Saturday, August 03, 2024

Who Put the "Bang" in the Shanga Langa Big Bang?

We've stipulated that the Trinity is an eccentric jazz trio -- as opposed to a self-enclosed "in-centric" one. 

Eccentric literally means "outside the circle," and it seems that it is thanks to the very ex-centricity of the immanent Trinity -- its tendency to overflow its own boundaries -- that creation exists. 

Not to say it's an automatic, emanationist deal, rather, that it is simply in the nature of the Good to radiate and communicate itself, if not to us, then someone. The music of creation. Who doesn't hear it? 

Now, to quote the old song,

Who put the "bomp" in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp?
Who put the "ram" in the rama lama ding dong?
Who put the "bop" in the bop shoo bop shoo bop?
Who put the "dip" in the dip da dip da dip?

Come to think of it, who put the bang in the shanga langa big bang? In order to find out if the answer has changed since writing my book, I'm reading one called Science at the Doorstep to God: Science and Reason in Support of God, the Soul, and Life after Death, by Robert Spitzer. 

We can never prove with absolute certitude that God is responsible for the Big Bang. However, we can say that, whatever alias he goes by, our leading suspect is an immaterial personal being with an intellect infinitely superior to ours, so we've put a tail on him and are attempting to tap his line.

As Spitzer says in the Introduction, the unimaginably unlikely fine-tuning of the Big Bang makes "the idea of a transphysical, transuniversal intelligence a most compelling explanation" for these improbable coincidences. 

And when we say "improbable," we mean something like a raccoon typing randomly and coming up with the text of Macbeth on the first try.

So, you're telling me there's a chance atheism makes sense?  

I no longer spend much time thinking about how to harmonize religion and science. Rather, I just try to comprehend the metaphysics of it all, and let the harmony take care of itself. 

What I mean is that some things are true regardless of what science or religion say. 

If this sounds impertinent, even God cannot, for example, violate the principle of non-contradiction, i.e., simultaneously exist and not exist. Indeed, to say I AM WHO I AM is to validate the principle of identity. 

I won't review the whole book, rather, focus on some of the material I overlooked in my own. 

Spitzer puts forth a sophisticated argument for why science not only cannot disprove the existence of God, but actually makes a transcendent intelligence the most probable explanation. But even an unsophisticated argument easily proves this to be the case. No need to rub it in. 

Likewise, there is much argument that the cosmos must have a beginning, and that this beginning is the Big Bang. However, even absent the Big Bang, we can again prove via metaphysics that the cosmos must have an uncaused vertical source. In short, the cosmos cannot explain itself.

One of the most simple but compelling arguments for a beginning is from the law of entropy, meaning that the existence of disorder necessarily increases in the cosmos with the passage of time. Once maximum entropy is reached, no activity can occur, and the cosmos will be functionally dead. In short, "the entropy of the universe must increase until equilibrium is reached."

Unless this turns out to be an open cosmos, more on which as we proceed. But it certainly appears to be open to a transcendent source, clearly so at the beginning, so why not at the end, and at every point in between?

Anyway, let's complete our gedankenexperiment with entropy. If maximum entropy is the inevitable end of the cosmos, then 

it's clear that if the universe had existed for an infinite time, then that equilibrium would have been reached, and if it had been reached, the universe would no longer be able to undergo spontaneous change and would therefore be dead. 

Right. Therefore, the cosmos not only had a beginning, but there is necessarily more order at the beginning, indeed, an inconceivably vaster amount. And this is precisely what we see with all of the fine-tuning packed into the Big Bang.

The low entropy of the universe is so improbable that its occurrence at the Big Bang is virtually impossible.  

I won't bore you with mathematical figures and comparisons. Well, just this one: out of all the possible universes, given the free range of various parameters governing it, the "right answer" for a cosmos capable of sustaining life comes down to one in 10 to the 10th to the 123rd, a number so large that "if it were written out" in 10-point font, "our solar system could not contain it."

There are numerous other comparisons, but they essentially equate to impossible, "which screams out for an explanation, a cause." And Spitzer easily bats down such desperate pseudo-explanations as the multiverse, string theories, or cyclic cosmologies. 

In chapter 3 Spitzer moves on to a more purely metaphysical argument. Lotta ins & outs, but it basically comes down to the reality of an uncaused and unrestricted intellect behind it all, which is the source and ground of the "profoundly intelligible existents filled with information that can give correct answers to the full range of questions." 

In other words, a Talking Universe ordered to our unrestricted desire to know about it, for "observable realities are shot through not only with contingency but also with intelligibility." 

This prior unrestricted intellect is the basis for our "correct answers to all possible questions" herebelow.

Which is as far as I've gotten in the book.

1 comment:

julie said...

the "right answer" for a cosmos capable of sustaining life comes down to one in 10 to the 10th to the 123rd, a number so large that "if it were written out" in 10-point font, "our solar system could not contain it."

The irony being that even if the average atheist grasped the impossibility of a living universe just happening all on its own, they'd immediately pivot to the real issue: that the universe isn't to their personal liking, and since god (or the flying spaghetti monster) is such a jerk they will refuse to acknowledge his legitimacy.

Theme Song

Theme Song