Because of all of this, I'm getting back into reading and thinking about the core concepts of the book, which inevitably stirs some entertaining mind-wanderings. One of those is the whole "first cause" conundrum.
In a discussion group last month at my tiny church about the compatibility between faith and science, a well-informed and regular participant presented an opinion that I for a long time held myself. It was a variant on what is often called the "First Cause" argument.
For those faith folk who don't buy into the reflexive fundamentalist 6,000 year old universe thing, "First Cause" has come to be understood in the context of our observable time and space. Looking out at the way that creation has banged out bigly, and how it appears to have begun at a point of inscrutable singularity beyond which nothing can meaningfully be known, science-friendly believers have seen the possibility of God on the far side of that event.
Beyond that first moment lies God, we've thought. And we're not wrong. We're just not right in the way that we thought, either.
This is one of the many challenges the Many Worlds interpretation poses for the faithful. Because that moment? It's not the boundary. On the "other side" may lie an infinity of other realities, or just a single scraping of reality against reality. Yeah, Stephen Hawking described the number of other potential universes as 10 to the 500, but I know physicists. The technical term for when they start pitching out numbers that high is "spitballing at infinity."
What Hawking is saying is that the multiverse itself might well be functionally infinite and eternal. And if it's infinite and eternal, there can be no first cause.
Which, to be honest, works just fine for faith, with very little muss or fuss. Why? Because while First Cause arguments make some sense relative to time and space, they have never been meaningful statements relative to being outside of the bounds of our time and space. Some unpacking of that is in order, eh?
From faith we know that God is eternal, but we know more than that. We understand existence as not being limited to the bounds of the flow of time and space, and understand being in God's presence as partaking of that eternity. Being eternal, timeless, and without cause is an integral aspect of God's identity.
But when we've tried to explain this to skeptics, the conversations always go the same way.
Jesus-dude: "Everything had to come from something. So that something is God."
Skeptic: "Oh yeah? Well, what did God come from?"
Jesus-dude: "Nothing. God has just always existed."
Skeptic: "But if everything has to come from something, then God has to come from something."
Jesus-dude: "No, because God is God."
Skeptic: "But everything has to come from something. You're not making any sense."
Jesus-dude: "That's because things work differently in the universe. God's not part of everything we see and hear."
Skeptic: "Oh, c'mon. How can there be anything outside of our universe? That's wackadoodle."
And to be honest? The skeptic does have a point. There's some tension in that thinking. Or, to be more plain about it, did have a point. If Many Worlds gains more purchase as a cosmology, the whole classical First Cause argument isn't worth arguing over. It's just no longer relevant.
If the universe is an infinite and immeasurable multiverse, then ascribing causality is functionally meaningless when considering that infinity. And saying "first" is equally meaningless. How can there be a "first" if being stretches out to places where time has no meaning?
And into this kwazy cosmic yarp, the faithful have to ask: at what point did God create? Could we still refer to God as the "Creator?" The answer returns: Sure. At every point, always, back farther than we can see, and forward beyond the scope of our vision. It's just that parsing out God's infinitely generous self-expression from God's nature becomes a meaningless exercise.
I really am enjoying this manuscript.
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