Apple Pie From Scratch

You can't make something from nothing. Things don't just pop into existence from nowhere.The ironclad laws of nature that couple cause with effect in chronological order, dictate that everything in this universe has a cause, and that causes always precede effects. What follows are just some random thoughts on cause, effect, Carl Sagan and apple pie.

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

Carl Sagan spoke these words to indicate that the universe itself is the only thing we know of, that might have come into existence from nothing. Might have. Everything else that "comes into existence" is a mere re-arrangement of pre-existing matter and energy, that's why inside this universe nothing comes from nothing. But we can not apply characteristics and behavior of things inside the universe to the universe itself; this is a logical fallacy which I'm sure has some fancy name. I'll just illustrate what I mean: it's correct to say that every child in the class has a mother, but not to say that the class as a whole has a mother. This is a tricky one, because sometimes it does work; it's correct to say that every brick in the wall is red, and therefore the wall is red. Alternatively, it's incorrect to say that every brick is small, and therefore the wall is small.

Everything in this universe needs a cause, but we don't know if the universe itself needs a cause, or has one. Remember the chronological order in which causes always precede effects? Well, there's the next mind-boggling problem with thinking about the beginning of it all; Einstein unified space and time in his theories of relativity, we live in space-time, not space and time. This means that there's no "before" at the beginning of it all. There was no time before our universe existed, no before or after, therefore no cause or effect. If the universe was caused, then it's cause would be part of the universe, or multiverse, or something. Maybe ours started with the death of another one, maybe it's all cyclical like the cycle of life; eternal birth and eternal death dancing on cosmic rhythms.

There are questions to which we know there's a definite and correct answer, yet we also know we will probably never have access to that definite and correct answer. If we were to ask, for example, how many people on this planet were bitten by some insect in the last ten minutes; there is an answer to that question, but we'll probably never know it. If we were one of the bricks in the wall from the previous paragraph, what would we be able to know for sure about the wall we're part of? Well, at the very least we'd know the wall exists, that we are part of the wall and therefore our existence is tied to the wall's existence. And since we're a conscious brick, we're the ones that give meaning to the wall, because "meaning" is a product of consciousness.

We can't prove that nothing comes from nothing, simply because we don't have some "nothing" to test it on. We can't prove that the supernatural doesn't exist, because it's supernatural, it's outside nature and therefor unknowable. Everything inside nature is in principle knowable, but it's very improbable that we will someday know everything there is to know about the nature of reality; even with strict adherence to the laws of causality, accepting complete scientific determinism, Laplace's demon is, for now, the stuff of science fiction...

_{Carl Sagan Apple Pie (introduced by Michael Dowd)}

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