080 - Is There a God? - Creation, Becoming, and the Fate of the Universe

"Creation ex nihlilo (creation out of nothing) or "Ex nihilo nihil fit" (from nothing comes from nothing)?

The notion of a creator God is fundamental to Western religions.  But is it true?  The opening of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, studied so long and hard by the Kabbalists suggests so, and the Big Bang theory gave reason for many to believe the cosmological argument for God (everything that began to exist has a cause). But the newest scientific data suggests something preceded the Big Bang.  And in our secular age, many prefer to follow the science, rightly so.

Planet Earth, the sun, our galaxy, and the universe itself, like all of us, is headed for the graveyard.  But cycles of nature appear everywhere. Could this also be true of the universe itself?  Does the universe resurrect? This episode explores the question in detail.  

Transcript

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Hello. I'm Gregory Nowak. This is the cunning of Geist episode 80. Welcome back. The purpose of this podcast is to explore philosophy psychology and modern science with an emphasis on what these disciplines can tell us regarding building a better life for ourselves and others. And this episode, I will be exploring the timeless question of whether or not there is a God. Now you don't hear much about God these days in our highly secularized world. And I'm old enough to remember the famous time magazine cover of 1966. Asking the question is God dead. It created quite a stir. We even discussed it in some of my classes at the time. But just around this same time in the 1960s, the new age moving began to flourish and to focus more on spirit and Eastern religions that did not rely as much on traditional Western notions of God, the father, the creator, et cetera. You remember the Beatles went to visit the Maharishi. In India. And John Lennon famously said that the Beatles were more popular than God. And even today, and non-Orthodox denominations in many churches and synagogues, God is not the major focus. In most reformed Jewish temples to a large degree. And also many conservative. Jewish. Denominations, the focus is on living a better life here and not on any heavenly world, a person. And also, this is true in Protestant Christianity. Same, same thing can be said. Where the life of Jesus is held up as an example of how to be a better person. And there's not much dogma about heaven or abstract notions of God. And I can't really speak. To Islam, but I have read that studies have shown that a majority of Muslims around the world do hold more moderate views on many issues. And of course you have the Eastern religions, whichever, totally different conception of our nature here. Then these mean Western religions. Now of course, a major feature of these religions over the centuries has been that there is a creator. God. That started the whole thing. And what I'm going to be questioning here is whether this is true. Whether there was some entity that created the universe and all that's in it. And even in our scientific age where we know so much about the beginnings and, can speculate about the eventual death of the universe, the notion of a creator, God still persists. Although it's true. That it's much. To a much less extent than in previous centuries. It even appears in Hinkles philosophy, although in his own terms, as we've discussed her so many times, And the various episodes. So let's begin with some definitions. By the term creator. God, I am referring to the notion of creation X and a Hilo. Creation out of nothing that the universe was created of nothing by this creator. God. And it is this concept that I want to discuss. I believe it's the most. Common general conception of God that, that. This God is the uncreated creator of all things. You know, when little kids ask their parents who made all this, the easy answers, what God did. And of course the next question is, well, then who created a guide? And that usually stumps the parents when they say something like, well, I guess God has always existed. So, this is the question that I will be discussing here today. And I've touched on it several times in the past, in different episodes, particularly a point out episode, 15 on whether the natural world was really created. Episode 39. And whether there was an actual creation event. And episode 61 on the possibility of a cyclical universe. But I'm going to bring some dramatic new perspectives on these questions here in this episode. And that's why I'm covering this topic again. And I'll be including much more current science that we'll get to. Then I did in these previous episodes. As I said, the notion of a creator, God who created the universe out of nothing is central to the three main Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Opposing this view. Is that nothing can come out of nothing. This is an ancient Greek view that Parmenides is held in Greek it's it's known as, um, ex Mihaylo Naheed fit. Meaning nothing comes from nothing. So we have a dichotomy. Was the universe created or did it always exist? Which is it. Well, let's turn first to the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, the old Testament to Genesis to see what this text has to say about it. It's always a good place to start just to check things out. Let's begin with the first two sentences of Genesis. Which, by the way, they've been studied endlessly by capitalists over the centuries. The first sentence in Genesis. One, one is. Quote in the beginning, God created the heavens in the earth and quote. Barry chef is the first word of the Bible, the Hebrew Bible. It's Hebrew and it means. In the beginning or just beginning. Now, the first letter of bearish chef is the letter B bet in Hebrew. And this means to, and this shows to the cobble list that the universe was created as a duality, the heavens and the earth. The fact that it started with B is very significant to that. And that that suggests this duality of heavens and the earth. And as I mentioned, you're often, uh, I believe the heavens in the earth correspond to mind and matter the matter did not come from mind and mind didn't come from matter. They both exist at the same time. They're both primordial. This duality also corresponds to the Hey Galean notion of being in nothing. Existing equally at the beginning of his science of logic. So the heavens and earth had a beginning per Genesis. Which is say they were created by God. So you have three. God, the creator, the one, and then the duality of the heavens in the earth, which he created. And. Now. Th the question is. Where the heavens and earth. Created a nothing, or where they created a something. It is with the second sentence of Genesis where it gets complicated. The second sentence Genesis one, two begins in the following way. And the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters and court. One reading of this is that God created the heaven and the earth. And then once created by God, the earth was first formless as water is, and it was in darkness and the spirit of God hovered above it. Now. In this example. It's God is the one that has created the dark forms. Waters. and it's a result of God's creation. Now, but biblical scholars differ as to just what this means. Perhaps it meant that these dark formless waters were preexisting and. This is what God used to create the heavens and the earth. But I believe most traditional religious people take it as the foremost waters and the spirit of God being the creation out of nothing by God. There, what God, in fact, created the first step. So you have formless matter water. And you have mind is expressed by the spirit of God hovering above. The Hebrew word for spirit of God has ruach, which can refer to breath or wind or some invisible moving force. So as a result of this creation, we now have the duality of the formless waters. As I said, in the spirit of God was there as well. And then God went on to create light land and eventually Adam and Eve and so forth. Now, interestingly, there's a second version of the creation story in Genesis. Th the begins with Genesis two, four. This is where Adam is first created from the dust of the earth. And it reads quote and the Lord, God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils, the breath of life. And man became a living soul and quote. Bible scholars recognize this account is from a different source than Genesis one. So we have two creation stories and the first Adam and Eve were created together. And the second Eve is created later to keep Adam company. So it is in the second account that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil comes and eventually the fall of man, so to speak and you know, the rest of the story. So to summarize, we have two takes here. The first is that the universe is the result of a creation out of nothing. The second is the universe was formed out of a preexisting form. This material in God's spirit. So. The question is what does science have to say about this? Which, which way the science point. And before I get into that, I want to cover one other creation event that occurs in the very beginning of John's gospel in the new Testament. Let me read it. Short. Probably I'll know it. Quote in the beginning was the word. And the word was with God. And the word was God. He was with God in the beginning, through him, all things were made without him. Nothing was made. That has been made. And him was life and that life was the light of men and quote. Now. This is different than it. It places the word mind, rationality logos right there at the beginning. There was not a separate guide that created the word reminder, thought. This suggests the thought is pre-existing. And it is this thought or mind that made everything. And it also identifies this thought with life itself. And then it goes on a step further and says that this life. Is the light of men, which I take as meaning that the life of humans includes this rationality. So here we have got taken as the rational logos, which is very similar to Haydel's position. Uh, their rationality logically proceeds nature of the material world. It's what made everything. Now. We've covered these various biblical interpretations. As I said, let's move on to science and see what that has to say. Now. Sorry. In the beginning of the 20th century. Learned that the universe is not in a steady state. And something like the big bang occurred. This created a major change in thinking not only in the scientific community, but among religious believers as well. Basically early in the 20th century, evidence started to be accumulated that the universe is expanding, but then, I mean, the galaxies are moving away from each other. Our own son is part of the galaxy. Which we call the Milky way. Galaxy. And it's interesting. The Milky way galaxy contains some 100 billion stars. That's a lot of stars. And does estimated there are some, 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. So number of stars in the Everett, 2 trillion times, a hundred billion, I can't I've lost count, but you get the idea of the enormity. Here. And in the early 20th century, as I said, scientists noticed that the galaxies were moving apart from each other. And this suggests that the universe is expanding. Now as a side note, the question comes up. What's the universe expanding into. Now. If there's empty space, just theoretically that that extends infinitely than galaxies. I can just keep moving apart because there's no end. But. Going back to the big bang. If galaxies are moving apart from each other. And this was the big idea. In an earlier time, they must've been closer. So you could extrapolate going back into the past. That they were much closer. And at one time they were melded into one. They were crunched together into one singularity. And this included time as well since Einstein. Showed time and space to be linked as one space-time. So. Uh, according to this new big bang theory, time began then to. As well as everything else. And of course religion is latched onto this and claimed it was evidence of it creation event. The argument goes as follows. Everything that begins to exist as a cause the universe began to exist. So therefore the universe must have a cause and that the universe has a cause than an uncaused creator. The universe exists and some call this creator. God. This is often called the cosmological argument and it goes back to Plato and Aristotle. And it was later picked up by Aquinas in the 13th century. And now the theoretical big bang was suggesting that perhaps this was true. And interestingly, there was some reluctance among the scientists at the time of this discovery to release it to the public or supportive, because it seemed to support the religious viewpoint. So did the big bang, scientifically confirm creation out of nothingness. Well, interestingly as more analysis has done over the decades, and this was pretty recent stuff. Scientists now believe that there was a very brief period of expansion and inflation. That occurred a microsecond before the actual explosion of the big bang. What existed before this expansion? No one knows, but they know that that expansion did exist now. So some state of the cosmos did exist before the big bang. Some call it, quantum fluctuations, but it is unknown. That's important to realize we don't know what it is. It's not that nothing is, is we just, something is just, we don't know what it is. Now this shows that the university may not have had a miraculous beginning, that it was not created out of nothing. And this is what I contend based on the science and all that we've covered here. Now there's another side to this cosmology, which is you look out to the future. What's going to happen to the end of it all now. There's general consensus that the universe will keep expanding. And eventually burned itself out. There will be a death of the heat, so to speak, it will be a big chill. If you will. And we know that all stars have a lifecycle, including our own son. Eventually the fuel of the sun, the hydrogen will run out. The sun will run out of gas. If you will. Now it is estimated that the original big bang occurred some 13.8 billion years ago. And our son came into being an ignited about 4.6 billion years ago from spinning clouds of. Gas and dust. And is estimated it'll keep on shining for about another 5 billion years or so. So our son is actually in middle age. And stars go through a heating up process and some one to 2 billion years from now, the sun will be so hot that it will boil away the oceans and any life here will be wiped out. Now it's estimated that life here on earth is 3.7 billion years old. So that means if life here on this planet will be unsustainable in one to 2 billion years. It means we're currently about 65 to maybe even 90% done. With life sustainability on earth. So life here is in old age. That's an interesting concept. Once the hydrogen runs out on the sun, the sun will swell. It will swallow a mercury, the innermost planet, then Venus, then it will swell up earth. And maybe even more planets, it will become what's called a red giant and then begin to shrink and become a white. Dwarf and scientists know this by seeing the death of other stars. And then the white dwarf will fade back further and it will become a black dwarf and won't give off any heat. And this is the life pattern of all stars. Now stars do continue to be born in the universe, but this has been slowing down for some time. It's estimated that the university has 97% of the stars that ever will have. And the galaxies themselves will go through death as well as the stars that make them up die. Now it's estimated that in 100 trillion years or so all star formation will have ended. And so they will all eventually die out within 10 or so billion years from that point. And the universe will be put in its grave, so to speak. So, what does this mean for us? Well, obviously we living today. Don't have to worry about it, but somewhere down the line, people, our ancestors will have to worry about it and deal with it. So let's think about it. What are the options? Well, let me bring up a point I discussed before this is the notion of a cyclical universe, which you covered. As I mentioned in episode 61. And there's a very interesting theory proposed by physicist, Roger Penrose, which is called the conformal cyclical, cosmology or CCC for short. He detailed this in his 2010 books cycles of time, an extraordinary new view of the universe. And it's basically this, that after the death of the universe, the elementary particles themselves eventually disappear and there will essentially be a quantum state of neither time or space. They can be said to exist. Just this quantum fluctuation. And it is just this quantum state that may have produced the big bang in the past, in our past. So the universe may in fact be cyclical and then it goes from big bang to death and then a new, big bang. And what's interesting is that some information may survive. This death may get passed on to the next generation of the universe. And this could explain where the laws of the universe come from. It's a very big question, which science can not yet answer why these laws. This theory may provide the answer. That they. That the laws, in fact evolved. Over these different cycles to better support life and, and, uh, and, and progress in the universe. Now. The cyclical concept. I could also explain the fine tuning that we see in the universe that supports the formation of life. As I just mentioned. Each round may improve things a bit. For example, there may have been previous runs that only evolved up to the standpoint of the animals. And before that, there may have been times when there wasn't even life in the universe and it finally evolved to support rudimentary forms of life and so on. Now, this brings us to an important question. What is driving this evolutionary process? Is there a goal here? And so who, who set the goal? Well, this is a difficult question, but I do not believe that there's a puppet master behind the curtain, calling the shots. I do believe that evolution becoming improvement is fundamental. And life itself and all rational creatures are an improvement. This is what we are here to do, and improvement includes greater freedom, greater control. Greater happiness itself, greater contentment. This is all betterment. This is all growth. And at this cyclical theory is correct. The emergence of life in the universe may be more of a resurrection than some random spontaneous one-off occurrence. So how did this whole process start or did it start. Well, one way to look at it is this, that there's always been an evolution of becoming even in very primitive forms. And that's because there's always been an interplay between being and nothing. And there always will be. Hey, Google says this at the beginning of the science and logic that everything contains both being and nothing. And is becoming that's. Subplates the two it's what drives the process? The becoming is not static. It's always growing, always increasing sometimes slowly, but it is growing and increasing and it must do so to stay. One step ahead of nothing of oblivion. Growth. Evolution becoming as the most fundamental thing in the universe. And it may be. Occurring over a cyclical. Growth. In other words, what we're describing it may grow and then die out and then be reborn again, to grow even stronger. It's just like when winter comes and the trees go, dormant only did come to life again in the spring and grow some more. So the big chill of death of heat in the, in the universe corresponds to this dormant period we see in nature. And there may even be cycles of cycles in that life and mind grow to some superhuman point, maybe even merge. Rhonda after Rhonda and then the process starts all over again to build something even better that we can't even imagine at this point. Now there's also another merit of this possible within this current round or possibly one in the future. And that's that humans figure out a way to beat the death of the sun, perhaps migrate to a newer, younger solar system. And this however, made prolong things for a few billion years. But the next step is to reverse the eventual death of heat to reverse the big chiller to stop it. So the universe can sustain self without repeating around, and that evolution can continue. I realized this is all pure speculation. And I've taken this much further than Penrose has with this CCC theory. But I base it on what science knows today and, and I think it, it makes some sense. Now you may ask why couldn't this round? Just be a one and done. It was, the universe was, came into being and it's going to go away. Well, first of all, we know that something proceeded the big bang. It's unknown, but something proceeded and we do see cyclical patterns and rotations everywhere. We look in the universe. And the fact that we have life and minds to comprehend all this suggested evolution supports us the way we are, that we are moving in the right direction. And the cyclical evolving universe while spec of it makes tremendous sense to me. So to answer the question we started with. I do not believe there is a creator. God that created the universe out of nothing. I believe it is a continual process. The may include the birth and death of the universe in cycles of evolution. Well, That brings us to a close for this episode. Thank you once again for listening, for staying with me here. I know we've covered a lot of very heavy abstract stuff here. I know sometimes we go very abstract to the tabs. We make the episodes more practical, And I do hope you benefited a bit from this foray into cosmology. And please note that I do maintain a Facebook page for the podcast. It's at cunning of Geist on Facebook, please. Check that out, like the page, follow the page. I do post there almost daily in between episodes. We get into good, good discussions. I do try to respond to all comments. So check that out. Like it, follow it. Don't forget to tell your like-minded friends about the podcast helps spread the word. And feel free to share any post of mine, these episodes on your own social media accounts. So to wrap things up, thanks again for your support and encouragement. And let me close by saying I'm Gregory Nowak. This is the cunning of Geist. See you next time.