If there ever is a God, he probably hid himself sufficiently enough so that our innate insatiable curiosity may lead us to investigate how he made the universe, the galaxies, the stars, the planets and life. The excitement will be ruined if he’d just appear and say, “hey! stop thinking about it, I made everything”.

But then, in the end, we might be surprised to find out who or what is behind the veiling mystery. All of us may be wrong about our concept of God or of ultimate reality, it may be more grand than most of us have thought. Absolute denial of the supernatural as well as the religious perceptions of it may both turn out to be oversimplistic. What lies beyond the bounds of what we humans don’t know? At the very end of this seemingly unending horizon of human exploration, what lies behind the mysterious and the unknown?

The real essence of spirituality and of scientific thinking is the same – that our existence is an attractively grandiose mystery. This is enough positive force to draw us to a life of contemplation,  discovery, and (to a lesser extent) generosity.  Now, that’s a good reason for God to keep hiding.

I completed watching a lecture of Dr. Lawrence Kraus on the topic of the universe coming out of nothing. It is indeed a hallmark of success of modern cosmology that all events can be traced back now, from pieces of evidence, at the beginning of the universe up to time zero.

It goes beyond common sense to imagine how things came to be as depicted in the latest best model of cosomological understanding. As ridiculous as it might seem, most modern cosmologists are now convinced that the universe came from nothing – that is, from empty space. However, “empty space” is not really statically empty. It’s an emptiness where matter and energy are created and annihilated in a dynamic balance. This is called quantum fluctuation, which can be logically deduced from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. A sustained imbalance of creation/annihilation process resulted to a sudden outburst of matter and energy creation, which we call the Big Bang.

This is not immune to the sticky question of cuasation. What caused the sudden imbalance? Proponents of the god hypothesis can fill an intelligent god in this gap of our knowledge, something that really doesn’t explain anything. If an intelligent designer initiated this imbalance, how can we detect the presence of this designer? Alternatively, is there a non-intelligent/mechanistic cause of the imbalance?

In the end, the question of ultimate cause has to be confronted. Following Occam’s Razor, a simpler explanation is always most likely to be correct than a complex one (e.g. intelligent designer).

A simpler explanation that have been conceived is that the universe simply came from empty space. The imbalance that brought forth our universe is not unique, it could have been happening all the time. Thus, other universes may be lying out there but they’re just very far for us to observe. Universes, like ours, can just pop-out from nothing, due to quantum fluctuations.

If our universe came from nothing then nothing more needs to be explained. Nothing, therefore, could be the ultimate cause. If we should call the ultimate cause with the name “God”, then God is actually nothing.

On how this nothingness brought forth complexity in the universe is a separate question; but one that has been answered quite sufficiently by evolution. I personally think that the initial state of nothingness is actually already complex and that the resulting universe and life forms that happened to evolve later on are just other forms of complexity. In this point of view, evolution should actually be conceived as transformation from one complex form to another complex form and not from simple to complex.

For a graphical summary of the origin of the universe, see the figure below. Source: NASA.

If the human brain is highly evolved and that the survival of our species critically hinges on a sufficient objective understanding of the natural world, then why is it so susceptible to imaginative and inaccurate models of thinking? Think about how some credulous religious fanatics can kill thousands of people for an anticipation of heaven promised by their god – concepts/beliefs that never resulted from objective and rational understanding…purely imaginary. Less extreme examples of the credulity of the human brain are everywhere so that we can almost say that it really has a tendency to be uncritical, subjective, and even anti-realistic.

From the evolutionary point of view, perhaps a completely objective view of the world is not critical to our survival in the short term. A crude and partially realistic view of the world is probably enough to manage the survival of our species for a few thousands of years. We cannot prolong our survival though with these kinds of models of understanding the natural world. In the long run, we need to be more realistic in assessing the workings of nature. Without the efforts of science to fight plagues and diseases, for instance, through serious study of their causes and cures, our species might have already been wiped out from the face of the earth. If we are to continue to survive as a species for the next thousand or million years, we should evolve to a more rational and objective species. This has been happening throughout human history. The challenge now is on how to accelerate this transformation so we can attain peaceful coexisting rational “ideologies” before we destroy each other in a series of offensive and vindictive attacks resulting from ancient unrealistic and anti-progressive ideas.