Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - THE ORIGINS OF THE UNIVERSE! ‘X’ LISTENER QUESTION!

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Oct. 10, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

27:53

THE ORIGINS OF THE UNIVERSE! ‘X’ LISTENER QUESTION!

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	All right.
	Question from a fine listener on X. If we accept the principle of non contradiction as the foundation of logic, how do you resolve the apparent contradiction of an uncaused cause?
	That is a fine question, and I appreciate it, and I will he said rather redundantly as he's answering the question, do my best to answer it.
	Alright.
	So here we go.
	So non contradiction, the uncaused cause.
	So this is an Aristotelian argument, a St. Augustine argument, and the argument is everything that happens has a prior cause.
	Since everything that happens has a prior cause, right?
	There is no baby without pregnancy, there is no pregnancy without insemination, there is no insemination without sex, there is no right, you you get this.
	So everything that is has a prior cause.
	Domino's going all the way back to, back to, back to, right?
	This is sort of the question, is back to what?
	Back to where, back to how.
	Now, is it possible to have an infinity of prior causes?
	It's kind of hard to imagine how that could be the case, but let us endeavor as best we can.
	Let us endeavor.
	So when it comes to prior causes all the way back, can there be an infinity of prior causes, or must there be something that sets things in motion?
	So think of, I mean, let's talk about literal dominoes, right?
	If you've ever had kids, you set up these dominoes, right?
	So you set up these dominoes, and then you flick the first domino and they go down.
	Can we imagine an infinity of dominoes going back with no first cause?
	If everything that moves has something that moves it, right?
	A ball just sits on the ground, but if you play marbles, right, you roll the ball, the ball moves, but you have to get the ball in motion.
	So sort of business cliches get the ball in motion.
	So can we have an infinity of dominoes going all the way back?
	And it seems kind of hard to imagine.
	Now, of course, one of the big challenges when looking at the natural world is we have a habit or a tendency to anthropomorphize the universe.
	We have a life and death.
	We are not infinite or immortal.
	The atoms are, perhaps, but we are not.
	So we think that the universe, like us, is born and lives and dies, and we have a prior cause, and the prior cause goes back all the way through evolution, four billion years of life, and fourteen billion years of the universe, and so on.
	So Aristotle refers to it as the unmoved mover, something which causes things to happen, but which is not itself caused.
	Now the choice that we have when we flick a marble is not an automatic process, right?
	So the dominoes, they go uh up and down, or they go sort of prr they go falling down.
	The dominoes go falling down and they have no choice in the matter, obviously, right?
	But a human being may choose to flick the first domino or not.
	That's a choice.
	So if the universe is the dominoes, it is not the case that the dominoes go back to infinity.
	That's hard to conceive of, again, with the caveat that that which is hard to conceive of as infinite by beings like ourselves that are decidedly finite that's a limitation of our thinking.
	So the atoms that make me up or make up me are eternal.
	I am not.
	I am mortal, the atoms are eternal.
	Now if the atoms are eternal and matter and energy are two sides of the same coin, this is the old E equals MC squared thing, if matter is eternal, then you do not need a first cause.
	Now, again, I'm obviously no physicist, but my understanding is that there's this theory of the big bang, infinitesimally small origin to the universe, because you can see the galaxies moving and this and the other, right?
	And it does seem a little counterintuitive that if the universe were eternal, then there would be a problem if the universe is expanding and everything is getting further and further away from everything else, then it would be a little hard to conceive of how the universe is.
	If it didn't have an origin original starting point that blew outwards from a central point, it's hard to imagine what the universe is.
	If it was static and everything kind of hung in place, you could understand that or stayed relatively the same distance from each other.
	But if everything is expanding from a central point, that does indicate something that started or an origin point.
	And I don't believe that the galaxies moving away from each other indicate a slowdown, right?
	Because one of the things that you could think of with regards to the universe was that it would be a giant heartbeat, you know, like it blows out, but there's a central mass that causes everything to slow down and fall back, although that's hard to imagine given how far the galaxies are away from each other, but that there's a point that it blows out, and then it comes back in the same way that you throw a rock up into the sky, it goes up, it slows down, hits its meridian and then falls back to Earth.
	So it would make sense if there was a central gravitational mass that you know, the universe collapses in and of itself, causes a massive explosion, hurls everything back out, but there's still a central mass that causes things to collapse back in.
	But again, I don't know that there's much, if any evidence for the fact that there's a central gravitational mass.
	There's this sort of theoretical dark matter and this supposed to be some gravitational mass at the center of a galaxy that keeps everything swirling around in that lovely spiral manner.
	But I don't believe that there's any particular evidence for that with regards to the universe as a whole.
	So if the universe is just expanding, it does seem like, okay, well, there must have been an origin point.
	But if there if matter is eternal, then why would there be an origin point?
	Again, unless there's some massive gravitational center that is going to pull even the most distant galaxies back into a sort of heartbeat of collapse and explosion.
	That seem uh again, I mean, I'm not even I'm not even within my sphere of expertise at all.
	I'm just trying to sort of puzzle it out that it wouldn't make any sense to me that, you know, that the galaxies are so far apart that the idea that they would slow down their expansion because of some amazing central gravitational mass that would be billions of light years away, doesn't seem to make much sense to me, but again, I mean I don't know, there are comets that aug or that um orbit back out through the Oort cloud, and so bah, right.
	So we don't know.
	The Big Bang it was actually a derisive term given for this sort of explosion origins of the universe stuff.
	And so if the universe is expanding from a central point, and the expansion is going to continue forever, then what?
	I mean, eventually what, we only see our own galaxy, which again, if it if it has a central mass, then the galaxy will hold on to the what, hundred million, hundred billion stars in the galaxy.
	Almost blows my mind, these numbers.
	Honestly, it absolutely blows my mind, like a hundred billion galaxies, each of which uh each of which has a hundred billion stars, it's like staggering, the the staggering numbers beyond comprehension.
	I remember my friend in my early teens, the one who later died, his mother used to date a baker, who lived in northern Ontario in a town called Parry Sound.
	And occasionally we would go up to his fairly crappy I think it was a cottage, but we would go up to his place, and I guess his mother wanted to go up to date him.
	She couldn't leave her son alone.
	Her son didn't want to go up without a friend.
	I was his best friend, so I would go up, And I remember lying in front about the age of twelve or so, lying in the snow, in a snowsuit on the front of his either crappy place.
	He hadn't he had a nice little train set down there though, but it's fairly crappy place.
	And looking up, and it was a strange combination of things.
	Because I could see the distant stars, but snow was also coming down.
	Now, of course, in hindsight it might have been just blowing off the trees or whatever, but it gave me a really three-dimensional sort of star radius for the Atari 800 feel that the stars were flowing down over my head as if I was zooming through the universe and the static stars in the background.
	Like the Superman movie had the same sort of effect, the Richard Donner movie, with uh with the original for me, not the George Reeves, but the Christopher Reeves.
	George Reeves?
	Steve Reeves, Christopher Reeves.
	Anyway Christopher Reeves.
	Star Trek.
	The Christopher Reeves Superman, sorry, not Star Trek.
	So maybe we hang on to the stars in our galaxy, but the galaxies just get further and further away, to the point where it's I mean, it's pretty much impossible to get there anyway, because you'd lose too much time traveling between the uh galaxies.
	And I honestly think that I think that when you go from star to star, you'll find three things, I think in general.
	You will find nothing, like a poisoned soup air planet like Venus or a half baked sauna like Mercury or a mostly dead, maybe some residual bacteria like Mars or a gas giant like Jupiter, or an exploded one like the asteroid belt, and so on.
	So you find nothing.
	It's just, you know, accidental gravitational blobs of stuff.
	I think you'll find a whole lot of nothing.
	Which, you know, wouldn't be uninteresting.
	It would be interesting to go and see uh another planet, but I think we'll find a whole lot of nothing.
	Because, you know, it's not that many planets in the Goldilocks zone and so on.
	So I think we'll find either nothing or if you sort of throw a dart over the last four billion years, then you would find some single cell organisms, some amphibians, some fish.
	I doubt mammals.
	You know, is that line from the Sopranos?
	If the history of life was the Empire State Building, humanity's part of that would be a postage stamp horizontal width on the top.
	So I think we'll find a whole lot of nothing, and I think we'll find a whole lot of primitive stuff.
	Again, not uninteresting, but not very exciting either.
	And then I think we will find a whole lot of radioactive dead former civilizations that map uh weapons of mass destruction destroyed themselves.
	They called it the nuclear crossroads that a society that has governments and weapons of mass destruction, that governments will use those weapons of mass destruction against their own citizens, and life will be destroyed.
	And maybe you'll find a couple of off-world places, but I think it would be kind of weird to be living on Mars when the Earth was dead.
	I think it would be very depressing, and very I mean, obviously very foreign.
	Very foreign, it would drive you mad, I think.
	Suicidal.
	So I don't I don't honestly think there'll be much out there.
	Certainly the odds of finding any contemporaneous civilization are so close to zero as to be functionally impossible.
	So fourteen billion years history of the universe, four billion years history of life on Earth, and even if you were to go a hundred years back, which is a tiny time slice out of a minuscule time slice out of four billion years, even if you were a hundred years back, there wouldn't be that much to offer from a civilization a hundred years back.
	So this sort of Sartrek idea that there's the Romulans and the Klingons and the Vulcans and the humans and so on, and that they're all at sort of similar stages of development.
	I mean, it's a fun idea, but there's just no way.
	There's no way we're going to find civilizations contemporaneous to our own.
	I do, and it's funny, you know, I do kind of like the idea In a way, that there are space aliens out there, you know, cloaked up, invisible to us, but are gonna intervene if things get really crazy.
	I don't believe that that's true, but it's a sort of nice idea like having some portable sci-fi teleporting angels to solve our challenges, or to prevent us from doing the worst to ourselves.
	But I mean, there isn't anything out there, because if there were space aliens, they either want to be seen or they don't want to be seen.
	If they don't want to be seen, they're being seen a whole lot.
	If they do want to be seen, they're not being seen consistently.
	So it's a bit of a bit of a sidebar, a bit of a side quest here, but the question of the origins of the universe is only important with regards to morality.
	It doesn't matter what the origins of the universe are when it comes to say something practical.
	Like what is the origins of the universe?
	Does that matter if you're building a building or a bridge or writing a business plan?
	It doesn't matter.
	The origins of the universe don't matter when we're talking about mathematical equations or physics theorems or things like that, the origins of the universe simply don't matter.
	The only reason that the origins of the universe matter is that if our morality comes from God, then that which supports the existence of God supports the virtues and values and universality of morality.
	But here's where I have my problem, and I've really been thinking about this over the last couple of days, maybe a week or so.
	Doesn't matter.
	Anyway, so I look at let's just say one big issue, right, with the modern world has been the welfare state.
	And I did a show many years ago when I was taking over for Peter Schiff at times, the welfare state, Spenham Land, ancient Rome, it's been done a bunch of times before.
	And it fails, and we know it fails.
	Now, the welfare state is designed to make the domestic population addicted on it so that when it starts being exploited by foreigners, that it can't be repealed.
	I mean, if only foreigners were exploiting the welfare state, then it could be repealed.
	But once you get enough domestic citizens addicted to the welfare state, it can't be repealed, and therefore it can be exploited by foreigners for nefarious reasons we've talked about before.
	So let's give the very greatest support to, again, a the religion that I know best, Christianity, let's just give the greatest support to Christianity, and we'll say that it cannot be dominoes for eternity.
	There has to be an unmoved mover, there has to be an original set in motion thing, and that is God, and that original first mover, the prime mover, the unmoved mover, that that is the Christian God, and that means that Christian morality is true.
	I'm willing to grant all of that at the moment for the sake of a very important argument.
	Let's run through it again.
	I just want to make sure I'm clear.
	The prime mover is the Old Testament God.
	It validates the Old Testament.
	The validation of the Old Testament validates the New Testament because it's all written by God.
	And therefore, God's morality, the Ten Commandments to Moses, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus'injunctions, they're all valid.
	The dominoes from the first course end up with the universal, God-given validity of Christian ethics, right?
	And let's say that is all true.
	Well, the problem is, of course, if you look at something like FDR's Great Society, if you look at the 1930s, the origins of Social Security, if you look at the 1960s in Canada, the imposition from left-wing Tommy Douglas of the socialized medicine, the welfare state in the sixties.
	So all of this occurred at a time just to confine ourselves to England and Canada, though, sorry, to the US and Canada.
	That's just US and Canada, you could include England, but let's just say the US and Canada.
	They weren't as traumatized and brutalized by the Second World War from a manpower standpoint to some degree, but they weren't bombed, really.
	So if we say that if we borrow all the way back to the origins of the universe, we get the unmoved mover, which is the Old Testament God, which validates the New Testament, which validates all of God's commandments and Jesus' commandments.
	Okay, say that's all the case.
	It hasn't been enough.
	It has not been enough.
	Now, you say the welfare state, okay, so the welfare state, from a Christian standpoint, the welfare state, I'm not saying it's a total slam dunk, but it's not that difficult a case to make the Christian case against the welfare state, right?
	Because the Christian case against the welfare state goes a little something like this.
	Thou shalt not steal, number one.
	Now I know this render under Caesar, blah, blah, blah.
	But that's for um that's for the military and the police, the law courts, prisons, and so on.
	So Jesus says, all who would follow me, sell everything you own, give your money to the poor.
	He didn't say get Caesar to impose a welfare state.
	He didn't say that at all.
	For an action to be moral, it must be chosen.
	I don't think that there are many people who would approve of the occasional practice of converting people and then cutting their throats so they could not lapse in their conversion.
	So for morality to be a value, for a moral choice to be a value, it must be chosen.
	When the adulteress was going to be stoned to death, Jesus did not say let the government handle it.
	He appealed to the conscience and humility of every individual who was about to stone her, let he was without sin cast the first stone, and he said to her, go forth and sin no more.
	So for an action such as helping the poor to be virtuous, it must be chosen, it cannot be forced.
	If an action is virtuous when it is forced, then there is no such thing as thou shalt not steal.
	In other words, if giving to the poor is virtuous whether it is compelled or not, then if a poor person sticks a gun in your ribs and says, Give me your money, then that is as virtuous as you deciding to give money of your own voluntary free will to somebody less fortunate than yourself.
	So the free will that is necessary for virtuous actions ceases to exist if compulsion is applied, and God says, Thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not steal.
	Thou shalt not steal means that the transfer of property that is not voluntary is a sin.
	And since Jesus says sell everything you own and give it to the poor, give, not pass the law, not create a welfare state, Jesus is clearly saying that virtue is not virtue if it is compelled.
	This is not you don't require reading the Dead Sea Scrolls in the ancient original language in order to make this case.
	God gives us free will because God wants us to make more moral choices, better choices, virtuous choices, and you cannot make virtuous choices if they are compelled.
	That is saying that love making and rape are the same, because both is sexual activity.
	One is compelled, which is evil, and one is voluntary, which is not evil.
	So the welfare state, all of the forced transfers from the wealthier to the less wealthy, the welfare state should have been significantly opposed as a great evil by all Christians.
	Now, of course, you can say, ah, yes, but not all Christians are perfect, and not all and I I get that, and I'm not saying it'll be a hundred percent of all Christians have to go to extremes to but it should have been and should still be, a very robust debate within Christianity that the welfare state is forced charity, which is a contradiction in terms.
	Charity must be chosen, as Jesus very clearly said.
	And it has not been enough.
	Foreign aid should be chosen, not compelled.
	So UPB deals with this.
	Now, again, I'm whether UPB would have as strong a set of adherence remains unknown.
	But we do know that the religious solution to moral problems, even though it promises heaven versus hell, for your immortal soul is not enough.
	It's not enough.
	Now, if you were to say that you wanted sick people to get better, right?
	If you wanted to say you wanted sick people to get better, and you prayed mightily for them, but it did not make them better, no matter how mightily you prayed for them, they did not get better, then you would have to look for something else to make people better, and the something else that you would look for would be science, modern medicine, antibiotics, uh washing your hands before operating on people, and so on, right?
	Various medicines.
	So you would give up on the religious approach to sickness, and you would take a scientific approach to sickness, and as it turns out, the scientific approach to sickness is not I would say infinitely better, it's massively better.
	I mean, I think that prayer and positive thoughts and feelings do help with illness, they do help remediate illness, but obviously prayer is not enough.
	There was some crazy was an Australian woman, young woman who basically said that she cured cancer by switching her diet, and like I remember there was a woman in the documentary who was like, no, no, no, no.
	The uh that the the you cannot cure uh cancer with a salad, right?
	So you would switch out of the religious mode, and you would switch to the mode of science, of reason, of evidence, rationality.
	In the same way, if you prayed to God for prosperity for your people, it would not be provided without a free market.
	Thou shalt not steal, right, without property rights, without property rights and a free market, a price system, and so on, right?
	These these things would not they would not come to pass, they would not come to be, right?
	Now you would have to switch to something rational and objective, universal.
	I wouldn't say is the free market scientific?
	Not exactly, right?
	But it certainly is universal in terms of thou shalt not steal.
	So when it comes to wealth, when it comes to health, you would turn to reason and objectivity and certainly science for medicine, rather than religious beliefs.
	When it came to building a bridge over a river, you would not pray to God for inspiration, you would go to an engineer for a blueprint, and the engineer would use his expertise to make that work.
	So the process has been to not trust in God, but rather to shift to more objective scientific, rational empirical and universal disciplines, such as math and physics and biology and the free market and so on, right?
	You can't get wealth without a free market and price discovery.
	There was no one who prayed well, I shouldn't say that.
	I shouldn't say there was no one.
	There's not much of a tradition in the history of theology as far as I I understand it, when people said, Well, we prayed for prosperity, and God told us to get rid of slavery, so that labor saving devices would be economically valuable.
	So if things aren't working and they've been in the religious sphere for a long time, moving to science, objectivity, reason, evidence, philosophy has been enormously productive in a wide variety of circumstances.
	And why would that not be equally true for morality, right?
	The idea that UPB is better than revelatory ethics, even when the torture or bliss of your eternal soul is on the line, saying, Well, prayer has not worked for illness, let us turn to science.
	Well, religion has not worked for ethics.
	Let us turn to philosophy.
	So with regards to the origins of the universe, they only matter insofar as they validate Christian ethics or religious ethics.
	However, with UPB, we do not need Christian or religious validation of ethics, and switching virtue, morality, ethics from theology to philosophy will do as much good for humanity in the long run as switching physical cures for ailments and illness from prayer to medicine.
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	Lots of love, my friends.
	I will talk to you soon.

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