Early Man in Philippines 700000 Years Ago

We know pretty much everything from the first second of the Universe onwards, there are lots of bits missing but the main plan and predictions hold true.

The Plank era is the really interesting time, the first moment of Plank time, up to the first 10 to the power -43 seconds, you need to understand how short a period of time that is basically all the really interesting things happened in that period of time, we think that during that period gravity was as strong as all the other forces, this was the period of grand unification when everything was one, one force a bit like the Lord of the Rings one ring to rule them all and all that.

After that time the forces fractured and the universe emerged, gravity is the weakest force, the strong force (nuclear force) is the strongest, electromagnetism is next then the weak force.

They vary by distance, gravity and electromagnetism are long range forces, the strong and the weak act over very small distances and are responsible for holding the stuff we are made of together.

People do not realise just how much we actually know about reality nor do they realise how incredibly fascinating it is, far beyond any fiction.

For me the problem with human religions is that the "creator" actor in them is, in 99% of them, modelled as an infinitely powerful entity that resembles a human, I have no problem with the term god or creator if you strip it of all the human qualities and concerns.

To me it is preposterous that there exists an entity that presumably exists both outside and inside the observable universe and that possesses an intellect that cares what you had for breakfast last week or that cares about one human killing another human.

All of the "creators" that we have dreamt up seem to possess omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience, the creator myths where the entity or entities do not possess these attributes really don't cut it as they might as well be technologically advanced spacemen.

When you look at human religions where the creator possesses all three of the big "omni" attributes you run into logical contradictions with the rest of the theology immediately, an easy one is omniscience means that the creator knows absolutely everything about everything, this runs into the free will problem instantly just from a logical point of view, if the creator knows everything then at the point of creating you it knows every detail of your entire existence, so you can't have free will.

Just think about what this kind of omniscience would actually mean in physical terms, an average human body consist of 7x10^27 atoms, never mind the subatomic particle count, lets just think about the atoms, so this means that for say a 7 score year and ten lifespan this creator thing would have to know and be able to track every subatomic interaction of every one of those atoms and all the atoms outside of the body like the air and the ground, now that timespan is about 2.2 billion seconds, every one of those atoms undergoes billions of interactions per second, just do the math the numbers are utterly huge beyond the mind of any human, the sheer amount of information that would have to be known for just one human is in the realm that any ordinary human would start to think of as the infinite, in reality compared to the infinite these are in fact tiny numbers but just ask yourself what kind of consciousness could be aware of all that information, that is what omniscience means.

To be omniscient would require omnipresence as this creator would have to be everywhere at all times to make all the independent measurements in order to know and or record all of that information and we are only talking about one human so far, also to exercise such power in order to have omnipresence this creator would have to be omnipotent, when you start to put all this together an entity that possessed all of those attributes does not look at lot like the human notion of a creator.

But you know what it does look like, I'll tell you, it looks a lot like a universe, all the information in a universe is recorded in the world lines of every particle and every interaction of every particle (Omniscience), the universe as such contains all the energy that exists (Omnipotence) and every particle and interaction has a bearing on every other particle and interaction (Omnipresence).

And still a universe like ours does not look like it is infinite, these attributes would only apply inside the confines of this instance of a universe.

As Sanders says it is a huge topic and it would in fact require much more than four or five pages to even touch on it but the above points are what made me leave the catholic faith at the age of 14 as the absurdity of all the religions and their creators was self evident to me even then, for me it is easier to believe that it is all just happening as the emergent behaviour of a set of fundamental rules, even if we don't know all the rules.

Yes consciousness is hard to explain but it is quite clear that to own one (a conscious mind) you need a pretty complex hardware runtime environment called a brain and as far as we can see that brain is an emergent property of the universe it finds itself in.

I do not believe in the magical fairy land with no rules in which some essence of me called a soul is supposed to be able to reside, I do believe that a particle based universe is able to support and generate the experience that I observe that I call awareness but I won't go further than that.