Designing the Big Bang: God’s Choice
Which parameters of the universe were chosen to allow for the fulfillment of the Divine purpose in Creation? Is ours the only type of universe and laws of nature that could exist?
“What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world” — Albert Einstein.[14]
According to scientific origin theory, in order to produce our universe, at some point a big bang would have to exist. It could not be just any big bang, since only a very specific type of big bang would lead to our universe, eg with human beings.
From the traditional perspective, if God created the universe via a big bang, the design for the big bang would therefore have to be carefully worked out in advance. [15] Since a central purpose of the created being is its exercise of free-willed moral choice, the universe would have to be designed to contain morally meaningful situations and dilemmas. The design of the universe must therefore be based on the opportunities of moral choice that the Creator desires the being to eventually face.[16]
Creation and its Description
We can match aspects of the traditional conception of the universe’s purpose to resulting elements of the physical creation procedure.
If, as stated above, it is the eventual human moral challenges that prescribe the universal blueprint, and if it is the Torah that prescribes these moral challenges, then it is the Torah that sets the parameters for the design of the universe and humanity. As the Midrash says, “God looked into the Torah and created the universe.”[17]
Only after assembling a complete picture of a moral being and an appropriate universe could there begin the design of the big bang and laws of nature leading to their emergence.
According to this scenario, the process of Creation began not with the big bang but rather with the prior idea to create a being with moral responsibility, and a mental conception of this moral being and of the universe it would inhabit. Prior to physical creation it would be necessary to mentally assemble the desired main ingredients of the universe until everything necessary to produce a moral being has been obtained. The blueprint of the universe is created one stage at a time. A new stage is initiated after the previous stage is seen to fit into the whole—“God saw … that it was good”[18]—until the end product is reached. A being is created in the Divine image and is integrated into the rest of the Creation—“God saw … that all … was very good.”[19]
A description of this creation could then consist of an account of the creation either of the universe itself or of the blueprint of the universe, which is completed with the design of humanity.[20] Given the entire functioning integrated blueprint of a universe containing moral beings, a big bang could then be designed and programmed to teleologically produce them.[21]
The First Moment—from the Teleological Perspective
With the design of the big bang ready, its creation can be initiated. Until the emergence of a free-willed intelligent being from this teleological designed big bang, however, everything that occurs is preprogrammed, an acting out of the mechanistic laws of nature (as interesting as watching the hands of a clock for a few billion years) with some quantum randomness thrown in (more interesting than watching a clock - it's as interesting as watching the wash cycle of a washing machine, for billions of years). The truly “interesting” activity begins only with the onset of moral choice. Only then the purpose of the universe can begin to unfold.[22] In the teleological sense, Creation is completed not with the emergence of the big bang but rather fifteen billion years later when the first intelligent moral being emerges and decides to accept the burden of moral responsibility for its actions.
The Instant Retroactive Universe
Would the creation of a big bang be the most reasonable method of creation of such a purposive universe? Creation of a big bang involves a delay of billions of years until the free-willed being evolves and the desired moral activity begins. It would seem that the more reasonable [2] procedure would be the creation of the universe at the stage of the emergence of a free-willed human being. This would juxtapose the creation of the universe with the choice of the burden of the knowledge of good and evil.
This could be accomplished, for example, by a Divine mental extrapolation of the big bang conditions (mental “fast-forwarding”) up to the moral stage of the universe, followed by actual creation at that point. In this sense the reasonable creation method is the creation of an “instant universe” at the moral stage. Thus, paradoxically, the physical creation of the big-bang-emergent universe actually occurs not at the big bang but with the emergence of the first moral being.[23]
This radical idea
that the universe begins its physical existence only with the emergence of a
moral being interestingly finds support and parallel in the suggestion of
quantum metaphysics that the universe can emerge into true physical reality
only upon emergence within it of a conscious being, who,
according to our thesis, is a free-willed moral consciousness. As eminent
physicist John A. Wheeler states, the emergence of a conscious being
retroactively causes the emergence into reality of the big bang itself![24]
…………………..
[14] SHOULD WE PROVIDE ONLY HOLTON AS A SOURCE? Ie DELETE:?:
According to Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler’s Gravitation, Einstein said, “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world” to an assistant. The reference they provide is a book review by G. Holton of Ronald W. Clark’s Einstein: The Life and Times that appeared in the New York Times, 5 Sep 1971. p.20. (DELETE??!: Holton wrote a lot about Einstein and presumably inserted this quote into his review.)
[15] See Paul Davies, The Mind of God (Simon & Schuster Touchstone, 1992) for interesting discussions on related topics.
[16] This may be seen as a version of the Anthropic Principle in cosmology.
[17] Genesis Rabba 1:1. The midrash says that we know this because the first word of Genesis, breisheet = with reisheet = with the Torah, which is called “reisheet.”
[18] Genesis 1:3, 10, 12, 17, 21, 25.
[19] Genesis 1:31.
[20] According to tradition, the Creation account contains the whole Torah; and, “God looked into the [Creation account of] the Torah and created the universe.” The Creation account is paradoxically both the blueprint of Creation and the description of the Creation from that blueprint. Fittingly, it ends with the onset of Shabbat, which paradoxically, while it is part of the purpose of Creation and therefore ‘logically prior’ to the onset of Creation, is also the commemoration of the completion of Creation, and therefore ‘chronologically after’ the cessation of Creation.
[21] Moral beings seem a late development of the big bang, but the true order is reversed: They are the first stage of the big bang’s design. As in Alkabetz’s Shabbat hymn “Lkha Dodi” in which Shabbat, which is seemingly the final act of Creation, is teleologically primary to it: “That which was last in execution [of Creation, i.e., the Shabbat] was first in intention.”
See also Genesis Rabba 10:9 and the commentary of Radal. By resting on Shabbat, God places the universe in its natural-law operating mode. This is simultaneous with and caused or allowed by the emergence of moral consciousness.
[22] See my book 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.