The most profoundly unanswerable question that can be asked is ‘where do we come from’. Despite attempts from either religious or scientific ideology, the question remains unanswered for one simple reason; nothing we know can explain it. Many religious believers claim God as the creator, but that incites the question ‘what created God’. Science sometimes uses the Big Bang theory to describe the creation of everything, but again, this reverts to the ‘what’ question. What created the big bang? Until the notion that something comes from nothing can be understood, there’s no way to answer the infinitely regressing question of ‘what created what’.
Understanding something from nothing is a distressful endeavor. It might take wood to build a chair, a human to chop the wood, a planet to grow the wood, matter to build the planet, energy to create the matter, a universe to house the energy, the big bang to create the energy, and ….shit, what to create the big bang? The same thing happens with God. There comes a point when the human experience intercedes with our ability to explain the creation of existence. We can’t explain something from nothing and that’s what makes understanding the question so ambiguous and perhaps even impossible.
But, of course humans (being the epitome of the desire to answer questions) have very creative ways of disambiguating the ambiguous. Religion has God and science has the big bang and the best answer that either have given in explaining what created the creator is ‘nothing created the creator, the creator always was’. To me, this fringes on the higher end of probability and recently I had a revelation.
Though it doesn’t come without criticism, I self identify as an agnostic. I don’t dismiss the notion of God as the creator, but I also don’t surmise it. To what degree am I agnostic? Am I 50/50, 30/70, 70/30? I’m agnostic about that too. I don’t know. What I can say is that my agnosticism has made me overwhelmingly curious about the origin of this experience we call reality. Questions flood my brain day and night about it. Yeah, I lose sleep over it and because I’m not well schooled in the sciences or mathematics of either cosmology or quantum mechanics, my agitation with the question only intensifies. Imagine trying to explain the beauty of something without the capacity for language, that’s the level of frustration.
Nevertheless, I have spent a great deal of time managing around my own limitations and as I mentioned earlier, I recently came across what (at least in my mind) was an epiphany regarding existence. It actually came as a result of discussions with a religious believer. When I asked, what created God, the response was “Nothing created God, God always was”. Up front, I saw this as another pathetic blinded by religion attempt to take the easy out in avoiding an unanswerable question, God did it. But during a session of attempted sleep (because that’s all I can do, attempt to sleep), I imagined a God who was never beginning and tried to make sense of the implications this would have. That’s when it hit me, I realized that very simply, it makes more sense to believe that at some level of creation, there was no creator. But doesn’t that contradict my earlier point about the infinitely regressing ‘what created what’ question? Not if you assert a new belief in conjunction, time does not exist.
In order to have a beginning, time must exist, otherwise the notion of a beginning makes no sense. If there was a beginning, there is now time. A beginning means there was no before and thus, time is born. So, the question of what created the creator is only unanswerable if you believe in a beginning where by the question of a creating predecessor of the creator becomes a perpetual loop. If you dismiss a beginning (thus dismissing time) you’ve freed up a lot of room for new thought. You’ve solved the issue of something from nothing and you’ve answered the question…at some level, there is no creator.
Time is so pervasive in our lives and seemingly ubiquitous across the universe that for some it’s an almost equally difficult concept to fathom as that of something from nothing. But I myself find that concept significantly easier to grasp. The idea that time is an illusion of human thought opens the door to understanding that everything that is always was and even farther, likely will always be.
An unintended consequence of this realization is that it lends credibility more to religion than anything else. The Bible describes God as never beginning and never ending and that’s really all that makes sense when it comes to existence. It’s possible that deists in the time of writing the Bible thought this through and purposely inserted it in order to more easily dispel non believer’s inquiries on the creation of God. But this is unlikely because to catch something this undetectable and miss something as obviously falsifiable as building a latter to heaven would be too inconsistent.
This doesn’t mean that I now lean more towards God in my agnosticism, nor does it mean that I’m right about time. Again, I’m agnostic, even on the subject of this writing. Yeah, I’m a fence sitter. I don’t know what created existence, or what created time, or that time is not real. All that I’ve actually done for myself here is expand my mind to a new theory that helps me make better sense of my world. I don’t have anything concrete for my beliefs, I only have what I’ve experienced and with that, I’ve painted a new picture for myself to take solace in when I come across the frustration of existence.
For a long time, I’ve wanted to put my thoughts in writing, but it’s not until recently that I’ve felt I have anything revealing to say. Perhaps, I still don’t have anything to say, but at the very least, I hope this incites conversation from both religious and non-religious thinkers. I will continue to think about the world and will continue to write down my thoughts. I’m hoping to consider this chapter 1 of my very real thoughts about a potentially unreal reality 🙂
Does God Exist: Not with Time 