The Origin of the Universe

I have a number of thoughts about the origin of the universe. I'm not sure which one is right.

First, if you look at the world from a causal perspective, then you get the common "first cause" theory; that something comes from something else and so on and so forth. However, at some point you get to the end of the line. For a lot of people, this is where God comes in. He is the unmoved mover. A lot of people just assume that anything that caused all existence must be God. It must be something spectacular. Maybe. Maybe not.

The problem with this is you can then ask the question, "what caused God?" And then you fall into a series of unending questions..."what caused what caused God? What caused what caused what caused God?" and so on ad infinitum. So, instead of admitting God's infinite power and suggesting that he has just "always existed," that he is the "unmoved mover," I ask why can't the universe have the same spectacular property of just simply existing? If there is something that can simply exist without a cause, why can't it be the universe? Why do we insist on attributing it to a fabulous God who we, as human beings, have dramaticized, romanticized, and used as our justification for war. It just seems a lot easier to me.

It might be difficult to admit that something as simple as matter just existed before all other thigns, so I wish to suggest something else.

See, one of the most fundamental laws of nature is Newton's law, Force=mass(acceleration). Another way to look at this is to say that if there is no acceleration, there is no force. Furthermore, if there is an acceleration, then there must be a force, something that caused the acceleration. When we look at the universe we see a lot of accelerations, hence there are a lot of forces that have occured over time. So where did the first forces come from? This is essentially the same question as above..."what caused the first force? And what caused what caused the first force?" However, in this case, we actually have an answer: gravity. Gravity is responsible for just about everything. It is the reason we orbit the sun, and the moon us. It is the reason scientists believe in the Big Bang Theory. It is the reason that asteroids crash into our planet in an unusually rhythmic pattern. It's also the reason that physicists say that our universe is expanding. And yes, it's always been there.

So why do we attribute infinite existence to something like a God when we can just attribute it to gravity? Yeah, I don't know either.

0 comments: