Before Creation

In the beginning, was the great cosmic egg. Inside the egg was chaos, and floating in chaos was P'an Ku, the divine Embryo. P'an Ku myth (China, third century) If God created the world, where was He before Creation?... Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end. Mahapuran (India, ninth century) "Did God have a mother?" Children, when told that God made the heavens and the earth, innocently ask whether God had a mother. This deceptively simpie question has stumped the elders of the church and embarrassed the finest theologians, precipitating some of the thorniest theological debates over the centuries. All the great religions have elaborate mythologies surrounding the divine act of Creation, but none of them adequately confronts the logical paradoxes inherent in the questions that even children ask. God may have created the heavens and the earth in 7 days, but what happened before the first day? If one concedes that God had a mother, then one naturally asks whether she, too, had a mother, and so on, forever. However, if God did not have a mother, then this answer raises even more questions: Where did God come from? Was God always in existence since eternity, or is God beyond time itself? Over the centuries, even great painters commissioned by the church grappled with these ticklish theological debates in their works of art: When depicting God or Adam and Eve, do you give them belly buttons? Since the navel marks the point of attachment of the umbilical cord, then neither God nor Adam and Eve could be painted with belly buttons. For example, Michelangelo faced this dilemma in his celebrated depiction of Creation and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden when he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The answer to this theological question is to be found hanging in any large museum: God and Adam and Eve simply have no belly buttons, because they were the first. Proofs of the Existence of God Troubled by the inconsistencies in church ideology, St. Thomas Aquinas, writing in the thirteenth century, decided to raise the level of theological debate from the vagueness of mythology to the rigor of logic. He proposed to solve these ancient questions in his celebrated "proofs of the existence of God." Aquinas summarized his proofs in the following poem: Things are in motion, hence there is a first mover Things are caused, hence there is a first cause Things exist, hence there is a creator Perfect goodness exists, hence it has a source Things are designed, hence they serve a purpose.' (The first three lines are variations of what is called the cosmological proof the fourth argues on moral grounds; and the fifth is called the teleological proof .The moral proof is by far the weakest, because morality can be viewed in terms of evolving social customs.) Aquinas's "cosmological" and "teleological" proofs of the existence of God have been used by the church for the past 700 years to answer this sticky theological question. Although these proofs have since been shown to be flawed in light of the scientific discoveries made over the past 7 centuries, they were quite ingenious for their time and show the influence of the Greeks, who were the first to introduce rigor into their speculations about nature. Aquinas began the cosmological proof by postulating that God was the First Mover and First Maker. He artfully dodged the question of "who made God" by simply asserting that the question made no sense. God had no maker because he was the First. Period. The cosmological proof states that everything that moves must have had something push it, which in turn must have had something push it, and so on. But what started the first push? Imagine, for the moment, idly sitting in the park and seeing a wagon moving in front of you. Obviously, you think, there is a young child pushing the wagon. You wait a moment, only to find another wagon pushing the first wagon. Curious, you wait a bit longer for the child, but there is a third wagon pushing the first two wagons. As time goes by, you witness hundreds of wagons, each one pushing the others, with no child in sight. Puzzled, you look out into the distance. You are surprised to see an infinite sequence of wagons stretching into the horizon, each wagon pushing the others, with no child at all. If it takes a child to push a wagon, then can an infinite sequence of wagons be pushed without the First Pusher? Can an infinite sequence of wagons push itself? No. Therefore, God must exist. The teleological proof is even more persuasive. It states that there has to be a First Designer. For example, imagine walking on the sands of Mars, where the winds and dust storms have worn even the mountains and giant craters. Over tens of millions of years, nothing has escaped the corrosive, grinding effect of the sand storms. Then, to your surprise, you find a beautiful camera lying in the sand dunes. The lens is smoothly polished and the shutter mechanism delicately crafted. Surely, you think, the sands of Mars could not have created such a beautiful piece of craftsmanship. You conclude that someone intelligent obviously made this camera. Then, after wandering on the sufface of Mars some more, you come across a rabbit. Obviously, the eye of the rabbit is infinitely more intricate than the eye of the camera. The muscles of the rabbit's eye are infinitely more elaborate than the shutter of the camera. Therefore, the maker of this rabbit must be infinitely more advanced than the maker of the camera. This maker must therefore be God. Now imagine the machines on the earth. There is no question that these machines were made by something even greater, such as humans. There is no question that a human is infinitely more complicated than a machine. Therefore, the person who created us must be infinitely more complicated than we are. So therefore God must exist. In 1078, St. Anselm, the archbishop of Canterbury, cooked up perhaps the most sophisticated proof of the existence of God, the ontological proof which does not depend on First Movers or First Designers at all. St. Anselm claimed that he could prove the existence of God from pure logic alone. He defined God as the most perfect, most powerful being imaginable. It is, however, possible to conceive of two types of God. The first God, we imagine, does not exist. The second God, we imagine, actually does exist and can perform miracles, such as parting the rivers and raising the dead. Obviously, the second God (who exists) is more powerful and more perfect than the first God (who does not exist). However, we defined God to be the most perfect and powerful being imaginable. By the definition of God, the second God (who exists) is the more powerful and more perfect one. Therefore, the second God is the one who fits the definition. The first God (who does not exist) is weaker and less perfect than the second God, and therefore does not fit the definition of God. Hence God must exist. In other words, if we define God as "that being nothing greater than which can be conceived," then God must exist because if he didn't, it's possible to conceive of a much greater Go4 who does exist. This rather ingenious proof, unlike those of St. Thomas Aquinas, is totally independent of the act of Creation and rests solely on the definition of the perfect being. Remarkably, these "proofs" of the existence of God lasted for over 700 years, defying the repeated challenges of scientists and logicians. The reason for this is that not enough was known about the fundamental laws of physics and biology. In fact, only within the past century have new laws of nature been discovered that can isolate the potential flaws in these proofs. The flaw in the cosmological proof, for example, is that the conservation of mass and energy is sufficient to explain motion without appealing to a First Mover. For example, gas molecules may bounce against the walls of a container without requiring anyone or anything to get them moving. In principle, these molecules can move forever, requiring no beginning or end. Thus there is no necessity for a First or a Last Mover as long as mass and energy are conserved. For the teleological proof, the theory of evolution shows that it is possible to create higher and more complex life forms from more primitive ones through natural selection and chance. Ultimately, we can trace the origin of life itself back to the spontaneous formation of protein molecules in the early earth's oceans without appealing to a higher intelligence. Studies performed by Stanley L. Miller in 1955 have shown that sparks sent through a flask containing methane, ammonia, and other gases found in the early earth's atmosphere can spontaneously create complex hydrocarbon molecules and eventually amino acids (precursors to protein molecules) and other complex organic molecules. Thus a First Designer is not necessary to create the essentials for life, which can apparently emerge naturally out of inorganic chemicals if they are given enough time. And, finally, Immanuel Kant was the first to isolate the error in the ontological proof after centuries of confusion. Kant pointed out that stating that an object exists does not make it more perfect. For example, this proof can be used to prove the existence of the unicorn. If we define the unicorn to be the most perfect horse imaginable, and if unicorns don't exist, then it's possible to imagine a unicorn that does exist. But saying that it exists does not mean that it is more perfect than a unicorn that does not exist. Therefore, unicorns do not necessarily have to exist. And neither does God. Have we made any progress since the time of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Anselm? Yes and no. We can say that present day theories of Creation are built on two pillars: quantum theory and Einstein's theory of gravity. We can say that, for the first time in a thousand years, religious 'proofs" of the existence of God are being replaced by our understanding of thermodynamics and particle physics. However, by replacing God's act of Creation with the Big Bang, we have supplanted one problem with another. Aquinas thought he solved the problem of what came before God by defining him as the First Mover. Today, we are still struggling with the question of what happened before the Big Bang. Unfortunately, Einstein's equations break down at the enormously small distances and large energies found at the origin of the universe. At distances on the order of a centimeter, quantum effects take over from Einstein's theory. Thus to resolve the philosophical questions involving the beginning of time, we must necessarily invoke the ten-dimensional theory. Throughout this book, we have emphasized the fact that the laws of physics unify when we add higher dimensions. When studying the Big Bang, we see the precise reverse of this statement. The Big Bang, as we shall see, perhaps originated in the breakdown of the original ten dimensional universe into a four- and a n n-dimensional universe. Thus we can view the history of the Big Bang as the history of the breakup of ten-dimensional space and hence the breakup of previously unified symmetnes. This, in turn, is the theme of this book in reverse. It is no wonder, therefore, that piecing together the dynamics of the Big Bang has been so difficult. In effect, by going backward in time, we are reassembling the pieces of the ten -dimensional universe.