God and the Multiverse: Humanity's Expanding View of the Cosmos
447
God and the Multiverse: Humanity's Expanding View of the Cosmos
447eBook
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Overview
How can conceptions of God, traditional or otherwise, be squared with this new worldview? The author shows how long-held beliefs will need to undergo major revision or otherwise face eventual extinction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781616149710 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Prometheus Books |
| Publication date: | 09/09/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 447 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
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God and the Multiverse
Humanity's Expanding View of the Cosmos
By Victor J. Stenger
Prometheus Books
Copyright © 2014 Victor J. StengerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61614-971-0
CHAPTER 1
FROM MYTH TO SCIENCE
THE WORD
Upper Paleolithic cave art in Europe demonstrates that humans of forty thousand years ago were already thinking abstractly and expressing creativity by projecting their mental images of animals onto the rock environment. During the Neolithic era, stone megaliths sprang up across Europe, most famously Stonehenge, which was erected in 2,300 BCE and was used for royal burials as well as charting the course of the sun and hosting solstice festivals for pilgrims. This suggests that humans had begun relating to their outside environment in an entirely new way — a way that has been exclusive to Homo sapiens ever since.
Earlier, around 3,500 BCE, writing, called cuneiform, had been invented in Mesopotamia in the form of wedge-shaped characters carved into clay, and for the first time information could be accurately preserved and transferred without depending on the memory of a human messenger. When the ancient Sumerians first took wedge to clay tablet, they couldn't have known that they were writing the first chapter of humankind's journal. But they were. And that story begins roughly six thousand years ago, which is why some still cling to the belief that planet Earth is only six thousand years old — despite conclusive scientific evidence that it is 4.5 billion years old and that our universe goes back 13.8 billion years.
Indeed, our world is six thousand years old. Our Story began when we started to write about it, 3000–4000 BCE. Everything that happened before then we call "prehistory." In a way, it is a prologue because we don't know the names of any Neolithic people. They speak to us only in images, structures, and artifacts. In the early Bronze Age, humans start using words and so that's when individuals emerge and Our Story begins. "In the beginning was the Word."
With the development of civilized culture and writing, we have on record the fact that Bronze Age humans thought in terms of myths (from Greek muthos, meaning "story"), sacred tales that served as explanations for what they observed in the world around them. And the words that they used to describe these myths had power, which gave them a magical quality. Written cosmologies were more systematic than prehistoric, animistic attempts to describe the world, but the supernatural was still a major component.
In Egypt, cosmological myths were woven into the religion with the heavenly bodies being associated with gods. Creation stories with differing details depending on city have been deciphered from various texts and tomb-wall decorations; I will just mention their common elements.
In most Egyptian creation myths, the world arose out of a watery chaos called Nu, an obvious allusion to the river Nile so central to Egyptian life. A pyramid-shaped mound emerged from the waters. The sun god Ra, or in some cases Khephri, appeared out of the mound — a self-created god who then created other gods and eventually humans.
Since it was imperative that priests could anticipate the appearance of gods in the sky and, more important, predict the Nile flood, they developed a calendar with twelve thirty-day months within a year of 365 days based on astronomical observations. And so ancient astronomy made the first step toward applied science.
Science involves two activities, which are today largely carried out by separate groups of professionals — observers or experimentalists who gather the data and theorists who develop models, usually mathematical, to describe what is observed. While the observational side of ancient astronomy was remarkably accomplished, the theory side remained heavily magical and mythological.
The Egyptian theory of creation is an example. According to the most common Egyptian creation myth, the sky goddess Nut gives birth to the sun god Ra once a year, thus describing a universe that is self-creating and eternal.
The Egyptian cosmos was composed of a flat, rectangular Earth with the Nile at its center. In the south, in the sky supported by mountains, there was a river, and on this river the sun god made his daily trip. The sky was a roof placed over the world, supported by columns placed at the four cardinal points. The stars were suspended from the heavens by strong cables, but no apparent explanation was given for their movements.
The civilizations of Mesopotamia and Canaan all had similar concepts of the cosmos and humanity's place in it. Earth was a disk with the firmament, or vault of heaven, resting on its edge. Beneath Earth were the waters of the abyss. Once again, we note the role of water, obviously derived from the fact that the civilization developed along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
Babylonian astronomy was remarkable, with records going back to 800 BCE that are the oldest scientific documents in existence. Babylonian astronomers discovered the 18.6-year cycle of the rising and setting of the moon. They made the earliest recorded sighting of Halley's Comet in 164 BCE, making possible accurate calculations of its orbit by Halley and other astronomers centuries later. Babylonians produced the first almanacs of the movements of the sun, moon, and planets. Although primarily intended for astrological forecasting, the techniques they developed enabled accurate predictions of planetary motion and eclipses.
Curiously, Babylonian scientific astronomy did not lead them to a scientific cosmology; their cosmology remained highly mythological. However, the Greeks would utilize Babylonian astronomy to produce the first cosmology that could be clearly identified as natural rather than magical or mythological.
As in Egypt, Mesopotamian cosmology was integrated into religious belief and a cosmogony, a myth of creation. That myth is described in a poem known as the Enuma Elish dating from a little before 1000 BCE. It describes a clash among the gods in which Marduk (or Assur) defeats the ocean goddess Tiamat and rips her body into two halves that become the heavens and earth. He then organizes the sun, moon, stars, planets, and the weather. He creates humans from the blood of Tiamat's husband, Kingu, so they can do the work of the gods.
The Christian faith, the biggest in the world today, emerged two thousand years ago out of the older faith of a tiny tribe of desert dwellers in Canaan called the Hebrews. The Hebrews divided the universe up into heaven, earth, sea, and the underworld, as shown in figure 1.1. Earth is a more-or-less flat disk floating on water with the vault of heaven resting on foundations on the edge of the sea. Beneath earth were the waters of the abyss. God sits at the apex of a series of heavens above the vault of the sky.
Of course Christians today, even those who insist that the Bible is infallible, know that there is more to the universe than what is depicted in figure 1.1. Furthermore, God is now generally imagined to be either everywhere in space and time or outside both (depending on theologian), rather than at one special place. Nevertheless, it must be kept in mind that Christianity was built on the superstitions of very simple people for whom the model in figure 1.1 represented the best knowledge available at the time — based on their own observations of the land, sea, and sky. It was easy for them to conceive of God as a great king watching everything that happens and making sure events proceed according to his divine plan.
There are actually two contradictory creation myths in the Hebrew Bible. For example, in Genesis 1, vegetation is made before animals and animals are made before Adam and Eve. In Genesis 2 Adam is made first, then vegetation, then animals, then Eve. Chapter 1 was composed in the sixth century BCE when the Jews were in exile in Babylon, and it is clearly descended from the ancient Babylonian Enuma Elish. The creation myth in chapter 2 of Genesis came from Canaan a few centuries earlier.
The biblical creation myth familiar to us today, based on Genesis 1, needs little elaboration: God creates the world in six days, resting on the seventh. On the first day, he starts by creating heaven and earth. But they are in darkness and he (using the power of the Word) says, "Let there be light." On the second day, he makes a firmament to divide the waters above, which he called heaven, from the waters below. On the third day, God demands dry land to appear in the waters below, and he calls it earth and the waters seas. Then he tells earth to bring forth vegetation yielding seed and trees bearing fruit.
On day four, God adds the sun, moon, and stars to the firmament of the heavens. On the fifth day, he orders the waters to bring forth fish and birds and blesses them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply." On the sixth day, God has earth bring forth cattle, beasts, and creepy things. And finally, God makes man in his image and gives him dominion over all Earth and its living things. And then he saw it was good and took a day off to recover from his labors.
Genesis, of course, also tells the story of the first humans that God kicked out of Eden because they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In Christianity, this became the original sin that Christ died for.
Since the late nineteenth century, most scholars have concluded that Moses did not write the book of Genesis, as tradition claims, but it most likely arose during the Jewish captivity in Babylon. This is primarily based on the discovery in 1872 of Babylonian cuneiform tablets containing a deluge story closely resembling the biblical flood. It has even been argued by some that the Hebrew Bible and Judaism itself derives directly from Mesopotamian mythology, although how much remains in dispute.
CREATION EX NIHILO
Today's prominent Christian apologists, such as William Lane Craig and Dinesh D'Souza, argue that Genesis is the only ancient creation story that is consistent with modern cosmology in featuring a transcendent deity that created the universe out of nothing, the doctrine known as creation ex nihilo. However, it is to be noted that Genesis does not speak of any creation ex nihilo, which was a doctrine that developed much later.
The first words of the Bible are, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." But, as biblical scholar Tim Callahan points out, this is not the only translation of the original Hebrew. The word bara can be translated not only as "create" but also as "chose," "divide," and other meanings depending on context. And Hebrew translations depend very much on context.
Old Testament scholar Ellen van Wolde says that in the context of Genesis, the first sentence should be translated, "In the beginning, God separated the heavens and the earth." This is more consistent with the other "separations" that are then described: light from darkness, waters above from waters below, and land from water. Furthermore, this interpretation is more in line with the Babylonian creation myth, on which the Hebrew myth was surely based. In the Enuma Elish mentioned above, Marduk slices Tiamat's body into the heavens above and earth below.
But even if creation ex nihilo is the correct interpretation, it is not unique to the Bible. Callahan observes that, before being killed by Marduk, Tiamat ruled over a chaotic, formless void. As we will see, formless chaos is about as nihilo as nihilo can be. Neither have any information or structure that you can use to define them as something other than nothing.
The late keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum, Sir Wallis Budge, lists a series of what he oddly calls "epithets" collected by the nineteenth-century German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch (1827–1894) from hieroglyphs. Here is a sample:
God is from the beginning, and He hath been from the beginning; He hath existed from of old and was when nothing else had being. He existed when nothing else existed, and what existeth he created after He had come into being....
God is the eternal One, He is eternal and infinite; and endureth forever and aye; He hath endureth for countless ages, and He shall endure to all eternity....
God hath made the universe, and He hath created all that therein is: He is the Creator of what is in this world, and it was He Who fashioned it with His hands before there was any beginning.
Budge says these epithets, which "are applied to the gods, from texts of all periods," show that "the ideas and beliefs of the Egyptians concerning God were almost identical to the Hebrews and Mohammadans at later periods."
However, no actual texts are cited. It makes one wonder if we have a bit of apologetics going on here, designed to show that Judeo-Christian-Islamic beliefs are universal. Ironically, these claims contradict those of the apologists mentioned above who want to make us think that the Christian creation myth is unique and original.
In Budge's own translation of the Papyrus of Nesi Amsu in the museum (No. 10,188), the god Neb-er-tcher identifies himself as Ausares (Osiris) and says, "I developed myself out of the primeval matter which has evolved multitudes of evolutions from the beginning of time." This sounds more like creation from already-existing matter. Incidentally, the god does this by word alone: "I uttered my own name, as a word of power, from my own mouth, and I straightway evolved myself." Again we see how much stock the ancients put in the power of words by themselves.
Moving to India, in his Creation Myths of the World, David Leeming gives the following quotation from the Hindu Rig Veda, which goes back at least to 1000 BCE:
In the beginning there was neither Being nor Non-Being, neither air nor sky. What was there? Who or what oversaw it? What was it when there was no darkness, light, life or death? We can only say that there was the One that which breathed of itself deep on the void, that which was heat and became desire and the germ of the spirit.
In any case, according to Leeming, creation ex nihilo myths are as common as creation from a preexisting watery chaos. And, as I will often remark, complete chaos is indistinguishable from nothing.
OTHER CULTURES
It is not my purpose here to give a comprehensive survey of the many rich creation myths and cosmologies that can be found in the oral and written traditions of ancient cultures. While differing greatly in details, most early cosmogonies, as mentioned, attempted to explain the origin of the world in human terms with anthropomorphic gods bringing order out of chaos or out of nothing (ex nihilo).
Of course, many complex traditions can be found in ancient India and China. It would take me far afield to do justice to them. In any case, they have little bearing on my topic, which is the development of scientific cosmology to the present day and its clash with the religions of yesterday and today. Modern science emerged exclusively in Europe, with its origins in the great river civilizations of the Middle East and Greece where the religions it most clashes with also arose.
Still, it is worth mentioning that Hindu thinking envisaged a world that passed endlessly between phases of creation and destruction. The concept of a cyclical universe, which differs markedly from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic view of a created universe finite in time, has raised its head in some scientific cosmologies of today.
In astronomy, the Hindu astronomical work called the Surys Siddhanta, written about 400 CE by an unknown author, gave the average length of the sidereal year that is only 1.4 seconds longer than the modern value, and it stood for over a thousand years as the most accurate measurement of that quantity made anywhere in the world.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from God and the Multiverse by Victor J. Stenger. Copyright © 2014 Victor J. Stenger. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments, 15,Prologue, 17,
Preface, 19,
1. From Myth to Science, 29,
2. Toward the New Cosmos, 55,
3. Beyond Unaided Human Vision, 81,
4. Glimpses of the Unimagined, 87,
5. Heat, Light, and the Atom, 101,
6. The Second Physics Revolution, 115,
7. Island Universes, 139,
8. A Dynamic Cosmos, 149,
9. Nuclear Cosmology, 169,
10. Relics of the Big Bang, 183,
11. Particles and the Cosmos, 205,
12. Inflation, 239,
13. Falling Up, 263,
14. Modeling the Universe, 289,
15. The Eternal Multiverse, 309,
16. Life and God, 347,
Notes, 379,
Bibliography, 409,
About, the Author,
Index, 435,