No beginning...

There are at least two rationales used to suggest the existence of a supreme being.

1. The Clockmaker argument.
2. Everything has a beginning.

The thing that got us thinking about a clockmaker was the industrial revolution bringing about mechanical thinking. And western medicine gives the illusion that we are composed of interchangeable parts what with organ transplants and such. But it should be noted that when you replace a part on a clock, the clock will not reject the new part. The medical patient receiving their “new part” will reject it. So suffice to say we are not clocks.

That’s all I’ll say about the first argument for now. But for this post, I want to deal with the chicken and egg argument regarding beginnings.

But I needed to introduce the first argument because of the predicament in suggesting the Clockmaker has no beginning or end. A large part of the rationale to believing there is a clockmaker in the first place is because we find it impossible to think that we, ourselves, have no beginning or end.

If we can believe that there is a supreme being with no beginning or end, why is it inconceivable that we, too, have no beginning or end?

What we assign as a beginning is really just an arbitrary point in time on a continuum. For example, we’ll say our beginning is when we are born or conceived. Lot’s of arguments on those two arbitrary points in time, but you can assign other arbitrary “beginnings” as well.

You could say that when your parents met was your beginning, since they would eventually conceive you and you’d be brought into the world. And, their meeting each other at all is a result of their respective “beginnings”, just as arbitrary as yours. So you could say that their being brought into the world was your beginning. And you can just keep going back.

There is another angle to add to this. The idea of us having “a beginning” presumes that we are individuals. But, really, you are not an individual at all, since you did not appear out of thin air. You are a combination of your parents’ genetic make up. You are half your father and half your mother. Only…your father and mother are also a combination of their parents’ genetic make up. So, in short, you are merely a continuation of your father and mother’s respective lines.

No sign of a beginning yet.

Ah, but our planet has a beginning, right? It’s, what, 4.5 - 4.6 billion years old? Well, yes, the earth as we know it. Just like I’m 30 years old as we know it…starting from an arbitrary point in time. But the earth also came from something before it.

I bring up the concepts of energy. Energy is conserved. It’s neither created nor destroyed. All things that live utilize the energy of something else that died (or that will die). For example, we will die eventually. So we expend energy that is transferred to our progeny. And our progeny ensures that part of us will live on (or continue) after we die. But even when we die, our energy is not destroyed. It is passed on to something else that will utilize the energy.

When a star dies, a new star utilizes the energy that was passed on. And when the new star becomes old, it will pass its energy on. When the sun becomes old, it will expand into a red giant and consume the inner planets. Life as we know it will end. But the energy will be passed on.

There is no beginning. There is no end.