Doug's Darkworld

One of the side effects of trying to write thought provoking blog posts is that often they provoke a lot of thoughts, expressed in the form of comments. And unfortunately I often do not or cannot take the time to address them all properly. Hell, I could write a book on my responses to the comments to the Dyatlov Pass Incident alone, and if someone offers me a pile of money,  maybe I will. Anyhow, I digress.

So, someone left this comment on my “What is Outside the Universe” post:

“Perhaps our existence is only the thinking of another.
Perhaps our dimensions being time, space, sound, gravity, light or energy, mass and speed or rate of expansion are the only ones the Creator chooses to contemplate. On the other hand,
If you go back to the idea that existing is a reality painted on a canvas that could be a variety of shapes including a sphere in or outside a parabola and flat or undulating surface that meets itself but always our existence is someplace. bigger, smaller but where?
I think that we are in the imagination of the Grand thinker and where is He? or She or It. Are we being crapped on a stump, floating in beer or piss or in a soap bubble. Will we ever be able to see or know?”

Well, um, yes. That’s the whole point I am trying to make. 400 years ago the idea that science could explain and explore the fundamental nature of reality was laughable. 50 years ago the idea that science could understand the nature and origin of the Big Bang was science fiction. Today scientists are using scientific instruments to peer outside our universe and see what is actually going on. And amazingly enough, what they are seeing is similar to what some philosophers have been saying all long. Our entire universe is a tiny fleck of foam on a storm tossed sea that extends infinitely in all directions, a sea that has been storming forever and will be storming forever.

And this sea contains energy such that we can’t comprehend it. Our entire universe was but a tiny speck of this underlying reality, that’s how “dense” the energy is in the underlying reality “outside” our universe. And our universe is one of an infinite number of universes, in the past and it the future. (Although “past” and “future” have very little meaning outside our universe.) I’m having trouble grasping the idea of infinite myself, but it means that for every decision point in my life, there is a universe where I made a different decision. Doesn’t it? And when one looks about at all the decision points in people’s lives, that’s a lot of universes. Infinite is more than a lot though, right?

The point I am making is that our universe doesn’t appear to have been created by God, it appears to have been a natural consequence of events in the underlying reality. A reality so vast and energetic it has created and will create an infinite number of universes. And science is on the verge of proving this. And no God or other supernatural being is needed to explain any of this. I mean, if God exists, he created a reality that has infinite energy and will create all possible universes and has always been here and always will be here. Clever trick, but there’s no longer anything to explain. “Reality contains infinite energy, exists forever, and creates all possibilities” pretty much covers all possible contingencies.

It may sound mean, but claiming a God is required to explain reality and/or the Big Bang is now logically akin to saying God is required to explain the sunrise. Scientists are probing the nature of reality itself and the origin of our universe, the very same way they learned about the Earth orbiting the Sun and everything since, by logical application of the scientific method and using increasingly sophisticated scientific instruments. Some evidence for this and the existence of other universes is illustrated above. Some cosmologists have detected patterns in the CMB radiation that they claim may be “bruises” caused when our universe impacted other “nearby” universes before the Big Bang. This particular line of inquiry may may not pan out, but it’s only one of many ways scientists are now exploring the very fabric of reality.

We are at a historical junction akin to when Galileo showed the Pope that Jupiter has moons. Some people started to understand it then, that’s one of the reasons they called the Renaissance the “Age of Reason.” And we are coming to the inevitable end of the journey Galileo started with his little telescope. Humans invented God to explain things we couldn’t understand. Well, scientists have now shown that there isn’t anything left that requires a supernatural being to explain. I can’t prove there’s no God, but when someone like the esteemed commenter above says “We can never ultimately know whether we are foam in an infinite  stormy sea or bubbles in an infinite glass of beer,” no disrespect intended, but they are talking metaphysics, not cosmology or science.

As far as reality goes, the reality we live in, there is no God. That appears to be a scientific fact now, whether people like it or not.

(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit and is central to illustrating the post. Credit and Copyright: Feeny et. al.  And then of course there’s the whole situation where as soon as people came up with a hypothetical supernatural being to explain why the sun shines and the grass grows, some people realized this was a great avenue to manipulate other people, but that’s a topic for another day.)