reply to post by DaMod
Dear DaMod,
The math and logic that you have used to address this question are, frankly, a bit difficult for me to grasp. But I don't doubt that they make
sense.
Here, in brief, is what I was taught by a teacher who I trust. To know this as truth would be to experience it fully, which I have not. However, it
was not taught to me as an ultimate truth, but simply as a more workable way of looking at things.
It could be said that there was a beginning, but it would be so close to unknowable that its details may not matter that much.
The general idea, though, is that it all started with a sort of amorphous ability to consider. And from that ability came the considerations of space,
time, energy, and matter. Also, points of causation came from this ability. And those points inherited that same ability to consider, and they went on
to independently create more space, time, energy, and matter.
The picture, then, is of a physical universe created by many different cause points who had many different considerations. We can suppose that they
even had different considerations of time, at first. Ultimately, what we know today as the physical universe is essentially the sum total of what all
the cause points were willing to agree to. Nothing prevented any of them from going out and creating their own universes with different rules.
In this vision of the universe and of life, the urge, or ability, to consider and to create something is more basic and primary than what gets
created. I have books that attempt to explain the mechanism used to create energy starting with just a consideration. It's hard to understand, but it
makes more sense to me than the Big Bang.
When you think of of how big the physical universe is, you can only imagine how many cause points might have existed in it, or still do. As their
space started filling up with their creations, the story goes, they became tired of making stuff and more or less settled down into less grandiose
pursuits. One of these was the creation of life forms. As the creation of the universe had actually involved the invention of the laws and particles
we study today in physics and chemistry, so the creation of life forms involved the invention of the whole whole set of complex systems that we study
today in genetics and biology.
This gives us an overall picture of the universe as a huge engineering project. We can imagine that certain beings, as they began to take on distinct
identities of their own, would specialize in some certain type of form, like flies, or orchids. Some beings eventually got so taken with their
creations that they basically gave up on being creators, except on an automatic level, and sought to exist as their creations. This is what is known
as being "trapped in the physical universe." This eventually happened to everybody, practically, so now it would be extremely rare to see some new
star appear in the heavens out of nowhere.
In the case of life forms, if you wanted to create, say, a cat-like animal, but wanted it to be different, or differently adapted than other cat-like
animals, wouldn't you start with an existing design and build on that? Intelligent evolution.
Though I have presented this in a rather fanciful way, it was taught to me with all sincerity as an extremely workable way of understanding how the
physical universe and the life forms in it came to be, how we came to be confused about which came first, and how we ended up in the situation we (and
many other societies throughout the broad reaches of space) find ourselves in today.
What I am saying in more simple terms is that I agree with those who feel that god came first. But god, from the point of view of the physical
universe, was never a single unit. It was a huge multiplicity of cause points. And those cause points survive to this day (most of them) as you, and
me.
