God In The Details
One of the deepest questions that can ever be raised is the question of ultimate reality. The existence of mankind cannot be divorced from the existence of the universe. The universe’s origin and that of life itself, and therefore the existence of mankind all have one common source. They are all parts of the greater whole of reality.
Information can be a difficult term to grasp. We assume the makeup of a drop of water, that it has certain properties. We never give much attention to the how and why those information parts of a drop of water came to be, or the changes that take place within them under certain conditions, say heat or cold.
When science describes a certain physical object, it includes in the description certain information about that object. This listing of information is uniquely attached to that object and that object alone. If you are describing a red rubber ball or a hydrogen atom, the sum and total of that description is the total of that objects information.
Having said that, how do we consider mankind’s existence? Dose he belong to this universe and also to dimensions beyond that? Or is mankind confined to his physical existence, nothing more than atoms, bacteria and cosmos?
This last idea is a popular one these days. A number of possible explanations have been offered up ever since it was discovered that the universe had a beginning. However, these explanations frequently forget to include in their offerings that natural processes cannot and do not produce information. (Natural processes being those things that can be observed by man to operate according to natural laws.)
It is an accepted fact that intelligence produces information. Red rubber balls produce nothing and your pet cat simply exists as itself, and yet information is produced. We know much more today about our universe than we did 200 years ago. Not that anything was discovered in the sense of invention, no, information was discovered, and therefore produced, which was there all along. This implies that there is intelligence behind every thing in the universe.
For example, dust particles contain a small amount of information. A throw rug contains a larger amount. A vacuum cleaner contains still more information and your house even more than that. The laws of information demand that increased information must accompany increase in organization. This means that the Macy’s day parade balloons can be bigger than a birthday party balloon but not be more organized and thus NOT have more information, but the space shuttle does indeed have much, much more information.
Those who proffer natural scenarios for creation and reality often ignore this law or treat it lightly and as if it were of no consequence. The ordinary man on the street who likes to listen to atheist comedians has little knowledge of this law of increased information and therefore no problem with ideas like evolution and the self-assembly process.
The discussion of natural processes forming our universe varies from the sublime to the ridiculous. It’s been offered that the universe “popped” into existence due to quantum fluctuations, all the way down to a happy accident of chemicals that bounced into one another. Which, by the way, I have never seen, and having driven on the Los Angeles freeway system for six years now, you would think I would see brand new and better cars “popping” up all over the place due to the way they crash into each other on a daily basis here. But that doesn’t happen. Accidents just create disorder and waste, not new forms of existence. That’s observable science.
Let’s talk astrophysics for a moment, since I like studying the stars and find they cannot be ignored in light of our own existence. Once upon a time, it has been said, the stars were all uniform. There are those who say that if you were to scan any region of space a long, long time ago and far, far away; that you would have seen that one region contained the same amount of stars as any other region. However, with the passage of time, the initial symmetry of stars changed into the increased organization we see today. This appears as a faster and greater number of stars toward the center, and slower, fewer stars toward the exterior.
We’re told that this structure displays self organization. The previous mix of uniform stars has now changed in a way that is understood to form structure. Therefore your dust, rug, vacuum cleaner and house have assembled themselves, so to speak.
The idea of natural self assembly is intriguing and speaks to a flawed part of the human nature, but it is essentially untrue. The structure we see in the heavens, the appearance of symmetry, with numerous stars clustering here and there, tells us that the stars were programmed to be this way from the beginning. The Big Bang had within it the imbalances that produced the structure we see today. The passage of time has magnified that structure a thousand times over.
The reason that stars cluster is because they were never uniformly distributed. If a star system were truly uniform, the force acting on each star in any direction would be counter balanced by a force of equal and opposite direction. If the system were symmetrical about it’s center, then we would expect symmetry to be preserved. No star would change it’s velocity without a corresponding change somewhere else. Each star with its myriad of sister stars would present a uniform stellar pattern across the skies. (Like throwing out a rolled up fishing net flat on the ground.)
But, we see something quite different than that. We see structure that was predetermined before the creation of the universe. This immense information is on display throughout the universe, and it tells of an intelligence that is more than just our physical reality. It is an intelligence that was there before hand, or else... the information has no source. And, how can that be? (If we accept that intelligence produces information.)
Let’s consider the human body. Man is nature’s highest organized structure. We know that information within the body; height, weight, sex, eye color, hair color, ect., is carried within the genes. This information can only be observed under a microscope that was just invented in the last century.
Scientifically, we describe how DNA information organizes chemicals into a human body. Unbalanced electrical forces between the side chains of twenty or so amino acid residues spontaneously fold a polypeptide gene product into a three dimensional protein structure we call the body. (whew!) The resultant structure was there all the time, just like penicillin in mold, waiting to be “discovered” for thousands of years. The information for the body was unseen along the DNA strand waiting to be birthed, if you will, as a human body.
All information necessary to produce an assembled structure is already present before the structure appears. As for the universe, the information necessary to its formation can be traced directly back to its origins. In principle, the ability of gravitational systems to undergo self assembly is no different than what happens when a drop of water becomes a snowflake. Natural forces produce movement of system parts in response to pre-existing symmetries. (I know, but stay with me I’ll try to break it all down.) As time passes, unseen information contained inside the basics of a thing is magnified into something that is easily seen with the naked eye. The more its organization, the greater the amount of information is needed to describe it. Easy for a red rubber ball, harder for a skyscraper.
Okay, so water and a snowflake. When water in the atmosphere produces snowflakes, you might think that its organization has increased. Certainly the pictures of snowflakes are more complex than a drop of water. But that’s not true. We actually need less information to describe a snowflake. Why? Because when water freezes, it actually creates millions of little ice crystals that have sixfold symmetry. Ice crystals are identical to each other, those that make up the snowflake, not the snowflakes themselves, and yet no two constructed snowflakes are alike. Amazing! The information for one ice crystal, that multiplied and rearranged makes up the whole snowflake, is consistently the same.
As atmospheric water turns into a snowflake it loses information. This is true for all natural processes. Entropy rules the universe, right? Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, you see it all the time.
When we try to look into the origins of the universe, we are really looking for the original information that developed into everything we see. Where did these “blueprints” come from? Everything traces back to the original condition that held this information. To explain the structures we see we must first understand the source. Can we explain water and it’s benefits to the body to natives living in the bush without an understanding of it’s atomic structure? I mean ultimately, if indeed we want them to be educated about the world they live in and not just satisfied that they know enough to live.
Natural processes are mechanisms that allow things to unfold, but initial information directs what we ultimately see and experience.
Parachutes are packed away in the back of a kit on a paratroopers back, we don’t see the parachute until it opens up in free-fall. Pre-ordained conditions, when followed in order and with competence, produce a parachute that was always there in potential before we ever see it.
The same is true of our universe. Moments before a big bang, it pre-existed in “information”. Creation of the universe aligns with the supernatural because natural processes in and of themselves do not produce information. Therefore, logically and scientifically, the galaxies must have been pre-formed within the fabric of space time before even the atoms were created.
(Take THAT, Sheldon.)
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