You can talk God out of existence, but you can't talk existence out of God

The fact is, God is unavoidable.

Even as the Universe evolves (see About genes, science, the Universe, evolution, God and all that stuff), no one - no caliph, bishop, mystic, naturalist and, let’s be clear, no scientist - is able to say for sure how the process started or why, Chances are none ever will.

If the Big Bang started it, next up is what started the Big Bang? If the Big Bang started itself, how did it have the necessary explosives? If it wasn’t an ‘explosion’ in that sense at all, just quantum fluctuation and instant expansion*, where did the quanta come from and why do they fluctuate?

Any way you think about it, you're into an infinite regression. In one Creation story the world stands on the back of a giant turtle, famously requiring turtles all the way down. There’s no way out of infinity. Unless the mystery is not “out there” at all. 

Our human brain did not evolve to deal with the infinite, which necessarily involves there being or not being a Beginning; it evolved to deal with our situation in our “environment” here on Earth. When the simplest single-celled life emerged in some hot spring somewhere unimaginably long ago, its concern was surviving in the hot spring, not on the planet Mars. Naturally, it's still at it.

To dig a little deeper into this, we are able to grasp without a sense of fathomless mystery Earth’s very long past and formation, and before that, a time when Earth wasn’t yet around.

And it doesn't stop there. Though we can understand Earth isn't going to last forever, it’s not hard imagining an infinite future for the Universe. 

Perhaps there’s no mystery, no evolution, no science, and no God; never were. What on earth would explain that?

Us.

*Most scientists seem to accept the Universe is expanding, but not on how fast.

 

 

 

About genes, science, the Universe, evolution, God and all that stuff

We've all heard about our genes. Genetics is the science of genes, their structure, function and the not quite perfect way they transmit copies of themselves - without which there would be no variety and people would not show it in profusion among us, as they do.

As if that weren’t enough, environments also change, and the life varieties that survive over time are those naturally adapted to sustain their existence - their 'life' - in changed conditions. Charles Darwin, who of course introduced this mechanism to us all, called it ‘natural selection’ to distinguish it from the artificial selection that people had already been doing for ages. From tigers, pussy cats.

There is no known or apparent reason why the process of natural selection is not at work in the Universe itself, or across the Multiverse if that’s what the situation is. 

Our Universe has certainly evolved or we wouldn’t be here. And we’ve all heard as well of a primordial ‘soup’ that was around very early on. If our Universe, in all its stunning complexity - galaxies, stars, planets, tigers, cats and us - did not emerge out of that soup, we must explain what it did emerge from, and how.

On that, more recent scientific theorising (itself constantly ‘evolving’) considers that the Universe is not necessarily running down like some gigantic machine, as is generally supposed to be the case. That scenario, faintly depressing however far off, is the result of entropy*, which means everything runs from order to disorder and finally arrives at a featureless state of equilibrium. Like the coffee in our picture, or the hot water left to become tepid then cold in your bath.

The alternative proposal is that, provided a system is not ‘closed’ - that is, it continues to receive inputs of energy - the increase in disorder spontaneously gives rise to new forms. And those that succeed are the most stable, the forms naturally adapted to the environment. 

Now the Universe that began with the Big Bang clearly did not start out like it is today. In which case, entropy may not be death but re-birth, midwife not undertaker, and this may be the way things are eternally.

That’s where, if S/He ever left, God comes back in.

*Entropy is promulgated by the intimidating Second Law of Thermodynamics. Could it have been repealed?

Can a journalist ever get a politician to tell the truth?

Journalists, even when partisan in the name of freedom of speech, still like to say they are after the truth.

That may well be honest in terms of how they see truth and in the eyes of their prime listeners and readers. But is it how their work comes across to an audience requiring unbiased information on current events? If it isn’t, is it a job done honestly? - assuming some superior ‘objective approach’ is open to them.

Interview after interview shows most politicians, legally and professionally counselled beforehand, are able to evade journalists' questions and stifle useful discussion by robotically repeating the party line. Digress and deny, concede nothing.

In the same way, mixed panels on popular political ‘shows’, got up to present a ‘balance’ of opinion, all too often end in a futile shouting match between panelists whose one shared aim is to prevent opposition views being heard.

We appreciate this is election year in key western democracies and that no one said democracy, or life, is fair. If we want democracy, we must accept all its ways and means, not just the ones we agree with.

But if there is such a thing as 'the truth', can politicians somehow be held to it? Let us speculate.

What if journalists were always to interview politicians constructively, giving them time to put their position while pointing as now to any gaps and contradictions along the way. Then suppose they ask the same simple question politely every time - it could even become this method's catch-phrase:

“Do you really believe what you’re saying?”

Even politicians could not talk round that question. And wouldn’t their answer 'tell' all listeners, those agreeing and not agreeing with what they just heard, everything they want or need to know about the truth: namely, whether the speaker is telling it?

Alas, we live in the real world. The truth, like politicians, is elusive and the media is doing what they can in the circumstances. Indeed, they would no doubt quickly run out of willing interviewees if they did anything more. 

We have the pageant politician-journalist jousting we have and had better think for ourselves.