For me, I embrace the Wonder and Mystery of our reality while I endeavor to pursue my best understanding of that reality. This personal quest to pursue understanding reality as robustly as I can has produced my understanding that humans communicate their respective descriptions of their respective understanding of that reality via different language sets. As described in my essay, “Language Sets and the Limits of Human Knowledge,” some language sets are more robust than others in their ability to encompass more meaning or more nuances of the meaning being conveyed.
I used the example of the difference between two language sets to convey positions in space. The language set composed of “up, down, left, right, and across,” etcetera and the language set of navigational terms such as “east, south, west, north, northeast southeast, southwest, northwest.” To win the computer simulation of a hot air balloon race, the language set utilizing navigational terminology was more robust and conveyed more meaning describing relative positions than the simple therms, up, down, left and right. The additional meaning and ability to clearly describe the relative positioning of the hot air balloon allowed students to become victorious in their races. Not all language sets can convey the same meaning. The language set of a mathematical theorem is distinctly different from the language set of a given poem. The greater my familiarity with more and more language sets, the greater is my ability to understand the perceptions of other humans conveying their understanding of reality.
Sidebar:
Consider these two phrases: “to clearly understand” and “to understand clearly.” To me, both have the same meaning; however, there is a convention in the English language that it is incorrect to split an infinitive. “To understand clearly” was acceptable to the nuns that were teaching my grammar school class in composition. “To clearly understand” would receive red marks stating that infinitives were not to be split and I would have to rewrite my essay all over in ink with corrections appropriately completed. Not splitting an infinitive is the accepted convention in formal writing (according to the nuns of my elementary school). However, who does not understand that both phrases mean the same?
Conventions have purpose. The purpose of conventions in writing English is for the sake of clarity. In college I was informed that conventions needed to be obeyed if you wanted your work to be taken seriously. Then there was my English professor explaining that e e cummings was unconventional in his use or lack of use regarding punctuation. e e comings is a very renowned poet in spite of (or perhaps because of) his unconventional attitude toward punctuation. My favorite English professor, Dr. Louis Sheets, explained to me that the issue was not to ignore conventions when writing but to know clearly that you are breaking with tradition and convention when you do so and that you have a very good reason for breaking with tradition and convention. Finally, the writer needs to evaluate that the meaning is not lost nor obscured when the convention is broken and that breaking the convention in fact expresses that meaning being conveyed.
That being said, please consider that splitting the above mentioned infinitive strikes me as having a subtle important nuance. “To understand clearly,” emphasizes ‘clarity’ arising after ‘understanding’. “To clearly understand,” puts ‘understanding’ as that which is infused with clarity. This subtlety becomes more apparent by adding an object to the phrase: “To understand ballet clearly.” With the infinity not split, ‘clarity’ resides with ‘ballet’. If I split the infinitive, “To clearly understand ballet,” ‘clarity’ resides with ‘understanding’. My understanding is clear about the ballet. Perhaps I a splitting hairs. This point is, perhaps, argumentative.
But, I have learned that convention can have another purpose — to control.
The Pope, telling Hawking and the other presenters at that cosmology conference that they could not investigate the Big Bang directly, invoked the power of the sacred to overrule the secular because the Big Bang, itself, was God’s act of creation. Such a statement demonstrates an age old convention used by the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) to control human thought via Papal Pronouncements or Decrees. Direct interaction with God and God’s direct interaction with mankind is through the clergy (the male clergy) or the prophets and saints. It is this convention, that divine revelation is the province of the anointed and the consecrated holy men of the church, that I believe this pope was invoking to maintain control of the holy teachings of the RCC (as it sought to control Galileo). I no longer ascribe to this controlling, authoritarian voice due to the RCC’s public demonstration of its unholiness as presented via its involvement in its scandalous behavior of traumatizing so many children through the sexual abuse by its “holy men.” At this point in my life, the RCC is the same as any other religious institution and all other institutions in general. All institutions, all professed perceptions (by any and all humans), are absolutely open to critical investigations. To say that this means that nothing is sacred is incorrect. Each individual must come to terms with reality, complete with what is known and unknown, to form his or her understanding of what is, or is not, sacred and worthy of holy homage. Each individual should have reasons for their positions on such matters. I am not a believer of blind obedience. It is my experience that blind obedience, especially the requirement for blindly obeying conventions is motivated by the desire to control others and not to be held accountable for what is being professed or, worse, dictated.
So it is that I perceive that Saint Thomas Aquinas and his Uncaused Cause of the First Cause (UCFC) and Stephen Hawking and his investigation into the Big Bang are perceptions of the same reality. The Pope speaking to Hawking and the others was correct. Investigating the Big Bang itself is looking into the act of creation and Stephen Hawking was very cognizant of that understanding as is evident in his chapter, “The Origin and Fate of the Universe” where he writes on page 117:
At the Big Bang itself, the universe is thought to have had zero size, and so to have been infinitely hot. … One second after the Big Bang, it would have fallen to about the thousand million degrees. This is about a thousand times the temperature at the center of the sun, but temperatures as high as this are reached in H-bomb explosions. At this time the universe would have contained mostly photons, electrons, and neutrinos (extremely light particles that are affected only by the weak force and gravity) and their antiparticles, together with some protons and neutrons.
This first sentence: “At the Big Bang itself, the universe is thought to have had zero size, and so to have been infinitely hot,” greatly impresses me. The universe just as the Big Bang is to occur is without size and is “infinitely hot.” To this I want to juxtapose a phrase that I read once or twice in this chapter: “…back to the beginning of time.” In all the words written in A Brief History of Time, this phrase is easily unimpressive when compared to all of the other profound statements expressed by Hawking. I have a fondness for phrases that sit quietly upon the page that on their surface seem mundane in their function but tend to become critical in their nature to imply some unexpressed profound reality. If time has a beginning, then there must a state in which time did not exist, a state of being before time began.
Remember. The state of being just before the instant of the Big Bang and the UCFC, to my thinking, is the same reality. Scientists, like Stephen Hawking, do not seek to control the search for understanding our reality, the RCC via the pope who addressed the conference demonstrates the desire to exercise such control through censorship. Individuals cannot investigate the Big Bang because the Big Bang is the act of creation. That is an imperative law. Thou shalt not investigate God’s actions. Galileo was unjustly persecuted for accepting and promoting the results of scientific investigations because they refuted church doctrine.
I believe that this pope and Hawking are both correct in their perception about the Big Bang as an act of creation though their views on creation are different. The difference between this pope and Hawking is about the relationship between humans and science and the relationship between humans and religion. Scientists are responsible for scientific investigation and priests and holy men are responsible for divine revelation. I know of no scientific institution that has killed individuals for their scientific theories or pronouncements. There have been many horrors and killings in the name of some deity for not following religious prescriptions or dogma (the Inquisition for example).
Sidebar:
I chose the phrase, “scientific institution,” because there have been situations like the killing fields of Cambodia or Hitler’s extermination of millions of Jews for political reasons to establish political control over a large population or country.