Greater than the Creator?

In the beginning there was nothing. From nothing emerged a singularity, a “Big Bang” between 10-20 billion years ago. “Its explosive birth was accompanied by a flash of intense heat. During the first split second, the basic physical forces and fundamental particles of matter emerged. By the time that one second had elapsed, the essential materials of the cosmos had already formed. Space was everywhere filled with a soup of subatomic particles – protons, neutrons, and electrons – bathed in radiation at a temperature of ten billion degrees. The cosmic material was spread through space with almost perfect uniformity. The temperature was the same everywhere. Matter, stripped down to its basic constituents by the fierce heat, was in a state of extraordinary simplicity. As the universe expanded from its uniform primeval state, it cooled. Atoms began to form, paving the way for chemistry and the formation of solid, physical objects. Matter was able to aggregate into vast amorphous structures – the seeds of today’s galaxies.”

So states theoretical physicist Paul Davies in the forward in to his intriguing book, The Fifth Miracle – which has absolutely nothing to do with miracles (apparently he doesn’t believe in them) and everything to do with scientific theorizing about the origins of life on earth. “Many wonderful phenomena have emerged in the universe since that time: monstrous black holes weighing as much as a billion suns that eat stars and spew forth jets of gas; neutron stars spinning a thousand times a second, their material particles so elusive that they could penetrate light-years of solid lead; ghostly gravitational waves whose fleeting passage leaves no discernible imprint at all. Yet, amazing though these things may be, the phenomenon of life is more remarkable than all of them put together.”

Davies descriptive imagery instills in me awe…and more questions…about the formation of the universe and the creation and development of life and human consciousness on planet earth. Davies spends his book discussing different scenarios of how life may have come to be, and the deeper he probes the more incredulous I found that life could ever have arisen and evolved in the first place. The most fundamental question is how the phenomena of a singularity could have occurred when ‘in the beginning’ there was nothing: therefore no matter. However, assuming it did and that the universe formed in a similar manner as described above, how is it that matter, stripped into its fundamental parts and spread throughout space in near uniformity, came to differentiate itself and express different characteristics and properties when it cooled to be able to aggregate together? There are recently published books by physicists on precisely getting a universe from nothing - and we can go down all kinds of rabbit holes getting there - but for the sake of this entry I’m taking at face value that somehow we did and that the aggregation of matter lead to the cosmic framework we know today: complete with planets, neutron stars, black holes, galaxies, and black matter and black energy…whatever they are. Somehow, someway, billions of years after the universe formed, life took hold on planet earth. Paul Davies discusses several ideas how this might have taken place in his book, but I’m going to skip over billions of years and the theorizing of how inert, non-organic matter could have possibly become living, organic matter and reflect a little bit on the end result.

Natural selection tells us that “a long series of meaningless, directionless accidents” (as Davies puts it) - the result of random mutations - caused the most basic and simple of biological organisms to evolve over hundreds of millions of years into complex, self-aware beings capable of reflecting on their own creation. To say this is astounding would be the understatement of time immemorial. And man, a dazed and confused newcomer to cosmic events, seeks to both place himself in nature and outside it. On the one hand, man insists that he is little different than the myriad of creatures around him, having evolved alongside them, but on the other hand seems to think that he is the culmination of cosmological events. Man has developed mathematics and scientific inquiry to explain both natural phenomena on his home world as well as that of the entire universe. He has successfully left the confines of his home and walked upon his planet’s satellite. And in his success and conceit he has boasted that God is dead.

Man is made of nothing more than cosmic dust, but cosmic dust that - as the eons marched on - formed a particular kind of matter that somehow came to organize itself into a being with intelligence that is able to unravel the mysteries of his own existence. So man becomes greater than the creator, because he is able to dissect, label, and name the parts of the creator. He is able to identify, measure, and predict the phenomena of the creator. But can the created truly understand and explain the creator? Whether the creator is represented today by the cold, impersonal, and hostile environment of mostly empty space, or a deity that transcends space and time the question remains: can a created being ever truly understand the power that caused its creation? Man will, and should, continue to search to understand his creator. But I believe the creator will necessarily always remain largely unknown.

One would think that with the scientific community’s strong embrace of Big Bang cosmology that they would believe that the possibility of life arising in a similar manner elsewhere in the universe would be slim indeed. One would be wrong. As Davies points out in his final chapter, “A Bio-Friendly Universe?”, there are many scientists at NASA and elsewhere - whose views are propagated by a like-minded media - who believe that adding the right concoction of water, amino acids and a few other substances and simmering for a few million years will necessarily produce life. But the critics point out that all the factors that went into the simple life form that we all allegedly evolved from are astounding. “The sheer intricacy of life bespeaks a freakish concatenation of events, unique in the cosmos” and “no amount of water…even if laced with fancy chemicals, will come alive on cue. Earth life must therefore be a fluke of astronomical improbability.”

If we do indeed live in a bio-friendly universe, then this means that its laws are “cunningly contrived to coax life into being against the raw odds; that the mathematical principles of physics, in their elegant simplicity, somehow know in advance about life and its vast complexity.” In short, “It means that the laws of the universe have engineered their own comprehension.”

This comes awfully close to saying that there is an end, or goal, in nature. But having a purpose in nature leads us back 3000 years ago to Aristotle and his doctrine of teleology, or goal directedness. And this, to scientists, is anathema because it ultimately winds it way to a belief in an unmoved mover and uncaused cause: God.   

 To be consistent would mean for these scientists to whole-heartedly embrace the notion that we are indeed all alone in the universe. So why don’t they? Perhaps this thought is subconsciously too terrifying to fully accept because of the natural consequences of their atheism: being completely alone, in a hostile universe, and living a life devoid of meaning. If I may, I’d like to give them some advice:

Fake it.

Pretend that life has meaning. Those who find purpose and have goals in life are happier and more fulfilled than people who go about their lives aimlessly. If this is true – and all evidence indicates it is – then is man’s search for meaning hardwired within him by his creator? If it is not true, then why do we get out of bed in the morning? What is the point in continuing to exist just a little while longer?    

The fact is that most people do believe that life has meaning: whether one believes in God or not. The difference is that most atheists haven’t reflected on why. NASA scientists get out of bed so they can continue their quest to find alien life in the universe: just as if they were innately directed to do so. Biologists like Richard Dawkins, physicists like Laurence Krause, and other so-called new atheists are motivated by denouncing a supreme being they claim they don’t believe in. But they are goal oriented. However, don’t expect them to thank Aristotle anytime soon.