COMMENSAL ISSUE 96

I'd like to thank Graham Dare (C95/35) for providing the inspiration on this; but warn him against believing everything he reads; and especially to guard against equating the temporally fashionable with either truth or God.

The idea that the laws of Physics did not exist until a smidgen of time after the Big Bang is current fashion. The watch they used to measure it with was fairly advanced as well: perhaps the Bible should read, "In the beginning was the atomic clock". Leaving aside the measurement problem, the reason why the laws of Physics were dropped was because they foul up the model. Call me simple-minded if you will (and you will), but space being infinite (if you disagree please provide proof of absolute nothingness) there would presumably have been quite a few quantum fluctuations (in fact an infinite number, if that expression isn't a contradiction, which it is). Out of these an again infinite number must have occurred so close together (Damn ! another measurement problem. I'd forgotten about the primeval ruler which goes with the clock) that the two opposite products which disappeared in a puff of space came from different fluctuations. Whoops! Blobs of matter all over the place. O.K. you've discovered a flaw in this exposition: homogeneity. It's not insurmountable but to get to the great puddles of matter we see now you need time: that is you need some fluctuations to go off before others. This is very advanced physics you understand, so you'd hardly expect me to know how they do that, but I'd rather have eternal time than lose all the laws of Physics. Like the man said, "plurality should not be assumed without necessity"; and you can't get much more plural than throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Dismissing Science as a not-too-bad discipline for finding out how the world works but a bit vague on how it got that way we turn to God. No-one has yet bettered the five proofs of Thomas Aquinas, even if there is only one of them. Hume tied himself in knots over cause and effect but then Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect undid them all. Unfortunately, the idea of a First Cause is not proof of God as you need to believe in Him before it works. One of the best, more recent, defences of the idea of God I've come across, though I doubt that was the intention, was provided by a chap called John McNulty, who used to do a science page in Mensa Magazine, and who seemed to have a bit of a thing about Sol lnvictus. He accused the Christians of stealing Christmas 'in an attempt to obliterate the pagan festivals of the winter solstice' (Mensa Magazine, December 1991). Effects outlast intentions, and the effect of this appropriation was not lost on Violet Firth (aka. Dion Fortune, mystic, occultist, founder of the Society of the Inner Light, and one-time owner of Chalice Orchard on Glastonbury Tor). In his book 'Avalon Quest' (Methuen, 1982), Geoffrey Ashe quotes her 'welcoming the Catholic Church to Glastonbury', with the words, 'If you want to understand paganism, study Catholicism, its lineal descendant.' Is not an ancient origin exactly what you would expect of God; and if you were He, what would You pick to maintain contact with Your Creation? You could do worse than pick a photon: that strange timeless creature at the heart of all matter, and generated, or at least passed on in its never-ending journey, in abundance by the Sun and countless other celestial bodies. I'm not saying that's how it is: but before anyone dismisses ancient beliefs as the product of simple minds I would ask what one might expect from our technologically primitive ancestors: high energy physics ? To deduce the meaning one must first look at the audience.

Anthony Owens

Anthony : lots of statements above calculated to annoy ! If you (and others) understood non-Euclidean geometry, you wouldn’t have a problem with "absolute nothingness". It’s because you imagine Euclidean space as the "real" space that you think of any bounded space (as per big-bang models) as being inside it; which is not the case. I have nothing to say on the rest of your second paragraph other than to inform you that it imperilled my dentition like so much else you write. Maybe another reader can take issue with you. I was pleased that you introduced one of my heroes, William of Occam, but less pleased with your casual dismissal of Hume, who tied many people other than himself in knots. There is also nothing acausal about chaos theory - it’s only predictability that suffers. With QM causality does indeed go out of the window, though statistical predictability is fine.

Someone recently posted a piece of post-modern gibberish to the ISPE mailing list that appeared to say a lot but was just a collection of high-sounding sentences concatenated together that said nothing. I correctly deduced that it was computer-generated (I can let anyone who’s interested have the Web address so you can produce your own - I haven’t got it to hand at the moment). Has someone tipped you off, Anthony ?

Theo