Unbelievable!
And I mean EVERYTHING! You, me, a leaf on a tree, an octopus, a puff of wind, the moon and stars or Bob. Especially Bob. Unbelievable, but there it all is anyway. It’s crazy! Crae, crae! .
Isn’t it? Is it just me, or do you catch yourself strolling along in a bit of nature or an urban sprawl, along an empty beach or just gawping up at the majesty of the heavens on a clear winter’s night, and just think “WOW I’m actually here, and thinking about me being here and how all this other stuff is here, and I’m here actually looking at it all. It’s unbelievable!”.
And then, one day, there it is. Maybe you were eight years old or maybe fifteen, but probably not older than that, and a whisper of a question drifts into the back of your mind, uninvited like a little grey, innocent puff of cloud….
“Hmm, just how did all this stuff get here in the first place?”.
And right there in that moment, my inquisitive little padawan, you are royally buggered…..FOREVER!
Couldn’t just let it go, could you? Couldn’t just do the ole empty-headed “Oooh thas pretty init love?”. Now you have to deal with the fallout from that harmless-looking question for at least the rest of your life, but maybe FOR ALL ETERNITY!
And it’s not in fact harmless at all, is it? In fact, it’s the single most complex question that you have ever asked, and now we all have to be here to try and deal with it, and it’s just so exhausting!
Still, no use in bitching like Trump about it is there? So in the words of Hannibal Lecter as he is about to push the Commendatore Rinaldo Pazzi out of a very ornate window in Florence, spilling his intestines all over the street and tourists below, “Okey Dokey, here we go”.
We take very little at face value, do we? If someone tells us something, we like to understand whether that thing is true or just made up, don’t we? Surely we need that?
“How do you know?”
“Do you have any evidence to support that claim?”
“Did anyone else witness it?”
“Who told you that?”
“Did you just make that up?”
Our entire judicial system depends on not taking things at face value, albeit that might not have always been true.
Villager: “She’s a Witch!”
Judge: “Is she?”
Villager: “Yes, she’s a witch”
Judge: “BURN HER!!!!”
Ok, I’m exaggerating, even then we used to apply the stringent witch test of seeing if she floated. If she did then she was clearly a witch and sent to the stake whereas if she sank, she was innocent but dead from drowning.
Whilst today, our judicial system calls for very detailed evidence to prove the guilt or innocence of a witch the accused, the corroborating evidence needed in other aspects of our society to support any given postulate, doesn’t appear to be that great. Sometimes, huge swathes of support from great numbers of people for a particular view can be garnered despite there being a complete vacuum of evidence to support that view.
I give you the 2020 US Presidential election. The strength of belief in large portions of the Trump base, that the election was rigged or fraudulent, is so strong that these people felt the need to lay siege to the Capitol building in Washinton DC in an attempt to overturn the election. They were/are prepared to start another civil war! Four people gave their lives for that belief and one police officer gave his life defending the truth. The basis for this belief? Trump said so. He said so over and over again to anyone that would listen, via every outlet that would carry his insane claims. No matter that over 80 court cases brought alleging voter fraud were summarily dismissed by various State and Federal legislatures, including the Supreme Court. No matter that no evidence of any fraudulent activity has been uncovered by anyone during or since the election. Despite the complete absence of any evidence of wrongdoing, this very large cadre of people (some 33.8m or 45% of Republican voters supported the assault on the Capitol), have simply taken it on faith that Trump is telling the truth and that everyone else is lying to them. The go-to position of everyone else in the world appears to be…
“Dumb bastards”
and whilst this is an incredibly powerful argument in the example I have given, it’s also lazy and somewhat arrogant thinking. Not all Trump voters are white supremacist, misogynistic, hardcore racist, uneducated, conspiracy toting, baseball-cap-wearing, dumb-as-dirt rednecks; it just feels that way. Some Trump supporters are black, and beyond credulity, some are women! WTF! All of these people have seen fit to put their faith in this awful travesty of a human being and his fantasies, against all reason, logic or fact.
“Come on Creasy, everyone knows they are just a bunch of dumb shit-kickers”
Hmmm. In the words of a very famous bloke from Palestine 2,021 years ago
“Let he who has not sinned, cast the first stone.”
Good old JC, he had a quip for every situation, didn’t he? We’d all like to think that we aren’t like these Trump voters but actually, none of us is really any different. We might kneel at different altars, but we kneel nonetheless.
You are wrong Creasy! I don’t like to say it because you are such a clever bloke with amazing insights and very good looking, but you are wrong about this! I am nothing like those gob-shites”
Very well, I will prove it to you, and when I have, I want you to leave me an apology in the comments….and another compliment about how good looking I am.
There are currently 7.8bn people on the planet and you are indisputably one of them. Of these, according to sociologists Arieta Keysar and Juhem Navarro-Rivera in 2017, there are only 450-500 million atheists and agnostics worldwide. That is only 6.4% of the world population; 93.6% of the world’s population believe in some sort of deity. Billions and billions of people affiliate themselves with structured religions such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Sikhism and many more.
Think about that for a moment. Not one single shred of credible evidence has ever been produced that proves there is a God, and yet the vast majority of us believe in some omnipotent being(s), that created everything. For many believers, their Faith is so strong that they would happily lay down their lives for their God. They even have a word for it; martyrdom! Many already have. Isn’t that unbelievable? Yet there it is, it’s a fact. Statistically, most of you reading this Blog believe in a God of some sort (yes, both of you!), and all three of you believe in something you can’t actually prove.
Let’s take a brief look at Faith in God. There is even less available credible evidence for the existence of God than there is for Trump’s claim that he won the US election, yet the vast majority of humans still believe God exists.
The accepted “evidence” for God, is written down in books like the Bible (Old and New Testaments), the Quran, the Torah or other sacred texts, and for huge portions of the population, these texts are compelling. For these believers, words and insights such as these could only come from God, and God used his prophets, or a Messiah and his disciples, to bring us his thoughts and his commandments via the written word. These written texts may be compelling, but are they enough to create and sustain such a large body of Faith in God on their own? I don’t think so, so there must be something else.
Let’s talk about “inherited” Faith as an evidentiary source for a mo’, because in my opinion, this may be the single biggest factor for Faith in God.
A child trusts nobody more than his or her parental unit. If they say Santa Claus exists, he does. If they say the tooth fairy will come to take the tooth and leave some money under your pillow he will, especially if the parental unit makes sure of that by removing the said tooth and depositing said money whilst the innocent, but somewhat naïve, little sausage is sleeping.
Which of us has not half-eaten Santa’s Milk and Cookies on Christmas Eve to convince our little angels that Santa came? It’s little surprise then, that our children believe in these things until such time as we tell them they aren’t real. Then, there is the painful realisation that a) magic isn’t real after all and there are no Unicorns, and that b) Mummy and Daddy are lying little shit-bags. My 12-year-old daughter has only recently discovered that a Haggis is not a trumpet nosed wee beasty living in the Scottish Highlands, because I didn’t disabuse her of that belief.
In like fashion, few parents tell their children God is not real and so, he stays real until such time as the child questions that belief. Many never do. For some reason, parents draw a distinction between Santa Claus and God. One is fun, the other a serious matter involving the eternal glorification or damnation of one’s soul. My own grandmother, a strong Catholic, would “hunt” down any of her grandchildren that hadn’t been baptised and baptise them herself. She was afraid that they might die and spend eternity in purgatory because they still carried Original Sin around with them (they get forgiven this sin when they are baptised). This distinction, and certainty that God is real and serious, probably derives from the fact that nobody said he wasn’t, and because people grow up in a world where sin is also very real; each one being marked down in their eternal ledgers.
Fear of God’s judgement and eternal damnation in the afterlife becomes a real factor in how we choose to live our lives. Conveniently, the right way to live can be found written down in the aforementioned sacred texts, and our laws tend to be largely aligned with them (Thou shalt not covet thy neighbours wife etc). This inherited tradition and the reinforcement provided by the rituals, mysticism and ceremony of the religion they are born into, combined with the fear of God’s judgement in the afterlife, becomes a powerful dogma that successfully confirms Faith in God but also provides a powerful disincentive for anarchy in this life.
The belief in an afterlife and a judgemental (but all-loving) God, gives many people a sense of purpose too. What greater purpose than to serve God, live in the way s/he has prescribed and avoid sinning. If you do sin, and the sin is not a very big one, ten Hail Mary’s, two Our Fathers and an act of contrition will sort you out, and eternal happiness will be yours. Our ability to reason forces us at some point in our lives to ask “Why am I here, what is my purpose?“. Pleasing God and being rewarded with eternal life in paradise, provides a pretty good answer to this question.
This isn’t true for everyone though, and it would be wrong to say it was. God as creator simply doesn’t work for some, and they search for answers in other quarters. Very few, including atheists and agnostics, sit back and decide not to believe in anything though!
Typically the Faith argument falls between the Believers and those that believe Science can answer how everything got here and where everything is going to. Science is a very compelling competitor to God, not least because it starts from a different place than religion. It starts by stating upfront, that every theory that has not been definitively and empirically proved could be wrong, no matter how elegant the theory is. It also starts out from the premise that the work of Science is to disprove theories raised, not to prove that they are correct. Believers make no such compromises or allowances.
“So what does Science say about the origins of Creation then Creasy?”
If you are going to ask questions like that you really need to be prepared for the consequences. Are you? Are you ready? Because if you aren’t I don’t want to go to all the hassle of writing it all down!
Ok then, you asked for it….
Science says that everything can be explained if only we could come up with a single unified theory of everything. This single theory would bring together all of the different branches of Science like Relativity, Thermodynamics, Quantum Mechanics etc. to definitively show where everything came from, how the universe came into being, it’s history and how everything will turn out.
“And where are we with that Theory then?”
It’s a bit of a mixed bag to be honest.
On the one hand, Science is pretty good at history and predicting where the universe is heading. For example, Science can explain the history of everything in the Universe from 10-36 seconds after the Big Bang to right now.
In addition, Science does not only explain the theoretical history of the Universe, but it can also point to it in the sky and show us, so we can witness it by looking back in time with our own eyes at the light from the early Universe. In 1965, two chaps called Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias inadvertently stumbled upon the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), because it was interfering with the radio receiver they were building (they subsequently won the Nobel Prize for this discovery). They couldn’t figure out what was going on and at one point, they even got out some brushes and cleaned the receiver because they thought it might be bird poop that was causing the problem.
When that didn’t work, they had to think of something else. They, and subsequent observers, noted that the radiation noise they were picking up was uniform across the entire sky, and in every direction. This discovery provided definitive proof that the Big Bang happened. Had there not been a Big Bang, the temperature of the sky would be different in different parts of the sky because it would not have been causally connected at some point in the past when the Universe was much smaller. General Relativity predicts how the universe should have evolved since 10-36 seconds after the Big Bang and guess what? It has, and to a ridiculous degree.
Extrapolating from that history and continuing to follow the natural implications of General Relativity, Scientist can also predict pretty well where the Universe is heading, and you’re going to need a coat because it’s going to be cold. They call this the Big Freeze. We now know that the Universe will never shrink or contract, it will keep on expanding and everything in the Universe will continue to get farther away from everything else. As it expands, the Universe will “cool” and eventually, all matter in the Universe will be consumed by black holes. These will then evaporate, and as they do Hawking Radiation will be produced (a whole bunch of massless photons). Eventually, the back holes will go “Poof” and disappear too, and all that will be left are the photons in a cold, dark, very uniform Universe.
So, pretty much the whole of science agrees on the history of the Universe from 10-36 seconds after the Big Bang to now and have effectively proven this history by what we can actually see. Science is also agreed on the predicted evolution of the Universe to a cold empty sea of photons as I just described. It’s just that bit at the very “beginning” and the bit right at the very “end”, that is giving everyone the Ick.
“Well of course it is Creasy, but if they would just open their eyes they would see that God is the only thing that could have set it all in motion, and Judgement day will mark the end of everything”
Whoa, steady on there. Way too early to lay down those particular cards matey. I haven’t finished yet.
So, I’ll bet that most of you out there think the Universe started with the Big Bang right?
“NO IT DIDN’T !!!”
I bet you thought that the sequence of events was:
- Singularity (a bit of a mystery where this came from – leaves a bit of a crack in the door for God)
- Big Bang (Start of the Universe but we don’t know what made it go bang – door open a wee bit more)
- Inflation (a period of rapid exponential expansion of the Universe just after the Big Bang)
- Expansion (Long and much slower expansion of the universe just after Inflation ends)
Well, that’s just wrong! Where on earth did you get that idea from. Honestly, I wonder where my tax quid goes sometimes. I might as well tip my tax in the back garden and set fire to it!
The right sequence is :
- Inflation (Not originating from a singularity and it occurs before the Big Bang)
- Big Bang
- Expansion (as per #4 above)
So, no singularity then? Now it seems like a small thing, and perhaps you are thinking that this has changed just recently but no, it’s not a small thing and apparently it changed about 40 years ago and those scatter-brain scientists didn’t bother to tell us! Apparently, the sequence we were all taught at school had a few problems that were incompatible with inflation happening after the Bob Big Bang. Moving Inflation to before the Big Bang solves these issues precisely, and better explains the Universe we currently find ourselves deployed in (for a very easy read about this and the problems solved have a read of Ethan Siegel’s article entitled “What Came First: Inflation or The Big Bang” in Forbes here).
“So is there anything else you haven’t told us that we should know about before we declare God the winner Creasy, because you still haven’t explained the origin of the Universe yet”
Well, there is this one other thing. There’s this other chap called Sir Roger Penrose (Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford), who is also having a bit of a rethink on how everything “started”. Penrose worked with Stephen Hawking on black holes and he’s a Nobel prize winner, so that’s pretty good then.
His latest theory, called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC), postulates that our Universe is just one aeon in an endless succession of aeons/Universes. It’s an alternative theory to the Big Bang without throwing out Big Bang altogether. CCC is consistent with our current view of the History of our Universe in that it stipulates that Inflation happens before the Big Bang, but instead of thinking of the Big Bang as the beginning of everything, it is more useful to think of the Big Bang as marking the end of the previous aeon. The new aeon/universe then expands and evolves directly in line with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity with all matter being consumed by black holes in the latter stages of the aeon. They then evaporate leaving only massless photons behind (Hawking Radiation).
All sounds familiar so far. You still with me?
“Yes Creasy! This is fascinating”
Ok, good! Let me know if you need a fag break…
In this late stage aeon, where we only have an ocean of massless photons, the related concepts of time, distance, big and small will lose all meaning and to all intents and purposes, the Universe “loses track” of how big it is. Due to this lack of “awareness” of its size, Penrose states that Big and Small are effectively the same thing and therefore the conditions for a new Inflationary period exists (rapid expansion of the Universe) which will then be followed by a transition to the slower expansion of the new aeon/universe of the kind we are experiencing today. This transition point is what we recognise, in our classical history of the Universe, as the Big Bang.
Nope, don’t say it. We’re not finished yet!
The Energy required to bring this Inflation and Big Slow Expansion about (much better nomenclature), is provided by the ocean of photons left over from the evaporation of the Black Holes at the end of the previous aeon. Even though photons do not have a mass, they do have energy. Hold onto this thought because it’s important.
Energy doesn’t go anywhere. The law of Conservation of Energy states that in all cases, energy comes from one store and can only transfer to another. Energy cannot be created and it cannot be destroyed. All the energy present at the Big Bang is therefore still present in our Universe today. If there was an aeon previous to our aeon as Penrose suggests, then all of the energy from that aeon would be present at the end of that aeon too.
The following excerpt is from a Cornell undergraduate Sara Slater, who went on to study at Harvard as a post-graduate student and who is now a researcher at the Kavli Institute, MIT. Sara sums up how matter arises naturally from energy during the early stage of the Universe.
“In the beginning, there was not yet any matter. However, there was a lot of energy in the form of light, which comes in discrete packets called photons. When photons have enough energy, they can spontaneously decay into a particle and an antiparticle. (An antiparticle is the exact opposite of the corresponding particle–for example, a proton has charge +e, so an antiproton has charge -e.) This is easily observed today, as gamma rays have enough energy to create measurable electron-antielectron pairs (the antielectron is usually called a positron). It turns out that the photon is just one of a class of particles, called the bosons, that decay in this manner. Many of the bosons around just after the big bang were so energetic that they could decay into much more massive particles such as protons (remember, E=mc2, so to make a particle with a large mass m, you need a boson with a high energy E). The mass in the universe came from such decays.”
HOLY SHIT! There it is! At the end of one of Penrose’s aeons there are only photons, and at the beginning of ours what do we have? Only a whole bunch of photons that haven’t decayed into particle pairs yet, init-dough?
Coincidence? Je ne pense pas mon brave!
“Hang on Creasy, now it’s you who are jumping the gun isn’t it? Is there any evidence…at all…that any of this wish-wash from Penrose could actually be true? All seems a bit far fetched to me”
What, more far fetched than a Big Bang that nobody can explain where the energy to make that Big Bang happen came from unless it was an omnipotent being you mean?
The notion of a cyclic cosmos, with no beginning and no end, that appears to be fully compliant with all the laws of the Universe and that provides the perfect ingredient at the end of an aeon to seed and power the next, sounds pretty intuitive to me.
Of course, a little physical evidence would go a long way toward making me a firm believer though.
Fortunately, Penrose claims that we can actually observe the results of this process, by identifying what he calls Hawking Points in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). He defines a Hawking Point as the signature of the Hawking Radiation caused by the evaporation of Black Holes in the previous aeon. These would appear as very precisely sized circular temperature variations in an otherwise wholly uniform CMB. Penrose and his colleagues published a paper in 2018 which states that he and his colleagues have in fact made such observations of precisely the right size, in the Plank and WMAP satellite data, with a very high degree of confidence (+99.98%). So that’s pretty good then.
You had me at “Hello” Rog!
In the interests of full disclosure and objectivity, despite these observations, many people in the Scientific community have been pretty scornful and an itsy-bit rude about this theory from Penrose, but remember, Science starts out from the point where it tries to disprove a theory. This wouldn’t be the first theory that Scientists peed on, only to discover later it was right in the end. Until there is general acceptance that there is in fact irrefutable evidence to support CCC, then it remains just another theory.
“So it MUST be God then Creasy”
Well, I can see why you might think that. I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that. If all these bright scientists can’t agree and prove that it wasn’t, then why not God? I get it. I don’t believe it, but I get why this becomes an option.
For the life of me though, I just can’t fathom the purpose for an absent God. I don’t understand why he can’t just come to dinner and show us that he is God. I can think of a million things I could ask him/her to do that would help me believe that s/he is God.
“Go on then, walk on water”
“Sink under the water, and stay there for a day without any mechanical breathing apparatus”
“Fly”
“Grow wings and fly”
“Take me to heaven and let me have a look around”
“Let me meet my mum and dad in Heaven”
“Help me find my GoPro in the Red Sea by parting the waters right where I lost it”
“Make the Smyths sound good in my ears”
“Reduce the population to 500m”
I could go on all day
“Make Donald Trump a good person”
“Make Jeremy Corbyn useful”
“If Jenny has three bags of sweets with 12 sweets in each bag, and Bradley has a box of 4 chocolate eclairs, and Sue has a puppy with floppy ears, how many Km have I travelled if I have 23 postage stamps and a flask of coffee?”
“How many fingers am I holding up behind my back”
Any one of these things would constitute incontrovertible proof that God was real, but s/he’s not coming to dinner is s/he because for some reason, having Faith in God is way more important than having Knowledge of God? Because of that, I just don’t know what s/he is for, so instead of “Why not God” I end up with Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.
God can’t just turn up, shoot enough energy into a singularity to create the Universe and then naff off for the next 13.8bn years without a by your leave. And anyway in that theory of the Universe, creation only took less than 10-36 seconds because everything after that doesn’t need a God because science can fully explain everything as a natural process. What did s/he do before that? If Penrose is right, there is no “before that” because we are in an endless cycle of aeons that needed no kick start. If the Big Bangers are right, then what has God done after that? If we are saying that God’s useful purpose lasted between time mark 0 and 10-36 seconds to set everything in motion, then, really?
Don’t we end up with Occam’s Razor? This states that all things being equal the simplest solution is generally the right one. For me, the simplest solution is that we have not yet figured out what natural process took place, but we have a bloody good theory in Conformal Cyclic Cosmology and I believe, that in due course, we will find the evidence needed to convince the rest of science and everyone else that CCC is true.
But that evidence is a pretty important missing piece, isn’t it? Angry atheists, the real anti-Religion anti-Godders like Richard Dawkins or Ricky Gervais, tend to skip on by this “how did everything get kicked off” and simply adopt a more aggressive “people who believe in God are a bit stupid and so are their religions, because there is no proof for a God” argument, without stopping along the way to provide any scientific evidence for how existence came about. They forget that Science is in the middle of a massive cosmic game of Cluedo, and the only thing we know for sure is that it wasn’t Colonel Sanders in the library with a candlestick!
Placing one’s faith in science today, regardless of whether it is the classical view of creation or Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, is no more justifiable than placing one’s faith in God. It’s that simple. It’s also why you should never discuss religion at the dinner table.
Something else that is simple, is that regardless of whether there is a God or not, there is no getting away from the fact that humans are spiritual beings. The spiritual experiences we have throughout our lives tend to be cherished moments. It can be as simple as watching a drop of rain slowly run down the glossy slope of a leaf, or as momentous as lying sheltered in a shallow culvert on a mountain in the middle of a blizzard.
These moments are when I feel connected to something outside of me, to the natural world around me and to the impossibly elegant feats of natural engineering like a spiders weave, or the way trees sometimes lean in toward each other when they should all be leaning in the direction of the prevailing wind. Why do they do that? Are they aware of each other? Do they need the physical and spiritual connection of another just like us? I know that observing these connections between things, emotionally and spiritually connects me to them too. I can’t explain it. I can’t prove it. I only know it’s true.
It would be very easy for me to conclude, as someone who has placed his faith in science to ultimately explain everything, that life is a fortuitous accident and that there is no grand purpose or meaning; things are the way they are because that’s the way they are. However, I have been increasingly drawn to the notion that our purpose is finding the connection to everything in the Universe, starting with the pebble in my shoe.
The Lakota people call this Wakan Tanka which is often translated as Great Spirit, but also as Great Mystery. Wakan Tanka is the sacredness or power in everything. Every grain of sand, every cloud, every star, every river and every being whether that being is a person or a mouse, a flower or a tree. I, and everything else in existence, have borrowed energy from the Universe and that energy flows through everything and between everything. Energy and Mass are equivalent, so every “thing” in existence is ultimately energy. Today that thing exists as matter, and one day as a function of entropy (the state of any system tending towards randomness), the Universe is repaid as it decays and returns to energy. In this sense, we are truly eternal because the law of Conservation of Energy states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Today I exist as Matter. Sometime in the future, what was me will become energy again.
Maybe it is our intuitive understanding of this flux between energy and matter, that gives rise to concepts like the soul, reincarnation, eternal life and spirituality. We have a natural tendency to anthropomorphise: “It can’t be just the way it is, it has to be more like me“. Maybe this tendency pushes us to add personality and intelligence to the energy that flows through and around us, and we call that God?
I have always maintained that there is no upside to atheism. Not much to look forward to really. Hope is what keeps us going, isn’t it? Isn’t it comforting and hopeful to believe that we are eternal and go on after our lives have finished? For me, the knowledge that everything I am, and everything I have ever been will persist, is comforting, but I choose to believe that persistence is not a soul in the religious sense but rather the conversion of the matter that makes up me, into the energy borrowed from the Universe. Everything I was, gets to be part of the future and one day in that future, some of the energy that was me might be lent to another Mozart or another Gandhi or another Georgy Best, on some distant planet in another galaxy, or even in the next aeon.
The worst of all lives is a life without hope. A life without belief in something leads to a life without hope. So, whether you believe in God, Science, the Great Spirit or the leprechaun at the bottom of your garden, nobody can prove you are wrong (but that last one is ridiculous because everyone knows leprechauns live at the end of Rainbows to guard the gold). So I say ignore the sceptics and those who would ridicule your own particular brand of Faith because, in the end, these folks tend to be a bunch of smug pseudo-intellectual wankers when you get right down to it. So, give to other Faiths the same respect you would like from them. Keep an open mind. Keep hope alive and keep the Faith.
