Cosmology describes how some 13.8 billion years ago an infinitely small, unimaginably hot and dense point known as the singularity spontaneously inflated and created our expanding universe. While this explanation known as the Big Bang Theory explains a great deal about how the universe that we presently observe came to be, it does not explain the origin of the singularity from which our universe sprung.
And even if science could explain what came prior to the singularity we would still need to know what caused the preceding event, and then the event that preceded it, and so on — ultimately a process of infinite regressions. Our need to repeatedly ask: “Okay, but what came before, that?” is perfectly natural, and might also offer us insight to our cognitive limitations.
The origin of our universe can have one of two equally impossible explanations — either it has a true point of origin, or it has always existed. Having a true point of origin seems inconceivable because our human minds will always assume that no matter what the event, there had to be an event which preceded it. The alternative explanation – that the universe is infinitely old and has no origin is equally inconceivable. Nothing in our human experience is comparable.
The British journalist and author Christopher Hitchens put it well:
…some problems will never be resolved by the mammalian equipment of the human cerebral cortex and some things are indefinitely unknowable. If the universe was found to be finite or infinite, either discovery would be equally stupefying and impenetrable to me. And though I met many people much wiser and more cleaver than myself, I know of nobody who could be wise or intelligent enough to say differently.
-Excerpt from God is Not Great
Several philosophical traditions teach that certain knowledge, understandings, or realities may be impossible for a human mind to apprehend, much less communicate.
In an interview with American journalist Bill Moyers American author Joseph Campbell addressed this idea:
The ultimate mystery of being is beyond all categories of thought. As Kant said, the thing in itself is no thing. It transcends thingness, it goes past anything that could be thought. …the best things can’t be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood, because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can’t be thought about…the third best are what we talk about.
-Joseph Campbell transcribed in The Power of Myth
And from the Tao Te Ching: A New English Version, by Stephen Mitchell:
The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.
– Attributed to Lao-tzu
Despite the limits of our intelligence, we can imagine that intelligence several orders of magnitude beyond our own might be able to conceptualize things that to us are inconceivable. Imagine how smart a dog is compared to an animal like a jelly fish. Yet, despite a dog’s comparative brilliance, dogs have no capacity for understanding a lot of what regularly happens in everyday human life such as using a computer, watching a movie, or even starting a fire. What might a level of intelligence that was as far advanced beyond our own as our intelligence is to a dog’s be able to comprehend which we cannot?
Such a level of intelligence could possibly exist, or will exist in the future. If intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe and if it developed significantly before it did here, it is likely to have achieved a much greater cognitive capacity than that of humans. Alternatively, humans may be on the verge of creating Super General Artificial Intelligence — artificial intelligence that will surpass human intelligence.
Intelligence more powerful than our own may determine that the problem with cosmological spiritual questions such as: What is the origin of the universe? is not that the answer is too complex, the problem may be in the question itself.
Perhaps, if we were far more intelligent we wouldn’t ask such questions. It is possible to imagine that if our cognitive abilities were far superior, the entire construct of questions and answers, well suited to our present conceptual capacities, might be rendered useless.
Or maybe answers to our questions do exist, but to us, they would be unintelligible. Imagine a higher intelligence responding to deep questions about the universe’s origin with just an ever-accelerating Shepard’s Tone[1].
So some spiritual, cosmological questions such as: “How can the universe not have had a beginning?” may be unanswerable because there is no conceivable answer that could make sense to a human mind.
Despite its seeming futility, however, pondering such unanswerable questions can be strangely satisfying, particularly when we do so with others. It is as if we walk together right up to the very edge of an abyss, sit ourselves down and feel both danger and exhilaration as we allow our legs to swing over the point of no return.
[1] The Shepard Tone is an audio illusion that creates the feeling of consistent, unending rising or falling.