I find some coincidences interesting, while others are troubling. It is interesting when making a new discovery, such as an interesting film, and learning that a friend has just become obsessed with the same filmmaker. It is troubling when learning about a new product, then seeing that repeatedly showing up in a Facebook feed. My wife questions whether Facebook is somehow listening to our conversations, Alexa-like.
The current “coincidence” is reading an old science fiction novel questioning human assumptions about the universe and then seeing a Substack post that makes a similar argument about how science gets it wrong.
The novel is Brian W. Aldiss’ Crytozoic! in which the protagonist, Eddie Bush, roams through time past, like a phantom, through mind travel, repeatedly encountering a Dark Woman who may be a hallucination or a ghost from a future more distant than his own. Originally serialized in New Worlds Speculative Fiction in 1967, my hardcover edition came to me more than a half-century ago through the Science Fiction Book Club.
The story’s revelation is that the human perception of time as moving forward is wrong; what we consider the past actually is the future. Instead of death being the end of life, it is the beginning and, as we age, we grow smaller and eventually enter the womb. The diversity of life on earth moves from complex organisms to simple single-cell life until it disappears in the toxic atmosphere of a planet soon to join the rest of the matter in the shrinking universe, until it reaches a single point.
Or it all may be the perceptions of a madman.
As I reached the end of the book, I came across Julian Gough’s post in The Egg And The Rock, in which he advances his hypothesis that “our universe behaves like an egg (a complex evolved entity undergoing a highly structured process of development), rather than a rock (dead matter, slowly and randomly losing order over time).”
We have been consistently wrong about the complexity of the universe, and the efficiency of its processes; and consistently wrong in the same direction.
• The universe has always turned out to be larger than we expected; but more importantly, and more profoundly…
• Our universe has always turned out to be more complex in structure (at both large and small scales).
• Its energy production has always turned out to be more efficient than we had assumed.
• And, remarkably often, energy production that looked at first glance explosive and randomly-aimed, when looked at more closely turned out to be generating (and protecting) complexity in specific regions (such as Earth’s biosphere).
• That is, the flow of energy through the universe is such that, step by step, it builds out and protects complexity, rather than blowing all existing complexity apart.
The reason science has repeatedly underestimated the complexity of the universe, Gough argues, is that science has relied on an unexamined paradigm: that the universe “is made of matter with arbitrary properties, under the influence of arbitrary laws, interacting randomly … that now, somehow, had recently come into being out of nothing, with no explanation for that, and no history.”
He noted that “the first person to claim that the stars might be suns like our own, complete with exoplanets, and alien forms of life, was burned at the stake — which put that particular theory back a few hundred years.”
(Note that Giordano Bruno’s heresy trial during the Roman Inquisition may have been a response to his religious views: in addition to his cosmological theories, he did not believe in eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation. He did believe in the transmigration of the soul, or reincarnation.)
Gough sums up by saying that, until scientists start using egg physics rather than rock physics, “they will be blindsided particularly badly in the early universe; particularly in the first billion years … where they thought they would, finally, find random matter blindly obeying arbitrary laws — and where instead, again and again (as I predicted), they are finding the structure, and order, of an evolved organism efficiently and rapidly proceeding along a clear developmental path.”
For the complete essay, read his post:
Now, to inject the creation vs. evolution debate into all this, evolutionists make a good case going back to the Big Bang, but they end up in the same place as creationists at that point: an act of faith. All matter came into being with the Big Bang — but what existed before that? Creationists would answer “God” and be done with it. Science has no explanation.
Creationists have the problem of “time” — bound by biblical accounts, some believe that only a short time has elapsed since the beginning of everything — about 6,000 years. The Bible says creation took six days, but there is debate on the meaning of “day” with science demonstrating that time is not a constant, varying according to gravity and the distance from the Big Bang. Creationists have more recently introduced Intelligent Design as a way of reconciling faith and science.
There is not a big difference between Intelligent Design and Gough’s views of “an evolved organism efficiently and rapidly proceeding along a clear developmental path.” What is different is the approach: faith versus science. Need it be a conflict?
My approach to life has always been to seek out commonality rather than conflict. The truth lies in what we can agree rather than in where we have to agree to disagree.
Do you have a story to tell?
The News Café is a virtual meeting place where, each weekday, we discuss the news of the day: local, statewide, national, and international.
Subscribers can share their knowledge, thoughts, and questions about any topic, and we may select some of those subjects for more in-depth analysis.
If you’re unable to pay but still want to receive all of the free public posts in your in-box, click the Subscribe button and select a free subscription.
Visit us at www.libertymedianh.org
Join in the conversation through chat or notes by downloading the Substack app or going to the online site.
Also see our new Substack news site, By The Way.