Me: “Here’s the thing. I am not emotional about my belief, but I believe in God, and I choose to be a Christian, also. But in an Age of Smugness, I find atheists difficult to engage without seeing behind their eyes a ‘Hrumpff’ in a brain trained to dismiss any such thinking. There’s always the I-know-better-than-a-mere-believer that lies within brains that lump all ‘believers’ together. Now, don’t misunderstand me. I think I know how to balance my cognitive self with my religious self, maybe not on the level of brilliant people, but at least on the level of someone who knows a little about logic, thinking, and science.
“My belief has both little to do and much to do with my science. I don’t believe Earth is merely 6,000 years old. And no, I don’t believe a single worldwide flood was responsible for most of the planet’s erosional and depositional features or that some guy crowded two representatives of each of an estimated 5 to 50 billion species into an ark. Continental floods are common. Just look at Hudson Bay. Epicontinental seas have transgressed the developing North American continent for hundreds of millions to billions of years, and all of them have left their history in sedimentary layers—deposits of six transgressive seas over the past 600 million years alone. And mountains have risen and ‘fallen’ leaving their histories in rocks. Great deltas like the Catskill and Queenston, the erosional-depositional products of ancient mountains, formed long before the Mississippi Delta began to form. I’m not a literalist, or as the smug would say in derision, a fundamentalist. I probably fall in the tradition of Augustine of Hippo and some Neo-Platonists, but I wouldn’t claim to be as smart.
“Yes, I do think the Cosmic Microwave Background discovered by Wilson and Penzias in the 1960s is a leftover from the expansion of the initial stuff of the universe that was compact beyond comprehension and beyond what physicists can explain. I know what they discovered is real because I can hear that background radiation as part of the static on my TV and AM radio when they aren’t tuned to a strong station signal.* And yes, I think I probably contradict myself when I say there was a Before before there was an After. An impossible-to-understand Nothing preceded the Something we call the universe. Augustine seemed to have a way of handling it by saying, if I understand him, that what was created was the potential for forms to exist. Maybe physicists could accept that as the creation of probabilities or of Probablity itself.”
Another: “I’m befuddled. How can there be a ‘before’ if there was no time? We keep circling the universal room as though we’re dancing to Eugen Doga’s ‘Vals Gramofon.’** The waltz is captivating, but it keeps us repeating our steps without leaving the room. I can’t leave my universe to see the Nothing. I’m—no, all of us are—dancing round and round and round…
“Nevertheless, don’t worry about your self-contradictory stance. Even the late Stephen Hawking’s comment on God suggests that the famous physicist’s reasoning power had some limitations when it came to explaining the ‘Before.’ Hawking had been brilliant throughout his career as he wrote about ‘that which exists,’ like quantum fluctuations, evaporating black holes, and the singularity at the outset of everything that now is. But like all of us, he stumbled a bit when he talked about ‘that which was (or is) not,’ the ‘nothing’ that preceded and that underlies ‘what is.’
“I can’t fault him, however. Heidegger and other philosophers like Sartre have tried—and in my estimation, failed—to explain Being, No-thingness, and Time. Frankly, I think that we get a better understanding of time from Einstein and from people like Hawking who addressed ‘the Beginning’ from a physicist’s point of view. They wrapped their explanations in the language of mathematics, whereas the philosophers wrapped theirs in nuanced language. But Hawking’s explanation of why there is anything rather than nothing lacks the holistic Grand Unified Theory that I believe should surpass mere physical explanation and mathematical modeling. I think it should incorporate some philosophical reasoning—and possibly some theological thinking. I don’t think your ancient St. Augustine would have any difficulty accepting the Big Bang.”
“Of course, the reason most people don’t care about belief and beginning is that they can’t apply such a difficult topic to their daily lives. I mean, look, here I am about to go into my weekend to enjoy some ‘time off’ and you thrust this unsolvable problem on me. Sure, I’m sure, some atheists recognize that their own position requires some belief because no logic or math rests on itself. There are always those underlying axioms. Always those assumptions that ground logic in non-logic like the wire from a lightning rod. How does thinking about the ‘before’ apply to life, my life? That’s a utilitarian approach to life, I know, but with a finite lifetime, we can’t waste the little time we have asking questions we can never fully answer—unless we believe that every consciousness is on a mission of self-discovery.”
Me: “Maybe this is just the problem with being in Being. The longer any of us exists, the greater the personal need to answer the biggest of questions; but once we ask, we don’t seem to have the time, the instruments, or the intellect to write down a final explanation. Poor Hawking and poor Einstein; they worked to the very end on the problem of the beginning, but time caught up to them—or they used up their share of time. Whatever. Professors Hawking and Einstein left us with unanswered questions.
“In reality, our species has survived for a very long time without a comprehensive explanation of Being and why anything exists. Almost all science, though dependent upon assumptions, ignores the ultimate nature of what it examines; yet, science has provided us with practical knowledge. Wasn’t it Feynman who said that we can say how photons act, but we don’t know why they act the way they do? Mice in a maze don’t have to know why they are running the maze; rather, they just have to know how to get to the target area or target. We can run the maze of our existence without understanding why. We survive within the system. However, like the mice we can’t see the whole system or know the purpose of our running the maze. We’re just in the maze, and we don’t really know where the maze came from or how we got here.”
“But we aren’t mice. We are the self-aware combination of matter and energy. We want the same perspective on ourselves that we have on the mice and the maze. We want an explanation from above and beyond, not just physically, but also intellectually. And not just the above and beyond, but also the ‘Before’ that we can now date to 13.8 billion years ago. It’s so frustrating. We are much closer to the beginning of the universe than we are to its end. Billions of years back to the Beginning. Trillions forward to its End, to quote T.S. Eliot, ‘not with a bang, but a whimper.’ Or, as Robert Frost wrote, ‘…for destruction ice/ Is also great/ And would suffice.’
“Enter Hawking and a host of other like-minded thinkers that can’t accept a consciousness at the origin of the universe. Hawking says that “because there are laws, such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.”*** Profound? Or not? Gravity is part of the universe. It plays an important role, as anyone who has fallen or who wants to lie an extra five minutes in bed without floating knows.”
Another: “I might be missing something because of my own limitations, but if gravity is part of the universe, and if the universe didn’t exist prior to the Big Bang, then did gravity create its own universe so it would have a place to play havoc with people trying to climb a greased pole? Or did the ‘laws’ exist before the universe existed? Hawking seems to make a result its own cause. And doesn’t he say something about quantum fluctuations?
Me: “That’s a problem for me. The Nothing for Hawking engenders Something because of laws. But the very act of engendering or creating requires a process, and processes can be marked by time. That gives my poor little brain another conundrum: How can there be a process before time. I’m back to asking how there can even be a ‘before.’ Yet, Hawking and like-minded physicists and philosophers suggest that even though they accept that time is bound to the universe, they also accept by convoluted reasoning that there was a time before time, and that ‘before-time’ was a time ‘during’ which laws—such as gravity—caused the universe to be. Or Hawking simply dismisses the question about the ‘before’ by saying the question is moot. Now, he’s not the first to deal with the problem. I’m thinking of E. A. Speiser’s translation of Genesis. He says the opening words of the book have been mistakenly translated as a prepositional phrase that begins with in, but the book actually opens with a dependent clause that begins with the word when.”
Another: “What?”
Me: “Think; how does the Old Testament begin? The usual opening is “In the beginning….”
But Speiser says it should be “When God first set about to create….” The opening should be a dependent clause, not a prepositional phrase. Speiser says you can’t have the hexaemeron—the ‘six-day-creation’—without making the Creator imperfect if you use the prepositional phrase. The phrase makes it look as though God made an incomplete creation, so he had to do some fixing during the ‘week.’ But a dependent clause, well, that’s a process, and it allows for what Augustine and I argue for: The creation of the unfolding of forms, the possibility for forms to exist, the creation of Probability itself. Of course, that poses another problem: If creation occurred outside time and if an Infinite Creator exists outside time, then how does the act of creation occur as a process—since process implies time? In that, maybe there’s something to Hawking’s quantum fluctuations.
“So, now I’m wondering that what you just said about Hawking’s hypothesis with regard to quantum fluctuations before there was a universe in which quantum fluctuations occur doesn’t point to the choice between accepting an instantaneous or an ongoing creation—or at least a creation that occurred as a process. The argument Hawking and others make because they cannot accept the idea of a Creator is based on laws that create or on an eternal multiverse. Now, I understand that by ‘laws’ Hawking means an inescapable mechanism by which the universe works—or must work, but that doesn’t get me past that point called the Big Bang when time begins and processes start.
“And if Hawking and others want to argue that our universe is just another in a series of universes or that it is one among many in a concurrent multiverse, then he still has the problem of the ultimate time before time and laws before laws, especially since those who argue for a multiverse suggest that each multiverse might operate on laws not applicable in another. If that is true, if the laws of one universe don’t necessarily apply to another, then were there, like the pantheon of Olympians, many such Law-gods or Law-creators? And to run the analog of Speiser’s statement about single act of creation and creating process, are there still quantum fluctuations ‘out there’ in the timeless nothing from which they created the universe?
“But for the sake of the Smug, let me argue for Hawking. He might look at me and say, ‘You just don’t understand, my dear Professor. The universe just had to derive from nothing just as dark energy seems to spring from the vacuum of space. Nothing demands it. I know, that doesn’t sound right, but then you just don’t have the capacity for thinking that I have; plus, I was famous and highly accomplished, more accomplished than you during our virtually contemporaneous lives, what with all my evaporating-black-holes theory and whatnot. Anyway, I gave a lecture once in which I compared the origin of the universe to the South Pole. I argued that there is nothing south of the South Pole. But the South Pole obeys all the laws that apply elsewhere on the planet. So, the question about the origin is a bit irrelevant. Time, I said, was like the lines of latitude as they expand on circumferences that increase toward the Equator just the way the universe is expanding (though now at an increasing rate).’****
“Of course, I could point out that all analogies limp, as you know; so, the South Pole as an analog of the singularity from which the universe formed also limps a bit. The space beyond Earth lies beyond the South Pole but within the framework of a universe that contains Earth, it’s in that universe where we all waltz. The South Pole is neither on the edge of nothing nor at the beginning of something other at a convenient point of putting coordinates on a globe. I could say that south of the South Pole is the Not-Earth and that the Not-Earth is spinning in the same waltz in the same room in which Earth spins—or dances.
“Anyway, there are plenty of atheists—I think Hawking was one—who just can’t tolerate someone’s assigning the ‘moment’ of creation to a deity, and some of them scoff at those who accept a purposeful Creator over a random act of Nothing before time (paraphrasing and countering Einstein, Hawking said, ‘God really does play dice’). I can’t convince anyone who accepts Hawking’s explanation that that explanation is a water bucket with as large a hole on the bottom as it has on the top. No, I just want to mention that even the reasoning of a very bright guy who contributed much to our understanding of the universe might be a bit faulty when it comes to that same universe’s origin. And now that he’s gone, I have only the incomplete work he left.
“You don’t define a banana as a banana. Quanta exist in a post-Big-Bang era. Saying that quantum fluctuations might be the cause of a universe in which quantum fluctuations occur is saying a banana is a banana. Saying that the laws of a universe demanded the universe in which they operate seems just as circular.”
Another: “As usual, you are leaving me with a bunch of confusing thoughts. I wanted to rest this weekend, get things of consequence off my mind. I guess that now I’ll have to work out my own explanation of the ‘Before.’”
*I wonder whether the popularity of “white-noise” sleep aids aren’t an indication of our connection to the Cosmic Background Microwave Radiation, some archetypal static that permeates us.
** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p0pe-1_xUk
*** http://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-43408622/stephen-hawking-on-god-artificial-intelligence-and-mankind-s-future
**** http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-origin-of-the-universe.html
“My belief has both little to do and much to do with my science. I don’t believe Earth is merely 6,000 years old. And no, I don’t believe a single worldwide flood was responsible for most of the planet’s erosional and depositional features or that some guy crowded two representatives of each of an estimated 5 to 50 billion species into an ark. Continental floods are common. Just look at Hudson Bay. Epicontinental seas have transgressed the developing North American continent for hundreds of millions to billions of years, and all of them have left their history in sedimentary layers—deposits of six transgressive seas over the past 600 million years alone. And mountains have risen and ‘fallen’ leaving their histories in rocks. Great deltas like the Catskill and Queenston, the erosional-depositional products of ancient mountains, formed long before the Mississippi Delta began to form. I’m not a literalist, or as the smug would say in derision, a fundamentalist. I probably fall in the tradition of Augustine of Hippo and some Neo-Platonists, but I wouldn’t claim to be as smart.
“Yes, I do think the Cosmic Microwave Background discovered by Wilson and Penzias in the 1960s is a leftover from the expansion of the initial stuff of the universe that was compact beyond comprehension and beyond what physicists can explain. I know what they discovered is real because I can hear that background radiation as part of the static on my TV and AM radio when they aren’t tuned to a strong station signal.* And yes, I think I probably contradict myself when I say there was a Before before there was an After. An impossible-to-understand Nothing preceded the Something we call the universe. Augustine seemed to have a way of handling it by saying, if I understand him, that what was created was the potential for forms to exist. Maybe physicists could accept that as the creation of probabilities or of Probablity itself.”
Another: “I’m befuddled. How can there be a ‘before’ if there was no time? We keep circling the universal room as though we’re dancing to Eugen Doga’s ‘Vals Gramofon.’** The waltz is captivating, but it keeps us repeating our steps without leaving the room. I can’t leave my universe to see the Nothing. I’m—no, all of us are—dancing round and round and round…
“Nevertheless, don’t worry about your self-contradictory stance. Even the late Stephen Hawking’s comment on God suggests that the famous physicist’s reasoning power had some limitations when it came to explaining the ‘Before.’ Hawking had been brilliant throughout his career as he wrote about ‘that which exists,’ like quantum fluctuations, evaporating black holes, and the singularity at the outset of everything that now is. But like all of us, he stumbled a bit when he talked about ‘that which was (or is) not,’ the ‘nothing’ that preceded and that underlies ‘what is.’
“I can’t fault him, however. Heidegger and other philosophers like Sartre have tried—and in my estimation, failed—to explain Being, No-thingness, and Time. Frankly, I think that we get a better understanding of time from Einstein and from people like Hawking who addressed ‘the Beginning’ from a physicist’s point of view. They wrapped their explanations in the language of mathematics, whereas the philosophers wrapped theirs in nuanced language. But Hawking’s explanation of why there is anything rather than nothing lacks the holistic Grand Unified Theory that I believe should surpass mere physical explanation and mathematical modeling. I think it should incorporate some philosophical reasoning—and possibly some theological thinking. I don’t think your ancient St. Augustine would have any difficulty accepting the Big Bang.”
“Of course, the reason most people don’t care about belief and beginning is that they can’t apply such a difficult topic to their daily lives. I mean, look, here I am about to go into my weekend to enjoy some ‘time off’ and you thrust this unsolvable problem on me. Sure, I’m sure, some atheists recognize that their own position requires some belief because no logic or math rests on itself. There are always those underlying axioms. Always those assumptions that ground logic in non-logic like the wire from a lightning rod. How does thinking about the ‘before’ apply to life, my life? That’s a utilitarian approach to life, I know, but with a finite lifetime, we can’t waste the little time we have asking questions we can never fully answer—unless we believe that every consciousness is on a mission of self-discovery.”
Me: “Maybe this is just the problem with being in Being. The longer any of us exists, the greater the personal need to answer the biggest of questions; but once we ask, we don’t seem to have the time, the instruments, or the intellect to write down a final explanation. Poor Hawking and poor Einstein; they worked to the very end on the problem of the beginning, but time caught up to them—or they used up their share of time. Whatever. Professors Hawking and Einstein left us with unanswered questions.
“In reality, our species has survived for a very long time without a comprehensive explanation of Being and why anything exists. Almost all science, though dependent upon assumptions, ignores the ultimate nature of what it examines; yet, science has provided us with practical knowledge. Wasn’t it Feynman who said that we can say how photons act, but we don’t know why they act the way they do? Mice in a maze don’t have to know why they are running the maze; rather, they just have to know how to get to the target area or target. We can run the maze of our existence without understanding why. We survive within the system. However, like the mice we can’t see the whole system or know the purpose of our running the maze. We’re just in the maze, and we don’t really know where the maze came from or how we got here.”
“But we aren’t mice. We are the self-aware combination of matter and energy. We want the same perspective on ourselves that we have on the mice and the maze. We want an explanation from above and beyond, not just physically, but also intellectually. And not just the above and beyond, but also the ‘Before’ that we can now date to 13.8 billion years ago. It’s so frustrating. We are much closer to the beginning of the universe than we are to its end. Billions of years back to the Beginning. Trillions forward to its End, to quote T.S. Eliot, ‘not with a bang, but a whimper.’ Or, as Robert Frost wrote, ‘…for destruction ice/ Is also great/ And would suffice.’
“Enter Hawking and a host of other like-minded thinkers that can’t accept a consciousness at the origin of the universe. Hawking says that “because there are laws, such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.”*** Profound? Or not? Gravity is part of the universe. It plays an important role, as anyone who has fallen or who wants to lie an extra five minutes in bed without floating knows.”
Another: “I might be missing something because of my own limitations, but if gravity is part of the universe, and if the universe didn’t exist prior to the Big Bang, then did gravity create its own universe so it would have a place to play havoc with people trying to climb a greased pole? Or did the ‘laws’ exist before the universe existed? Hawking seems to make a result its own cause. And doesn’t he say something about quantum fluctuations?
Me: “That’s a problem for me. The Nothing for Hawking engenders Something because of laws. But the very act of engendering or creating requires a process, and processes can be marked by time. That gives my poor little brain another conundrum: How can there be a process before time. I’m back to asking how there can even be a ‘before.’ Yet, Hawking and like-minded physicists and philosophers suggest that even though they accept that time is bound to the universe, they also accept by convoluted reasoning that there was a time before time, and that ‘before-time’ was a time ‘during’ which laws—such as gravity—caused the universe to be. Or Hawking simply dismisses the question about the ‘before’ by saying the question is moot. Now, he’s not the first to deal with the problem. I’m thinking of E. A. Speiser’s translation of Genesis. He says the opening words of the book have been mistakenly translated as a prepositional phrase that begins with in, but the book actually opens with a dependent clause that begins with the word when.”
Another: “What?”
Me: “Think; how does the Old Testament begin? The usual opening is “In the beginning….”
But Speiser says it should be “When God first set about to create….” The opening should be a dependent clause, not a prepositional phrase. Speiser says you can’t have the hexaemeron—the ‘six-day-creation’—without making the Creator imperfect if you use the prepositional phrase. The phrase makes it look as though God made an incomplete creation, so he had to do some fixing during the ‘week.’ But a dependent clause, well, that’s a process, and it allows for what Augustine and I argue for: The creation of the unfolding of forms, the possibility for forms to exist, the creation of Probability itself. Of course, that poses another problem: If creation occurred outside time and if an Infinite Creator exists outside time, then how does the act of creation occur as a process—since process implies time? In that, maybe there’s something to Hawking’s quantum fluctuations.
“So, now I’m wondering that what you just said about Hawking’s hypothesis with regard to quantum fluctuations before there was a universe in which quantum fluctuations occur doesn’t point to the choice between accepting an instantaneous or an ongoing creation—or at least a creation that occurred as a process. The argument Hawking and others make because they cannot accept the idea of a Creator is based on laws that create or on an eternal multiverse. Now, I understand that by ‘laws’ Hawking means an inescapable mechanism by which the universe works—or must work, but that doesn’t get me past that point called the Big Bang when time begins and processes start.
“And if Hawking and others want to argue that our universe is just another in a series of universes or that it is one among many in a concurrent multiverse, then he still has the problem of the ultimate time before time and laws before laws, especially since those who argue for a multiverse suggest that each multiverse might operate on laws not applicable in another. If that is true, if the laws of one universe don’t necessarily apply to another, then were there, like the pantheon of Olympians, many such Law-gods or Law-creators? And to run the analog of Speiser’s statement about single act of creation and creating process, are there still quantum fluctuations ‘out there’ in the timeless nothing from which they created the universe?
“But for the sake of the Smug, let me argue for Hawking. He might look at me and say, ‘You just don’t understand, my dear Professor. The universe just had to derive from nothing just as dark energy seems to spring from the vacuum of space. Nothing demands it. I know, that doesn’t sound right, but then you just don’t have the capacity for thinking that I have; plus, I was famous and highly accomplished, more accomplished than you during our virtually contemporaneous lives, what with all my evaporating-black-holes theory and whatnot. Anyway, I gave a lecture once in which I compared the origin of the universe to the South Pole. I argued that there is nothing south of the South Pole. But the South Pole obeys all the laws that apply elsewhere on the planet. So, the question about the origin is a bit irrelevant. Time, I said, was like the lines of latitude as they expand on circumferences that increase toward the Equator just the way the universe is expanding (though now at an increasing rate).’****
“Of course, I could point out that all analogies limp, as you know; so, the South Pole as an analog of the singularity from which the universe formed also limps a bit. The space beyond Earth lies beyond the South Pole but within the framework of a universe that contains Earth, it’s in that universe where we all waltz. The South Pole is neither on the edge of nothing nor at the beginning of something other at a convenient point of putting coordinates on a globe. I could say that south of the South Pole is the Not-Earth and that the Not-Earth is spinning in the same waltz in the same room in which Earth spins—or dances.
“Anyway, there are plenty of atheists—I think Hawking was one—who just can’t tolerate someone’s assigning the ‘moment’ of creation to a deity, and some of them scoff at those who accept a purposeful Creator over a random act of Nothing before time (paraphrasing and countering Einstein, Hawking said, ‘God really does play dice’). I can’t convince anyone who accepts Hawking’s explanation that that explanation is a water bucket with as large a hole on the bottom as it has on the top. No, I just want to mention that even the reasoning of a very bright guy who contributed much to our understanding of the universe might be a bit faulty when it comes to that same universe’s origin. And now that he’s gone, I have only the incomplete work he left.
“You don’t define a banana as a banana. Quanta exist in a post-Big-Bang era. Saying that quantum fluctuations might be the cause of a universe in which quantum fluctuations occur is saying a banana is a banana. Saying that the laws of a universe demanded the universe in which they operate seems just as circular.”
Another: “As usual, you are leaving me with a bunch of confusing thoughts. I wanted to rest this weekend, get things of consequence off my mind. I guess that now I’ll have to work out my own explanation of the ‘Before.’”
*I wonder whether the popularity of “white-noise” sleep aids aren’t an indication of our connection to the Cosmic Background Microwave Radiation, some archetypal static that permeates us.
** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p0pe-1_xUk
*** http://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-43408622/stephen-hawking-on-god-artificial-intelligence-and-mankind-s-future
**** http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-origin-of-the-universe.html
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