God's Substitutes
The
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche thought we -- or at least he -- had
"killed" God. Instead, figuring that without an end, much more a
beginning, there is no need for a God, he thought he'd found a good substitute for
God in an eternally recurring universe.
According to the mad philosopher -- who died in a Swiss insane asylum in
1900 -- evolution is fated to eternally repeat itself, even to the point which
the same combination of atoms of which each of us is made will again repeat
itself, and given an infinity of time, each of our lives and the combination of
events that characterizes them will also be played out over and over again.
Now, after
nearly a century of trying, most serious astrophysicists and cosmologists, like
the late Fred Hoyle of
Not that this
data has stopped the skeptics: instead, basing themselves on purely
mathematical speculations, we find them dreaming up, visions of other possible
universes and even a "multiverse"-- not unlike the medieval
theologian-philosophers who did not argue as to how many angels could dance on
a pin-head, but did actually argue, for a long time about "other possible worlds".
The latest
wrinkle in this sort of reasoning seems to have come the "string
theorists" -- those who have been for the few decades been pursuing
Einstein's dream of uniting, within a single mathematical formula, the four
major forces of nature into a single "theory of everything". They've done pretty well in making
coherent sense of three of them: the electro-magnetic force, the strong force
that holds atomic nuclei together, and the weak force that binds electrons to
the nuclei. But to make sense of
the fourth force, that of gravity, especially as Einstein described its working
in his theory of general relativity, these mathematicians are forced to dream
up an imaginary scenario consisting of infinitesimally tiny "strings"
of energy that manifest themselves in a dozen or even thirteen dimensions -- of
which only four (three in space, the other time) are detectable to us, but the
others, of course, maybe detectable to other creatures in other universes.
At this
point, one wonders who was/is really crazy. Einstein, who was perhaps the greatest
mind of the twentieth century, unabashedly said his ambition was "to
understand what God had in mind."
So it seems that after his dazzling accomplishments of 1905 (Special
Relativity) and 1915 (General Relativity) and his subsequent forty year effort
to formulate a single theory of everything, all this really was, from the very
beginning -- although some thought he was only joking -- a quest to not only
understand the Universe, but also to understand God.
It is a shame
that his admirers have not understood this. Instead, it seems to me, that these
contemporary thinkers go on spinning their theories oblivious to the obvious.
Not only without a Creator, there can be no creation, or even a succession of
them, but that even more fundamentally, just from observing themselves, without
a Thinker, there can be no real Thought.
R
Godsubs.mss 565words 06-10-29.htm