Let
us imagine a trial in which a man is accused of murder. Suppose there
is a crucial witness for the prosecution who says she saw the
defendant kill the murdered person. Suppose her testimony goes like
this.
District
attorney: So tell us what you observed in front of the
defendant's house.
Witness:
I'll never forget it. I saw a
man take out a big knife and plunge it into the murdered woman's
chest.
District
attorney: And was that man
someone in this court room?
Witness:
Yes, it was the defendant. I saw him plunge the knife into her chest
three times.
District
attorney: And how did you
happen to be at the defendant's house?
Witness:
Well, I was sitting comfortably in my house, when I decided to
teleport myself to outside the defendant's house. So I closed my
eyes, said “Abracadabra,” and then poof, there I was in front of
the defendant's house.
The
final detail given here by the defendant is what we may call a
narrative disqualifier. A narrative disqualifier is some part of a
narrative that is so unbelievable or so seemingly fake that it causes
you to throw out the entire story. In this case, no jury would
accept the testimony that the witness had seen the murder. They would
discard or disqualify her entire story.
Let's
imagine another case of a narrative disqualifier, one that we might
see in a film. Imagine you are watching a film that purports to be a
true documentary about a trip to a strange jungle where creatures
like Bigfoot were seen. You watch the film, and it seems very
realistic. This film is real and truthful, you tell yourself. But
near the end of the film you notice something that reveals the type
of film you are watching. The film shows some people that are
supposed to be in front of a beautiful vista, looking down from a
high hill. You look closely and notice that the scene in back of the
characters is fake. The characters are standing in front of some
wooden screen on which the scenery was painted!
You
have now found a narrative disqualifier. So you disqualify or discard
the whole film. Even if all the rest of the film seems very
realistic, you now believe the whole thing is fake.
So
now you get the idea of a narrative disqualifier. But it is
interesting to ask: within the cosmic chronology told by modern
science, is there a narrative disqualifier? Is there some part of the
story so unbelievable that it should cause us to question or discard
the whole narrative?
Below
is the modern story of the past of mankind, life, and the universe as
told by modern science:
Long
before men built cities, they lived in primitive tribes, often living
in caves. A few million years before that, there were less
intelligent primates walking about. About 50 million years earlier,
the planet was dominated by dinosaurs. The major groups of animals
first appeared during the Cambrian Era about 550 million years ago.
About one or two billion years earlier, the first primitive life
appeared from some lucky combinations of chemicals. Millions of years
earlier, our planet formed. Billions of years before our planet
formed, our galaxy formed. Going back further and further in time, to
before the time our galaxy formed, we find the universe was very hot
and dense. The farther you go back in time, the hotter things were,
and the denser things were. Tracing things back to the very first
instant, we see the entire universe popping into existence in a state
of infinite density, in the event we call the Big Bang.
Is
there anything in this story we might call a narrative disqualifier?
If you study the complexity of even the most primitive life and the
genetic code, you may be entitled to think that the formation of life
from some lucky combination of chemicals is a narrative disqualifier.
But there's something in this story that seems like much more of a
narrative disqualifier. It's the very end of the story, the Big Bang
(or what would be the very start of the story, if the story were told
in chronological order). The entire universe popping into existence
in a state of infinite density? Perhaps we should regard this as
being the “mother of all narrative disqualifiers.”
According
to the theory of gravitation, gravitational attraction is
proportional to density. The gravitational attraction of a universe
an instant after the Big Bang should have been nearly infinite, and
should have caused the universe to collapse back into itself
instantly, instantly turning the Big Bang into a Big Crunch.
Cosmologists know of no known force that could have counteracted this
gravitation, and they are purely speculating when they describe a
force counteracting this gravity. For example, they may speculate
about some “inflaton field,” but there is no evidence for such a
field.
Back
in the nineteenth century, astronomers tended to believe in an
eternal universe. Imagine if someone had proposed the Big Bang theory
back around 1850. He would have been almost uniformly denounced as a
crackpot selling ridiculous hogwash.
Given
the apparent impossibility of the universe popping into existence and
expanding from a state of infinite density, perhaps we should regard
the Big Bang as a narrative disqualifier. Perhaps the Big Bang
disqualifies the whole modern account of the universe's history prior
to man's existence. It may be argued that for such an account to be
credible, it must have a credible beginning; and that the Big Bang
event is not a credible beginning for a universe.
But
what alternatives would there be if we made such a disqualification?
One alternative would be to construct an alternative physical theory
for the past of the universe. That might involve innovative thinking,
and an innovative interpretation of red shifts and the cosmic
background radiation (the two pillars of evidence for the Big Bang).
Another
alternative is to think outside of the box, and to break out of the
whole “first there was matter and then there was Mind” type of
thinking. Here is one scenario. Let us imagine that there are only
minds, and that matter exists only as something that is perceived by
minds. Let us imagine that there is what we may call a Mind Source
that is the source of minds such as ours.
If
such a thing were true, it might be appropriate to distinguish
between two types of events: events observed by minds, and events
that were not observed by minds. We might call the latter type of
events “phantom events,” and assign them a lesser degree of
reality. Similarly, we might call years in which no minds could
observe anything as “phantom years.”
This
would take us into an innovative way of thinking. Scientists have
traditionally regarded all years as having the same degree of
reality. Just as a poet once proclaimed “a rose is a rose is a
rose,” scientists have tended to think like this:
A
year is a year is a year.
A
century is a century is a century.
An
event is an event is an event.
But
maybe we shouldn't think in such a simple and monolithic way. If the
universe consists only of minds, then years that were never observed
by minds should perhaps be regarded as having a kind of shadowy,
phantom existence. We might call such years phantom years. The
whole first billion years of the universe's history could be regarded
as mere phantom years. The Big Bang could be regarded as a mere
phantom event.
If
this idea seems outrageous, consider how scientists think about
particles. You might think it's just common sense to think: a
particle is a particle is a particle. But according to modern
physicists, that isn't quite right. Physicists distinguish between
two types of particles: real particles, and what are called virtual
particles. Virtual particles have a kind of ghostly, phantom
existence, lacking the same reality as permanent particles. If we
can distinguish between real particles and these virtual, phantom
particles, why shouldn't we distinguish between real events and
phantom events, which might also be called virtual events?
Based
on the very strange results of the double-slit experiments, some
scientists have speculated on quantum mechanical grounds that events
don't become real until they are observed (at which time, supposedly,
the wave-function collapses). If that's true, what happens to the
Big Bang? It becomes a mere phantom event.
There
is another reason for regarding the Big Bang as a kind of phantom
event. The reason is a kind of “dirty little secret”
of cosmology. It is the fact that the Big Bang is eternally
unobservable. There is no chance that we will ever develop
technology that allows us to look back to the Big Bang, or anything
within 380,000 years of its occurrence.
The
physical reason has to do with what is called the recombination era.
Scientists say that in the first 380,000 years of the universe's
history, matter and energy were so densely packed that all photons of
light coming from the early universe were hopelessly scattered.
Imagine you are looking through some crazy telescope that is 50
meters long and has 1000 different lenses at different points in
the telescope tube. Each of the 1000 lenses causes the light to
scatter in a different way. Of course, such a telescope will not
allow you to see anything. Just as such an arrangement would act as
an impenetrable optical barrier, the first 380,000 years of the
universe's history acts as an impenetrable optical barrier. Each
light photon from the Big Bang must have been scattered many times
every second, as those particles interacted with other matter and
energy particles in the dense early universe.
The
cosmic background radiation cited as evidence for the Big Bang does
not actually date from the Big Bang, but from a time 380,000 years
after it. That radiation only tells us about the state of the
universe 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
The
visual below illustrates the idea. We can only look back in our
telescopes to the edge of the orange area. Trying to look back to the
Big Bang is like trying to look through a thick layer of clouds to
see the moon, but a million times worse.
We can only look back to 380,000 years after the Big Bang
If
we can consider the light from the Big Bang as a quantity of
information, then the first 380,000 years of the universe's history
served to shuffle that information billions of times. We can no more
recover that information than you could recover the original state of
a deck of cards after the deck had been shuffled a billion times.
So
we can never look back to the Big Bang. No technology will ever
overcome this physical obstacle. Since the Big Bang is eternally
unobservable, there are empirical grounds for regarding it as no
more than a kind of phantom event, lacking the substantiality of
events that we can presently observe or can at least hope to one day observe.
Should
we then refer to “the ghostly beginning of all things” when
discussing cosmology?
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