet would be a big act of deception. You could reason that the people on the newly created planet would see the tall trees, and reason that very tall trees take more than fifty years to grow, and the planet must therefore be older than fifty years. You could reason that the people on the planet would reason that marble takes thousands of years to form, and that the planet must be at least thousands of years old. You could argue that the people on the planet would reason that a newly formed planet takes ages to cool, and that a sun forming from gravitational attraction of dust and gas takes ages to develop into a bright shiny star; and that they would therefore conclude that the planet was millions of years old. You could reason that these people on the planet would reason that the distant starlight would take thousands of years to reach the planet, and that their planet must be thousands of years old. Finally you could argue that on these grounds it would be a great act of deception for a deity to create such a world, because it would wrongly give the people on the planet the idea that their planet was old, when it was instead very young.

If we followed such reasoning to its reductio ad absurdum, we might conclude that any honest deity would only create an environment in which every newly created thing looked like it was newly created – and that the entirely newly created planet would therefore be made of gleaming plastic and shiny stainless steel.

But there seems something very wrong with this whole line of reasoning. It does not actually seem to be a real moral principle that honest minds never create things that look much older than they are. For example, you might study the techniques of the French Impressionists, and create some paintings in their style. If you hung such paintings in your home, someone might think that they are very old paintings dating from the time of Renoir and Monet. But you have not done anything dishonest by creating these paintings. Or, you might have a new house built in the Colonial style popular at America's birth, but you are not some deceiver because many might think the house is older than it is.

We really don't have any sound basis for concluding that a created universe would be as old as it appears to be according to certain lines of scientific reasoning. If our universe was created, it could be 13 billion years old, one billion years old, 10 million years old, or only 1,000 years old. A universe could be created in any state of complexity or any state of motion. A freshly created universe might either have some “spanking new” look, or it might appear to be something much older. The fact that we may find fossils that we can radioactively date to millions of years ago does not necessarily  mean that corresponding organisms lived millions of years ago. Such items might be kind of just part of interesting details added to a universe created much more recently.

For some reason we have the idea that if a deity were to create a universe, the universe would always be created in a simple state -- maybe something like the simplicity of the Big Bang, or the relative simplicity of a Garden of Eden. But an omnipotent deity could create a universe that started out in a state of the utmost complexity, such as a state that included minds packed with memories, books packed with words, and freeways packed with moving cars.   Let us consider the complex state of the universe at 3:00 PM EST on June 1, 1950.  Given the existence of a deity of vast power, a new universe could be divinely created in exactly such a state, so that at the moment of creation newly created cars were traveling down newly created roads at 50 miles per hour, and newly created baseballs were traveling between newly created baseball pitchers and newly created baseball catchers, and newly created libraries were packed with newly created books, and so forth.  Persons created in such a universe could be created with memories, so that they were convinced they had lived for a long time, even though they had just been created an instant ago. 

Because of such a possibility, we cannot at all be certain of how old the human species is. Mankind could be 40,000 years old, or 10,000 years old, or 1000 years old, or only 100 years old.  For example, the universe could have started out in the state that it was in on the instant of 12:00 AM EST on January 1, 2019.  Such a creation could have included a very complex planet Earth packed with living things, buildings, technology, moving cars, flying planes and humans with minds already filled with memories. 

The possibility that the human race is much younger than we think is a very interesting possibility relevant to discussions of whether a deity might have permitted the amount of suffering that seems to have occurred on our planet.  History books tell us of enormous human suffering that occurred between 3000 B.C and 2000 AD, but philosophically we cannot be sure that all of this suffering actually did occur.  As I just mentioned, the universe could have been divinely created so that its first moment was a state of very high complexity and order, such as the state the universe was in at 3:00 PM EST on June 1, 1950. 

When we consider the philosophical possibility called idealism, we discover another reason why we cannot be sure about how old the universe is. Idealism is the possibility that nothing exists other than minds. Under this philosophical possibility, things such as stars and planets only exist to the extent that they are observed by minds. To really understand the theory, it helps to read a classic philosophical work such as George Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (which you can read online here).

Critics may claim that idealism means believing that matter isn't real. But an idealist will counter that matter is real, but that it exists (really and substantially) not outside of minds, but only inside of minds.  Critics may also claim that idealism requires us to believe in some external ordering reality outside of our minds that is causing all of us to perceive the same things such as the moon and sun we see in the sky. But an idealist would encounter that such a thing is no real difficulty, and that materialism requires us to believe in something similar, since it requires us to believe in intricate fine-tuned laws of nature that make our existence possible. There are actually a great many difficulties involved with the idea that a universe that had no minds for billions of years turned into a universe containing minds. A theory of idealism (that minds are all that exist) is one way of getting around such difficulties.  It is not at all clear that a theory of idealism (that only minds exist) is less plausible or more far-fetched than conventional ideas about the relation of mind and matter. 

Under the theory of idealism, how old is the universe? Apparently only as old as the earliest age of the first minds or mind. If idealism is true, then the age of the universe is very much uncertain.  An idealist will reject the idea that he has to believe the universe has existed for 13 billion years, and will say there was never actually a time when there existed nothing but matter and no minds. The idealist will claim that all that has ever really existed is minds, and that the universe is no older than the oldest mind that existed in it. 

All of these considerations lead to the conclusion that we really don't know either how old the universe is or how old mankind is. We merely have algorithms that allow us to produce calculations about the age of the universe and the age of man, but we don't know whether those algorithms are giving us the correct answer. We can put the matter succinctly by saying that if the universe was divinely created, or if everything is mental, then "all bets are off" regarding the age of the universe and the age of mankind. 

Your Stumbling Path as a Universe Creator

Let us imagine that you are a divine omnipotent being and you have just decided to create a universe to keep yourself company. This may seem like an impious or impertinent line of thought, but it is actually one that may shed some light on an important philosophical issue. So at the risk of committing blasphemy or some other spiritual sin, let us pursue this thought experiment.

Given this thought assignment, your first thought might be that you would need to create some universe that starts out in a simple state, and then progresses to a more and more orderly state, one in which life can gradually develop. So you start things off by creating a gigantic disorganized burst of matter and energy. But before long you find that things are not turning out right. The newly created matter and energy is not progressing in the right way. Things are not getting more orderly.

So you cancel this attempt at creating a universe, causing your creation to vanish. You resolve to plan things out more carefully. First you figure out some laws that will cause newly created matter and energy to progress into ever-more-orderly forms. This may take quite a bit of time. Then you figure out that there are physical constants that must be set up just right. After settings up such things correctly, you then create a new universe, one that will follow these laws.

You wait a long time, and at first things seem to be going okay. Your newly created universe is very slowly becoming more orderly. But eventually it dawns on you: this is going to take almost forever before things get interesting. So you ask yourself: what can I do to speed things up?

Eventually you realize: you don't have to create a universe in which order very gradually evolves over eons. You can create a universe that starts out as a highly orderly universe.

So again, you cancel the universe you created, causing it to vanish. Everything is now blackness and void once again. You wonder: how can I “cut to the chase” by creating a universe that starts out in a highly orderly state? Eventually you realize: you can just create a planet full of life, and even a planet that has intelligent creatures on it.

There is no reason, you realize, why a newly created planet has to have a “fresh born planet” look to it. You can create a planet in any state you can imagine. You can instantly create a planet that looks a thousand years old, a million years old, or five billion years old. The older-looking planets simply require more details for you to fill in. But that's no problem, since it is easy for your vast superhuman mind to quickly churn out as many background details as you need.

So you create such a planet, and a whole universe of stars and planets surrounding that planet. You observe your handiwork with satisfaction, focusing on the first planet created. On that planet you have created a race of intelligent beings. They have minds big enough to form a civilization and create cities. This is going to get interesting real soon, you think to yourself.

But things don't progress as quickly as you would like. For what happens is that these newly created beings have blank minds. Since you have just brought them into existence, and forgot to give them any memories, they start out completely empty-minded. They don't even know how to build a fire.

Again, you think to yourself sadly: this is going to take too long before things get interesting. But then suddenly you have a brilliant idea: why not create people whose minds are already filled with memories? There is, you realize, absolutely no rule that a freshly created person has to have a blank mind. You can create a person who starts out with any set of memories you can imagine.

You suddenly realize: you can instantly create a planet that is in any state of civilization you can imagine. The trick is to create people who start out living with all kinds of memories in their minds. Such memories, you realize, do not actually have to correspond to previous experiences the person lived.

You realize that if you want to create a planet starting out in a state just like Earth was in on January 1, 1950, or any other date, you can do so. You can just create people whose minds are already filled up with memories. Such people can be right in the middle of some task. For example, you can begin the planet's history with lots of people in their cars, driving down some road, and convinced that they have already lived 30 years, even though they were just created an instant ago. In the same first instant of the planet's history, there can be all kinds of other people whose lives just suddenly start, with their heads filled with memories.

So now you get rid of the previous universe you created, causing it to vanish. Once again everything is darkness and void. You decide on a plan to create a universe that will instantly begin in a highly ordered state. From the very first instant there will be all kinds of planets with all kinds of civilized and active beings, in various different states of existence. On the first day of this universe’s existence, none of these people will suspect that today was the first day they ever lived, and that the memories of their previous days were just memories that they started out with on the first day of the universe’s creation. 

 

So poof, you create such a universe. This is great, you think. No need to wait around. There are countless planets for you to observe, most of which are in highly ordered states, with cities packed with people, and cars and trains riding about, and all kinds of fascinating activity. Now you are happy. You finally got things right.

This has been an interesting thought experiment, but it has been more than just an idle exercise. There is a very interesting point behind this thought experiment. The point is: we do not know how old our universe is. The entire universe could have been created (by a deity or an extraterrestrial simulator of universes) x number of years ago, where x is any number between 1 year and 13 billion years. The fact that you may have memories of having lived for, say, 50 years does not prove you have actually lived for 50 years. The entire visible universe could have been created 20 years ago, and on the first day of your life, you may have started out with decades of memories in your mind, memories that were just planted in your mind (and the mind of countless others) on the first day of our universe's existence.

We cannot be certain that all of the people we read about in the history books actually lived. Real human history (that which humans have actually experienced) may not stretch back longer than 50 years or 500 years or some other shocking number. The fact that we have been given various hints or clues suggesting that our universe or actual human experience is a certain number of years old does not prove that the universe or actual human experience is not some tiny fraction of such a number – a hundredth or a thousandth. 

Of course, it is far more likely than not that you have lived as long as you think you have. But the idea that the universe was created fairly recently is an interesting possibility. 

Imagine a father gives a child named Susan a story to read. The story tells the tale of a man named John who was born 22 years ago. The father asks Susan to determine the age of John. Then there might be a conversation like this:

Father: So tell me, Susan, how old is John?

Susan (after re-reading the story): John is exactly 22.

Father: Are you sure of that?

Susan: Yes, I'm quite certain of that. It clearly says he was born 22 years ago.

Father: Well, you're wrong. The correct answer is: John is only two hours old. Because that's when I wrote this story involving John.

We may be making the same kind of mistake as Susan. We live in a universe that seems to have within it a kind of “background story” that it is something like 13 billion years old. But that whole universe, including this “background story,” may have been created much more recently.

  

3 Reasons the Age of the Universe is Highly Uncertain

Last month cosmologist Ethan Siegel made these dogmatic declarations with a naive enthusiasm:

The Universe is 13.81 billion years old... The uncertainty on this is tiny, at only around 120 million years, meaning that we know the age of the Universe to a 99.1% accuracy!

But in this post I will give three reasons why we do not know with any certainty the exact age of the universe, contrary to Siegel's claim. This will not at all be some post designed to get you to think that the universe is about 6000 years old, and I have never used the book of Genesis as a guide when considering the age of the universe. But even without considering any scripture or holy book, it is easy to come up with several good reasons why we cannot have any certainty about how old the universe is.

Reason #1: There are very many uncertainties in the very long and complex chain of assumptions used to derive an age of 13 billion years for the universe.

Before considering the age of the universe, let's consider something simpler: the age of our planet. By what reasoning do scientists conclude that Earth is 4.5 billion years old? A scientist would answer: earthly rocks have been dated to an age of more than 4 billion years.

But we can think of such a claim as something that is sitting on a 3-legged table. There are three legs that support such a claim, and each of these legs involves complexities and uncertainties. The three supporting legs are these:

1. The assumption that we have correctly figured out the decay rate or half-life of one or more radioactive isotopes used to date the rock.
2. The assumption that this decay rate has not changed in the past.
3. The assumption that we have correctly measured the amount of the radioactive isotope in the rock.

The first assumption cannot be justified through any simple argument, because a long and complex chain of reasoning is required to back up any claim that a particular isotope has a particular decay rate. The second assumption is basically just an article of faith. We have no way of knowing whether the decay rate or half-life of isotopes may have changed in the past. The third assumption also involves uncertainties. When scientists measure the amount of radioactive isotopes in a rock, they are usually measuring incredibly small quantities; and such measurements may involve errors.

For scientists to be wrong when they claim that a particular rock has been dated to an age of 4 billion years, it's not necessary that all of these assumptions be wrong. It would merely need to be that one of these assumptions be wrong. Since each of these assumptions involve a good deal of uncertainty, we cannot be so certain that a rock supposedly dated to an age of 4 billion years has such an age. Such a rock probably is much, much older than 6000 years old, but we can't be quite so certain about the rock's age.

The situation described here in regard to the dating of a rock is similar to the situation in regard to the scientific dating of the age of the universe. If you were to get an astronomer to explain in detail how we know that the universe is 13 billion years old, he might start on a chain of reasoning involving complex topics such as galactic redshifts and even murkier assumptions such as how much dark matter exists. But there are great uncertainties involved at many points in such a chain of reasoning. Cosmologists like to gloss over these uncertainties, and talk as if everything is “cut and dried,” but it isn't.

If I do a Google search for “how do we know hold old the universe is,” the second item in my search results is a wikipedia.org article on “Age of the universe.” I don't see how anyone can read that article and claim it is a coherent explanation of evidence showing the universe is exactly 13 billion years old. The article also notes, “Calculating the age of the Universe is accurate only if the assumptions built into the models being used to estimate it are also accurate.” That's exactly the problem. Our estimates of the age of the universe depend on model assumptions, some of which may be inaccurate. If any of the assumptions are inaccurate, the estimate may be wrong, and possibly very wrong.

Moving on to the third in my search results for “how do we know hold old the universe is,” I get a web site for a scientific space probe. That site basically argues: we know the universe is older than 10 billion years old, because globular clusters are at least that old. But the chain of reasoning used to establish the age of globular clusters is also a long and complex chain of reasoning, and there is no way to directly and simply measure the age of such a cluster. The site notes that some estimates come up with an age for globular clusters as high as 18 billion years old – five billion years older than the estimated age of the universe.

A globular cluster (Credit: NASA)

In short, there is much, much less certainty here than one would think from reading some cosmologists. When someone such as Siegel refers to a 99.1% accuracy in an age estimate, what he really means is: given the assumptions of my model,there is a 99.1% chance that the universe's age falls within this range. But there may be a 30% chance that one or more such model assumptions may be wrong. So the real uncertainty is much higher.

Reason # 2: The universe we observe may have been created much less than billions of years ago, by some power (divine or not) that started it out in a relatively complex state.

Imagine a father gives a child named Susan a story to read. The story tells the tale of a man named John who was born 22 years ago. The father asks Susan to determine the age of John. Then there might be a conversation like this:

Father: So tell me, Susan, how old is John?

Susan (after re-reading the story): John is exactly 22.

Father: Are you sure of that?

Susan: Yes, I'm quite certain of that. It clearly says he was born 22 years ago.

Father: Well, you're wrong. The correct answer is: John is only two hours old. Because that's when I wrote this story involving John.

We may be making the same kind of mistake as Susan. We live in a universe that seems to have within it a kind of “background story” that it is something like 13 billion years old. But that whole universe, including this “background story,” may have been created much more recently.

Let us consider the fact that an omnipotent God could create any type of universe that he wants, including universes other than universes which have that “just created” appearance. An omnipotent God could instantly create from nothing a universe exactly like the universe that existed in 1000 BC or 100 AD or 1000 AD or January 1, 2000. Consider if God wanted to create a universe exactly like the one that existed on midnight Eastern Standard Time at January 1, 2000. God would merely need to will into existence an expanding universe of billions of galaxies, a universe that would include at least one planet with billions of people. God could instantly will into existence those people existing at that date, having them suddenly come into existence with various memories and various states of motion (some walking, some driving, some sleeping, some celebrating the new year in Times Square). Under such a scenario, billions of people would suddenly come into existence, convinced they had lived for years. But they would actually just be recently created.

My point is that we cannot be certain that such a thing did not happen any length of time ago-- 100,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, or perhaps only 10 years ago. The fact that you may have memories of having lived for 20 years does not make it certain that you actually have lived for twenty years. You and everything else in the universe could have been created ten years ago.

Now some might argue that it would be deceptive for God to give you memories of some meaningful social experiences you didn't actually have. Even if you grant such debatable reasoning, we are still left with no reason why the universe could not have been created from nothing in the exact state we think the universe had in 3000 BC or 50,000 BC. In fact, we can think of a reason why such a thing might have happened. Perhaps God wanted to “cut to the chase,” as they say, and create a universe immediately filled with interesting life forms, rather than waiting billions of years for such life forms to appear.

If you don't like the theistic tone of this reason, there is an alternate version involving no theistic assumptions. It could be that we are just living in a computer simulation, as Nick Bostrom has suggested, perhaps a simulation created by some civilization vastly older than ours. If so, such a simulation may not have been created billions of years ago, but only hundreds of years ago, or thousands of years ago. In such a case, the real age of the universe might not be 13 billion years, but perhaps some vastly smaller number.

Reason # 3: There are philosophical reasons why the universe might not be any older than the time when Mind first existed.

The standard assumption of scientists is that matter is the father of Mind. The assumption is that first there was only matter for many eons, and that later Mind arose from matter. But there are difficulties in such an assumption. How could Mind (something immaterial you can't touch, see, or directly observe) arise from matter, a totally different type of thing? The concept of Mind arising from matter sometimes seems like the idea of blood oozing out when you squeeze a stone.

So it may be we have things mixed up. Rather than matter being the father of Mind, Mind may be the father of matter. It may be that matter did not exist in any real sense until there were minds to perceive that matter. Such an idea can be supported by arguments such as those given by the famous philosopher George Berkeley. Such an idea can also be supported by arguments derived from quantum mechanics, arguments that infer that consciousness is a vital ingredient in the collapse of the wave function, involved when probabilities become actualities.

Suppose such a radical assumption is true – that Mind is the father of matter, rather than matter the father of Mind. Then we would have to rethink the age of the universe. Under such a scenario, the age of the universe might be considered the length of time that conscious beings have existed. Such an age might be 100,000 years, or perhaps many millions of years or a few billion years (considering the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence that may have arisen long ago).

The uncertainties here are many. Rather than pretending that we are very wise beings who have figured out the exact age of the universe, we should humbly realize that we are bumbling little newbies who have only just started to put together a few pieces of the vast cosmic jigsaw puzzle.