Faith and lack of belief are two peas in a pod.

Faith and lack of belief are two peas in a pod.

I wrote earlier about how Yann Martel's Pi (in “Life of Pi”) recognizes in an atheist a fellow believer, but of a different sort. He saves his scorn for agnostics who cannot decide.

An interesting thought occurs to me. I have noted before that modern cosmology was presaged by St. Augustine who writes that people trying to ask “what came before God” are asking the wrong question, since time itself is a created thing, and does not exist outside its aspect as a dimension of the known universe.

Atheist apologetics frequently catch onto this. When they don't use the more primitive argument (“what came before God”) they take to task that if theists suppose that God exists in an extra-dimensional state, that this is unfalsifiable. We cannot observe that which is not within the universe, so they cannot test for the existence of a God we believe to be in such a state.

However, the Big Bang cosmology, combined with the anthropic principle, has always been deeply troubling to those physicists who are not at least Deists (as both Einstein and Hawking are reputed to be.)

One approach in response to this has been to come up with a theory of a multiverse on which our universe is stretched in almost a two dimensional fashion in subspace (a brane.) In this infinitely larger (but unverifiable) multiverse, a nearby universe is stretched out just above us. When these two universes do the Hubble expansion thing such that they are nearly empty and depleted, they are drawn close to one another and touch, setting off a catastrophic reaction, blasting each universe into a big bang like recreation (but with matter much more widely dispersed than would result from a big bang explosion.)

Voila – steady state ressurected, God can take a vacation, as Nietsche's prophesied vanquishing has been reclaimed. One problem – it relies on the same unfalsifiable premise as the non-temporal God of St. Augustine's conception. We can't prove or even observe this nearby universe whose brane collides with ours, only pick up on some of the after-effects of this “collision” (just like with the big bang.)

So the result? We have two completely unverifiable, but plausible premises. One suggests a God. The other suggests an endlessly repopulating universe that doesn't need one.

I may have chosen the half full glass. But my reasoning is objectively no less sound for having done so. :-)