9010
Master Sage
Archie here! Today I would like to meditate on some of the deepest metaphysical problems in history. For millennia, the majority of mankind has expressed a belief in a first mover, a cause that brought our universe into being. This expression has taken many forms, generally divided into polytheism, animism, and monotheism, in all of their colorful incarnations.
But the central claim is this: Before there was (physically) something, there was nothing, and there must have been something that caused this transition. This something was probably an intelligent entity, because the product was an intelligible universe with clear laws governing it, and a population of intelligent creatures capable of perceiving it. If you go that far, you are a deist. If you are religious, you go a step farther and say that there was a revelation given to mankind to fill in more details on this creator.
Science agrees at least to the extent that there was a beginning to the universe using the concept of a “big bang,” and there have been several discoveries in the last century that have had interesting implications regarding this question. This would include the theories surrounding the multiverse and string theory, as well as the discussion of how many dimensions of time and space we live in.
For my purposes today, I’m going to use the colloquial term “God,” to refer to the “unmoved first mover or cause” in the Aristotelian sense. I will meditate on what the implications of that reality would be for our universe, and see if that squares with what science has told us about time, space, and all the rest of it. To those who believe in God, let me ask you.
- Have you ever wondered how God can hear every prayer at once, or how it could be that he has always existed and always will exist?
- Have you ever wondered why God would create sentient life, or why he would care about us, tiny little dust specs in the universe that we are?
- Have you ever wondered since our universe needed an intelligent creator, that means God needs to have a creator as well?
In this post I don’t get into dogma, or even the debate over the existence of a creator as such. Rather, I attempt to infer the related metaphysics of a universe where God exists. To me, it is a matter of both curiosity and practical importance to square away some of the conceptions we have of a deistic God with what we know of how the universe operates. This is an exercise of reason, and hopefully the end result will be an answer to age-old questions. Well let’s take a crack at it, shall we?
Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient
Let’s start from these premises:
- There was a big bang at the beginning of our universe in which what was previously, for all intents and purposes, nothing, became something.
- This big bang cosmology was orchestrated by an intelligent creator.
- The qualities classically attributed to God as the creator are the ability to see, to do, and to know literally everything as it pertains to our universe.
- Our universe has roughly 10 space dimensions and at least one time dimension.
Taking all these into account, what conclusions can we draw about said creator? For one thing, it would mean that God is existentially outside the bounds of our universe. As such, he would necessarily be, or be part of, a separate universe, that is not necessarily subject to the same space and time parameters that we are. It would in fact be a situation where God experiences more space and time dimensions, which becomes particularly interesting when you consider time.
As humans, we experience our universe in linear time that is one-dimensional and irreversible. But imagine for a moment, that there were two universes each with its own dimension of time, and these two timelines could intersect. This would make time geometric instead of linear, and a being who created one timeline has clearly demonstrated the ability to go between the two. To help you visualize this, just imagine a Cartesian graph with one flat timeline and another that is quite flexible intersecting with the first line. Every time you see the two lines intersect, it is an instance where God intervenes in our universe.
So, a serious concession is in order. Obviously, we don’t know how this other timeline works in God’s universe. Is it reversible? Is it constant or can its speed be changed? Are the spatial dimensions connected to it, and are they also subject to laws of thermodynamics? We just don’t know, but it does open up the possibility that the following classical claims about God can be absolutely true.
1. He has always existed and will always exist. As far as it pertains to our universe, this is a given.
2. He can observe everything at once, including our future, and intervene as he sees fit.
3. He can be invisible to our eyes because he may exist on a spatial dimension that we cannot perceive.
So this would seem to answer the old “Santa Claus” problem. While Santa can’t be in everybody’s chimney at once, God can be everywhere and hear everyone at once because he can freely move in and out between our timeline and his. Everything fits together quite nicely if you accept these basic premises.
Who Created God?
This question has always been puzzling for believers and atheists alike. If God created the Universe and us, who Created God? After all, the whole argument for God is based on a “mind before matter” philosophy. If an intelligent creator is really necessary for the existence of complex systems such as the human brain, then wouldn’t something as complex as GOD need an explanation?
Theologians will often answer this talking point with the equally frustrating problem of infinite regression. e.g. if someone created God, then who created that person, and who created that person, and who created that person, and so on, until we come to the point where SOMETHING needed to have simply spawned by itself to begin the cycle.
Let’s go underneath this argument for a second.
Why do we ask this question? Once again, it’s because we are born, we live, and we die in linear time. Everything in our universe has a beginning, a lifespan, and an ending. What goes up, must come down. Change over time. That’s all we experience, much like being born on a moving planet, and so it’s hard to wrap our minds around anything else.
But remember, seeing as how God is part of a universe that is completely separate from ours, we can’t infer his origins. Just because the spontaneous generation of life via primordial soup billions of years ago seems infinitely improbable under the conditions of our universe, we can’t say that the same is the case in God’s universe. We also don’t know how time operates over there. Maybe there actually isn’t a beginning to God’s timeline as there is for ours, in which case, as hard as it is to contemplate, there would be no beginning to anything including God. Again, we cannot take our space-time parameters and assume they are the same in every universe, because that is almost certainly not the case.
The Reason for Creation
One interesting question to ask yourself then is this: What does a being with the classical attributes of God lack? The answer would of course be nothing. And if he lacks nothing, then ironically he lacks limitation.
And here’s the problem with lacking limitation. Think hard about this now. If you are everything at once, and you lack nothing, then in some sense you are nothing at all, and you have no reason to be, because you have nothing to do, because being involves moving and doing, and you are already everything so you can’t move and do anything beyond what you already are…
So what do you do with that? That form of existence is too static to be stable. There needs to be movement, there needs to be something to do!
Well, you can create things. More specifically, you can create finite and imperfect beings in your image and live vicariously through their free will. That’s one answer that the Judeo-Christian traditions have produced, and it seems to make sense to me. What’s particularly interesting is the biblical phrase, “in our image.” If we were created in the image of the creator, might that explain why we get such fulfillment out of building and progressing and destroying? Might that explain why we have an innate desire to live forever, like our creator? Just something to think about.
Consciousness
Humans often think of God as a sentient being, because they feel that logically it would require sentience to bring about sentient beings like us. When you look at our brains, there appears to be a library-like system of information running our consciousness on a physical level. As far as understanding it, I have my doubts that humans will ever have a full understanding of how consciousness works. But putting that aside for a second, I do believe that consciousness would infer a creator that is conscious.
This would explain why God would care about us despite the fact that we are such small specs in the universe. We are the only things among his creation that have consciousness in the same manner as him, and this would allow him to interact with and relate to us on a level that he couldn’t with a star, a planet, or an expanse of dark matter.
And just as a side note, what makes us think that we are really that small compared to the rest of God’s creation? Here’s an interesting fact for you. The size difference between a subatomic particle and a full grown human is roughly similar to the size difference between a human and the entire universe. So when you talk about it in a relative sense, assuming that God created the universe using atoms as his building blocks, humans are roughly in the middle of creation, which certainly wouldn’t make them spatially insignificant.
The Religious Mindset
Just as an added point to wrap this up, if the universe did come into being by an intelligent creator, and if he did have a purpose for creating, would it not make sense that he would reveal that purpose to us so that we could follow it? This is what the religious claim has happened, and will happen again.
Atheists, on the other hand, doubt that such revelations ever took place, and they eagerly anticipate a time where science can produce a naturalistic explanation for cosmology and the origins of life.
I’m not sure that day will ever come, but in the meantime I am proud to be a part of this age old conversation. I hope you’ve enjoyed my thought process at least.
Conclusion
Whether he believes in God or not, it is imperative that the Sage put himself through mental exercises that test his or her reasoning ability. Always make it a point to go beneath an argument and wonder why it is being argued about in the first place. Always lay out the foundational premises on both sides to get a better understanding of how to solve it. Not only can you solve the problem, or demonstrate its insolubility, but it will also help you be able to relate to your opponent’s argument so that they are easier to convince. Some problems simply can’t be solved, but with enough thought put into it, you can be on the winning side of the conjecture.
So what do you think?
Please share your thoughts below! What are the premises you start with when contemplating the nature of our universe? What are some of the great metaphysical questions that you would like answered?
From Athens’ forum to ours. Live wisely my friends.
Archie the Sage