Thomas Edison, the lightbulb & God . . .

I was watching National Treasure, the Nicholas Cage movie, the other day when a particular segment of dialogue caught my attention.  Two of the characters were talking about how to go about stealing the Declaration of Independence when Cage’s character said, “Thomas Edison tried and failed 2000 times to invent the light bulb.  When asked about this, the inventor said, ‘I didn’t fail.  I discovered 2000 ways how NOT to invent a light bulb.'”

 It could be God, good scientist that He (She?) is, didn’t give up after several (dozen? hundred? thousand?  You pick a metric) attempts and didn’t throw everything away and start again, from scratch.  I good scientist never throws anything away and God, after all, is “The First Scientist”.  His method may have been a bit primitive; being the first at anything means you don’t have anything to use as a reference.

I know there are some who would say, “What about evolution?  Isn’t that proof of experimentation?”  Well, yes and no.  Within the context of the Universe as we know and understand it, evolution could be seen as proof of experimentation but it could also be an “accident”, an “unintended consequence” that resulted in this universe’s classification of “failure”.

Oh, I almost forgot . . .I don’t want anyone to get the idea I’m espousing any kind of religious theory, here.  All this talk of God, evolution, experimentation, etc. . .is simply a “hypothetical construct” designed to place these questions in some kind of context.  I do not believe in “God” in the accepted sense of that word, not do I believe the supposed “theory” of Intelligent Design.  Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory.  It is a religious argument first put forth, officially, by Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica) some four hundred years ago.  It was formulated as a way of “filling in the gaps” between what we (at the time) understood about the physical world and what we didn’t understand and, according to the Catholic Church, could never understand.  It was, in essence, a myth created to explain how thing worked; the same way early man sued stories to explain where storms came from, or lightening, or earthquakes, or anything else the cause of which was not readily apparent.  The Church, it seemed, had a rather short-sighted view of human beings’ ability to acquire knowledge and, given the Church’s penchant for curtailing that ability, had every reason to believe their view would prove the correct one.  I didn’t.  But I digress. . .

I started this post with a question.  How many times did God try to create the Universe before He (She) came up with this one, the one that worked?  It’s an intriguing question.  I wonder if there’s an answer?