So during a panel at the SETIcon II conference in Santa Clara, California recently, the physicists there got into a debate about whether or not a god or divine power was needed to have created the Big Bang. The answer from most of them was "No." Some said for example that the Big Bang could just have occurred as a result of the laws of physics being there. Which of course then prompts the question, "What created the laws of physics?"
Now the thing that gets me with this entire discussion is, does it not occur to these physicists that maybe this is a question that is literally beyond the ability of humans to answer right now? There is a saying that goes, "Show me someone that has all the answers and I'll show you someone that hasn't asked all the questions." I think that aptly applies with this fundamental question. In truth, BOTH answers I find rather ridiculous personally, which really just means that humans are not capable of answering this question.
Think about it:
We have this MASSIVE, gigantic, super-enormous universe that is SO enormous that we can barely comprehend it. I mean just to go from one end of our galaxy to the other side, at the speed of light, takes at least a hundred thousand years (maybe two hundred thousand). So going at 186,282 miles-per-second, you'd cross the galaxy in a hundred or so thousand years (and that's assuming humans could reach that speed, which technically no physical object can). Of course, there are billions (yes billions) of other galaxies out there, some of them much larger than our own galaxy. Our own galaxy has at least hundreds of billions of stars in it. "Nearby" Andromeda galaxy has an estimated two trillion stars in it. And the galaxies themselves are millions of light-years apart.
Then we have those oddities called black holes, which are singularities. We have the force known as gravity, which we can understand in a quantitative sense, but not necessarilly a qualitative sense. At the sub-atomic level, things also get really, really weird as far as how nature works. Scientists keep searching for a "smallest" particle, and have thus far discovered thousands of tiny particles, but no one has found a tiniest particle yet. We also have the electromagnetic force, which somehow causes a positive force and a negative force to attract one another (again, understood quantitatively, but not really qualitatively, as no one can really picture just "what" that force is that pulls a positive and negative together, they just do).
And we have other aspects of the universe that we do not understand, such as "dark matter." The galaxies, one might think, are held together by the gravity of their stars. For example, that the gravity of our own Sun is intertwined with the gravity of the other stars in our galaxy. And then our own galaxy, as a whole, has gravity, which causes some smaller galaxies to orbit it. But as it turns out, that gravity isn't enough. If all you account for is the gravity of the individual stars in a galaxy, then the galaxy in any computer simulation flies apart. The stars are just too far apart. So the question is then, "What holds the stars in a galaxy together?" Scientists really have no clue, so they call it "dark matter," which they believe is a form of matter that we simply cannot detect at the moment. It's either that or our theory of gravity is actually wrong.
Well I am going way off-track, but I mean the universe is so complex and magnificent in scope, that it sounds rather ridiculous to just say that there was no creator involved in it. All of this can't just have "come about" on its own. There has to have been SOMETHING that created it all, right? But this becomes a very problematic argument, because then one is obliged to ask, "Who created the creator?" Now religious people will just say, "God doesn't need a creator! He's God." Well that may satisfy religious people, but to me it makes no sense. You can't say that the universe is so complex that it needs a creator, but then reason that the creator themself did not also need a creator. Of course, then who created the creator? And who created the creator of the creator, who in turn created the universe?
If you reason that the (obviously) very magnificent creator of the universe did not itself need a creator, well then technically you could just reason that the universe itself did not need any creator. I mean why should the universe have needed a creator but the creator itself not need its own creator as well?
So what we really are seeing here is the limitation of human brain power. Logically, it doesn't make much sense to say that the universe had no creator, but it also doesn't make much sense to say that it did have a creator. So the true answer is actually beyond the reasoning capability of humanity. I was once talking about this with a guy who said that he thought this line of reasoning, that the ability to answer such a question is beyond the capability of the human brain, was a cop-out. But in thinking more about it since then, I think he had it completely backwards. Realizing that this question is not answerable with the current human reasoning is not a cop-out, it's just an acknowledgement of the limitations of human reasoning.
In my opinion, the true cop-out arguments are that the universe just somehow magically appeared out of nowhere, the laws of physics, the matter, everything, it just all somehow magically appeared. That's a cop-out. It does away with answering the hard question of how did everything begin. But the alternative, that a divine power created everything, is also a cop-out. Because then, as said, you must ask who created the divine power. And if you reason that the divine power doesn't need a creator, well then neither did the universe itself, thus eliminating the requirement for a divine power and returning us to square one.
Thus both arguments are rather ridiculous I think. Saying that the question isn't answerable isn't a cop-out, it's just acknowledging that we aren't capable of answering it right now. I think some scientists over-estimate the capability of the human brain. In comparison to all the other animals on the Earth, the human brain is the most developed. But who says that it couldn't be more developed? Just because we can't understand something doesn't mean it won't be understandable if we get more brainpower. For all we know, our trying to answer this question is like a chimpanzee trying to understand calculus or nuclear physics. No matter how smart the chimpanzee, it won't happen, because they lack the requisite brainpower.
Let the human brain evolve up another level, to the point that modern homo sapiens are the equivalent of chimpanzees in comparison to what this next level of evolved brain would be. We might find a lot of these questions and physics issues become a lot more understandable. It thus amazes me though that these physicists don't recognize this. No one can answer with a resounding "Yes" or "No" about whether there was a divine creator regarding the universe.
For all we know, what we think of as "the universe" may not even be the true universe, as our Big Bang might just be the inside of a black hole in some other "universe" somewhere (as the Big Bang was a singularity and a black hole is a singularity, so do black holes create Big Bangs on some other side?).
To read an article on these physicists, go here: LINK
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