What are the odds that all land on earth would collide to form a supercontinent? The probability must be quite high since it’s happened three times in geologic history. Either that, or the earth just got lucky. For when continents collide, it can have major implications like mass extinctions or the earth freezing into a giant snowball.

There are many who discount the notion that the universe, and thus by implication the earth, is the product of intelligent design. I don’t know that I believe in intelligent design either. Still…

The moon is just the right distance from the earth so that when it passes in front of the disk of the sun, it seems to be the same size as the sun. This means that for a ring of fire eclipse, only the sun’s corona is visible as it protrudes from the moon’s face during a total solar eclipse. Or consider the finely tuned universe, which holds that life in the cosmos is sensitive to fundamental physical constants. If these variables were changed just a little, the universe would have evolved differently and life as we know it wouldn’t have.

The cosmological constant in our universe comes in at a rosy if infinitesimal number. Not too hot. Not too cold, but just right for life in the universe to exist. Were it any larger, stars and galaxies wouldn’t be able to form.

So there’s some evidence for the hypothesis of intelligent design, but it’s not regarded as good science by most scientists, who respond with the anthropic principle, the hypothesis that we live in a Goldilocks cosmos conducive to life because otherwise we wouldn’t be around to witness it. Being smart little creatures, it’s not so surprising that we find ourselves in a cosmos conducive to life because there are probably many other ‘attic’ universes out there which aren’t. We just happen to be in the right one. That’s the gist of the argument.

I regard the anthropic principle as a bootstrap argument. It never really made much sense to me. But that doesn’t mean I believe God made the universe.

Intelligent design argues that an intelligence created the universe. Since I can’t claim to have been around to experience the birth of the physical cosmos, I, like the cosmogonists, must make assumptions about the initial conditions that created it. The black box that existed in the moment before the Big Bang can’t exist in our assumptions, since it preceded the phenomenal universe and even time itself, though how anything can come ‘before’ time is problematic. Time presumes a before and an after. That serial ordering is part of the fabric of time itself. The problem for those who espouse the hypothesis of intelligent design is that, at present, it’s nonfalsisifable. Since it can’t be disproved, it’s not very scientific. To me, it’s inferential. It’s anecdotal.

Physicists have tried to fill in the gaps created by the dearth of data we have access to in the instant prior to the Big Bang through things like Inflationary Theory, which attempts to show how something (the universe) arose out of nothing.

The cyclic model holds that the universe expands (Big Bangs) and contracts (Big Crunches) in great cycles. This is akin in some respects to cyclical view of time in certain Hindu traditions.

If you’re from the West and are more religiously or spiritually inclined, you may say that a God made the universe. That’s intelligent design.

My hypothesis is that an intelligence did make the universe, but not the intelligence most people think of. I believe that we made the universe. That’s right: you and me. Together, we dreamt this mad cosmos into being. This is a compromise between those who insist that God made the universe and the people who argue that randomness and probability gave rise to the spacetime actuality in which we find ourselves. To me, probability is an idea, a sluice or gate through which we funnel the substrate of matter and energy, space and time into the organized systems around us. The universe appears ordered because our minds are ordered, and because those minds are attempting to impose order upon a rather chaotic and random miasma, the Prima Materia.

The idea isn’t new. The Gnostics, a rather broad set of schools of classical antiquity and early Christian belief, had the same idea. Only they regarded the universe of matter as inherently bad. I don’t.  I just believe that we went to sleep before time and dreamt the whole universe up. And it’s taken the cosmos this long to evolve a consciousness sharp enough to conclude that the universe is itself but a dream.

But one day, or I should say, one nontime, we’ll wake up out of it all and realize that it was all just a dream.

© 2025 by Michael C. Just