The contingent creation of life …

The contingent creation of life …

Lately there has been a large amount of debate albeit mostly in forms with an appeal only to the esoteric clan of scholars which includes an internet enthusiast,  a theology knowledgist or rather a religion upholder,  a scientist and many of that kind,  journalists with an interest in such esoterism and so on. The debate is about the role God plays in creating and possibly in mentoring our Universe. The source of such ripple in our thinking is the recent book by Hawking “The Grand design” of which I don’t have a copy, yet.

So such a book must have been a great deal of thoughts and ideas written into a brilliant collection of essays with a style as lucid and intellectually stimulating as mastered by Hawking and only Hawking himself, as is evident in his preceding text of nature, “A brief history of time” which I read for the first time only a year ago and have a copy by my side right now, by pertinent coincidence, rather than by any intelligent design of which I intend to talk here.

I finished the need of reading this book last year when I found this by  accident. Such a need was created not only by a popularity of this book which I had possibly first heard 15 years ago but also by a curiosity of knowing what lies in this book that this is so famously cited as a masterpiece of scientific thinking. I finished in a go possibly just that fateful night of  mosquitoes, cigarettes, loneliness and experience of my true feelings.

And in the same spirit I went through the Dirac’s famed lectures without stopping and finished the first 2 or 3 lectures (if there were 4) in one go, in just few hours in responsive vengeance of my feelings.  So my purpose was not mere to learn from the work of Hawking but to see how much of it is in line with my own thoughts.

Comparative religion is often a study taken seriously by practitioners of scholarship but comparative science is often taken by historians and as such lacks some necessary ingredients that are “supposed” to be present in such historians of science or biographer, as we may call them, except in those cases which are yet to be studied by me. But I have an ambition of reading some accounts of history of science and put in some serious thoughts into it to write my own essays. So please bear with me and promise that you will bear with my ambitions and my failure to execute my ambitions in the case of that happening.

So I have prepared you enough for reading this essay about which I have no idea how it will look like because I am yet to think what I am going to write. I am just one, one directional person. I think, then I start and then I go, just before I think, I tell you what I am going to think about. So its an exam for me to come up with good and reasonable ideas and to make sense not just to attract your attention and say nothing.

So I have not researched a great deal, in fact hardly anything, which I should before writing serious essays, about what we know about our Universe and its creation. But I might have come across some ideas and heard about a few others, might try to recall a few from high school and college when I was pretty serious about sports as much I was about study and might have forgotten much of what I had learned. Although we may question the seriousness of my sports activities, because I did not a produce a good athlete, hell ya I did not even produce a good son and I am yet to know how someone becomes a father, but I would surmise that I am a very good player.

Our Universe was created a billion years ago. Life came only a million years ago. I have premonitions about the role that God played in our Universe. What was God doing in these billion – million = still a billion years? You see I just readily came up with the most profound question a scientist can ask a religious zealot, who can nonetheless be as revered a man of religion as a Pope. What was God doing in the billion years that he created our Universe before he was ready again to create us??

My fundamental right is not only to speak but to speak of that which I find my most important action, to question and make attempts to find answers. And here I want to exercise my fundamental right in that direction, as a scientist. The pope or his silly representatives, one who may argue about questioning the pope, have a right not to answer, but they lose their right to preach God or absolutely pretty much anything.

Now that I proved I am vocal in my attitude to question anything, I am just reflecting the fact that I am a vocal and visual scientist and a little here and a little there I resemble the other scientists in how we think, but the outlets might take a very vocal form, and so fast that they may not be comprehended. To avoid such a scenario I am learning to just sit and write and I often think before I write. All I do in writing is I submit myself to an imaginary situation of writing my mind where others see, as I go on writing my mind, so there is a basic level of honesty about everything I write.

So I have diverted enough, because we are having a walk through my mind, but I haven’t dropped my premonitions about a scenario where the Universe was created a billion years ago and life was created just now. YES. Even I did not surprise myself until this very moment, that just passed, that life was created just now and as soon as we are created we started yelling at each other “Son of a bitch”. We didn’t learn this phrase last century, we might have invented this pretty early, as early as Alexander the greats, great mayhem.

So when the Universe came up it took about a billion years before we came up and then it took some people no time before they started talking about what they confer as a God, upon us all, the great creator. Others came up with what they confer, upon us all, a theory of evolution and so on.

We have not only been created in a contingency in time. We are also contingent in space. You have certainly come across the arguments that our place in the Universe is not at its center, neither is our place in our galaxy milky way at its center. We are located on one of the arm of our spiral galaxy. We are located randomly in the Universe.

We are contingent in the way we have been created. Our life forms have a variety which is purely accidental. Trees have barks and human beings and animals have skin. Skin of one species is arbitrarily different from another’s. Why? They are not “chosen” or selected by an intelligent design, they are statistically chosen. God did not throw his dice to select all this, because he wouldn’t understand the implications of statistics which we intelligent human beings do.

I have put God into so much vilification, but there is not much to worry here. The average person I have seen, across the world, believes very innocently that God exists. My job is to see they tone down their beliefs to God may exist. This will happen through a great deal of understanding of our Universe, how it came to being, why life only exists as a contingent being which is a question towards the sacred-ability of God. And once such understanding is achievable by a person it will be easier to accept for him to see the infallibility so ascribed to religions and accorded to the God talkers.

The points of a religion or God talkers are so vague and incoherent that they despise every other religion except theirs. This is not because they are on the voyage for a theory of everything in religion or a standard model of everything in religion. This is because God in different places of our world has been conceptualized differently.

When each of them were conceptualized there were no checks and reviews to enforce a singular thought on all religious thinkers at least on as grand as a scale as is needed in this century. Now that we are so advanced in our technology and communication and we live in a time where we have made great strides in our power to explore truth, discuss philosophy, debate religion and appreciate science and we  are constantly discovering great minds that build up their intellectual progress on the shoulder of the giant but are no less the creative geniuses themselves to find entirely new and powerful gamut of ideas, we have come into  contact to the debates of scientific and religious minds.

By the way I can not resist from telling you that the religious minds are hardly minds of any less integrity except how shamelessly they propound their religious agenda. Although they have a feeling that they should march on such a path of religious shamelessness and discover further fruits of religious jingoism, it just perpetuates like the folk music any much more, than the the evolution of human community’s intellectual and existential progress.

The debates between the scientific and religious minds, therefore, of present times have led one to see with more clarity, the untruths of the kind that the religious zealots wish were true and these are the same kind that support their God beliefs to eternity. A belief in God is based in an ineffective insight that I wish go off from the educated persons mind as soon as its basis is found to be untrue. But I am not sure where I stand. Probably I need to write an article about the types of people I find whose belief in God is intact even when the falsity of such is pretty much known to them.

Now in this essay I have given a few serendipitous arguments of why our life, our Universe, our evolution, they all are governed by principles and much like pretty much all we know about nature they are all contingent, not only upon us but also we are a grand design with a very simple principle of contingency rather than a zealots simple manipulation of this contingency to the grand master plan of an intelligent God who plays his wish on us like He wishes and we must succumb and subscribe to the same because that is His wish.

Now here is an imaginary conversation between the famed scientist who wrote  The  Grand Design and the famed God who created the Universe.

God to S. Hawking. Thanks Stephen, for telling the world I am actually not responsible for creating the mess in the Universe.

Stephen to God. I also told them that you did not create the Universe in the first place. Is that fine though?

God to Hawking. Hawking sometimes, I wonder why, you talk a bit more than necessary. You could have just said I am uncertain about God.

Hawking to God. Ok I will suck up to it in my next book, I will say; God is a infinite dimensional string, a singularity we will never solve.

God to Hawking. Hawking, that will be like awesome. Can you also add like God loves to hang around The Hooter.