Two conflicting concepts of the nature of time and space have competed for thousands of years. Modern science is at last on the verge of resolving the conflict one way or the other, and the ethical consequences may change the course of human development.
The Judeo-Christian myth of history is simple. In the beginning there was God. He created “the heavens and the earth” out of nothing. In the end he will destroy everything and create a new, eternal cosmological order that will be more to his liking.
Indo-European heathen cosmology, by contrast, is far more subtle. Our ancestors believed in a universe of endlessly repeated cycles.
Vedic tradition, for instance, conceives of “great cycles of Brahma” made up of 2,560,000 “mahayugas” of 12,000 tears each (1). Every cycle fits within another, larger one, and so the universe continues, endlessly renewing itself.
The Classical pagan philosophers inherited this Indo-European cosmology of eternal recurrence, which is most familiar today from Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil and the Stoics. It is an idea that is central to all intellectually developed forms of paganism.
New scientific understanding of heathen cosmology
In every ancient tradition there is also a purpose within the sequences of cycles. That purpose is embodied in the Gods, who are seen as beings within nature, rather than its creators. Typically, they strive against the forces of chaos to ensure that the initial Golden Age of each cycle will be higher than the one preceding it. The Gods therefore ensure that the endlessly recurring cycles spiral constantly toward a future that is more meaningful to us as humans.
This is the view of the earliest, least corrupted written account of our native cosmology, the Sanskrit Vedas. It is also the view of the last, somewhat corrupted written account, the Norse Eddas. In basic outline, the poetic or symbolic cosmological myths are often astonishingly similar. Thus, in the Vedic Hymn of Man, the Gods assemble our present world by dismembering the cosmic being Parusa. In the Eddas they assemble our world from parts of the cosmic being Ymir. In the Vedas the image of a great cow is often used as “a symbol of the inspiration implicit in the thought of the gods” (2). Snorri must have been familiar with some poem in which this image survived, judging by his confused introduction of the cow named Auðumla in Gylfaginning.
In neither tradition can the poets conceive any concept of meaningful order before the Gods emerged to structure our role in the universe. The Vedic Creation Hymn, for instance, reads in part (2): “There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose protection? Was there water, bottomlessly deep? … There was neither death nor immortality then. There was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day… There was impulse beneath; there was giving-forth above. Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?”
The corresponding section of Voluspá, discussing the time before the Gods, is only three terse lines (3):
[There] was no sand or sea, no surging waves,
Nowhere was there earth nor heaven above,
But a grinning gap and grass nowhere.
Although the most distant past is inconceivable, Voluspá presents the new beginning after Ragnarok as facilitating a higher stage of evolution, both of the Gods and of humanity
This heathen understanding of a guided unfolding of the universe toward a greater purpose was interrupted by the Judeo-Christian myth of time, in which God creates; God destroys; God re-creates, and his “new heaven and earth” constitute the end of history. The Judeo-Christian universe is static. Its laws are inflexible and unchanging – precisely because God made them that way.
Scientific discovery was immensely hampered by the Christian authorities, but nevertheless it happened, accruing many martyrs along the way. By the 19th century, scientific circles saw the universe as something like an enormous perpetual motion machine. It didn’t necessarily need a Christian God to start it off, it was without purpose, and it would probably eventually run down. This rather cheerless, mechanistic view was a partial step back toward our ancestral beliefs. At least the notion of a capricious creator God who stood outside nature was abolished. The path had been cleared for scientific investigation free of Judeo-Christian theology. Scientific thinkers, from Spencer and Haeckel to Rey (4), began to provide new evidence for the doctrine of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche considered it to be the fundamental issue of his philosophy, seeing it as “the way out of two thousand years of falsehood”.
Our modern cosmological thinking would have developed much further by now were it not for the theory of the Big Bang. According to recent science, the universe began with an explosion about 15 billion years ago. Before that there was no space, no time, no matter, no energy – there was absolutely nothing. Then, suddenly, everything was created ex nihilo. Once established at the moment of the Big Bang, the laws of physics became immutable. This concept is a return to something like the Biblical creation story, with the Universe itself taking the place of the Judeo-Christian God.
The Big Bang theory had little respectability until some of St Augustine’s ideas were revived in Einstein’s theory of relativity, re-affirming the idea of a static universe that came into being with time rather than in time. Einstein’s ideas were in a sense the culmination of the Judeo-Christian cosmology. They reigned supreme, with a lot of over-promotion for the sake of ethno-politics, until the 1960s. Quantum theory, with its discovery of hundreds of types of subatomic particles which behave in surprising ways, has shattered the rigid determinism of the Einsteinian or Judeo-Christian universe. Desperate attempts to reconcile the conflicting relativity and quantum theories are now being made, without noticeable success.
Another sign of progress is the articulation of the Strong Anthropic Principle, which states that: “The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history.” This implies that the universe has a grand purpose. As one author (5) explains: “Suppose that for some reason the Strong Anthropic Principle is true and that intelligent life must come into existence at some stage in the Universe’s history. But if it dies out at our stage of development, long before it has had any measurable non-quantum influence on the Universe in the large, it is hard to see why it must have come into existence in the first place.” With acceptance of the Anthropic Principle, no barriers remain to either (1) a universe embodying purpose, similar to the pre-Christian European concept of Wyrd, or (2) a universe given purpose by the Gods.
Despite all this progress, the Big Bang theory still remains the dominant cosmological model. Only a few scientists dare to question it. One was Fred Hoyle, the famous English astronomer. “The Universe didn’t start,” he said. “It’s infinite.” (6) According to Hoyle, the universe is eternal, with matter being continuously created at the centres of galaxies.
In 1996 a prominent Australian scientist challenged the Big Bang theory head-on, claiming that it is fundamentally flawed because it violates the first law of thermodynamics. The late Laser physicist Dr Len Hughes said, “You can bet that law is correct. Matter isn’t being created or destroyed. Every particle is unstable, changing constantly and cyclically in obedience to that law” In his book Laser Cosmology, Dr Hughes created a complete update of the cyclic universe of eternal recurrence – one that is infinite, unstable, without a creation point, constantly renewing itself through the birth and death of galaxies.
To simplify to the verge of caricature, Dr Hughes believed that giant clouds of gas condense into galaxies. After about 10 billion years the new galaxies themselves contract by gravity until the black holes at their core erupt into quasars. The quasars recycle matter back into huge gas clouds which will once again, in time, congeal to form new galaxies.
This new theory represents a complete return to the doctrine of eternal recurrence, by way of late 20th century physics. If Dr Hughes is correct, our ancestral heathen cosmology was correct. The Judeo-Christian or Einsteinian cosmology was therefore wrong.
Dr Hughes claimed that the evidence that is already available favours his theory, as against the Big Bang. He pointed out, for instance, that Big Bang cosmology cannot explain why there seems to be so little antimatter in the universe. The fact that we can see galaxies proves that they shed energy in all directions for 10 billion years. The inner galaxy must eventually contract to the point where the black hole at its core, where the “missing” antimatter has to exist, goes critical.
His work suggests that the old pagan (and Nietzschean) doctrine of eternal recurrence will be proven when lasers can be built that are sufficiently powerful to study photons. According to the Big Bang theory, photons must be stable, while in Dr Hughes’ theory they are as unstable as anything else in the universe. “I believe if we could isolate a photon from the surrounding universe, it would decay – into mass and other particles. It would show that a cyclical universe is possible.”
When will we have lasers powerful enough to settle the issue once and for all? By about the year 2015, according to Hughes. “They can call me crazy for the next 20 years,” he said, “but when there are big enough lasers they’ll change their tune.” (7)
If eternal recurrence is then proven to be an objective fact, the ethical consequences will be enormous. The fullness of life will again be recognised as both creation and destruction, joy and suffering, order and chaos – and as being beyond good and evil. Mankind will once again be seen to have absolute freedom, in contrast to the existentially meaningless automata to which we are reduced by the Judeo-Christian cosmology. Eternity will become the eternal Yea, rather than the endless and sterile subservience to God that Christianity envisages. And humankind will at last become a stage of evolution that exists to be surpassed, as prophesied in Voluspá.
…………………………….
The late Dr Len Hughes argued that the Big Bang theory was incorrect and that the (heathen) cyclical universe theory would be vindicated by about 2015.
It seems that Dr Hughes’ prediction was out by one year!
The article below is extracted from the UK’s Daily Express, October 19, 2016. The author was Paul Baldwin. It is not our usual practice to reproduce articles from elsewhere, but this one is so important, and so accessibly written, that we are breaking our normal rule.
Before Big Bang: Scientists discover what existed BEFORE the beginning of the universe
It has been the big question facing humanity since mankind crawled from the primordial ooze – where did the universe come from?
Non-scientific versions of the answer have invoked many gods and have been the basis of all religions and most philosophy since the beginning of recorded time.
Now a team of mathematicians from Canada and Egypt have used cutting edge scientific theory and a mind-boggling set of equations to work out what preceded the universe in which we live.
In (very) simple terms they applied the theories of the very small – the world of quantum mechanics – to the whole universe – explained by the general theory of relativity, and discovered the universe basically goes through four different phases.
More importantly they discovered what came before this universe was another universe or more accurately another ‘cosmological phase’.
Despite being infinite in size our universe is cyclical and has always existed in one of four stages.
The universe is expanding, and the expansion is speeding up, but the team believes that certain modifications motivated by quantum mechanics will ultimately halt the expansion and pull the whole lot back to a near infinite point – at which stage the universe will start expanding again.
The paper, called ”Non-singular and Cyclic Universe from the Modified GUP”, written by Maha Salah, Fayçal Hammad, Mir Faizal, Ahmed Farag Ali, is super complex but Professor Mir Faizal outlined the main points of this paper.
According to him they have incorporated quantum mechanical effects in cosmology using an approach called the modified GUP.
This approach changes the equation for cosmology in a very interesting way. It predicts four distinct phases for our universe — the present phase of the universe being just one of those phases.
There is a phase before the big bang in this cosmological model, and it is possible to know about that phase of the universe by studying the physics of the present phase of our universe.
Professor Mir Faizal said: “In our cosmological model the universe did not start with the Big Bang, but there was a phase transition from one phase of the universe to another.
“This is possible because the universe can exist in four different phases, like ordinary water can exist in three different phases. Just as we can know about the properties of ice, by studying water which has formed from it, we can know about pre-big-bang cosmology by studying the physics of this universe.
“Using our cosmological model we can study the physics of the cosmological phase before the beginning of our universe.”
In their model they have been able to study the pre-Big Bang state of the universe. The equations in their model predict that the expansion of the universe will come to a halt and then will immediately be followed by a contracting phase.
Professor Mir added: “When the equations are extrapolated beyond the maximum rate of contraction, a cyclic universe scenario emerges. Other cosmologists have suggested a big bang and big crunch scenario – but those models have singularities.
“Singularities are bad in physics as they indicate a place where the laws of physics break down, and at such places one cannot use physics to get meaningful results.
“This new cosmological model does away with such singularity. The Big Bang singularity can therefore also be avoided by using the modified GUP-corrections to the cosmology.”
Prof Faizal explained that even though there are many different mind-bending approaches to quantum gravity, like string theory and loop quantum gravity, what most of these different approaches have in common is that there is a minimum length below which space does not exist.
Many of these approaches also predict that there is also a maximum energy and no object in the universe can have an energy beyond that maximum energy.
The research team incorporated the effect of having a minimum length and a maximum energy into a cosmological model, and then they ended up with a cyclic universe.
Asked about the philosophical and even possible theological implications of his work Professor Mir said: “No-one draws any philosophical or theological implications of a finite or an infinite spatial dimension, and time is just another dimension, so why should it be treated any differently.
“In any case, I do not believe in a God of gaps, with Big Bang being a big gap, but in a God who made the mathematics describing reality so perfect that there are no gaps, not now and not at Big Bang.”
Professor Mir is no doubt a scientific mastermind, but he clearly has little understanding of the spiritual and moral implications of his research. As the article on the ORA website above concluded:
If eternal recurrence is … proven to be an objective fact, the ethical consequences will be enormous. The fullness of life will again be recognised as both creation and destruction, joy and suffering, order and chaos – and as being beyond good and evil. Mankind will once again be seen to have absolute freedom, in contrast to the existentially meaningless automata to which we are reduced by the Judeo-Christian cosmology. Eternity will become the eternal Yea, rather than the endless and sterile subservience to God that Christianity envisages. And humankind will at last become a stage of evolution that exists to be surpassed, as prophesied in Voluspá.
Notes
1. Eliade, M, 1984. The Myth of the Eternal Return.
2. O’Flaherty, W.D. 1981. The Rig Veda: An Anthology.
3. Taylor, P.B. & Auden, W.H., 1969. The Elder Edda: A Selection translated from the Icelandic.
4. Rey, A. 1927. Le Retour Éternel et la Philosophie de la Physique.
5. Bowler, P.J. 1984. Evolution: The History of an Idea.
6. “World Without End”, New Scientist, 27/4/96.
7. “Physicist Challenges Big Bang Theory”, The Weekend Australian, 25-26/5/96.
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