The Instant Evolutionary
Universe: Neither Wasteful nor Cruel
[excerpted from the article "The Instant
Universe: And God Said:
"Let there have been a big bang"]
Evolutionary advance is achieved by competition for
survival, selection of the fittest via predatory and environmental extinction,
fatal biological defects, and so on. The evolutionary path is littered with
corpses and suffused with suffering. The emergence of humanity is achieved at
the very heavy price of the sufferings of untold numbers of creatures losing
their struggle to survive to those more fit than they. Billions of “unsuccessful” mutations, many of them horribly
deformed animals unable to survive; billions and billions and billions of small
organisms, insects, animals, and even primitive humanoids devoured by
predators, killed by natural disasters or birth defects strew the evolutionary
path. It is not comfortable to contemplate the total genocide of our ancestors’ competitors, the Neanderthalers. The
path of “nature
red in tooth and claw” (in the words of Alfred, Lord Tennyson) leading to the
emergence of humans strongly disturbed
In the instant universe scenario, however, these two objectionable
features of evolution—that it is too clumsy and evil—disappear, at least in the period
leading up to the emergence of humanity. Evolution in the context of an instant
universe is not a violence-drenched process. The entire process leading up to
the emergence of moral man takes place only in potentiality, in the ‘mind’ of God, as the working out of a process implied by the
laws of nature and the initial conditions. Actual reality begins only with the
emergence of moral man.
The evolutionary process according to this scenario is
certainly not a clumsy method of producing human beings. Instead, the pre-moral
stage ‘evolutionary process’ is merely the logically-consistent theory which
underlies the emergence of man in a ‘natural’ physical universe. In actuality, however, the
emergence of humans took place in a most elegant, clever, and direct manner—as the initial stage of an instant
universe.
In addition, when the evolutionary process is seen as the “computational device,” which it is in the instant universe
scenario, it can be seen in all its elegance. Evolution by random mutation in
this sense is a self-improving program. It is a very
simple yet efficient algorithm, used to run the ‘computer simulation’ leading up to the evolution of ever more complex creatures.
Similarly, the big bang theory is a beautifully simple
algorithm for generating the blueprint of an extremely complex universe. Given
the design of the intended moral being, the big bang generates a complex
universe of billions of galaxies containing billions of stars, with billions of
life forms containing billions of cells. All that is created is a singularity
or big bang, operating according to one unified universal law in a four-(or
perhaps higher) dimensional space-time, and the rest takes care of itself. By ‘mentally extrapolating’ this ‘algorithm,’ God obtains very simply a complete description of a
totally self-consistent complex universe and uses this description to create an
actual universe at the moral stage without any “red in tooth and claw” physical evolution.
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[22] See my The Retroactive Universe for a more thorough discussion.
[23] Both science and a literal reading of
Genesis would place this event as occurring very recently, between five and
one-hundred thousand years ago, rather than millions or billions of years ago.
[24] For an explanation of these points, see
my book The Instant Universe or my papers “Free Will” in B’Or Ha’Torah 6E (1987) pp. 141-157; and with Herman Branover, “The Role of the Universe in Halakhah and
Quantum Physics” in H. Branover and I.
Attia, eds., Science in the Light of the Torah (Northvale, NJ: Jason
Aronson, 1994), especially Wheeler’s diagram on p. 79.