I love ideas. We have many enjoyments available to us in this life – friends, family, career, fitness, food and travel to name but a few. Yet ideas alone have the capacity to open doors and move humankind into new spaces and previously unimaginable vistas and experiences. Ideas are the best!
Consider the person who invented the Arabic system of numerals. A system where a string of digits, for example, 123 could be read together as representing the single number ‘one hundred twenty three’ – the idea was so revolutionary that it spread throughout the whole world. Modern mathematics and commerce would be unrecognizable without it. Yet it started as an idea in just one person’s head – its origins now lost in antiquity.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century it was felt that all the great discoveries in physics had been made and that pursuing a career in this field had a limited future. A young man who fortunately ignored this advice was Max Planck who came up with the idea that radiation is emitted in fixed and definite amounts or packets, which he called quanta. Legend has it that he told his son that his discovery was of equal significance to the work of Isaac Newton and would earn him the Nobel Prize. His son Erwin became his best friend and advisor but was implicated in the plot to kill Hitler and was tortured to death by the Gestapo in 1945. His work is the foundational idea behind quantum theory.
Here we see a foundational idea, one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the twentieth century – an idea that undergirds our understanding of the structure of the atom. We also see that foundational ideas have the capacity to birth multiple other ideas, for example, in science and technology. However, in the case of Atomic Energy, it can be used to power a city or destroy a city. As such, many ideas and particularly those in science have the ability to be used for good or evil.
We shall see in this study that there is one really foundational idea that relates to how the universe came into existence. The way we answer that question has profound consequences. Ideas have consequences because what we believe affects how we behave whether or not what we believe is actually true. Indeed it is generally accepted in a court of law that a person’s behavior is a more accurate indicator of what they believe than what they say. If I state in a ‘politically correct’ fashion that I’m not prejudiced against a particular group but act in a way to discriminate against them then my peers will judge me a hypocrite. Actions speak louder than words.
If I’m a lawmaker, I’ll draft laws differently if I believe all people are basically good than if I believe all people are basically flawed.
In the next chapter we’ll look at present day ideas on the origin of the universe. We’ll see that there are really only two possibilities. First that the universe came into existence by totally natural forces without any external intelligence – we call this the Scientific explanation. Alternately that the universe was put together by an external intelligence or creator which includes various religious concepts of God – this is the Religious explanation. Since there are many religions in the world today, we’ll limit the religious explanation to present day Judeo-Christianity. This is where the battle for mind-space in the western world is at its most intense.
Both sides of this divide have difficult questions that demand satisfying answers from the other. Scientists ask why an all-powerful God would let evil and suffering occur in our world. Religious people ask scientists for an explanation of the incredible complexity of life by Darwinian methods.
A first goal of this study is to state these questions and answers at least in outline form so the reader can determine which viewpoint is more intellectually satisfying.
A second goal is to show that each explanation spawns a myriad other ideas and that humans tend to mix and match the ideas from each side of the fence to produce the most comforting mix. Comforting maybe but intellectually dishonest nonetheless.
The underlying approach is to present in an unbiased fashion all arguments but to point out the consequences of particular viewpoints. At the very least, whatever your view on religion, it’s hoped that this study will challenge preconceived ideas on the validity of inadequate scientific explanations of existence.