generalspeaking

Are You There, God?

The immensity and unknowability of the universe causes human beings to imagine imponderables of cause and effect. Who we are, where we come from. We are marvellous creations of nature, capable of thinking and imagining and creating in our own small way, emulating in a way nature's own capabilities.

We conduct experiments in the hope that we will begin, slowly, first theorizing, then through empirical trials, to understand how the universe became itself. There is the Hadron Collider, which experimentation may, after repair, result in some closer understand, but perhaps it's not to be. We do know certain things, by deduction...

There was nothing, a void, a vacuum of monumental proportions, and then suddenly a singularity occurred, with an immense explosive light and thunder and matter began to exist and assemble itself in the universe, a heat so intense that the matter was gaseous and liquid, taking aeons to gradually disperse and solidify to create objects circling the heavens, and finally solar systems which held relatively small cooled planets in the magnetic grasp of their immense, life-giving suns.

There have always been competing schools of thought with various intermediaries between, and at one time and another either the theory of the Oscillating Universe, where the universe contracts and expands, or the theory of the Closed Universe, where expansion will eventually stop once expansion ends, held sway.

In an open universe there is nothing to halt expansion, and galaxies continue separating, in ever wider distances from each other. In time, the stars expire, the universe becomes cold and dark and life-suppressing. And then there's the flat universe (imagine, humans thought of the world being flat at one time, concerned about the possibility of a ship sailing too far out onto endless oceans, then falling off the edge of the earth into nothingness) where the universe expands into infinitude but at an ever-decreasing speed.

Wouldn't we prefer frail humans far choose to believe in the existence of a universe without end, ensuring the survival of living things? Nature plays her little tricks on us, changing our atmosphere cyclically, and teaching us in the process that we've been playing fast and loose with the endowments she has given us. We may yet prove our own destructive force.

But the amazing thing is that humans have been created by nature with a brain that can reason, compute, theorize and come to acceptable conclusions. That we are capable of producing theoretical geniuses like Albert Einstein somehow capable of visualizing concepts beyond the imagination of most people is a miracle of existence and nature's clever design in and of itself.

And that an elite cadre of cosmologists are capable of presenting potentials to a world amazed at our existence in the face of such uncertainty says much indeed about the cerebral prowess of the human animal. The average person finds it difficult to contemplate the enormity of the universe; we cower in fear and apprehension before the inevitability of extinction should the universe time itself out of existence.

Yet we speak here and think of limitless time, billions of years of evolutionary creation and diminishment. Now another theory raises the possibility of another unimaginably immense state of being, 'The Big Bounce'. The universe existing as a series of infinite cycles repeating and repeating a process whereby the universe expands hugely, until gravitational forces cause contraction before once again expanding.

Scientists working in theoretical physics, like Sir Roger Penrose, speak of microwave background radiation demonstrating traces of a previous aeon, thought of as the lingering 'flash' of a Big Bang. Which would have it that what the scientific community agrees is the original and only 'big bang' that occurred some 14-billion years ago, would have been merely one in an ongoing and infinite series of big bangs through the process of expansion and contraction.

Life would be destroyed through the extreme contraction, then a mystical flint would cause another singularity as a result of the infinite mass and energy ultimate contraction represents, to produce yet another Big Bang and the long, very long process of expansion would resume. Space and time exploding yet again from a single infinitely hot and dense point, to throw matter into the void and the cooling chemicals and gases once again solidify and produce matter; stars and planets.

And with them, life. Such as the multitudinous lifeforms, some of which we are still discovering, right here on Planet Earth. Not one single primal singularity but a succession. What kind of life might have come to existence in previous expansions? Who knows; the human mind is not capable of imagining that which we have never experienced; we know only that of which we are familiar.

We are not Nature, we cannot imagine ourselves to be omniscient and omnipresent.

But humans have imagined a creator, not nature, but a living and powerful spirit unlike any other to whom nature is a hand servant. The God that human beings thought into existence as a reasonable explanation for our own existence and that of the universe that surrounds us and encapsulates us as a minuscule portion of its immense infiniteness, knows everything, sees everything for He has created everything. Out of nothing came much.

But that existence of the First Mover, the Creator, relies on the belief of a single Big Bang, an initial and only singularity that created everything. Where is God in the equation of The Big Bounce, where the universe reflects itself as an ongoing series of cycles? It would appear, if recent cosmology is proven correct that the elements radiated into existence through an immense cataclysmic splitting and formation of galaxies, time after time, that God's hand might be absent.

Alternatively, might He be a bored deity, playing with life like a child destroying its village made of tiny plastic blocks, to entertain itself, then to restore the village time and again attempting to create perfection?

Labels: Environment, Nature, Science

posted by Pieface @ Sunday, October 05, 2008