Say you buy into the whole Big Bang, 3 deg K cosmic background radiation, universe underwent rapid expansion from the size of a grapefruit, thing.
Who made the grapefruit? What caused it to pop into existence fraught with all its incomprehensible potentiality at that particular moment, allegedly approximately 15 billion years ago? What was happening before that?[/quote]
The big bang is the scientific materialists one “miracle” they need to make the whole thing work.
From a point of singularity – exploding into a plasma of electrons into a thermodynamic cooling process, that brought about planets, suns, chemical processes, to, as far as we know, biological processes, in one tiny area of this project – to simple organisms that undergo an “evolutionary process”, then complex organisms – to organisms with self-awareness, to complex social structures, and organisms that try and figure the whole thing out through an interconnected mind-connecter called the internet and so forth and so on. That is quite the trek from a point of singularity.
Then you get into things like dark matter and dark energy, which supposedly comprises like 99% of all matter. This is where quantum theory gets into what the mystics of the ancient world have always said – that the physical world is just a mirage.
Then on the biological side, we are all, of course, permeable to our environment as we routinely exchange materials with the world. We are semi-permanent patterns of flux with an existence independent of the specific material substances that compose us, just as an ocean wave only temporarily comprises a certain collection of water molecules. The molecules simply bob up and down as the wave moves forward onto new ones. Similarly, even though the matter of the universe cycles through each of us at varying rates and in a unique way, we share this matter and, in our relationships, co-determine each other’s ever-mutating patterns of flux. Neither the matter nor its patterning constitute autonomous, independent units. The self has only a conditional reality
If the nature of the universe is to create paths for energy to flow from highly organized or concentrated forms to disorganized or chaotic forms, then why (you might ask) are we (and other living things) both highly organized (complex) and persistent over millennia of time? It has been suggested that life is the only anti-entropic tendency in the universe – that somehow we violate the Second Law (that most universal of all scientific principles) with impunity. Ain’t so.
Life is a verb. Life is the most effective process toward restoring equilibrium. We go with the flow, but in a very creative way. If the Second Law – the necessary devolution of energy into entropy – is mandatory, and if that law requires a constant movement toward the degrading of energy differentials (or gradients) to the lowest common denominator (or equilibrium), then wouldn’t it make sense for the universe to employ clever methods for accelerating the generation of chaos? You betcha! And you’re IT.
As something of an aside, the first great American populizer of esoteric Eastern thought, Alan Watts, suggested in his 1966 book, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, that the whole universe consists of a Cosmic Self playing hide-and-seek, hiding from ITSelf by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe, forgetting what IT really is; the upshot being that we are all IT in disguise and that our conception of ourselves as an “ego in a bag of skin” is a myth; the entities we consider separate “things” are merely processes of the whole. Interestingly, this exotic philosophical perspective is now the core of Gaia theory, which has become broadly accepted in the biophysical sciences, the basis of epigenetics which postulates that DNA expression is controlled from outside our “bag of skin” by environmental factors, and central to evolutionary biology which notes that the mitochondria in our cells that produce chemical energy were (are?) non-human bacteria. We are as much our environment as our in-vironment.
