Former Harvard an MIT astrophysicist Alan Lightman's article, "The physics and metaphysics of the creation of the universe," in last January's Harper's Magazine, elucidates why I retain a philosophical allegiance to agnosticism, rather than swinging to -- some would say more honestly -- atheism. Because his article is 3,749 words long, perhaps my 682-word quote won't seem excessive.
Most physicists believe that in this quantum era, the entire observable universe was roughly a million billion billion times smaller than a single atom. The temperature was nearly a million billion billion billion degrees. Time and space churned like boiling water. Of course, such things are unimaginable. But theoretical physicists try to imagine them in mathematical form, with pencil and paper. Somehow, time as we know it emerged in that fantastically dense nugget. Or perhaps time already existed, and what emerged was the "arrow" of time, pointing toward the future....
It is well known in the science of order and disorder that, other things being equal, larger spaces allow for more disorder, essentially because there are more places to scatter things. Smaller spaces therefore tend to have more order. As a consequence, in [one cosmological hypothesis], the order of the universe was at a maximum at the Big Bang; disorder increased both before and after....
A second major hypothesis is that the universe, and time, did not exist before the Big Bang. The universe materialized literally out of nothing, at a tiny but finite size, and expanded thereafter. There were no moments before the moment of smallest size because there was no "before." Likewise, there was no "creation" of the universe, since that concept implies action in time. Even to say that the universe "materialized" is somewhat misleading. As Hawking describes it, the universe "would be neither created nor destroyed. It would just BE"....
[Q]uantum cosmologists are aware of the vast philosophical and theological reverberations of their work. As Hawking says in A Brief History of Time, many people believe that God, while permitting the universe to evolve according to fixed laws of nature, was uniquely responsible for winding up the clock at the beginning and choosing how to set it in motion. Hawking’s own theory provides an explanation for how the universe might have wound itself up — his method of calculating the early snapshots of the universe has no dependence on initial conditions or boundaries or anything outside the universe itself. The icy rules of quantum physics are completely sufficient. “What place, then, for a creator?” asks Hawking....
[M]ost quantum cosmologists do not believe that anything caused the creation of the universe.... [Q]uantum physics can hypothesize a universe without cause — just as quantum physics can show how electrons can change orbits in an atom without cause. There are no definite cause-and-effect relationships in the quantum world, only probabilities. [One theoretic physicist] put it this way: "In everyday life we talk about cause and effect. But there is no reason to apply that thinking to the universe as a whole. I do not feel in any way unsatisfied by just saying, 'That’s the way it is'"....
In the 1940s, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow developed the concept of a hierarchy of human needs. He started with the most primitive and urgent demands, and ended with the most lofty and advanced. At the bottom of the pyramid are physical needs for survival, like food and water. Next up is safety. Higher up is love and belonging, then self-esteem. The highest of Maslow’s proposed needs, self-actualization, is the desire to get the most out of ourselves, to be the best we can be. I would suggest adding one more category at the very top of the pyramid, above even self-actualization: imagination and exploration. Wasn’t that the need that propelled Marco Polo and Vasco da Gama and Einstein? The need to imagine new possibilities, the need to reach out beyond ourselves and understand the world around us. Not to help ourselves with physical survival or personal relationships or self-discovery but to know and comprehend this strange cosmos we find ourselves in. The need to ask the really big questions. How did it all begin? Far beyond our own lives, far beyond our community or our nation or our planet or even our solar system. How did the universe begin? It is a luxury to be able to ask such questions. It is also a human necessity.
I enjoy reflecting on the metaphysical; I find it as philosophically pleasurable as medieval monks would have found modern physics intolerable. I also find organized religion -- in large part assemblages of fixed doctrine, monuments to the stupidity of man, to paraphrase Gen. Patton -- little more than institutions barely evolved from ancient oracularism. Purely metaphysical ponderings, however, suit my grounding in philosophical skepticism: Is science the only remaining prophet of truth and reality? For all its thrilling explorations of the heavens' wonders, is the nonetheless slide-rule work of astrophysics and cosmology the singularly legitimate search for our farthest-most origins? Of The Ultimate? Of perhaps indiscernible, epistemologically impossible dimensions? I'd like to think -- in fact I like it so much, I believe it rather than merely thinking it -- that what we might call a theoretical agnosticism is nearly as intellectually valid in this science-worshiping world (excluding, of course, the ISIS caliphate and Donald Trump's United States) as theoretical physics. Open-minded agnosticism could never quite catch up to the intellectual respectability of science, since the former is wholly unverifiable, while the latter often finds a way. But in its cosmic meditations, does not free-thinking agnosticism -- contra the closed doctrine of atheism -- liberate us from modern conventionalities, some of which just might be as mistaken as antiquity's?
I see it's time for another round of my cough-suppressing and post-surgery-related narcotics, which hardcore atheists might also see as the induced "reasoning" behind this post of neither here- nor-there abstractions.
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Updated: A just-discovered gem of relevance, arranged in a literary device known as an "antimetabole":
I would rather have questions that can’t be answered, than answers that can’t be questioned.
-- Richard Feynman, theoretical physicist, d. 1988