The Wonderful Big Bang

 Denial #2

A force of a certain magnitude when applied at a certain angle to a billiard ball will cause it to go in a specific direction, and if it hits another ball in its path, the latter will move off at another deterministic angle and speed. Repeated ten million times, this cause and effect result will be exactly the same, every time.

It is the deterministic certainty of this causality that allows us to do everything that we are doing today. Without this, you wouldn't dare to make an airplane journey, if sometimes the plane might not stay aloft. You wouldn't dare to step into a building, if sometimes the roof might just fall down. 

Scientists have a fairly good understanding of how our bodies work too. If you decompose your body to its smallest components, you get the cell. A cell is nothing more than a tiny puddle of several inanimate chemicals combined in certain proportions. A different combination of different chemicals produces a different cell. So we have skin cells, hair cells, blood cells, and so on, in a human body.

It is science and not fiction that if we are somehow able to put together the right chemicals to configure the right cells in the right places, we create life, plain and simple. Only the actual process of doing so is extremely difficult today. Think Newton wanting to build a 200-floor skyscraper - a very simple idea by applying the laws he had derived, but the construction techniques and tools were not available in his time. 

From a scientific perspective, a human is not much different from a table or a billiard ball, just that the composition of atoms are different. 

Scientists also know pretty well how our brains work. A brain has a large collection of brain cells, known as neurons. The activity of a cell is the result of the reaction of the chemicals that make up the cell. Chemicals react because the energy forces of the different atoms making up the chemicals react. The chemical reactions are casual deterministic, behaving precisely according to the laws of mechanics, without exception, like the motion of billiard balls.

High resolution brain scans show how the brain of a person with depression is physically different from a healthy person. Doctors can work out the chemicals to make a drug to treat depression. We can see the changes to the brain as the drug takes effect and as the patient improves or is cured of depression. Current evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the mind is physical only, that is, the brain, and all the neurons therein, is all there is to our consciousness. 

Now, if you see a billiard ball in motion, you know that it is the result of some force applied to it at some earlier point in time, whether directly from a cue or from another moving ball. That initiator in turn is the result of the impact of some other moving object. If we are talking about a billiard game, the originating force could come from a human player. The force would come from his hand muscles. The muscles would be activated by nerve cells in the hand. The nerve cells act only because of signals sent from the brain cells of the player. Each brain cell fires a certain synapse based on the chemical reaction in the cell. You can see what I am getting at. 

Extrapolating every physical force backward, we get closer to the origin of everything. Evolution is a beautiful fact because of this deterministic physical cause and effect phenomena. The theory of the collapsing of the universe to an initial point is also based on this same reasoning. All this is wonderful indeed. 

There is, however, a slight irritation. The position of the moon 24 hours from now is not only determinable, it is precisely certain. Even if a gigantic meteorite were to slam into it afterward causing its orbit to change, the pre-determined position of the moon is still known and unchangeable, because we can similarly take into consideration that deterministic trajectory of that meteorite and its impact in the computation of the position of the moon. The moon is not much different from that inanimate neuron in your brain, other than in size. What you are going to do 24 hours from now is similarly already decided. In fact, it was already decided long ago, at the moment of the Big Bang. 

If there was a Big Bang, the first kick of the Big Bang set in motion the first particles on certain trajectories. After many causes and effects, the earth was created, followed by the primordial soup, then the first cell, then us, and then what you will do tonight. 

The slight irritation is everything is fated, like it or not. Nobody can be guilty of any crime because nobody is responsible for his actions. Every action of every person was decided at the moment of the Big Bang. That you will be reading this at this moment has been decided, long ago. You cannot escape the clutches of determinism. 

The science clearly says that you have no free will and are living out a robotic existence, decided at the Big Bang. Do you deny this?

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