'til the End of Time

Although science does not claim any authority in the realm of good and evil, it is uncanny how the Fall of Man still echoes in our purely secular world view.  The Christian church continues to retreat on all fronts -- Secularism, Islam, Eastern mysticism, Hedonism and even Dialectical Materialism -- not because people reject the message, but because the Christian church is falling apart from the inside.  Yet the underlying message of the church still molds and nurtures new expressions of morality, salvation, and even eschatology.  Science fiction and futuristic drama have replaced Scripture as the vehicle for moral expression.  These expressions in turn inform the world view of the scientific academy as well as the increasingly blurred intersection between science and politics.  The greenhouse effect was once simply a quaint description of the electromagnetic transmission characteristics of atmospheric gases; now it has become one of the Four Horsemen (along with Nuclear War, Overpopulation, and the Coming Plague.) Mankind's greatest sin is not rebellion against God; oh no, that rebellion was fought and won in the 19th century.  Our greatest sin is the desecration of our planet, or perhaps even worse, if we are to believe Professors Krauss and Dent in their paper titled "The Late Time Behavior of False Vacuum Decay: Possible Implications for Cosmology and Metastable Inflating States."

It is the last line of the paper's abstract which causes one's brows to knit:

"Several interesting open questions are raised,  including whether observing the cosmological configuration of a metastable universe can constrain its inferred lifetime."

Surely they had to know that this would bubble to the surface of popular scientific controversy.  Does humankind have the capacity to alter, or shall we say corrupt, the Universe simply by observing the deep forbidden secrets?  Have we, in our arrogance, already opened Pandora's box, or plucked the fruit from the Tree of the Unified Field Theory?  Perhaps this theory can be expanded.  For example, is it possible that the reason atheists don't believe in God is because the act of searching causes God to recede at ever increasing velocity (at least for an atheist)?

This is not the first time that scientists have speculated on the godlike powers of humanity.  In the mid 90s, Frank Tipler speculated on the possibility of future machines altering the heat death of the Universe, reversing entropy, and restoring physical replications of all humans who have ever existed, thereby presumably resurrecting the dead.  Tipler is the exceptional optimist, believing that a future of ever evolving machine intelligence will ultimately be moral and compassionate.  A more likely scenario would be Matrix or Terminator, in which machines prove to be almost as diabolical as humans.

If the balance of visible and dark matter and energy can be so easily and disastrously disturbed by the mere observation of the dark side, then perhaps this says something about the underlying cosmological framework, like maybe we are dividing by zero.  On the other hand, if it is at all possible that the lifespan of the Universe could be altered by mere observation, then why is resurrection from the dead so unbelievable to materialists?

We sneer at faith as superstition to be tolerated at best, or to be suppressed if possible, but then we turn to the High Priests of Cosmology and find that the Grand Fulcrum of the Universe is actually located right here on this speck of dust we call Earth.  Like Saruman peering into the palantir, we have searched too deeply and greedily for knowledge, and now the Great Eye has awakened and looked back at us.

But mankind's sin is not the desire for knowledge, but rather our desire to be God.  A man-become-God is a self negating reality because such a man would ultimately think a thought which would annihilate both himself and the Universe.  God gives us freedom but restrains our power because we cannot be trusted with it.  A God-become-man is a much more desirable situation...

It would seem that we are hopelessly trapped in our own mythos.  Even Freud filled his office with statues and figurines of gods and goddesses, after first denying the existence of the only God who matters.  So while Science appears to push back the frontiers of ignorance and superstition, it does so by recasting those superstitions as future horrors and man-made catastrophes.  We will not allow God to bring Apocalypse, but by God, we'll create our own Nuclear end time.  Noah was a Hebrew reinterpretation of Gilgamesh and no more than an exaggerated account of a real flood in ancient Mesopotamia, but the catastrophic man-made ice age caused by our evil consumption of fossil fuels is going to happen if we don't restrain the evil corporations and their evil accomplices.

Now our search for knowledge has stumbled upon the darkest secret of all.  If we observe the wrong thing, the Universe will die early.  It reminds me of the librarian Evelyn in "The Mummy"  as she reads the forbidden words in the Book of the Dead to awaken the monster.  Had Krauss and Dent not written their own magic incantation, perhaps there would not be a rip in the space-time fabric. Alas, it is too late.  The Force has been perturbed and the ripples will expand and amplify to the ends of the Universe.  Game over, man.