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Step 1: Articulate the Question
Answering the Primordial Existential Question invokes two possibilities. Option 1 is that the universe has always existed and possibly always will. Option 2 is that the universe had a beginning and possibly will also have an end. Many scientist subscribe to Option 1, believing with Stephen Hawking that “the universe is really self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have no beginning nor end, would simply be. What place then for a creator?”(9) While compelling, this option is also frustrating. It’s not enough to say that the universe is eternal; we need to explain how and why eternity makes sense.
And trying to answer the “how and why” frequently leads us, seemingly by default, to Option 2; if it exists, how did it begin? We assume that the question of why the universe exists can be answered by understanding its origin. Indeed, the preferred scientific description of the universe, the Big Bang model, would seem to suggest a beginning, a point when the initial “bang” occurred. However, this model elicits, but fails to answer, a fundamental question: where did the initial material of the universe come from? A number of solutions have been attempted, with Hawking addressing two of them. One solution is that since Time begins at the initial bang, it is meaningless to even ask what came before. “If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no observational consequences. One may say that time had a beginning at the big bang, in the sense that earlier times simply would not be defined.”(10) This observation is less than satisfactory since it still fails to explain how the universe began – and why. Hawking addresses the question of the initial material thusly:
When the universe was a single point, like the North Pole, it contained nothing. Yet there are now at least ten-to-the-eightieth particles in the part of the universe that we can observe. Where did all these particles come from? The answer is that relativity and quantum mechanics allow matter to be created out of energy in the form of particle/antiparticle pairs. And where did the energy come from to create this matter? The answer is that it was borrowed from the gravitational energy of the universe.(11)
The problem with this explanation is that we have a universe that “contains nothing” somehow containing “gravitational energy.” One still has to wonder where the gravitational energy came from. This description still fails to answer how it all began in the first place and may even lead to the idea that the universe must have been “created” out of nothing. Without a convincing solution to the problem of initial material, the argument that Time and the Universe began at the Big Bang threatens to become a quasi-theological notion with God as the Prime Prankster setting alight the firecracker. (I have this image of a pre-adolescent God running home to Mom, simultaneously thrilled by the noise and horrified by the mayhem He’s created.)
The solution intrinsic to Option 1, of course, is that the material of the universe was not created at all – it’s been around forever. Hawking’s developmental formula might still apply if we can explain a mechanism by which the gravitational energy existed without a beginning. But how do we explain that? One common answer enlarges the Big Bang model into a cyclical mechanism – as an eternal series of expansions followed by contractions (the Big Crunch) followed by yet another Big Bang and another expansion. A problem with this theory is that there seems to be no evidence that the universe’s expansion is slowing in anticipation of an eventual collapse. In fact, current observation suggests that the universe’s expansion is accelerating. Also, while the cyclical model may (or may not) describe the mechanism of the universe, it still does not explain how or why it exists at all.
The inability to solve this riddle has driven many to the extreme interpretation of Option 2, the theological solution. Lacking an intellectually satisfying explanation for how something can exist without a beginning or end, they assume a beginning that was brought about by a supreme being (God) whose abilities and methods are simply beyond our understanding. The fallacy of this solution, of course, is that we are left to wonder where God came from. And if we assume that God is eternal, we must wonder how that can be and we find ourselves right back at Option 1 – we have simply moved the state of eternity back a generation. The solution to the Primordial Existential Question, it would seem, must be to answer Option 1. The question is not “how did the universe begin?” The real question is, How does one explain a universe that exists without a beginning or an end?
The key to answering this question is understanding the fundamental relationship that exists between individual “things” and the universe that contains them.