In the beginning there were myths and stories, of how the world was
molded by some all-powerful beings. Out
of these myths came formal religions that taught strict interpretations of how
it all began. Finally, as the world
entered into the age of science and rational thought, highly technical and
evidence-based theories predicted how the universe might have began from a
single point. Though the answers we’ve
come up with may vary greatly, what’s for certain is that humans have always
felt the need to answer this particular existential question: How did
everything begin? It’s so easy to
imagine the story of the universe like a book or a movie. There has to be a particular beginning, as
well as an underlying purpose or narrative.
But real answers may require us to think beyond our normal conceptions
of what a story can be to figure out the story of the universe.
Let’s consider. Science
has been extremely valuable in explaining the laws of nature and our place in
the universe. It’s based on rational
thought and empirical evidence, so it’s typically the ideal way of going about
figuring out why things are the way they are.
The conventional and mostly undisputed belief among scientists these
days is that the universe as we know it began with a sudden expansion known as
the big bang. This makes sense because
the universe has been observed to be expanding, so logically at some time this
began from a single point. But this
doesn’t really answer the
question. If the universe began with an
expansion that produced all matter, energy, space, and time, then what existed
before this event that allowed it to take place? If there existed complete nothingness, then
this creates a paradox, because how can something be produced from absolutely
nothing? And if there was some existing
framework that allowed the big bang to take place, then the universe didn’t
really begin with the big bang. In other
words, science, at least for now, is limited in understanding how the universe
began.
To get closer to the
answer we seek, we must turn to the realm of philosophy, which, though less
reliant on empirical evidence, still depends on rationality and logic. One philosopher that offers an important
perspective on the matter is 17th century thinker Baruch
Spinoza. Spinoza offered a revolutionary
view of what to him was God. He proposed
that God was not so much a human-like being, but rather the totality of
everything in existence. Everything that
exists exists within God, and, importantly, nothing can exist outside of God (because
how could something exist that’s not already included in “everything in existence”?). If we simply think of Spinoza’s God as the
idea of “nature”, then this seems like an obvious observation. But what this idea also implies is that what exists
in nature, will always be what exists in nature; nothing new can come in and
nothing can leave (Nadler). Much like
Greek philosopher Parmenides’ doctrine the “being is one” (Mcdermott 62), the
universe is a set structure with no real change, other than the movement of
things within it. This also, of course,
leads to the conclusion that the universe is completely deterministic, as
everything is already set out in a way that, by the laws of cause and effect,
will continue without propensity for new possibilities to arise. Our concept of “free will” is then simply an
illusion (Nadler). To me, this all seems
perfectly logical.
So now we can apply
these rules to some beginning of the universe scenarios. Whether it was a big bang or the hand of God
or anything else of that nature that “created” the universe as we know it is in
fact irrelevant. First, if we consider
the idea that absolutely nothing
existed before this creation event, then this could not occur, because this
would require some real change – from nothing to something. Second, perhaps time did not exist before the
creation event, and the event simply set time in motion. This again would not make sense, because the
universe could not go from a completely static state to one where movement
occurs within it – that again would be a real change. So we’re left with one clear option: that our
universe that exists now has always existed in the same way, and there was no beginning. This isn’t to say that the big bang didn’t
occur, as it seems to have in all rationality, but before it there must have
been a sort of structure already in place that could cause it. And, even if time didn’t exist at that point
in the same sense that it does now, the universe had to be non-static in some way,
in which one thing could lead to another.
The other option, as some of modern physics seems to suggest, is that “time”
itself is an illusion, functioning more like another dimension of space, and
the universe is completely static, in
which case a beginning of the universe would not make any sense at all.
These conclusions may
not be exactly what Spinoza would have predicted, however his principles do
lend to my personal deduction that the universe could not have had a true beginning. But who am I to make this grand proposition? Even
as I sit here explaining this theory, the major paradox of why the universe even
exists at all, rather than not existing, seems to make just as little sense as
a universe beginning from nothing.
Ultimately, I’m limited by my all too simplistic human brain, and though
I may use logic and rationality to predict what truths seem most likely, I know
I can never fully understand the mysteries that have intrigued people for
thousands of years.
Works Cited
McDermott, John J. A Cultural Introduction to Philosophy.
New York: Knopf, 1985. Print.
Merriam-Webster.
Merriam-Webster. Web. 6 Nov. 2015.
Nadler, Steven. "Baruch Spinoza." The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. N.p., 2013. Web. Nov.-Dec. 2015.
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