Hartle-Hawking cosmology and unconditional probabilities

Abstract

1. Quentin Smith has been arguing for nearly a decade that the universe is uncaused (Smith 1988). For almost as long he has argued that it appeared spontaneously from literally nothing in accordance with a quantum wavefunction model of the universe initially formulated by the physicists James Hartle and Stephen Hawking and subsequently developed by Hawking and other collaborators (Smith 1993-1997a). Let us call a proposal that the universe emerged spontaneously, uncaused, from literally nothing, an 'emergence-from-nothing' (EFN) cosmogony. In the literature, both technical and popular, the Hartle-Hawking (HH) cosmology is widely viewed as implying EFN cosmogenesis (e.g., Vilenkin 1983: 2852, 1984: 510, Pagels 1985: 346-47, Barrow and Tipler 1986: 443, and Barrow 1991: 90, 92). We have argued before that the HH cosmology is not best construed as an EFN cosmogony (Deltete and Guy 1994), and that, in any case, an EFN emergence of the universe is physically and metaphysically unfounded (Deltete 1995c; Deltete and Guy 1997). Here we want to argue more specifically against a claim Smith defends in this issue of ANALYSIS and elsewhere (Smith 1995c, 1997a, 1997b), namely, that the HH model gives an unconditional probability for EFN. Smith apparently wants to use that claim to discredit theism or at least to argue that quantum cosmology and classical theism are incompatible. We won't address his anti-theistic arguments here;1 instead, we try only to