The X-Factor Universe

I'm a little late catching up with Doug's rather nicely worked-out comments on the prologue to John's Gospel. You know how it is. Hearing that my phone was on an Android operating system, Burton went all "Blade Runner" on us and declared war on all smartphones, vowing to hunt them all down and replace them with nice, safe phones with circular dials. It took six days before the phones managed to out-think him and bring him to justice. Well, ten minutes to out-think him. They spent the rest of the time trying to re-program him to have a personality.

But what set me thinking were Doug's comments on the universe in which we live and its susceptibility to reason and what one could see as its "right" universal constants. Doug lists three views (one of which can be discarded out of hand) and the other two are thusly:

"2. Those patterns reveal that the universe is ordered according to mathematical ratios and scientific principles in ways which make it entirely open to rational investigation, but there is no actual reason the universe is reasonable. The ordered, proportioned and investigable universe is the result of a purely accidental, irrational and random chance."

3. Those patterns reveal a fit between the reasoning investigator of the creation and the rational nature of what is being investigated that make design, purpose and intentionality a more congruent understanding of the patterned universe. Some sort of Creative Reason behind the universe seems a more reasonable explanation both of the human capacity for reason, and the susceptibility of the universe to rational investigation."

Some scientists, of course, adopt a different explanation to this apparently innately anthopogenic universe, where by divine plan - if you like - the constants are "just right". Let me use the analogy of the Eyeballs in the Sky.

In the Perishers cartoon strip, you may remember, Boot the dog goes with the children every August to the seaside. While Marlon says stupid things and Maisie pushes the lads around, Boot goes off to see what the crabs are doing in the rockpool. The crabs, seeing Boot's "Eyeballs in the Sky" assume he is a divine visitation. Hymns are sung, the low are lifted high, the seers and leaders are brought low, civilisations are brought to an end and mildly dirty jokes are made. And then the kids go back to School, late, and the dog goes with them and it's all over for another year. The crabs wait for the Eyeballs to come again.

Now to the crabs, the rock-pool is their "Pooliverse". There's only one, and heaven is upwards. The rationalists among them  have in the past, Babel-like, built towers of crabs to attempt to reach the Eyeballs to prove they are not divine, or pushed crabs holding onto sticks up out of the "Pooliverse", but these heretics always come to a sticky end and need not concern us now.

But of course, we - the clever, cartoon-reading omniscients in all this - we know there are other rock-pools, on that beach. Some will contain periwinkles or sea urchins. Others will have holes in them, so are empty - or they are too shallow and dry out in the heat of the morning sun. Or they are polluted by the outflow from the storm drains. But the crab's Pooliverse is in the Goldilocks zone, where the components are "just right". It may appear to the crabs that the pool has been designed for them - in fact, they just happen to be in the right place.

And so it is with the Universe, say these scientists. There are uncountable other universes - each one with its own sets of universal constants. In some the strong nuclear force is too week, and helium cannot form. In others gravity is too strong, and stars collapse into black holes as soon as they form. In others, the Humboldt's Constant is irrational, and penguins cannot fly underwater. And so, you see, we have no need of God to explain the "just right" universe - instead we have an X-factor multiverse, where the Leona Lewis set of constants go on to deveop life and perform at the Palladium, whereas the rather rubbish universes rail at the cosmic (but, I stress, metaphorical) Simon Cowell that they could have supported life, only they had a bit of a cold and didn't warm up properly. And nobody understands them because their speed of light is too fast.

And so we live in a just-right universe because where else could we live?

And, in between kicking Burton because it appears that the smart-phones have reprogrammed him as a member of JLS, it makes me think two things. One is - if that's the case, where did the just-right multiverse come from? And the other is - how come I'm here?

Making Light Work of Creation

Two things conjoin, as they sometimes do, to set me thinking.

The first was the story of Hen Browne, unpaid Guardian of Stonehenge and avid creationist. He believed that some gelatinous matter congealed on the stones of Stonehenge was the dried-up waters of the Deluge. More creditably, he walked all the way from Amesbury to the London Museum to present them with his set of models of Stonehenge "as-is" and "as-was", as we would say in these Marketing-driven times. Since poor Hen lived in Victorian ones, he was merely told to sling his hook and take his cork models with him. I can imagine him, standing there in Bloomsbury, looking at his set. Resolving not to take in "Les Mis", then an established West End hit. And then imagine him dragging his way back off to walk back to Wiltshire. A heroic, devout and yet definitely off-beam kind of a bloke.

And the other was Anita's musing on Joseph and the way he could only see part of the story. Anita refers to the light of stars taking tens of thousands of years to reach the earth.

But Hen's story, of course, would shatter Anita's analogy. If the universe were only 6,000 years old then the light from even quite nearby stars was never emitted by those stars. God must have created that light en route.

But light isn't just light, is it? It's not just an eastern glow. Because light is actually carrying information (I am also including X-ray, Ultra-violet etc raditation in this. We welcome radiation of all wavelengths and none). If the light comes from a pulsar, we can tell. If the light is being interfered with by an exoplanet we can see that. If the star whose light we see exploded as a supernova, that information will be passed on to us.

But that means that in a 6,000 year old universe, God must have encoded all this data into the light streams. Including the explosions of stars that never existed. Like Joseph, but in reverse, we have the story of a star that never was.

So either God has lied to us, or the first chapters of Genesis are a poetical and mythical theological reflection on what life's all about and not a scientific theory at all.

I know which one I'm going with.