Paul Davies begins The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World with a number of interesting discussions. He calls the discoveries made by man using the methods of science: miracles. Yet from the very first pages, Davies doubts we will ever answer ultimate questions through pure inductive logic alone: Questions like what caused the Big Bang; why are we here?
According to Davies, the a priori methods of the ancient philosophers led to the rigid doctrine found in the religions which exist today. Countless numbers of people accept the Koran, the Bible, and other religious texts as God inspired. Accordingly, religious affiliation depends on how these alleged, ancient warehouses of God’s words are interpreted. As a result, there exists a variety of belief, usually originating in myth, concerning where the world came from; what will happen after death; what lies ahead at the end of the universe.
But Davies steers clear of any irrational religious sentiment when explaining the scientific basis for our world. The hardware of the human mind, he says, makes it capable of ingesting accurate information from the outside world through sensory inputs. It analyses this data then synthesizes laws accordingly. Once a law is believed to be a universal truth, it becomes the foundation of further experimentation with reality. Thus, all of the scientific achievements we see in the world today are built on this logical, scientific superstructure.
The Mind of God then delves into the seemingly unreasonable question, “Can the universe create itself?” Common sense would seem to preclude that every existing thing, every event—had a cause. At the present time scientific thought accepts as a given that the Big Bang caused our existing universe. This acceptance is not without proof. Following Max Planck’s quantum theory, science has measured the size, the density, and even the time since the Big Bang occurred when the entire universe was almost infinitely small—a singularity.
Accepting this reasoning, we must conclude that our adaptive genetic makeup as conscious thinking human beings was packed into that infinitesimal singularity like every other existing thing. I’m certain Davies would admit this is mind boggling, but at this point in human development, mostly all attempts to burst the big bang paradigm have been unsuccessful.
Article comments