> And the author of "Coming to Understanding" is clearly identified as Marc Sanders.
The Slate article is a republishing of a Lingua Franca article from 2001. Author identification was presumably only added after the author's cover was blown.
The 2000 and 2007 versions of the document don't mention his name. The acknowledgements in the 2010 version mention his brother, Dr. Michael Sanders, and the included review by Zimmerman mentions the author's name.
"Does reality have a purpose? Why are things intelligible at all?" Those questions run into the usual problem when looking for a First Cause:
"God created the world."
"Then who created God?"
"Shut up, kid."
Some philosophers get into this mess by starting from the assumption that there must be something more than the physical universe, so that it somehow "makes sense". With that bias, you get things like this paper. Plus a big chunk of theology.
I understand the consideration that this Universe is all that exists. But isn't that... weird? That there's no 'why' to this particular existence? We could be much more complicated if you consider all possible things that could exist. Is it simply senseless to ask 'why this'?
Personally, I'm not convinced, although I see the merits of the argument.
Of course as you noted, if you simply assume a parent system you get into an infinite that may or may not be reasonable (the parent system must have a parent, and so on, an infinite stack of parents; this infinite stack of parents also lies in another infinite stack, and so on). I think the only possible alternative to brute fact is to just assume everything exists, to different extents. Then after a lot of handwaving you can sort of explain why the universe is kinda simple.
I haven't picked a side, but I have to say I'm more weirded out by the proposition that this is everything that exists than the proposition that essentially everything exists.
You have that problem with any theory, not just religious ones. You could argue that God was created the same way we were - by another God. Which eventually leads to "Gods have always existed", which is similar to Big Bang's problem of "matter has always existed".
It’s similar only if you misunderstand the questions physics seeks to answer. “If we rewind time according to present observations and theories, what do we see?” The answer is a Big Bang event, but that is just the answer to the question posed, not the deeper one posed by the wiki article. If you ask “why is there something rather than nothing?” physics has no single clear answer. Science takes very limited questions and seeks to answer them in a limited fashion with a high degree of confidence. Metaphysics plays word games with philosophy because hey, who can really gainsay you? Maybe it’s D-Branes, maybe it’s eternal inflation, maybe it’s the Great Green Arkleseizure.
The problem is that popular science and people who don’t know better misunderstand the nature of what physics actually does and tries to shoehorn theories into the questions they want answered.
I think the question in that case is what existed before the Big Bang, has a vacuum always existed before? Or are we on a constant loop of universes forming and disintegrating.
I think the answer is that the concept of "before the Big Bang" doesn't make sense. Time is a part of the universe, and so there is no "missing" time or space before it. I think Steven Hawking said that it's like asking what is north of the north pole.
I think the heart of the issue is that the big bang is confusing to our understanding of causality. What caused the matter to exist in the original singularity? Before it was a singularity, was it some other form or had it always existed as such? What triggered the big bang?
Based on the first law of thermodynamics we can figure that a constant quantity of energy (in the form of both energy and mass) has always existed, but then the question remains - why does it exist?
That’s a question which may or may not be meaningful in the first place. In the classic formulation it’s a meaningless question, because time and space expanded from a singularity in the BB event, so there is no “before” just as there is nothing into which space expanded. The vacuum exists within the context of spacetime and the universe after all.
Maybe it was part of a cyclical series of events as you suggests, Big Bang followed by Crunch, and then Bang again. Maybe the String Theorists are eight and it’s cyclic and ekpyrotic, and our universe is just a burst of energy release by interacting Branes. Maybe none of that is right and some other model which better fits observations and predictions will turn out to be better.
One thing to keep in mind is just how tricky it can be to ask seemingly good and simple questions about these things. People come into this with a lot of assumptions and intuition that tends to fail at thes scales. Classic questions that don’t actually mean anything in the formalism are, “What is space expanding into? What came before the Big Bang?” There are other models which accommodate these questions such as eternal inflation in the context of a multiverse, but not in the formalism.
Might not be looping through the same events but rather through every variation. Which could explain how we finally get here. It feels like we are way out in the countryside of what's possible in the universe.
And it's hard to say where we are and what time it is.
http://www.marcsandersfoundation.org/about/the-founder/