There aren't many things I'm sure about. But I am sure
I exist and that I'm sitting at a typewriter. You and the rest of the universe may be figments of my useful imagination, just like the dreams I enjoy or endure every night. But as a practical matter it makes more sense to assume
you exist and that you can think and speculate about the universe just like me. And in the last few days I've been speculating more than usual, firstly because of a book by a physicist, Paul Davies, which carries the notably
arrogant title "The Mind of God", and secondly because of Russian astronomers, Linde and Molin, who suggest that our own universe may be one of many universes being formed and evolving or collapsing.
Paul
Davies, who is a prolific writer and has been Professor of Physics at Newcastle-on-Tyne and now is such at Adelaide in Australia, has chosen for the dust-jacket of his book a detail from William Blake's famous painting
"Elohim Creating Adam". This shows God at work, bur with a wild hairstyle and an extremely worried expression. I would never trust a surgeon who looked like that, and Adam himself gives every sign of lack of
confidence in the whole procedure. I certainly cannot believe I was made in that image of God.
Davies points out that we expect the universe to be shaped and governed by reason and logic and laws, and that the success which
science has achieved is good evidence that this is so. But then he weakens his case by emphasising difficulties which logic can lead us into, such as the sentence "This statement is false." Obviously, if that statement is
true then it is is false, and if false then it is true. Many such sentences can be constructed. It is no big deal. They are merely trivial tricks which language can play, not statements about anything. Forget them.
All
physicists (and a lot of ordinary people) know about Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty, about Einstein's gravity which makes space curved, about the new theories of chaos, even about quantum chromodynamics, but all these
absurd truths, so difficult to visualise, have been reached by using reason and confirmed by experiment and by making successful predictions. All of them may be changed tomorrow by new and better theories.
In conspicuous contrast
are the unchangeable revelations of religion, reached by the use of other human faculties, not confirmable by experiment and which, when making prophecies (such as the End of the World next week) have been rather
unsuccesful.
For God to have (or even to be) a mind God must exist, and this has always been a bit difficult to prove. Davies struggles with the climbing crowd on the steep cliff, hanging on to handhold words like
Necessary, Contingent, Immanent, deliberate Creation, Deism, Theism and Pantheism. Any priest should be able to take you on a conducted climb, whether up the Christian cliff, the nearby Islamic mountain or the densely God-populated
Hindu pilgrimage. You should ask him about the fashionable idea of the di-polar nature of God, in which He is necessary in His nature but contingent in his actions in the world (recently enlarged to the universe).
But, alas,
like so many before him, Davies doesn't reach much of a destination, concluding merely that, as an aesthetic decision, he prefers to believe in God rather than to disbelieve. Scarcely a clarion call. If my own aesthetic decision
goes the other way should I then deserve an eternity of torture?
So now we come to the Russian astronomers. But before I bring them onto the page perhaps I should mention the cosmological choice we now face. Whether to believe in
a universe which continues to expand as it is doing now until it ends up in the distant recesses of space, cold, dispersed and dead, or the slightly more cheerful alternative in which it expands until gravity stops the
expansion and drags us all together again into an ultimate black hole and another explosive big bang to start off the next universe. It seems, unfortunately, that to stop the expansion we need more matter around the place than we
can find at the moment.
It appears that no information could pass through the black hole/big bang stage, and that the next universe might not even have the same rules as our present universe enjoys, rules that, whatever
you may think about God, certainly have allowed you and me to exist and even speculate about the universe. A scholarly book on this very subject is The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, by XXXXXX
Already we know that this
universe is well-provided with black holes, into which lots and lots of stars are falling to be extinguished and to vanish, like a fly in the mouth of a frog, as their matter is compressed to a singularity of immense mass and no
dimension.
Our Russian friends suggest that these black holes may, even now, be starting off new universes in their dual capacities of black hole/big bang. Universes in space-times which we could never observe. All we could
ever observe would be the disappearance of the black hole, and those effects which surround it, leaving empty space in our neighbourhood.
Once again these stripling universes might have different physical rules, some of
them pretty useless, so that the universe would soon collapse from a gravity too strong, or expand so fast that there would be not enough time to form stars or people. Only universes which happened to have rules resembling ours
would develop in an interesting manner, with life and reproduction, and evolution and language and theology and science and theories about the universe.
Maybe our own splendid universe was once a black hole in another
mother-universe which we can no longer observe. Maybe, like the many living creatures we do observe, universes themselves may be evolving, with survival of the fittest universes and quick death for those universes which don't have
good laws.
Whatever would God be doing in that scenario? All those universes to look after, as well as the chore of having to remember every occasion when I didn't actually speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but
the truth. And the same for every one of the five thousand million other people on this beautiful and interesting planet.
Poor Fellow! I think it would be a kindness to put Him down. No weapon is needed.
