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This post continues the discussion of the intersection of science and religion in the area of God.

 

             Science constantly seeks to explain what our senses tell us and to find relationships to extend our knowledge and abilities. Science uses a method of imagining what might cause a phenomena that is sensed then testing then defining a relationship or reason connecting that imagined phenomenon to what can actually be sensed, then testing the relationship on things that can be sensed to determine the accuracy or validity of the relationship. However, there is a limit to this method as what cannot be imagined in some reliable manner cannot be tested. The creation of the universe we inhabit lies at this limit. While our existence clearly indicates some sort of beginning^[1], there simply is nothing available to our senses which could form the basis of a reasonable extension (imagination) of what might have occurred before the universe as we know it came into existence.  It is interesting to observe that many theories regarding the universe break down because the theorists do not recognize that there might be something that existed before our universe as we know it existed. Merely because we cannot sense, or do not have the ability to sense, something that might have existed prior to the universe as we know it existed does not mean that nothing existed prior to the universe as we know it existed. It is egocentric to believe that nothing existed, or exists, merely because we humans do not have the ability to sense what was or is there. We should not be so self-centered as to believe that simply because we do not or cannot know of something that it does not exist. We must accept the possibility that there are things in the universe that we do not, and perhaps cannot, know.

 

 

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The next post continues the discussion of the intersection of science and religion in the area of God.

 

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^[1]   With regard to the “beginning” of the universe, in their book “The Grand Design,” Hawking and Mlodinow discuss the issue of the beginning of time by using the concept of curved space:

The issue of the beginning of time is a bit like the issue of the edge of the world. When people thought the world was flat, one might have wondered whether the sea poured over its edge. This has been tested experimentally: One can go around the world and not fall off. The problem of what happens at the edge of the world was solved when people realized that the world was not a flat plate, but a curved surface. Time, however, seemed to be like a model railway track. If it had a beginning, there would have to have been someone (i.e., God) to set the trains going. Although Einstein’s general theory of relativity unified time and space as space-time and involved a certain mixing of space and time, time was still different from space, and either had a beginning and an end or else went on forever. However, once we add the effects of quantum theory to the theory of relativity, in extreme cases warpage can occur to such a great extent that time behaves like another dimension of space.

 

The authors then use this analysis to conclude:

 

In the early universe-when the universe was small enough to be governed by both general relativity and quantum theory-there were effectively four dimensions of space and none of time. That means that when we speak of the “beginning” of the universe, we are skirting the subtle issue that as we look backward toward the very early universe, time as we know it does not exist! We must accept that our usual ideas of space and time do not apply to the very early universe. That is beyond our experience, but not beyond our imagination, or our mathematics. If in the early universe all four dimensions behave like space, what happens to the beginning of time?

 

The realization that time can behave like another direction of space means one can get rid of the problem of time having a beginning, in a similar way in which we got rid of the edge of the world. Suppose the beginning of the universe was like the South Pole on earth, with degrees of latitude playing the role of time. As one moves north, the circles of constant latitude, representing the size of the universe, would expand. The universe would start as a point at the South Pole, but the South Pole is much like any other point. To ask what happened before the beginning of the universe would become a meaningless question, because there is nothing south of the South Pole. In this picture space-time has no boundary-the same laws of nature hold at the South Pole as in other places. In an analogous manner, when one combines the general theory of relativity with quantum theory, the question of what happened before the beginning of the universe is rendered meaningless. The idea that histories should all have closed surfaces without boundary is called the no-boundary condition.

 

Over the centuries many, including Aristotle, believed that the universe must have always existed in order to avoid the issue of how it was set up. Others believed the universe had a beginning, and used it as an argument for the existence of God. The realization that time behaves like space presents a new alternative. It removes the age-old objection to the universe having a beginning, but also means that the beginning of the universe is governed by laws of science and doesn’t need to be set in motion by some god.

However, merely because our concept of time can be viewed as being irrelevant, does not per se mean that the universe occurred spontaneously out of nothing. Thus, there might be something occurring, just not in our concept of time.

With further regard to the creation of the universe, using principles of quantum physics, Hawking and Mlodinow conclude that the universe can be self creating. That is something can be created out of nothing; the universe self-created out of nothing. Their reasoning includes a requirement of a law of nature is that energy of an isolated body surrounded by empty space be positive, that is work has been done to assemble the body. Negative energy would have to be done to separate that body, and for small bodies in space, the negative energy balances the positive energy. Using this concept, and the observation that black holes have positive energy, Hawking and Mlodinow conclude that bodies such as stars or black holes cannot just appear out of nothing. However, when viewed on a universal scale rather than on an individual system scale, whole universes can. The next step in their argument is that because gravity shapes space and time, gravity allows space-time to be locally stable but globally unstable and using the scale of the entire universe, the positive energy of matter can be balanced by the negative gravitational energy and thus there is no restriction on the creation of the universe when it is viewed as a whole. Furthermore, since at such an instant, time has no meaning, thus, these authors conclude “Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing…Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing,…”

However, Hawking and Mlodinow do not answer the question that is immediately presented: “where did the gravity come from?”

See, also, “Fifty Shades of Nothing” by Edward Feser, Mosaic Magazine of New York, NY, July 24, 2013.

It should be observed that the Hawking/Mlodinow model of the universe is consistent with the universe of universes model used in this essay as the universe inhabited by humans and described in Genesis is but one universe of an untold number of universes. Each of these universes could self-create as suggested by Hawking/Mlodinow and still be within the universe of universes concept of this essay. If the Hawking/Mlodinow model is used, the concept proposed in this essay that several universes were tried before the present one became available is especially pertinent as the Hawking/Mlodinow model uses the anthropic approach of using the present state as the starting point and analyzing backwards to determine what conditions must be present at the beginning to result in our present state. The Hawking/Mlodinow model of the universe having all possible beginnings with only one being the most probable also complies with the approach used in this essay.

Yet another approach to the problem was suggested by Hans Reichenbach in his book The Rise of Scientific Philosophy published by the University of California Press (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951) pages 203-214. Reichenbach suggests that instead of pushing the date of the initial stage of our universe back, if a formula could be devised which determines for every state a preceding state and place this formulation into the concept of an expanding universe, the origin of our universe could be comprehended: “The question of the origin of the universe would then be answered in the same way as a question of the smallest number: the formula of the expansion would say that there is no origin of the universe but that there is an infinite series of calculable states ordered in time.” The time before and after this event is disregarded.

Yet other ways of envisioning the origin of our universe are also outlined in Reichenbach’s book and include: a small enclosed universe filled by a glowing gas which has a disturbance that stars and expansion which, after a length of time, reaches equilibrium but which is dead because of thermodynamic degradation whereby small disturbances cannot start any major change; and a solution that envisions time as running in first one direction and then reversing and running in the opposite direction. The point where time reverses itself would not be a sharp demarcation but would correspond to the point we identify as the beginning of our universe.

There is still another theory that suggests our universe was created out of nothing. This is the so-called Quantum foam creation theory. This theory holds that the “nothing” of the vacuum of space actually consists of subatomic spacetime turbulence at extremely small distances measurable at Planck scale. The Planck length is the length at which the structure of spacetime is dominated by quantum gravity. At this scale, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle allows energy to briefly decay into particles and antiparticles, thereby producing “something” from “nothing”. A question is raised as to where the subatomic particles and subatomic particles come from.

Lawrence M. Krass in his book “A Universe from Nothing,” like Hawking and Mlodinow in their book, uses quantum gravity to explain how a universe can spontaneously appear from nothing and still contain matter so long as the total energy in the universe is zero. Therefore, this theory has the same question as the Hawking Mlodinow theory of where did the gravity come from?

As can be seen, these theories work extremely well after the beginning to predict, confirm or refute conclusions. As discussed above, science works when it has something to sense, it is where things cannot be sensed, such as before the formation of our universe where and when it is totally impossible for senses to be applied to test anything, that science breaks down and moves into the realm of “faith.”

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