This was an episode of "Into the Universe" with Stephen Hawking, on the Science Channel. Hawking is one of the greatest minds in this generation, if not THE greatest. Imagine if he could procreate. The brain power that could be achieved by the human race in future generations. But that's a topic for another time. This is about the episode and where my little brain went with it.
I'm always fascinated by things that refute the Bible. I watch documentaries on such religious studies. A religious person might think these documentaries are on the side of religion, but if you pay attention, and I do, these documentaries raise more questions than they answer, and they actually question doctrine. The religious scholars who comment in the shows never say this is absolutely so or otherwise. Maybe it was edited to keep the whole thing objective, but I think these scholars are really saying this one fundamental thing. We don't know, we can't know. We just can't.
So I look to science for the best guess. This episode started with the Big Bang (of course) and Hawking's and his colleagues' theories on what happened. He says it started with one thing. Just one tiny atom. Hydrogen.
Genesis - creation. People took the Bible so literally that they believed the universe and all that's in it was created in 6 days. Science has proven that's just plain silly. So religion tries to adjust their flawed beliefs to fit the current science. Then science learns more, and more flaws appear. Christians believe their "Genesis" is the true story of creation, and the rest are just myths, including scientific theory. They are all creation myths. Yes, even the Big Bang Theory. The stories are created to explain the things that can't be explained. Science has just taken it to the next level - the logical level, and they use proven science to tell the story.
From the science arose another version of creationism called "intelligent design". This was how some religious factions compromised to acknowledge the science. It attempts to rationalize the concept of deity by saying that nothing is random, something...some "mind" had to be at the beginning to create it. In the beginning there was Nothing, and then "intelligence" created Something.
Here comes the part where my brain went. If there was nothing, where was this intelligence? It couldn't be there, nothing was there. If it was there, then there couldn't be nothing. What if there was always Something? Not an intangible "intelligence", but a real physical Thing. Hawking said in the beginning there were hydrogen atoms with their gravity and space, but he didn't speculate on how the first atoms came into existence. What if it was always there? Not magically zapped into existence by some deity. Hydrogen and gravity and space. Just THERE.
If we try to apply time to this idea it falls apart. Time implies a beginning. Scientists can only speculate on how long it took for things to happen. Their beginning point is the events leading to the Big Bang because that's as far back as they can go with the science. We can't know how long things were there waiting for something to happen, so we can't know whether or not it was always there.
Religion says the creation of life is too complex to have happened randomly. Hawking said that it could. A couple of hydrogen atoms randomly collided and created a new element and a different gravity. This new element's gravity and energy affected the atoms around it, and created more elements in new configurations. The chain reaction was unstoppable. Eventually this vast array exploded and blasted all those new elements and energy out into space, and those little pieces continued the process that led to life as we know it.
Religion says God is perfect, and everything he does is perfect. If a perfect deity had created the first atoms, they would have been arranged perfectly. That would have been the intelligent, logical thing to do, right? But intelligent design theory doesn't go that far. It simply says that the first thing, the first building block was created by intelligence. They can't give up the idea of deity because their religion won't let them.
Hawking's science says it was random, and it could only be random because it wasn't perfect. If all the little hydrogen atoms had been arranged perfectly, the exact same distance from each other in any direction, nothing else would have happened. They would have just sat there in that arrangement forever. But they weren't arranged perfectly. The arrangement was random, and the atoms' gravitational fields affected the space around them randomly. The concept of a building block created by deity is flawed because there would have been nothing else to cause a reaction. Even if this deity created the randomness necessary for things to progress as they did, it couldn't create the specific events that led to the first atoms coming together, the ones that led to us. Because it's random, it would be unpredictable and therefore uncreatable.
If that's true, and I believe it more than any religious text, life is the result of happenstance. Why is that so hard to digest? Why must there have been a mystical brain to create it? We weren't created by a god, we created god.
My inner geek wants to believe that time travel will answer all our questions. But will it? Anyone who has ever read or seen a time travel story knows that traveling back in time can and usually does change the future. The tiniest change in the past can radically change what happens later. The very act of traveling back to when those first atoms came together could change everything, because the existence of our time machine (or the device that allows us to view the past) in that time and place would affect how those first atoms come together. We might be a very different form of life. Or maybe we don't happen at all.
Good morning.
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