The other night I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking of the cosmological argument for God’s existence and the Big Bang. Yes, these sorts of things keep me up at night from time to time as well as thinking about making an excel spreadsheet of my comics collection and fantasizing about quitting my job and doing something crazy like moving my family to the other side of the globe.
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| I'm a big fan of the whole school of thought, "we are a way for the universe to know itself". Sounds cool, ya know? Really without us or another sentient, conscious beings, the universe is a utterly pointless and meaningless affair. |
Anyway, if you’re unfamiliar with the cosmological argument, here is one version:
- Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
- The Universe began to exist.
- Therefore, the Universe had a cause.
Most believers point to the “cause” being God – although this itself is a leap of logic and faith. The obvious weakness to this next leap is that if God started the universe and everything has a cause (per premise #1), then where did your “eternal” God come from? It starts the whole argument over again.
So this got me thinking what came about before the start of the universe?
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| Oh, that's clever. |
I am reasonably sure I have thought about this before, but this particular evening, the idea stuck around in my head. I should state that I am way out of my depth here. Basically, my knowledge of the cosmos and philosophy can be fit into the palm of very small child. Maybe this is why I find it so fascinating because everything I read, I learn something. Nonetheless, I will carry on because that’s what bloggers do (I guess).
I recently finished reading Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs (eh, it's alright) and in one section he rails against probability, stating that everything is 50/50. Either something is going to happen or it’s not. Either it is or is not true, etc. etc. . Of course if you play with this idea enough it gets absurd: Unicorns: 50/50, UFO’s: 50/50, Noah’s Ark: 50/50, and so on and so forth.
Even still, there is certain logic to it. I am working under two assumptions here and they are basically clarifying the positions above:
- We know the universe began
- Something can’t come from nothing
If we are discussing the prehistory universe (and apparently there are whole books on this subject) then we find ourselves, whatever our position to be, in theoretical conjecture. Is everything at this point 50/50? Maybe there are no odds at this point, just ideas that are variously silly, educated, absurd, realistic, obvious and troubling. I guess what I am trying to say is that something caused the universe into being. It was either on purpose or a happy accident.
So if it wasn’t God behind creation, what was it? Again, we are in theory, and this idea might be debunked or outdated, but, work with me people! Here’s one theory I found:
“…the new view argues that our universe was created when two parallel "membranes" collided cataclysmically after evolving slowly in five-dimensional space over an exceedingly long period of time. These membranes, or "branes" as theorists call them, would have floated like sheets of paper through a fifth dimension that even scientists admit they find hard to picture intuitively..”
Sounds good.... but wait - where did the “branes” in the fifth dimension come from? A common phrase I kept reading on the web, was "asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what is north of the North pole". It was a common discussion point among atheists. Here's an interview with atheist Richard Dawkins by fundamentalist Hugh Hewitt:
HH: I’m talking about the whole cosmos. Where did that come from, 13 billion years ago?
RD: It came from the big bang, which is not a complex process. It’s a simple process.
HH: And what preceded the big bang?
RD: Well, physicists won’t answer that question. They will say that time itself began in the big bang, and so the question what preceded it is illegitimate.
HH: What do you think?
RD: I’m not enough of a physicist to understand what I’m saying, but I have to say that that’s what physicists say.
HH: So when you consider before the big bang, what does Richard Dawkins think was there?
RD: I don’t consider the question, because I recognize that it’s an intuitively appealing question. I recognize that I, along with everybody else, wants to ask that question. Then I talk to physicists who say you can no more ask what came before the big bang than you can ask what’s north of the North Pole.
Ironically, whether you go with the "God" answer or the "nothing" answer, they each share similarities in that the ultimate answer is of what was before the Big Bang is...well...don't ask, because the question itself can't be asked. When I asked a philosopher (who is a few offices down from me) about what happened before the Big Bang, he noted that people don't like to hear that this question is basically unanswerable. Even if that really is the case after all. Still, something bothers me about saying there was nothing (or "branes") that by sheer nature did something.
It is likely that I am missing something at this point (either from philosophy or cosmology). Maybe the more refined question is to ask why is there something rather than nothing to begin with?
From my perspective, both of these creation accounts are stories we tell ourselves. We consume stories in film, television, in novels and in art. We repeat stories told in song and in our sacred books. It's like our brains can't accept anything without a definite start (and end?) We're the story-telling animal. Personally, one's belief of disbelief shouldn't be centered on one argument alone so I take this whole exercise with a grain of salt. All that being said, at least tonight, I'll sleep a little better about the story I've adopted for my own.
