other crazy thought 16

God’s existence rests with the individual, not science Ken Cowan, US Sep 30, 05 2:27pm


Arbibi Ashoy's letter God's existence, mathematically initially appears to be interesting, but a closer scrutiny of it, or even familiarity with basic physics for that matter, shows that it has several faults. First off, not all religions believe in one god. The Greeks certainly did not, nor did the Mayans, the Celts or countless other religions. The idea of a monotheistic religion first appeared during the Egyptian reign of Amenhotep IV, also known as Akhenaten, and disappeared for centuries following his death. The current idea of a single god, so in vogue at the present point in history, is a comparatively recent development in the history of global religion. Even in many modern religions, such as Wicca, the idea of a single deity is denied. To state that, ‘All religions believe in one God, just the name differs’ then, is folly, or ignorance, at best. Secondly, while Arbibi is to be commended on his knowledge of Einstein's Theory of Relativity and the classical Second Law of Thermodynamics, his understanding of them appears to be flawed, or incomplete. Einstein's equation posits that energy and mass are the same thing, merely in separate states, much as water can appear as a solid, liquid, or gas. The equation E = MC2 is actually the exchange formula for figuring out how much of one you get when you convert the other. Energy does not, then, ‘create’ matter, as Arbibi states, any more than gas-state water ‘creates’ ice. As to including the Second Law of Thermodynamics (energy can neither be created nor destroyed), well, put simply, that is wrong. Yes, on a larger scale, the Second Law does hold true, but once we begin to examine the laws of quantum physics, we see that this is, simply put, untrue. Instead, we see matter and energy constantly popping in and out of existence in a state called ‘vacuum fluctuation’. So long as the energy balance eventually returns to zero, matter and energy can be created and destroyed as much as one wishes. Some physicists have actually postulated that our entire universe may simply exist as one particularly long-lived vacuum fluctuation. None of this, naturally, refutes or proves the existence of a God or gods. Neither science nor mathematics can do that, at least as we presently understand them. The question of whether or not God exists, then, remains just as much on the individual, rather than science, as it ever has.