[Vision2020] God's problem: Dark Energy

[Ted Moffett]

nickgier at adelphia.net wrote:

 I am a theist only because I converted to process theology when I enrolled
> for graduate school in Claremont in 1967. (I was just in Claremont to
> celebrate the birthday of the world's greatest process theologian, John B.
> Cobb, Jr.)  Process theology solves, to my satisfaction, both the problems
> of free-will and evil.


See my essay at:


http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/process.htm

From URL above:

"There is no beginning to creation; God and the universe are co‑eternally
creative. Whitehead does, however, have a concept of cosmic epochs which
appears compatible with an oscillating "big bang" cosmogony."
-------------------------

I recall studying Whitehead's "Process and Reality."  The idea of
"co-eternally creative" is interesting, I assume not a mainstream view (most
Christians in the USA) of God as creator, though I suppose most don't parse
these theological complexities to the level of a university course.  I never
cease to be amazed by the diversity of possible views of religion,
spirituality, spirit, spirits, the Sacred, God, Gods, Goddess, Chi, Ki,
Prana, etc.  Or as Jane Siberry put it when asked about God:  "God is dog.
I don't understand the question."  What a vast mind boggling ideological
landscape.
 <http://www.eclecticenergies.com/energy/whatis.php>
However, regarding an "oscillating "big bang" cosmogony," recent discoveries
in Astronomy and Physics indicate our universe was "born" in the big bang,
indicating a beginning to creation, and will eventually die out.  A cyclical
or oscillating universe does not fit current cosmology in modern physics.
But in the incredible "multiverse" possibly predicted by modern physics, we
may be able to escape the death of our universe by jumping to a parallel
universe, universes which may be created all the time.  Go figure!

Consider this article written by Michio Kaku, one of the world's leading
theoretical physicists.  I include a few excerpts below:

http://discovermagazine.com/2004/dec/survive-end-of-universe
 How to Survive the End of the Universe (In 7 Steps) The cold, dark end is
coming. We need an escape plan

The more the universe expands, the more dark energy there is to make it
expand even faster, ultimately leading to a runaway cosmos. Albert Einstein
introduced the idea of dark energy mathematically in 1917 as he further
developed his theory of general relativity. More evidence came last year,
when data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP, which
analyzes the cosmic radiation left over from the Big Bang, found that dark
energy makes up a full 73 percent of everything in the universe. Dark matter
makes up 23 percent. The matter we are familiar with—the stuff of planets,
stars, and gas clouds—makes up only about 4 percent of the universe.

As the increasing amount of dark energy pushes galaxies apart faster and
faster, the universe will become increasingly dark, cold, and lonely.
Temperatures will plunge as the remaining energy is spread across more
space. The stars will exhaust their nuclear fuel, galaxies will cease to
illuminate the heavens, and the universe will be littered with dead dwarf
stars, decrepit neutron stars, and black holes. The most advanced
civilizations will be reduced to huddling around the last flickering embers
of energy—the faint Hawking radiation emitted by black holes. Insofar as
intelligence involves the ability to process information, this, too, will
fade. Machines, whether cells or hydroelectric dams, extract work from
temperature and energy gradients. As cosmic temperatures approach the same
ultralow point, those differentials will disappear, bringing all work,
energy flow, and information—and the life that depends on them—to a frigid
halt. So much for intelligence.

-----------

The notion of the multiverse—that our universe coexists with an infinite
number of other universes—has gained ground among working scientists.

The inflationary theory proposed by Alan Guth of MIT, to explain how the
universe behaved in the first few trillionths of a second after the Big
Bang, has been shown to be consistent with recent data derived from WMAP.
Inflation theory postulates that the universe expanded to its current size
inconceivably fast at the very beginning of time, and it neatly explains
several stubborn cosmological mysteries, including why the universe is both
so geometrically flat and so uniform in its distribution of matter and
energy. Andrei Linde of Stanford University has taken this idea a step
further and proposed that the process of inflation may not have been a
singular event—that "parent universes" may bud "baby universes" in a
continuous, never-ending cycle. If Linde's theory is correct, cosmic
inflations occur all the time, and new universes are forming even as you
read these words.

Naturally, the proposal to eventually flee this universe for another one
raises practical questions.

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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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