From Amoeba to Moral beings:
The Evolutionary Emergence of
Life, and of Free-Willed-beings created in the Image of God.
The First Moral Beings on Earth
According to the theory of evolution, the emergence of Man is
approximately described by the following dates [ Y.A. denotes "years ago"][1]:
Early Hominid
YA = years ago 3,000,000 YA = Australopithecus
Homo Erectus
700,000 YA = Java Man
500,000 YA = Peking Man
Homo Sapiens
120,000 YA = Neanderthal
Man
Homo Sapiens Sapiens
100,000 YA = Modern Man
[Between 200,000 and 40,000 YA]
The
Evolution of Morality
According to the scientific origin theory, we have been billions of
years in developing: from big bang to
home planet, from inorganic matter to life, from simple life to ape, and
millions of years more from ape to man.
However, it was only approximately 100,000 years ago that there appeared
an ancestor we could identify as a member of our species: a truly sapient
[thinking] creature, the first of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Clearly, then, even if the universe is 15 billion
years old, morality could only have emerged in the last 100,000 years[2].
The essential human
qualities we associate with a human, as opposed to an animal or a computer, are
those of moral behaviour and the idea of moral accountability. These qualities,
when they first arose among Homo Sapiens Sapiens would almost certainly result
in the formulation of religion. Thus, the earliest religions would follow not
too long after the first stirrings of moral consciousness. When one actually
reviews the cultural history of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, one makes an interesting
discovery - it becomes clear that religion as we know it developed only in the last 5,500 years.
A Short
History of Major Cultural Developments[3]
10,000 YA Painting[4], burials
BCE
5000 YA 3000 Writing, farming
4000 YA 2000 Abraham: Monotheism formulated[5]
3500 YA 1500 Moses .
Hinduism formulated
3000 YA 1000 King Solomon: philosophy, ethicalwriting,
poetry
2600 YA 600
Isaiah (Yeshayahu)
2500 YA 500
Ezekiel(Yeheskel),Buddha,Confucius,Lao-Tze
2400 YA 400
Greek Science/Culture/Philosophy:
Socrates,
Plato, Aristotle Etc.)
1900 YA = CE
100 R. Akiva; Christianity
(spread of);
1400 YA 600 Islam
300 YA 1700
140 YA 1850
80 YA 1900 Einstein
Thus, Man's brain had developed about 100,000 years ago. His cultural
abilities - painting, pottery and so on - developed perhaps 15,000 years ago.
The first glimmerings of thought about death and life - the first burials -
took place about 10,000 years ago, and the first religions were developed about
4,000 years ago.
The emergence of the first true moral being, with sufficient
intelligence and understanding to make a free choice would presumably occur somewhere between the time that man
began to think of death and a possible afterlife, and the time that religious
thought and attitudes were first developed .
According to the chronology
of the Biblical geneologies, this occured roughly 6,000 years ago - 2,000 years
before the first religion developed, and about 4,000 years after the Cro-Magnon
culture's cave-wall paintings.
We would then add one stage onto the chain of human development
Early
Hominid 3,000,000 YA = Australopithecus
Homo
Erectus 700,000 YA = Java Man, 500,000 YA
= Peking Man
Homo
Sapiens 120,000 YA =
Neanderthal Man
Homo
Sapiens Sapiens 100,000 YA =
Modern Man [ 200,000 -60,000 YA]
*** Homo Sapiens Voluntas 6,000 YA
= Moral Man [6] [7]
We can see that:
1. Man as a race
achieved his modern type of intellectual capacity only 100,000 years ago, and
prior to that many modern concepts - such as "morality" - were likely
beyond the conceptual ability of man' evolutionary ancestors.
2. All the world's
religions were founded in the last 4,000 years, so that 4,500 years ago there
was no real conception of a Gd, of moral responsibility, of purpose to a human
life, and so on [8] .
3. The vast majority of our scientific
knowledge was unknown only 500 years ago, and science had its rudimentary
beginnings only 2,500 years ago. The
great ideas which are the foundations of our society - ideas of religion,
philosophy, culture and science - are relatively recent innovations[9].
The Creation Account and Subsequent
Chronologies
After
the
However, of course the Adam of the
chronology may not be the same Adam as the creation account, just as the
creation and Eden account seem to speak of two separate Adams, "adam"
being simply a generic term for "a man". Also, the chronologies speak
of lifespans of many hundreds of years, and may well be allegorical, not
historical. However, those who assumed that the creation account is a literal
account of the actual creation of the physical universe and that the
chronologies atre meant literally, concluded after adding up all the figures
given in the various chronologies that Adam must have lived about 6,000 years
ago.
Adam and the Emergence of Moral
Beings on Earth
As indicated above, the first
moral beings on Earth may well have emerged approximately 5,000 to 10,000 years
ago, and the chronologies of Genesis place "Adam" as having lived
about 6,000 years ago. Therefore,
whether one interprets the "Adam" of Genesis as an individual named
'Man', or as the race 'Man', one can identify this "Adam" with the
first moral beings who emerged on Earth - either the first such individual, or
the race of moral man as a whole.
The Creation and
In the Biblical perspective which sees the
purpose of the existence of the universe as tied up with the emergence of moral
beings within it, it is appropriate that humanity should be considered as
having begun with the emergence of the first moral being, and that the universe
itself should be considered as having begun its relevant existence only with
the emergence within it of moral beings, in Genesis symbolized by the enigmatic
and ambiguous "Adam". Thus the creation account, reflecting this
perspective, collapses into a very brief discussion the creation of the
universe and its subsequent development until the emergence of Adam, and
commences its recital of history with the emergence of the first moral being -
symbolized by Adam - rather than with the big bang, or with the dinosaurs, or
even with the pre-moral Homo Sapiens.
The Evolution of Adam
"Thus
from the war of Nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we
are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals,
directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or one;
and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of
gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and wonderful
have been, and are being evolved."
The closing paragraph of
Charles Darwin's "Origin of the Species".
Part I:
Scientific
Monogenesis[10]
It has long
been recognized by many evolutionary biologists that all life emanates from a
common source. The famous mathematical-physicist Hermann Weyl writes as follows[11]:
"Considerations of evolution in the large
will of necessity lead to the question of the origin of life. The evidence of
genetics makes one incline to see in life the chance success of a play of
creative accidents. Not some predictable macrophysical or macrochemical
process, that with a certain natural necessity came to pass at a certain stage
of evolution - and would repeat itself
wherever the appropriate conditions prevailed - seems responsible for the
historic beginnings of life, but a molecular event of singular character,
occurring once by accident, and then starting an avalanche by autocatalytic
multiplication (P. Jordan).
It is
now becoming evident however, that there is yet more truth to the story of Adam
and Eve: a specific gene has been traced
in the various races of Man which indicates that it derives from a common ancestress who lived about 100,000 years ago.
In this way comparative genetics indicates
that all mankind existing today is descended from one genetic line, which
mutated from the parent line about 100,000
years ago [12]. Thus even according to evolutionary theory, all
humankind is descended from one original progenitor just
as in Genesis. Fittingly, evolutionary geneticists have dubbed her
"Eve" [13].
Genesis and scientific theory are therefore in
agreement that the universe emerged out of nothing, and is not eternal; that
all life is descended from a single original life form; and that all Mankind is
descended from one unique ancestral human being.
The Emergence of Moral Man
Physical science does not
generally recognize free will as a qualitatively unique physical phenomenon, but
rather as a psychological phenomenon, and therefore evolutionary genetics can
consider an intelligent conscious being with free will as genetically identical
to one lacking free will. Therefore fossils and skulls may not be relevant as
indicators of whether or not their owners were free-willed.
It is also not clear if one can
ascribe different types of behaviour to true moral beings and to non-moral
beings who imagine themselves to have free will, and therefore it is not clear
if archaeological evidence can ever be used to distinguish between the remains
of a civilization of moral beings and those of non-free-willed beings.
Therefore although there are various theories and pieces of evidence which help
determine when humans of one type or another emerged, it is not clear when
free-willed moral beings first emerged.
One can suppose however that since
moral beinghood requires intelligence and foresight in addition to free
will, that the emergence of moral beings
was somewhat after the emergence of ordinary Homo Sapiens. Indeed, as we saw in
a previous chapter, it may perhaps have been relatively recently - about ten
thousand years ago.
One could consider Cro-Magnon Man
as the first to have been capable of free will, and perhaps it was a genius
from this stock who first formulated a moral code, and who taught morality to
his contemporary latent moral beings. Alternatively, it may be that an
additional mutation was responsible for the aquisition of free will, and the
first such mutant descendant of Cro-Magnon Man was the first moral being and
the father of a new race of moral beings.
The
emergence of the first moral being or society may be the event which is
referred to in Genesis, in the allegory of the eating of the Tree of Knowledge
and the consequent understanding of the concepts of good and evil.
Adam's Birthdate
The
date of the creation and of the emergence of Adam - the first moral being - is
not given explicitly in the Bible and is not referred to anywhere else in the
Bible. A putative date can be computed via the geneology given after the
creation account, however in it we are told of life-spans of almost a thousand
years, so that the geneology is apparently not refering to ordinary physical
ages and dates, leaving the date of the emergence of Adam unspecified.
Genetics does not deal in
categories of purpose, and therefore the ability to exercize free will and
become a moral being is not considered genetically significant. Genetically
speaking, the first human may have lived long ago, however with respect to the
category of purpose relevant in the Bible, the first true human was the first
moral being, and we - who are moral beings - are its children.
In the terms of reference of the
purpose of the human race in the
Biblical context, it was the emergence of Moral Man which allowed the onset of
purpose.
Biblical perspective classifies
beings according to categories relating to purpose rather than to
evolutionary-genetic development. From this perspective, the predecessors of
the first moral man are classified with
the animals since they lacked intelligent free willed consciousness. Only the
moral being is a 'human' being, and can be classified as being 'in the image of
Gd', so that the title of ëfirst human beingí is bestowed on the first of ëMoral
Maní. The Bible essentially begins with the emergence and moral development of
the first such beings since their prior evolutionary development is not of
direct relevance from the perspective of the category of purpose.
Genesis and the origin theories
agree that the race of modern man 'began' at some point, that there was a
'first man'. However from the categories of science and of religion 'human' is
defined differently, and therefore the date of emergence of the 'first human'
is different. Although Cro-Magnon Man may have existed for about 90,000 years
before Adam, we are told that it was Adam who was the first human, and the only
human of his time, since he was the first Moral man, and for a while, the only
one.
Part II: Adamís Predecessors as Inhabitants of the ëPrior
Worldsí
There
are statements in the Talmud and Midrash to the effect that "Gd created
and destroyed worlds" prior to the creation detailed in Genesis[14]. It is not clear however whether this implies the
creation of worlds prior to the very
creation of heaven and earth -
that is, the creation of prior universes - or if it is referring to the
creation of planets within the universe whose creation is described in Genesis.
And, if it refers to the creation of planets within the universe of Genesis, it
is not clear whether the reference is to planets other than earth, or to the
planet earth prior to the creation of Adam.
Indeed,
another Talmudic statement declares that the destruction of an individual is
considered as the destruction of a world. Thus, if God ëcreated and destroyed
worldsí on planet earth prior to the emergence of Adam, this would mean that
Adam was not necessarily the first human on our planet. Indeed, the Tifferet
Yisrael[15] stated that
fossil remains may bear witness to such pre-Adamic man. Similarly, according to
R. Shimon Schwab, Adam was not necessarily the first human-like being[16] - there may
have existed beings without free will, beings not created ëin the image of
Godí.
We can
perhaps interpret the "creation of worlds" as taking place via a
divinely instituted natural law - via an evolutionary process. One could then
say that life - and man - originally arose on Earth via evolution. Then at some
stage Gd "destroyed the world" which arose this way - that is, caused
an evolutionary or climactic change such as for example caused the
disappearance of the dinosaurs and later of Neanderthal Man, the ice ages and
so on - and created Adam as described in Genesis - that is, caused the
emergence of the first moral being.
Part III: The
origin of the soul, and its transmission
According to religious philosophy, Man is connected to the spiritual
realm and posseses a non-physical aspect - a 'soul'- as distinguished from the animals. Since the
soul is by definition a spiritual entity, not a physical one, we
encounter the age-old philosophical problems relating to the difficulty of a
purely spiritual entity interacting with a purely physical entity - a form of
the mind-body problem.
In
Genesis, the soul-body issue is referred to in the phrase “and the spirit of
God hovered above the waters”, where it was from the waters that life emerged,
and especially in the almost shocking statement that after causing man to
emerge from the physical elements at hand, “God breathed into him the living
spirit.... creating him in the image of God”.
The genetics of soul
In order to listen to the radio,
one must have, as a necessary condition,
a functioning, powered radio. However,
this is not a sufficient condition.
There must also be a transmitter which is broadcasting, and among other things,
the radio must be tuned to the same frequency as the transmitter. Similarly, one can distinguish between the
necessary and sufficient conditions to be fulfilled in order for a being to
possess a soul.
In order for the spiritual realm
to interact with a physical being as a soul does, it is necessary that the
being be of a highly developed type with a certain genetic structure. This however is not a sufficient condition, as it
is also necessary that there be the transmitter, in this case the spiritual
realm reaching out to the physical being.
In addition, the being must 'tune' its consciousness to the proper
channel.
This genetic potential to tune in to the
spiritual can be inherited genetically.
The spiritual realm is constantly reaching out to man, and anyone with
the potential[17] can tune in
if they choose to do so. Thus, a 'soul'
is more of an interaction, a reception, than an entity by itself. It is not a 'thing' that can be inherited or
given. Rather, it is 'a phenomenon'
available to all beings with the requisite genetic structure.
Thus physical birth can allow
transmission of a transcendant 'soul' from a mother, and the origin of a
transcendant soul can coincide with a particular physical genetic development,
so that the first being to evolve with sufficiently 'advanced' genes would possess a soul , and pass it on genetically
to its progeny.
Summary
Genesis
relates those points most relevant to the category of purpose: the universe is
a purposive creation; God is involved in the universe, intervening in affairs
in order to further a divine plan, including the evolution of moral man;
humanity is imbued with a spiritual nature in addition to its physical,
evolved, animal nature; and mankind possesses the ability to distinguish good
from evil, and the moral responsibility to choose the good.
After
presenting these ideas in the metaphorical language of the creation and Garden
of Eden accounts, the Bible goes on to relate the history of the first individuals
to encounter the divine, and continues with the revelation achieved by their
descendants, and the commandments to all humanity - all within the context
provided by Genesis of a purposive
universe directed towards moral activity.
Ch 28: The Age
of the Universe
Introduction
The determination of the age of
the universe is in some sense straightforward in modern cosmology, with an
answer somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 billion years. Yet, as we shall see
below, in other more subtle senses it is perhaps impossible to actually
determine the age of the universe,.
The weight of scientific evidence
points to the origin of the universe in a big bang billions of years ago.
Nevertheless, as we have seen quantum metaphysics points to the possibility
that the big bang and subsequent events occurred in a 'superposition of
states', with the universe beginning its true physical existence only when
there emerged within it the first free-willed consciousness, and so the
emergence of the universe and the emergence of a moral being are juxtaposed.
This result of quantum metaphysics
also implies that the universe is essentially only as old as the first moral
being, and since the earliest moral being we know of would be some version of
modern humans, the age of the universe would be computed in the thousands of
years (probably between five thousand and a hundred thousand years) rather than
in billions of years[18].
From the viewpoint of Genesis and
of standard cosmology - and as opposed to the view of Aristotle and Spinoza -
the universe began some finite time ago, rather than being eternal. How long
ago? The answer depends on the perspective: if of standard cosmology then the
universe began in a big bang fifteen or so billion years ago; if of quantum
metaphysics combined with Genesis, it began with the emergence of moral man
some thousands of years ago.
Alternative Definitions of Time passage
Even from the standpoint of
standard cosmology, the question of the age of the universe is a difficult one
for various subtle reasons.
One such reason has to do with the
idea of a clock. There can be only one universe, since by definition of the
word universe we mean 'everything that exists'. But if there is nothing other
than the universe, then the clock which tells us how old the universe is must
be part of the universe itself.
A clock can keep time, and we can
use it to measure the amount of elapsed time since it was first put into
operation - but we would need a second clock to determine how much time had
elapsed from the time of the creation of the first clock until its initial
operation, and so on and on...... Furthermore, no actual clock could have
existed in the conditions obtaining in the early universe (extreme high
temperatures etc.) and progressively more sophisticated clocks would be
required the closer to the origin that one wished to probe. In any case, at the
earliest time, when all was chaotic energy, matter as we know it did not exist,
and certainly no known type of clock existed.
In addition, since no clock can
exist independent of the universe, then whichever type of 'clock' will be used
to tell the age of the universe, it must necessarily be part of the universe
itself. There is therefore a problem in defining the age of the universe[19]. Scientific estimates place it at about fifteen
billion years, but the closer one gets to the origin of the universe, about
fifteen billion years ago, the fuzzier the definition of the elapsed time[20].
Time, Consciousness, and Creation
Even the definition of the elapsed time since the big bang is not
necessarily an objective one. Color is a mental sensation, subjective, and
would not exist in a universe without mind. So too the very idea of a flow of
time may be subjective, a property of consciousness rather than of the universe
in of itself.
Take a film-movie of the universe
from big bang to the end and then lay it out on a surface and view all the
frames simultaneously. There is no time, all is simultaneous. Cut the film into
separate frames and then shuffle them and number them in the new order, and
then show the movie. Nothing in the history of the universe has changed, only
the order in which the events are viewed by the viewer. The change is in the
consciousness of the viewer not in the universe.
The equations of physics are
symmetric with respect to time reversal - they are the same whether we suppose
time flows forwards or backwards. In fact, from the laws of nature themselves
there is no reason to suppose that there is a flow of time at all - no past
present and future - but rather all of space-time exists as a whole.
Time is not a true parameter in
physics - it is inserted by consciousness, which perceives the universe within
the conceptual framework of time. As a result, in a real sense it can be said
that when consciousness did not exist, time did not exist, so that the
universe-clock can be said to have begun ticking only when consciousness arose
within it.
There was in this sense no time before there
was conscious life in the universe, so that the the universe can be said to
have 'begun' when it was first perceived by a conscious being.
How
old were you when you were born?
If the universe indeed emerged
into existence as postulated by Wheeler, how old is it? How old was it when it
was born? One second after the initial
observation of the moral being was it one second old or was it fifteen billion
years old?
If the universe emerged into existence with the
first observation of the first moral being, does the ëtimeí that ëpassedí in
the non-full-reality of the quantum superposed states count as real time? Do we
count the age of the universe from the emergence of the moral being or do we
add 15 billion years to this?
If the flow of time, the division
into past present and future, is a mode of perception of consciousness rather
than an objective feature of the universe, then is there any meaning to
assigning a flow of time prior to the emergence of consciousness?
Metaphysical
Definitions of "The Age of the Universe"
From the
perspective of scientific cause and effect and step by step development - the
standard origin theory - the universe begins with the big bang even if this big
bang can emerge into existence only with the emergence of moral man, especially
as from this perspective moral man is an incidental development, not designed,
and the universe is therefore 15 billion years old. However, from the
perspective of the Bible, since the universe was created as a purposive one,
and begins to have purpose and meaning with the emergence of the first moral
being, the universe can be said to be only as old as moral man, as in Genesis -
especially as moral man served as the template for the blueprint of the
universe and the big bang.
From the metaphysical
perspective, the universe begins when non-simulatatable, non-extrapolatable
history begins and so it is only as old
as the amount of time elapsed since this primary stage. To determine the age of
the universe from this metaphysical perspective, we must therefore determine at
what point the universe began its real - non-extrapolatable - existence, and isolate the true primary stage of the
universe.
The Onset
of Non-Extrapolatable Existence
In a universe
without free will, in theory the big bang can be extrapolated using the laws of
nature to compute the paths of possible histories up to the end of the
universe. However, in a universe in which free will emerges, the extrapolation
can continue only up to the point of emergence of free will. Beyond that point,
it is impossible to predict what paths the universe can take, or what
probabilities to assign to these paths[21].
A universe which is extrapolated past this point contains a history
of events which may seem to have been free willed, and for which Man was
morally responsible, but were actually neither real nor free.
Thus the latest point at which an extrapolated universe would
optimally begin to unfold in reality -
rather than as an extrapolation - is that at which free will emerges, or when
the first free-willed choice is executed.
Furthermore, as we have seen, since purposive meaningful activity
begins only with the emergence of a moral being, prior existence of the
universe would be meaningless from the perspective of the creator, and
therefore the point at which a moral being emerges is also the earliest point
for a purposive extrapolated universe to begin its existence.
From this perspective, the universe is only as old as the time
elapsed since the emergence of moral beings within it, that is, thousands of
years rather than billions.
The Initial Stage of Existence: Four Perspectives
·
There
is no objective meaning or purpose to existence other than that which life
creates for itself, free-willed consciousness is a side effect of the development
of the universe, and the universe begins
with a random big bang fifteen billion years ago.
·
quantum
metaphysics: the universe begins actual physical existence only upon the
emergence of a moral being; therefore
this emergence is the first stage of the existence of the universe and the
universe is one or several hundred thousand years old.
·
the
strong (religious) anthropic principle: The primary stage in the creation of
the universe is that of the design of the moral being, which then serves as the
template for the design of the universe as a whole; laws of nature, and initial
conditions (big bang). This design did not occur 'in time' but is 'logically
prior' to the creation[22]; no 'date' can be set for it, and the 'age' of
the universe has no quantitative meaning in this sense.
·
Biblical perspective: there is objective
purpose to existence and meaning to life, the big bang was designed to produce
life, to produce moral beings. At the level of ideation, intention, and design,
the moral stage of the universe - symbolized in Genesis by Adam in the Garden
of Eden - precedes the big bang, and serves to specify the design of the big
bang. The true initial stage in the creation of the universe is that of the
design of the moral being, and the creation and
Solipsism of the Moment
We saw that the past exists
only in our memory, and although the universe exists now as you read this it is
possible that it did not exist any time in the past i.e. that the universe was
created just now, or at any point in 'the past'.
Indeed, according to
quantum physics, there is a non-zero probability - non-zero but so close to it
that it is virtually indistinguishable from zero to most intents and purposes -
that a universe such as our own would pop into existence spontaneously without
any prior cause, complete and developped as it is now, with all its artifacts,
fossils, memories and so on, and then cease to exist spontaneously immediately
thereafter. There is no way for us to know that we are not inhabiting such an
ephemeral universe[24].
The age of the universe is then
indrterminate, since it can logically have begun its existence right now or at
any time in the past. From the scientific perspecrive of course there is no
particular eason to suppose that the universe originated other than in the big
bang 15 billion years ago, while from the Biblical perspective it might be
reasonable to suppose that the universe originated at the onset of meaning and
purpose from the perspective of the creator - specifically at the moral stage,
with the onset of free-willed moral choice.
As there is no operational distinction
between the two, there is effectively no conflict betweeen the two
perspectives.
From the scientific perspective it is
irrelevant and scientifically meaningless to ask when the universe 'actually'
began its existence, since all is exactly as though it arose in a big bang15
billion years ago - the universe is
'big-bang-emergent' - so that we must employ the big bang model to learn
scientific facts about the universe.
From
the Biblical perspective on the other hand, the question of whether or not our
universe is big-bang-emergent is not as relevant as the issues of moral choice
and of moral responsibility, which are central to the issue of meaning and
purpose of the existence of the universe - especially so as the big bang itself
which science describes is in this perspective a derivative stage - the
specifications of the big bang are teleoderived from the moral stage.
For all intents and purposes, from the scientific perspactive the universe is 15 billion years old whereas from the Biblical perpspective it is only as old as the existence of free moral choice.
The
Scientific and Biblical Perspective
[Merge this with previous section]
As
we saw in the discussion of solipsism and Occam's razor,[25]the
question of whether other minds exist is unanswerable as there are no
observable consequences of either possibility, and therefore the issue is
irrelevant to science. Similarly, whether or not there exists a creator is
unanswerable as there are no observable consequences of either possibility - the
universe could have been created in any manner at all, and then subsequently
manipulated by a sufficiently advanced being into the universe as it is now,
with this performed in such a manner as to have left no trace of these
manipulations accessible to human scientific investigation.
As a result, the question of when actually the
universe emerged into existence in not truly a scientific question, as it is
clear that the universe could have emerged into existence right now or at any
previous time either spontaneously or via the action of a creator, without our
being able to detect how it emerged or when.
What is
instead of relevance, what is a meaningful question, is what the evidence
available to scientific inquiry implies as to the origin and development of the
universe, and the elapsed time since this origin. Science has found that all
the evidence available to scientific investigation - as opposed to evidence
gained via other possible means such as revelation - reveals that the universe
emerged from a big bang billions of years ago, and has evolved into the
universe as we now know it in the intervening time.
Accounts of the origin and development of the
universe as related from the understandings of other perspectives, relying on
knowledge obtained from other sources than scientific investigation - as for
example is the case with the Biblical creation and Eden accounts - are of no
relevance to science, and neither conflict nor support science, as they relate
to a different realm of discourse.
Summary and Conclusion
The question of the age of the
universe is therefore more one of metaphysics than of physics - indeed, there
is no scientific means of distinguishing between a universe created this very
instant, one which emerged from a big bang fifteen billion years ago, or one
which emerged retroactively upon the observation of a moral being .
From a perspective in which there
is no objective meaning or purpose to existence other than that which life
creates for itself, free-willed consciousness is a side effect of the
development of the universe, and the universe begins with a big bang fifteen
billion years ago[26].
From the perspective of the
anthropic principle, the universe is designed to produce moral beings, and
therefore in a teleological sense the onset of its true existence is at the
emergence of the first moral beings; the universe is said to exist
telologically speaking only since the emergence of the first moral beings
(perhaps a mutant form of Cro Magnon between 100,000 and 5,000 years ago) just
as Genesis implies that the universe is only as old as the first moral beings
to arise in it, Adam and Eve (who are implied to have lived about 6,000 years
ago).
Similarly, from the viewpoint of
quantum metaphysics the universe begins its true physical existence, its actual
history, only with the emergence of the first moral beings, just as Genesis
implies.
Finally, from a perspective such as that of
the Bible in which there is objective purpose to existence and meaning to life
and the universe was designed to produce life, to produce moral beings, the
true history of the universe begins - as in Genesis - with the onset of moral
history, with the emergence of the first moral beings.
God as Quantum Observer
Introduction
Our exploration of quantum
metaphysics familiarized us with the idea that it is conscious observation
which brings into true physical reality that which was previously only existent
as a quantum probability wave, and that in the cosmological context the
universe can be said to have begun its true physical existence only upon the
emergence within it of a conscious observer.
This idea has other cosmological
implications as well: since no human consciousness can observe the entire
universe, the reality status of the large part of the universe not being
humanly observed is cast into doubt. Inevitably, large parts of the universe
will be left 'unrealized' unless there is some mind which can observe the
entirety, and with this implication quantum metaphysics may seem to point in the
direction of a mind 'outside' the physical universe.
Is such an entity then within
the purview of science?
Science deals with that which
can be tested, with phenomena which can be verified by scientists in various
countries independently of their beliefs or their culture or language. This is
not to say that scientists consider all else uninteresting or insignificant.
Rather, science limits itself to certain types of phenomena, and makes no
judgment or indeed reference to matters outside its purview. No unequivocal
demonstration of the existence of a such a Mind has ever been presented that
convinced scientists everywhere, no experiment has been devised which would
point to its existence in a manner convincing to all laboratory workers, and
therefore the subject of such a Mind is not considered generally to be of
relevance to scientific endeavor. The topic therefore remains within the bounds
of speculative quantum metaphysics rather than of physics itself.
From the Biblical perspective
however, there is a Mind which is creator of the universe and of all laws of
nature, encompassing all of its creation, and sustaining its existence.
Schroedinger's Cat and Wigner's Friend
The eminent physicist Erwi