Most people fall into the trap of believing that there is either;
1. A fully formed, often anthropomorphised, conscious, sentient, all knowing, all powerful, all loving God, who has a particular interest in, and cares for us; or
2. There is no God.
Dawkins is good at demolishing belief in the first of these possibilities and the mistake that most people make as a consequence is to believe that his arguments therefore prove that the second possibility is therefore correct.
Science indicates that the universe came into existence with the ‘Big Bang’ approximately 13.5 billion years ago. No one knows what existed prior to the Big Bang and the Big Bang consisted of a sudden out-rushing of raw energy from a central point, filling the void of nothingness that existed beforehand.
Whatever existed in the void of nothingness before the Big Bang, and which occupied the central point, was the source of all of the energy from which our universe has formed.
Whatever existed prior to the Big Bang – the act of universal energy creation – no longer appears to exist. It appears that whatever it was became completely consumed in the act of universal energy creation.
That source of energy could be viewed as a ‘creator’ of sorts, because from the energy created during the Big Bang, all of the matter of the Universe has evolved, including us.
What we do not know at this stage, is what form the Creator took. We have no way of knowing whether the Creator was conscious, or sentient, or all knowing, or all powerful. Furthermore, there is no evidence to suggest that the Creator was all loving and certainly none to suggest that the Creator has or had any particular interest in, or care for us.
The universe, or the Cosmos as it should be more accurately described is an immense random generation device in which matter has formed from the energy that was created, and has evolved through many stages, gradually increasing in complexity and the level of consciousness achieved by the most highly evolved life forms.
In searching for the purpose of life and the purpose of the Cosmos, there are many as yet unknowns, but it is clear that the Cosmos is a mechanism that facilitates evolution – the evolution of inanimate matter, but also living matter, through ever increasing levels of complexity knowledge, power and consciousness.
We humans, as far as we can tell, stand at the pinnacle of that evolutionary process, but there is no evidence to suggest that we are the ‘end product’, in fact the contrary. All of the evidence suggests that we are as Nietzsche describes, a ‘stepping stone’ from sub-man to super-man and beyond.
Cosmotheism asserts that providing we continue the process of evolution, mankind, or at least the currently most highly evolved elements of humanity, such as the White race, will evolve through ever higher and higher levels of consciousness, power and knowledge until our future generations achieve a state of total consciousness and omnipotence. This will be the culmination of the Creator’s work, the metamorphosis of the Creator from a pre-physical state, either with or without consciousness, but with an indefatigable ‘will to be’, through many stages to his/her eventual complete self-realisation as a conscious, sentient, all powerful, all knowing entity – Godhood.
This belief is the fundamental tenet of Cosmotheism, which unlike any other religion, is completely consistent with science and nature, and does not rely on blind faith or superstitious mumbo-jumbo in order to attain credibility.
By Max Musson © 2013
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Rosalind Werner
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This is a very interesting article.
Alec Suchi
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Interesting article Max in which you clarify the tenets of cosmotheism. The Big Bang Theory is now widely accepted in the scientific community, while Fred Hoyles’ Steady State Theory had some adherents at one time.
Time understood in terms of the Beginning and the End reveals a linear understanding while the ancient Greeks understood time in terms of circularity, whereby there would not be a beginning or end. In that context they viewed the universe as eternal. Thus had they been aware of the Big Bang, they would have understood it not as an absolute beginning of the universe or cosmos but merely a succeeding phase of earlier events.
I hope there will be more replies to this article, but it would be difficult to surpass Mr Millard’s recent success.
John Salisbury
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I’m not sure what relevance the pondering of ancient Greeks has to our current understanding of the early universe. In recent times it was considered a serious possibility that we lived in an oscillating universe – one which would decelerate under the gravity of matter and energy until reaching a maximum size, then collapsing into a singularity and rebounding in another Big Bang, and so on ad infinitum. However, we now know that the universe is not only expanding but accelerating under the influence of dark energy. Since the effect of dark energy is increasing relative to ordinary matter, dark matter and energy, this acceleration will go on and the universe will expand forever. It seems that in this regard, time is not cyclical.
However, cosmic inflation gives us the possibility of a kind of cycle: some cosmologists think that the physics which allows inflation also predicts that it does not only happen once, implying that there might be an endless number of bubble universes coming into being all the time. In any case, none of this information was available to the ancient Greeks as you have pointed out. I suppose it’s still interesting to compare our current understanding to early attempts and see where we were wrong.
John Stephens
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A good freind of mine does not believe in the traditional Christian God. I do, to a degree.
He states the same thing in every discussion/argument about God or no God, and that is:
“If God existed, who created God?” My answer in public or otherwise, is simply that It could be, that God is actually the first sentient being.
This usually results in even more heated debates. However, logic demands that this must be the case. If my freind thinks we got here by evolution, then there may have been an initial intelligent being.
We came from this being, via his billions or trillions, of years as a lonely, ever growing “first born”. Other than that, we have to go back to an unthinking state of low-IQ hunter-gatherers, and simply live for today
Max Musson
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Hi John,
It’s good to see that you are still with us.
Your friend I would assume, has always made assumption one, that God is “a fully formed, [probably] anthropomorphised, conscious, sentient, all knowing, all powerful, all loving” entity, and I would have to agree that such a being or entity could not just ‘pop out’ of nothingness. Such a highly complex entity would in all probability need to have formed over eons of time. However the ‘creator’ — the cause of the Big Bang — need not have been anything of the sort. It conceivably need not have been conscious or sentient at all. It simply needed to be something just sufficient to trigger a chain reaction in the same way that the splitting of a tiny, otherwise insignificant hydrogen atom is sufficient to cause a nuclear explosion.
This is however, the subject matter for a further article.
John Salisbury
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Hi John. I’d like to make a few points in response to your comment. I think the question about God’s own origin is a perfectly valid one, and one which Christians have yet to come up with a satisfactory response to.
In trying to demonstrate the existence of God, believers often invoke the cosmological argument, the basic form of which is generally something like the following: everything which exists has a cause, the universe exists, and therefore that the universe has a cause (and that the cause is God).
There are several problems with this argument. Firstly, it’s not necessarily true that everything which exists has a cause. This is an extrapolation from the fact that we can identify a cause for most things. There is no logic which says this has to be true of all things, or of the universe – it is a heuristic, nothing more. If this premise were true, it would indeed lead to an infinite regress as your friend has pointed out.
This brings me to the second problem: it is special pleading to say that God doesn’t require a cause to exist. In fact, the argument violates one of its own premises if it insists that God has no cause. You can’t get out of it by saying that God is the first sentient being – there’s nothing about sentience which abrogates a thing from needing a cause.
Finally, I’d like to point out that we don’t even know that the universe did come into existence, as opposed to having always existed. Yes, you could say the same thing about God, but then Occam’s Razor dictates we do away with God as a necessary cause, as an eternal universe doesn’t need a creator because it was never created.
Does it even make sense to talk about a time when nothing existed? Personally, I think we’re already in trouble by the time we say that nothing “existed”. Therefore, maybe it makes no sense to talk about the coming into existence of everything.
You say that if we got here by evolution, there may have been an initial intelligent being. While not strictly untrue, this statement misses the whole point of evolution which is to explain how the diversity of life arose without the need for an intelligent designer, and it does so admirably.
Can you explain why you think we’d need to go back to being low-IQ hunter-gatherers living only for today (incidentally, a doctrine Jesus himself espouses in the Bible when he advises his followers to take no thought for the morrow) if we reject notions of an intelligent creator?
John Stephens
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Max.
I’m not just “still with us”, I’m everywhere I can be, watching silently mostly, but popping up in various places where the intellectual stimulation is too much to ignore.
Also, our lively differences, publicly espoused, made for a good airing of opinions that normally, result in silence from “hurt feelings” etc. I have seen it all, and still know instinctively, what is required to S.O.S.
This article is a very good example of “Site ownership diplomacy”, and erudite jigsawing of intense personal feelings on a saw subject matter. Well done
John Stephens
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“Sore”… early morning comment appologies.
John Salisbury
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The dichotomy Max presents at the beginning of the article between an anthropomorhpic god and no god at all is indeed a false one. I very much doubt Richard Dawkins buys into the dichotomy as I have heard him talk about deism (the belief in a non-specific, non-personal, non-interfering god) as opposed to theism (the belief in a specific, personal, interfering god). I would be disappointed with any atheist who thinks that arguments against the existence of the former prove the non-existence of the latter, because this is faulty logic as Max rightly points out.
There are a few problems with what comes next: “Science indicates that the universe came into existence with the ‘Big Bang’ approximately 13.5 billion years ago”. The Big Bang is not really thought of as the coming into existence of the universe by most cosmologists, who now believe that something like cosmic inflation must have happened – in this model, the very early universe underwent a massive and extremely rapid expansion from a sub-atomic to a macroscopic size, magnifying tiny quantum fluctuations into the large-scale structures that would become the galaxy clusters we see in the cosmos today. Inflation helps to explain the flatness and extreme homogeneity of the universe and is allowed by general relativity. The Big Bang can perhaps be thought of as the moment this inflationary expansion gave way to the normal Hubble expansion we observe today.
Max then writes “No one knows what existed prior to the Big Bang and the Big Bang consisted of a sudden out-rushing of raw energy from a central point, filling the void of nothingness that existed beforehand.” I have a number of problems with this statement. Firstly, as I have explained in the previous paragraph, what must have existed prior to the Big Bang was a very tiny universe in an extremely hot, dense state. True, we do not have a full understanding of the physics in this regime, but that’s not to say we know nothing about it.
Secondly, we know there is no central point to the universe. The cosmological principle states that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic – it is made of the same stuff arranged in the same way everywhere, and there is no preferred direction: point a telescope anywhere on the sky and the average makeup and arrangement of galaxies is the same. Moreover, this would be true wherever you placed the telescope – for example, since the universe is expanding it looks as though every galaxy is moving away from us, but observers in every galaxy would see exactly the same thing. This principle is not just an assumption but a fundamental observation. There is no centre to the universe, and in fact relativity works on the basis that there is no absolute frame of reference – if there was a centre which every observer agreed upon, this could not hold and relativity would be wrong.
This can be hard to visualize, so I like to use an analogy – picture a two-dimensional universe, consisting only of the directions of forwards and backwards and left and right – there is no up and down. Imagine this universe existing as the inner surface of a three-dimensional balloon. As the balloon is inflated, the area of the two-dimensional universe increases but the centre of expansion only exists in a higher dimension – to a person living on the inside surface of the balloon, there would be no centre point at any time, not even when the balloon was microsopic in size, but it would be possible to perceive any two points on the balloon getting further apart. This analogy is far from perfect but it should give you an idea of how it can be possible for there to be no centre when your intuition tells you that there is one.
Thirdly, I have problems with the phrase “filling the void of nothingness that existed beforehand”. The idea of the Big Bang is not that all the space in the universe today was already in place, with the matter and energy initially concentrated at a tiny point within it and then exploding outwards to fill it up – rather, the space itself was much smaller compared to today, and the energy existed (albeit at an extremely high density) throughout that region. This space expanded, cooling and diluting the matter and energy as it went, until it was cool and diffuse enough to condense into first protons and neutrons, then an ionised plasma, then neutral atoms and finally structures like stars and planets.
I don’t know that it makes much sense to talk about a “void” existing outside of this space, as this is all the space we know. I also don’t know if it makes any sense to talk about a void of nothingness existing – we can never observe true nothingness, and I really doubt whether it even makes sense to talk about “nothing” in the first place. Just because we can construct a syntatically valid English sentence containing the word “nothing” does not mean that it has physical meaning.
I hope my explanation of the Big Bang is sufficient to explain why it’s problematic to talk about it as an “act of universal energy creation”. Scientists don’t believe that the Big Bang created the energy in the universe, but rather that it caused it to exist over a much larger and consequently cooler volume of space. There is no evidence that anything beyond this existed before the Big Bang to be consumed by it. The source of energy Max then attempts to label a “Creator” (a term with enormous unnecessary baggage – note also the capital “C”) is simply the energy itself, but earlier in time. If we are going to arbitrarily call this a creator then I think it does more to confuse the definition of the word “creator” than it does to explain the early universe, and risks smuggling religious baggage into the conversation – most people understand “Creator” to mean some sort of conscious, designing intelligence even if this is not the meaning Max is appealing to. Millard, whose articles frequently appear on this site, certainly seems to believe this, so I hope you can see why I’m concerned about using this word.
I agree with the next paragraph in its entirety. We don’t know what form any capital-C Creator took (or if there was one at all) or any of its other possible characteristics. I celebrate Max’s refusal of the temptation to conclude that a universe-creating entity would have any interest in human lives, as I think this is an enormous hyperbolic inflation of the true scale of our role in the cosmos, and profoundly arrogant.
The terms “universe” and “cosmos” are both used with varying definitions so I won’t quibble on this point. I will quibble with the assertion that it is “an immense random generation device in which matter has formed from the energy that was created, and has evolved through many stages, gradually increasing in complexity and the level of consciousness achieved by the most highly evolved life forms”. Firstly, there is no evidence that the universe is a random generation device. The word “device” again smuggles in the concept of agency and design.
Secondly, the overwhelming majority of the matter in the universe has not evolved to the point of consciousness; the only occurrence of this we know takes the form of a tiny subset of the organic matter which inhabits a thin layer on the surface of one planet. I also object to the idea that more consciousness corresponds to being more “highly evolved”. Every species that exists today is as highly evolved as we are – it has been through the same duration of evolutionary change as us, and in many cases these species are hardier than us and likely to outlast us. Evolution simply selects for organisms which are better at surviving and passing on their genes. To this end, a highly evolved organism is just one which is very efficient at survival and reproduction. We are hardly the best species by this metric.
Max then moves onto talking about the search for the “purpose of life” and even worse, the “purpose of the Cosmos”, as if these are facts about nature to be discovered. However, purpose is a human concept, and again smuggles the idea of design into the conversation. We design things with a purpose in mind to do a certain job. Therefore we tend to assume that all things must have a purpose, especially when their influences on the universe take on a discernible pattern. However, to extrapolate this mode of thinking to things we have no evidence were designed at all is to commit the basest of creationist fallacies. The cosmos does facilitate evolution, but then an airplane facilitates flying into skyscrapers – clearly this was not the purpose the designers of the airplane had in mind. A rock found lying on the ground facilitates stone-age violence, but nobody built the rock with that in mind. Not everything that works is designed; not everything that exists has a purpose.
I have explained before that there is no reason to think that humans are at the pinnacle of evolution. For billions of years, evolution produced no intelligent life, and the universe seemed to be getting along just fine without us. It was only through a long series of geological disasters, random mutations and happenstance that we came about – there was no guarantee that this would happen, and even then we came close to extinction a number of times at the hands of “mother” nature. We may still be close to extinction at our own hands when the world’s vast arsenal of nuclear and biological weapons is considered. The universe is hardly fine-tuned for intelligent life.
I will agree with Max that there is no evidence to suggest we are an end product, but I will go further and suggest that there is no evidence we will evolve into a super-man either. There is much concern these days that our evolution is now dysgenic – that we are selecting for less-intelligent, less-hard-working, perhaps less fit people who are in a better position to have large numbers of children. I don’t know if this is the case, but it should at least be pause for thought for anyone who thinks we’re on a trajectory to some sort of godlike being. In any case, there is no mechanism in evolution to guarantee the evolution of greater and greater intelligence, nor any guarantee that we could artificially select for these characteristics. The only criteria for propagation in evolution are survival and reproduction, and this does not have to take an intelligent or strong or moral form.
I am pleased that Max concedes that the fundemantal tenet of cosmotheism is an assertion, as this displays a level of self-awareness and humility that most religious people don’t seem to possess. However, I will refer readers to my previous paragraphs for my opinion on his religion’s compatibility with science.
Max Musson
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Thanks John, I will endeavour to incorporate your feedback into future revisions of my hypothesis.
Wolf of the Sun
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John – forgive me if, by virtue of poor comprehension, I have missed the answer to this question in your erudite and informative post, but: what do cosmologists say, if anything, about how the “very tiny universe in an extremely hot, dense state” came to exist in the first place?
John Salisbury
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Firstly, thanks for your kind words. To my knowledge, cosmologists tend not to say anything definitive about how (or whether) the universe itself came to exist, although they might speculate. We do know that before a certain very early time, our model of the universe breaks down and so there is likely some new physics to be discovered in that regime, which may or may not cast light on your question.
I’m not necessarily convinced the question is answerable. We think we are used to things “coming into existence” in our everyday human experience and so we expect that there should be a similar origin for the cosmos, but this is merely an assumption. I’d also point out that things don’t really come into existence even in our everyday experience – anything that comes about is really a rearrangement of pre-existing matter and energy and not actually something totally new.
It may be that there is never a satisfactory answer because it simply doesn’t make sense to talk about what caused the universe to exist – this would have to be something that existed before the universe, implying the existence of time “before” the universe, but then we’ve only pushed the problem back a step – what caused time to exist, and what caused this cause? It surely doesn’t make sense to talk about something causing time, or existing “before” time. Maybe it’s just a brute fact that the universe exists and there was no beginning.
Sometimes the correct answer to a question is “we don’t know” because we don’t have sufficient information – pretending to know just for the sake of having an answer doesn’t do us any good.
Mark Holland
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A good place to help understand god is i feel the Holy Bible, i saw this article and i think its right up my street. i will use some bible verses to perhaps illustrate my point of view.
What follows is what i see god as.
The root attributes of Big God: Creator, Destroyer, Nature, Time and Destiny.
The root attributes of man: Creator, Destroyer, Nature, Time & Destiny.
If i haven’t missed anything out, did you notice anything? they are both the same.
Genesis 1.26 let us make man in our image, after our likeness 27 So god created man in his own image, in the image of god he created him
.
John 10.34 Is it not written in your law’ I said you are Gods’
Because of the root attributes this is why god appears to do nothing in times of great stress and need, but as the saying goes god works in mysterious ways.
The root attributes i regard as the base things that god and us do, there are of course many other things that god is responsible for but i regard those as the by products such as love and procreation.
And because its says in the Bible ‘Let us make man in our image’ God is Both male and Female in gender.
Max Musson
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It is a mistake to use the Bible as an authority. The Bible is of dubious provenance, having apparently been written over a period of many centuries by an assemblage of unknown and culturally/scientifically primitive Israelites/Palestinians/Jews etc. When someone uses the Bible as a reference, they might as well refer to the human origin folk myths of the Khoisan peoples of the Kalahari. Such myths are just that, myths, and most importantly, they have nothing to do with the peoples of Europe. If we must draw upon folk tales and myths, we have enough of our own in the form of Norse mythology.
Cosmotheism however provide a better alternative – a religion that serves the ethnic/racial interests of our people and which is consistent with both science and nature.
mark holland
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So what book would you suggest is closest as an authority on god? besides the the bible.
In my opinion the Bible should be read ‘literally’ but understood ‘mentally’ not like the Quran and Hadith which some people read literally and carry it out literally there is a difference.
The standard book of 66 books is not i regard the complete word of god because some books were taken out for various reasons like the Apocrypha for instance, but it perhaps to be taken as a guide to understanding things.
It is also full of ‘metaphors’ and i am not the only one who have said this,the word ‘Trumpet’ is mentioned lots of times in it, we have now D Trump president of the USA there’s no coincidence, its no accident the bible is written the way it is.
I know that there are certain stories which are hard to believe, but their are others that could well have happened and have happened, like Alexander the Great for instance that’s true.
Any way, western civilization is founded on some teachings in the book i don’t see Cosmo theism in the foundation of Europe.
Max Musson
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There is no need to cite any book as ‘the word of God’, least of all a book written by primitive nomadic Middle Eastern tribal scribes. As I stated earlier, if we want to embrace myths and folk tales and try to formulate a religion based on them, it would make more sense for the peoples of Europe to embrace the myths and folk tales of indigenous origin, that are the product of our own ancestors inspiration.
AS for the Bible, it is a long enough book with a sufficiently ambiguously rambling narrative, such that a passage can be found from one or another part of the Bible which could be interpreted metaphorically as having virtually any meaning one might wish to find. Therefore the particularly poor Trump/trumpet suggestion of yours is comparable with the various fraudulent interpretations made by purveyors of the Nostradamus prophesies.
Western civilisation evolved despite the adoption of Christianity, not because of it.