And then a Miracle Occurs…….
By Philip Comella Modern science tells a story of how the world came to be. It goes something like this: Big Bang to stars to planets to life to mind. Or, in simpler terms, from matter to mind. Because this story has the imprimatur of science, we tend not to criticize it, believing that the job of explaining the world belongs to learned professors, not to us. This article throws caution to the wind and looks critically at the scientific account of creation currently in vogue. This brief examination will show that although science has been successful at explaining events within stages of cosmic development, it relies on miracles to bridge the distance between the stages. For the definition of a “miracle” I will use the one given by the 18th century philosopher, David Hume, who defined a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature. Looking closely at the scientific creation story, we find a number of miracles hidden between the stages, like codes in a computer program: (Miracle 1) to Big Bang (Miracle 2) to stars (Miracle 3) to planets (Miracle 4) to life (Miracle 5) to mind. Miracle 1: Something from Nothing How something came from nothing remains a deep – and usually ignored – mystery under our current scientific worldview. The mystery grows when it is recognized that the “something” in question is the entire universe, consisting of roughly 100 billion galaxies each containing 100 billion stars. How this something came from nothing, under any account of creation, must qualify as a high-order miracle. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that matter or energy can neither be created nor destroyed, making the Big Bang the greatest imaginable violation of this law of nature. Miracle 2: The Big Bang Leads to an Ordered Universe The Second Law of Thermodynamics holds that disorder in a closed system always increases. Left to itself, with no outside force helping, a system of energy will seek equilibrium; it will spread out, not coalesce into organized forms. Dust scatters in the wind; it does not assemble itself into statutes. If this law held true, we would expect the Big Bang to have raced toward further chaos, not toward a universe of spiral galaxies, precise nuclear reactions, and the DNA molecule. Science itself is the study of the harmonies of nature, and would not be possible without them. When we look up at the stars, and the constellations that sketch a primitive story in the sky, it becomes evident that the Big Bang led to order not disorder. So this violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is another miracle. Miracle 3: The Laws of Nature Scientists believe all they need to create a universe is matter and the laws of nature. But where in the debris of the Big Bang will we find a source for laws that dictate the movements of the world? We will need another miracle. A related problem concerns how the laws of nature seem finely tuned to allow life to exist on Earth, as if life came first and determined the conditions it needed to thrive. The peculiar fit between the laws of nature and humans has led some scientists to postulate that an infinity of universes really exists, and one of them just happened to come equipped with laws finely tuned for life. But this approach simply uses one miracle (the multiverse) to explain another one (laws of nature), and nothing is gained. Miracle 4: The Origin of Life How life managed to arise spontaneously from the dust is a deep and still unsolved mystery. Biologists comfort themselves with the thought that they only have to show it happened once, but this same approach can be applied to any claimed miracle, and does not answer the question of how the miracle is possible in the first place. Miracle 5: The Emergence of Mind from Matter Mind is the source of thought and creativity; it is the wellspring of inspiration, hope, love, imagination, and dreams. Theorizing how these ephemeral inner states arise from mindless particles always seems futile and unsatisfying, as if we know we are not using the right piece to finish the puzzle. Science says at some point mind emerges from the brain. Through this approach, science hopes to plaster over a miracle with a term – emergence – that no one really understands. The question remains, how did mind emerge from matter? There is no answer. Although science holds up its reliance on testing and measurement as hallmarks of its superiority over other means at finding truth, science carries out these methods within each stage of cosmic development, not between the stages. Between the stages –before the Big Bang, at the birth of life, the emergence of mind from matter – we see something more akin to hand-waving, as scientists believe that their success in explaining what happens within the stages will earn them the credibility to bridge the distances between the stages. So what choice do we have? Here is another approach: Suppose that instead of mind coming from matter, matter came from mind. Suppose that matter is actually an appearance of matter, a dream image; and then further suppose that both our bodies and the physical world – Mother Nature – are part of the same dream, so they are real to each other. In other words, suppose that we actually dwell in a great dream in the mind of a being some call God. This places the source of energy and order deep within us, not out in the cosmos. This approach allows us to reduce the necessary miracles to one: this is the miracle of how it is possible for a mind to project a real-seeming image of a three-dimensional world from itself, or how it is possible to dream. This is truly a miracle, but it has a distinct advantage over the miracles relied upon by modern science. In our world, we know dreams are possible. ` PHILIP COMELLA is a lawyer, visionary futurist, and host of the popular radio show Conversations Beyond Science and Religion, podcast at www.webtalkradio.net. His book, The Collapse of Materialism: Visions of Science, Dreams of God, is a culmination of decades of work committed to developing a new and credible scientific paradigm to unify the physical world of science with the metaphysics of religion. He lives with his wife and daughter in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. The Collapse of Materialism: Visions of Science, Dreams of God, Published by Rainbow Ridge Books, ISBN 978-1937907211, and is available on Amazon.com, BN.com, and bookstores everywhere. Copyright 2014 Phillip Comela |
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