Consideration of theological implications of the Universe before the big bang might rightly have been placed within a philosophy or religion section, yet with the opportunity to write on this somewhat interesting topic I must use it where it is in physics. There are string and membrane theory physicists that support the concept of God creating this Universe and all other potential matter, space-time and a vacuum in which all that could exist with a material appearance did. Presumably theological deliberations regarding the nature of God and his relationship to the physically evident universe would be a matter of consideration of causality-of where the spiritual meets the material. That approach however is rather biased toward physical causality and the nature of the promulgation of forces that humanity and philosophers generally have always tended to believe was best interpreted with reductionist principles. Such reductionist ideas brought pre-Socratic philosophers to consider that perhaps water was the fundamental constituent element of mass, and also of course Democrtitus would later isolate the fundamental force as a discrete composite construction. Today with the unsatisfactory termination of the standard theory of physics at a singular infinite ‘dead end’ because of the difficulties in extending the general theory’s equations to quantum mechanical paradigms modelling the first second of the history of the Universe, scientists and mathematicians have pursued several other theoretical avenues to go beyond the equations of general relativity and to unify it with a better quantum mechanical theoretical foundation of explanation. Are there other than causal relationships of the spiritual to the material? It would seem that there must be for the alternative would imply that the material and the spiritual are a part of the same continuum. If that were so it would seem a better choice to prefer that matter is really a product of spirit in a subjective appearance to human sentience than the more absurd alternative that a Creator could be mass originally. If that were the case the creator would need to be created from mass,and the Creator of the mass would be the real Creator. Plainly separating the issue of the physical causality from either first cause considerations or an inter-tie to the Creator as spirit would be desirable. There are several other approaches to engaging a theological criterion with the pre big bang Universe that we shall presently set aside for another time for brevity’s sake. The pre-big bang Universe has been considered to be a vacuum into which virtual particles might appear and through some force of a fundamental nature collapse into an aggregating mass perhaps extending a force upon space-time sufficient to draw in other appearing, distant virtual particles to form a black hole-white hole transition into a hyper-inflation Universe. In theory any number of Universes might have arisen from the ‘perturbative vacuum. Of course we would wonder about innumerable questions regarding the nature and relationship of particles or waves in a ‘perturbative vacuum. Mathematicians perhaps must reconcile the possible relationships or qualities of strings or membranes, virtual particles and their extended,dialectical exchanges and values relative to other particles with the observable Universe. Such approaches may eventual produce consistent theories that are rather arbitrary in that because they work they are accepted. It is reasonable to consider the questions about the range of potential elements and configurations of pre-big bang vacuum particles or waves interminably before and after a functioning series of equations are found that work consistently with the apparent Universe. At some point in virtually any theory of vacuum energy the intervals and exchanges of existing particles or wave, membranes or strings would be plural and obvious candidates for temporal manifestations from a monistic, spiritual field in which all dimensions and mass-energy are simply appearances generated by reducing the presence of omniscience and omnipotence. Pluralism would seem to be the product of the absence of the continuum of the One Spirit. Why the One might wish to use a negative presence to create ‘outside’ of Himself is unknown of course. The philosopher of neo-Platonism Plotinus considered such questions in his ‘The Enneads’ in the third century a.d.
