John Dobson

At the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1993, a session on Religious Responses to the Big Bang was held with Ian Barbour as chief speaker. Another was John Dobson. The following is extracted from Dobson's replies to question put by the publisher of "Open Court", who subsequently published a book entitled Cosmic Beginnings and Human Ends.

What are your views on cosmic beginnings?

For one who feels that the Big Bang cosmology is not well supported by the observational evidence, and for one who suspects that the universe may not have had a beginning at all, any discussion of "cosmic beginnings" with respect to the "origin" of the universe must take on a rather odd look. If the universe could be "actual," i.e., if it could have arisen through some process of physics, then its beginning could be considered a "happening in time" and a discussion or "origins" would be in order. But if, as I have suggested, the universe might be apparitional, rather than actual, then the discussion of origins must take the form of an investigation into the nature of the apparition. We must know what might be behind the apparition, what are the consequences of such an apparition, and whether they correspond to what we see. Also, we should see whether or not the notion that the universe is apparitional might help to explain some of the things which heretofore we have had to take for granted.
To ask what might exist behind such an apparition is to ask what might exist in the absence of matter, energy, space and time, and it is easy to get an answer to that question in terms of negation. In the absence of time we are left with the changeless, since change can take place only in time. And since smallness and dividness can exist only in space, in the absence of space we are left with the infinite, the undivided. So what I am suggesting is that by seeing what we see as if in space and time, we might have mistaken the changeless, the infinite and the undivided for something else. And the question is whether that something else could be expected to take the form of the universe as we see it. I am suggesting that the nature of the apparition is seeing what we see as if in space and time, and that what's behind the apparition is the changeless, the infinite, the undivided.