Physicist's God

I mentioned that I haven’t started as an agnostic.

I was brought up Catholic in a ‘communist’ country. This was important because my father was a member of the Party (Polish United Labour Party – PZPR) and a declared atheist. Since my early years I had to struggle with questions like: ‘Where was God in Auschwitz?’ I knew that as a boy in pre-war times (before 1939) he used to tease the priest who taught religion in his school with remarks like ‘If Adam and Eve didn’t descend from the tree, we would still be sitting there’. Funny, sarcastic and intelligent. Also, very bitter. I guess I recognise the same emotions behind Richard Dawkins arguments.

And yet I was a believer. More, I was a follower. The difference was, it was never obvious to me. I knew that I had to choose and when I was 16 I decided to believe in Jesus.

At the beginning it was very limited faith. I separated Jesus, Yeshua from Nazareth, from the Demiurge of philosophical debate. I had, as Dawkins, no reason to believe in God Creator. But I was fascinated with this Jewish prophet and his humanism. He seemed to be the epitome of goodness in Man and I wanted to believe him. Okay, so he was talking about God who is Father to all mankind. He talked about kindness and compassion, and unity. When you are 16 you are ready to love. You want to find a master and become his apprentice. You want directions to find your own path.

He seemed to be the right choice.

But there was a problem. God, about whom Yeshua was preaching, didn’t exist in my scientifically inclined mind.

I needed to find a solution. And I found it. You can bet on creativity of a teenager in love.

Richard Dawkins believes that a complicated structure of our brains can be only a product of evolution. Karl Marks believed that awareness, thought and intelligence are products of highly organised matter.

There is no reason to limit this highly organised matter to neurons and neuronal connections. We expect to create artificial intelligence based on semiconductors and microchips.

We can conceive a much highly organised matter. A net built not of chips or neurons but of universes.

The idea started as a pretty simple assumption that our Universe, the one we observe is a closed one, that is, it starts with a Big-Bang and after a time it begins shrinking again to return to its singularity. In multidimensional space it has a shape of a ball or a bead. Now, we know about black holes. They may be connections to similar circumscribed time-space entities. Expanding this picture, we can imagine that the Cosmos is much bigger than this Universe we know. It may be populated by myriads of Universes similar to ours (or quite different). There may be a connection between some of them (like those black holes). Energy may be passed between them. It’s actually enough to make a highly complicated system.

Many years after I first thought about this, I have found that some cosmologist are proposing a model of multi-fractal, self-replicating Universe. I read an article in a Polish edition of Scientific American. Unfortunately, I lost the copy when I moved to the UK.
But I do remember a picture on the cover – multicoloured, connected beads almost like quipu.

It sounds like an invitation to pantheism, doesn’t it? Because I was tempted to make a jump and suppose, just suppose, that this highly complicated structure gained consciousness. It could be a Mind. And then it would have quite a number of attributes we usually ascribe to God.

In old Greek philosophers terms it would be an equivalent to pantheism. God is Cosmos. Cosmos is God. Yes?

No. Most of us reject the idea that we are our bodies.

So God could be the Mind of this (highly complicated) Cosmos. Our definition, our understanding of time and space could not apply to him and from our vantage point he would be eternal and beyond time and space.

Could this Mind influence what is going on in one of the pearls of Universe? The very process of thinking is changing chemical structures of our neurons, so I guess the exchange of energy between the Universes may and would change the probability of events within them.

But it is only a thinking experiment. I cannot test it. I cannot disprove it. I cannot confirm it.

I can only choose whether I believe or not.