© 2015 Santiago Rodríguez
© 2015 Urantia Association of Spain
| The universe is an incredibly big place | Luz y Vida — No. 39 — March 2015 — Index | Urantia Questionnaire: Mariano Perez |
Why is the universe as we see it? The answer that was in style 500 or 600 years ago, and that in the light of today’s knowledge would seem childish and completely outdated, would be something like this: “God created it that way.” Or put another way, there is a God who does everything and makes everything perfect. I don’t need to ask myself anything because everything has been designed and created by Him.
Certainly, with that way of thinking, scientific progress slowed down, it was paralyzed until thinkers arose who dared to go against that way of seeing the world. Thank God, there were minds that were able to shake that childish vision of things and considered that the place of God was not immediately behind each question.
With the passage of time, and after all the scientific-technological progress that we have experienced, humanity has grown and evolved. We are no longer children, now perhaps we are enjoying a stage of humanity’s adolescence, boasting of our strength, our inventiveness, our ability to know the universe. The time of rebellion has arrived. Thus, we are convinced that, to know what surrounds us, we do not need anyone outside of ourselves, and what we need to complete our knowledge is only a matter of time, we will find out. We have mind enough for it.
This statement is obviously a caricature, but it tries to reflect the essence of what many scientists defend today.
After the scientific effort to know and explain the reality that surrounds us, after being able to find an explanation for many things, some aspects of our measurements arise before which the theories are silent.
There are a number of physical parameters whose values are not predicted in any way by theories. In principle, theories can work independently of the values that these physical magnitudes take, and yet the values that they take are very precise and are adjusted in a non-arbitrary way. We have been able to measure them with great precision, and what is surprising is that these values make it possible for the universe to be as we observe it. Some of these values are the speed of light in a vacuum, the charge of the electron, the rest masses of electrons, neutrons and protons, the gravitation constant, etc.
In our current conception of the universe, we consider a “cosmological principle” in which we have no choice but to assume that the same local properties exist throughout the universe. In other words, what we know here works exactly the same in all parts of the observable cosmos. And it may be so. UB 2:7.2 The physical facts are fairly uniform…
Today’s science is shocked, for it has realized that if any of those values were slightly different from what they are, the universe as we observe it could not exist…and we as its observers could not exist either. How is it possible that these values are so tuned, and are what they are, so that the universe is as we contemplate it and allows our very existence? How could they collude like this?
Once again, we are facing another version of the same initial question. The answer (which shows a lack of evolutionary maturity, from my point of view) has been accepted by the scientific community as an “anthropic principle”, which at the risk of reducing it excessively, we would come to summarize as "the universe is as it is, because we we exist». And indeed it is still true, because if it were different, possibly we would not be observers.
But is the initial question really being answered? Both the answer from several centuries ago and the current one, don’t they give the impression that they are trying to avoid something? Perhaps the time has come for science to turn its eyes to the reality that the universe has been designed with a purpose… that there are minds that design and organize in such a masterful way that everything seems to work automatically. in some mechanistic way.
The sovereignty of God is unlimited; it is the fundamental fact of all creation. The universe was not inevitable. The universe is not an accident, neither is it self-existent. The universe is a work of creation and is therefore wholly subject to the will of the Creator. (UB 3:6.2)
If we refuse to admit that the values of the constants are what they are because they reproduce the cosmos in which we find ourselves and have been chosen very carefully; if we refuse to admit a mental intervention with will and purpose, that leads us to have to speculate with an endless number of enormously fanciful assumptions, such as admitting infinite parallel universes to ours in which each one differs by an infinitesimal value from one of the characteristics of each of the particles that compose it. Universes that, on the other hand, we would not have any possibility of contacting. Or we would have to look for alternatives that in other places (to which we do not have access) an infinite number of universes have been formed and have evolved according to their own parameters, each one with different values of the different universal physical constants. We are in one of them and it is the one that is given to us to observe. Or, through endless ages, alternate universes have followed one another until chance has allowed those values to collude to bring into existence the universe we know.
In short, at the present time it seems that any argument is admissible rather than succumb to the idea from which we fled from the beginning: that there is a mind, an intelligence behind the scenes that has arranged things so that the scenario we are contemplating occurs. .
I believe that humanity would take a great evolutionary leap if it were to move away from prejudices, as it was able to do after the Middle Ages, if it were to move away from the preconceived idea and admit the possibility that there is a function, that there is a intelligent purpose in all that surrounds us. That the idea of a God has to stay in place, and certainly not completely apart from physical reality.
The Urantia Book reveals to us that the universe is not an accident, but something generated by the will of the Creator, and this same Creator controls the “power”, that is, all forms of energy that are sensitive to linear gravity, to the gravity we know.
God controls all power; he has made “a way for the lightning”; he has ordained the circuits of all energy. He has decreed the time and manner of the manifestation of all forms of energy-matter. (UB 3:2.4)
Universe power includes all forms of energy which, while still responding to Paradise gravity, are directly responsive to linear gravity. This is the electronic level of energy-matter and all subsequent evolutions thereof. (UB 0:6.7)
Let’s hope that science will gradually return to place and allow things to be in their place. Placing God behind each question mark stagnated progress. In the same way, ignoring that there is an intelligent purpose in the design of the universe will delay our deep understanding of it.
¶ References
- Light and Life Magazine (all old issues): https://aue.urantia-association.org/numeros-antiguos-del-lyv/
| The universe is an incredibly big place | Luz y Vida — No. 39 — March 2015 — Index | Urantia Questionnaire: Mariano Perez |