The chimp that does calculus

Alright, that was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek, teaser headline to reel you in, but it wasn’t totally pointless. I wanted to make an analogy that will probably help you understand why it’s okay to not have all of the answers around the evolution of the universe and still not be religious. Most people that I know who are, by their own admission, "apathetic about religion, but still believe in god", do so mainly because they haven’t found the holy grail (pun intended :) ) of the evolution theory. While science has undeniable facts around the history of the universe and has very cohesive, albeit complex theories about how a universe can be formed and destroyed, it hasn’t tied every single loose end, like recreating the big bang (though, as we speak, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in Switzerland is trying to do just that) or dark matter, etc. And that gives these religious fanatics enough of an excuse to debunk the rest of the theories by saying that since we cannot conclusively prove or recreate this process, it must not be true.

That’s where our analogy comes in. Let’s say we have a chimp, which is the closest relative to man that we know of (clue #1 for evolution, but that’s a different topic). Let’s say this chimp is smart… smarter than his other chimp brothers. Let’s say he can do cool tricks and arrange colors and numbers and even do simple math. And then let’s say we try to teach this chimp calculus. Not just basic calculus, but the whole nine yards. We teach it every possible derivate, integral, limit, etc. Does anyone expect it to learn any of it? No… not possible. Not by the chimp as we know it today. The reason is that a chimp, even a smart one, is limited by it’s genetic makeup. It is incapable of understanding complex concepts like calculus.

But that does not mean that calculus is not real or cannot be understood by a higher intelligence (read man… well, some people at least!)

That’s the same reasoning I use for humans understanding and explaining all of cosmology and astronomy. Just because we cannot piece together every last piece of the puzzle doesn’t mean it’s not true. Maybe we are limited by our powers of understanding and we are incapable of conceiving of something as complicated as the creation of a universe! Maybe the secret lies in a new dimension that we are yet to discover or might never do since our 6 senses do not allow for this new dimension to be recognized or measured! Maybe we are the chimp trying to figure out the calculus of the universe and we are genetically incapable of doing so.

But it still does not mean that the theories of evolution that have been proved so far and the facts of the universe (and multiverse) are false or optional. The only thing limiting us from accepting these facts and using it to propel us forward is this dangerous, abysmal, controlling stories of religion and the consequences of not following "the rules". The sooner we recognize the dangers of believing in these types of backward ideologies, the better off we will be as a species.

A universe from nothing

Those who know me know I'm an atheist. More importantly, I am extremely anti-religion. Not to be confused with anti-spirituality, but strictly anti-"organizations who take themselves too seriously in the name of religion and brain wash people into believing that their god is better than yours". It's very hard to talk to these religious fanatics since, when all else fails, they throw words like "dogma" and "inner feeling"... things that cannot be verified by any means known to man. But when I sometimes do talk to them, one of the final defensive arguments is "well you can't explain how the universe began since you cannot create something out of nothing".

That's actually a valid argument and something that the scientific community has always had a hard time answering. My only argument to that point until now has been "well, just because we cannot prove the exact instant and method in which the universe was created billions of years ago doesn't mean the religious theories are correct. There are still several other FACTS that support the evolution theory much more clearly and without doubt that any creationism story can ever hope to do". I still stand by that argument since we've already proven (and I mean without doubt or prejudice) that the sun is close to 14 billion years old and almost at half it's life span, that the big bang did in fact occur, that there are actually several universes (multiverse), that millions of other galaxies exist and have existed over a very long period of time with a very good probability of having sustained life, etc. But that's not enough for the bible thumpers... they need proof (which, coming from a bunch that implicitly believed the first "invisible man in the sky" story that their parents and pastors fed them, is kinda funny!).

So I've always been fascinated by the work done by theoretical physicists and the field of cosmology since that's the field of science that explains a lot of what has happened and what we can expect to see over the next 14 billion years, should we somehow find a way to survive that long. One of the prominent members of this scientific community is Dr. Lawrence Krauss; he's a theoretical physicist who runs the Origins project at Arizona State University's Cosmology department. He delivered a very famous lecture, now titled "A universe from nothing"; it's about an hour long and does get quite technical, though he does a great job of dumbing it down for people like me. Now I'm no scientist or even pretend to understand a lot of what they say. But just because I don't understand it, doesn't mean it's not true. It's that blatant audacity of the religious community that pisses me off the most; that if they can't understand it, it can't be true. If they'd only stop and consider the fact that they are too stupid and closed minded to even comprehend what's being said, then a lot of this nonsense would stop.

In any case, for those searching for alternate explanations and a slice of the complicated truth, this is a must see: http://www.youtube.com/user/richarddawkinsdotnet#p/u/34/7ImvlS8PLIo
Hopefully this will at least open your eyes to the possibility of a vast collection of facts that is out there.

Happy viewing!
- Fred