When All Was Just Total Chaos

Plato talks of the Divine Craftsman who brought order to the universe, writes MUKUL SHARMAIn the Timaeus, Plato presents an elaborate account of the formation of the universe — especially regarding the order and beauty he observes in it.The universe, he proposes, is the product of a rational, purposive and beneficent agency, the handiwork of a Divine Craftsman who, imitating an unchanging and eternal (platonic) model, imposes mathematical order on a preexistent chaos to generate the ordered universe. Or as the science fiction writer Philip K Dick puts it in How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later: “In Plato’s Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform the chaos into order...(Meaning) what if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is gradually transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?” Let’s see if we can put that in a somewhat scientific context now. For instance, science tells us that the universe as we know it came into being at what is called the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago, when an infinitely small, dense and hot singularity expelled itself.Science also tells us that it was at this moment that all matter, energy, space and time came into existence too. (Which is why it makes no sense to ask what was there before the Big Bang because there could be no ‘before’ without time existing.) But, does it take such a great leap of faith now to propose that an event which could have created so much of the totality of all material and non-materials things could not have also created consciousness? Obviously, this would not be a limited human type of consciousness, because humans were still about 14 billion years down the line, but a far greater, all-encompassing cosmic kind of consciousness. It would then also be correct to maintain that this cosmic Agency had not created the universe but ‘simply found it one day’ — on the exact day in fact that It and the universe came into being.The same Agency would also find that the universe was “in a state of total chaos” because that’s what cosmologists tell us the newborn universe was like.They say the abounding energies at that time were simply too high for even the tiniest subatomic particles to exist independently and, thus, it was all a chaotic mass and mess of a pre-subatomic plasma. In other words,‘not quite real’;‘a sort of illusion’.And,of course, everything was in darkness. It would take approximately another 300,000 years before the first photons broke free and said something like the equivalent of ‘Let there be light’. And finally, this Agency which Plato described as a ‘Divine Craftsman’, would be like it has been described and posited by all cultures through human history and up to the present, logical, judicious, resolute, charitable and, ultimately, good.It would realise that nothing meaningful could emerge from chaos and begin instead to impose upon it a ‘mathematical order’. Funnily, a lot of leading mainstream physicists also believe in the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis which states that our external physical reality is a mathematical structure. Looks like Plato was on the ball more than two thousand years ago! Going through the above some people might think that the argument provided is that science created God. But they would be wrong. At the time of the Big Bang and for an extremely short interval thereafter, science as we know it breaks down completely and cannot say or predict anything about the prevailing conditions. Therefore, all we can infer is an Event that gave rise to matter, energy, space and time also gave rise to a Cosmic Consciousness. However, since there was no time before the Event, God has indeed existed from the beginning of time.■ Post your comments at speakingtree.in