The Echoes of Existence
Confronting our place in a universe we do not understand
“All my life I wanted to be nearer to God. But the only nearness… silence.”
-Joel Theriot, True Detective
It is difficult to remain unimpressed when one considers the depths of knowledge we have gained, in only the past century of our species: knowledge about the scale and movement of the cosmos, the dynamics of the quantum realm, the history of genus homo and the other creatures of the biosphere, stretching back 4 billion years.
It is difficult, until one realizes that what we know encompasses almost nothing. Our species and every other living thing on Earth and Earth itself could be annihilated in an instant by a pedestrian cosmic event and it would be no loss to the greater whole… which appears to be infinite.
We know from the cosmic background radiation that our universe is about 13.8 billion years old. We also know that it is about 93 billion light years in diameter. However, there is a confusing feature of cosmology which took a great deal of personal research for me to personally reconcile. Science uses ‘universe’ to describe two very different concepts: the first ‘universe’ (what I will call UNIVERSE #1, which is the more common meaning) is the observable universe, or the distance from any point to the edge. Think of this finite but inconceivably voluminous area as a vast inflating bubble (whose inflation is now accelerating). Unlike a regular 3d bubble, though, every point is a center and has an equal radius to the edge (a result of uniform expansion of space itself). That radius is 46 billion light years. UNIVERSE #1 began as a very small unit of space. How small? We believe it that the whole of what we now call ‘the universe’ existed within a speck of empty space with the diameter of the Planck length (although I’m not sure there is 3d space on that scale). This seems the smallest that things can be in our universe and it is one hundred thousand billion billion times smaller than an atom. Little did Zeno know that his arrow paradox was more than a mathematical curiosity. The ‘Big Bang’ is a mostly a term for popular consumption, it seems. That is, it seems to be mostly translational between the scientific community and the public. A ‘singularity’ is considered to be the center of a black hole, to use another example (the term ‘black hole’ itself is yet another science magazine phrase) but it’s really a kind of mathematical artifact expressing a place or value that breaks or transcends normal calculations. Every corner of every cube is also a singularity. The Big Bang wasn’t an explosion and it wasn’t a specific event, or if it was we can’t determine when or of what nature it was. We certainly don’t know what caused it and considering that question takes us suddenly into the realm of pure infinity, which is a disorienting place, as we shall see. In a sense the Big Bang is still happening.
The James Webb Space telescope has enhanced our ability to observe and measure the far expanses of space. This is a digitally rendered simulation of the cosmic web, or the structure of galaxies and planets and stars and black holes and voids throughout the known universe. OUR universe (#1) seems to be structurally homogenous but only on the scale of a billion lightyears or so. Every pixel of that image would contain millions of galaxies, which would all contain millions of stars and more millions of planets… and the image is a single drop of water in a never-ending ocean of spacetime and energy and creation.
At some point 13.77 billion years ago an infinitesimally small unit of space experienced a fluctuation of vacuum energy such that expansion was required to bring it to a lower and more stable energy state. Honestly I’m not completely certain what that sentence means and I can only form it now from dozens of repetitions of lectures on quantum mechanics and theoretical physics and cosmology. We know that empty space actually has an enormous amount of energy within it (how much isn’t certain). We know that empty space is not empty and is a writhing mass of ‘quantum foam’ with particles popping into and out of existence constantly. Quantum mechanics is probabilistic and even low probability events are guaranteed. It’s also a theory of linked variables: spin and charge for particles, energy and spacetime for the fabric of our universe. Even counterintuitive and illogical possibilities like the appearance of new objects in a vacuum are pedestrian, although most of them flash of existence with impossible speed. The idea of particles appearing from nowhere seems impossible but if the time scales are short enough even nearly impossible events can happen. Just as Plank lengths are the shortest possible units of space, Planck times are the briefest possible units of time: 10^-43 seconds. We don’t believe that time and space are ‘smooth’ around these scales. Interestingly, one of the features of a simulated universe would probably be some kind of pixelated reality, with discrete units for algorithms and representation, and these Planck units are precisely that. To return to the Big Bang: a very small region of space experienced a quantum fluctuation or some mysterious change which caused it to express a truly unimaginable amount of energy. A theoretical particle called an inflaton drove the expansion of space and energy. In the briefest moment UNIVERSE #1 grew from a Plank length to an area 10^78 times (that is 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times) larger. The inflation began to slow and the slowing accelerated… until some period a few billion years ago when it began to speed up again. Why? No one has any idea and the force driving the expansion is dark energy, but dark energy just means ‘the theoretical factor driving the recent acceleration of universal expansion’. We know absolutely nothing about it.
Here’s the crazy part: our universe (UNIVERSE #1) is not the whole universe. The universe is actually infinite. Our inconceivably vast observable universe (which is 46 billion light years across after 13.8 billion years of expansion, the difference being accounted for by accelerations in expansion) is a growing bubble in a field of space which is also nearly all empty and which probably contains infinite bubble universes like ours: an endless multitude of tiny volumes expanding for hundreds of billions of years until their expansion has driven all energy to be spread out over such vast regions that there is no longer any energy interactions and no matter… and, with no energy or movement or change, no time. This is the condition of heat death and (according to science) our universe will become this insanely larger and perfectly cold void… which has an immense amount of potential vacuum energy and hence the possibility (the certainty, extrapolated over enough space and time) of new fluctuations, new Big Bangs, new universes.
Did you know that on a planet with earth’s exact atmosphere in the center of our galaxy the night sky would be hundreds of times brighter, due to the concentration of stars nearby? Did you know that there’s a cluster of hundreds of thousands of black holes which have slowly sunk into the middle of our galaxy over the eons? Did you know that our galaxy has a black hole that is estimated to be 4,000,000,000 times more massive than our sun (and this black hole is so big that it has the density of water… unlike in films supermassive black holes are not particularly dangerous) and that every galaxy seems to have a supermassive black hole (or multiple), the causes and effects of which are still not understood?
We think we know all of this but as I survey what ‘this’ is it becomes clear that we exist in a place that is so bizarre and complex and vast that knowledge seems a pretention. Werner Heisenberg said “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
The God of Abraham began his consolidation of control over the hearts and minds of humanity (which is still not complete-and never will be-but soon encompassed the descendants of the Indo-Europeans, and then the recent arrivals to the New World, and now much of Africa as well, all in addition to his chosen Semitic tribes) with his command and his promise to a middling herdsman somewhere in the outlands of modern Iraq. During this time and for most of the interim our species could only perceive the terrestrial, and the merest hint of the astronomical. Abraham’s descendants ended up being a prickly and unfortunate people who were not especially competent in the realms of astronomy or mathematics, although they were and are excellent historians (and, more recently, outstanding soldiers). Humanity’s understanding of the universe was effectively zero but they could look around and see that they were located in a place and time with prolificity and diversity and boundless mystery and so they naturally attributed the creator God (who described himself not with a name but with a title and a koan: “I will be what I will be”) with awesome power and limitless knowledge.
I suspect that the rupture of science from religion (which makes perfect sense methodologically and epistemologically) loses little for science (other than some context or a set of guiding values, perhaps) but loses a great deal for religion. Our conception of God doesn’t seem to have changed in concert with the growth of our knowledge of the universe. If-as all evidence indicates-the universe is as I described shouldn’t we attribute a literally infinite amount of power and mystery to God? A being who creates and suffuses the infinite reality of our plane of being simply cannot have emotions or motivations or ideas or goals as we do. Possibly he is loving, possibly he is indifferent… but I have to believe that if he relates to the universe that we inhabit in the way that the faithful proclaim that he is neither. He is something else, in every aspect and to an extent that transcends our understanding by a googolplex. That is not to say that he has not communicated with us or not made us in his image or deceived us (although I am perfectly willing to believe that any of these are true). Yet his communications would be toward ends and for reasons (if concepts like goals or motivations could even apply) that we could never comprehend. “In his image” would have to relate to some aspect of our self-awareness, perhaps, or in our potentiality as creators (perhaps creators of the AI singularity?) or in our rudimentary use of abstraction. If there is a God, after all, he must be before all else the author of abstraction, who breathed reality into being with thought and language (the embodiments of abstract systems and symbols to the bronze age pastoralists who first began to describe their idea of him thousands of years ago). Has he deceived us? Perhaps. I have to believe that his morality and character would have to be as ineffable and alien as his thought or his aims. Paradoxically I also must believe that the values and ethics we have developed relate to something greater than ourselves, if there is such a thing. If there is a God I believe that suffering was some objectively negative value, in other words, even if it’s very slight. More likely words like character and morality are as meaningless when applied to God as ‘color’ would be to describe the intensity of nuclear fusion processes within stars. These lenses and constructs are not made for the task at hand. We are only saved from nihilism by the realization that he did create all of this.
I write these things because I rarely encounter this kind of speculation and part of me finds that a bit strange. The religious think that they have at least the barest grasp of reality in their texts and prayers and the researchers imagine that they are moving toward a fuller understanding of material reality but upon apprehending the scale of reality and the boundaries of our knowledge in space and time I imagine that our certainties must prove to be illusory. Information cannot propagate faster than light and so we have no way of ever gaining data from outside of UNIVERSE #1, the observable universe. Similarly we cannot moved beyond a point a few milliseconds after the begin of inflation. These limits seem vast but even if we were Laplace’s demon and we understood the movement of every atom at every second in every corner of this universe stretching back 13.8 billion years that knowledge would be as nothing compared to the immensity beyond. Many (most?) cosmologists believe that every universe has its own constants and force values and so the greater universe-UNIVERSE #2-isn’t a repeating infinity of universes like ours but is instead an infinite array of infinite creative possibilities.
We know two things:
(1) We know almost nothing and even a galactic reign of a billion years would not change that. Nothing ever would or could.
(2) We exist. As Descartes said “I think, therefore I am” we each know that we exist in some sense, even if it’s just disembodied consciousness. We know that the consciousness has limits of awareness, and had a beginning, and changes over time. I used science to explore and possibly expand the idea of God. Now I will use logic and experience to throw down the ideas of heaven and hell.
Our consciousness changes. It processes, it understands (the accuracy or use of this understanding is irrelevant here… some formation of idea or sensation is happening), it perceives time. I’ve written elsewhere about the folly of the idea of our “soul” (unlike an abstract conception of God, which I can incorporate into visions of reality I cannot grasp what the word “soul” means and I suspect it means nothing) existing in a place after death with thoughts and feelings and emotions and vision as we have those things now. Those are all functional epiphenomena from the processes of our bodies. There’s no reason to bind a soul with their particularities and constraints. If we have souls then their experience in the afterlife would have to be unimaginable to us and so I doubt that they could really relate to our earthly identities.
More tenuous than that though, are the ideas of infinite punishment and infinite reward. The more I consider Hell the more certain I become that it is a human fiction. Leaving aside the justice of infinite punishment for acts and thoughts committed in the painful and uncertain plane we now inhabit (which none of us chose to enter) there is the issue of change. A consciousness trapped in Hell for all eternity must learn and grow and adapt for those are parts of the nature of experience and time. What is time as we perceive is other than a flow of sequential information interacting with our consciousness? Every moment teaches us something and we cannot be completely static. I suspect that complete stasis belongs to God and God alone.
How then could a consciousness endure an eternity of suffering (while keeping an identity, some narrative memory, and sense of self) without adapting or learning or becoming inured, becoming wise? Might it not be that after a billion years of Hell the damned souls would be the most righteous? Might it not be that after a billion years of the placid bliss of Heaven the elect might be the most ignorant, and the most sensitive?
I realize that I’m using human concepts of growth and adaptation to describe the eternal but either there is some way to discuss what that realm may be like or there’s no way and it is too far outside of our frame of reference to say anything meaningful about it. The likelihood of the latter doesn’t preclude conjecture. Either our morality and our ideas and values have some reference to something outside of our selves or they do not and the universe is purely amoral. Either our lives have meaning or they have none. I believe that we must live as if we have some tiny possibility of understanding our existence, minuscule as it may be, and we must live as if our lives have meaning.
How should we think about the concept of God? I believe that as our understanding of the universe has changed and grown our understanding of what God may be and what he must be should change commensurately. We cannot understand such a being and any pretension to the contrary should be questioned. First, we must feel a maximum level of awe. The biblical patriachs certainly stood in awe of God and they knew nothing of what we know. An attitude of awe must attend the thought of God. In that awe we should feel fear as well, for such power warrants boundless chaotic incomprehension and cannot help but overwhelm our sense of the safe and the familiar.
13 But He is unchangeable, and who can oppose Him? He does what He desires. 14 For He carries out His decree against me, and He has many such plans. 15 Therefore I am terrified in His presence; when I consider this, I fear Him. 16 God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me. 17 Yet I am not silenced by the darkness, by the thick darkness that covers my face.
-The Holy Bible (BSB) Job 23:13-17
Lastly, we should feel gratitude. Who knows how and why all of this is here or whether such a question even has meaning but we know that we are here and that we have the capacity for hope and courage. Hope in the face of despair and courage in the face of risk redeem themselves. Even in a universe without value they create value. Even if our lives are meaningless the capacity for courage gives them meaning. We will never know the scope or narrative of creation and we will never know the mind of God but we know that, despite the silent expanse of his apparent power and the boundless possibilities, we are here, now. If our lives are to have meaning that meaning must attend that unlikely and wondrous fact: we exist.
“I have only one friend, and that is echo. Why is it my friend? Because I love my sorrow, and echo does not take it away from me. I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night. Why is it my confidant? Because it remains silent.”
-Soren Kierkegaard