Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Journey to Belief (part 3)
(part 2)
After an experience that I may relate someday, I found myself questioning again. My personal "pascal's wager" was all well and good, but it what about embracing truth? Had I really made the right choice, the choice to believe in God? So I crawled back through everything I knew, and I found yet again that black box of science: the beginnings of the universe.
It's a troublesome place, really, a gap filled with anthropic principles, quantum fluxuations, spaghetti monsters, and other philosophical bogeymen. And that is the problem, really. There is no evidence for anything before 10−33 seconds had passed. That is an incomprehsibly short time for us mortals, but it is still not the instant of coming into being.
To imagine that this instance happened one single time, with all the special qualities of the universe that make intelligence possible seems so beyond probability as to be ridiculous. The odds are worse than winning any lottery. It makes us special in a way that, philosophically, leaves a bad taste in our mouths after Galileo and Copernicus. And it screams intelligent intervention.
The other option is to imagine it has happened enough times for a universe like ours to occur. And if it has happened that many times, then there is probably more than one universe in which some form of complexity has occurred that resulted in intelligent information processing. Can we impose a limit on the number of universes created? Because if we can't, then it is infinite, such that even the that miniscule fraction of universes that contain intelligence is infinite. And if that is so, the deity must have evolved.
But what of the nature of that deity?
To be continued ¶ 11:39 PM
(part 2)
After an experience that I may relate someday, I found myself questioning again. My personal "pascal's wager" was all well and good, but it what about embracing truth? Had I really made the right choice, the choice to believe in God? So I crawled back through everything I knew, and I found yet again that black box of science: the beginnings of the universe.
It's a troublesome place, really, a gap filled with anthropic principles, quantum fluxuations, spaghetti monsters, and other philosophical bogeymen. And that is the problem, really. There is no evidence for anything before 10−33 seconds had passed. That is an incomprehsibly short time for us mortals, but it is still not the instant of coming into being.
To imagine that this instance happened one single time, with all the special qualities of the universe that make intelligence possible seems so beyond probability as to be ridiculous. The odds are worse than winning any lottery. It makes us special in a way that, philosophically, leaves a bad taste in our mouths after Galileo and Copernicus. And it screams intelligent intervention.
The other option is to imagine it has happened enough times for a universe like ours to occur. And if it has happened that many times, then there is probably more than one universe in which some form of complexity has occurred that resulted in intelligent information processing. Can we impose a limit on the number of universes created? Because if we can't, then it is infinite, such that even the that miniscule fraction of universes that contain intelligence is infinite. And if that is so, the deity must have evolved.
But what of the nature of that deity?
To be continued ¶ 11:39 PM
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Hmm-I'm definitely interested as to where you are going with this next part, because I see a fundamental difference in philosphy regarding belief, faith if you will, that the Big Bang could have been a singular event.
As I see the world, random events occur daily. Many might say that these random events are the microinterventions of a diety because there is no obvious explanation. Others see random, seemingly unexplainable, events as complexities of the world not yet identified.
Greeks made a god for the rainbow because they did not have an explanation. Rainbows are now understood--no need for a diety on that one.
I rarely ponder exactly how the universe began. Yet, in an odd way, I believe that one day humans will figure it out.
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As I see the world, random events occur daily. Many might say that these random events are the microinterventions of a diety because there is no obvious explanation. Others see random, seemingly unexplainable, events as complexities of the world not yet identified.
Greeks made a god for the rainbow because they did not have an explanation. Rainbows are now understood--no need for a diety on that one.
I rarely ponder exactly how the universe began. Yet, in an odd way, I believe that one day humans will figure it out.
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