Life is improbable

It is very strange that anything exists. Surely it is much more likely that there should be nothing. And if something did exist you would expect it to be something very simple like a quark, or a string, or a dimensionless point, or an energy field. But a woman in a ball gown clutching a rose – that’s highly improbable. But then we make this observation from a privileged position – that of existing - however improbable we are, it seems we do exist.

What are we to make of this paradox? How did we get from nothing to something? And how did we get from simplicity to the world of roses, women, dancing and plastic models?

Did God sit around for aeons of time twiddling his thumbs in empty space, getting bored, then decided to give things a push and created a universe? No – space and time were made at the same er … time! There were no aeons before creation and no space to put the universe in. Did the first explosion of existence contain the instructions to make a plastic model of a woman in a ball gown, just like an acorn is programmed to make an oak tree?

Could anything be said to exist without an intelligence to perceive it? Imagine a universe with no living things. Imagine that life never arises in this dead universe. How would it know it existed? How would you know whether it really existed or not? Now imagine that you never imagined it in the first place. Where did it go?

Suppose time is not a sequence of events but an illusion. All past events happen ‘at once’. Suppose we - the intelligence of the universe - are pulling events from the future.  Suppose God did not push – we pulled!