After reading my previous premise, a clever person might use my counter-perspective psychology against me and ask “Since nothingness is impossible, how is creation possible?”
Well, well, my clever friend, I hope you’re ready to have your feathers ruffled!
Believe it or not… it isn’t.
The word “create” is fundamentally wrong; a sort of misnomer. The definition of the word create is “to bring into existence.” Since the previous premise showed us non-existence is impossible, you aren’t actually ever creating anything. Us puny humans simply use the word “create” to make sense of the things we do within our local spheres of experience.
Now, the implications of this are larger than you’re probably thinking right now, so let me dramatically rephrase what I just said for impact:
In the history of the world, the Universe, and existence itself, nothing and no one has ever created anything, ever. Not once. Not when you painted that painting that day, not when the Romans built their empire, not even the big bang at the “start” of our Universe. Nothing is ever created, ever, nor has it ever been.
Ok, I know that statement challenges some beliefs, but let’s be the adults we are, take a deep breath, and think it through. I’ll build into the rationality of it.
Say I’m a farmer and I just acquired a piece of land through a large inheritance I received. The land is beautiful and as part of the inheritance I also received top-quality seeds and 100 head of cattle. Although the land is beautiful and I have my cattle and my seeds, there are no streams or lakes nearby. How will I water my crops? From where will my cattle drink?
This is clearly a problem, so I ask my farmer neighbor for advice.
“Well that’s easy,” says my neighbor, “just dig a big hole and the rain will fill it!”
So that’s what I do. I rent some heavy machinery and hire a few workers and we dig out a lake-sized hole. A few months later, a marvelous lake stands before me, wind rippling across the water and everything! I stood there, admiring my creation.
But did I create this lake? Let’s ask my farmer self directly…
Did you create the lake?
“Yes.”
How?
“It wasn’t there before, but now it is. It came to be through my efforts.”
I wonder, is it possible the lake was already there?
After a suspicious look, my farmer self said “No.”
What makes a lake?
“Water.”
What else?
“A hole in the ground.”
Did the hole spontaneously appear?
“No, I dug it out.”
Did the water spontaneously appear?
“Well no, the rain filled the lake.”
So what’s the difference between the lake before you dug it and now?
“Well, I moved a lot of dirt.”
Did the dirt disappear?
“No, I just moved it over there.”
So you moved some dirt and a lake happened because water fell in it?
“Uh, yeah pretty much.”
You didn’t create anything.
“Wha.. what do you mean?? I moved the dirt and now there’s a lake. Look at it!”
Bingo! You moved dirt, causing a lake to form. Everything that makes your lake a lake was already there, you just rearranged things to allow them to take a different form. You didn’t actually create anything, you simply transformed something into something else.
“Bah! I don’t have time for these shenanigans, get a job you hooligan…” says my farmer self, clomping off into the distance.
This brings us to our next premise.
Premise Two: Everything has always existed, it simply changes.
Further Questions
Doesn’t the Universe have a beginning?
No. Our need to believe a beginning exists is a common cognitive error; a natural coping response that helps us make sense of things beyond our comprehension. Things beyond our comprehension are essentially unknown. We fear the unknown. It’s understandable that we have this fear and we try to rationalize it, as it’s helped us survive in a harsh world full of uncertainty. But our feelings don’t change the fact that the Universe having a beginning is logically impossible; a beginning implies there was nothingness before, and we know nothingness is impossible from the previous premise. Thus, the Universe has always existed, despite how that makes us feel.
What about the Big Bang Theory (BBT)?
The BBT is remarkably misunderstood: The BBT is simply the currently prevailing cosmological theory (our understanding is constantly evolving). Basically, there’s radiation everywhere out in space called the “cosmic microwave background radiation.” This radiation has “red shifted” over time (increased it’s wavelengths) as it’s travelled throughout the cosmos. This red shifting takes time. We can measure it. We have measured it. From those measurements and others, we’ve discovered the Universe has been expanding for a very long time. With a lot of regression-engineering and math, we found out just how long by extrapolating using our modern understanding of physics – thus, the BBT!
Perhaps surprisingly to many, the BBT is not asserting there was a beginning to the Universe, it’s asserting the Universe has expanded from a “smaller” state. I put “smaller” in quotations here because, as hard as it is to comprehend, the Universe was always infinite in volume (size), even at the point of the big bang when it was theoretically infinitely dense. Remember, because nothingness is impossible, the Universe is necessarily infinite in volume at any point in time and has no outside.
Which is a mind fuck!
The bottom line is no one knows precisely what happened in the first fractions of time when the big bang occured (or before it) because our physics models aren’t good enough. They’re not good enough because we simply don’t have enough data yet to make predictions that accurate (and there’s a possibility that we’ll never have enough data).
It’s kind of like a professional baseball pitcher throwing a ball to the catcher. If the pitcher is the standard 127 feet away, he’ll be able to accurately throw it to the catcher on most pitches. But the further away he walks, the less accurate he becomes. Eventually, he won’t be able to throw it accurately no matter what he does.
In fact, any real physicist worth their salt will tell you our models break down in accuracy proportionately as we get closer to the “beginning” of the big bang. Beyond a certain point, we’re only speculating. And there are many speculations about what happened before the big bang. The flying spaghetti monster is just as valid as any of them. For me, I find the most logical symmetry in the “Big Bounce.” The Big Bounce is the simplest explanation: It states the Universe has oscillated forever, phasing between a “Big Bang” and a “Big Crunch.” Obviously, we are currently in the Big Bang phase (I’ll explore much more of this idea later).
What about our fading “light cone,” “light shell,” or “visible Universe?” Doesn’t this imply the Universe is finite?
Nope. Our visible light shell is simply red-shifted relative to distance from the point of observation (Earth). Light can only travel so fast, so the further out you look, the longer the light has been travelling. You could pick a spot on the very edge of our light shell (the furthest galaxies we can detect), and the observable light shell would appear similar if an observer were looking outwards from that point as well.
Then how do we know the age of our Universe?
The answer is pretty much the BBT described above, however it’s not what you might be thinking: The Universe, in reality, has no age. It’s infinite. Age implies a beginning. A beginning implies there was nothing before. We know from the previous premise that nothingness is simply not possible.
However, if we trace the configuration of the Universe in the present day all the way back as far as modern science will allow us to go, we get a mathematical singularity, or “the point where time initially has meaning,” as some physicists will say. That expanse of time is about 13.7 billion years backwards from today, give or take a hundred million.
This is, of course, ridiculous. “Where time initially has meaning?” Really?
Again, “singularity” is simply a cool-sounding word for “we don’t know.” The reason physicists say this is because the BBT posits that the origin point of the Big Bang was a singularity – infinitely dense and infinitely small. When you throw around “infinitely” dense and small, at some point you have trouble extracting meaning from the thing you’re talking about. Since time is impossible without space (I’ll explain why this is the case in my next premise) and space is “infinitely” small at this stage, science-folk often describe this as the point “where time initially has meaning.” But it’s pretty much marketing nonsense.