If you accept the literal interpretation of the book of Genesis you will believe in a beginning - only a few thousand years ago. God did it all in a week. But that leaves the question: what was there before God created everything? How long was God around before he decided to get to work on his big project? To be perfectly honest, and to blow away any last vestige of impartiality, I can't understand how anyone can still take that story literally (or seriously). I'm sorry guys, I have to side with Dawkins on that one.

But then ask Dawkins for his alternative explanation and he will give you an equally silly answer: it all happened by pure random chance. There was a Big Bang 14 billion years ago and all of the supremely complex conditions required to bring us to this point in our evolution were present by sheer fluke (I'll have more to say on this later). But, unlike the Genesis believers, I can understand why Dawkins prefers the random fluke argument. Even though I don't agree with his conclusions, I can see his logic; but to do so I need to adopt the materialist world-view. From this point of view, anything - no matter how unlikely - is preferable to accepting a creator God. To any materialist, the denial of the "supernatural" is a matter of faith. That there is no God is, to the materialist, axiomatic. It is a starting point: in the beginning, there was no God and any further hypothesis, theory or explanation must take that as given. Now, to my mind, that is much the same as a religious person accepting the existence of God as a given: a statement of faith. To the religious mind, God is eternal so there is no need to ask "what came before God?". Thus, in the beginning, God made the world.

The problem I have with both of the above is that they are both incredibly naive. The first assumes a biblical God in our image, a man, standing apart from his creation and judging what goes on in it. Look at the picture in my banner at the top of this page. That was the Michelangelo vision of such a God. It is still the image held by many a Sunday-morning church-goer. And, ironically, it is also the image held by a lot of atheists. No wonder they reject it! It is ridiculous. Many of the arguments against religion assume this Jehovah/Allah type God: the vengeful one who would punish those who deny him with floods and pestilence. The one who allows the holocaust. Who needs a God like that? Who needs a God at all? Most thinking people reject that God and so do I.

Materialist science seeks to provide the "common-sense" alternative. Evolutionary scientists would trace a line for you ... from the Big Bang to the present moment and show that there is a naturalistic explanation for all of the development along that line. Of course there are gaps but that is the job of science and not a day goes by when one of those gaps is not filled by yet another theory based upon solid empirical evidence. They would tell you that religion and superstition has always found refuge in those gaps: they call it the "God of the Gaps" argument. But fear not, science will eventually fill all of those gaps and eliminate God altogether. That, simply put, is the materialist creed.

Now, the latter position is what we (here in the West) are taught in school and is supported by our communications media. When presented with a choice between the two worldviews outlined above, there can only be one winner. But there is another view, studiously ignored by both camps. If forced to consider it, both camps will also resort to ridicule and the dismissive wave of the hand - as though that might actually make it go away. Nevertheless, it will not go away. It has been around for thousands of years and is stronger today than ever before. This view does not see an anthropomorphic God sitting outside His creation, nor does it rely upon the impossible odds against an infinitely complex universe such as ours arising out of pure chance. This view sees the signature of consciousness in every physical construct, in every temporal event, indeed in absolutely everything that is. Some might prefer to call this consciousness God - as I do myself sometimes - but this concept of God is far removed from the white bearded old man in the art of Michelangelo. Such an idealist philosophy does not deny the evidence of science, nor does it deny the spirituality of faith. Instead, it says "there is no separation; there is no inside and outside; there is only the mind of God". Ok, so that happens to be my take on idealism and, like any other ism, there are almost as many interpretations as there are thinkers. Plato, Descartes, Leibnitz, Berkeley and Kant were all idealists but they would all disagree with each other about various aspects. Still, this summary from Wikipedia seems to define the kernel of the philosophy:

"In Western civilization, Idealism is the philosophy which maintains that the ultimate nature of reality is ideal, or based upon ideas, values and essences and that the so-called external, or real world is inseparable from consciousness, perception, mind, intellect and reason in the sense of rigorous science." [My emphasis.]

So, back to the (non-) beginning. Ancient thinkers, from the Buddhists to the Greeks, believed that reality, as we perceive it, is illusion. During the "Age of Enlightenment", Newton and others described an orderly, clockwork reality only to be challenged by Einstein in his Theory of Relativity. Commenting on the death of a friend, Einstein said:

"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

Which is very similar to something he said about reality:

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

Despite Einstein's genius, many people - even scientists - find it hard to move away from Newton's classical mechanics. Those same people - even scientists - will bring in Einstein to support their mechanistic worldview. Now, I wouldn't presume to claim that Einstein was an anti-realist. In fact, Einstein's philosophy is quite hard to pin down so, much like the gospels attributed to Jesus, his words are used by just about everyone to support just about any philosophical position. Arch-realist and physicist, Victor Stenger, invokes Einstein thus:

"Thus it remains possible, though not provable, that ultimate reality is composed of only atoms and the void, where the atoms are localized bits of matter, whatever the ultimate uncuttable objects may turn out to be. Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which led him and others to attribute a reality to space and time, suggests a connection between geometry and matter."

Whereas, this article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy uses Einstein's own words to suggest something else entirely:

"I concede that the natural sciences concern the "real," but I am still not a realist."

Einstein was uncomfortable with some of the ramifications of his own theories, particularly Quantum Mechanics (as discussed earlier, in the Science section of this website). And if Einstein might have been somewhat on the fence when it came to the nature of reality, some of those who ushered in the Quantum Age had daringly vaulted that fence. Stenger, above, alludes to atoms as "localized bits of matter" as though any respectable scientist should have stopped right there and not delved into the nonsense world of sub-atomic particles which do not appear to be composed of any discrete "bits of matter" at all. To quote quantum physicist, Nick Herbert, in this interview with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove:

"Particles aren't even particles anymore. That's one of the connections with consciousness -- that the solidity of matter is dissolving away in light of these theories, and becoming more and more like the fuzziness that's inside our heads."

I am all too well aware that most scientists - quantum physicists included - abhor the fact that people have "hijacked" their theories in attempts to support looney-tunes New Age beliefs or religious/creationist ideologies. While I obviously don't consider my own website to be looney-tunes or religious, it would probably qualify as one they would really not like those theories to be associated with. So, to be clear: I am NOT claiming that any physicist would necessarily agree with any of my opinions. It would be nice if some did, but even then I wouldn't expect them to admit to it. Nevertheless, I have come across the views of some scientists who's views encourage me to think that I'm on a similar wavelength. There are others I greatly admire even though their conclusions might be very far removed from my own. And, let's face it: if "the solidity of matter is dissolving away", then where does that leave the materialist paradigm?

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