Late Night Philosophy

Introduction

 (This entry was edited by synthetic on 03-21-01 @ 1:25 pm EST)

When I was born, I was baptized a Roman Catholic. However, my parents aren't exactly hardcore Christians, so we almost never go to church unless it's for a sacrament or something (not even for Christmas). The point is, I never really felt obligated to worship. Well, I wasn't the most popular boy in grade school and I took my frustrations out on God and prayed for a reason to beleive in him, becasue I desperately wanted to. When I got no reply, I turned to the bible for answers. I don't remember where I saw it, but it says somewhere that you should not test God to see if he's real. That struck me as a really stupid thing to say. I mean, why should I put my life on the line if I can't be sure it's worth it? Hell, it seemed like a great way for the creator of the religion to keep the followers in line; just say that he won't prove He's real becasue He doesn't have to and won't. That's just how I felt at the time, so I decided to become an athiest just to spite my Christian school.

Eventually, I discovered science. Now, Christianity had been figuratively drilled into me my entire life (though not to the extent that others have, beleive me), so learning scientific facts helped me figure out what I believed in. In the last year or so, I had learned more about Christianity, Science, and Philosphy than I had in grade school (of course), so I finally had the tools with which to make some decisions.

One of the main fields of science that I'm most interested in is Cosmology. No, it has nothing to do with make-up, believe me. It has to do with the creation of the universe, its death (and possible rebirth), the movement of galaxies, and all sorts of weird and wonderful phenomenon. Personally, I think that any fundamentalist of any faith should try to learn basic cosmology so they can make choices about their faith with a bit more objectivity. Anyway, these cosmologists (and theoretical astrophysists) are the people who showed the world black-holes and the Big Bang. Stephen Hawking is probably the most famous of these people. Where does Creation Nihilism fit into this, you ask? Well, I looked at what some of these scientists had to say about the Big Bang, the bgeinning of the universe about 12 to 15 billion years ago. Basically, a singularity, an "object" of infinite density and zero volume and a gravitational field that light cannot escape from, that contained all the mass of the universe exploded somehow and created space-time as we know it. Without getting into specifics, it is not known what the universe was like before the Big Bang becasue it, well, wasn't there. So what was? Who knows? If there truly was NOTHING (in the strictest most sense, not the space between stars or galaxies, but truly nothing, not even space or time) before the universe, where did that "cosmic egg" of a singularity come from? Did it spontaniously come into existence?Something from nothing, of course, defies the Laws of Thermodynamics. Based on the idea that the universe could not have come into existence all on its own, especially from a singularity THAT massive, in a "place" outside of space-time, I concluded that the universe must have been created by someone or something somewhere. A Creator outside of space-time with the power to make a universe. Lacking any definition of what the Creator might be like, a just attached the Christian God to it, at least for now.

Of course, the universe may be one of countless many before it in a huge expansion/contraction cycle and it could be true for all I know. The problem with that theory is that the expansion must have started sometime, right? All things in this universe must start somewhere. So even if we are one of a zillion universes before us, the whole thing must have started somewhere and that's is why a Creator must have been involved.

That is the Creation portion of my faith, so now on to the Nihilist portion. Nihilism is dervied from the word "nil" or nothing. It is the belief that nothing matters, we are nothing, and the world is an illusion. I think that it sounds almost like the Buddhist teaching that "nothing is permenant; permenancy is an illusion". I beleive just that. Nothing lasts forever and we have proof of that in our daily lives. People die and animals inevitably die; stars use their nuclear fuel and collapse on themselves. I have decided that nothing we do really matters in the end. I came to this conclusion, again, through cosmology.

In recent years, cosmologists discovered, by observing the luminosity of distant super-nova, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This is a huge problem becasue all bodies in the universe will eventually begin moving at the speed of light away from each other. The process of cosmic monotony is longer and more complex than I wish to address in this entry, so I will say what the end result will be. The end result of trillions of years of expansion is that the sky will be absolutly black becasue there is no object large enough to provide illumination. Truly, there is no object larger than a positron (or mabye some exotic form of matter that has yet to be discovered) because all normal matter has degraded into quarks and quarks into something else. Even if something could emit light, the light would never reach anything because every particle is moving at least the speed of light away from every other particle. Normal radiation has also been streatched by cosmic expansion so that it has nearly no energy at all. The density of energy in the cosmic vaccum would be at an all-time low. One could move in trillions of light-years from any point and never see a speck of matter. Trying to get energy from anywhere would be like trying to squeeze a car from a pebble: next to impossible. How could life exist in such a place? How could anything I do affect this bleak outcome? How would loving my neighbour or giving to charity or even praying to God change the end result? No matter what I do, the universe will end up being utterly monotonous and devoid of energy. That is why I beleive that nothing we do matters at all, not in this world. I mean, if God meant for our actions to matter, why is Life's future so bleak?

That is not to say that I don't beleive in Heaven and Hell, it's just that I don't care if they do. If nothing I do in the universe matters, then when I die the universe will forget me forever. If there is an after-life, one that does last forever and where there are no phyisical limits, then I'll be happy to go there. I would enjoy having a conversation with the Creator to ask why things are they way they are. Also, I may not be a humanitarian, but I do care about humanity's future. I want the species to live forever and learn everything there is to know, just not in the state it is now. So I hope that there is some way to beat the laws of the universe, or just find a new universe to live in.

In conclusion, I do beleive in a Creator and an after-life, although I have no idea if the former cares or the latter exists for anyone. I do believe that nothing we do matters, so I'm effectively wasting my time, but I don't care (cuz nothing matters). I do beleive that humanity will endevour to exist as long as possible, but nothing lasts forever.

Please e-mail me with comments, questions, and such and I will get back to you.