Eyre Lines

I found a piece on my FB feed today on the origin of the universe, written by a Physicist. “What was the cause of the Big Bang?” it asks.

I find it slightly surprising to find that from a Physicist, to be honest. The author will know well that if there was indeed a “Big Bang” (and it seems overwhelmingly likely that there was, despite the criticism that it has to have been a “one off” event which can’t be replicated so as to produce additional experimental data), the mathematics of the situation demand that there be a singularity at the origin, a point beyond which there is no space and no time.

I’ve become used to the question from laymen “So what caused the Big Bang?”. Everything we experience in normal existence, after all, seems to have a cause, and this is a cataclysmic event which we detect at the earliest point in time.

The thing is, the whole notion of cause demands that there be event a which causes event b, and event a has to be before event b, i.e. earlier in time. When it comes to the Big Bang, however, there is no “earlier” to look at. The idea of “earlier” is impossible, and so the idea of a cause for it is equally impossible.

That can require some getting the head around for most of us. However, in the case of a Physicist, ideas of the random (in which you cannot say something was “caused” because the same supposed cause could have produced a variety of results including the one observed) are prominent. So is the concept of the “Dirac soup”, an universe of elementary particles in which particles pop into existence and out of existence on a purely statistical, random basis; that too seems to be experimentally verifiable.

More even than that, however, is a set of observations in particle physics which seem to give the lie to the whole concept of causation; particles can influence each other at a distance simultaneously, being “quantum paired” and a change in circumstances can actually have an effect earlier than the cause (in the case of this experiment by altering the situation after a particle has passed a double slit).

In the circumstance, it surprised me a little to find a Physicist writing about the “cause of the Big Bang”. Clearly there was and could be no “cause”, because time as well as space just “happened”.

Theologians will probably want to say that as God is atemporal, a cause remains possible. The thing is, “cause” is still an incoherent idea unless one postulates another time-like dimension experienced only by God, and at that one to which God is subject, i.e. experiences as a constraining factor. I suspect most theologians who go down this route are not going to want to concede that God can be constrained by any dimension… If, with God, there is no “before” and no “after”, then with God there is also no “cause”.

And yes, I know this all throws a huge spanner in the concept of God as creator, at least if you interpret it as “creatio ex nihilo”, creation out of nothing. The concept of creation, too, is a time dependent one. I can see little option but to think in terms of creation as a process in which God may well be involved (and I am confident that whatever it is that is God is fundamental to that process), but which it is impossible to say that God originated.