Now for something like the original Gretchenfrage.
Is There a Role for a Creator in Quantum Cosmology?
Perhaps, but it is a somewhat strange one. It seems to me that science can never do more than guess – theorize about – the structure of things and then test to see whether its conjectures are confirmed. This is an open-ended venture (with tremendous successes behind it) and always presupposes that there is some structure already out there waiting to be found. In the scheme I have advanced, much is presupposed: Platonia, its detailed structure (immensely important) and a wave function that ‘samples’ possibilities. It is the nature of theory to presuppose something, so that always leaves a potential role for a Creator. But does invoking something to explain what we cannot explain get us any further?
What does intrigue me is the power of structures in a timeless scheme. They determine where the wave function collects. If one wanted to see ψ as spirit pondering what shall be brought into existence, it has no power in the matter. Leibniz always said that not even God could escape the dictates of reason. He must always act rationally. Perhaps that is more reassuring than a capricious deity is. However, a rational universe is quite alarming too. If you are about to perish in a concentration camp, is it any consolation to know that what must be will be?
In The Life of the Cosmos, my friend Lee Smolin espouses a self-creating universe, likening its growth to the often largely unplanned development of cities. I find his epilogue especially eloquent. In fact, timeless quantum cosmology does give almost god-like power to structures, ourselves included, to bring themselves into being. We shall be if that fits the great scheme of things. The ideas of both Lee and myself tend to pantheism. The whole universe – Platonia and the wave function – is the closest we can get to a God.
Where Is Heaven?
I have long thought that, if only we had the wit to see it, we are already in heaven. It is Platonia. I say this with some trepidation, though I believe it is true. If so, Platonia must be hell and purgatory as well. What I mean by this is really quite simple: some places in Platonia are very admirable, pleasant and beautiful, many are boring in the extreme, and others are horrendously nasty. The same contrasts exist within the individual Nows. What we do not know is where the wave function collects.
I certainly find it difficult to believe that there is a material world in which we currently find ourselves, and some other, quite different, immaterial world we enter after death. Apart from anything else, modern physics suggests very strongly that so-called gross matter – the clay from which we are made – is anything but that. It is almost positively immaterial. Platonic forms have exact mathematical properties, and those are all that physicists need to model the world and to attribute to matter.
I also feel strongly that this created world is something to be marvelled at and cherished, not dismissed as some second-best version of what is yet to come. Disrespect for this world is disrespect for whatever creates it. I shall not attempt to argue about these things in detail here, but the total elimination of time, if accepted and supported by mathematics and observation, must force theologians to reconsider their notions. If there is a happier and more perfect world, in which the lion lies down with the lamb and the sword is made into a ploughshare, I think it will simply be somewhere else in Platonia. I am sure that there are locations where experience is much deeper and richer than here. Such experience may be perfectly timeless – consciousness just sees what is. Perhaps we are somehow included in that awareness. Perhaps too the world is redeemed, and its inner conflicts resolved and understood somewhere in Platonia’s distant reaches, farther from Alpha than we are.
It is not for nothing that I emphasized in the early part of the book that Platonia has an Alpha but no Omega. The idea of a Point Omega was introduced by the Jesuit biologist Teilhard de Chardin, who conceived of it as some kind of consummation of evolution in the ultimate future, ‘on the boundary of all future time’. I have quoted these last words from Frank Tipler’s book The Physics of Immortality, in which he argues that Point Omega is where our material universe recontracts to the Big Crunch. By then, he argues, intelligences will have become so adept and computerized that we shall all be recreated as virtual computer programs, run so fast that we have an effective eternity of existence in which we are resurrected before the universe ends in the Crunch.
I can only say that is not how I see things. I search in vain for Omega in Platonia and find only Alpha. But Platonia is a vast land. Let us cherish everything around us wherever we happen to find ourselves in the Platonic palace.
Of one thing I feel very sure. Many poets and theologians give a misleading image of heaven and eternity. Consider the opening lines of Vaughan’s famous poem The World’:
I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres,
Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world
And all her train were hurled.
This is magnificent poetry as a description of the mystical state in which mind comprehends all structure as unified. But the real wonder of unity is when it knits together rich variety. Bliss is comprehension of many things in harmony at once. I do not think that eternity is pure and endless light. Such light merely illuminates, for example, the millions of leaves of the forest of the American fall when we see them all at once.
Is Time Travel Possible?
Time travel of a sort is possible within general relativity as a classical theory, but is subject to strict limitations. You cannot travel back into the past and kill your parents before your conception. In quantum cosmology, you can travel back to a parallel universe, and there kill your parents before they conceive you. However, we have to be careful about the use of ‘you’. The person who ‘travels’ to these other worlds is not exactly you now. As the discussion of the haemoglobin molecule showed, the change within our bodies from one instant to another is stupendous. The fact that we have such an enduring sense of deep continuity of our personal identity is very remarkable. I see it as another manifestation of the creative power that brings everything into existence. Stephen Hawking long suspected that even if time travel is logically possible, it will have a very low probability in quantum cosmology. That is my feeling too. Platonia certainly contains Nows in which there are beings whose memories tell them they have travelled backwards in time. However, I think such Nows have a very low probability.
To tell the truth, I find the idea of time travel boring compared with the reality of our normal existence. Each time capsule that represents an experienced Now reflects innumerable other Nows all over Platonia, some of them vividly. In a very real sense, our memories make us present in what we call the past, and our anticipations give us a foretaste of what we call the future. Why do we need time machines if our very existence is a kind of being present everywhere in what can be? This is very Leibnizian. We are all part of one another, and we are each just the totality of things seen from our own viewpoint.