God as the Source of Mass = Energy
Edward Booth O.P.
Materialism has not adjusted itself to the postulation by Einstein, even before the nature of atomic structure began to be established, that mass is identical with energy in relation to the squaring of the speed of light. This is the ultimate background; it is the highest speed, and can therefore become the measure of cosmic distance, normally in light years. This fixes the conversion factor between units of mass and units of energy.
It is an indispensable means of expressing the intensity of the forces in cosmogony, in their initial density and their immediate expansion. Immense heat in the initial fireball – but so much more than a ball of fire. Its content contained the heat as a reception of energy being realised and being put immediately to work.[1] That quite apart from the initial energy in its content. If it was compressed, it was compressed as it came from its source. Normally compression is in relationship to a container, but there was nothing to contain it as it diffused itself in space and time, creating them together. Its temperature was about three billion degrees.[2] All in a gaseous state far beyond the nearest reproducible conditions. In the expanding universe it acted as a radiation which expands according to its capacity, as the temperature decreased by the inverse of the distance. Seen as linear rods, that radiation was a billion times (109) shorter than now, whilst the densities are higher by a cube of the factor (1027).
In saying that the material was of individual nuclei of the simplest atom: the proton of hydrogen, and that individual nuclei would have been in agitated rapid notion, it should not be forgotten that individual electrons were already present with a different electrical charging (+ and -), which would facilitate their union as atoms. Nor can the presence of sub-particles, quarks and leptons, be forgotten, produced by the vibration from the strings.[3] Heat as present communicated energy, but in the first seconds preventing reactions; keeping the one-proton nuclei, charged positively, from associating with its one-electron, negatively charged, potential satellite. Keeping also the antiprotons with their antiquarks, and the anti-electrons (positrons), from not exactly annihilating their counterparts, but converting the mass of their counterparts into energy.
In the original big bang itself and the beginnings of the processes which it started there was soon a relative drop in temperature which allowed the capture of other protons and electrons under nuclear fusion. Here big bang nucleosynthesis[4] is extremely close to the ultimate sourcing, and its physics entails the processes of the direct chaining of proton to proton (without the appearance of electrons), and the chaining of proton to proton via the chaining of an electron en route. It is thought to have lasted from 100 to 300 seconds from the beginning of space expansion, achieved then under the heat and pressure of a nuclear fusion, which then fell away, leaving the mass abundances of about 75% of h[ydrogen]-1, about 25% of the very stable helium-4, about 0.01% of the unstable deuterium, together with traces (of the order of 10-10) of lithium and beryllium, and no other heavy elements.[5] The relatively simple capture of neutrons by other neutron clusters, and the production of all the other elements in the periodic table would have to wait for the production of an skin of iron around a star prompting its explosion as a super-nova, and the passage of the resulting gas and dust into space, to be churned up and delivered in the formation of planets such as ours whose periodic table is the model of completeness – with the higher elements being the rarest. The two stages of the nucleation of elements must be kept apart.
In the language of cosmologists, the big bang was a “singularity”.[6] The immediate consequence was an intense activity of a plasma of hydrogen at the intensest heat, able to effect the fusion of the simple protons of hydrogen into the nuclei of the immediate more complex forms. It emerged as the first diversification. One can accept that this extrusion from no like source was initially small,[7] provided one gives a higher value to the immense heat and pressures. Energy characterised it more than mass. The atoms which were to be formed, with their immense anti-retaining force, would await the end of nuclear fusion. The time had not yet come to manifest their eventual force of 1036 times that of the original retaining gravity in the relations between atoms, but an expansive force was beginning to work in excess of this. The pressures on it were all interior to it, as it was uncontained. So it would continue in the temperatures necessary for nuclear fusion in the development from a single proton nucleus of hydrogen to a double proton nucleus of helium, and the capture by the former of negatively charged electrons: all with their sub-particles and their individual strings actively vibrating. To us hydrogen and helium are the simplest and lightest elements. Far more important is the presence in them of polarised electrical force, the mutual attractiveness of their unlike poles contributing an ordering principle structuring complete atoms. ‘Structuring’? The whole universe would pass through an expansion of enormous force: exponential, as the only feasible way of expressing it is by doubling followed by doubling (a hundred times) up to 1078, the number of atoms in the universe. If ordering can only be produced from a mind, then the numbers appreciated by Rees need that for its completeness: four ratios of opposite forces “finely tuned”,[8] in his words, plus the mathematical expression for originally microscopic ripples which developed into the physical features of the ultimate cosmos, and the number 3 which, as dimensions, make life possible. And all of that activity does not touch merely solid matter, but mass which is to be identified with energy according to the formula E=mc². It is in a variety of forces to be recovered in different ways: attractive and repellent forces; some like gravity by its transmission and reception expressible in units from quantum mechanics (gravitons), and light measured in photons as units of electromagnetic radiation with a frequency. The physical objects whose apparent solidity and absence of any other characteristics had allowed the hypothesis of materialism we now know to be active energy: attractions and repulsions on the smallest scale, with spinning, oscillation and vibration. That demands a source of even their tiny movements, capable of very long term persistence and in general unvarying. The perfection of energy displays itself in the microcosm, in which we acknowledge its identity with mass. A comprehensive and yet detailed source is necessary for the macrocosm, even as still in a passing state of nuclear fusion. Only then will we begin to understand the significance of seeming matter: not in fact the bedrock of physical reality, not as locked up in itself and impervious to investigation, but under its appearances subsisting in an ordered state of forces, in imprinted and lasting movements: light through its force, heavy only through its resilience and regularity, most certainly not dispersible like a gas.
Despite the discovery of the active and moving forces which operated as the ultimate energy reality of corporeal masses, the inertia of a scientifically materialist past found no incongruity in looking at what had emerged in a materialist light. As long as some kind of solid status was given to the supposed ultimate particles, a materialistic interpretation of the cosmos seemed an easily derived consequence. Even the discernment of quarks and cognate sub-particles provided a vision of an ultimately simple and regular ordering of material at that level and therefore all-containing, leaving the derivation of configurations as a less demanding problem in the light of this new supposed foundation. However the picture of forces holding atomic particles together, together with that of supervening forces contrary to and overlapping each other has opened further questions. Whilst unallocated energy might be a chaotic ultimate, allocated energy demands its positor, even a source for itself. By the definition of singularity this source and the positor who directs it would be completely unlike its effects. Yet the order of opposed forces which is observable raises the question: does ordering belong to this cosmos alone, or must it come from outside and before the singularity itself? Symmetries could exist in a beyond, but we must not expect them to appear like cosmic symmetries. So with the forces behind cosmic expansion and containment, even if in the longer or shorter term. We observe processes in which perfect symmetries are not evident. Yet we can believe in an analogy with cosmic symmetries and asymmetries, that an ultimate symmetry must be postulated, because their foundations are not those of energy-mass, because it must be its source, and we must be prepared not to exclude its positor and source together as one. Yet hesitant analogies must not be ruled out, even though now the analogism must be that of energy or energies. The unities of unity and multiplicity in the cosmos postulate the highest unity in the source. Axiomatic is the need that the source should be a more powerful energy than the energy and energies which it produces. Should a source be sought for that, from an empirical scrutiny and overview alone (and we have to start there with a phenomenological analysis) there is an evident possibility in the power of mind or spirit which does not tire proportionally to its cosmic range but grows stronger through its activation, though it may tire in the cerebration of its explanation.
The discernment of linked single-dimensional strings of dimensions without objects could be supposed to be, not the play-out of matter, because dimensions belong to a stage before its production, and their ten (or more) dimensions indicate a greater richness than the space with time in which we experience ourselves and our physical world. The unused dimensions “coiled up” within the others express an unused potential force, such as does not exist with cosmic forces. The simplification which would be applied to what is incalculably potentially greater would seem more to belong to a play-in of matter rather than its play-out. May one then raise a further question: could these strings be at the frontier of dimensions with another reality which comprehends in unity far more than they could comprehend in multiplicity, whether the ultra-miniscule strings whose vibrations from received energy produce the quarks and leptons and their contraries, and the bosons, for which the only known candidate would be the purity and power of mind or spirit such as contemplates it, yet analogically expanded more than exponentially to timelessness and quasi-spatial infinitude. Yet the difficulty of discernment becomes enormous when we have to admit that with our minds we consider this with (in the sense of Kant) a transcendental dispositioning which we do not how to suspend, and therefore we attempt to consider these multiple dimensions within our own, whereas their traces read that they have escaped from that. And that this is the source of the energy which is the reality of the totality expressed as energy = mass, in an extent without the limits of our cosmos.
Here are some obiter dicta of philosophers and theologians which seem to grasp something through the tiny, encrusted, dim and little used window into the world if pure mind and spirit. All of the texts below describe the activities of mind as having some tangible phenomenological association, which provides a facility for making what a sceptical person would always seek to represent as an unjustified leap. Whilst the sceptic might feel secure in his assertion that creation is made up of brute matter, he ought to feel less secure if he confronts the mass of matter as energised energy in movement:
Of the totally different characteristics of intellectual knowledge from sensible knowledge Aristotle makes a pregnant remark in de Anima 429b4: “in the case of mind, thought about an object that is highly intelligible renders it more and not les able afterwards to think objects that are less intelligible: the reason is that while the faculty of sensation is dependent on the body, mind is separable from it.” Saint Thomas Aquinas’s expansion of this thought in his Contra Gentiles (III 59) is rich: “if in this matter the sense and the intellect are different, which is made clear in [Aristotle’s] de Anima III, because the sense itself is corrupted or weakened by experience of the highest of sensible things, so that afterwards it cannot perceive relatively lower sensible things. On the other hand because mind is not corrupted nor kept away from, but only perfected by its object, when afterwards it knows the greater intelligible objects, it will be able to understand other intelligibles not less but more. The highest among the genres of intelligible objects is the Divine substance. In consequence when the intellect is raised by divine light to see the substance of God, so much the more is it perfected by the same light to understand all the other intelligible objects which are in the realm of nature.” (cf. Saint Thomas in de Anima 688 (Turin edn.)
Aristotle’s thoughts on the nature of God in Metaphysics XII,7 (1072b13-81) have some thoughts on the divine nature in itself which arise from an analogy with human thinking totally surpassed, but arrived at a unity – even though Aristotle felt obliged to deny to God, though not to lesser minds, a knowledge of the human cosmos. This is a classical intellectual (anagogical) elevation to God, which is a thread to help us speculate on the source of cosmic energy. Note how Aristotle says that “actuality” rather then “potentiality” is its characteristic. That is its specific quality, establishing its superiority – not to have to be awakened, as our thought, and Aristotle sees that as leading straight to the sense of the cosmos as depending on the divine – which we are investigating here: “On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature. And its life is such as the best which we enjoy, and enjoy for but a short time. For it is ever in this state (which we cannot be), since its actuality is pleasure. (and therefore waking, perception, and thinking are most pleasant, and hopes and memories are so because of their reference to these.) And thought in itself deals with that which is best in itself, and that which is thought in the fullest sense with that which is best in the fullest sense. And thought thinks itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought in coming into contact with and thinking its objects, so that thought and the object of thought are the same. For that which is capable of receiving the object of thought, i.e. the substance, is thought. And it is active when it possesses this object. Therefore the latter rather than the former is the divine element which thought seems to contain, and the act of contemplation is what is most pleasant and best. If, then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God’s essential actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God.”
Saint Thomas Aquinas had a conception of the divine knowing as reaching everything, down to their accidents, because that was their reality, and that ‘everything’ included all angelic and human knowing: he knew all of this in his own timeless knowledge of Himself in His own essence. God's knowledge of human beings and angels was not only of what they had done in the past what they were doing in the present and what they would do in the future, but all of what they might do in the future: ‘future contingents’. All of this is imputable to God before his act of creation: it included the whole of the unravelling of the cosmos in its overall nature and in the ultimate details of its sub-particles, and from the earthly point of view, it continued to contain everything with the advancement of time. This is contained in Thomas’s Summa Theologiae I, q.14, which is too long to quote here. We give extracts from just two articles:
a) Art 4 [“Whether his understanding is his essence”] After arguing (from Aristotle Metaphysics XII) that the understanding of God could not be other than his substance, because otherwise the substance would be in potency to it as “act and perfection”, he then appeals to a general principle in knowing that understanding does not go outside the knower but remains within him. The latter, an interior form (‘species’), must be identical with the divine understanding, where there can be no multiplicity.
b) Art 5 [“Whether God understands things other than himself]. He argues from the position that the power [virtues] of God extends to everything, for he is their cause, and that everything exists in him not in its natural modality, but in the mode of God in his knowing. “He sees himself through his essence. He sees things other than himself not in themselves but in himself, for his essence contains a likeness of everything other than himself.” With this we can link what he says in his work on the Sententiae (in I Sent. Dist. 3 q.4 art. 4 corpus) that everything that exists in a more noble way (nobiliori modo) in a mind. I, dist. 3, q. 4, art 4, corpus
Pseudo-Dionysius, whom Thomas highly appreciated, brought back some of the highest attributes of God, which had become separated and hierarchized in neo-Platonist thinking (especially by Proclus) as “being in itself”, “thought in itself” and “life in itself” – all derived from Metaphysics XII – to be reunited and identified with God, so that all things could participate in his power and ‘superessentiality’: “He who is, by power and superessentiality, the substantial cause, the demiurge of being, subsistence, essence, substance and nature” (PG 3.817C). Based on philosophical and theological predecessors, it was an elevation which soared securely to the essence of God, occasioned by the need to offer a more convincing alternative to the figure in Proclus’s Platonic Theology. Yet whilst retaining the original corrected Platonic structure, the spirit of Aristotle’s empiricism contrives to keep it close to reality. (v. my Aristotelian Aporetic Ontology in Islamic and Christian Thinkers (Cambridge 1983), pp.76-80. Also, >ΤÎ ßπερεÃvαι of pseudo-Dionysius and Schelling=, in Studia Patristica, 23, (Leuven, 1989), pp.215-225.)
Saint Thomas’s Quaestiones Disputatae de Anima confronts the question of how a soul, in itself intellectual and immortal, can be the form of a corporeal body. Here we are fortunate in having on the web the definitive text of the Commissio Leonina, published by the Polish Dominicans (św.Tomasz z Akwinu: http://www.dominikanie.pl/old/tomasz/index.htm). “Each part of the body receives the soul in its mode …” (art 10 ad 13), for “the water does not have the nature of the amphora” (ib. ad 14). “ … the sense is diversified according to diverse modes of being modified, but not the intellect” (art 13 ad 19) – so because of its higher and superior nature the intellectual soul as form of the human body remains always itself in the body, whose reception of it varies with its parts. “The body which receives life from the soul is corruptible, even though the soul in itself is incorruptible” (art 14 ad 20). At a number of places the text refers to the connatural facility with which the intellectual soul understands intelligible objects (e.g. art 13 ad 11, which qualifies this to the extent of positing also an “appetitive potency”).
Finally we refer to a text of Saint Augustine (de Trinitate X 10,16) which has an insight into how the soul can have a perception of itself. Having identified them one by one, the soul pares off from itself all knowledge of external sense objects, until it is sure that nothing of that remains, “whatever remains to it of itself that alone is itself”. It is a remarkable insight, anticipating the later method of Husserl’s phenomenology with its initial ‘epoche’.
We think that the Christian theological structure of God, the divine ideas (positively and negatively expressed) together with divine ergonomics, which are, like the divine ideas, to be identified with God, produce a particularly convenient figure to express the dependence of creation even through the cosmogony of the big bang. As a comprehensive principle from which nothing falls out, and especially as the essence of God is conceived of as his being and his knowledge together, the knowledge of God as we have referred to it in Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae propose together a reality of a higher sort than material, which through cosmic knowledge exists in God before cosmogony, during it and for the whole course of time, and all as a principle of reference above change. It knows change unchangeably.
The uniqueness and integrity of God is the condition of his freedom. The positing of stages in cosmogony and a stepwise expansion seems excluded by the big bang as a singularity from being an element in a comprehensive figure which includes God and the cosmos.
Such a comprehensive stepwise expansion was produced by Plotinus, Porphryry and Proclus to explain the cosmos and the divine together, the cosmos being organized by a triad of divine realities: the One which was normally placed beyond being and thought, Mind as “one-all’ (plurally instantiating the same principle), Soul as “one-and-all”. The two latter were degrees of distention. This structuring was dictated by an eclectic intention of uniting the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. As Aristotle’s thought started from a measured and radical critique of Plato’s, the project was fatally flawed from its inception.
There is another overall conception which has also to be given some consideration here, especially as it was used by Saint Paul: that God is “all in all”. He uses this formula of the Father in Eph. 4,6 and of Christ in Eph. 1,23 and Col. 3,11. Simply speaking, God is not to be identified with the all of creation; the expression refers to an interpenetration of creation and its participation of God, especially by assimilation, not by taking a part of God. It clearly has a place for the return of all creation to God as its source and as the endpoint of angelic and human salvation.
The God revealed by Christ is triune. Each of the three persons is in identity with the single divine nature which unites them. God is love, and selflessly the Father gives Himself totally to the Son, and then, with their common divinity they give themselves as one to the Holy Spirit. That self-giving in love indicates the correctness of its traditional scholastic assimilation to the exercise of will - that will and love are identified, especially within the divine simplicity. Knowledge as such does not break out into love, but precedes it. Readily understandable in a human situation, but the divine simplicity and its infinite power reduces the distinction, without negating it, to a unity beyond our grasp. Without a plurality of persons in unity the conception of God as love has no standing. But that needs completion. Each person gives himself back to his source in adoration and living obedience – and in the highest liberty. The energy of Love based on knowledge is the essential energy on God, expressing the intensity under which infinite divinity gives itself to infinite divinity and responds to its reception by giving itself back. All in an unchangingness which corresponds to an eternal total mutual selfless giving in love and an eternal selfless reception in the same love. That eternal renewed energy energizes God in himself, and in his constantly renewed creative outflow. Three instantiations of the same divine nature, infinite and all-powerful, affect timelessly their union in their infinite identification with the single divine essence. Completeness demands that whilst this energy is unlimited so that He is “always” active, the activity finds an instantaneous finality in God, constituting himself at rest. In the divine modality of timelessness, activity is therefore not in contradiction with the divine immobility of which it is the product. It is an expression of the highest energy in God that he timelessly achieves the totality of his activity as his own peace. That peace is an expression of the total intensity of coherent energizing. All the equilibrium posited by Aristotle is in God, but it requires an effort of mind to see that in the peaceful and powerful equilibrium of God there is an energizing which Aristotle had excluded. This demands not only power in God, but liberty for the total creative communication of energies deriving from his own, and the liberty to call all things back to himself as their source, who is also their end. The facility of outgoing and return, taken into neo-Platonism, and even taken over by Saint Thomas as the plan for his Summa of realized and activated theology: creation proceeds through the creative Word: the Son, and returns to its source through the Life ending with the Pasch of this Word as incarnate.
The creative attention of God goes as far as each subparticle of mass. It was the source of energy through the initial fusion of the plasma of simple nuclei, and the union of their primary positivism with the negative electrical polarity of their complementary electrons. Subtle inter-reacting principles, expressible mathematically, kept finely tuned together, account for the greatness of the universe and non-uniformity of its history. An initially communicated energy came with an appearance of its own. Expansion by a establishing a dominant expansion over the gravity still weakly holding like to like, and the crunching force of gravity, when liberated from the superior force of expansion, these were not blind but, like all the processes behind them, were guided powerfully and in an ordered way from the beginning. Even the apparent cosmic accidents of supernovas exploding and leaving little behind them were adapted to a higher end, when from the ensuing clouds of gas and dust; concretized planets emerged with the higher elements of the periodic table amidst them, and from its carbon and oxygen came the stuff of life.
Light has an extreme importance as its unvarying velocity becomes the containing frame and boundary of it all, still essentially expanding. Fire as its origin, and light as its space- and time-filling radiation, criss-crossing the expanding all: they were two of the conspicuous characteristics of the Divine nature in the visions given in the ancient revelation, and accompanied by energy, expressing itself in intense and sustained expressions of energy bursting into lightning and its connatural thunder (cf. Ex. 19,16 20,18). For us lightning is produced in a unipole electrical manifestation from a charge in the clouds: the stronger positively charged from their tops, the negatively charged from their undersides, drawn to their opposite poles which they call into being in a corresponding field around objects below. Besides the electrical energy in the stroke, there can be a production of temperatures five times that of the surface of the sun.[9] The analogy between the electrical manifestations in the divine Theophanies as experienced by human beings, with the positive monopole as the more powerful, and the original production of hydrogen protons as positively charged separately from the negatively charged electrons is most striking. Both come within the class of phenomena. Nuclear fusions during the earlier seconds of the big bang achieved those unions of positive and negative electricity in the first particles. That fusion corresponds to the termination of the original distancing of opposed connatural electrical poles in lightning. In it the electrical force is manifested in enormous power literally in a flash; in the aftermath of the big bang electrical forces are channeled over a long period into created masses, becoming normally quiescent. That the processes are analogous should not surprise us, but be seen as a strong indication that the ultimate source of the cosmos must be the God revealed to the Patriarchs and especially to Moses in the midst of the Jewish people at Mount Sinai, which had escaped from bondage in a Pasch which had demonstrated the power of God in another context.
Theophanies were always regarded as exhibitions of the power of God, that is of his energy.
[1] Known universally as the “Big Bang”. The Wikipedia [Internet] art. “Big Bang” attributes the origination of the theory to the realisation by a Belgian Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, of the significance of the fact that spiral extra-galactic galaxies were receding. “Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, independently derived the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker equations from Albert Einstein's equations of general relativity in 1927 and proposed, on the basis of the recession of spiral nebulae, that the universe began as a simple "primeval atom"—now known as the Big Bang.” v. bibliographical references in n.6: “G. Lemaître (1927). "Un Univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extragalactiques". Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels 47A: 41. Translated in: (1931) "A homogeneous universe of constant mass and growing radius accounting for the radial velocity of extragalactic nebulae". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 91: 483–490. . The "primeval atom" was introduced here: G. Lemaître, Nature 128 (1931) suppl.: 704.” There is a good Wikipedia article on his life, with a summary of his scientific work: "Georges Lemaître". Einstein knew Mgr. Lemaître, and respected his work. This photograph shows them together:
[2] These figures from Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers (London 1999), p.78; cf. also p.94. His analogy with rods refers to the painting of M.C. Escher, Cubic Space Division, on p.65.
[3] On string theory, v. the section on “Cosmic Strings et al.” in Cambridge Relativity: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/cs_home.html
[4] Wikipedia art. “Big Bang Nucleosynthesis”.
[5] Figures from ib.
[6] According to Stephen Hawking (with Roger Penrose) The Nature of Space and Time (Princeton 1995). Expressed mathematically yet with a very suggestive example, they can be recognised “by the existence of geodesics [the shortest distance between two points on a curved surface] that cannot be extended to infinite values of the affine parameter”. Also, “a spacetime which is timelike or geodesically incomplete but cannot be embedded in a larger spacetime” (p.15). Hawking and Penrose proved that Einstein’s theory of general relativity entailed that there should be a singularity in our past (ib. p.75)
[7] Rees, op.cit, p.141: “when our universe was smaller than a golf ball”; “an entire universe could evolve from a tiny ‘seed’”, ib., pp.138-9.
[8] Here, unknowingly, he comes close to the three potencies of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie: +A-A±A. Even that simple expression makes an implicit criticism of Rees’s pairs of forces. Creativity derives from the “harmonisation” of the two forces acting as a principle in ±A, which should be expressed as such formally. Rees’s picture is of a space penetrated by pairs of linearly independent forces, joined conceptually.
