In Search of a Road to Reality

The new cosmologies are not shedding much light, except on the sheer power of the human imagination. Whatever they were supposed to explain has been rendered by their own rules unexplainable. What follows?

In a 2012 triumph, the Large Hadron Collider detected the previously theoretical Higgs boson (the "God particle," thought to give everything in the universe mass). But the boson did not support any radical new cosmologies. Its lightness suggests the existence of other similar particles. That's promising for research but little more than that. Indeed, the Higgs's feast of data "seems to match the standard model's predictions perfectly" and leaves "usurpers of 'standard model' [with] little to chew on, as Nature put the matter in 2012. Science writer John Horgan says, "The Higgs doesn't take us any closer to a unified theory than climbing a tree would take me to the Moon."

Meanwhile researchers are finding greater structure in the universe than they anticipated. Spiral galaxies are "pin-ups of the cosmos" and thus "something of a headache" if chaos and disorder are expected. Much of the vast array of proposed life-friendly exoplanets, that would show Earth to be just average, could mainly be gas and dust.

Britain's Guardian asks, thinking about the multiverse, "Has physics gone too far?" Perhaps a better question would be, is New Atheist cosmology failing as physics? Because, make no mistake, an admitted motive for seeking alternatives to the Big Bang and the fine-tuning of our universe is getting rid of their theistic implications.

Worse, for some, the hateful Big Bang bangs on, oblivious of its critics. Cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin, resigned to the Big Bang's reality, theorizes that it was "merely one of a series of big bangs creating an endless number of bubble universes." Another scheme to get rid of the Big Bang as a singularity involves a rainbow universe where time has no beginning, a model that, as Scientific American tells us, "is not widely accepted." No wonder because, as one critic put it, the scheme must get rid of the singularity within the Standard Model of physics. Similarly, another new cosmology accounts for the apparent acceleration of the universe -- but only if there is no Big Bang: "This universe has no beginning or end, just alternating periods of expansion and contraction." It also has no cosmic microwave background, which our universe inconveniently does have.

Still others propose that the Big Bang was a "mirage from [a] collapsing higher-dimensional star," a thesis with which the new Planck data apparently disagree. In general, experimental findings continue to support the Standard Model. As New Scientist's editors put it in a 2012 editorial titled "The Genesis problem":

Cosmologists thought they had a workaround. Over the years, they have tried on several different models of the universe that dodge the need for a beginning while still requiring a big bang. But recent research has shot them full of holes. It now seems certain that the universe did have a beginning.But does that mean evidence matters again? Not clear. Some say we now have the tools to examine the beginning of the universe scientifically; others that we may never know what it was like. And there's always the option of declaring stubborn facts off limits. Steven Weinberg reflects:

Here's an alternative: On the road to reality, evidence must matter again. The weight of the evidence must count. And when it does count, if our cosmos is orderly, new approaches will emerge. They may be emerging now.

Intriguingly, a recent article in Scientific American noted, "Some researchers think that the world, at root, does not consist of material things but of relations or of properties, such as mass, charge and spin." But information, not matter, is fundamentally relational.

So, is the basic substance of the universe information? In that case, the ID theorists are right.

Editor's note: Here is the "Science Fictions" series to date at your fingertips.

After pointing out that the new cosmologies are not shedding much light, except on the sheer power of the human imagination, the author wonders if whether the basic substance of the universe is actually information.

In other words, if the basic substance is information rather than physical matter, does this make physical matter an illusion (maya)? Does it mean that reality is inside the skull, as Orwell's Big Brother declared?

This way of thinking is captured by Orwell in his book, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” in which negation of the physical world is an integral part of the social and political philosophy of Big Brother and his despotic Party. At one stage in the book, Winston stumbles upon the shocking realization that,

“…in the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later; the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.” (Orwell, “The New Spirituality and its Hallmarks, Alan Morrison, SCP Journal, Vol. 30:4-31:1, 2007, p. 19)

When the Thought Police agent O’Brien tortures Winston for “wrong thought” he states,

“We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation---anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to….You must get rid of these nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.”

Big Brother is a demon-possessed pagan sage (a Hermetic magician), an Eastern Guru (god-man) in a long line of magicians and gurus going back to Ham in the post-flood world followed by Nimrod and the Egyptian magus Hermes Trismegistus, the early Christian-era Simon Magus and the Gnostic Valentinus, Eastern Tantric sages, Yogis, and god-men on through to Renaissance magicians such as Agrippa, and Paracelsus.

The idea that reality consists of one substance predates the Christian worldview with its' interfacing, interacting two-dimensional view of reality by thousands of years and belongs to the family of naturalism.

Naturalism refers to a one-dimensional view of reality grounded in a monist/Advaita pagan philosophy holding that only void, matter and evolutionary (developmental and change-making) energies exist. Therefore void, matter and energy are the Ultimate One Substance of which the universe consists and with which all life is in continuity, thus "all is one" and "everything is perpetually evolving and ascending."

Both scientific evolutionary materialism (life and mind evolve from physical matter) and its Eastern oriented new age evolutionary pantheist counterpart (life and mind are aspects of divine energy) are the two main types of naturalism.

Marxist Communism is the sociopolitical form taken by the former type. In his analysis of Marxist Communism and its' alter ego, scientific materialism, Frank Meyers, an early conservative intellectual concluded that Communism is the state form,

"....taken by a materialist faith determined to rule the world." Godless Communism is the "final synthesis of all heretical tendencies that have pervaded Western civilization for many centuries." It is materialist scientism of which, "Communism is the culminating hubris of the Promethean man who reaches out for the world and means to remake creation. It is scientism gone political." (The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, George H. Nash, pp. 251-252)

The main difference between the two types of naturalism resides in whether matter is thought to be physical (i.e., Greek Atomism) or spiritual (i.e., Buddhism, certain forms of Hinduism, New Physics). However, both views share in common the following:

1.Negation of the supernatural God of Revelation and of man as His spiritual image-bearer as necessitated by one-dimensional views of reality

2.An inverted account of origins and history lending itself to the notion that since there was no fall then the devil is not the devil and men are not sinful but rather evolving from primitive hominids into gods

3.Natural Science: Both materialism and its' Eastern-oriented counterpart are types of natural (one substance) science

4.Evolutionary conceptions: These serve two main functions. First, as a mechanical process of development and second, as a mechanism for purification of matter

5.Nihilism

Jesus Christ to Buddha,

"...you took God away (and) your espousal of an absence of self is the most unique and fearsome claim you made." (The Lotus and the Cross: Jesus Talks with Buddha, Ravi Zacharias, pp. 59, 67)

Life and being are only with the living God of Revelation, the creator and upholder of the life and being (soul/spirit) of men. But if He does not exist, it logically follows that there is no ultimate source for life, conscious being, meaning and purpose; or for the sanctity of human life, worth, dignity, individual liberty and personal property. Without God the Father Almighty unalienable (God given) human rights are as meaningless as America's founding documents have become in our Godless neo-pagan society.

If man is not God's spiritual image-bearer then he is less than nothing, a conclusion Buddha reached long before Jesus Christ God Incarnate walked this earth:

"Six centuries before Jesus Christ, the Buddha already knew that if God does not exist, then the human self cannot exist either...Therefore, he deconstructed the Hindu idea of the soul. When one starts peeling the onion skin of one's psyche, he discovers that there is no solid core at the center of one's being." Thus your sense of self becomes illusion, "Reality is nonself...You don't exist."

Liberation, the Buddha taught, "is realizing the unreality of your existence." (The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, Vishal Mangalwadi, p. 6)

Both Mangalwadi and Zacharias know that the Biblical One God in three Persons created the living souls of all men, hence the soul of Western civilization. Equally, both men clearly see the soul-destroying nihilism involved in the West's rejection of its' Biblical foundations in favor of one dimensional views of reality posited by natural science, psychology, academia, and today's burgeoning 'new' religions grounded in evolutionary naturalism.

Having escaped the nihilism inherent in naturalistic views of reality both men are shocked and dismayed by the West's maddened determination to plunge into the abyss.

In conclusion, the answer to the author's question re: one substance views of reality is "NO." If all that exists is one substance then man is less than nothing. He is a walking dead body that somehow speaks. Or as the OT prophet Jeremiah put it, a cistern without living water.

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In Search of a Road to Reality

Denyse O'Leary January 13, 2014 5:33 AM | Permalink