Monday, 09 May 2011

• A Scientific View on Creation & the Beginning of the Universe

  Those of you who know me will know that I am scientifically inquisitive, and while I prefer empirical evidence above all other evidence, sometimes philosophy and logic is the way to go in things that cannot be empirically proven.

  A common argument against creation was established by the following experiment: a software engineer creates a "super-program," running on some of the world's most powerful super-computers, that is capable of spawning its own child programs and eventually those child programs, via machine learning algorithms (which, for skeptics here, is a very real field in engineering), will eventually learn how to create their own child programs as well.

  It is then defined that this entire system can be considered its own digital universe, and thus the engineer was the creator of it. The argument is as follows: then who created the creator?

  However, modern mathematics state that theoretically, our universe is, ultimately, finite. (I will not explain why; ask a PhD for the math). This implies the universe is either cyclical (which is preposterous) or there has to be a point of origin.

  First, why it cannot be cyclical: consider the basic concept of matter. We can continue to break down matter into its fundamental components (starting at the atom, and then into increasingly more basic subatomic particles), but you can never arrive again at the first point; you cannot derive an atom again from a lepton, for example. Physical, chemical, and biological complexity is linear, or for better wording unidirectional (at least, my head tells me that.)

  So now the point of origin - the fundamental problem with asking "then who created the creator?" is that it is confined by our perception of the dimension of time. it is saying something must have come "before", and "before that", and "even before that", etc.

  Our human understanding and perception of time is limited by our inability to actually grasp its "dimension." In fact, the linear passing of time is nothing more than a fabrication of the human mind; we just define time to "pass." Although the rules on this planet, as understood by us, are governed by unidirectional and linear time, it does not mean that the actual dimension of time resides in "one quadrant", per se. We do not know that for sure, of course, and perhaps our technology will advance so much in the future that we can actually time travel (again, mathematically possible but limited by our skills).

  But who says time only goes "forward" and "back"? What about "up" or "down" (to get really crazy and creative here, if time went "up" consider the warping of 3-space and whatever other dimensions on a stationary point in the time dimension)? Again, a definition we apply to the unknown. Not that it is wrong to do that, but it definitely does not rule out a Creator as the point of origin - if anything it points towards it.

  Just a brain-dump on a Monday morning ... feedback and criticism much appreciated.

   

  Do you understand and agree/disagree with the author's description of a finite universe and thus the possibility of a creator? Would such a creator necessarily be God? If you're familiar with Stephen Hawkings recent assertions of spontaneous generation of the universe, how do you think that fits in?

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