In the traditions of many religions throughout the world (including Judeo-Christian beliefs), there has long been a sustained belief that the Universe as we know it today did not exist forever in the past, that there was a spontaneous act which gave birth to all that has been, all that is, and all that will be. In other words, the Universe itself has not been eternal as our senses might indicate at first glance, but has had a limited lifespan after its creation. Those beliefs in an act of creation were based solely upon faith, and civilizations of bygone eras had no other means than sheer faith to accept the happening of such a major event that no corporeal inhabitant of this Universe could have witnessed. In days of yore, only a few could have enough courage, without having any experimental data at hand, to try to deduce a starting point, an act of creation, resorting not just to faith but also upon the powers of the intellect. Interestingly enough, modern science, especially during the last century of the ending millennium, has provided confirmation that indeed the Universe did not exist forever and that there was indeed a moment of birth. But this is going ahead of our story.
Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican monk born around 1225 as a nobleman of Lombardic descent, was a medieval doctor of the Catholic Church, considered by many to be the greatest. Among the most famous and influential of his works are the Summa contra Gentiles, a treatise on God and his creation, and the Summa theologica, an exposition of theology for which he was given the title of Doctor communis or “universal teacher”. The most important influence upon St. Thomas Aquinas came from his teacher, Albertus Magnus, considered to be “one of the most universal spirits of the Middle Ages”. Around that time, both had received a strong influence from the Latin translations of the works of Aristotle and the great Arabic and Jewish philosophers such as Averroës, Avicenna, and Maimonides, and their thoughts brought into being a new relationship between faith and reason, starting a movement known as scholasticism [Scholasticism is defined on the Dictionary of Cultural Legacy of The American Heritage Dictionary in its third edition as follows: "The philosophy and theology, marked by careful argumentation, that flourished among Christian thinkers in Europe during the Middle Ages. Central to scholastic thought is the idea that reason and faith are compatible. Scholastic thinkers like Thomas Aquinas tried to show that ancient philosophy, especially that of Aristotle, supported and illuminated Christian faith"]. In essence, this school of thought upholds the belief that faith and reason, far from being confined to different realms, actually complement and support each other, and knowledge of God and his creation can be gained with faith and reason supporting one another. That this point of view created shock waves among traditionalist theologians goes without saying, and the scholastics were promptly accused by many of “having sacrificed religion to philosophy, and Christ to Aristotle”.
In trying to “prove” the existence of a supreme being to “disbelievers”, St. Thomas Aquinas resorted to carefully elaborated arguments, following a strict system of Aristotelian logic and using as building bricks some of the knowledge that was supposed to be true at the time. Unfortunately, with the passage of time, some of these arguments are now outdated, interesting to look at, but not giving much guidance besides the historical value they might have.
However, among his arguments that have not yet been thoroughly demolished by time, there is one in particular in which we want to focus our attention very carefully: the Prime Mover. Essentially, the argument goes like this (excerpt taken from the book A History of Religious Ideas by Mircea Eliade):
“In one manner or another, this world is in movement; every movement must have a cause, but this cause results from another. This series, however, cannot be infinite, and one must admit the intervention of a Prime Mover, who is none other than God. This argument is the first of a group of five which are designated by Thomas as the ‘five ways’. The reasoning is always the same: taking the world of evident reality as the point of departure, one comes to God. (Every efficient cause presupposes another, and in tracing back through the series one comes to the first cause, God. And so on.) Being infinite and simple, the God thus discovered by reason is beyond human language. God is the pure act of being (ipsum esse); thus he is infinite, immutable, and eternal. In demonstrating his existence by the principle of causality, one arrives at the same time at the conclusion that God is the creator of the world. He has created all freely, without any necessity. But for Thomas, human reason cannot demonstrate whether the world has always existed or, on the contrary, the Creation took place in time. Faith, founded on the revelations of God, asks us to believe that the world began in time.”
More than seven hundred years later, St. Thomas Aquinas himself would have had no choice but to recognize that, through human reason (and meticulous astronomical observations) Man can find compelling arguments to demonstrate that an act of Creation actually took place in time. Human reason can find out many things about the origin of the Universe, provided enough clues have been left behind to follow the trail. However, the argument of the Prime Mover (and by Prime Mover we mean the causative agent responsible for setting up the initial conditions which allowed for the Universe we live in to be born) has some solid truth to it in modern times if cast into a new light: the Second Law of Thermodynamics. From this perspective, St. Thomas Aquinas was right all along, indeed we cannot go back indefinitely in time without encountering a starting point. Going back forever without encountering a point of origin is not just improbable, it is infinitely improbable. Such is the unavoidable conclusion we obtain if we adhere rigidly to the second law of thermodynamics, a law that has strenuously withstood the test of time all the way to the end of the second millennium and which not even the most skeptical of scientists and philosophers attempt to put into doubt. But even if the second law of thermodynamics was not enough to convince us of the absolute necessity of a point of origin, a “Prime Mover”, recent developments in modern physics have all but buried forever the concept of a static Universe existing forever in the past, requiring us instead to accept the prior existence of a singularity as the beginning of a very, very dynamic Universe. These two scientific arguments will be elaborated upon a little bit later.
So far, we have said nothing about the actual intelligence that could have been involved in the act of creating the Universe. Whether the Universe came into being entirely on its own or whether some other (perhaps very intelligent) causative agent had anything to do with the way the Universe started, these two widely opposing points of view have staunch supporters on both sides. Before trying to address such a thorny issue, we must study the possible alternatives under which this Universe could have begun.
In an article published inside Scientific American on April 1980 titled “The Structure of the Early Universe”, John Barrow and Joseph Silk make the following observation:
“There are ‘chaotic’ cosmologists who like biologists maintain that the properties of the universe are the result of evolutionary process. If it could be demonstrated that the present structure would have arisen no matter what the initial conditions were, then the uniqueness of the universe would be established in theory as well as in actuality. On the other hand there are ‘quiescent’ cosmologists, who appeal largely to the initial conditions to explain the present structure of the universe. They hypothesize that when the universe was created at the singularity, it had certain definite and preferred structural features for reasons, say, of self-consistency, stability or uniqueness. This means that gravitational evolutionary processes played a role not in shaping the overall configuration of the universe but only in molding substructures such as galaxies, stars and planets.”
In the first case, the initial conditions are completely irrelevant. No prior planning is required, and everything happens entirely on its own without any design or purpose in mind. In the second case, if we assume that the initial conditions played an extremely important (perhaps crucial) role in the creation of the Universe, then the possibility that those initial conditions may be traced back to yet another causative agent ultimately responsible for the setup of those initial conditions will provide much food for thought. This possibility will be explored more fully in other chapters. In the meantime, let us elaborate and expand on what has already been said.
The science of thermodynamics takes its first start with French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794), the father of modern chemistry, who besides isolating the major components of air and organizing the classification of compounds went on to disprove the phlogiston theory by determining the role of oxygen in combustion, thus laying the foundations for what is known today as the principle of conservation of energy which states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant regardless of changes within the system. In killing the phlogiston theory, he had placed the first solid brick on what we know today as the First Law of Thermodynamics.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics, discovered by French physicist and engineer Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796-1832), who is regarded by the many to be the founder of thermodynamics, is not so obvious, and it states that even though an energy supply might be available to produce some work, once the energy supply has been used its capability to produce work is diminished even though the energy itself has not disappeared out of existence (first law of thermodynamics); it has simply become less useful. Were it not for the second law of thermodynamics, it would be possible to connect a refrigerator to a heater and the heat which is being extracted from the refrigerator could be used to produce the work necessary to keep the refrigerator’s motor running forever once the heat has been converted back into the electric power required by the refrigerator to run, thus making a “perpetual motion” machine possible. There is absolutely nothing in the first law of thermodynamics that prevents this from taking place. However, the second law of thermodynamics completely rules out this possibility, and precludes any type of “perpetual motion” machine from ever being built, no matter how sophisticated the contraption might be (our own Sun will not last forever, once it has burned out its nuclear fuel supply and turns into a nova, although it will take a long time for this to happen). The unit of measurement used in the application of the second law of thermodynamics is something we call entropy, which measures the degree of disorder in a system. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language lists the following definitions for entropy:
“Entropy. 1. For a closed thermodynamic system, a quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not available to do work. 2. A measure of the disorder or randomness of a system. 3. A measure of the loss of information in a transmitted message. 4. A hypothetical tendency for all matter and energy to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity. 5. Inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society.”
Left on their own, most things tend to deteriorate as time goes by, and the only way to restore them to their original conditions is by the expenditure or work (which must come from an outside source whose entropy will increase), an expenditure that by itself will create even more disorder (since the source must pay the price tag for decreasing the entropy of the target, thereby making the combined entropy of the total system source-target always increase), making the total amount of energy even less useful. A tall building eventually begins to crumble and will have to be demolished in a pious act to hasten its inevitable demise. A car eventually turns into a pile of rust, but we never see a pile or rust reconstituting itself into a brand new car. Clothes wear out and have to be replaced periodically with brand new ones. Our own bodies, as we age, begin to deteriorate and develop wrinkles and white hair, and our bones become brittle. The landfills for trash around the world are always growing, and not a single trash dump anywhere on planet Earth is decreasing in size in spite of an ecologically conscious society and all the best recycling efforts being carried out today. Entropy can be shown to have a statistical basis, and in some cases it can actually be stated in terms of some formula which can be used to measure in numbers the total entropy increase of a closed system. But the major issue at stake here that must be kept in mind by the reader is that entropy actually marks the passage of time, since most things in nature are going from a state of lower entropy to a state of higher entropy (there is a very important exception to this law which will be covered later). A system with zero entropy would be a perfectly ordered system, and we may assume that this could have applied at some point in time to the entire Universe, most likely when the Universe first started. It cannot possibly be otherwise, because going from a less ordered Universe to a Universe with a higher degree of order would require vast amounts of physical work to be carried out continuously on a major scale, and we do not see such a thing happening today. Since it takes a measurable amount of time for a system to go from a state with higher order into a state with less order, then the only way we can go back to the original state with higher order is to run the clock backwards. But for the largest system of them all, the Universe itself, the clock cannot be run backwards indefinitely without reaching the point at which entropy was zero, since there cannot be a more highly ordered system than a system with perfect order, a system with zero entropy. And if entropy itself is the yardstick used to measure the passage of time, once we have gone backwards and we have reached the state of zero entropy we cannot go backwards even further since the concept of time itself becomes irrelevant by not having absolutely anything at hand with which to measure its passage. Thus, on thermodynamic considerations alone, the Universe had to have an origin, a starting point. The reader should take into consideration that when St. Thomas Aquinas started outlining his arguments in defense of a starting point, an act of creation of all that is seen and known today, the science of thermodynamics did not exist!
The common belief about the structure of the Universe that was held even by Albert Einstein himself at the start of the century was that of a static universe, a belief which made him introduce into his equations of general relativity a “cosmological constant” (which he later called his “greatest mistake”). The first blow against the belief in a steady-state universe was given by American astronomer Vesto Slipher, who made careful measurements of the nature of light emitted by nearby galaxies, and found that most galaxies had light that was shifted towards the red, and since we know by the effect known as “Doppler shift” that light emitted by an object moving away from us is shifted towards smaller frequencies corresponding to the red just as the horn of a train moving away from us sounds with a lower pitch than when standing still or moving towards us, the unavoidable conclusion is that most galaxies are moving away from us. Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter, using Einstein’s theory of relativity, showed us that the space of the Universe could expand, taking galaxies away with it in such a manner that the galaxies will be moving away from each other. Edwin Hubble was later able to demonstrate through careful measurements that the velocity with which a galaxy is moving away from us is proportional to its distance away from us, a discovery that until recently has withstood the test of time and continues to hold today for most of the observable Universe, a discovery that implies that the Universe is indeed expanding.
But it was the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965 by Arno Penzias and Ralph Wilson, the most important remnant of a fantastic explosion that had to occur before the Universe began expanding, which gave the final blow to the theory of a static steady-state Universe, and for the first time in the history of mankind there was undeniable scientific proof that there actually was a moment in which the Universe came into being. This monumental finding was first reported by them in volume 142 of the Astrophysical Journal under the title Excess Antenna Temperature at 480 Megahertz, and at the time even Penzias and Wilson were unaware that they had actually discovered the relic radiation from the an explosion that gave birth to the Universe itself. Their paper begins almost innocuously as follows:
“Measurements of the effective zenith noise temperature of the 20-foot horn reflector antenna at the Crawford Hill Laboratory, Holmdel, New Jersey, at 4080 Mc/sec. have yielded a value about 3.5 K. higher than expected. This excess temperature is, within the limits of our observations, isotropic, unpolarized, and free from seasonal variations…”
A microwave antenna has the shape of an old-fashioned horn trumpet, except much bigger. Pointing the antenna towards different parts of the sky enables us to compare how much microwave radiation flows into it from different directions, and this radiation turns out to be the same in every direction, to an accuracy of one part in ten thousand, and thus we say that the radiation is isotropic. The isotropy of the cosmic microwave radiation provides dramatic confirmation of yet another fact that was also unknown at the time: the early Universe was extremely uniform. Indeed, since visible light and all other forms of electromagnetic energy from this primeval explosion -dubbed nowadays as the Big Bang [the term "Big Bang" is somewhat misleading, since the expansion is not an expansion in the usual sense of the word where the debris is flying through preexisting space; at the moment the Big Bang took place, space itself did not exist, and at this very moment space is expanding at an enormous rate separating galaxies further and further; furthermore, a center for such an expansion does not exist, in much the same way as the surface of a perfectly spherical balloon that is being inflated has all of the points over its surface separating away from each other at the same rate] - has been traveling to us through space at finite speed, when we see the farthest galaxies not only are we seeing today light from ten billion light-years away; we are seeing light emitted ten billion years ago, and by probing the farthest reaches of our Universe with ever more powerful telescopes we are actually coming close to witness how the Universe looked like a short time after it was created. And the early Universe appears to have been far too uniform for us to explain how the wide variety of stars, planets, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, super clusters of galaxies and everything else it contains.
Further theoretical work by English scientists Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose on Einstein’s equations of general relativity uncovered what is known today as the singularity theorem, which implies that the entire dynamical Universe must have evolved from or into a very dense state.
Because of the very limited tools at his disposal, even if St. Thomas Aquinas could have arrived at the conclusion that a “Prime Mover” was the causative agent for the “first impulse” or the “first kick” which started the creative explosion of the Universe, he could not have known during his time that a first “impulse” was simply not enough. There are many ways in which an impulse might be given, and not all of them will necessarily pave the way for the conditions required to bring life into being, as we know it. A “first impulse” is just not enough. It also has to be smart enough; or at the very least it has to able to defy and beat almost insurmountable odds long after it has taken place. It has to be carried out in the right manner. That first impulse must be done correctly, it must be done with the right initial conditions.
