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.

Why Time?

I've spent a good deal of time thinking about time.  It is a mystery.  We know it passes, the more quickly it seems as we get older.  Since Einstein, we know it is part of spacetime, baked into the fabric of the universe.  But that simply deepens the mysteries.  Why can we travel in all directions in space but only one in time?  And how can it be that there is no absolute time the same everywhere?  The "now" that  I see all around me is punctured during the day by photons from the sun that show me how that looked nine minutes ago and at night by stars showing me how they existed many thousands of years ago?  When we see those stars, we are looking into the past. Our experience of the "now" of those stars is likewise thousand of years in our future.

 

So time varies by distance in space.  The speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- connects these.  Contemplation of the speed of light leads to pondering how light can possibly have a speed.  Objects with mass, when not at rest, have speed.  (Actually, nothing is ever at rest except relatively.)  As an object with mass increases speed, time runs slower as it appears to observers not so moving.  Relative motion, in effect, eats relative time; the quicker something moves, the less time remains that seems to pass for the object moving relative to the observer at rest where "normal" time passes.  Mass-less particles, such as photons, do not experience time.  Mass-less particles are everywhere they will ever be at the same moment and are, in this sense, eternal.  Only objects with mass -- including us -- experience light as traveling in time.  A photon that left Proxima Centauri, traveled 4.25 years and just reached our eyes here on earth, took that photon no time at all. 

 

By capturing some of the particles spewing from the Big Bang and giving them mass, the Higgs Boson may in effect have also created time.  But as there is no universal and simultaneous "now," how can we think about time. As noted, under Einsteinian relativity, time is the fourth dimension and relative to location and motion in the other three.  Yet clearly there is also "now."  We live in it.  Is there not a single "now" that exists for all the photons that fill the universe in their one timeless, eternal moment?  Does that create a universal framework of now?  Perhaps each and every particle of matter exists in its own "now" tied to every other such moment within the crystalline universal now established by light?  Light seems to have a speed because it ties together the universe of separate, individual "nows."   Perhaps mass is simply the way everything is kept from happening at once?  Mass separates us from eternity, immersing us in spacetime where our consciousness has space and time to manifest.  Perhaps time exists to provide a way for the universe to experience itself.

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?