The Big Bang Never Happened

THE COSMOLOGICAL DEBATEious objects—individual horses, for example, are embodimentsof the ideal form of a horse from which their existence derives.Since these ideal forms are ideas, they cannot be perceived bythe senses, but only uncovered by the use of reason, guided by acritical use of logic.In the Timaeus Plato formulates a cosmology and creationstory consistent with this concept of human knowledge. At thebeginning of time, a beneficent creator used the eternal ideas orforms to mold preexisting, chaotic matter. (Like Pythagoras, Platobelieved that the ultimate basis of these forms was mathematicaland geometrical.) The creator molded matter into approximationsof these ideal shapes, creating a universe ruled by eternal mathematicallaws, laws which humans can deduce through reason.These eternal mathematical laws are the true reality while thechangeable universe we see is mere appearance—the observationof nature is thus unreliable.Plato emphasizes the ethical implication of this distinction:the ideal forms are the source of all good, while base, earthlymatter is the source of the world's evils. The mundane, changeableworld of everyday life cannot be used to understand theeternal, perfect, and unchangeable heavens. The most perfectmotion, circular motion, occurs only in heaven, not on earth.Plato thus developed another mode of thinking about the universeand creation. Against the traditional appeal to authority,Plato counterposes the power of human reason. But Plato attacksobservation as a route to knowledge and strictly separates theworlds of thinking and doing, the spirit and the flesh, the heavensand earth. He thereby created a mathematical myth, a formidablebarrier to the development of science.Plato's belief in the supremacy of pure reason necessarily ledhim to formulate a myth to account for the rational origins of theuniverse, and thus led to the reestablishment of authority as thesource of all knowledge. The observations that Plato so firmlyrejected have the great advantage of objectivity. But a theory ofthe universe based on ideal mathematical forms relies on theauthority of a priesthood of reason that can dictate which mathematicalforms are the most ideal, most beautiful, most perfect: theones which the creator chose at the beginning. The story of creationthat is based on such priestly authority is just as much a myth68