 
### Black Holes In A Brief History

### Published by Donald Stark

### Copyright 2015 Donald Stark at Smashwords

### Cover Design by Laura Shinn of Shinn Designs

Discover other titles by Donald Stark or Bud Stark

Suffocating On Mouunt Improbable

The Place of Execution

### Contents

Preface

Part One, Introduction

Chapter 1, "Infinite Fear, Infinite Regress,"

Chapter 2, "The Smallest Ball:"

Chapter 3, "Land Before Time,"

Chapter 4, "Land Before Space"

Chapter 5, "A Mindless Matter Of Space And Time"

Chapter 6, "Cut It Out, Occam"

Chapter 7, "He Cheated!"

Chapter 8, "Repeat What You're Taut!"

Chapter 9, "Design or Chance, Choose Your Creator"

Part Two, Introduction

Chapter 1,"Accidental Universe?"

Chapter 2 "Why Something Rather than Nothing?

Chapter 3,"Always Was?"

Chapter 4,"Volition? In A Tree!"

Chapter 5,"The Sun and the Big Bang. Chicken Feed?"

Chapter 6,"Intelligence Ain't Chicken Feed."

Conclusion

Other Books by this author

Preface

I and millions of readers without a scientific education were delighted when Stephen Hawking published _A Brief History of Time_. Its purpose was to give us an insight into how science, cosmologist especially, tackle the "questions that are of interest to us all,"where did the universe come from? How and why did it begin? Will it come to an end, and if so, how? The insight he imparted opened questions about Hawking's own methods and conclusions: were they shared by most cosmologists? Did they adequately answer the questions the book was written to address? In both cases, no. In _A Brief History_ , Hawking presents to the general public his own no boundary theory which most cosmologist do not espouse. And of the things which Hawking does share with other cosmologist, neither he nor they can answer the questions he poses. _Black Holes in A Brief History_ demonstrates that in fact his no boundary theory is but another failed attempt to do so. In this case sciences failure rings a note of hope rather than of dispair. The most prominant cosmologists see the universe as pointless and we, as Hawking maintains, as insignificant creatures who accidentally inhabit it. On the brighter side, sciences successes in medicine, energy, comunication, biology, water purification, transportation and on and on sound a peal of hope that makes of current cosmology little more than entertainment. Long before formal science existed, religions struggled with the same questions of where the universe came from and how and why, and if it will end and, if so, how, and shared with science the same failure rate. In addition, religion was dogged by another, more important question: can a good, all powerful god design an evil world? These are the questions _Black Holes in A Brief History_ deals with, also dogged by another: Is there any hope to be found in such a morass of failure?

# Part One

#

### Introduction

### Infinitely Small Universe, Smaller Dice

Burningly it came on me all at once.

This was the place!

Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came "

Abandon a faith that abhors science. But if your newfound science won't abide faith you've left one narrow minded path to follow another. It's possible to delight in both, but it isn't easy. Shelves sag with exciting books written for laymen like me, about how the universe began and functions–cosmology and physics, but most are written by scientist who won't tolerate faith and thrill to say so. It's a heavy obligation to show that in their contra-religious mentality these scientists are narrowminded. Heavier still for a layman like me--I was a roughneck most of my life, sweating and freezing night and day, summer, winter on an oil drilling rig, making some oilman rich. We Starks were an uneducated lot, vagabond oilfield laborers who arrived in California from Oklahoma in nineteen-fort-one. Only I, of four brothers and three sisters, ever finished high school. I stayed only because of sports. Even then, I'm less an athlete than most in my family. Less financially successful than most of them, too. So if I'm dwarfed by my seven self-educated siblings, I'm a fool to take on scientists of Stephen Hawking's ilk.

Why pick on Hawking?

Please. I can't pick on Hawking. I agree with most of what he says that I have sense enough to understand. Much of it I don't understand and have no reason to object to. Only in those few areas where Hawking attacks needlessly (and after at least twenty years, fruitlessly) humanity's hopes for meaning do I feel compelled to risk my considerable self esteem. His books are enormously popular and his ideas influential. So if I'm going to make a fool of myself trying to defeat the message that ours is an accidental universe, devoid of meaning beyond what physics describes in theory and mathematics, why not at the expense of someone who is most influential there, someone whose rich intellect can best afford it?

And a fool I am. Fool enough to hope that some young person reads my story and goes early where, late, I wish I had gone. Or that my story will allay the fears of someone who yearns to know how the universe began and functions but is afraid his faith won't survive the investigation. Oh, that mine had been one long journey of faith and science that began with deliberation and, as with a Robert Frost poem, "assume(d) direction with the first line laid down." That I could reflect on a body of work like that of Arthur Koestler or Graham Greene, then top it off with something of an autobiography describing the road I had traveled. Had I talent enough and time...but I'm short of both. I do have a perspective on life denied Koestler or Greene–I view reality through the lens of an undistinguished education. Should I have contemplated suicide, as Graham Greene did, it could never have been on the Oxford campus that I put the pistol to my head. Only by the good grace and long suffering of York College did I ever set foot on a college campus, and then, nineteen-fifty-six, only because the new school needed students lest it be a campus with teachers and no students. They scoured the continent and came up with some surprisingly brilliant students, and me. I went because they allowed me to and because I detested going back on that oily drilling rig. And while I would never have had the courage to put a pistol to my own head, I'm sure there were several of my teachers who would like to have.

Why do I rake up all this oilfield trash? To emphasize that if physics and cosmology excite a man like me because they illustrate design in the universe, they can excite you, and should. If you follow the logic of those many science books that sag the shelves, and not their illogical prejudices against design, you'll enjoy the splendor of science and remain as convinced as I am that the evidence for design in the universe is, if not unassailable, compelling.

Nothing rewards like love. It's its own reason to exist. The same goes for wonder. Love and wonder are what humans are made for. But when one is confronted with evidence that makes him suspect that all he has had faith in is fantasy, then wonder turns to despair. That happened to me when first I peered through a microscope at fossils washed to surface from the bottom of a ten-thousand foot oil well. There was no more hiding of the facts from what little faith remained after a lifetime of sheltering it. No chance of holding Galileo in house arrest. I knew that the earth was no longer the center of the universe, that fossils existed older than Noah's flood, that fifteen-billion years ago the universe deployed in what we call the big bang. No Grand Inquisitor in my lifetime could stifle that knowledge. One follows for years a weak faith that allows only a biblical interpretation of the physical universe until one day he suspects that he is arguing more with God's evidence than with the scientists who interpret it. Better, engage the evidence early. Ah, there's the rub; the rules for engaging God through his physical evidence are the same as those for engaging him in meditation–ask honest questions, accept honest answers and prepare to have your perspective changed forever.

There was no point at the end of my wandering where faith suddenly stepped forward like the priests bearing the ark of the covenant, their feet striking the flowing waters of the Jordan and halting it and Joshua leading the children of Israel into the promised land. Mine was a journey like "Child Roland To The Dark Tower Came." I was not sure I was even on a quest, I had wandered aimlessly so long. "Burningly it came on me all at once. This was the place," and I was dauntless before the dark tower. But I was a battered old man at the end of a quest I began as a boy. I had not conquered fear; somewhere on the long journey fear became disinterested in me, shrugged his shoulders and walked away. Go early into science, it will alter your faith, but if this book is successful it won't destroy it.

What this book won't do: It won't change–does not attempt to change–people whose tragic experiences in life have robbed them of faith–"If there were a God, how could He have let such an evil thing happen?" I have nothing but compassion for such people. Not pity, compassion. God's existence is not contingent upon our belief in him, nor is he good or evil because we think he is or is not. If God is good and someone rejects him because their experience in his creation has been tragic and they can't believe that a good God would allow such bad things to happen, then their reasons for rejecting God as evil are good reasons. If God exists and is good, he thrives in such doubts. But it is the good that drives these doubts. It is not scientific observation and mathematical calculations. This book is zeroed in on scientific and mathematical calculations aimed to dissuade people from believing in design in the universe. Physical things are neither good nor evil, and physical existence is the study of physics. Scientists who argue that it is impossible that a good god could have created a world riddled with evil should frame their logic in theological or ethical proofs, not scientific ones.

But this book is not about religion poking holes in science, it is about logic poking holes in the non-scientific claim against design in the universe. I'm convinced that the universe was designed. Why it was designed as it is, and why there is evil in it, I do not know. The tsunami in south Asia, the day after Christmas, two-thousand-four, left me shaking my fist at the heavens one moment and perplexed the next at why a lotus eater like me, who flees catastrophe, is privileged to share the same planet with others who rush to it risking their lives to bring relief; and others who voluntarily leave the wealth and comfort I avidly pursue, to live in squalor so as to make life less miserable for those who can't escape it. When in this book I reason from first cause, which has traditionally been called God, it is not because I aim to sell anyone on religion, I am not associated with organized religion and have nothing to sell. I am grateful that mine is a rich niche in time and place, a paradisaical time warp in man's usual fare of famine, disease, war and death. I cannot show you how a path back to the beginning will put you at the feet of a beneficent First Cause of creation. But as I follow logic back to the big bang it leads inevitably to the yawning question of First Cause and before I know it I have fallen in and can no more escape than if it were a black hole.

# Part One

#

### Chapter 1

### Infinite Fear, Infinite Regress

...the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from (man) in an impenetrable secret: he is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up.

Blaise Pascal, _Thoughts_

Standing aquiver beside my desk, I was a biblical fundamentalist of the strictest order confronting a teacher who was describing how life began and evolved to what we see today.

"Where did the water that the amoeba formed in come from?" I asked.

"The earth's gravity drew oxygen and hydrogen to it and these mixed and became water."

"Where did the earth that drew the oxygen and hydrogen come from?"

"It began as a gaseous cloud that got closer and closer together until it began to form into a solid."

"Where did the gaseous cloud come from?" And so on, an infinite regress.

"Sit down, Donald, I am your teacher, you are not mine."

She was, and would have been the following year had my family not followed the old drilling rig from the gas fields of Rio Vista, California to an oil well two-hundred miles south at Greenfield and spared me the embarrassment of having to repeat her class. But there was more afoot in the world of science in nineteen-fifty than a seventh grade teacher trying to sort out how a failing student had got her in an infinite regress--Einstein was in search of a unified theory, a theory that would explain everything. I had no knowledge of Einstein's search in those days, little of Einstein. I could not have understood the first thing about a unified theory if it were explained to me. Nor had I the slightest formal concept of such a thing as an infinite regress. But I knew what infinite fear was. I was silently terrified that one day science would arrive at an explanation for everything and it wouldn't be God. That fear dogged me for forty years.

The impulse that moved my argument in the seventh grade, that there must be a first cause for there to be any following affects, was a natural knee-jerk kind of impulse, had to be. Any concept demanding brain power was hopeless with me--I was and am a slow learner. But knee-jerk impulses have served me well over the years. Drilling rig roughnecks keep their fingers and toes by going with first impulse--if things feel unsafe, they probably are. In my whole oilfield career I've only mangled one finger.

Slow learner that I am, should I come into an apparently empty pool hall and see balls knocking around on a pool table, I wouldn't scratch my head and say, now if those balls are moving, either they moved themselves or something moved them. I'd impulsively look around for a pool shooter. If there really is no one in the pool hall, a pool hall in California, I'd run into the street yelling Earthquake!

Something set those balls to moving. The logic to ask what is basic--cause and affect. The process of following cause to affect, cause to affect, until one arrives at a first cause is regressive. If the trail leads forever back, one cause to another, infinitely, it is an infinite regress.

Plato denied that there was an infinite regress--one must come to a stopping place, he said. His stopping place was at a first cause -- the soul that moves all things but is moved by no other. This first cause, a prime moving soul, he called the self moved mover and referred to it as God.

Aristotle went a step beyond his teacher, Plato, and reasoned that a first cause would move only if he desired or needed something. Since he is complete in himself, desires or needs nothing, he himself does not move. All things that exist have coexisted with him forever, but only because he moves them to exist. They need him to exist, he does not need them. He needs nothing, he exists by necessity, the existence of all other things is contingent upon him. Aristotle called this unmoved mover, God.

Twenty-three-hundred years after Plato and Aristotle, Stephen Hawking, in his book, _A Brief History of Time_ and subsequent books, sidesteps the term, first cause. He says instead, there was a time, called the big bang, "when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense."What this infinitely small dense object was that banged time, space and matter into existence, Hawking never says. Nor does he say what it existed in if not in time and space.

It's unwise for a person who is no historian to disagree with a history book, but unless one is a cosmologist with expertise in quantum theory, he'd be a fool to disagree with Stephen Hawking's _A Brief History of Time_. I've never claimed to be a historian or a cosmologist with expertise in quantum theory, and I've admitted being a fool. So, with my backside covered by the assurance that fools have little to lose, I take issue with Stephen Hawking's book.

# Part One

### Chapter 2

### The Smallest Ball

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question

T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Stephen Hawing's _A Brief History of Time_ recounts that in 1929, Edwin Hubble made the observation that wherever you look, galaxies are moving rapidly away from us, just as the Russian physicist, Alexander Friedmann had predicted they were. Friedman took Einstein's then recent theory of relativity more at face value, it seems, than even Einstein did, and accurately described our universe as expanding evenly in every direction.

Hawking notes that, "Hubble's observation suggests that there was a time, called the big bang, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense." The logic is obvious: working backward from a universe that is expanding in every direction, one arrives at a starting place where it was all together before it began to expand. Conceptualize it like this: reverse an air pump and suck the air out of a basketball and see the basketball collapse. Think of the big bang in the same way, the universe is sucked in upon itself until gravity makes it, in Hawking's words, "infinitesimally small, infinitely dense." If one comes upon a pool table with balls exploding from the middle of it, he doesn't have to be familiar with pool, which I am not, to know that the balls were originally all together in the middle and something burst them apart.

We may assume the same thing about our expanding universe–probably it originally was tiny and dense. Good that it began to expand, otherwise time and space would not exist and we would not exist. But how that original spot came into existence before time and space; what it was before time and space; and why it deployed into time and space is out of reach for anything but speculation. Hawking says of the big bang:

At that time...the density of the universe and the curvature of space-time would have been infinite. Because mathematics cannot really handle infinite numbers, this means that the general theory of relativity predicts that there is a point in the universe where the theory itself breaks down. In fact, all our theories of science are formulated on the assumption that space-time is smooth and nearly flat, so they break down at the big bang singularity

This singularity, this maybe-something-maybe-nothing, as a foothold, is a quandary for cosmologists struggling to construct a ladder to the heavens–a unified theory of everything that tells us what the universe is and perhaps what it was before time and space and why it became the universe in time and space. Hawking says that in order to predict how the universe should have started off, one needs laws that hold at the beginning of time. He and Roger Penrose proved that if the classic theory of relativity is used as the model for how the universe started off, one arrives at a point of infinite density and infinite curvature of space-time where all the known laws of science break down–a singularity. But, by the use of quantum mechanics, Hawking says that one may arrive at a model of how the universe started off and avoid the singularity. His own personal model of how the universe started out has remained unproven since the nineteen-eighties, but were it worked out, it is doubtful that it would tell us how the universe started off. And no theory can tell us why.

Quantum mechanics, hard at work in the minutia all these years, is short sighted. It has a good vision of the tiny, but can't see into the distance far enough to make out where the pieces go when they explode. The general theory of relativity, however, is far sighted. It describes the big picture but can't make out the nitty-gritty. The theories need to work together if they are to solve the "small" that began at the big bang and became the "large" that is the present universe. As of now they are involved in a family quarrel and are not compatible. Hawking believes that he can devise a theory that will resolve their disagreement, but such a theory must meet his criteria for what a good theory is:

In order to talk about the nature of the universe and to discuss questions as to whether it has a beginning or an end, you have to be clear about what a scientific theory is. I shall take the simple minded view that a theory is just a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observation that we make. It exists only in our minds and does not have any other reality (whatever that might mean (his parenthesis)). A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: it must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations

I lack the expertise to understand the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics. Given a lifetime to study, I would lack the intellect to understand them. I must rely on scientists to tell me if and when they resolve the differences between the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. If these difficulties are resolved, Stephen Hawking probably will resolve them. If someone else does, he has the intellect to understand how they did it. If Stephen Hawking says the problems are resolved, I trust him to believe that they are. He knows all the theories out there. Thus far Stephen has said nary a word about a resolution of the difficulties between quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity.

He does say, "We don't yet have a complete and consistent unified theory that combines quantum mechanics and gravity. But we are fairly certain of some features that such a unified theory should have." For clarity and brevity, we will avoid an explanation and description of these features and just mention that they are Feynman's sum over histories and Einstein's idea that the gravitational field is represented by curved space-time. All attempts to combine the general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics have, to this day, failed. Should they have succeeded, here is what Hawking assumes will follow:

When we apply Feynman's sum over histories to Einstein's view of gravity, the analogue of the history of a particle is now a complete curved space-time that represents the history of the whole universe.

He concludes on the following page:

There would be no singularities at which the laws of science break down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: 'The boundary conditions of the universe is that it has no boundary.' The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.

BE what? Remember, this small dense particle is posited as existing before the big bang, therefore before the existence of time and space and matter. Absent time, space and matter, there are no particles to BE, and therefore no "large class of observations" upon which Hawking can construct a model that makes "definite predictions about the results of future observations." Without those observations from which future observations can be made, Hawking's theory fails as a good scientific theory.

Hawking posits this infinitesimally small, infinitely dense particle from whence all other particles – an infinite number of them perhaps – derived, as an analogue of the universe, an analogy. But nowhere does his tiny ball stop being a tiny ball and become an analogy. He even gives physical properties to this tiny ball:

Using the no boundary condition, we find that the universe must in fact have started off with just the minimum possible nonuniformity allowed by the uncertainty principle... This would lead to the formation of galaxies, stars , and eventually even insignificant creatures like ourselves.

Later in this book we shall see how fine tuned this minimum nonuniformity had to be in the first billionth of a second into the big bang for there ever to be a universe like the one we experience, but that is not the point of this chapter. Nor is "Insignificant creatures like ourselves." We'll disregard the snub for now, noting only that intelligence is the most marvelous thing in creation, and Hawking's theory can't be a theory that explains everything if it dismisses intelligence as insignificant.

The point here is that Hawking is describing an analogy as if it were not an analogy at all, but a thing the analogy was supposed to be like. Given such detailed characteristics of the ball, this is no analogy, this is what Hawking thinks that infinitely tiny ball really was.

Granting that the non-uniformity necessarily existed in the infinitely small, infinitely dense analogue of a universe and the analogue was ready to explode into the big bang, what was this analogue? Stephen Hawking describes it as "finite in size but (does) not have any boundary or edge." Of course it is a contradiction to describe something as "infinitesimally small" and "finite" in size. It can't be both infinitely small and finitely small at the same time. This is not to quibble, it is only to ask what Hawking means.

Disregarding this seeming contradiction, we blow up this small particle to see what it looks like: It's a sphere, a basketball. That is, an immortal ant could walk forever around a basketball and come to no boundary or singularity--he would not fall off. This is the example that Hawking gives of his infinitely small, infinitely dense ball, but instead of a basketball, he describes it as being like the earth, which he says he traveled round without ever having run into a singularity or an edge. One cannot conclude from such an analogy that the earth is infinite. I know personally that basketballs are not, and they fit the same analogy.

Moreover, until this "infinitesimally small, infinitely dense" ball explodes, it does not exist, the universe does not exist, space and time or space-time does not exist (a note here: "explode" is inaccurate if one is made to think of bombs and firecrackers. Even though the big bang's first three second enlargement makes a detonation of TNT look as if it were in slow motion, its deployment was near perfect in symmetry). Obviously the ball has not become the universe at this point, has not deployed in the big bang. The universe that we know exists only in time and space–it is time and space! But time and space did not come to exist until after the big bang, and so the universe did not come to exist until after the big bang. Until the big bang, nothing exists. To talk about any configuration that fits Hawking's description of "finite in extent...(with no) boundary or edge," as if it existed before time and space, is to talk about it as if it existed before existence, which makes as much sense as to say that because an immortal bug could crawl around a basketball for eternity, basketballs are infinite.

It is unimportant what precisely the configuration was that Hawking uses the shape of the world as an analogy of, but it is of utmost importance that it had a configuration. Things have configuration, non-things don't. When Hawking talks about that infinitely small, dense particle, he is talking about something rather than nothing. It makes no sense for an analogue to be analogous of nothing; no sense for a theory to be a theory about nothing. Keep in mind the criteria Stephen Hawking says a good theory must conform to: It must describe a few arbitrary elements, and from those observations, make predictions. "Infinitesimally small, infinitely dense" describes something that exists. There was a time, he says, when all the galaxies were together at the same place. What place did they exist in before space; what time before time?

We laymen are not limited by the limits that Hawking places on himself. His science can't describe something beyond time and space, and time and space did not exist beyond fourteen billion years ago. His mathematics meets with a paradox, and mathematics does not deal well with paradoxes.

But we laymen know how to handle paradoxes without resorting to mathematics. We simply point to what we see must have happened in reality, and draw logical conclusions. Mathematics is an indispensable tool, but it can't explain how something came from nothing or describe how something can exist forever. Hawking can't describe this infinitely small dense ball as existing forever, because forever began fourteen billion years ago for Hawking's science.

If we are not careful, Hawking will roll that particle into an infinitesimally small, infinitely dense ball and sneak it by us without our seeing it and asking the bothersome metaphysical question, "Where'd that come from?"

Of course there was no literal "small" or "dense" before the particle exploded at the big bang--there was no space before the big bang for "small" to describe, nor matter for "dense" to describe. Hawking's usage of "infinitesimal" and "infinite" to describe conditions at or before the big bang, explodes into a giant complication. If something is infinitely small, it follows that there is an infinite number of divisions that are smaller than it, and an infinite number of divisions larger. If it is infinitely dense there are an infinite number of divisions that are denser than it and an infinite number of divisions less dense. That's what infinite means.

No one illustrates better the breakdown of mathematics when it meets with the infinite than the fifth century B.C. E. Greek philosopher, Zeno of Elea. Here is one of his paradoxes: Two runners are racing around a track; the second runner is gaining on the first. He halves the distance between himself and the lead runner, then halves the distance again, then halves that distance and so forth. It is mathematically impossible for the second runner to overtake the lead runner because however many times the second runner halves the distance between himself and the lead runner, there will forever be another mathematical number to halve--divide two and you get one; divide one and you get one-half; divide one-half and you get one-fourth. You can divide forever and never arrive at a last division between the two runners.

Zeno used that paradox to show some illustrious Pythagorean mathematicians of his day that their theories and formulas can lead them into absurdities. It's a lesson that has escaped Stephen Hawking and modern day scientists. Laymen need have no such problem. We may simply point out to the Pythagoreans of Zeno's scorn that the second runner did indeed overtake the first. The problem lies with the primacy the Pythagoreans attribute to mathematics. For centuries, math was a religion to the Pythagoreans. They are something of an historical allegory of a tendency in humanity to put too much faith in scientific systems, the blessings of science not withstanding.

But Zeno's paradoxical infinite number of mathematical divisions between two points is less a problem than Hawking's paradox. The failure of mathematics to describe one runner overtaking the other is not a denial that in reality the second runner often overtakes the first runner, but a demonstration of a our inability to describe the infinity of mathematical divisions between the two. Zeno's "infinite" is not a difficulty in reality but in math. Stephen Hawking's difficulty is not in mathematics but in reality–how describe something as existing either before time and space, or describe something as coming from nothing? In this case the whole universe as existing before existence or as coming from nothing.

The only apt description of the universe at or before the big bang is that there is no description, squeeze it into as small a ball as one wishes. Reduced smaller and smaller it either vanishes into nothing, and therefore we cannot describe it nor can we attribute to it any power to become materially existent, or it exists small but materially and in time and space. The universe did not exist before the big bang, because time and space and matter did not exist before the big bang. It was nothing and there are no words that can describe nothing, no theories to explain it, no apt analogy for it. Hawking himself says we cannot talk about events in the universe without the notions of space and time. Although he does not suggest that space and time existed before the big bang, he does insists that his little ball did. Until he proves that it did, we are left with all scientific evidence that says that only after the initial bang was there any tiny particle to balloon into the universe we know. There was nothing before the big bang, no particles to speed, no space for a particle to speed in and no time with which to measure a particle's speed travel. There was nothing! The kind of nothing that you and I understand as well as any scientist. Hawking knows a great deal about science and mathematics, but he can't know more about nothing than I do; I'm a specialist in nothing.

Were it possible, I would like to trace back one of those billions of particles speeding away from the big bang, blossoming into the universe; trace them back to that tiny speck in which all of them a fraction of a second previously were fused and from which they all exploded; then trace that speck back as gravity shrinks it ever smaller and denser until it arrives at a point that Stephen Hawking in the Twentieth Century would describe as "infinitesimally" small, "infinitely" dense. Having gotten that far, I would insist on going further back--back, back, back, because there are an infinite number of smallers and densers to trace back, and because time also came into being with the big bang and is a property of it, I have an infinite stretch of duration, prior to the advent of time, in which to do my tracing. Eventually my pursuit tires me and I finally ask the question that's bugging me, "Does this speck get so small that it finally disappears? finally ceases to exists?"

If it doesn't arrive at a point where it is small but existent one second, and a second beyond, non-existent, then it must have existed always. The other alternatives are that it materialized out of nothing (absurd), or it was created by something that already existed.

For Hawking to describe a configuration of something infinitely small and dense is to describe something that can only exist as matter in space and time: "small" is contingent on space; "dense" is contingent on matter, and both are contingent on duration in time. But before the big bang, nothing existed in space or time because space and time did not exist. Is that small dense configuration, that Hawking talks about, something or nothing? If time does not exist before the big bang, which Stephen says it did not, and illustrates how even God could not have created the universe before time, then in what land before time did this eternal BE just be?

It is necessary, according to Hawking, to know what a good scientific theory is before one can talk about what the universe is and how it got started. A good theory, he says, "is just a model of the universe, with rules that relate quantities in the model to observations that we make." But does he mean by "model," or theory, what I mean, or you mean? If we know this, then we can compare what he expects from a scientific theory and see if it is what we expect from a scientific theory. I would hope a scientific theory would give me some idea if some power, call it God or nature, that caused the universe to exist. If the universe did not exist before the big bang, what was the big bang that caused it to exist? If the universe existed infinitely into the past, I want to know that. If it exists now, in infinite space, or if it has finite dimensions as my house does, I want to know. Those are some of the questions I would hope that a scientific model, or theory, could tell me. My questions have to do with physical existence, they are what a philosopher would call ontological questions.

Roger Penrose sometimes uses the terms, "good physical"answers in reference to descriptions of things that mathematics is used to describe. Always, when evaluating a mathematical formula that represents something other than itself, one must make sure he is not swept away by the beauty of the formula rather than how well it represents what it is supposed to represent. Penrose cautions with a question: "What is the physical justification in allowing oneself to be carried along by the elegance of some mathematical description and then trying to regard that description as describing a 'reality?"What he means by "good physical" I take to mean real in the sense that physical things are real in a way that mathematics is not real. For instance, 2 + 2 only represents itself as a mathematical formula. Use the formula with apples and you have a mathematical formula that descries a physical phenomena: 2 apples + 2 apples equals four apples. Here mathematics is used to describe reality. Penrose is a co-publisher with Hawking of several books, and he quotes Hawking in regards to scientific descriptions:

I don't demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don't know what it is. Reality is not a quality you can test with a litmus paper. All I'm concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements.

On the same page Penrose says that Hawking is one of those "'positivists' who have no truck with 'wishy-washy' issues of ontology in any case, claiming to believe that they have no concern with what is 'real' and what is 'not real."

The difficulty with Hawking's procedure is that he may create a theory that is true in mathematics but false in defining what the physical world is and how the world started off. In other words, his mathematical formula may give a mathematical description of how the world started off that is accurate as a mathematical formula, and is real in the sense that mathematics is real, but which describes nothing that ever happened in material reality. It would not be a lie, it would just be a mathematical formula that does not relate to space, time and matter. There are mathematical formulas whose truth is so objectively apparent that no objection can be logically leveled against them. Hawking's no boundary theory is not one of them, that is why it remains unproven after these many years. Objective language (with its limitations as a conveyor of ideas that are themselves not physical entities) may explain time, space and matter with greater accuracy than a less objective mathematical formula can explain it. A mathematical formula, however elegant, does not accurately describe the universe that physically exists. Hawking closes his book with precisely this point: "Even if there is one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

Unfortunately, the humility demonstrated in this closing statement is absent in most of _A Brief History_. He opens his book by requiring that a theory of cosmology conform to close rules of science. He closes the book with a confession that mathematics does not answer the crucial question of reality. And between the opening and closing he makes unwarranted claims for what his mathematical model, the no boundary little ball, does. Mainly, he claims that it displaces any need for a creator. That is a pretty hefty ambition for "...just a set of rules and equations." If his theory displaces a need for a creator, one would at least expect it to know what creation is; what reality is. This, however, he says he does not know.

We must not conclude that a mathematical formula whose figures hold throughout, represents reality or tells us anything about how the universe started out. After all, there are numerous other mathematical formulas – indeed, as many as there are cosmologists – whose formulas hold, and yet which differ with Hawking's. They can't all be right. That a theory hold in its mathematical integrity is not a criteria for being a true representation of what is real. It may be objectively true as mathematics, but false in what it claims it represents in the physical world. To reiterate, in some instances mathematics may be less adequate to tell what physical reality is and how the world started off, than language is.

Give Hawking his due, but not more. It is of utmost importance to remember that this no boundary theory, for all its ambition to displace a creator, remains with those that Brian Greene characterizes as valiant but non-conclusive.It is unproven.

# Part One

### Chapter 3

### Land before time

Had I world enough and time.

Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"

Time is measured by clocks. But a clock exists that is you; you are your own personal time, one that no watch can keep. No one else in the universe has exactly the same time as yours, just as no one on earth can occupy the exact same space as you. Your personal time is a function of space-time, the subject of E=MC2. However, your clock, synchronized with that of your neighbor's, gives you both a time close enough to the same time that neither of you will know the difference, and you can coordinate your movements through space and time with each other. So you have your own personal time that is yours exclusively, and another time that you coordinate with your neighbor. But there exists still another time that we all, as part of the universe, share with the rest of the universe. Brian Green says of the clocks that measure this time, "It is precisely these clocks – whose only motion comes from the expansion of space – that provide the synchronized cosmic clocks used to measure the age of the universe."When we speak of the big bang as having occurred fifteen billion years ago, this is the time we refer to. This measure tells us when the big bang occurred and gives us the age of the universe which we translate into years.

This clock, ticking from the outer edges of space, was wound at the big bang. Had there not been an "...intense background of radiation present during the first few minutes of the universe," Steven Weinberg's _The First Three Minutes_ explains, "nuclear reactions would have proceeded so rapidly that a large fraction of the hydrogen present would have been 'cooked ' into heavier elements." The radiation was there, and because of it, so is the universe as we know it and so are we. That radiation comes to us now, evenly, from every direction in the universe, and tells us "...the temperature that the universe had long ago, reduced in proportion to the enormous expansion that the universe has undergone since."This cosmic clock is a time piece accurate beyond imagining, and a reminder that as a universe we were nearly a foundry.

Stephen Hawking posits the ball, the subject of the last chapter, as existing always, therefore before the big bang and before the cosmic clock was wound. As a ball that has always existed, and was the universe but un-deployed before the big bang, it differs with that of the universe of the early Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition. Hawking says that "According to a number of early cosmologists and the Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition, the universe started at a finite, and not very distant, time in the past..."

Not very distant is not very descriptive. If Hawking's universe didn't start at some finite time in the past, i.e., the big bang, whether fourteen thousand or fourteen billion years ago, then it must have begun in an infinite time in the past, which Kant points out would mean that it never began, because there is no beginning for an infinite time. Hawking believes in the big bang; believes that it makes no sense to talk about the universe as existing outside time and space. He believes the big bang was that point where time and space, as a continuum, began. Obviously that is a "finite" time in the past where the universe began, tag as many "infinitesimals" and "infinites" on it as he likes.

Should Hawking's ball have existed for infinity, as he says it did, fourteen billion years ago is as recent as yesterday. Call the past fourteen billion years "recent," and Hawking's theoretical beginning of the universe is identical in kind to the Jewish/Christian/Muslim beginning of the universe. They differ only in when they began, no big deal when considered from eternity.

Hawking says that the early Jewish/Christian/Muslims argued that the universe began at some time in the past because they had the feeling that "...it was necessary to have 'First Cause' to explain the existence of the universe." The logic for First Cause, however, is in no way contingent on when the universe started. Indeed, according to Aristotle, First Cause says nothing about when the universe started. Aristotle maintained that the universe was eternal and coexistent with God but that God was First Cause–the universe was contingent on the existence of God but God was not contingent on the existence of the universe. If the ball deployed, as Hawking believes it did, and from it the universe as we know it began, then Hawking's ball is first cause of the universe. To say that it existed infinitely before it exploded is only to load it with more godly characteristics. This ball subsumes all of Aristotle's God and all of the god of the Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition.

Hawking's theory describes a little ball, "infinitesimally small, infinitely dense," that existed before the big bang and before becoming the universe as we know it. The difficulty that prevails in his theory, is its inability to get to the very moment of the big bang and witness (mathematically) whether space-time began from a single point called a singularity, which is fraught with the infinity before which mathematics fails, or whether whatever expanded had existed infinitely before expanding into the universe. The answer he says lies in a third possibility:

In a quantum theory of gravity...one could avoid...having to describe what we do not and cannot know [how the possible histories of the universe would behave at the boundary of space-time in the past] only if the histories satisfy the no boundary condition: they are finite in extent but have no boundaries, edges, or singularities. In that case, the beginning of time would be a regular, smooth point of space-time and the universe would have begun its expansion in a very smooth and ordered state.

This tells us how, according to Hawking's theory, the universe in the form of space-time began to expand, but it does not tell us where and what the border between time and non-time, time and eternity, is. It fails to tell us how a universe exists in a land before time. As a theory, this tiny universe may satisfy the no boundary condition by avoiding having to specify the behavior at the boundary to space-time, and by avoiding singularities at which laws of science break down, but as an object finite in extent, it cannot escape a need to exist in time and space. Hawking is saying that if one rounds off the ball and polishes it up, makes it so tiny that it almost reverts to nothing, it will cease to be a single point. One would then not have to say whether or not it existed in time, before the big bang, which is supposedly the starting point for the existence of time.

We understand the time part of the space-time continuum to be a means to measure duration. We understand duration to mean enduring, or existing, from what we call one moment to the next. This may not be the whole story, but it is as much an explanation for time as science gives. Moreover, it is much more explanatory than just saying that something just was. In what form of duration did the little ball exist if there was no moment to moment before the big bang? Is eternity really only time but more of it? How can Hawking posit this ball as just BEing without explaining in what form of duration it just was in the eternity prior to the big bang? Here is what Hawking does with his theory:

Hawking points to a ball and says, because it is shaped thus, it is eternal. He illustrates just such a ball, juxtaposed to an Earth globe. The Earth globe is a traditional globe with North and South Poles; the ball to its right that represents Hawking's theory has the big bang at the North Pole, the big crunch at the South Pole. He vests this ball with infinity, which indeed it is, just as there are an infinite number of divisions between two points, as Zeno points out. But because there are an infinite number of mathematical divisions between any two physical points on this ball, or that one could walk his fingers around it forever and never come to a barrier, is no proof that such a ball ever existed, especially that it existed infinitely in some form of duration other than time, since time did not exist before the big bang. This ball proves nothing in reality. If it solves anything – or shall we say, will solve anything should Hawking ever prove it – it solves the problem mathematics has of handling infinite numbers, and it does so by avoiding the question of infinite regress that existence itself poses.

If one takes away time from the little ball, then the little ball has no medium in which to endure and therefor no meaning. However, should one imagine that the little ball was designed so that when it deployed, time would begin and be a part of the expansion, the little ball makes perfect sense. In such a case, the designer of the little ball and of time would necessarily exist outside time in a manner not contingent on the existence of time. According to Augustine, such a designer did exist before time. But Augustin's god existed outside in a manner of duration beyond our comprehension and in a manner that no physical characteristics can describe. Augustine, therefore, never describes God as existing in time or with physical characteristics. Hawking, however, describes his tiny configuration, the universe to be, as "...self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply BE." This puts Hawking's ball, before it banged, outside and before time, before the observable universe, where no physically observable qualities existed. It is, therefore, outside Hawking's requirements for a good theory. This little ball is Hawking's rendition of Augustine's god, all powerful, having no beginning and no end, another I AM, a creator that Hawking declares, needs no other.

If the ball did exist prior to the big bang, as Hawking maintains, the question still remains – how long had it existed, fourteen minutes before the big bang or fourteen billion years before the big bang? Did it come into existence precisely at the big bang, or did it exist infinitely having no beginning and no end as Hawking says it did? Our cosmic clocks tell us when time and space began, but no clock echoes from eternity that tells Hawking how long before the big bang his little ball existed, or if it existed at all. It is Augustine's god, outside and independent of time, that Hawking uses to dispatch what Hawking says was Kant's idea of time as infinite. Hawking says that Kant's argument for the thesis that there are equally compelling arguments for believing that the universe had a beginning, and the antithesis that it had existed forever was that

if the universe did not have a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before any event, which he (Kant) considered absurd. The argument for the antitheses was that if the universe had a beginning , there would be an infinite period of time before it, so why should the universe begin at any one particular period of time ?

Hawking says that Kant argued these two contradictory points from a perspective that time continued back forever, whether or not the universe had existed forever in time.

Kant wrote his _Critique of Pure Reason_ in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and therefor was unaware of the theory of relativity that gave time and space a conjoined existence. He was unaware of Hubble's telescope that gave the universe a beginning at the big bang which we reckon to be about fourteen billion years ago. Lacking that knowledge, Kant insisted that it could not be determined whether the universe had a beginning in time, or whether it existed from infinity.His logic was that the thesis that the world (or the universe) had a beginning in time, and its antithesis that it existed forever, are both valid arguments and therefore contradictory, that's why he called them antinomies, they cancel each other out.

Hawking points out Kant's argument as something of one page in a history of cosmology, an example of how a philosopher reasoned about time before it was known that the big bang occurred and time began. Hawking uses Augustine's insight – time is a property of the universe that God created and did not exist before the beginning of the universe – to dismiss Kant's reasoning. But Kant's reasoning is not dismissed. When Hawking posits the little ball as existing prior to the big bang, he is confronted by Kant's antinomies. If the little ball had no beginning there would be an infinite period of time before it exploded and became the universe. But this is absurd. The time before could not have been infinite or the little ball would never have exploded and no universe would now exist.

If it had a beginning there had to be a period before it in which nothing existed, and nothing happened to mark the passage of time, and therefore time would not have passed to bring the little ball into existence – again absurd.

The logic Kant follows in Critique of _Pure_ Reason, concerning time, was sound for its day and it is sound today. The question of how and why space-time exists and when it came to exist, or if it always existed, remains the central topic of cosmology. But when we evaluate cosmological evidence, or any evidence as regards physical existence, Kant asks what the means are by which we evaluate. How do we know what we know? This is the main thrust of Kant's philosophy in _Critique of Pure Reason_.

Time and space in Kant's philosophy are not physical things but conditions without which no physical thing or event can be imagined to exist. They are conditions that enable us to know what we know about physics. Time can be compared to light in an otherwise dark room, flip the switch and light shows you what you could not see without it, but the light itself is not seen. "Time is not an empirical concept that has been derived from any experience," Kant says, it is an a priori underlying presupposition necessary for us to "...represent to ourselves a number of things as existing at one and the same time (simultaneously) or at different times (successively)."We cannot think of things without thinking of them in time, but according to Kant we can think of time without thinking of things as filling it. That we can think of time independent of existing things is not, however, an assertion that time is or is not eternal.

With the advent of Einstein's theory of relativity we know that time and space form a continuum, but we still think of things just as Kant said we do, from a perspective of time and space. If we think of two things happening at the same time we think of them as happening simultaneously in time. Simultaneity is possible as a concept only as things exist in time – that's Kant's point. If we think of something happening and something else happening as a result of the first thing happening, we think of them as happening one after the other, in succession in time, just as Kant said we do. We can't think of anything as happening at all absent the concept of time. Time, Kant says, is a purely subjective condition of our (human) intuition. Apart from the subject (us), it is nothing. He says that time does not inhere in the object but in the subject, us, which intuits time.

Kant's point was true then and it is true now, independent of whether time and space form a continuum of one thing. Kant was out to establish parameters for what the mind can know and how it knows it, and not how long time has existed, as Hawking says. Hawking misrepresents Kant's emphasis, but more importantly, he violates Kant's logic and his own and posits a ball in a place he has no means of knowing anything about, a land before time. Hawking says it makes no sense to talk of things as existing before time; before the big bang. From a scientific perspective I take him at his word. We cannot conceive of Hawking's ball as existing outside of time, nor should we unless he can prove another medium of duration other than time. To ask us to accept such a proposition is to ask us to indulge physics in religion.

For me to grasp time and how it functions (excluding simultaneity), and when it may have begun to function in and as the universe, I explain it to myself in an analogy constructed somewhat along Kantian logic. I picture time in the form of a conveyer belt and space in the form of empty buckets that are carried in an endless succession on the conveyer belt. Time moves the buckets along and if anything happens it appears in one of the buckets and continues to appear in each successive bucket so long as something is happening. If nothing occurs, no existence turns up, then space passes empty, as does time that carries it. I cannot leave my station and I have no way of knowing how long the conveyor belt is, down the line or up the line, but I do have the advantage of a button that I can push to stop the belt and examine the contents of the buckets should something turn up. As in Kant's logic, time and space are the underlying conditions for my knowing about any physical thing, but are not themselves existing material things (except as buckets and conveyer belt in this analogy). One could say that it is possible for all sorts of things to be happening in some manner in some way somewhere else, but unless it appears as happening in one of the buckets on the conveyer belt I have no way of knowing about it. For all practical considerations then, nothing exists in the universe – not even the universe -- except me and what appears in these buckets.

Nothing happens so these empty buckets pass in what appears to be an infinite succession before me. If they all are indeed empty, there is no distinguishing one bucket from the next, you can add the contents of all of them up and dump it into one bucket and it would not make any difference because all the nothings still equal one single nothing. To this point, all space on the belt of time is an infinite succession of nothings. Add the contents of all the empty buckets together and you get a single infinitely long conveyer belt of nothing.

That is, until suddenly one of the buckets turns up full of existence. I press the button and stop the chain so as to examine the bucket. Sure nuff, this one is full. I look in the bucket preceding it and find it empty, as are all buckets before it as far as the eye can see. In this line of otherwise non-existence, where did this bucket full of existence come from? The contents of this particular bucket do not tell me where they came from so I can only know that they exist in it. I cannot know how the existence got there, I can only know that it is there. If a line of empty buckets exists infinitely before this full bucket, then obviously this full bucket could never have come to exist as a result of some other existence in a preceeding bucket. In that it does exist, it must have been filled at some finite point up the line. The alternative is that this line is infinite and this full bucket has exist in it infinitely. That, however, is absurd. There can't have been an infinite time before this bucket or this bucket would never appear. The appearance of this bucket deems all time before it and all time following it, finite.

Suffer me another analogy as regards time and the universe. In this analogy I am one of many small occupants in a single bucket that is mysteriously filling from within with material that expands evenly like yeast dough. Everything that exists inside the bucket, including me, is made of this expanding material. Inside the material are all the axioms and theories from Euclid to Newton to Einstein. The bucket zings with E=MC2, string theory, and all the concepts physicists use to understand what constitutes time and matter. The dough seethes with justice and injustice, tragedy and triumph, love and hate, hope and despair, comfort and torture, war and peace. Yours is a glorious existence if you live in one section of the expanding material, a tragedy in a section an inch away. Because the material expands in an orderly way, I have a good idea when the expansion began – fourteen billion years ago. But I have no idea what the capacity of the bucket is or what the limits of the material's expansion may be, I only know that my universe began about fourteen billion years ago. I may conclude such things as when the expansion might stop, time run out, but occasionally I do more than this, I wonder if mine is the only bucket or if it is not, perhaps, one of an endless succession of buckets with, say, twenty billion year capacities. Until I find a note I can only guess.

Hawking says wonder all you wish, but don't theorize about things beyond the swelling material – anything before the big bang. But that is precisely where his no boundary-little ball theory resides – before the big bang. Using his theory in this analogy, Hawking maintains that we only thought the bucket was empty. In reality, at the bottom of our bucket was, from eternity, an "infinitely small, infinitely dense ball" which began to expand fourteen billion years ago.

Analogies have limits. In my string of buckets carried on a conveyer belt, I account for time as both the conveyer belt, and as an ingredient in the bucket. Actually I can't account for time in either position, as conveyer belt or as one of the ingredients in the bucket. As a layman, however, I'm not obliged to. I'm free to suggest that there is some other means of duration other than time, a duration that I cannot conceive of but which moves the conveyer belt that carries the buckets in which exists time as I know it. Time turned up in the buckets with all other existence in the universe, at the big bang, and time is the only means I have to measure duration in this universe. But I can't know that there is no other form of duration outside my bucket, outside my universe and outside my possible knowing. Perhaps there are many means of duration, or perhaps a designer is an artist and has used time as a theme in a billion other such universes as ours. In our experience, time was born at the big bang along with space and everything that exists in the universe. It is reasonable to conclude that some form of duration existed in which time itself was born.

Hawking, as a physicist, hasn't the liberty to theorize as I do. For physicists, time is the only means of duration. Physics can only draw conclusions from physical things in this universe. Hawking cannot posit his ball in a land before time and remain a physicist, because before time, whether in the bucket or as the conveyer belt, the little ball has no time in which to endure.

Should we grant Hawking that the little ball did exist before the big bang, in a land before time, he still must tell us why it exploded. It stands poised, perfectly balanced to deploy into the universe we know, but it can't, because all existence and all potential for change is in the ball and for an infinity before, it has needed no change. Nothing had ever changed before in its infinite just BEing, that the ball should change its mode of potential universe to actual universe, so why should it have changed its mode of existence fourteen billion years ago? If Hawking insists that the ball existed with no beginning and no end, then he must explain this change.

Let's put this reasoning in the bucket analogy again. As Hawking would have it, everything that exists in the universe – the universe itself – exists in a little ball at the bottom of the bucket. For an eternity it has seen no reason to make itself bigger, no reason to change from a little ball to the universe. What got into the bucket, or the ball, that caused the ball to explode when it did that had not been in it and caused it to explode (deploy, if you prefer) in its infinite BEing before? If it were simply a change of conditions, what new conditions got into the bucket, where did they come from and why do they suddenly enter the bucket, get into the ball and cause it to explode? If Hawking insists the ball was there, he must account for these new conditions. Absent some force outside the bucket, this new thing or condition that suddenly caused the ball to expand either came from nothing, or was caused by nothing, which is absurd.

Here is the essential problem with the little ball before time: either there was a time when it did not exist then suddenly did, or necessarily it either never existed, or it always existed. There is no half measure between an event and a non-event, no way to ask why that little ball exploded into the universe when it did and not before or not after, no half measure between is and is not. Until Hawking proves a physical necessity for this ball to have existed eternally and a physical timepiece that proves that it existed eternally, his is an opinion about an event that supposedly occurred before time and space, a subject for metaphysics not physics. If the ball existed before it became time and space, it must have deployed itself into the universe at will, because it being all in all, there are no accidents or changes that it does not initiate. Then it exercised volition and is an eternal god that changes modes of existence when he pleases. And Hawking has become his evangelist.

None of the new technologies or recent breakthroughs in physics that Hawking refers to in the first page of his _Brief History_ ; no complicated mathematics that he says in his "Acknowledgments" is reserved for people with a scientific education, give Hawking license to travel beyond the big bang where his little ball lives. It is a land where physicists have no license to travel, a land before time, it is a metaphysical land.

As laymen we have a metaphysical license. We can arrive at a logical conclusion that the little ball was designed by a designer outside time and space and was intentionally set to deploy. There the little ball makes sense. It has sufficient cause for the big bang to occur when it did, and sufficient design for it to become the universe we know, the universe of time-space.

Admittedly, it is a stretch of the imagination to suppose that a creator existed in a land before time, or even that a land before time existed. But a land before time assuredly did fourteen billion years ago before the big bang brought into existence space-time, whether one assumes the cause to be the tiny ball or a creator. The alternative is that the universe came from nothing. So the imagination and logic will be stretched in any case, when one is in the land before time. A creator poised with a match, waiting for things to be just right before he lights the fuse and sets off the big bang, is less a stretch by far then an accidental ball adrift forever in a sea of nonexistence that decides at some point to explode--especially when one sees, as we shall in Part Two how crucial "just right" was in the first three minutes of the big bang for the universe to survive and become the universe of our experience.

# Part One

### Chapter 4

### Land Before Space

The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.

Blaise Pascal, _Thoughts_

"Space," in this chapter, means volume: inflate a balloon, it gains volume; deflate it, it loses volume. The object is to split the term space-time so as to talk about the space part. We all understand what volume means when we think of a balloon growing with volume when we blow it up. If I had the expertise, perhaps I would explain space mathematically, perhaps not; I don't know. Were I to explain space mathematically or geometrically, perhaps I would use Euclidian geometry or hyperbolic geometry to explain. Again I can't know because I haven't the expertise. But as I explain it here, everybody, including cosmologists such as Brian Greene, who recognize that Einstein's work showed that space and time "... are actually interwoven and relative,"understand what I mean.

According to Kant, space presupposes our conceptions of "...shape, magnitude and relation."If we think of something, we think of it as existing with some shape that is of some size and is positioned somewhere. Hawking's ball is of some shape – a ball; of some size – infinitesimally small; but where can it be positioned before the big bang, before space exists? It exists somewhere in a land before space, just as it must have existed in a land before time.

Space, as used here, can be divided into separate pieces that adhere to strict rules. For instance, think of a balloon as being large enough to hold a parking lot. The parking lot has spaces marked off, most of which are filled with parked cars. Two cars arrive at different entrances to the parking lot and the drivers see in the middle the last empty parking space and rush to it. If they arrive at the space at exactly the same time, and insist on taking it, there is a collision. Two cars can't occupy the same space at the same time. All of space is one space – inside the balloon -- but each space that is occupied by a material object has rules that apply accordingly. Fourteen or so billion years ago space began at the big bang and has been expanding ever since. All the parking lots in the universe are contained in, and are part of, the single space which we think of as the universe.

This analogy of space as the universe, is less precise than a mathematical description, but it is the only one available to me. There is no intention here to disparage mathematics. Mathematics is more real (if real has degrees) than my example of the balloon. However, mathematics is real in a different way than the example is. For example, the written word "ball" is real; so is the material ball it refers to, but they have different forms of reality. In like manner, mathematics describes the space or volume in a balloon but it is not that volume. If the balloon is used as an analogy, then I apply principles of language to it whereby I compare two things that have similar characteristics so as to make understandable the less familiar one by showing its similarity to the familiar one.

Analogies and mathematics both have legitimate ways of stating things, but analogies come and go; mathematics is real in a way that does not come and go. It has a structure of absolute laws, and exists independent of space and time. We remove one mathematical law and replace it with another only if we find a mathematical flaw in the first. We do not impose laws on mathematics, we discover them. Mathematics could well have existed before the big bang; nothing says that it could not. And it's hard to conceive of space and time as coming to be at the big bang except under conditions that meet precise mathematical criteria. That, however, does not mean that mathematics can be used in a one for one exchange with space and time. Mathematics is not space and time nor is it space-time. It is a means whereby we measure and understand things about space and time.

More will be said about mathematics in a later chapter. Here, I'll just say that I envy Stephen Hawking his mathematics. Should we arrive by way of a time machine to Plato's Academy, he would be allowed entrance and I would not, because I do not have mathematics, a prerequisite. It's too late for me to change that now, but perhaps it's not too late in your life to add mathematics. I suggest you do, for no utilitarian purpose, but for the same reason I would say that if you have not seen Yosemite, you should.

In regards to Hawking's small ball that had no beginning and no end, but for the big bang fourteen-billion years ago, it would still be hunkered in its "infinitesimally small, infinitely dense" BEing. However small it may have been, if it is small as Hawking describes it, by definition it necessarily extends into, or occupies, space. Small is a descriptive term of something that occupies space. But space did not come to exist until the big bang, so into what did this ball extend prior to the big bang? In what form could it have been small when small did not exist? Not only is it impossible for an object described as small to have existed before space, it is also impossible that it is "infinitesimally" small. Infinitesimally small is a means of expression that is used to describe how small one thing is in comparison to another thing, but in the case of Hawking's ball, before the big bang there was nothing else in comparison to which the little ball was said to be infinitesimally small. This ball can't be compared to anything, there is no other thing, it's the beginning of all existence.

We ordinarily allow a phrase such as "infinitesimally small" to go unchecked –we have an idea of what it means when it is used. However, when it is used as a means to convince people that the universe has no designer, then one needs to be demanding about forms of speech. Small is predicated on space. It is impossible for a thing to be small absent space to be small in. If space does not exist, this ball cannot exist. Space did not exist prior to the big bang and therefore Hawking's small ball could not have existed prior to the big bang.

Were Hawking right about the little ball that existed before the big bang, it would be the single exception to non-existence. Time and space having not come to exist yet, it would exist as Augustine said his god exists – outside of and independent of space-time. There it loses all authenticity as an object of a scientific theory, a theory about physics. Again, Hawking disregards his own criteria for what makes a good theory and posits a ball as existing before space exists. This ball, identical in many respects to Jewish/Christian/Muslim god, existed before the universe, outside of space, before time, and created the universe in space and time. If space-time is really a product of the big bang, then it is incumbent upon Hawking, as a physicist, to show that his ball existed in a physical form prior to the big bang, that requires neither space nor time to exist in. Without such an explanation, belief in this little ball is a religion.

Perhaps we should allow some latitude here, after all, the universe did come from something. If we allow the ball to be physical and to have existed before time in a land before space, we still must ask what changed in its infinite BEing such that the little ball suddenly needed to devise space. Of the causes by which this event, the big bang, occurred, they can be 1) accidental; 2)the ball could have caused itself to explode; or 3) something other than the ball could have cause the ball to explode.

If it exploded accidentally, after eons of not exploding, then something in its eternal BEing changed just before the big bang. What conditions inside the ball changed? In an eternal ball that had as yet not exploded, what conditions could possibly change so as to enact ancient laws that dictated that it react with a bang? Why were the laws such that the ball would create space rather than scrunch into one of the infinitely smaller dimensions that lay at its disposal? If the ball is to be more than a religious speculation, these questions must at least be addressed.

If this little ball is the sum total of all that exists, as Hawking maintains, then the cause of its explosion was inside it – must have been since nothing existed outside it. It had to have caused itself to explode. This is Hawking's position, he posits the ball as cause because the alternative would be that it is affect. If it is affect then something other than itself is its cause, which is not logical from Hawking's perspective; he says that nothing else existed but it. If it is the cause of the universe, then it is necessarily first cause, the cause from which everything else is affect. If it caused itself to explode, and carried in it the potential to be all that we see, then it had such things as intelligence, insignificant though it is, in Hawking's words. If Hawking is right about it being the only and eternal cause, call it first cause of intelligence – which it must have been – and one has God. In fact, for Hawking it was first cause, albeit, without volition. It was the source of all unalterable laws, but laws to which accidents happen. It accidentally exploded; it was so accidentally well balanced that it turned into an elegant universe rather than the metal bin or soup bowl it was destined for; it accidentally sustained life – at least on this planet; it accidentally was the source of intelligence, although itself totally dumb. It was eternally the universe, accidentally small then accidentally large.

Other than being an accident prone super power whose laws can't be altered, the closer one examines this ball the more one sees in it Aristotle's god. Both theories begin with a need to explain why there is something rather than nothing. Something cannot come from nothing, that is why it is important to Hawking to show that this tiny ball always existed. Aristotle's god is the efficient cause without which the universe could not exist; God is the Prime Cause, the Unmoved Mover, whose very property it is to exist and without which nothing else can exist. Aristotle concludes that the universe is co-eternal with God, but depends on God to exist. Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, depends on nothing but himself to exist. He is fully self sufficient, and is unconcerned that our universe is an elegant or unbearable universe. Hawking's accidental ball with its accidental explosion matches it in many ways.

The Twelfth Century Spanish philosopher and Jewish Biblical-Talmudic scholar, Moses Maimonides, says that Aristoteleans refuse to believe that "...a transition from potentiality to actuality would take place in the Deity itself, if He produced a thing (the universe) at a certain fixed time." Should they allow such a transition, or any transition, in the Deity, Maimonides says, would be to them tantamount to saying that one configuration of the Deity was not satisfactory, not perfect, so the Deity adjusted accordingly. That the Deity was not perfect, the Aristoteleans will not allow. Thus the Aristoteleans isolated their god from any change, any transition, and made him totally self absorbed. The universe was co-existent with god, but of no concern to him. This seemed to Maimonides (an Aristotelian scholar of the first order) to make the universe the accident that Hawking's ball is. Maimonides found no reason to believe in Aristotle's self-absorbed, non-concerned god. Rather, he believed that God can affect change or transition in the universe by His freewill without undergoing a transition within Himself, thus avoiding anything that would indicate that He is less than perfect. Maimonides reasons that a transition from potentiality to actuality, which the Aristoteleans fear would mean an imperfection in God, does not occur in God but in the universe. A transition of any kind "...applies only to bodies composed of substance." God created all substance, according to Maimonides, but is not substance himself. Maimonides argues that the creator of the universe created time and space at his pleasure, from nothing. This creator is independent from his creation, time-space, and is subject in no way to the laws and bounds of what he has created. He is different than Aristotle's god and Hawking's ball, in that He may create according to His pleasure and with His perfect freewill. The creator does not conform to anything we can imagine, because the very condition of our imagination is a result of something created.

Maimonides argues that if the universe had a beginning, its beginning had to be caused by something other than what it is composed of--laws and all--otherwise we find ourselves trying to discover what laws caused various material things to react, and those to react to a previous condition and so forth, in an infinite regress. Maimonides reasonably concludes that the cause of the universe lies outside its parts and laws. God created it, and thus there is hope that He may change it, yesterday, today and for as long as the creator wills it to exist. But to understand this source of power is beyond us, even if it is the source of our hope. So I draw illustrations of a designer contemplating the universe, bringing it from potentiality to actuality, but it is only an illustration. I cannot possibly know about what preceded time and space.

The logic that led the early (and current) cosmologist and philosophers to First Cause was not simple choice, but logical necessity, the law of cause and affect. They saw that all things were in movement and asked why. The logical need for a First Cause, or Ultimate (Last) Cause, Prime Mover or however you wish to name that cause from which all results sprang, led Plato to posit the Self-moved Mover, and Aristotle to posit the Unmoved mover.The Jewish/Christian/Muslim religions say that apparent design in the universe proves that God created the universe sometime in the past. Hawking also believes that the universe came to exist sometime in the past, although he believes that it came to exist farther in the past than the Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition says it did. Hawking explains the reason for existence as a small ball with eternal characteristics, suddenly in an accidental well organized manner, expanding into the present universe sometime in the past. Both theories are accepted on faith. Hawking claims that his theory is backed by science, but it is hard to square scientific laws with all those elegant accidents.

If you're looking for a reasonable theory that explains existence, and you don't want to appear simple, Hawking's ball is not it. If it's faith you seek, however, this little ball demands considerably more than a traditional creator.

# Part One

### Chapter 5

### A Mindless Matter Of Space And Time

We do not yet know all the basic laws: there is an expanding frontier of ignorance.

Richard Feynman _, Six Easy Pieces_

Whatever time, space and matter are, Hawking's little ball in its infinite BEing went public with them fourteen billion years ago. "What could have caused the stars to have turned on?" Hawking asks. If you were of the Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition, he says you would feel that "...it was necessary to have 'First Cause' to explain how the stars came to be turned on – how the universe came to exist." In the universe one follows the logic of cause and affect back to the cause of the universe itself: how did one material thing cause another, and that another and so forth back to the ultimate question, what was the first cause of all the material things that followed it? The Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition presupposes that the first mover of material was himself non-material. God caused the universe, He turned on the lights.

In Hawking's early work, he and Roger Penrose showed that "...provided only that the general theory of relativity is correct and the universe contains as much matter as we observe,"the stars were turned on at the big bang. At the big bang, however, the universe is shrunk to a single spot, a singularity. It may be a spot and it may not, whatever it was and did is shrouded in infinity, so it is impossible to say precisely what turned the stars on. Here, all scientific theories break down, says Hawking, and since all scientific theories break down we only know what has happened since the big bang and in no way can know what happened before. Therefore we should, he says, cut out of all scientific models any considerations of possible events before the big bang, and say that time had a beginning at the big bang.This restriction, he himself violates so as to construct a theory that avoids the singularity his early work ran into: the little ball that existed forever, he says, turned on the stars when it exploded at the big bang. This ball is for Hawking, First Cause. It caused all things and itself had no cause. So Hawking's logic follows cause and affect back to a first cause, the little ball, beyond which there is no other.

The Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition holds that the universe began when God created it, but God is eternal. Hawking holds that the universe in its present mode of time and space began at the big bang. Prior to the bang, the ball that caused the bang, was eternal. The central issue of this book is which of these two theories is the most logical. Since the scope of this book excludes inspired scripture or special revelation, and agrees, generally, with cosmologists about the big bang and what has happened since, the only permissible way of deciding which of these two theories is most reasonable is to pursue logic back to the big bang. From the universe we witness, can we draw any conclusions as to which of these two theories most logically explains what happened before the big bang that might have caused the universe to exist and us in it? The crucial difference between the two is that the God of the Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition, of his own volition –his freewill – turned on the stars. According to this tradition, nothing caused God to exist, it is His property to exist. Hawking says that it is the property of his ball to exist too: "...it would just BE." But he claims no freewill for the ball.

It is not significant that one tradition assumed that the universe has existed ten thousand years and the other that it has existed fourteen billion years. The first had no scientific knowledge of the expanding universe and the big bang, otherwise it might have reasoned the big bang into its theory, as many theists today do. Both agree that the universe as we see it now, came into existence sometime in the past; whether sooner or later is not the question. The question is, what caused it to come into existence at all? If one posits an all powerful God who created the universe and all its laws, one may ask why He created it, and never receive an answer. One unavoidable answer is that He created the universe of his volition.

The ball of Hawking's imagination has no freewill, no volition, it is at the mercy of laws itself, to which it is eternally bound. Like Aristotle's universe that coexisted eternally with First Cause, the ball has coexisted with the laws forever. Aristotle's universe (which I take no satisfaction in) was uncreated, but was contingent on first cause – God – to exist, but First Cause was not contingent on the universe to exist. For example, a shadow exists only if there is a body that casts it; it is contingent upon the body to exist – no body, no shadow. The body, however, does not depend on the shadow to exist. The ball, in this instance is different than Aristotle's First Cause. The ball, one might say, takes the place of Aristotle's universe, and law takes the place of his First Cause. The ball depends on laws to exist, but laws do not depend on the ball to exist.

Here is where it becomes necessary to take one's eye off the ball. We step around the shadow as it were, and ask about the body that casts it: where did this body of laws come from?Laws are not physical, but they are something not nothing, and they have force. The whole story of existence is about laws reacting to other laws, cause and affect all the way back. If one desires to know conditions at the big bang, he follows laws of physics and mathematics back to the big bang. Physical things don't move unless some law dictates that they move. It is science's job to determine what these laws are and how the physical world is and was constructed. But any theory that projects itself beyond the physical universe and claims to tell why the universe exists – whether string theory or Hawking's no boundary, or religion – must necessarily give a reason for why laws exist, because laws are a major component of existence. One may, however, say that laws have always existed just as the Jewish/Christian/Muslim god is said to have always existed, which is precisely what Hawking claims and what is being examined here: did the laws always exist, having no creator?

If Hawking should claim volition for the ball, his theory would become another theistic religion. His little ball would become a creator. And of that creator we would ask: of all the universes he could have created, why such a one as this? Hawking's ball, however, leaves no place for a creator.

After an infinity of existence before the big bang (unless the little ball materialized out of nothing, which Hawking says is absurd), something happened that caused the little ball to bang. In Hawking's argument, there exists nothing outside to cause the big bang, so there is no need to go outside the universe or Hawking's little ball to discover what could have caused it to explode. There being no creator out there -- no "out there" for there to be a creator in -- whatever set the ball on course to the big bang can only be contained within the little ball.

Is it possible that the laws that lay dormant for infinity inside the ball accidentally activated and set themselves on countdown to the big bang? Accidents don't happen, they are caused, as the watchword in industrial safety goes. A good safety program has a committee that investigates the causes of accidents so that the chain of events that led to an accident can be altered or eliminated. Physics works on the same principle, it looks from one cause to another among physical laws and mathematical formulas to discover why something happened; in this case, why the universe exists. Hawking argues that there is no need for a creator, the ball is fully sufficient for its existence, but he gives no reason why the ball, at this point and not earlier, exploded, or if you like, deployed. His argument that the ball existed at all, would be palatable if he did not insist that the ball was fully self contained and needed no creator. Having made this the central point of _A Brief History of Time_ , as Carl Sagan in the Introduction points out, then one would expect him to at least provide as much an explanation for what happened as a good safety program demands. We cannot allow a boss to be cavalier about people's safety; surely we can expect one whose genius wields great influence not to be cavalier about people's faith.

But if not accidentally, then did the ball deploy of its own volition?

It is one thing to say that laws exist in the universe and that we cannot know why, just that they do. It is another to account for creatures within that universe who are not merely passive material upon whom laws work, but of their volition, go where laws do not send them and carry material to places that material could not otherwise go. They can't manipulate the law, but they use it to its greatest advantage. They reconstruct material in ways the laws by themselves never can. They create art. More importantly, they create it of their own desire, out of their own imagination. They inject into reality a new reality that could not exist without them. A million chimps banging on typewriters may eventually turn out a Hamlet, but until they exercise imagination and creativity the magic of Hamlet forever escapes them. Now we humans are an example of this freewill creative ability, but we cannot say we are the only such creatures in the universe who are, nor that ours is the ultimate in creativity. But we humans, as the affect of the little ball after it exploded, are ample evidence of volition and freewill and creativity. How can Hawking deny a creative ability to the cause – the ball, that is apparent in the affect – human intellect? How can he know that before the big bang there was no volition in the little ball that decided at some point in its infinite BEing to bang?

The logical answer to Hawking's question, "What place, then, for a creator," is so that he may tell us why this ball, unexploded for infinity, banged.

# Part One

### Chapter 6

### Cut It Out, Occam!

Heaven is for thee too high

to know what passes there;

be lowly wise

Raphael to Adam

John Milton, _Paradise Lost_

In "Acknowledgments" to his _Brief History of Time_ , Stephen Hawking asks, "Where did the universe come from? How and why did it begin? Will it come to an end, and if so, how?" questions, he says, that are of interest to us all. "But," he cautions, "...modern science has become so technical that only a very small number of specialists are able to master the mathematics used to describe them."Absent science and mathematics, he says, one gets only basic ideas about the origin and fate of the universe. To properly appreciate the finer brush strokes of string theory that Brian Greene, in his _Fabric of the Cosmos_ applies, or to get a clear picture of what Weinberg describes in his First Three Minutes, we need to understand the physics and mathematics those authors provide for those who can work them. Short of a mathematical and scientific background, we must be satisfied with the basic ideas of cosmology that these books, and Hawking's _Brief History_ , give us. Even then, the greater insight of science and mathematics that these specialists use in their day to day endeavor escapes us, unless we have the capacity and the fervor to undertake an in-depth study approaching theirs. My capacity doesn't approach theirs, if my fervor did.

However, because I comprehend only the rudiments of physics, I must not assume, nor should you, that one cannot dream, can't philosophize. Philosophy, religion, literature, drama, art, music and a world of wonder is available to we the masses in measures not dreamed of a hundred years ago. If the pablum of popular entertainment does not deter us, the finest products of the human mind is ours to kill and eat. If we endeavor to appreciate the universe at whatever depths our capacity permits, we may get an insight into reality that an over dependence on science and analysis shrouds. Mathematics is an avenue to wonder, but it is not the only avenue. Pascal, one of history's eminent mathematicians, bears witness to that. He was a mystic

It is important that one not be deterred from challenging physicists because he lacks a mastery over mathematics and physics. The logic of cause and affect compels one to step beyond the big bang, and the first step beyond the big bang leaves science behind. It does not necessarily leave logic behind, but it may. You are on your own out there, and no one can tell you what you might find. It is up to you whether you take that step or not, but you cannot take it as a scientist. There is no physical evidence beyond the big bang for science to analyze.

Stephen Hawking tells us that very thing. If we wish to ask whether the universe has a beginning or end, he says, we must be clear about what a scientific theory is, and apply that theory to the physical evidence. If we have no physical evidence, he says, "...employ the principle of economy known as Occam's Razor and cut out all features of (a) theory that cannot be observed."

...if, as is the case, we know only what has happened since the big bang, we could not determine what happened beforehand. As far as we are concerned, events before the big bang can have no consequences, so they should not form part of a scientific model of the universe. We should therefore cut them out of the model and say that time had a beginning at the big bang.

Cut them out of the scientific model perhaps, but not out of philosophical considerations. If Hawking's ball ever existed, it existed before it banged. If it existed there, it can in no way figure in as part of a scientific model of the universe. But it cannot figure itself out of a philosophical necessity. The law of cause and affect demand that the ball somehow account for its origin. If the ball ever existed, some plan existed inside it, either accidentally or deliberately, with sufficient power to turn the potential universe into the material universe we live in.

Although "before" has no literal meaning in this case – time did not exist prior to the big bang -- there still is logical reason to ask what might have caused the big bang. The inadequacy is in our ability to know of a form of duration other than time. If we lack the words to adequately ask the question, the question still remains a logical, legitimate question. If one refuses to ask questions whose answers he cannot presently conceive of – that is, whose answers cannot be seen in the observable world \-- he can never receive answers about things he believes to be inconceivable. A pity to have missed such a vision if we only feared to look foolish. History is not observable, and certainly not the big bang, but if we are to reason at all, our path is along a line of reasoning whose end we cannot know. Reason compels us to ask questions about things that are not and never could be observed.

Hawking dismisses events earlier than the big bang because he says they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence, he says, can be ignored because it would have no observational consequences. But where does such a limit leave us laymen, should our very questions be the ones with which Hawking opens his book: "where did the universe come from? How and why did it begin?" questions whose answers cannot be found in the physical universe? To leave these unaddressed leaves us where the Chief Investigator in the following illustration insists that Occam leave his investigation:

"This Occam?"

"Occam, sir."

"Chief Investigator here."

"I recognized your voice, sir."

"One would hope, after working for me for thirty years. Look, Occam, get down to the corner of Infi and Nitty. It has been reported that a body lies in front of the Hotel Accidental. See if there are any indications at the scene as to how it died and how it got there."

"You mean natural causes or murder?"

"How many times do I have to tell you, Occam, all causes of death are natural, even those caused by murder."

"Then what should I look..."

"Occam, your problem has always been that you ask too many questions, and the wrong ones. Go down there and find out if there is anything fishy about this body. If it died from causes other than natural, I want to know. If there is anything more important than my knowing–which is hard to imagine--it's that the public will want to know."

The Chief Investigator hung up, but no sooner had he stirred cream in his coffee and bitten off a chunk of doughnut than Occam was calling back.

"Gravity, sir."

"Gravity! How is that?"

"The man is crushed from beneath."

"You mean the earth came up and crushed him? How do you know something didn't fall on him?"

"There's nothing around, sir. Not only that, I've examined the body very closely, and it is crushed from underneath evenly throughout. I suggest that it fell from a great height. The pull of gravity accelerated it and the earth stopped it abruptly, crushing it evenly throughout."

The Chief Investigator stopped chewing: "You usually fail me, Occam, but this time you've solved the problem quicker than..."

"Sir. I don't think it is solved."

"Obviously gravity and the earth's surface caused this man's death. That's as natural as two causes get, Occam. What more could you ask of a theory? Keep it simple, Occam, that's how I got where I am."

"One more?"

"If you must."

"Why was he falling?"

"Obviously you don't know much about Newton and the laws of gravity."

"No sir."

"A thing will accelerate to a certain speed under the law of gravity, and maintain that speed until something stops it. In the case of this unfortunate man, he did and it did."

"Where did he fall from?"

"The Sky, Occam!"

"I've checked with the airport and there were no airplanes aloft over Hotel Accidental at that hour."

"Are you telling me that this guy just..."

"Something else fishy here, sir. The soles of the man's shoes are caked with roof tar."

"Occam, use your brain. It's hardly conceivable that an airplane would have roof tar in it."

"No, but the Hotel Accidental has roof tar on it. His footprints are on the roof. And! another set of tracks are right behind his."

"Look, let's keep it simple, Occam. Obviously gravity and the surface of the earth caused this man's death. Were anyone else up there with him, they could in no way affect the force of gravity and the surface of the earth, the obvious reason for this man's death. Cut out further considerations, write up the cause of death as natural, and report in. I'll call the coroners office and tell them to collect the body."

If Occam's investigation is restricted to the laws of physics and to the evidence observable at the scene, then the investigation misses the most pertinent cause of this death, a motive. Did this man leap? Did someone push him? Natural laws killed him but someone used them for a predetermined end. Hopefully we fell from heaven for reasons less sinister, but given the state of affairs on earth at times, I can't blame someone for wondering. It's one thing to say that the state of things on earth are often deplorable, quite another to set the limits of ones inquiry as to why the universe exists to answers dealing only with the natural conditions under which it exists. If one limits questions about why the universe exists to the natural laws under which it exists, he will never answer Leibniz's ultimate question: why something rather than nothing? The answer may be more than physics can provide. If you choose to accept Hawking's ball as the reason the universe exists, your questions still remain: why did a tiny ball exist to explode, and why did its explosion result in time and space and our material universe?

It is reasonable that science limit its enquiry to what has happened since the big bang, because the object of scientific study is the physical universe, and the physical universe did not exist prior to the big bang. However, just as Occam wanted to look for whomever left tracks on the roof, and ask that person about possible motive, we want to know why physical things exist at all; was there a motive? To do that we go beyond physical questions. Scientists may enquire about the non-physical just as we do, but not as scientists. Their study is physics, the branch of study beyond physics is metaphysics, a branch of philosophy. The term, metaphysics was first used to denote the written body of work that followed Aristotle's "Physics." Down through the ages it has come to mean far more than simply a book of Aristotle's, it has long meant the study of existence beyond physics. That is what Hawking means when he uses the term.

If we ask, where the universe came from and why, ultimately we cannot arrive at an answer from physics. The answer lies before the big bang, before the physical universe, and there, Hawking says, we cannot go. Hawking concludes his book with hopes for a unified theory, a single model that describes the universe. But again, he offers a caveat: "the usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the question of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?" Most scientist, he says, have been so occupied with developing new theories about what the universe is that they have had little time to ask why it is. "On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories"(see footnote 2). Philosophers, he says, have reduced their enquiry to the analysis of language.

Hawking is right to bemoan the loss of true philosophical enquiry. Until philosophy returns to a study of metaphysics, and philosophers are willing to ask questions that admit of the possibility of design in the universe, philosophy in its present form has little to add to what science is already doing, and nothing to add that is not scientific. Anyone can and should ask metaphysical questions unless he has established some well thought out principle for not doing so. Stephen Hawking has established for himself such a principle, but you need not abide by his principle. Stephen Hawking does not allow himself to ask metaphysical questions, so he is the last person who should tell what the rules for metaphysics are. He believes that any explanation other than a scientific explanation for existence, the universe--why it is the way it is, and what its ultimate destination might be--can have no bearing on why it exists, therefore it can be safely ignored. That is to say, metaphysical questions can have no bearing on why the universe came to exist. At the same time, he seems to be saying that only scientists have the expertise to ask metaphysical questions.That is the same as saying that metaphysics can be a field of study, but only under the tutelage of someone who disbelieves in its efficacy.

# Part One

#

### Chapter 7

### He Cheated!

I am altering the arrangement, pray I don't alter it further.

Darth Vader to Lando Calrission, "Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back"

If you want to discuss questions about the universe, and whether it has a beginning and end, "...you have to be clear about what a good scientific theory is," says Stephen Hawking.One of the two parts of a good scientific procedure is that it makes predictions about the results of future observations. Consequently, because

...all our theories of science are formulated on the assumption that space-time is smooth and nearly flat.., they break down at the big bang singularity, where the curvature of space-time is infinite. This means that even if there were events before the big bang, one could not use them to determine what would happen afterward, because predictability would break down at the big bang... If...we only know what has happened since the big bang, we could not determine what happened beforehand. As far as we are concerned, events before...should not form part of a scientific model of the universe. We should therefore, cut them out of the model...

Having established these rules, Hawking presents the thesis of his _Brief History of Time_ , which posits an infinitely small ball that could only have existed before the big bang, precisely where Hawking says a good scientific theory cannot go. It necessarily existed before the big bang, because its deployment is the big bang.

We would gladly excuse Hawking this contradiction were the results enlightening. However, this contradiction, as we shall see, neither moves us closer to answering the questions Hawking says are of interest to us all – how and why the universe began? how and why it will end? – but it illustrates the dangers of taking a scientific theory into territory it cannot possibly go. Having posited this ball beyond the big bang, and against good scientific procedure, he asks, "what place, then, for a creator?"

Hawking says that if his no boundary theory, the theory of this ball, is right, then even if there is a god, He had no freedom at all to choose initial conditions in constructing the universe.

He would, of course, still have had the freedom to choose the laws that the universe obeyed. This, however, may not really have been all that much of a choice; there may well be only one, or a small number, of complete unified theories, such as the heterotic string theory, that are self-consistent and allow the existence of structures as complicated as human beings who can investigate the laws of the universe and ask about the nature of God.

In this passage, Hawking applies laws that have existed since the big bang, to conditions – if there were any – that might have existed before the big bang. If there is a God, Hawking stipulates the laws and conditions under which he could have created the universe. It is impossible for Hawking to know if any laws existed before the big bang, or what they were, or what laws may exist in another universe right now. There is no way Hawking can set the parameters for an existence that he cannot possibly envision. It is not important that Hawking contradicts himself – we all do. But it is important that he contradicts himself in such a crucial way. The heart of this thesis that Hawking would have you replace the notion of a creator with, assumes that the laws that exist now, after the big bang, were the laws that existed before the big bang. He does more than violate a principle of cutting out all that he cannot know, he uses what he cannot know – the laws before the big bang – to dictate the conditions for what he cannot know -- the little ball.

If the universe were designed to deploy at the big bang, all its reason to exist existed prior to the big bang, and none can be known by a system that disallows inquiries about anything before the big bang. Most scientist are satisfied to stay within physical bounds and make no conjectures as to what happened before the big bang – why the universe exists. For good cause; this big bang does not simply mark a boundary beyond which we cannot see, as if we were in a lighted room and looking out a window at a pitch black night. The big bang marks the boundary where nothing, to our knowledge, exists outside the room. Time, space and matter that exists in the room, do not exist beyond this dark pane. If a world does exist outside the window, it may well be a world that we could not possibly comprehend if it were displayed in broad daylight. We have no way of knowing whether before the big bang, at which point the universe began to exist, the laws that now rule the universe existed then. So far as we can know, nothing existed before the big bang, including natural law as we know it.

In Hawking's more recent work, The Universe In A Nutshell, he says,

If the universe in imaginary time are indeed closed surfaces, as Hartle and I propose, it would have fundamental implications for philosophy and our picture of where we came from. The universe would be entirely self-contained; it wouldn't need anything outside to wind up the clockwork and set it going. Instead, everything in the universe would be determined by the laws of science and by rolls of the dice within the universe. This may sound presumptions, but it is what I and many other scientist believe.

He's right, it does sound presumptuous. It presumes too much, primary of which is that we should believe what Hawking and other scientists believe because they are scientists. Should he prove this theory – a theory he has failed to prove since nineteen-eighty-eight -- it would only be a mathematical resolution for an imaginary ball that Hawking posits as having "closed surfaces" and existing before the big bang. Here is a ball presumed to exist before space or matter existed, in a land before time. Here is a ball whose very concept is off limits to good scientific procedure.

It's presumptuous to insist that a little ball existed infinitely with laws of quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle rattling inside it for eternity until, for unknown reasons, they were cast like a set of dice fourteen billion years ago.

The dice are cast and of a trillion probable outcomes, the single least probable turns up: a universe with laws and conditions that we comprehend -- and we in it to comprehend them. This, Hawking presumes to have been an accident, because he discredits any place for a creator. We humans, he presumes, are but the insignificant results of a string of fortuitous accidents as improbable as the big bang. Most prominent current cosmologist don't believe in a creator, but most don't push a theory that presumes to have special insight into conditions before the big bang.

We see the logic of these scientists who stop at the big bang beyond which mathematics fails and all scientific laws break down, and where it is impossible to tell whether there is a ball anymore. We can know only that this existent/non-existent mystery deployed into the universe fourteen billion years ago in what is called the big bang. Hawking insists that black holes – his specialty – are the model for what conditions were before the big bang. Evidence does not compel him to suggest this, it's simply his theory. But it is a necessary theory if he is to remove the need for a creator.

In the books Hawking has written for laymen, he preaches his no boundary theory, the little ball, and recounts its most dramatic presentation in 1981 at "...a conference on cosmology in the Vatican." His theory went unremarked by the pope, he says, because the pope did not understood its implications. Perhaps Hawking did not understand the pope. It's possible that the pope was not impressed with the theory, because in none of Hawking's books does he prove it. So why does this scientist argue so adamantly for a theory that no science can prove? Because Hawking is on a crusade, an objectionable term but one the Vatican does understand and we understand. With no compelling scientific reason for this theory, that Hawking insists on its believability is pure dogma. Its authority is the influence of Hawking's intellect, nothing more.

The ball that Hawking violates good principles of science to posit, answers none of the questions: "Where did the universe come from? How and why did it begin? Will it come to an end, and if so, how?" If it ever existed, these questions still persist. Moreover, the little ball theory reopens a question that science no longer asks– how long has the universe existed. No scientific evidence urges us to accept Hawking's word that it is the property of his ball, the latent universe, to just BE from eternity before it exploded. Hubble discovered that the universe that can be mathematically analyzed, has existed for approximately fourteen billion years. Hawking's only proof for his little ball having existed eternally, is its shape. But assuming it was in the configuration he describes, this is no proof that it existed that way forever. We know that if it ever existed, it exploded fourteen billion years ago. Grant Hawking this little ball theory and he still must answer why it exploded fourteen billion years ago and not before. This ball raises more questions than it answers.

To our knowledge, ours is a closed universe in search of what makes it run. Since we don't know what makes it run, we cannot know if anything outside it affects it. We cannot know what might have affected our universe in its inception. Obviously our universe is the consequence of something that happened before the big bang or the big bang would never have occurred. The only other alternative is that the universe came from nothing.

We don't know what our universe is a consequence of. Since it is here, we only know that it is the consequence of something. We don't know all the laws that run the universe, we just know they do. Hawking is as much in the dark about what caused these things as we are. And like us, it is impossible for him to know that events before the big bang can have no consequences. Should Hawking's ball ever have existed, it existed necessarily before the big bang, and the universe is necessarily a consequence of it. Such a basis for a theory shows that his assertion that events before the big bang could have no consequences, is self evidently false. Stephen has the right to speculate beyond the big bang, but not as a scientist whose mere speculation is supposed to leave no room for a creator.

We are not scientists, so we can speculate. We speculate about non-material things. We ask questions, as Hawking does, that cannot be answered by physical evidence alone. Just as the coroner's assistant, Occam, found traces of roof tar on the shoes of the mysterious body on the corner of Infi and Nitty, we find traces of the infinite within the finite. The material world is finite, but mathematics, geometry, logic, the structure of language, all are traces of something that may be infinite. None exists as finite material in time and space, but if anything exists, they do. To attribute these things, along with our sense of jubilation at triumph, mourning at tragedy, the joy of wonder and mystery of love, as properties of a small, dense ball that is purely material, is to presume too much. Should the ball ever have existed, as Hawking conjectures, it would be impossible to attribute the origin of these properties to a purely material accident. These things, and we as their repository, are made of different stuff than matter. Accidents that happen to material things have material results, they don't create law, mathematics, aesthetics, emotions and the plethora of non-material things that are the heart of existence. If science insists that they do, it remains to science to prove how. Should we attribute the origin of these properties to an infinitely existing force that is not contingent on the material universe to exist, but which, like law, exercises power over matter, then we have good reason to see a place for a creator.

Like most of us, Stephen hasn't the discipline to stop at the big bang, and leave a possible reason for existence lost in a singularity. We can forgive him that, it's our nature to ask metaphysical questions. But we cannot allow him to ask metaphysical questions to which he allows only answers that apply to physical existence. Hawking's _Brief History of Time_ should be accepted as just that, and just to the extent that it agrees with the body of science that most other cosmologists draw from. Hawking's no boundary theory, the theory of the little ball, goes outside that body of accepted science into what amounts to personal dogma.

# Part One

#

### Chapter 8

### Repeat What You're Taut!

He seemed so cock-sure, you see. And yet none of his certainties were worth one strand of a woman's hair.

Camus, _The Stranger_ 35

In the flickering light of a movie projector sits the middle aged Earth, a handsome planet, graying at the temples, nostalgic this evening, watching old family movies that trace his family history, the Cosmoses, back to the beginning. He has reversed the film and sees himself as a young planet shrinking ever smaller. Eventually he disappears from the picture, swallowed up in a group picture of the family. Then the whole Cosmos family shrinks smaller and smaller until all the various aunt and uncle planets disappear into the past.

"Stop!" says Stephen Hawking, emerging from the dark at the back of the room, calculator in hand. "You've drawn the circle in too tight. The hub is so dark I can't see through it, and the zeroes have gone off my calculator."

Earth peers into the darkness as Hawking approaches the projector. "Is that a problem?" he asks.

"It will be if you keep going back, reducing its size. Eventually it'll just... Stop it there and I'll just figure out a backward math that'll reduce the number of zeroes. Back the picture out a bit and bring the dot just back into focus."

"But then I won't see my first grandparents."

"You can't see them anyway. Another frame or two back and the whole picture would have..."

"Disappeared?"

"Don't say that. If you think Nature abhors a vacuum, you can't imagine how much my colleagues abhor one–and how much they'll abhor me too if I find one!"

Earth brings the spot back now, small but not as dark. "There!" says Hawking (all cosmologist speak with exclamation points). "That puts the zeroes back in our screen, allows us to see from where we began to expand–let's call it "'Infinitesimally Small!'"

"But that's just my great grandparents when they were small," says Earth. I want to see their parents." Earth pulls out a magnifying glass.

"Put that away!"

This is a thumbnail sketch of Hawking's no boundary theory, the little ball. What follows is an examination of the circular reasoning and tautologies of this theory on a point by point basis. Each point is, in capsule, a shorter version of what has gone before. It's yours to pick and choose which, if any, of these shorter versions fit your needs.

Hawking's no boundary theory:

When we try to go back in time to visualize the universe from its first event, as does nostalgic Earth in this illustration, we last see it as it disappears into infinity. From infinity begins pure speculation. We may stop at the big bang and say that it was space-time's first event, but that doesn't tell us what staged that first event. Ultimately it was staged by something or nothing. It is illogical to think it was staged by nothing. But if it was staged by something, then the beginning of that something too, must have been staged by something or nothing. Theists, such as Plato, cut that conversation short by saying that there is something that causes all things, but itself was caused by nothing else; it always existed, having never begun.

The big bang may be the first event in the history of our universe, but perhaps it is not the first event in the history of all existence. It may be but a single event in an infinite line of events about which we cannot know. But just because we cannot know, does not mean we cannot speculate, or ask. We know there is no logical answer as to why there is something rather than nothing, but the question will not leave us.

Our only means of getting a first glimpse of the universe as it emerges from infinity, or of imagining it as it dissolves back into infinity, is by way of mathematics. Even then it is impossible to cross out all the Xs and Os, and reduce our numbers to zero, because, as Hawking and all cosmologist agree, mathematics cannot handle infinity, and infinity is where the big bang begins. What, if anything, existed before, Hawking says we do not and cannot know. But Hawking is not satisfied to leave it there. He insists on theorizing away the possibility of a creator. Before he can do that however, he has to get by this singularity. He does so by avoiding it. Before the ball disappears, he stops the picture, and while the ball is visible, he posits the universe as the little ball. Thus he avoids the singularity, and avoids having to discuss the disappearing universe. He simply says, this is the universe as it always was before: almost but not quite out of focus, ready to bang.

Fair enough, for the sake of his theory, to avoid a singularity that no theory can handle. But in the face of this inefficiency, he presumes a theory that leaves no room for a creator. The danger here is that should the answer to existence lie in the singularity, and be accessible by some means other than mathematics (perhaps a means as elusive as the means by which mathematics itself came to exist), Hawking and his theory will never find it. His no boundary theory accounts for none of the material his little ball must have been crammed with before it banged, nor the balance of its packing without which it could never have become an orderly universe. As an explanation for this material and its balance, he simply says, "it would just BE."

Hawking's picture of the universe begins from where he first (mathematically) can see it, but not so small that it disappears in a singularity.Having simplified it down to virtually nothing – "infinitesimally small"– and drawn it smooth so that no infinities stick to it, and filled it with just the tiniest drop of disorder in its near perfect order – so that galaxies rather than iron or soup can form, he still cannot eliminate or explain the origin or complexity of its contents, nor their near perfect balance, nor the trigger mechanism that caused the bang, nor the power that caused it to bang and become the universe of our experience. His arbitrary point for the ball to bang may avoid the infinity that further reduction must inevitably bring it to, but unless it accounts for the complexities of the ball before it banged, it is hardly a theory that accounts for why and how the universe began. It is especially no theory more logical than the theory of a creator, even if neither theory is perfectly satisfactory. By avoiding the singularity it cannot explain, Hawking's no boundary theory is only saying that it cannot explain the beginning of the universe. It can only posit the universe as a god in a purely material form that emerges against impossible odds to become the universe we see.

The no boundary theory and quantum mechanics's uncertainty principle:

Had Hawking been present before the big bang, calculator in hand, to survey the primeval material ready to explode, he could never have predicted that a universe like ours would emerge – unless he were a creator and had a plan. With one chance for our universe being filled with galaxies, against the probability of a "...one followed by one hundred billion billion zeroes," that it would be filled with black holes and chaos, no scientist in his right mind could have predicted our universe. Cut those odds down by billions, and still no one in his right mind would have bet on this universe, especially no scientist armed with the tools of quantum mechanics to project the probabilities. Even with hindsight, and the fact that we are here to have hindsight, our vision of how it was possible is smeared beyond interpretation. And yet, with vision that borders clairvoyance, Stephen Hawking proclaims a theory that not only explains it, but leaves no place for a creator.

His first optical tool in this near perfect vision is quantum mechanics. It's a natural wonder of creation and has enriched mankind immeasurably, but for all its utility and marvel, it is an inscrutable mystery; certainly no tool with which to dislodge a creator; it may as easily lodge a creator. Moreover, Hawking chooses the most mysterious aspect of quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, to clear up another mystery: how the universe banged into existence with just the right amount of lumpiness to be a universe with galaxies rather than one made of soup or iron? "Using the no boundary condition," he says, "we find that the universe must in fact have started off with just the minimum possible nonuniformity allowed by the uncertainty principle"

This in no way explains the mystery of how that little ball had just the minimum possible nonuniformity. The uncertainty principle does not tell us why things are uncertain, or nonuniform, it only tells us that they are and gives us a means for calculating likely or unlikely results of scientific projects. Therefore it cannot be an explanation for the presence of the nonuniformity in Hawking's little ball before it banged, it can only be a reiteration of an obvious but unexplained fact of nature. The usage of the uncertainty principle here is a tautology. What we want to know is, how, against odds of one against a one-followed-by one-hundred-billion-billion zeroes, that "minimum possible nonuniformity" essential to form our universe of galaxies, rather than one filled with black holes, got into the little ball before it exploded. How that "minimum possible nonuniformity" is even possible is the essential question. This using of the mystery of the uncertainty principle to explain why something in nature is unexplainable, is no more than a pointing to the uncertainty principle as an explanation of the uncertainty principle – using one unexplained thing to explain another unexplained thing. The uncertainty principle is a fact of nature that no one can explain. Of it, Richard Feynman says:

Physics has given up. We do not know how to predict what would happen in a given circumstance, and we believe now that it is impossible, that the only thing that can be predicted is the probability of different events (his italics).

Now, let us revisit Hawking before the big bang, calculator in hand, in the past that Brian Greene calls the unobserved past, "the time before we, or anyone, or anything has carried out a given observation, (a past that) remains in the usual realm of quantum uncertainty, of probabilities." Hawking scrutinizes the little ball, its mystery inaccessible to him. He knows only that it will deploy in some big bang. Armed with quantum theory and a calculator, however, he can only calculate what it probably will be after it explodes; quantum mechanics refuses to deal in absolutes. Only the results will tell him if he was right, or if quantum mechanics decided to pull one of its tricks and do the unbelievable: Quantum mechanics tells Hawking there is a chance of one-followed-by-one-hundred-billion-billion-zero possibilities that the bang will produce a universe filled with black holes and chaos, against one chance that it will produce a universe of galaxies with stars and planets. The second possibility is so out of sight that to even consider it before the big bang would have been unthinkable. Other than the obvious evidence that one-followed-by-one-hundred-billion-billion probable chances were wrong, what method does he use to show why they were wrong? He uses the uncertainty principle, which has no explanation. It is circular reasoning to use an unexplainable phenomena of nature, the uncertainty principle, to explain the existence of nature. If Hawking remained true to his methods before the big bang, he would have been billions to one wrong.

Hawking says of the relationship between quantum mechanics and a unified theory of everything, his no boundary theory included:

Even if we do discover a complete unified theory, it would not mean that we would be able to predict events in general. For two reasons. The first is the limitation that the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics sets on our powers of prediction. There is nothing we can do to get around that.

Here Hawking points out that because quantum mechanics is inscrutable, it limits any theory's ability to predict. Recall what he says in the opening pages of _A Brief History_ , that if one is going to talk about the universe and whether it has a beginning or end, he must know what a scientific theory is. A good scientific theory, he says, makes observations and from those observations, makes predictions. Quantum mechanics puts limits on both. It limits what one may observe, and it limits what one may predict. Hawking says it himself in the above quote – there is no way to get around the limits quantum mechanics places on our ability to predict. With observation and predictability limited -- components necessary for a good scientific theory – there is no justification for using quantum mechanics to supplant a creator.

Sum over histories, :

Nearly as ubiquitous as the Nobel laureate, Richard Feynman, is the "brilliant" that accompanies his name. But perhaps more ubiquitous than both is his "sum over histories," a method, Hawking says, essential to any consistent theory that combines quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, should one be found. Since these two theories must be combined if any unified theory is to be consistent, and a necessary component of this combination is Feynman's sum over histories, Hawking's no boundary theory incorporates the sum over histories. To understand what the sum over histories is, we return to the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics.

Brian Greene explains this principle using the electron-two slit demonstration,an illustration of the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics found in every recent history of cosmology. This demonstration shows that there are no explanations for the behavior of reality at the sub-atomic level, or ultimately, at any level.

Photons are fired at a screen with two slits; sometimes fired in groups, sometimes as single shots. Behind the screen is a photographic plate that records the various patterns of the photons as they pass through the slits. In the demonstration, one time the right hole is covered, another time the left, and another time both are open. As a single object, the photon should pass through one slit or the other, but the electron does not pass as a single object. It goes through as a group. One can't know whether the electron is now a particle or a wave. But if a particle, then a single object that occupies two spaces at the same time. Moreover, a pattern of successive single shots results in a pattern of interference that, under classical physics, is possible only for a group shot. It's as if these individual shots conspire to form over time, a pattern that shows the same interference they would form if fired all at the same time. This is the mysterious uncertainty principle that science admittedly cannot explain.

We don't know what path the electron took through the slit, or if it took them all, or whether it took them as a wave or a single electron. If we knew, the uncertainty principle would not be uncertain and quantum mechanics would not be quantum mechanics. Feynman shares our ignorance, but rather than let it handcuff him, he harnesses the whole phenomena in his ingenious sum over histories. Feynman devised a method by which to calculate all possible paths the electron could have taken to pass through both slits, and sums them up. Greene says that should these paths be correctly added together, "the result would agree with the total probability predicted by quantum mechanics."

The sum over histories is no small achievement. It allows cosmologists to make valuable calculations they could not otherwise make. But how much is hidden in this cosmological generalization, no one knows. The devil, or design, or blind luck, or God, may be concealed in the details of the uncertainty principle, the core of Feynman's sum over histories. Whatever it is, perhaps we simply lack the faculty to know. Its advantages notwithstanding, sum over histories has no bearing on whether or not there is a place for creator.

Anthropic Principle

The anthropic principle is Hawkins's answer to the question, "What picks out the particular universe that we live in from the set of all possible universes?"

...many of the possible histories of the universe won't go through the sequence of forming galaxies and stars that was essential to our own development. While it may be that intelligent beings can evolve without galaxies and stars, this seems unlikely. Thus, the very fact that we exist as beings who can ask the question "Why is the universe the way it is?" is a restriction on the history we live in. It implies it is one of the minority of histories that have galaxies and stars. This is an example of what is called the anthropic principle.

Galaxies and stars provide the circumstances for us to exist as intelligent beings and ask how we got here. Hawking depends on this weak anthropic principle (as opposed to another called the strong anthropic principle ) to prove that our universe has survived fourteen billion years of impossible odds to be the universe that can house intelligent beings who can ask how it all came to exist. But this weak anthropic theory explains nothing that is not obvious. It only points to us as evidence of an observed fact: the universe exists and has for fourteen billion years and we observe it because we are here to observe it; the conditions for our existence exists, otherwise we would not be here. This observation that things are as they are and not otherwise does not explain why they are as they are. Hawking's anthropic principle cannot be more than an observation. It does not and cannot answer, "what picks out the particular universe that we live in from the set of all possible universes."

It's a desperate theory that uses this tautology, the anthropic principle, to prove anything other than that our universe exists as it does, and we exist in it as intelligent creatures, therefore ours is a universe that has the conditions that allow us to be here. We can make no judgements about other universes or the lack of them, or other intelligent creatures that may inhabit them, or the conditions in which intelligent creatures can exist. To say that it is "unlikely" that intelligent creatures can exist in conditions other than ours, is to assume that we know what intelligence is and under what conditions it can exist. In fact, we can't explain intelligence or under what conditions it may exist. It may exist in conditions about which we cannot dream. Given our understanding of how intelligence exists at all, it is unlikely that it should exist in any conditions. We can only observe that we exist in circumstances inherent in our universe, and we have intelligence. The anthropic principle is no explanation for why the universe exists, why it exists as it does, or why we exist in it to observe that it does and we do.

It's right to wonder at the impossible odds against there being a universe that can harbor intelligent beings, and wonder that it not only survived but survived to spawn galaxies, life, and intelligent life. It's unreasonable for Hawking to explain that it did because it did, and because it did there is no need for a creator. If we take Hawking's assumption that intelligent life can only exist in circumstances like those in our universe, and observe that those circumstances are arrived at against virtually impossible odds (unless designed), then the fact that intelligent life exists at all is an appeal to design as its most logical explanation. The anthropic principle demonstrates that Hawking doesn't know how or why this universe was picked.If he did, he would not make this tautology an essential element in his no boundary theory.

The anthropic principle is like casting dice down the table and seeing them turn up a ten and having an overly scientific dealer explain why they turned up ten rather than some other number, most of which would have been more probable.

"Why a ten!" (You were hoping for a four).

"Because the dice turned over as they did. If they had turned over once more it would have been a four, "

"But, why didn't the dice turn over once more?"

"Because we did not see them turn over once more. This table and its conditions are as they are on this cast of the dice to turn up a ten. Had they turned up a four, it would not have been at this table and we would not have been here to see it. We're here to see that they turned up ten, not four. Had they turned up four, we would not be here."

"But why a ten?"

"Because if it were any other number besides a ten, it would have been something it is not."

"But why a ten?"

"A ten because it is not a four, a three, seven or any other possible number it could have been but wasn't because it can only be what it is, a ten, and we can only be what we are – observers at this table, not another. By your seeing that the dice turned up ten, proves that this table has the properties that allow you to be here at this cast of the dice. That excludes this table from being another table at which the cast of the dice might have turned up a four."

You see where this leads. The dealer does not know why it is a ten, only that out of its chaotic bounces and turns it emerged a ten. As a ten, it excludes it being any other number – at least on this throw of the dice. The anthropic principle is indispensable to Hawking's no boundary theory, and yet it proves nothing more about why our universe is the one picked than this dice analogy proves why the dice turned up a four and the disappointed patron observed it. But Hawking claims to explain far more than why a cast of dice turned up four. He claims to explain so well why there is something rather than nothing, that his explanation leaves no room for a creator, and yet his means are the same as the dealers, a matter of odds, and virtually impossible ones at that.

The arrow of time:

"Why do we remember the past but not the future?"asks Hawking. This, his no boundary theory intends to explain, but in a new way, because until shown otherwise, "the laws of science do no distinguish between the past and the future"

Hawking isolates what are called the three arrows of time: the thermodynamic arrow, the psychological arrow, and the cosmological arrow, and proposes that his no boundary theory, together with the weak anthropic principle, "...can explain why all three arrows point in the same direction, and moreover why a well-defined arrow of time should exist at all," two feats as yet unachieved in science.

The thermodynamic arrow of time, which tells us why we don't see broken cups "gathering themselves together off the floor and jumping back on the table," is derived from Newton's second law of thermodynamics. This is how Hawking explains it: "in any closed system disorder, or entropy, always increases with time. In other words, it is a form of Murphy's law: things always tend to go wrong!" The thermodynamic arrow predicts that, unless things change, the universe will dissolve into ever smaller particles (if indeed the universe is made of particles) down to their least dimension, and the temperature will be distributed equally throughout.

The psychological arrow of time is simply our perceiving that time passes from the past to the future: we remember things in the direction in which entropy, or disorder, increases. The cosmological arrow describes the expanding universe: we perceive time to pass as the universe expands.

Hawking says that the classical theory of relativity cannot predict how the universe started out, because tracing the universe back, it disappears in a singularity – infinity – and there scientific laws cannot go. Hidden by a singularity the universe may have started out smooth or lumpy and the theory of relativity could not predict which. So "One has to use a quantum theory of gravity to understand how the universe began." Inter Hawking's no boundary theory which stops the shrinking universe just prior to the big bang, and prior to its disappearing in a singularity. In that thin no man's land between nothing and something he draws a ball ready to bang, "...a regular, smooth point of space-time," the ideal condition for the universe to begin its expansion – a smooth and ordered state. But not too ordered, otherwise there will be no galaxies and no intelligent life; no observable properties that demand an explanation. The fluctuations in the no boundary condition, Hawking has to draw as small as they could be, consistent with the uncertainty principle. Expanding from this most ordered state, the only direction possible is disorder. So, as the universe expanded (the cosmological arrow of time), those tiny fluctuations, the original tiny disorder in the ball, gathered mass and coalesced and become galaxies (the thermodynamic arrow of time). Eventually those galaxies would cool enough so that life would somehow emerge on this planet and in the life, intelligence that could perceive that the universe is expanding, and perceive that as it expands it grows more disorderly (the psychological arrow of time).

But, Hawking asks, why does disorder increases in the same direction of time as that in which the universe expands? Why isn't there disorder everywhere, all the time? That, he says, "One can answer ... on the basis of the weak anthropic principle:" the universe can only harbor intelligent life in an expanding phase, not in a collapsing phase, should there be one. Should the universe have expanded as far as it could go, and is now in a collapsing phase, its expansion will have taken it to the ultimate limits of entropy. This entropy would have been opposite to the near perfect order present at the big bang, and unsuitable for intelligent life. Since we exist as intelligent life, and could exist only under an order possible in an expanding universe, we can conclude that the universe is expanding. This indicates that the three arrows of time -- expansion, disorder and intelligent perception -- all point in the same direction.

It's obvious that in the examples Hawking gives, all three arrows point in the same direction. But it is not obvious that they must in any other circumstances than our own, nor that they do in ours for the reasons that Hawking gives.

The first point of disagreement is with the assumption that since the big bang the destination of the universe is toward disorder. The no boundary theory shares with all secular cosmology the assumption that disorder always increases. This is Newton's second law of thermodynamics, evident in such examples as gas escaping from opened soda bottles. Before a bottle is opened, it contains an order of ingredients. Open the bottle and the gas escapes and the ingredients go to disorder. This is analogous to the big bang. The big bang occurs, packed with near perfect symmetry. Upon the bang, symmetry immediately tends toward entropy. This scenario foresees a dissolving of the galaxies, and the whole universe ending in thermal equilibrium. Had the big bang deployed in perfect symmetry, rather than near perfect symmetry, there would be no galaxies, no life and no intelligence, and thermal equilibrium would be much further along than it is now.

Brian Green points out that this second law of thermodynamics "is not a law in the conventional sense," as say, the law of gravity. The second law is an observed phenomena so prevalent that any exception is unconventional; something out of the ordinary is influencing things. He gives as an example of an unconventional occurrence, the return of the gas back into the soda bottle after it has wheezed out when the cap was removed. "Don't hold your breath waiting for this outcome..," says Greene, "but it can happen"

Greene is right, the gas can return into the bottle, but only under unconventional conditions. That in turn means that the practice of bottling soda is itself an exception to Newton's second law of thermodynamics. In fact, the Coca-Cola Bottling Company has been bottling and capping order in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, and selling it in the most uninhabitable reaches of our planet, since 1886. The company has a secret recipe which only it can put into Coke bottles. Once a bottle is opened and the coke removed, no one other than Coca-Cola knows the exact recipe, so no one but Coke can put it back. Coke's recipe is no casual concoction. By the most careful design did Coke come by its unique taste.So when you open a bottle of Coke, you not only open order and symmetry, you open design. I reject any odds that say that once a Coke bottle is opened it is possible that the ingredients, on their own or by some quirk of nature, may return to the bottle in the same proportions they left. They were put in by design, and as far as I am concerned, only by design shall they return. To ask me to believe otherwise is to ask me to believe in miracles.

The objection to this Coke example is that in the bottling of the Coke, energy is expended and adds to the total entropy in its inexorable trek to thermal equilibrium. It does, but not in any definable proportions. Here, being a fool, I rush in where cosmologists fear to tread: I don't equate "disorder" with thermal equilibrium. The order established in the simple process of bottling cola far exceeds the energy expanded in the second law of thermodynamics, because bottled cola presupposes a living being who had the intelligence to bottle it. That observable phenomena, an intelligent being, demands explaining, could we understand an explanation if one were given. The occurrence of life and intelligence are so obviously devised that to dismissed their existence as insignificant, as Stephen Hawking does, amounts to a failure to engage the evidence. Some law is necessarily afoot to suspend or use the conventional operation of a law as dominant as the second law of thermodynamics. Whatever that law or operation of laws is, it is responsible for an order more sophisticated than the observable universe, which is said to be on a one way track to chaos. In our section of the universe, earth, existence is not on a one way track to chaos but to order. Until we can understand why this is, we cannot claim that the rest of the universe, none of which we shall ever observe intimately, is. Because temperatures level out and gas escapes from soda bottles is no proof that overall disorder will prevail. Order may be on the increase.

There is no accurate means to measure the order that is created on earth, against the energy expended to create it. This planet has been in the making since the big bang, and even though eras have arisen and fallen in the past billion years or so, its progress is toward order and creativity, not chaos and destruction. Intelligent life on this planet – and who knows on what other planets – is evidence that nature is in the business of bottling and capping order that makes Coca-Cola's secret formula, and its escaping from and returning to bottles, child's play.

If the bottling of soda is an analogy of the big bang and the universe, as cola was designed before it went into the bottle, galaxies and intelligence are evidence that some design went into their making before they were put into the universe. Until we know what energy or driving force caused the galaxies and the planets, and the intellectual creatures that inhabit at least one of the planets, we cannot legitimately exchange it on a one for one basis with the energy referred to in Newton's second law of thermodynamics. We may be dealing with two different currencies here, one of which is like the old Italian Lira and the other like the present Euro. Only if one assumes that the universe is an accident, are galaxies evidence of disorder, and intelligence insignificant. But if the universe is not pointless, and intelligent creatures are significant, then Hawking and current cosmologists miss the whole point.

The second point of disagreement with Hawking's explanation of the arrows of time is his usage of the anthropic principle as proof that these arrows point in the same direction. As we have seen, even the occurrence of such order as Coca-Cola is an exception to Newton's second law of thermodynamics. The existence of intelligent life is so great an exception, that to use it to explain how the universe tends to entropy rather than order, is to distort what we observe: intelligence life is the most pronounced example there is that time points toward order rather than disorder. One could argue that because there are so many exceptions to this law – intelligent life being the most salient – indicates that the second law of thermodynamics is but a function in an arrow of time that shows time moving toward order rather than disorder. To use the anthropic principle to prove that time always moves toward disorder, is to distort what we observe. We don't observe that time always moves toward disorder. We can't know much about things in other galaxies. Our best tools leave us to conjecture. But about this planet in the single galaxy we do know, time moves toward order.

That disorder always increases; that we as intelligent creatures are insignificant exceptions to that rule; and that only conditions like those on earth can harbor intelligent beings, are three assumptions that Hawking's explanation cannot be allowed to proceed from. These assumption rest on the greater assumption that the universe is pointless, an accident.Our closest evidence, planet Earth, tells us that Newton's second law of thermodynamics does not stop time from moving toward order, and Hawking's observation that "things always go wrong," is wrong.

A science of the gaps.

Mathematical formulas, such as 2 + 2 = 4, describe something. Unless they are made to relate to some material thing, such as oranges, they only describe themselves. When used to describe a physical phenomena, mathematics may describe it well, describe it poorly, or be unable to describe it at all. Some equations may describe the same phenomena better than others. This inadequacy in mathematics, compounded with the subjectivity of scientists, gives a true picture of theoretical cosmology. It is an abstract painting: beautiful in its variation, puzzling, but perhaps only representing a world that exists in the artist's mind. Were it a painting in a museum where connoisseurs try to figure out what the artist might have had in mind, it would succeed. As a scientific theory that proves how a universe began and functions absent a creator, it fails.

The best scientific theories can't describes existence perfectly, for the same reason that the perfect usage of language cannot explain things unless the writer has all the facts. As things in themselves, mathematical formulas may be elegant, but their elegance must not be taken as a true representation of the material world. Perhaps that is what Hawking means in the "Conclusion" of _A Brief History_ (with the humility I would have preferred from the beginning) when he says of unified theories, his own included:

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breaths fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the question of why there should be a universe for the model to describe.

This asking about what real thing breathes fire into mathematical formulas, makes of Hawking the realists he resists being. In debate with Roger Penrose, he says:

I don't demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don't know what it is. Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper. All I'm concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements.

But, as Penrose points out, it is not that easy to divorce one's scientific theory from reality:

Whatever 'reality' may be, one has to explain how one perceives the world to be. QM (quantum mechanics) does not do this and one must incorporate something additional into QM – something not contained in the standard rules of QM.

One cannot assert that objective quantum mechanics explains one's subjective view of reality, just as one cannot point to Mt. Whitney and say that Mt. Whitney explains how one sees reality. Mt. Whitney is Mt. Whitney, it is not a perception. To explain what one perceives about Mt. Whitney, one must add something not contained in Mt. Whitney, but contained in the viewers mind and invoked by his seeing of Mt. Whitney. Quantum mechanics is a reality of nature that does not explain itself; it cannot describe Hawking's theory. If Hawking's theory is to be significant, Hawking must describe and account for quantum mechanics. As Penrose points out, he must incorporate into quantum mechanics something quantum mechanics does not have, his subjective view of quantum mechanics. That view may or may not prove anything.

Simply to point to quantum mechanics to prove by its uncertainty that nature is uncertain, is only to point to nature and say that nature is uncertain. This observation adds nothing to what we do not readily observe. To claim that the uncertainty principle accounts for the irregularities necessary at the big bang, for our universe to be the universe it is, is to appeal to a science of the gaps. The very question is, "why is nature as it is? Why is the uncertainty principle uncertain?"

If the requirement for a good scientific theory is that it observe something, and from that observation make predictions, one must wonder what it is that Hawking observes if not reality? And if not reality, then of what interest is it to us? If mathematics does not breath the fire of existence into the material world, and mathematics is Hawking's only tools, how can he say that no creator is needed to breath fire into existence and make a universe for mathematics to describe?

There is no unified scientific front that tells us what took place fourteen billion years ago, and no theory at all that tells us why it took place. The popular picture of cosmologists objectively in search of truth, is distorted. There are objective cosmologist in search of truth, but, as this debate between Penrose and Hawking shows, Hawking is not one of them. Cosmologist can be as protective of their personal theories as are religious leaders, and Hawking is. He does not shrink from disparaging other theories, as he disparages Penrose's twister theory, and in the same debate, can't resist a swipe at string theory, of which he says: "So far, its performance has been pretty pathetic: string theory cannot describe the structure of the Sun, let alone black Holes."

Hawking says that, given the best tools, the equations for a unified theory (that tells us how the universe began and operates) are simply too complex for us to solve. "We cannot even solve exactly for the motion of three bodies in Newton's theory of gravity." He should have left it there, and in heed of his own caution, not been so ambitious as to remove a creator. Given our simplicity and the complications of reality, generalizations and assumptions are unavoidable. We have no choice but to assume that natural laws in our galaxy are the same throughout the universe. But we get into trouble when we claim too much for generalizations. The most objectionable generalization of the no boundary theory is its generalizing about what Hawking can see but can't explain – intelligent life. This most mysterious marvel in existence, Hawking dismisses as "insignificant." It is not wise to draw too many assumptions about what you cannot know – the universe outside our cone of observation, but it is pure arrogance to dismiss as of no significance a wonder you can observe but can't explain.

# Part One

#

### chapter 9

### Design or Chance, Choose Your Creator

... _like the baseless fabric of this vision,_

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.

William Shakespear, "The Tempest"

Hawking asks, "Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? ...does it need a creator, and if so does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him?" He says that up to now science has been so busy constructing new theories that describe what the universe is that there is little time left to describe why it is. Moreover, the why, Hawking says, is the business of philosophy to answer, not science, but philosophy has degenerated into linguistic analysis and has not learned the new scientific methods necessary for any explanation of why a universe exists.

As far as Hawking is concerned any answer as to why the universe exists, from science or philosophy, will be a scientific answer, because his preconditions for an answer's authenticity is that it be scientific. As we have seen in Chapter Nine, he says he does not know what reality is. Nevertheless, he refuses to acknowledge existence in any form except the physical, and therefore refuses to accept any explanation for existence other than one grounded in physics. Even should there be a god, given Hawkins's no boundary theory, should he have created the universe, his selection of laws to govern the universe would have been those available to him as provided by physics. Not even God can escape the physical laws and conditions Hawking's theory places on Him. Quoting again what he says about god and his necessary compliance with natural law:

(God) would, of course, still have had the freedom to choose the laws the universe obeyed. This, however, may not really have been all that much of a decision; there may well be only one, or a small number, of complete unified theories...that are self-consistent and allow the existence of structures as complicated as human beings who can investigate the laws of the universe and ask about the nature of God.

It is for Hawking a given that the present universal laws have existed always and are all powerful. They had no designer themselves but they impose upon any conceivable designer, laws by which he cannot escape. If there is a god, he is an exalted sufferer with us under the laws of nature, and ultimately to the laws of nature he shall succumb.

If Hawking and his science do not wish it were otherwise, we other mortals do. We hope for some author of all laws to alter those under which we suffer and die. Were there a simple either-or choice between Hawking's ball that always existed with its natural laws, and exploded into the universe fourteen billion years ago, or a god that always existed and fourteen billion years ago devised the expansion of the universe with all its laws, then most of us would prefer the latter. We do because under unrelenting natural law there can be no hope that our sometimes horrendous existence will be supplanted by our sometime euphoric existence. For all but nature and natural law, there is ultimately only death. Why anyone would hope this to be true rather than hope that it not be true, I have no idea. But that we prefer that it not be so, does not make it not so.

We can hope that what Hawking cannot know and cannot prove he is wrong about. To follow his reasoning, we imagine time reversing and the universe shrinking back to its original source. The stars are dissolved back into the galaxies, and the galaxies back into their smallest primeval matter, and the universe is reduced to Steven Weinberg's picture of the first frame of the first three minutes:

the temperature of the universe is 100,000 million degrees Kelvin... (and ) is simpler and easier to describe than it ever will be again. It is filled with an undifferentiated soup of matter and radiation, each particle of which collides very rapidly with the other particles. Thus, despite its rapid expansion, the universe is in a state of nearly perfect thermal equilibrium.

Weinberg's first frame of the universe is taken about one hundredth of a second after the beginning. At this point the universe is dense and small and hot, but not infinitely so. This, Weinberg says is not the first frame – "zero time and infinite temperature" – but calculations about conditions before this time are calculations about infinity, and the calculations themselves become infinite. Beyond here, calculations are soon impossible. At one hundredth of a second before the big bang, Weinberg, like most cosmologists, pulls to a stop rather than slam into a singularity, a nothingness.

Hawking swerves and avoids the big bang and its singularity and comes to a stop at an infinitely small, infinitely dense, perfectly round crust whose very property was always "to BE." And here it has always been, gorged with infinite possibilities one of the least probable of which is that, should it explode, it will become time and space and matter. And upon exploding, it is close enough to perfect balance and charge that it will expand evenly in all directions for fourteen billion years plus, rather than scrunch back into its original crust. But it is out of balance just enough that its explosion will result in a universe of stars and galaxies rather than one of the zillion more probable universes filled with iron or hot soup or black holes. For an eternity it has waited, charged to go off, its quantum mechanical dice rattling inside. Then for some undiscovered reason the big bang occurs, the dice are cast and of their near infinite possible outcomes, the least possible turns up: a universe that can be known, and with thinking humans to know it.

Hawking's scenario does not go unchallenged. Few current cosmologists agree with his no boundary theory. But fewer still believe in a designer of the universe, even though a plethora of questions remain to science about the big bang, such as why there was something before the big bang to bang. Why did it bang? Why was the early universe so hot, and why so well balanced? They prefer these unanswered – perhaps unanswerable – questions about a natural universe to others about a supernatural creator. Why would a creator exist unless he too was created? Why would he have the power to create a universe? And with such omnipotence, why create a universe like ours, perfect in its overall balance and imperfect where it really counts – our personal lives which are fraught with pain and death?

This book is unlike Paradise Lost in most respects, but none more so than in its refusal to justify the ways of God to man which is what Milton's poem attempts to do. I don't know why so many lives are the tragedies they are. But that they are does not make it less likely that they are created, should the evidence incline to that conclusion. All evidence, natural and unnatural, is inconclusive. In the end it demands a choice between which explains more logically why there is something rather than nothing, a scientific answer or a theistic answer. In this book, the choice is more restrictive: which is the more logical explanation for why there is something rather than nothing, Stephen Hawking's no boundary theory or the theory that god created the universe?

Nothing in Hawking's no boundary theory compels us to accept the idea of an eternity in which there existed only a little ball in waiting, and from that ball sprang our material universe. But there is something in the mathematics he uses that is compelling, but for a different reason than to take us back to the big bang. We are compelled to ask why and how the non-material laws of mathematics exist. Perhaps these laws have their limits, but the material universe is not one of them. Mathematics cannot explain why the universe exists, and therefore why the big bang occurred. But mathematics itself does not depend on a material universe to exist. Mathematics is a law unto itself, and even though it has no power to alter matter, it describes matter and predicts what matter will do when physical power is applied to it. It is confined to no time and space and therefore may exist independent of time and space. It may be "meaningless to suppose that (the universe) was created before the big bang,"but it is not meaningless to suppose that mathematics was. So what has happened to those physical laws that Hawking says all existence – including God if there is a god – must succumb to? Mathematics does not succumb. Its very existence contradicts the parameters that Hawking proscribes for existence, and if one is intent on finding the most logical reason that something exists rather than nothing, then the basis of that logic must include why something non-material, such as mathematics, exists and has existed even before and separate from the little ball and the big bang. I will second guess Hawking here and assume that he accounts for the existence of mathematics the same way he accounts for the existence of the universe – it exists because it exists – it just is. One can hardly argue with that. It is a religious statement of sorts. If one accepts it as truth, he does so not because the evidence compels him to but out of choice.

Mathematics and geometry do not compel us to go beyond the big bang. In fact they become so complex that we cannot follow them. For humans, the singularity of the big bang leaves mathematic's Xs uncrossed. If mathematics can handle the singularities that await it inside the big bang, our minds cannot handle the mathematics it takes to do so. By its own rules, science or physics cannot go beyond the physical, and the physical stops at the big bang.

But nothing stops logic from going ahead into the big bang and beyond. Indeed, logic repeatedly draws history's most elite philosophers into existence's holy of holies, the question of why there is something instead of nothing? Why was there something to bang? In pursuit of an answer, philosophy has constructed metaphysics to follow logic where science cannot go, beyond where the physical universe stops. Current physics, for the most part, sweep this pursuit away; the pursuit does not involve physical matter, and therefore is not the proper study of science. That may be good advice for science, but it is not necessarily right for logic or for ordinary people. Moreover, science uses mathematics extensively and mathematics is not physical nor does its existence have a physical explanation. So implicitly, science does believe in non-physical existence, just not in the kind that might explain why the physical or the non-physical exists.

Should one ask why there is something rather than nothing, logic would take him beyond the big bang and the little ball. His question would in essence be asking why there is logic itself. What is its source? And what is the source of mathematics and geometry and justice? Here is required more of Hawking than his science can give. More too than religion can give. But religion does not pretend to answer definitively. Its answer must be accepted on faith. Part One has noted what I consider the shortcomings of Hawking's no boundary theory to explain why there is something rather than nothing. In Part Two, the onus is placed on design to prove that it is a more logical explanation of existence than Hawking's no boundary theory.

# Part Two

### Introduction

God knows whether Dulcinea exists on earth or not, or whether she is fantastical or not. These are not matters where verification can be carried out to the full.

Cervantes, _Don Quixote_

If religion is to be viable it cannot abandon to science natural phenomena such as quantum mechanics, as if quantum mechanics were the property of science and not the common property of us all. Nor can religion abandon philosophy as if all philosophy were vain philosophy. Logic is not hostile to faith. The truths of philosophy and mathematics and the mysteries of quantum mechanics and outer space belong to nature, and nature belongs as much to religion as it does to science. If science has arrived at a demonstrable truth, then that truth belongs to religion. If philosophy has arrived at a logical truth, that truth belongs to religion. All demonstrable truth belongs as much to religion as it does to any other discipline. Moreover, it is the job of religion to make sure that the truth that science or philosophy arrives at are verifiable by scientific and logical methods. That means that religion needs to know science and philosophy's methods. As long as religion holds science to what it can prove, religion can be consoled by what science finds.

Religion's blessing and curse, however, is that it is not bound by the methods of science or of logic. This difference is at the heart of the debate between religion and science. Science is compelled to use demonstrable models, and they would compel religion to do the same if it is to be believed. But religion is not driven by physical demonstration but by faith. Unless it is bound by love for humanity in general, religion is very dangerous. Few people make this point more forcefully and often than the late Carl Sagan. His Demon Haunted World accurately describes the world of carnage that religions have wrought. However, it is logical that if carnage fills our world, religious people have wreaked most of it, because most people in the world are religious. Were the world and history peopled with atheists their carnage may have equaled religion's we don't know. But if the Stalinist, Maoist and Pol Pot eras are any indication, perhaps we are better off with the devil of religion we know rather than the atheistic devil of which these eras have given us a mere peek.

Part One set out to prove that Stephen Hawking's no boundary theory fails to explain why there is something rather than nothing. Hawking's theory's failure is shared by all scientific theories, but is shared by religious and philosophical theories as well. If there is no god, we do not know why there exists something rather than nothing. If there is a god, we don't know why he created physical existence rather than to have left it uncreated. And as to philosophy's pursuit of why there is something rather than nothing, logic never arrives conclusively at an original cause of which existence is the affect. Part Two of this book sets out to prove that it is more logical to conclude that the universe exists because it was designed, than it is to explain that existence just is – that ours is an accidental universe.

Scientist almost always confuse the parameters for this debate. They are physicists, but use non-physical moral and ethical arguments against arguments for design. To illustrate this confusion, let's look at Physics Nobel prize laureate, Steven Weinberg's "A Designer Universe?" found on numerous web searches in physics and cosmology. This is an essay about whether or not the universe shows signs of having been designed. Weinberg is a physicist, so I assume that he is asked to give a scientific assessment of this question. His essay is no scientific argument against design. It is an ethical/moral argument against a benevolent designer.

Weinberg's first point is that one cannot talk about the universe as designed unless he has "some vague idea of what a designer would be like." This is no scientific observation. One may find a machine – let's assume a humming, turning metal machine -- and have no idea of its purpose. The several parts are together by no volition of their own – metal can't think -- in an assembly of balance and complexity. Since the assembly was obviously thought out, or devised, and metal cannot devise, then it is logical to conclude that something other than the individual parts devised this assembled machine. The reason for this machine's existence, whatever it is, is not in the parts but in the parts as they function together; remove a part and the machine no longer hums and turns. Should we find that this machine exists to bring pain – a torture machine – then we may ask about the morals of the designer, but that is no physics question. It is not logical therefore for a physicist to conclude that because the machine is a torture machine it can't have been designed, because no designer this intelligent would create a torture machine.

The universe – especially our world – seems often to be a torture machine. Any of us have a legitimate reason to ask why this is so, Weinberg included, but we ask from a moral/ethical reference, not a scientific one. It's a question that is either avoided by religion or explained by the myth of The Garden, and that is religion's failing. The art and matter of the myth of Eden are far too important and complex to be frittered away as a historical justification for why there is evil in the universe. Surely the eating of forbidden fruit is no infraction grave enough to have brought the wrath of God down on all humans, none of whom were born at the time of the infraction, and none of whom were guilty except Adam and Eve. To insist that god was justified in condemning all humankind because of the infraction of their first parents is to make nonsense of our moral compass, Milton notwithstanding.

One can accept that the laws and the individual parts of the universe are so assembled that it is illogical to conclude that the parts assembled themselves or were assembled accidentally, without having to explain the moral reason for why they were assembled as they were or assembled at all. Existence is horrible at times, and I don't know why. Nevertheless, I personally believe that the universe was intelligently assembled – it turns and hums. Leibniz's question is my question: why something instead of nothing? Because the universe of galaxies has emerged from virtually impossible odds to turn and hum, and being material is absent the intelligence to create the laws and material to cause itself to turn and hum, it seems logical to use the word "designer" to designate what might have created it to turn and hum.

Weinberg says that "the human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather. "We can't predict whether it will rain one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain..." He sees nothing, he says, about the human mind that is beyond the hope of understanding than is the weather. Let me suggest that should Weinberg ever perceive the weather perceiving us and asking why, from moral or scientific reasons, it and we exist, then he would surely be convinced that the laws that rule the weather have suddenly taken on a complexity that the weather's simple material cannot account for. The point is that existence is the miracle, and if "miracle" is too strong a word, then existence is the mystery. There exists no greater question than why there is something rather than nothing. A close second is, why thought? In fact, what is thought? It, like mathematics, has no material extension in space – no physical existence.

Weinberg follows the weather observation with the observation that "human beings are the result of natural selection acting over millions of years..." This brush stroke, prevalent among cosmologists, conceals more than it reveals. It is not significant that it took a long, circuitous rout to arrive at intelligent life – the human being. The primary significance of human beings is their intelligence, and to say that it took us a long time to gain intelligence is no explanation for what intelligence is or how we posses it. Should the weather or a plant or animal evolve to ask the questions humans ask, then unless we can give a better explanation than that they came to do so "over millions of years of breeding and eating," we must admit that we cannot account for intelligence. We know it is there, we know that it deals with thought and logic and mathematics – which have no material existence -- but how it is there and why it is there, we do not know. Here is what Roger Penrose of Oxford (under whom Stephen Hawking received his Doctorate) says:

A scientific world-view which does not profoundly come to term with the problems of conscious minds can have no serious pretensions of completeness. Consciousness is part of our universe, so any physical theory which makes no proper place for it fall fundamentally short of providing a genuine description of the world. I would maintain that there is yet no physical, biological or computational theory that comes very close to explaining our consciousness and consequent intelligence...

I do however, share Weinberg's opinion (which surely tickles him no end) that the fundamental principles of nature appear to be "utterly impersonal." But I don't agree that they are "without any special role for life." "Special role" is not clear. The designation does not distinguish between "role" and "special role." If one considers number as special, rather than size, then the myriad life forms on earth alone, living in every drop of water and covering every speck of land with plants and animals, then life is special. The number of these complex organisms exceeds the number of stars we can observe in our sky, or stars and planets that have come to exist since the big bang.

Life's role is special if an exception to Newton's second law of thermodynamics is special. Newton's second law of thermodynamics declares that, as a general rule, things tend to chaos. But life exists as an exception to this general rule. Against chaos, life somehow came together in organized complexity that exceeds anything in our experience. That it came together repeatedly over billions of years and against virtually impossible odds makes it special if "special" has any meaning.

In his "Designer Universe?" Weinberg maintains that the universe is not so finely tuned to accommodate life as some physicists have argued. The example these physicists give is the occurrence of carbon, which is essential to life, and the narrow parameters within which carbon is produced. Weinberg shows how the parameters for carbon are not as close as these physicists suppose they are, because carbon can be produced in ways that these physicists have not taken into account. I have no idea who is right, I am no physicist, but I do know that however essential it is to life, carbon is not life. One may know that gas is necessary to make his car run, and have no conception of what an internal combustion engine is.

What religion should mean by "design" is the same thing that science means by design. My description above, that parts were fashioned and assembled in a machine that turns and hums, is adequate for how I use "design." But if I am asked to explain why a designer designed such a machine as our world, and whether he did so to watch man's struggle for good and evil," or was "jealous, or loving," I could not say. However, if a physicist were asking me these questions, I would say that these are ethical questions to which physics has no answer. If a theist were telling me that we were put here on earth so that god could watch us struggle with good and evil, I would answer that if god put us here for those reasons then we have a god with a psychological problem.

The point is that ethical/moral questions don't address the material reasons for what appears to be a designed existence. Ethical and moral questions about a designer don't tell me why physical things exist and are in some degree of order that they could not have devised themselves. Science explains more adequately than religion what the natural laws are, and why, if they were "slightly different" we would find ourselves in "logical absurdities," as Weinberg says. But that only emphasizes the balance in the machine. And he is right that religious theories are infinitely flexible, such that they are useless in describing the laws of nature.

He is wrong, however, in saying that the fine tuning that brought about life are not as fine tuned as some scientist claim. Perhaps they are not as fine tuned in some areas, but in others they are fine tuned to a mystifying degree. We can't know how fine tuned things have to be to bring about the universe – what fine tuning is there between is and is not? We don't know what life is so we can't know the fine tuning that brought it about. And as to conscious life, according to Roger Penrose of Oxford, we are even deeper in the dark. In this instance, Weinberg's argument is one of physics, not of morals and ethics. But he says of it, "I have to admit that, even when physicists will have gone as far as they can go. When we have a final theory, we will not have a completely satisfying picture of the world."

Nor will religion. Weinberg concludes his essay with a personal note about his own reasons for not believing in a designer: his mother died of cancer, his father was destroyed by Alzheimer's disease, and scores of his second and third cousins were murdered in the holocaust. For him, he says, "signs of a benevolent designer are pretty well hidden." Weinberg's reasons for atheism are good reasons. They shake me because I have no answer for why a good god would allow such torture to continue. I even consider my own argument for design cheap when compared with this question. But in hopes that there will be some answer beyond my fondest dreams, I must point out that Weinberg's description of pain and death in the world is drawn from a moral/ethical framework, and valid though it is, it does not dismiss a designer as the most probable reason for this turning, humming well organized mechanical device we call the universe.

# Part Two

#

### Chapter 1

### Accidental Universe?

...there is an embarrassing vagueness about the very beginning, the first hundredth of a second or so. Also, there is the unwelcome necessity of fixing initial conditions, especially the initial thousand-million-to-one ratio of photons to nuclear particle. We would prefer a greater logical inevitability in the theory.

Steven Weinberg, _The First Three Minutes, Introduction_

On page two of _The First Three Minutes_ , Steven Weinberg describes how our universe began: "In the beginning there was an explosion." Unless something sprang from nothing, which is absurd, we necessarily assume that there was something to explode. The mystifying thing about this something-that-came-from-nothing-or-always-existed is that whatever it was, at explosion time it was as close to being perfectly homogenous (uniform) as physical reality gets. "It could not have been completely uniform," says Stephen Hawking, "because that would violate the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics." Perhaps the real mystery is that bit of non uniformity itself. Absent the non uniformity at the big bang, the universe of galaxies do not exist and we do not exist. Paul Davies, speaking for the whole of science, says

The odds piling up against a starry cosmos become mind boggling: one followed by a thousand billion billion billion zeroes at least. Even if the disorder-probability arguments have only very approximate validity, the conclusion must be that we live in a world of astronomical unlikelihood.

Add to all those zeroes that militate against a universe, the odds against a galactic universe, one of whose planets can harbor intelligent life, and you will see that we buck the odds to an unbelievable degree, a degree that science refuses to attribute to anything but chance. Science would rather insist that we are accidents, we have no purpose. And yet the only way science has made sense of our having hit upon this order rather than one of a zillion more probable disorders, is to assume a selection so large that to have chanced upon just this one with just the right mixture was improbable but not impossible. As seen from this perspective, the chances are reduced from zillions to mere trillions or even billions to one. But to have hit upon such good fortune, first crack out of the barrel! That's remarkable.

This method of reducing odds from the impossible to the breathtakingly improbable is a tool that science uses to explain every step of existence that has brought us to the now. It is used to explain the just-right accident of imbalance at the big bang, and the just-right accident of balance that produced galaxies, and the just-right accident that produced our planet, and the just-right accident that gave our planet its atmosphere favorable to life, and the just-right accident that began life, and the just-right accident that caused the mutations of evolution, and the just-right accident of intelligent life. Please! This argument is wearing thin. Call this improbable chance, miracle, or say "We don't know!" In my judgment, "We don't know" is not used because it allows too much latitude for us common folks to consider the possibility of design.

Were laymen like me to forge ahead where science fears to go, we might call those astronomically unlikely near misses which Stephen Hawking describes as, "...as small as they could be, consistent with the uncertainty principle," clearances. Having worked on my own cars all my life, to me "clearance" specifies the space between a rod bearing and the crankshaft throw in an engine. The rod bearing clearances in my four cylinder, 1986 Ford Ranger, are four-thousands of an inch. They were designed this close so as to allow a thin layer of oil to cushion the transfer of power from the up and down motion of the pistons, to torque that turns the crankshaft and subsequently the wheels. These close clearances have worked well: the engine has nearly a half million miles on it, and the oil pan has never been off. Absent those clearances, the rod bearings in my Ford would have burned up, or the rods hammered the engine to junk iron 400,000 miles ago.

But the clearances for my Ford's rod bearings are worlds compared to the clearances at the big bang (and in nature since). Were the clearances at the big bang really only accidents, as most current cosmologists maintain? Even if they were as close as quantum mechanics's uncertainty principle allows, they could just as easily have been any larger number. Since it is not known what banged nor why, it takes an act of faith to even say it was an accident.

Science, however, often assumes that it knows more than it can observe or mathematically calculate, which is what Hawking does in his theory. There is no evidence that things at the big bang were as close as the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics allows. They may have been closer or not so close. But in order to see what Hawking is getting at, we will grant him these accidental clearances – as close as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle allows. After all, things at the big bang were, if they existed, as small as they physically could be, and that is where quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg principle operate.

According to the Nobel laureate, Richard Feynman, science has given up on knowing why, at the quantum level, nature behaves as it does, especially the uncertainty principle. To this day no one has refuted Feynman's observation. So, to use the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics as an explanation for something that cannot be explained without it, is not logical. It is illogical to use one unexplained thing to explain a second unexplained thing. The big bang and the uncertainty principle are both mysteries. Until the mystery of their existence is clarified, it is illogical and unscientific to insist that the conditions for their existence – those small clearances – are accidental.

The apparent imperfections of our existence notwithstanding, here is an assumption that explains the clearances at the big bang and subsequently, that is more logical than science's assumed accidents: before the big bang the tolerances were engineered to be unimaginably narrow, so that upon banging, galaxies would form. A miscalculation of billions of billions to one here, and ours is a universe of black holes, a thin uniform soup, or a sea of floating iron. So the clearances are set, the big bang occurs, and the tolerances allow for clumping; the clumps become billions of galaxies afloat in space-time; after ten billion or so years, the universe cools such that life is possible, and life appears. At least it appears in our galaxy, on our planet, and with intelligence. Perhaps it exists on other planets also.

But back to pursuing the assumptions of science, we arrive at Newton's 2nd law of thermodynamics. Science assumes that the near perfect state at the big bang accounts for all order since. Indeed, science cannot escape assuming this if it is to account for the obvious order in the universe now, and at the same time remain in lock-step with Newton's 2nd law of thermodynamics. The 2nd law states that things in order will descend into disorder. In more scientific terms: low entropy will escalate to higher entropy, and not vice-verse. Currently cosmologist witness a near perfectly ordered universe with many orderly things in it, such as living organisms. Such order can't have come from greater disorder, if the 2nd law holds. If the 2nd law holds, then our universe, after fourteen billion years, should be chaos. To make sense of the order we see, and still hold to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, we must conclude that conditions at the big bang must have been in balance beyond conceiving. Physicists do site exceptions to the 2nd law, which again they must because the exceptions are obvious – life and intelligence which cosmologist often dismiss as insignificant. But in spite of these exceptions, in the end entropy – translate disorder, chaos – is ever on the march.

But invoking the 2nd law at the big bang to explain how things descended to become the less ordered present, and are destined to become even more chaotic in the future, raises serious questions, one of which physicist have failed to answer. In contradiction to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, all calculations from the now point to a past that must necessarily be as disordered as the future is destined to be. Here is how Brian Greene puts it (his italics)

Since Newton's laws of physics have no built-in temporal orientation, all of the reasoning we have used to argue that systems will evolve from lower to higher entropy toward the future works equally well when applied to the past... Thus, not only is there an overwhelming probability that the entropy of a physical system will be higher in what we call the future, but there is the same overwhelming probability that it was higher in what we call the past.

How then do cosmologists account for the order in the present universe, if the past calculates to be as disordered as the future? They trust their experience of an ordered present universe, which they must, and trust that the calculations for the past are simply wrong. But they will not trust that Newton's second law of thermodynamics is wrong, even if it has a world of exceptions to it. One of the more notable possible exceptions to the 2nd law, as sited by Brian Greene, is the return of gas to a cola bottle after it has escaped to the atmosphere.

The 2nd law of thermodynamics bodes ill for Hawking's little ball. However small it was, if the ball existed then the 2nd law was in force. And if the 2nd law was in force, then the ball must have had a greater order before it exploded than it would have after it exploded. And, working ever back, any such order that the ball had before it exploded must necessarily have had a previous greater order, and that order a previous greater order, and on and on ad infinitum – infinite regress. But what holds true for Hawking's little ball holds true for every other theory as well. If cosmologist insist that Newton's 2nd law prevails, they may call those initial conditions that preceded the big bang infinitely small, but that does not dismiss them from existence. And if they exist then, according to physics, they are under the domain of Newton's 2nd law of thermodynamics. That means that, however small, they must necessarily have been more disordered than whatever infinitely small conditions preceded them. And those conditions less ordered than their former conditions – infinite regress. If we come to a point where physics says that no conditions existed, then we must conclude that the conditions that preceded the big bang came from nothing, and the big bang came from nothing, and we came from nothing, the most absurd conclusion our minds can contemplate.

Of course a physicist could say that this infinite regress stops at an order than which no greater order can be conceived, and from this order all order proceeds. Anselm did in the eleventh century. But the order he conceived of, he called God. Do not expect modern physicists, who have not advanced one step beyond Anselm's inevitable conclusion, to say: "for lack of a better term, we shall call it God, too."

Newton's 2nd law of thermodynamics solves only for future disorder, and leaves unsolved the present and the past order. This, as we shall see next, is complicated by one of the greatest problems in physics – the arrow of time.

The present is so allusive that not much more can be offered about it than Einstein offered. He believed in a designed universe, but such conviction was not always comfortable to him. Einstein found, sandwiched between an infinite past and an infinite future, a "now" impossible to understand. In _The Fabric of the Cosmo_ s Brian Greene tells of a conversation that Rudolf Carnap had with Einstein. Carnap tells of Einstein as saying that

...the experience of the now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seemed to him (Einstein) a matter of painful but inevitable resignation.

We can say of the now, whatever it is, that in it we remember the past and look to the future. Alas, it is not so for physics. Physics's calculations of time are very different from what we experience. Brian Greene explains,

Nowhere is there any distinction between how the laws (of physics) look or behave when applied in either direction in time. The laws treat what we call past and future on a completely equal footing. Even though experience reveals over and over again that there is an arrow of how events unfold in time, this arrow seems not to be found in the fundamental laws of physics.

This leaves physicists in the undignified position of not knowing whether they are coming or going.

Science is acclimatized to the high altitude of astronomical odds, of which our universe is an example: by sheer luck it has either always existed, or sprang from nothing. By whichever of these two means it got here, science is confident that Einstein's "painful resignation" was unwarranted. Even though the reason as yet is not found, the reason for the now is a physical reason, and an answer for it and for everything lies within physics – with, perhaps, the lone exception, mathematics, which seems not to be physical. So science keeps the faith that it shall find a fit explanation for why its calculations show an arrow of time that points the same for the past and the future. This will solve the mystery of why people see eggs break but don't see them un-break. Having solved the mystery of the arrow of time, science has faith that it can trace the universe back to the big bang and calculate for a perfect physical order, than which no greater physical order can exist. Having come this far, science asks that we bear with them as they figure out why the universe exists rather than non-exists – why something rather than nothing?

It's more logical to assume that there is an order that exists independent of the physical universe. This order is the source for all order at, and since, the big bang. Einstein believed in such a source. According to Einstein, physics cannot grasp the now because it is essentially different from the past and the future, and that difference lies outside physics. To account for the near perfect order at the big bang, and avoid the infinite regress inherent in not accounting for it, one may assume that Einstein was right: there exists an order whose essence is non-physical. This is the source for the order at the big bang and subsequently. It is an order, in Anselm's terms, than which no greater order can be conceived.

The question would still remain for such an order – did it always exist or did it spring from nothing? The physical universe obstructs our view here, after all we are the physical universe, if anything more. We cannot see the answer to that question. Probably we could not understand it if it were shown us. "Always" implies time, and such an order would not exist within time as we know it, or space as we know it. "Exist," as we understand the term, is not definitive for it either. The thing it would have that is common to us is intelligence. Science can call intelligent creatures insignificant accidents, but they cannot explain intelligence. Grant intelligence at the big bang and one understands, at least in part, why the beginning of our universe was near perfect, and why the arrow of time pointed to a future – the universe is going somewhere because it is aimed to go somewhere.

# Part Two

### Chapter 2

### Why Something Rather than Nothing?

...he showed me something small, no bigger thana hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and I perceived that it was as round as any ball. I looked at it and thought: what can this be? And I was given this general answer: It is everything which is made. I was amazed that it could last, for I thought that it was so little that it could suddenly fall into nothing.

Julian of Norwich _Showings_ 66

We would like more than three possible answers for humanity's most compelling question: why something rather than nothing? Why a universe at all? But for this question there are only three possible answers: 1) the universe exists because something created it; 2) the universe created itself ; or 3) the universe has always existed. The first option, the universe was created, ends in circular reasoning. The second option, that it created itself, is absurd. And the third option, that it always existed, dissolves into the first. All of these answers are shown in Part I to be insufficient, but of the three, one answer is more reasonable than the others even though it, like the others, has its problems. We might prefer not to choose at all, but even that is a choice, after all we do exist and we have no clear idea of how that came about.

The obvious problem with the first answer, that something already in existence created the universe, is that it leads to the question – who created the creator? Even though it is circular reasoning to conclude that the universe was created, this was the conclusion of Plato and Aristotle and most philosophers since (although few in the Twenty-first Century and the last half of the Twentieth embraced this conclusion). Plato and Aristotle and most philosophers simply stopped the infinite regress and maintained that there had to be something that started everything else but was itself not started by anything else.

In addition to having to arbitrarily stop the infinite regress that the question, "who created the creator?" poses, the answer that the universe was created gives rise to another difficulty: why would a creator who could create a universe create a less than perfect world? Why a universe with so much suffering and death? Modern science uses this question as a rebuttal but it ais no rebuttal at all. Their may be moral reasons why one rejects the idea of a creator who would create such a world, but those reasons are not scientific reasons. The overwhelming evidence for design in the universe does not depend on there being a benevolent designer. "Design" is the devising of an object whose parts are coordinated so as to produce a certain result: the coordination of means working for an end. When those means have not the intelligence to communicate so as to work together with each other toward an end, but obviously cooperation in sync with each other to achieve that end, then it is logical to suppose that some designer who does have intelligence directs them to the end which they have not the intellect to see. In fact it is not logical to conclude otherwise. The whole universe is a display of non-intelligent means working for an intelligible end. It is not necessary that we recognize the full purpose of a designed object to recognize that it is designed.For instance one may recognize design as demonstrated by the working together of several non-conscious organs toward a mutual end, life, without having to know why life exists at all.

As yet, no cosmologists, scientist or philosopher of the last one hundred years who insist that the universe is absent design has a mathematical or physical alternative account for how the universe came to exist if it was not intelligently designed. They cite blind chance, but chance happens to something not nothing, and the whole question is how anything at all came to exist.

Let us avoid the pitfalls of trimming ones philosophy to match his religion as Leibniz did, or his scientific bias as Hawking does, and look at Leibniz for what he was, one of history's greatest philosophers, Voltaire not withstanding. He distinguishes between truths of reason and truths of fact:

The laws of motion which actually occur in Nature and which are verified by experiments are not in truth absolutely demonstrable, as a geometrical proposition would be.

The point here is that the universe does not exist necessarily, as a geometric or mathematical truth exists. A rectangle is a rectangle by necessity; a world is a world only if there was some sufficient reason for there to be a world. The big bang banged because something caused it to bang. It might never have banged unless something caused it to bang. A rectangle, however, exists necessarily whether a physical rectangle conforms to it – or exists – or not.

The question is, what was the sufficient reason that caused the big bang? Why did it bang? Did something or nothing cause the bang? It's not logical that nothing caused the bang, from nothing comes nothing. It is logical that something caused it – whatever "it" is – to bang.It is not logical that it dodged being what it should have been – black holes or iron – to become what a zillion to one it should not have been – our well balanced universe. The most logical conclusion is that whatever the sufficient cause was that made the universe come to exist, it wanted the universe to be what the universe is, or at least close to what it is.

Any universe that springs into existence, whether for good or ill, perfect or imperfect, does so because something has sufficient power to cause it to exist, no exceptions. From all appearances, ours is not a perfect universe ( to the chagrin of Leibniz ), especially in its most important aspect (from a human point of view), the human condition. It is only in its mechanical aspects that I can see a compelling cause for a creator, not its compassionate aspects (and that is laying aside my own personal hopes).

The second option, that the universe created itself, is absurd a priori. If the universe created itself then obviously it could not have exist before it created itself. We can only conclude that it created itself from nothing, which is absurd. Nothing creates nothing.

The third option is dealt with in the following chapter.

# Par Two

### Chapter 3

### Always Was?

...on some gilded Cloud, or flowre

My gazing soul would dwell an houre,

And in those weaker glories spy

Some shadows of eternity...

Henry Vaughan "The Retreate"

Chapter Two demonstrates that since the universe exists and could not have caused itself, something already in existence must have caused it. Should one follow cause and affect back to what current cosmology says must have been infinitely small, infinitely dense, however small and dense that point reduces to it still exists. However small existence gets it won't go away. Nor will the question, what caused it to exist?

Should the point disappear and in its place we find something such as a point of energy that caused the big bang, we not only must ask what caused the point of energy, but ask what means of duration it existed in since time did not exist. What space did it exist in since space did not exist? What was it composed of if not matter? These things came to exist at the big bang, and if we knew what caused any of them to exist then human logic would compel us to ask what caused that mysterious it to exist.

We may say, as current science says, that whatever it was it existed forever, it just was to use Hawking's terms. Science, however, cannot resist one more step even if that step is a leap of faith; they must insist that whatever it was, it wasn't intelligent. But even of that eternally existing just is, that non-intelligent something poised to bang, we must ask – why did it bang? Why bang now and not in the eternity (whatever that is) before? And why so meticulously? Why explode within such impossible parameters? Why such a controlled explosion such that it was not an explosion at all but rather a deployment whose end by every calculation should have been immediate chaos? If it is naive to you that the big bang was intelligently directed, it is naive to think that it wasn't. As humans we are naive, and always shall be. We shall be because our logic necessarily runs out - in mathematics as Kurt Gödel proved,and in logic as Karl Popper maintains: "It might be well for all of us to remember that, while differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal."

In physics, in science, "existence" means time, space and matter combined. But if human logic means anything, something must have existed in a different way than these three exist, and caused them to come into existence, because they came into existence at the big bang. This something has to be different than time, space and matter, or the question persists: where did it come from? Whatever it was, it must exist ( and "exist" does not properly address this mystery) in some way similar to that of mathematics and geometry. They exist outside of time, space and matter. The essential difference between this mysterious something and math and geometry, is that this mystery imposes laws – it has force. Mathematics and geometry are a kind of language that explains that mysterious force, but neither of them are that force.

Religion and science both appeal to "always was." Jews, Christians, Muslims, and most philosophers including the ancient Greeks, have their prime mover that just is and moves all other existing things to be. Even science once adhered to this conclusion, in the days of old fashioned scientists such as Newton and Einstein. Current scientist make a similar assumption in various ways, none very clear. They cannot get by that first hundredth of a second after the big bang to see what caused it (however, most are not reluctant to insist that they know what didn't cause it – intelligence). "It would be meaningless," says Stephen Hawking, "to suppose that it [the universe] was created before the big bang [his italics]." If there were events earlier than this time, he says on the same page, their existence can be ignored, because they could have no observational consequences. Unlike other cosmologist who heed the admonition to ignore what they cannot know, Hawking disdains his own advice and posits his major thesis, the infinitesimally small ball whose property it was to "just Be." But "just being"for eternity did not suit this mysterious something. It began to fidget and accidentally blew up. One can understand why that infinitely small dense point blew up, crammed as it was with a whole universe. And what a universe! It was an accidentally near perfectly balanced universe that accidentally produced insignificant creatures that now exercise self awareness and contemplate the question of why they exist.

Both religion's and science's "always existing something" are gods of the gaps. Religion's god does not explain why he exists, and science's god of the gaps has no intelligence so as to be able to explain his existence. Hawking's god of the gaps, his little unprovable ball, could not even guess as to its own existence until fourteen billion years after it exploded and accidentally produced creatures who make no end at guessing.

If our choices are necessarily between one god of the gaps and another god of the gaps, it is most logical to choose the one that fits the bill. That of course would be an intelligent designer. It doesn't make sense to attribute to blind chance that out of nowhere (literally) something exploded that was endowed with laws such that a universe was born which obviously had as its end at least the existence of time and space and matter, and whose non-intelligent means worked so obviously toward that end.

# Part Two

### Chapter 4

### Volition? In A Tree?

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer,

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Dylan Thomas _The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower_

In a grove in California stands a giant Sequoia that the wind almost toppled when it was a sapling a thousand years ago. Its trunk is long and narrow at the base, then grows up in the shape of a right angle triangle that props the tree up. For a thousand years this prop has grown wider and higher as the tree grew taller. Had it not, the tree would have grown top heavy and fallen centuries ago. Were a support constructed to hold up the tower of Pisa, this is the pattern it would follow.

Either this tree exercised volition or an engineer endowed it with the ability to apply the principles of support, otherwise this thousand year old living example of engineering makes no sense. One who mumbles "accident" or "incidental," or "insignificant," and passes this tree by, in Feynman's words (in reference to something else), has no soul. Nor does one who mumbles DNA as if they understood what that means or why it exists. This rearranging of inanimate matter to make it not only animate but animate with a survival mode, is a mystery that we can't as yet understand. Purdue University's Robert Pruitt and Susan Lolle ( as reported in the Washington Post) oversaw studies that showed that:

Plants inherit secret stashes of genetic information from their long-dead ancestors and can use them to correct errors in their own genes - a startling capacity for DNA editing and self-repair wholly unanticipated by modern genetics...In a move akin to choosing their own parents, plants apparently can retrieve selected bits of code from that archive and use them to overwrite the genes they've inherited directly.

How can a plant "choose" one thing over another unless it exercises volition? This question has perplexed a far greater mind than mine. Regarding what the phenomena of consciousness means within scientific terms, Roger Penrose of Oxford said of this phenomena in cytoskeletons (which like our sequoia exercises some form of volition but is one of the simplest forms of life), they (cytoskeletons) are

ubiquitous amongst eukaryiotic cells – the kind of cell that constitutes plants and animals, and also single-celled animals like parameciums and amoebas, but not bacteria. Must we expect that some vestige of consciousness is present in a paramecium? Does a paramecium in any sense of the word, 'know' what it is doing? What about individual human cells, perhaps in the brain or perhaps in the liver? I have no idea whether we shall be forced into accepting such apparent absurdities when our understanding of the physical nature of awareness becomes adequate for us to be able to answer such questions.

Penrose believes that someday science shall understand how a paramecium or a sequoia do what they do. Science may, but it may not. This may be one of those questions whose answer Sir Karl Popper says disappears in the infinite. Until science knows and demonstrates this volition it is a religious faith that trusts that science shall someday account for it.

What science will probably do is what it does over and over: outlaw terms that were previously used to denote a mysterious phenomena, and rename the phenomena without explaining it. If we are descended from animals, the animal from which one trait in human behavior is derived is obviously the sheep. We follow what someone who is knowledgeable and modern says, without ever questioning how they came to their conclusion, or what the conclusion, in fact, is. A case in point: Kepler. He declared that "souls" did not exist to drive the stars, as Aristotle maintained, but rather his "force" did. Of the switch, Arthur Koestler says:

We are witnessing the hesitant emergence of the modern concepts of 'force' and 'radiating energies' which are both material and non-material, and, generally speaking, as ambiguous and bewildering as the mystical concepts they replace.

This is a replacing of mythological imagery with mathematical hieroglyphics, "a transformation," Koestler says, "which never was, and, one hopes, never will be completed."

Our sequoia may never have exercised its engineering feat had that wind not blown it out of kilter, but its potential for correcting the accident of its youth, and its potential for choosing to divert some of its energy away from growing taller and bigger – as did all its neighbors – toward propping itself up, was potentially always there should it need it. Until this observed phenomena – a seed as a potential tree and as an engineering marvel -- is explained and demonstrated, it is illogical to dismiss it as just some capacity that plants acquire over billions of years. The most illogical conclusion is that this tree accidentally acquired this capacity for engineering a corrective measure of such sophistication and longevity. It is only because plants are so commonplace that we no longer regard them as mysterious, not because we understand them thoroughly. To fairly assess what this sequoia has done, one is compelled by logic to say that it acted intelligently. If sequoias or paramecium or liver cells do not possess intelligence but act intelligently, then it is logical to conclude that something else that is intelligent has engineered them to perform as if they were intelligent.

The ability of this tree to rearrange itself from a more disordered state to an ordered state is precisely how this botanical subject found its way into a study of cosmology. Science cannot know from whence the universe came, because it cannot see beyond the big bang, but it has taken upon itself to prove that no order has cropped up in the universe since. "Why the big bang?" is a big enough problem for cosmology to have to relegate to accident. It would be foolhardy to complicate things by allowing that perhaps new order and force has incrementally been introduced into the universe since the big bang, and so science doesn't. Instead, it relegates all sophisticated marvels to "accident."

So how is cosmology – or any science – to account for this tree and still embrace Newton's second law of thermodynamics? The second law states that order always ends in disorder. Entropy, or chaos, always increases. "Always" is an inconvenient term here. The inconvenient truth is, as Hawking points out, that "always" does not mean always: "The second law of thermodynamics has a rather different status than that of other laws of science, such as Newton's law of gravity, for example, because it does not hold always, just in the vast majority of cases."

But this difficult question, of how non-intelligent matter temporarily reverses the second law of thermodynamics to exercises such a mystifying capacity for engineering, is not original with this sequoia. It began with the question of how that exploding infinitely small point-non-point at the big bang exercised such precision in its deployment. Indeed, if the second law is to hold, all order since the big bang is necessarily derived from the big bang. That is a real problem, admits Stephen Hawking, since cosmology has not the figment of an idea how the universe began so well balanced, as if it had eyes: why so hot?; why so uniformly hot throughout?; "why so uniform on a large scale?"; why expand at so nearly the critical rate of expansion which, "had it been smaller by even one part in one-hundred-thousand-million-million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size,"

Is it possible that the order we see in this sequoia, indeed in innumerable other manifestations of life, is an order that could not have been present at the big bang? an order different than the order that dictates simple matter? Penrose builds a whole edifice on the second law: all order came from the big bang; the sun is the origin for all living order on earth (including this tree). He calculates all energy coming in from the sun and being absorbed by plants, and the residue that those plants give off. But nowhere does he demonstrate how such order that exists in this plant, this sequoia, can change the energy from the sun into a living plant that obviously manifests some sort of volition. The sun has no volition; the big bang, I assume, had none. If either has volition then we have something of a Spinosa type pantheism afoot in our universe, which is a more accurate explanation of this sequoia than mere measurements and the term "accident."

In plant life we witness dumb nature rearranging itself, inanimate matter changing into animate matter, and going into a survival mode and acquiring other elements of inanimate nature and changing them into animate matter. Such creativity is relatively new in our universe. The last such creative act that even approaches it happened fourteen billion years ago – the big bang. And neither the big bang nor this new manifestation of organizing we call plant life is accounted for by science. Trees don't grow on the sun and I'm guessing that they didn't grow on the big bang. If they were there in potential they were put there by design, because their type of order is novel to the raw energy and order of the universe.

# Part Two

Chapter 5

### The Chicken, the Sun and the Big Bang. Chicken Feed?

[In] the sonne, and Chauntecleer so free

Soong merier than the mermaide in the see...

Geoffrey Chaucer, _Canterbury Tales_

Roger Penrose of Oxford University takes leave of platonism and his usual logic and explains how a chicken comes by its order from its feed. The explanation is necessarily limited because the actual operation of this virtual miracle is never explained. What is explained, to a degree that it can be explained, is Newton's law of conservation: there is no new energy in the universe (since the big bang), therefore whatever a chicken is, it came to be that only by transforming the known energy in the universe into a new arrangement. Here is Penrose's explanation:

The Earth gives back the same amount of energy that it receives from the Sun, but what it receives from the Sun is in a much lower entropy form, owing to the fact that the Sun's yellow light has a higher frequency than the infrared that the Earth returns... Plants make use of this low entropy energy in photosynthesis, thereby reducing their own entropy, and we take advantage of the plant's to reduce ours, by eating them, or eating something that eats them, and by breathing the oxygen that the plants release.

Calculate as Penrose does the energy coming in from the sun that is expended on the chicken, energy itself defies definition. Such terms as energy, force, gravity, are words that point to a phenomena that as yet we do not know in its entirety. But should we grant that there is nothing in the chicken that is new: no new power, no new matter; grant that all order in the universe derived from the low entropy of the big bang, there is nevertheless a new arrangement in the lowly chicken, a rearrangement of the old power and matter.

It is important to note that in Penrose's explanation, it is the plant that is active in the converting of the sun's low entropy. It is the plant that exercises photosynthesis. For all the sun's low entropy nourishment, that is essential to the plant and the chicken who eats the plant and we who eat the chicken, it is the plant, the chicken and we who actively make the change. The sun is passive, we are active, and this operation of actively changing one low entropy source – sunlight – into a highly sophisticated lower entropy organism – the chicken – is an operation that Penrose does not explain. Penrose's path from low entropy to an ever increasing entropy is a descending order from the big bang to the Sun to the plant to the chicken. In actuality, the action is an ascending order: from an inanimate big bang to a passive sun's yellow light to an active plant to the most complex organism in the chain, a living self propelled chicken.

We see in the chicken, life broken loose from its moorings and exercising conscious volition in a way not possible in a plant. The chicken is aware of its own existence – even if it cannot conceptualize that awareness -- and is free to go where it wills. Such awareness and freedom neither the sun nor the low entropy sunbeam is blessed with. The crucial question is not how low entropy the sunbeam is, but rather, what accounts for this new order in the chicken that is not present in the sun, nor can be shown to have existed in the big bang.How is the mechanically imprisoned sun and its rays transformed into the consciousness and freedom of the lowly chicken? Unless this transformation is demonstrated there is no logic in arguing that the chicken gets its order from the low entropy state of the sun. The sun may be the ready building material for this new order, but it is not the new order itself.

Consider a builder who decides to build a house in the desert. All his building material is creosote bushes and cactus – high entropy building material. So he orders a load of lumber and nails – low entropy, highly ordered building material. The lumber may be just that, lumber, until a design is arrived at for the construction of a house and the lumber is assembled accordingly.

This rearranging of the low entropy-high order building material that the big bang supplied the universe with demands no small explanation. That rearrangement of the old is so complex that an explanation of it, in the words of Richard Dawkins, Oxford University's champion of Darwinianism, makes an explanation for the big bang seem simple:

In the beginning was simplicity. It is difficult enough explaining how even a simple universe began. I take it as agreed that it would be even harder to explain the sudden springing up, fully armed, of complex order–life, or being capable of creating life.

However simple Dawkins and other scientists try to make an explanation for life, such as is in this chicken, they have thus far failed. There is no duplicate of this life, no scientific demonstration of how it works. Even should life somehow be brought about in a test tube it would only be life that is discovered, not life that is created. Its secret of existence would still be hidden.

In quoting Dawkins here, however, the point is that in his opinion, life and its origin is far more complex than a universe. It is only a guess that we can go back in time, as Dawkins suggests, to what seems a less complex arrangement of elements to explain the origin and complexity of life, because we have no idea how simple or complex the original building blocks were or how they came to be. The big bang shrouds the origin of the universe, and necessarily, the origin of life. The scenario of the building blocks all arriving from the big bang and accidentally falling into organisms whose complexities are far more sophisticated than what we know about the big bang is a guess. A better guess is that such complexity in an organism was no accident at all.

# Part Two

### Chapter 6

### Intelligence Ain't Chicken Feed

He had never indulged in the search for the true Substance, the One, the Absolute, the Diamond suspended from the Christmas Tree of the Cosmos. He had always felt the faint ridicule of a finite mind peering at the iridescence of the invisible through the prison bars of integers. And even if the Thing could be caught, why should he, or anybody else for that matter, wish the phenomena to lose its curls, its mask, its mirror, and become the bald noumenon?

Vladimir Nabokov _, Bend Sinister_

A writer sits by a blazing fire, hammering out a novel. It is a good novel, true to life, which means that each character has his own life and personality. The lives of the women and men in this story cannot be violated if this is to remain the good novel that this writer has begun. And life, in this novel, does not mean an exchange of low entropy sunlight for the activity of a living organism. Life here is perhaps love and heartbreak, war and death. This novel, as a novel, is diminished to a story not worth telling if it is only about chemical reactions. It is the freewill, the good choices and bad choices that the characters make, the tragedies or euphoria that befall them, that make this a story worth telling.

Insignificant creatures, Hawking calls us, like computers and abacuses. Our brains, he says, expend energy and contribute to entropy. He's right, so far as our physical brains and bodies are concerned. But he is wrong about what makes us the creatures we are. As humans, our intellect deals with eternal realities, such as geometry and mathematics, that existed before the big bang. We deal with ethics and love and aesthetics, the essences of which have no extension in space and time. We cease to be human without these non-physical essences, and without these essences there is no one to hear whatever it is that Hawking finds of significance in the universe. If we are insignificant then the story of the universe is not worth telling.

Even though 90% of the genes of this writer sitting by a blazing fire tapping on her laptop match those of a chimpanzee, there is an essential difference between her and the chimp, the least of which is their morphology. She is creating in a way the chimp never can so long as it remains a chimp. The most complex part of existence in the universe is life; the most complex life is conscious life; and the most complex conscious life is intellectual, creative life.

Brian Greene uses as an example of entropy the tossing into the air the numbered, unbound pages of War and Peace. The pages were in order when they were tossed, but the wind caught them and they fluttered to the ground in disarray. After tossing them over and over the likelihood of their coming together in order are billions to one. Entropy is like that, he says, the big bang started out with all the pages in numerical order – the nascent universe was in almost complete balance. Shortly after the bang, entropy or chaos ensued and, according to Newton's 2nd law of thermodynamics, shall continue until the dissolution of the universe.

This is a good example of entropy, but as an example that all order in the universe emanates from the order at the big bang it fails. It fails precisely because there really is such a book as War and Peace and it is made of such stuff as a purely mechanical, numerically measurable big bang could never produce. The universe had to wait fourteen billion years after the bang to condition itself for this new emerging order -- intelligent creativity. This order was not present at the big bang, or if it was, it was doing with the universe something like what Tolstoy did with Russia and the lives of the characters in War and Peace.

What if we take the emphasis off the numbered pages and put it on the story? After all, as Greene points out, the numbers are only a convenient way to keep the sequence of the story in tact. The significance suddenly is how these make-believe lives proceed, their tragedies and triumphs. Given only numbered pages, we know that after page one comes page two, and after page two comes page three, and on and on through the whole 1396 pages. But when the emphasis falls on the story, we can't know what the next page will bring, even though it followed the order and imagination of the author. Absent the story, numbered pages hold no wonder for us, we find nothing in such a book that reflects our own tragedies and triumphs. Tolstoy dismisses entropy and does what could not be done at or by an inanimate big bang, however balanced it was. The emphasis here, no matter what the numbers say, is not really how entropy invariably proceeds from the big bang and becomes more chaotic all the time, but rather, what is the exception to the 2nd law of thermodynamics that gives rise to life and intellect, and allows this intellectual human, some fourteen billion years from the big bang, to write such a story. The significant question here is: what is afoot in our universe that so revered a law as Newton's 2nd law of thermodynamics is so drastically reversed? Absent intelligent life in the universe, the whole process is numerical order. When intellect comes on the scene, freewill adds novelty and unpredictability to an otherwise bland, mechanical procedure.

How then did we creatures, whose very presence in the universe marks the suspension if not the reversal of Newton's 2nd law, come about? Virtually all current scientists, if they are scientists in good orthodox standing, give the same answer to this question. Roger Penrose has written at least two books on the subject of conscious thought, and he is a scientist in good standing, so it is to him that we turn to get a scientific answer as to how conscious thought ( and hence, intelligent thought ) comes about. We find him in something of the same quandary that we are in: "How is it that consciousness can arise from such seemingly unpromising ingredients as matter, space, and time?" he asks. "We have not come to an answer..."

He says that we could not construct an intelligent device "...unless some breakthrough tells us how consciousness comes about." The closest we could come is to a device

hit upon partly accidentally, without there being a proper theory of consciousness. It goes without saying that this seems very improbable – unless, of course, advantage is taken of some Darwinian evolution process, so that the intelligence might eventually arise simple through the direct benefits that this consciousness confers, without there being any understanding on our part as to how it was done (which, indeed, is how it happened with us

He is right that there is no understanding on our part as to how conscious thought came about, but wrong to suggest that it was by some Darwinian evolution process that we humans came about, his exclamation mark notwithstanding. This Darwinian evolution process that Penrose resorts to, to get himself out of a quandary, is science's pat answer as to how life came about and how intelligence came about. But, by accepting Darwinian evolution as his starting place without requiring that it verify its position under the same rigors he demands of other theories, Penrose lets slip beneath the rug more than is dreamed of in all his theory. Moreover, this Darwinian refuge of evolution as a result of blind natural forces is in jeopardy right now.

"With each passing day," writes Jeffrey Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh, in his book, Sudden Origins, "another group of articles on homeobox genes appears in scientific journals." And what the homeobox gene shows us, and Schwartz's book so dramatically illustrates, is that evolutionary changes are not, as Darwin insisted, proceeding blindly and slowly, but rather as Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould argued and the fossil record shows, in punctuated start-stop fashion: new species arise and suddenly disappear without having seemed to evolve from other species and into other species. The homeobox gene, as explained in Sudden Origins, is the key to this mystery. It is a regulatory gene that has the ability to change one species into a new species. Although it is not known what activates the genes to end one species and begin a new one, it is known that this change is neither drawn out nor blind, as neo-Darwinian orthodoxy insists.

Homeobox genes [first identified in the 1980s] are ultimately implicated in the differentiation of all aspects of an organism... [They] code for proteins that do not necessarily go immediately and directly into the formation of a particular structure. Instead, the protein one homeobox specifies may travel to another stretch of DNA, corresponding to another homeobox gene, and bind with it. In turn, this protein may activate or turn off that homeobox gene. Consequently, one homeobox gene can initiate a cascade of effects of gene-protein-gene interactions that can lead to the unfolding of an ostensibly complex, but exquisitely simple, organized pattern such as the coloration of a butterfly's wing or of a brilliant tropical fish.

If Penrose takes the fossil record for what it says, he cannot assume that a Darwinian evolutionary scheme is the way it happened with us. The formation of a new species, us or any organism, has never been observed. "Given the potential of homeobox genes to be fully rather than partially expressed," Schwartz says, " we can appreciate why 'missing links' are so elusive in the fossil record. They probably did not exist." The homeobox gene accounts for the morphological differences between the chimp and the novelist, and those differences did not come about blindly. What the fossil record cannot record, and the homeobox gene thus far cannot account for, is the intellectual chasm between an animal that is not human, and a human.

We may not know the mystery of these gene's origin and what turns them on and off to make the morphological differences they make – all at once as the fossil record shows, not gradually as the Darwinian theory postulates – but we do know that something does indeed turn them on and off, and when they are turned on or off they are not turned on or off blindly but for a purpose.

Before long the study of the origin of species should center on the homeobox gene. That gene will account for the abrupt emergence of new species – missing links will be shown to have never existed. The debate should then move to what turns those genes on or off, and whether that turning on and off -- and consequently what causes new species – is random or directed. It's my own personal suspicion that there is a law of nature that says that life will exist wherever it can. Wherever it does, these genes will probably run the show.

You may have heard that the odds against life existing at all, anywhere, are like that of a tornado barreling through an airplane wrecking yard and leaving in its wake a complete 747. An example like this is given by the Oxford Darwinian, Richard Dawkins. Those may be the odds, but I don't believe that we would be as shocked if we find life on another planet as we would if we saw a fully constructed 747 in the aftermath of a tornado. I doubt that our reaction to discovering that life exists, or has existed, on Mars would be, "My God! The same tornado that tore through Earth and left life, tore through Mars and did the same. Two incidents in the same neighborhood equal to tornados creating 747s. What are the odds of that!" It seems that we either expect there to be life where conditions warrant, or, because Earth is so full of life, life has become commonplace. The insistence by educators that ours is a purely mechanistic universe that is wholly understandable has taken the wonder out of observing life, and that is modern man's tragedy.

I think that if the atmosphere on Mars can support life, it either does or has. But if ours is the only planet in the universe that harbors life and intelligence, Earth is the single greatest phenomenon in the universe, and, with all its heartbreaks, the greatest place in the universe to be.

# Conclusion

### No Escape

The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded as he raised his glass high, is not that the practitioners of one are smatter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

The physicist, Robert W. Wood, as quoted by Carl Sagan in _The Demon-Haunted World_ 88

Nothing in the physical structure of the universe that can be studied under laboratory conditions is evidence against design. The universe is not arbitrary. Its laws are fixed and the whole physical universe that we can study under laboratory conditions conforms to those laws. Our human minds are fashioned such that we are somehow able to apprehend the physical universe and decipher its laws, and to some unknown degree, exercise freewill within the boundary of those laws. Our freewill and creativity alters the physical world, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, in ways that would be impossible for a purely physical world to do. It is logical to assume that this coordination between the physical universe and the non-physical mind that studies the universe and changes it, did not come about by accident. It is logical to assume that such coordination was designed by a mind of sorts, an intelligence that has no physical aspects just as mathematics and geometry and logic have no physical aspects. Such a conclusion cannot be tested in a laboratory, but such an idea does not militate against logic. On the contrary, because the universe necessarily emerged from nothing, if its first existence was at the big bang, and survived impossible odds to be a livable universe at all – as it did, it is logical to conclude that such something-coming-from-nothing, and such a survival was made possible by design. It is illogical to conclude that our universe accidentally came from nothing and accidentally negotiated such a convoluted survival. It is absurd to insist that once something came to exist at the big bang, it survived against odds of billions upon billions to one to become the universe we know.

There are no odds against design because design puts us in that world beyond physics, namely metaphysics, where odds are not applicable. But because odds are not applicable does not mean that the whole notion of design is illogical. Design is perfectly logical, but not provable in a laboratory or demonstrable in a laboratory. An accidental universe – something from nothing – is neither provable or demonstrable in a laboratory, but more importantly, it is illogical.

Current science emphatically rejects design and holds to their own illogic. In fact, the scientific landscape is strewn with carcasses of poor souls that science made fools of for suggesting that the universe looked as if it were designed. And yet, to put it bluntly, hardly any theory is more absurd than Stephen Hawking's infinitely small, dense ball that leaves no need for a creator. It existed eternally before it banged, but once it banged, because its shape was just right, it became our universe.89 This theory has gone unproven for several decades and is rejected by most cosmologists, but the general public snaps up Hawking's ideas as if he actually does have insight into how such a ball would exist before the big bang and therefore before the existence of time, space and matter.

I see no argument against design more convincing than Steven Weinberg's (Introduction to Part Two above, _Black Holes in a Brief History_ ). Weinberg reasons that it makes no sense that a creator would design such a world of pathos as ours and so piteously forsake it. The point is a good one, but as I argue there, its frame of reference is ethics. It can't be analyzed in a laboratory and therefore has none of the leverage that the physicist, Robert Wood (opening quote, this chapter), attributes to physics. It is a metaphysical point not a scientific one.

That it is not valid as a subject for laboratory study, and is therefore not a scientific point, it is nonetheless a valid ethical argument against the existence of a creator, and must be dealt with, especially by theists. But how deal with it? Personal encounters? A blind faith in scripture?

You may hold a blind faith in a literal interpretation of scripture, but I cannot. I cannot believe that God created the universe and made it appear as fourteen billion years old, when in fact it was only a few thousand years old. I believe the universe is fourteen billion years old and that God created it by way of the big bang. So what do I do with scripture that offends against this view? Before all else I hold love as the measure for belief; justice is a close second.

Love is more sacred than scripture, and when it conflicts with scripture, I do whatever I must with scripture and hold to love. I practice a selective faith in scripture: I give great credence to myths, if they are profound and carry as their essence the paradoxes of existence. The fall in the garden of Eden I regard as profound. Such myths are not history. Myth presents physical facts as they come into play with the human condition, and asks why such a paradox exists between what is and what should be or might have been. This is a more liberal stance than many Christians can bend to. For me there is no other way.

Because it is absurd to believe that the universe is a blind phenomena, I can't not believe that it is designed. Why it is designed with so much woe I cannot understand, but that does not negate the logic that such a phenomena as the universe cannot have happened by sheer chance. Since I cannot escape believing in design, if anything is to be logical at all, I must believe within my ethical frame of reference. I do not know the purpose of the universe, but I hope that it has a purpose and that I may encounter the designer and find that the purpose has as its beneficiaries humans and the universe in general.

Would that Weinberg were as considerate of human hopes as he would have a designer be. His is a hard saying: "The more the universe seems incomprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." According to Weinberg there are few things to relieve us of this pointlessness, but foremost among them is scientific pursuit, even though its only solace is not in the facts it uncovers but in the pursuit itself: "The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy." I assume that for we poor fools who are not scientists and are "...content to comfort [ourselves] with tales of gods and giants, or to confine our thoughts to the daily affairs of life," our lives are doomed to be graceless farces. We have traded our scientific birthright – pointlessness – for a mess of contentment; we dare to hope that grace means something different than the way Weinberg uses it. All in all, it hasn't been a bad trade. Left with his tools and a foregone conclusion that existence is pointless, the more research a scientist does to understand the universe the more he compounds its pointlessness. His sole reward is that his research lifts his life above the level of fool to the level of tragedy.90

The dignity of tragedy is ashes in our mouth compared to the hope that our existence means something. We don't want our lives and the lives of our children -- indeed, of all the people who have lived or shall live -- to be mere farce. Were science compelled by scientific evidence to conclude that existence is meaningless, one could understand how Weinberg might feel compelled to discourage hope. But when the arguments against design – and possible purpose – rests on such tenuous arguments, none of which are scientifically demonstrable, i.e. nothing that can be examined in a laboratory, one must ask what the driving need is for science to step in where its rules forbid it to go, just so as to dash human hopes.

This question -- Why does science feel compelled to dash hope that life has meaning? -- is no rhetorical question. For an answer all one needs to have experienced is a lively debate where proof becomes less important than the desire to smear ones opponent, or to save face. The history of science is filled with just such debates, and to see one being acted out now, keep up with research in the role of the homeobox gene in evolution. You will see Richard Dawkins of Oxford defend, at any cost, traditional Darwinian theory against new genetic discoveries that jeopardize it. If you have ever thought that science was objective, any account of historical scientific debate should dispel that notion. To take pleasure in debunking the hope that existence has meaning is as inexcusable as religious fanaticism that wishes that people who differ with it be eternally damned. For the billions of tragic lives, most already gone, let's hope that both hardcore religion and hardcore science are wrong.

### ### End ###

If you found this book interesting, please visit my Smashword page at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/budstark., or my blog at https://www.blogger.com/profile/01651923580699187105. Here are other books by Donald, or Bud Stark

Suffocating On Mount Improbable

_The Place of Execution_.

 Hawking, Stephen _Black Holes in a Brief history of Time_ (New York, London, Bantam Books, 1988) pg 8

 Ibid, pg 46

 Ibid, pg 9

 Ibid pg 135

 Ibid 136

 Ibid pg 130

 Penrose, Roger, _The Road to Reality_ , (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), pgs 631,632.

 Ibid pg785

 Hawking _Brief history_ , pg 174

 Greene, Brian, _The Elegant Universe,_ (New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 1999) pg366

 Greene, Brian, _The Fabric Of The Cosmos_ , (New York, Random House, 2004) 235

 Weinberg, Steven, _The First Three Minutes,_ (New York, Bantam Books, 1984) pgs 45, 46

 Hawking, _A Brief History_ , pg 7ff

 Ibid, pg 148

 Ibid, pg 138

 Ibid, pg 136

 Ibid, pg 8

 Kant, Immanuel, _Critique of Pure Reason,_ (New York, Random House Modern Library edition, 1958) pg 48ff, 216ff

 Greene, Brian, _Elegant Universe_ , pg 51

 Kant, Immanuel, _Critique_ , pg 43

 See Modern Library's _Introduction to Aristotle_ , by Richard McKeon, (New York: Random House Modern Library edition, 1947), chapters on "De Anima," and "Metaphysics," or any of the many books about his theology

 Maimonides, Moses, _The Guide for the Perplexed_ , (New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1956), see "Creation – Eternity of the Universe," chapters XIII ff, especially XX, XXI and XXII as regards Aristotle on the existence of God and the universe.

 Feynman, Richard, _Six Easy Pieces_ , ( New York: Addison Publishing Company, 1994); prepared by Robert P. Wesley and Leighton and Matthew Sands; pg 2

 Hawking, _Brief History_ , pg 7

 Ibid, pg 50, 51

Ibid, pg 46

Hawking, Stephen; _A Brief History_ , pg vi

 . Ibid. pg 55

 Ibid. pg 46

 Hawking, Stephen; _A Brief History_ , pg 9

 Ibid, pg 46

 Ibid. Pg 174

 Hawking, Stephen, _The Universe In A Nutshell,_ (New York, Bantam Books, 2001); pg 85

 Hawking, Stephen, T _he Theory About Everything_ , (Beverly Hill, CA, New Millennium Press, 2002); pg 97

 Camus, Albert; _The Stranger_ , (New York, Vintage Books, a division of Random House, 1946); pg 151

 Camus, Albert; _The Stranger_ , (New York, Vintage Books, a division of Random House, 1946); pg 151

 Davies, Paul; _Other Worlds_ , (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1980); pg 167 – 169

 Hawking; _A Brief History_ , pg 140

 Feynman, Richard; _Six Easy Pieces_ , pg 135

 Greene, Brian; _Fabric_ , pg 179, 180

 Hawking, Stephen; _A Brief History_ , pg 168

 Greene; _Fabric_ ; pg 178, 179

 Ibid, pg 190

 Hawking, Stephen; _Nutshell_ , 86, 87

 Hawking; _A Brief History_ , 144ff

 Ibid, pg 148ff.

 Greene; _Fabric_ , 156

 Hawking; _A Brief History_ , pg 174.

 Hawking, Stephen, and Roger Penrose; _The Nature of Space and Time_ , (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey; Oxford, England, 1996), pg 15

 Ibid, pg 127, 128.

 Ibid, pg 123

 Ibid, pg 97

 Hawking; _A Brief History_ , pg 174

.Ibid, pg 174

 Weinberg, Steven, _The First Three Minutes_ , (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), pg. 95ff

 Hawking; _A Brief History_ , pg 9

 Penrose, Roger; _Shadows of the Mind_ , ( Oxford University Press; New York, Oxford, 1994) pg 8.

 Weinberg, Steven; _The First Three Minutes_ ( Bantam Books, New York; 1984) pg 2.

 Hawking, Stephen: _A Brief History of Time_ (Bantam Books, New York: 1988) pg 148

 Davies, Paul; _Other Worlds_ ( Simon and Schuster, New York; 1980 ) pg 169.

 Hawking, _A Brief History of Time_ , pg 149.

 Greene, Brian; _The Fabric of the Cosmos_ (Knopf, Borzoi Books, trademark of Random House, New York, 2004)pg 160.

 Ibid, pg 156, 57.

 Ibid, pg l41.

 Ibid, pg 145.

 Furlong, Monica; _The Wisdom of Julian of Norwich_ , compiled by Monica Furlong; ( Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company; Grand Rapids MI, 1996); pg 12.

 As quoted by, Copleston, Frederick, S.J.; _A History of Philosophy_ , Volume 4, Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Leibniz; ( Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1963); pg 284.

 Penrose, Roger, _The Road To Reality_ , (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), pg 369 ff

 Popper, Karl, _Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge_ , (New York, Harper & Row, 1963), pg 29.

 Hawking, Stephen: _A Brief History of Time_ (Bantam Books, New York: 1988) pg 9

 Ibid, pg 136.

 This story, first reported by the Washington Post, was covered in the Sacramento Bee, March 23, 2005

 Penrose, Roger; _Shadows of the Mind_ , ( Oxford University Press; New York, Oxford, 1994) pg 406, 407

 Koestler, Arthur; _The Sleepwalkers_ , ( Arkana, published by the Penguin Group; Bucks, England, 1959) pg 261, 262

 Hawking, Stephen: _A Brief History of Time_ (Bantam Books, New York: 1988) pg 103.

 Ibid, pg 120, 121.

 Penrose, Roger, _The Road To Reality_ , (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), pg 702-706.

 Ibid, pg 706.

 Dawkins, Richard; _The Selfish Gene_ , (Oxford University Press, New York, 1976), pg 12.

 Nabokov, Vladimir, _Bend Sinister, (_ Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1947)

 Hawking, Stephen: _A Brief History of Time_ (Bantam Books, New York: 1988) pg 147

 Penrose, Roger; _Shadows of the Mind_ , ( Oxford University Press; New York, Oxford, 1994) pg 419.

 Ibid, pg 395.

 Schwartz, Jeffrey H. _Sudden Origins_ , ( John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1999), pg 349.

 Ibid, see his chapter, "Toward a New Evolution."

 Ibid, pg 337, 338.

 Ibid, pg 369.

88 Sagan, Carl, _The Demon Haunted World_ , ( Headline Book Publishing, London, 1997) pg 37.

89 . Hawking, Stephen: _A Brief History of Time_ (Bantam Books, New York: 1988) pg 148ff.

90 Weinberg, Steven; _The First Three Minutes_ ( Bantam Books, New York; 1984) pg 144.

