The God Dimension.

Here is the gist of the matter. Life in this world serves a higher purpose; no doubt it is not easy to guess what that purpose is, but it certainly signifies a perfecting of man’s nature…over each one of us there watches a benevolent Providence which is only seemingly stern and which will not suffer us to become a plaything of the over-mighty and pitiless forces of nature. Death itself is not extinction, is not a return to inorganic lifelessness, but the beginning of a new kind of existence which lies on the path of development to something higher…In the end all good is rewarded and all evil punished, if not actually in the form of life then in the later existences that begin after death.

- Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

In this quotation from The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud begins making his case that all of our religious beliefs originate from our collective fear of death. It can certainly be argued that religion serves a plethora of other purposes apart from reassuring us about the future after life. Still, one of its primary functions is to comfort us that there is, indeed, something over the horizon and that we need not worry about death as an eternity of nonbeing. The big problem with this reassurance is that it comes to us with absolutely no evidence supporting its veracity. There is nothing supporting the truth of the afterlife apart from a book that just “says so.” Add in religion’s insistence on ridiculous, arbitrary rules and tendency towards bigotry and violence, and I find myself more inclined to take my chances with death as a mystery. Not everyone feels this way, however, and I can appreciate the freezing terror that comes from contemplating an eternity of nothingness. But, if the fear of death is really the siren call luring so many otherwise reasonable people to a life of religious devotion, it would be useful to point out that one need not necessarily believe in God in order to believe in immortality.

I believe in infinity. What I mean by this is that I do not recognize the universe as having either a beginning or an end; it has always been, and always will be. I recognize the Big Bang as the start of the universe as we know it- given that there is evidence to support this claim- though I do not consider it “The Beginning.” After all, what came before the beginning? What started it? Rather than pinning the answer to all of those questions on “God”, I prefer to consider infinity a sufficient answer in itself; nothing ever began nor will it ever end. In the case of the Big Bang, everything in the universe exploded outwards from a tiny point encompassing all matter. Before then, everything was simply a part of this point. If, as some theorize, the universe will begin to reverse the outward trend and implode back in on itself, this does not represent “The End”, but simply a new phase of being. After all, what comes after the end?

The universe cannot just stop; to imagine that it does is to apply the human concept of death to the whole of existence. Also, to assume a beginning of everything practically necessitates a Creator of some kind (hence God and religion), which further necessitates a creator of The Creator. Instead, it seems simpler (and therefore more logical) to posit that the universe simply exists forever, in one form or another. Accepting then, that the universe is itself eternal, we can assume that within the context of infinity, all possibilities are realized.

To quote Fight Club, “Given a long enough timeline, everyone’s chances of survival revert to zero.” To put it another way, given a long enough timeline, everyone's chances of death approach 100 percent. Likewise, given a long enough timeline, the odds of anything approach one hundred percent. Are the odds of your dead body, long since decomposed, reanimating itself favorable? No. How about over a hundred years? A hundred million years? Or over a hundred trillion? The odds are still not great, but not to worry, you have all of eternity to await circumstances in which the odds are good you might live again. And if death really is nonbeing, you can take solace in the fact that the passage of so much time will seem to you like nothing more than a nap. This same logic applies to any vision of life after death, or any idea period, that you can imagine.

For a more elaborate explanation of my personal view on the nature of the universe- and, incidentally, for the origin of this blog’s name- click on the following link and watch the 10 minute video “Imagining the Tenth Dimension.” It’s pretty interesting:

http://www.tenthdimension.com/medialinks.php

Given this view of the universe, as a tenth dimension encompassing all possibilities, I take solace in the possibility that some part of me will continue to live, or live again, in some form or another, no matter what. The odds are just too good that, even after “death” I will experience more. And so will you. And we don’t need God to believe in that. To quote Dr. Manhattan: “It never ends.”