Term Paper: Eternal Circle of Time Electrons

Pages: 9 (2850 words)  ·  Bibliography Sources: 1+  ·  Level: College Senior  ·  Topic: Astronomy  ·  Buy This Paper


[. . .] Eventually, the leaf falls off of its tree, tumbles to the ground, and is carried off by the wind. The wind might drop somewhere else, into another field, or perhaps into the sea. Each and every one of the steps in the leaf's cycle of life and death is governed in accordance with the laws of action and reaction. Nothing is created from nothing, and every single action has a prior cause. Likewise, the leaf exists within the terrestrial environment of the Earth, an Earth that scientists tell us was created as a result of energy supplied by the sun out of matter that already existed somewhere in the solar system. "[Scientists] have been able to rule out the steady-state theory, but the rate invoked for the creation of matter is too low to rule out straightforwardly." (Pasachoff, 2001)

So, current scientific theory holds that matter can be created out of nothing, though this cannot be stated without reservations as the rate of its creation out of nothing is so low that it cannot, at present, be scientifically tested. But can matter really come from nothing? Even if its substance is derived from "nothing," still something must have caused its creation to occur - action and reaction. Just as the tide moves in response to the Moon's gravitational pull, so must the creation of matter be in response to some pre-existent force. The very first atom must have been created somehow, just as the very first leaf to fall into the mud on the bottom of a stream must have come from somewhere. And we know it did. It came from a tree, a tree that came from the seeds of other trees that came before it. Likewise, the salmon that lays her eggs in the mud of the stream grew ultimately from the eggs that were laid by another salmon that swam up the stream before her. Seed to tree to leaf. Egg to salmon to upstream migration. One cause leads to another. The life cycle of the species repeats over and over, but not the life cycle of the individual. The dead leaf does not become a seed. The dead salmon does not become an egg.

Of course, there are exceptions to this natural order of things.

Humans are conclusively different from all of natures other truly wonderful creatures. No other species on Earth is capable of achieving the incredible accomplishments of the human race. No other species have landed themselves on the moon, examined the sights of every planet in our solar system, or been able to play god by recreating themselves by means other than sexual or asexual reproduction. We appear to be unconventional anomalies in a master plan that has been disturbed.

Every species on Earth has a natural instinct to preserve the harmonious coexistence between themselves and their surroundings. Humans on the other hand, behave like a disease, continually spreading out, reproducing, feeding and destroying until all natural resources have been consumed. The interests of humans and the interests of nature seem to be conflicting paradoxes." (Russell, 2001)

Human beings, like grizzly bears, do things to alter their environments. The grizzly bear that fishes in the salmon stream uses his own brute strength to secure as much of the stream as possible for his own use. If he is big enough he drives away other bears. And even if he's not so big, he drives away humans. Voracious feeding by a single hungry bear can have dramatic effects on the population of salmon in a small stream. Similarly, when well-armed humans arrive and kill or drive away the bears, and take the salmon for themselves, they can have even more devastating effects on the salmon population. This devastation can come directly, either through the use of human ingenuity to capture enormous numbers of salmon, or through the creation of human settlements on the banks of the stream that pollute the waters, or perhaps divert them for some other purpose. In either case, the grizzly or the human is the cause of a permanent change in the environment. The powerful grizzly that commandeers the stream and devours all the salmon has forever put an end to the salmon in that waterway as surely as would human activity. Salmon only swim up the streams in which they were hatched. If salmon no longer live to lay eggs in a given waterway, they will eventually disappear completely from that waterway. As well, the mighty bear, by eliminating the salmon, eliminates a primary food source for himself and other bears, meaning that in time, the bears themselves will cease to frequent the vicinity of the stream. The same will happen with humans. If they destroy their environment, and have no other resources upon which to draw, they too will disappear.

Food is necessary for human existence," and "Human populations tend to grow faster than the power in the Earth to provide subsistence." (Bleier) So said Thomas Malthus more than two centuries ago. Yet his observations on the principles of cause and effect within human society are as true today as they were then. They are also equally fine illustrations of the general laws of cause and effect. Even the seemingly unnatural - the human manipulation of the Earth's environment - is the result of some cause. It is not a natural cause, but rather, like the grizzly bear's conquest of the salmon stream, is based upon the purposeful act of a higher intelligence. A human being may indeed be more intelligent than a bear but it still remains an unalterable fact that the changes produced by the thoughts and desires of either are the cause of the changes that occur. Nothing happens without a cause, and so to travel back to the very beginning, the Big Bang, and indeed the primordial ball of atoms, and the empty space that contained it, must have been put there as the result of some cause. All events in the natural world are the result of some prior physical event. There is no deviation from this norm. Those deviations that do occur are the outcome of an intelligence acting to alter the normal course of events. Cycling back through the eons, the big bang may indeed have recurred countless times. However, there must have been a first time, a first big bang that set in motion all the other cycles of big bangs. Whether or not the primordial ball was created second and placed inside the emptiness of space, or the emptiness of space was created with primordial ball already inside it does not matter. In either case there was an act of first creation. And this creation, of necessity had to proceed from some prior cause. But, as this cause proceed literally from out of nothing; this violates all known natural laws. Only the will of some intelligent being could have willed these things into existence. And an intelligent being acts always according to some reason, no matter how inscrutable that reason may be. Therefore, there must be an overall order, an overall rhyme and reason to the universe and all that is contained within it. Time does indeed have a purpose, and its purpose is the eternal cycle of birth, development, and regeneration.


Bleier, Ronald, Ed. From Thomas Malthus, (1798) "Essay on the Principle of Population." The International Society of Thomas Malthus. http://www.igc.org/desip/malthus/

Pasachoff, Jay M. (2001) Astronomy: From the Earth to the Universe. Brooks/Cole Publishing Company.

Russell, Steven. (2001) "The Evolution of Gods." Your Own World USA. http://www.yowusa.com/index.html

Schaefer, Dr. Henry III. (Jan. 1994). "Stephen Hawking, The Big Bang, and God." The Real Issue. Leadership University. http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9404/bigbang.html

Smith, Huston. (1993). Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World's Religions. San Francisco: Harper.

Weinstein, Eric W. "Newton's Laws." Wolfram Research.


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