A New Dimension

As we have seen before, the universe began with a big bang 13.6 billion years ago. From that moment on, space and time started to exist, and the laws of nature guided how the universe would further expand and develop to higher and higher complexity. If we would operate along the thinking of a purely materialistic worldview, the entire universe, all that ever happened and will ever happen, must have already been coded at the moment of the big bang in matter—each piece of art ever created, each idea that would ever come to anybody’s mind, each thought ever thought. Every thought, innovation, or flash of inspiration would merely be the product of a predetermined sequence of events. Just as a clock’s hands can only move in one direction at a fixed pace, in a purely mechanistic universe, the emergence of ideas would be constrained by the preset rules of the cosmic machinery. If one holds a deterministic view of the universe, believing that every event is the result of prior causes and conditions, then the inception of the universe, the Big Bang, set into motion a series of unalterable events leading up to the present moment. In this framework, every event, including all human decisions, and actions, all created art, each thought ever thought, would be a natural outcome of the initial conditions and laws set during the Big Bang.