The Cosmic Designer

Having written The Cosmic Design and the Designer to explore what modern science can say about the nature of our universe and reality, I’ve been wondering what it might be possible to tell about the Designer: did it have an origin, where did it come from, what is it like? The first two questions seem, on the face of it anyway, truly unknowable. They eventually reach the point of whether it’s turtles all the way down. But the question of what the Designer might be like, how it might be described, is perhaps open to some exploration.

Considering the nature of the Designer depends on the questions we ask. We might start by asking if, from our perspective, the Designer did a good job or a bad one? Given the state of the world we live in at the dawn of the 21^st Century, you could go either way.

Or we might begin by considering whether humans are in the Designer’s image. (Humans have long imagined their gods in their own image, but somehow greater.) At our best, we are conscious, rational individuals with free will and the capacity to act with the moral sense of right and wrong, good and bad. At our worst, we are killers who shit in our our nest and do not always even eat what we kill. In between, we are weak souls often unable to perceive and understand our own self-interest. The cosmic design allows our best form, so perhaps the Designer is also a rational agent with free will, one that defines, by its own nature, the good. I’ll go with that.

Freud’s work on the healthy soul and Alastair McIntyre on individual practical reasoners can help us describe the rational agent. According to Freud, the psychically healthy individual is one where our I (das Ich) has absorbed the It (das Es) and the Over-I (das Uberich). The I holds the soul's facility of intellect and reason. In Freud's conception, psychic health is attaining the proper internal order, one where the I overcomes and absorbs the Over-I (the imposed internal agent of outside authority) and the It (the drives and desires of our animal and infantile self). Thus freed, the individual becomes capable of choosing and acting in a rational and practical manner, following our own defined ends and goals, within the confines of what reality presents. McIntyre looks to moral virtue (aretḗ) as elaborated by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Human beings are animals, they begin as such and remain as such with the bodily desires and needs of all animals. We possess the intelligence common to other animals such as the dolphins and our fellow great apes. But with language we can move beyond this to become independent practical reasoners (Freud’s healthy soul) following the necessary reciprocal obligations of giving and receiving (the virtues) that allow us as social animals to collectively live the good life.

Free will manifests as choice. Choice – the ability to choose and the act of choosing (as confined only by the laws of nature) – expresses free will. How does choice get made? Through individual consciousness. Consciousness allows choice and is a property of an individual agency, a being. Free will is an expression of an individual consciousness operating in a universe that permits the ability to choose between different achievable outcomes. Consciousness powers the will.

Consciousness – in the human at least – rides a wave generated by individual, biologically-based processes running through and on our “wetware” of neurons and neural networks with inputs from our bodily organs, processes and senses. These processes produce what might be termed native intelligence (as opposed to artificial intelligence) one that comes about through the biological equivalent of “machine learning” and probably includes quantum computing elements and entangled states. When the brain and neural networks of higher animals – great apes, dolphins and others – became complex enough to support quantum processing, that may have been the point at which consciousness is kickstarted into self-consciousness.

Humans are self-conscious creatures capable of reasoning and choice and, thus, also of acting morally. If we are in the image of the Designer, it must be also. The Designer included free will in the design because it enjoys free will and values it. Of course, who really knows and how could we tell? One might suppose our apparently designed universe was a random creation out of nothing, simply an accident (one of an infinite variety of random big bangs). Or perhaps it’s some form of “simulation” (as a higher dimensional form of entertainment?). But as I have argued before, these beg the questions of how and why there should be anything rather than nothing. If there was a design – and following St. Thomas’ finger – the Designer had to be an individual, conscious being.

Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 13

For episode 12 see here


The Theory of the Universal Community


XIII.  Universitas Hominum

  A. Rebirth of scholarly activity in 13th Century

       1. rediscovery of Aristotle

       2. concentration on theology and metaphysics

  B. John of Salisbury

       1. saw kings bound by law as everyone was

       2. carried on argument of Cicero for res publica

  C. Saint Thomas Aquinas

       1. used Aristotle as new support for Christian philosophy

       2. tried to synthesize faith and reason

       3. saw each as acting to achieve own form of perfection within a

           hierarchy of degrees of perfection

       4. saw Aristotelian society of mutual exchange for achieving the good life

       5. ruler derives power from his part, under God, in the community of

           directing every class towards a happy and virtuous life

       6. offered no clear definition of lawful authority or of its derivation (or the

           kings relation to law)

       7. law was one aspect of the cosmic system by which God rules the world

           i. all different manifestations of the same principles

           ii. Eternal Law -- the eternal plan of all creation, not knowable

           iii. Natural Law -- reflection of Eternal Law in created things

           iv. Divine Law -- revelation from God in the Scriptures

           v. Human Law -- ius gentium and ius civile, applies to humankind the

           divine principle

       8. Human Law is Natural Law made to cover man


"For both men [Aquinas and Locke], the ruler is as definitely bound by reason and justice as his subjects, and his power over the positive law arises from the need of keeping it in agreement with Natural Law. Enactment is less an act of will than an adjustment to times and circumstances. (259)


 D. Dante sought to show the Emperor's authority derived directly from God but

      not dependent on God.

 E. For all three thinkers, human race forms a single community whose existence

     implies a single head.

 F. Out of line with Aristotle's presumption that the state is an outgrowth of the

     natural evolution of society, justified by the moral values it sustains without

     religious sanction.


Next week: Three Challenges to Christian Society    


A Conclusion to a Still Unwritten Book: The End?

I previously have suggested that the universe seems to have been designed and that this therefore implies a designer. Following this supposition further leads to two fundamental questions: where did the designer come from and why might it have designed and launched the universe we inhabit. Subsidiary questions might include what materials and tools did the designer use and what can be said of the designer? We might also wonder if the designer watches or cares for us or has any of the other attributes humans have often associated with their gods such as being infinitely powerful, wise, kind, all knowing, loving, good etc?

Before taking a stab at these questions, it is worth noting that physicists and cosmologists are also trying to peer behind the curtain of creation. String theorists are still seeking – despite a lack of any experimental evidence offered by current high energy physics – to reconcile relativity and quantum physics and thereby explain the menagerie of observed elementary particles and forces. Recently, they have found a set of one quadrillion possible solutions to string equations within a ten-dimensional spacetime that have “the same set of matter particles as exists in our universe.” But there remains no experimental evidence or process for deciding which of these quadrillion, if any, may be applicable to the observed reality.

Also, for the past decade or so, cosmologists have been looking at alternatives to the inflationary scenario of the post-Big Bang universe. Inflation explains features of the cosmic background radiation. However, it does not explain from where the Big Bang itself arose beyond the suggestion that it came from some quantum fluctuation within a primordial singularity. An attractive alternative to having to explain any sort of a beginning is to assume that the Big Bang was simply our side of a “bounce” or “collision” between universes.

All these efforts to explain what might otherwise appear to be an amazing Goldilocks universe – in which all the elemental particles and forces seem to lead to the evolution of complexity and the seeming inevitability of life – must in the end still suppose something unexplained and just given: a multidimensional universe beyond ours, a singularity just sitting there at the beginning of time or a series of bouncing universes just following one another. (This latter leaves aside the issue of dark energy’s apparent speeding up of the expansion of our universe so that it never reverses into a big crunch. Instead, it seems that eventually – in some enormous 10 to the 100th years – matter will have broken down and even black holes will be warmer than space and radiate away with a final pop.)

It might also be worth pausing to wonder why the universe would have to be designed rather than simply “wished” into being as befitting an all-powerful “god.” Put another way, why would a creator need to design a universe using materials and processes that we would find understandable as laws of physics? Was the designer constrained in some way – perhaps by some preexisting Platonic Forms – to act through means such as singularities and Higgs fields?

Occam’s Razor suggests to me that we simply acknowledge that our universe seems to have a design discoverable by science and wonder about the designer. Following this line of inquiry, I return to considering where might have the designer come from and why might it have designed and launched the universe we inhabit?

It seems to me that there is no way to answer the where question. One must either posit that there never was an original moment of creation or accept that there was such a moment and recognize it as an uncaused first cause. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Either the designer was caused – by what, from where? – or was itself the First Cause. This seems to me the unanswerable question behind all others and thus the essential mystery at the bottom of all science, religion and philosophy.

The why question may be somewhat more amenable. Consider that the universe does appear to have been designed and put into action according to the physical laws thereby built into it. Could it be a grand simulation to test theories of good and evil, a complex and especially vivid dream or simply a work of art? Might it be a majestic theater on which a countless number of actors play our parts and then disappear off stage thus making the designer a cosmic Shakespeare? Or might it have been set in motion for the consciousness behind the design to dump itself into to avoid an endless eternity of loneliness and thereby undergo an almost endless series of experiences acted through everyone and everything? I myself drift toward the last suggestion and to the possibility of a universe in which consciousness is primordial and attaches to everything with mass (a kind of panpsychism). Life would offer the most interesting existence. So perhaps the designer looks out through the being of everything, in a sense making us all “children of god?”

One last question, does love come into it at all. Does the designer love its creation or any part of it, such as us? If the cosmic consciousness is in everything, then it may be essentially a matter of self-love, even when we “love” one another. I believe we exist as individuals and we love as such. Our capability – indeed need – to love suggests it is somehow built into the design.

If There Was A Cosmological Design, What about the Designer?

I have been speculating about the origins of the universe and consciousness for some time now. Following St. Thomas’ finger, modern science points to an act of creation tightly constrained to produce the universe of matter and energy that we see around us (and in which conscious beings arose). If the fundamental constants of physics were not exactly what they are, if the Higgs boson did not manifest itself in a way to create the menagerie of particles that physics has discovered, the Big Bang would have produced some other kind of universe or perhaps none at all. We discover the laws of nature because they – the laws – appear to be there. They were there from the very first moment something “exploded” into spacetime. We exist in a universe that seems to have been designed according to these laws, or better, was created through using a particular set of fundamental constants and rules.

Of course, if there was a design, it suggests there was a designer. (I’m now reading Mind & Cosmos by Thomas Nagel. He suggests something like a design without a designer but more on that another time.) My question this time is why anything capable of designing a law governed creation on the order of the cosmos would have to use or obey law? The traditional notion of a Transcendental God is a being all-powerful and without constraints. As noted here before, I tend not to believe in such a god. And in fact, it seems that whatever set in motion the particular universe we find ourselves in was constrained to act through rules of the game we now discover as fundamental physics. Could an omnipotent god be constrained? Could not such a god simply call a universe that would look like ours into being by commanding or dreaming it? What kind of “god” would work with a rule book and where would that rule book have come from? Either that rule book precedes its use or for some unknowable reason the god created it in order to use it? What kind of god would do the later? And if the rules predate the god then we have not yet reached the First Cause.

I have no answers to these questions so let me have some fun. Let’s imagine a toolkit of cosmic software that allows the creation of universes. It contains menus of all sorts of starting conditions, rules and variables. A “player” – amateur or professional – plugs in, picks through the many choices available and runs the program. The “machine” cranks and out spews the result. Some might crash immediately, others just sit there shining or in the dark, others maybe moving forward in whatever way the rules encourage. A “successful” run might eventually contain things like stars, planets and people. If this program came on the market here, it would quickly outsell any of Sid Meier’s creations.

I said fun, but this is really a thought experiment for it raises the question of why any designer would create a universe and let it run without further ado. For it seems that the putative designer plays no further part in influencing outcomes. There is good and evil in our world and one must assume that it exists anywhere conscious beings exist. Lots of bad things have happened here on earth – to civilizations, societies, individuals – despite whatever prayers or entities were sent the gods’ way. One might argue that God showed its care for us by allowing us free will, by allowing us reason, by giving us the ability to tell right from wrong. There is scant evidence that that has worked out very well when one looks at the present state of the world, or as my historian friend would say, at any period of history. What possibly could be the intention of the possible designer who set our world in motion? Play, experiment or maybe child-rearing?

What if there was no designer but simply a design and the universe is an example of the eternal return?

Saint Thomas’ God

Somewhere in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas is the suggestion that when one follows reason as far as it can go, that is a finger pointing to God. Over the past several years, I have been considering what the existence of consciousness, modern cosmology, quantum physics and relativity can say about the origin of consciousness, life and the universe. This has led me to some conclusions, including that consciousness may be primordial, that there may indeed be a “ghost in the machine,” and that the creation of the universe seems to have happened according to laws written into the act. My way of summing all this up has been to accept the notion that the universe is a product of conscious intent and that we all share in that same consciousness. I have come to think of the “creator” as a kind of Shakespeare who wrote a cosmic script setting the stage full of interesting processes, happenings and beings and dumped itself into it in order to experience its creation first hand. (Each “I” is part of that consciousness.) Another way to think about this might be to imagine an all-powerful being who designed the most amazing multi-level, multi-player computer game to play – to alleviate a really cosmic case of boredom? – by downloading itself into it to play every role.

As a former Catholic, however, I had trouble with the concept and notion of “God.” Cleary the God of all three religions of the Book – the Hebrew, Christian and Muslem – was too anthropomorphized. The concept of God comes with baggage I could not accept. A transcendent being like some sort of super human that loves us as a parent and deserves worship is simply a reflection of our own collective lack of psychic maturity. There is also no evidence for such a being that judges us and will hold us accountable for our actions, right and wrong. Given the fantastic and unlikely beauty of a universe that seems just right for us, there is no reason to suppose that there must be a heaven beyond it. Given our experience of the various forms of evil, historical and current, there is also no reason to suppose the need for some other hell. It seems clear to me that the universe as it exists is ungoverned by any morality beyond what we humans bring into it.

But recently, sitting in the Bishops Garden at Washington’s National Cathedral on a sunny, early spring morn, I made my peace with the word God. Listening to the gentle sound of a burbling spring and basking in the warmth of the sun, I considered the process by which the millions of photons showering down reached me. The sun’s energy comes from a myriad of fusions of two hydrogen atoms into one helium in the sun’s core. It takes thousands of years for the energy produced by each single fusion event to reach the surface of the sun. Then it takes just eight minutes to travel the 93 million miles to earth. The physical laws governing our universe are just right to allow this font of endless free energy sitting in the middle of an expanse of nothingness to bring to life our planet and all the creatures on it.

Some might say that that conditions may seem just right because else wise we wouldn’t be here. Just a happy accident out of an infinity of possible combinations that don’t work for conscious life forms. But that seems to violate Occam's Razor. Why suppose an infinite number of random fluctuations just to come up with one that has us? Much more direct to suppose that the one that contains us was meant to do so. And besides, the fundamental questions remain why is there anything at all rather than nothing and how could something arise out of nothing. Much more logical to recognize the likelihood of a First Cause. And one might as well call that God. Not one to worship, follow or depend upon for any kind of salvation but one to wonder about. Accepting the existence of St. Thomas’ God opens, at the most basic level, the door of wonder.

Light tricks: The Delayed Choice Experiment

Physical Review A reports a recent "experimental observation of simultaneous wave and particle behavior in a narrowband single-photon wave packet."  This is also covered in a more accessible form in Science News.  The experiment is a variation on the delayed choice model that submits a photon to being observed (measured) after it has already been through a double beam splitter setup.  This essentially is a way of forcing the photon to behave first as a particle (by passing it through a beam splitter) and then after having made that "choice" having it behave like a wave again, as predicted by quantum physics.  The recent experiment takes this one step further by first stretching out a single photon so that it takes a small but measurable period of time to pass through the second beam splitter.  With the splitter in place, the photon acts like a wave.  With it removed while the photon is still passing through it, the photon manifests as a particle.  The very same photon during one single act of observation -- in two parts -- is both particle and wave.  This does not violate quantum physics but, as a scientist quoted by Science News suggests:  "‘Wave’ and ‘particle’ are just words.  In quantum physics, those words are imprecise at best."

This beautifully done experiment offers a window into the nature of not only light but the universe.  As noted before, at the speed of light, time does not exist.  Therefore, every photon is everywhere it will ever be at the same instant. The speed of light measures the degree of departure of our existence as mass affected by gravity from that cosmic external moment in which light exists.  When we measure light we seek to capture in time that which exists without time.  Wave and particle are the way we perceive its timeless nature as we move at our own pace through time and space.

Gravity, Mass and Time

Recently finished physicist Kip Thorne's The Science of Interstellar about his work to make the movie as scientifically grounded as possible. While written for the interested layperson, some of it was hard to follow. But it provided a lot of food for ruminating about the deep connections between gravity, mass, time and the speed of light.

At the speed of light, time stops. Anything with mass that reached the speed of light also achieves infinite mass. (This is one good reason to believe that nothing with mass can go that fast. Anything of infinite mass would need a great deal of thrust to keep going, indeed, an infinite amount.) Photons have no mass and thus they gain no mass. Anything – some ghost without a machine – traveling with that photon at 186,000 MPS would also be timeless and thus everywhere that photon will ever be all at once.

Time also stops with an infinite mass that is not going anywhere, at a black hole. Gravity slows time. At the event horizon of a black hole, spacetime is so warped that nothing can escape upwards – not time, not space, not matter, not light – but falls down into the black hole until it reaches the singularity at the “bottom.” While the black hole may have a certain mass – the mass left over from the collapse of the star that formed it – the singularity itself has the equivalent of infinite mass. Anyone watching a friend drop into a black hole would never see him or her actually fall all the way past the event horizon. From the outside, the friend would be seen moving ever slower. At some point, a second to the falling friend might be, for example, a billion years to the outside observer.

Not just black holes slow time. Anything with mass does, including earth. Einstein's theory of relativity predicts this. And indeed, time on the GPS satellites (orbiting over 16 thousand miles up) run some 45,900 nano seconds slower per day than clocks on earth. The stronger the gravity, the slower time goes compared to places of less gravity.

Mass warps spacetime and achieves that effect through gravity. We don't understand where gravity comes from and it does not fit into the Standard Theory of quantum physics. Relativity seems to describe the effects of gravity but neither meshes with the Standard Theory nor explains from whence gravity comes. String theory has been the Standard Model's framework to incorporate relativity as quantum gravity. To do so, it would require extra dimensions beyond the four we observe (three space and time). But recent experiments have found no supporting evidence for the simplest forms of such theories.

It may be that mass, gravity, and time are just givens. Gravity is something that slows time. At the speed of light, time stops. Our experience of time – our consciousness – seems related to the speed of light. Mass keeps us from exceeding the speed of light. Random?

In or Out?

Was recently talking about the Higgs boson and what it seemed to indicate about the Big Bang.  I gushed that the only way to think about it was as an act of conscious intention, an act of creation.  My friend responded by asking "so what."  How does that help us live now?  That was a good question.

If the Big Bang was a conscious act of creation, if the universe in which we live was "engineered" to be a home for life and consciousness, what was the meaning of the act and what does it say to us today?

First of all let me say that I do not believe in "God."  After thousands of years of human history, that concept is too loaded with unhelpful freight.  Indeed, I don't "believe" in anything as an act of faith.  Rather I follow Saint Thomas in following reason until it can go no farther.  At that point, the finger is pointing at God.  Or as Plato saw it, we can never describe the Good, we can only perceive the world in its light.

However, quantum physics and relativity present us with a deep understanding of the universe.  We can trace back the expanding cosmos we see now to a moment in time and a place in space - the Big Bang - that in fact created time and space.  We can paint a picture of the elementary particles that fill the universe in the form of matter and energy.  We can understand gravity as a bending of spacetime.  We can explain the entire material world of our day-to-day existence.   That our understanding is incomplete - gravity cannot fit into the Standard Model yet, we cannot so far explain dark matter or dark energy and we have no explanation of consciousness - does not impact on all that modern science has so far allowed us to understand and do.

So we tend largely to allow the question of what it all means and where it comes from to hang in the air.  Just one of life's mysteries, the answer to which is beyond our reach and really not essential.

Nevertheless, for some, unless there is a meaning, a reason, life may seem rather pointless.

Following Aquinas and using Occam's Razor, I've come to believe that the Big Bang was the result of a conscious act, an act we'll never understand the mechanics of on this side of the veil.  How something is created from nothing and where the agent of that creation comes from, that defines the outlines of the essential meaning of "God."  But one can think about the "why's."

Being a conscious being, we can at least hypothesize about why.  We can, for example, wonder about how it would be to be everything and eternal, the one thing that is and neverchanging.  Lonely and bored?  Finally coming to the point of dumping oneself into an act of creation that created a stage for consciousness to inhabit space and time in pieces, to fill each fragment and create many from one?  Think about a universe filled with 100's of billions of planets that support various forms of life.  Uncountable numbers of individual consciousnesses each looking out on Others?  No one lonely anymore and not at all boring.

And this bring me to the answer to my friend.  The whole point of creation is to experience fully the many splendored world we occupy for our allotted time.  Not everyone needs this answer.  Some instinctively inhabit their lives fully.  But some cannot help but see humanity as full of folly and much of what passes for news as pointless, evil or just epiphenomenal.  For us, it is worth realizing that the point of the universe may be that it exists, and so do we, for the shear experience of it.  It is all important, we are all important, our lives and loves are all important, our acts and efforts are all important because that it why the universe was created.  Nothing is epiphenomenal or beside the point because the point is us. 

If this is the case, then it is besides the point not to be fully engaged in all that life presents to us, not to strive to understand and act in the best way we know how.  Our "duty" then is to try to make this ride as enjoyable as we can for everyone.  To seek beauty, to do good and to have fun.  Fun was almost surely lacking before the Big Bang.

The choice is to be all in or to be all out.  To be engaged in everything or take no real interest in anything.  Freud called this choice one between Eros (love) and Thanatos (death).  Choosing the later would be a real waste.  To be or not to be.