Fiction by Captain Jack Hawksworth Esq.
Introduction
Scientology has Xenu, the all powerful ruler of the Galactic Confederacy (a bit like Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets, only considerably darker). Xenu brought billions of his people to earth, tied them to volcanoes and killed them with hydrogen bombs.
Not a pretty sight.
Not to mention the damage to our climate.
Sciencology, however, has to make do with a Professor at MIT.
And quantum physics is where it all started.
The Loaded Gun
A physicist once remarked that telling non-scientists about the weirdness of quantum physics was like giving a child a loaded gun to play with.
The problem lies with quantum particles like electrons, protons, gluons, up quarks, and down quarks. Particles that, until you set out to observe them, are impossible to see. So impossible they may as well not exist at all!
Forget children! Even Nobel Prize winning quantum physicists can’t get their heads around them! Okay, they’re elusive. But so is Big Foot and the Abominable Snowman. But they’re not particularly dangerous unless you’re in a forest in Oregon or on the slopes of Mount Everest. Whereas everything in the universe is created by these particles! You and I included.
These particles are dangerous because they turn our safe and secure notions of reality upside down. Unlike us these particles can exist in two states at the same time. As particles and as waves of particles. Which is like saying a billiard ball can also look like a billiard table. They can also be in two separate places at the same time and that two particles can communicate instantaneously no matter how far apart they are.
They could even be at both ends of the universe!
I think J. K. Rowling will admit that even Harry Potter would be hard pressed to come up with sorcery like that!
If these particles were into music they’d be listening to the Sex Pistols, The Clash and the Buzzcocks. They have the audacity to suggest reality may be in the eye of the beholder. That, when conducting an experiment using quantum particles, it’s the experimenter, not the quantum particles, that choose the result!
The bad news for the Pope is that they can lead you suspect the universe wasn’t created by God. Instead it’s constantly being created by a bunch of power crazed scientists in their laboratories. Or perhaps all of us are creating it! We certainly have the potential because we’re composed of quantum particles. So, unlike those mutants with their X-genes beloved by Marvel Comics, we may have the power to create the universe!
That’s what that physicist meant when he said a loaded gun. Those quantum physicists have enough outrageous assumptions of their own to contend without letting children into the act.
Sciencologists are of hardier stock. Sciencology is a religion based on the cutting edge of modern science. A religion that dares to flaunt convention by making itself a religion that’s fun to belong to! A religion based, not on superstition, but one based firmly on logic and reasoning.
Now you may be asking, how can logic and reasoning be fun? Mr Spock in Star Trek was full of logic and reasoning. And how many jokes did he crack?
Not many.
But Sciencology hopes to do better than that.
Sciencology presents you with a choice. In the film, “The Matrix,” the hero was given the choice of taking a red pill or a blue one. The red pill would lift the veil and show him that what seemed to be real was just an illusion. But, if he chose to bottle out, he could take the blue one. Whereupon he’d wake up in bed and blissfully forget everything that happened to him. We give you a similar choice.
Only our red pill is metaphorical. And, unlike the pill Keanu Reeves was offered, ours is considerably larger. That’s because some of the things we’ll be telling you are pretty hard to swallow.
The good news is that if you take our pill you won’t wake up naked inside a high tech pod to discover that you’re hooked up to a giant battery charger. Although some of you may hanker fantasies about that.
So what is this religion we’re offering?
Sciencology is aimed at those prepared to open their minds to the mind-bending theories at the cutting edge of modern science. Like the Catholic Jesuits, we are missionaries and teachers.
We also make good use of Occam’s Razor.
Philosophers and scientists regard it as the intellectual version of your Swiss Army Knife. Occam’s Razor states that the simplest explanation is the one most likely to be correct. The simplest explanation being the one that makes the fewest assumptions. And the more complicated and convoluted the explanation is, then the less likely it is to be true. We Sciencologists use Occam’s Razor to detect the presence of potential bullshit.
How ironic that it was a 14th Century Franciscan Frier, William of Ockham, who came up with this principal. And, with his help, Sciencology will make those other religions out there feel the cutting edge of his Razor. To wax lyrical, Sciencology will use his razor to shave away the layers of superstition and false logic and reveal the pure bullshit underneath.
Unlike the theologian, Saint Maximillian Kolbe, we won’t be using circular arguments. Kolbe pronounced that the Virgin Birth was far too deep and mysterious and regarded any attempt to explain it to be pointless. Thus using a circular argument to defend a form of childbirth that disregarded the laws of nature.
Nice try, Kolbe. But no cigar!
Check the other religions out. They use a lot of circular arguments.
We also teach that Sciencology is open to criticism. If you don’t like our religion then find one you do. There’s plenty to choose from. There’s no room in Sciencology for indoctrination. Take it or leave it.
End of story.
As for those who feel Sciencology is questioning their God’s suitability to take on the role of Supreme Being? Well, their God shouldn’t have given us the intelligence to ask these questions. Instead he should have made us gullible enough to accept every word written in those bibles.
A Word About Our Nearest Competitor
At this point we should mention our nearest competitor in the theological stakes. We refer, of course, to Scientology! People have said Sciencology sounds similar to Scientology. Are we in any way connected to them? No. The difference between Sciencology and Scientology is more than just one letter.
The difference is we like to think we’re more scientific. For those who don’t know, Scientology is a religion created by the late L. Ron Hubbard. The author of such science fiction pot boilers as “Battlefield Earth” and “Typewriter in the Sky.”
Make of that what you will.
George Clooney’s Watch!
Christians have a series of interactive sessions freely exploring the basics of the Christian faith. It’s called “The Alpha Course.”
No pressure, they claim.
No follow up.
No charge.
And, you could say, no use to anyone! But, if you’re willing to ignore pure logic and rational thinking, then the Alpha Course is right for you. Sciencology has the Omega Course! Why Omega? Because the information we give you is as accurate as an Omega watch!
And, by a happy coincidence, George Clooney advertises Omega watches! And unlike Tom Cruise, he’s not a Scientologist. So, when you think of the Omega Course, think George Clooney because it’s as accurate as the watch on Clooney’s wrist!
Our mission is to prove that Sciencology can be an attractive theological alternative to a traditional religion. And if any of you feel tempted to change your religious beliefs, then you’re only two steps away from salvation.
But not two steps away from heaven. For this is not the salvation of your soul, but the salvation of your intellect!
A Rational Alternative to Genesis
I wanted to begin by replacing the Biblical Genesis with the Big Bang Theory. After all, the story of Adam and Eve and a talking snake selling poisoned apples ran counter to advances in genetics and anthropology. Although not in Snow White.
But even the Big Bang is not without flaws. The most fundamental being the question of what happened before the Big Bang. Then I heard that some scientists speculated there was nothing before the Big Bang. Nothing-to-the-power-of-nothing, as one of them succinctly put it. Nothing-to-the-power-of-nothing had a nice ring about it. It described an absolute state. Suddenly an intense feeling of excitement came over me!
Could the universe have been created out of nothing? Did nothingness have some special power which enabled it to trigger the Big Bang. This was Red Pill weird.
There was just one problem: as far as I knew there is absolutely nothing in nothing-to-the-power-of-nothing to do anything. In fact we can only think about about the word “nothing” because there’s nothing in it to think about!
Then I remembered the fact that there are two sides to everything. And the opposite of nothing is something. In other words, if a state of nothingness-to-the-power-of-nothingness exists then so must a state of something-to-the-power-of-something. And something does exist! The universe exists!
I then recalled that Steven Hawking had said time itself was created by the Big Bang. Thus solving the “what happened before” problem. Which begged the question; how long did it take for time to come into existence? And this revealed yet another fascinating paradox!
In the absence of time it must have taken no time at all.
In other words it must have happened instantaneously! And, because it was instantaneous, you could argue that time has always existed. This was the simplicity that Sciencology needed. It was certainly far simpler than the convoluted version of Genesis one finds in the Bible.
Virtual Worlds
Then I came across the philosopher Nick Bostrom. According to him we could all be living in a computer simulation run by a technologically advanced human race in the future. This seemed to be the sort of red pill weirdness Sciencology needed!
Clearly Bostrom’s computer is powerful enough to recreate the complexity of the real universe we once lived in. And there happens to be just such a potential computer! But more about that later.
Next I turned to what is regarded by science as the “Hard Problem.”
The nature of the conscious mind.
IT’S ALL IN THE MIND
This next bit is best read slowly.
To me one aspect of Mind is self-evident and requires no proof whatsoever. It’s the simple fact that the universe and everything in it would not exist without a conscious awareness of its existence.
In other words, the conscious mind. But there was a glitch.
There’s plenty of hard evidence to show the universe existed before the Mind appeared on the scene. But that begs the question: how do we know that? We know it because the Mind tells us so. Indeed, one could argue that the Mind is the only reason we know the universe exists!
This fascinated me. For example, my Mind can imagine a universe where there are no conscious minds; in fact, I could be greedy and imagine an infinite number of universes where there were no conscious minds.
But I need my Mind to do that!
Which led me to another obvious conclusion. Without my Mind there’d be no such things as thoughts. There’d be no existence, no past, present or future. There wouldn’t even be the concept of “nothingness.” Nothingness would cease to exist!
Which has to be the paradox of all paradoxes!
So how long did it take before the conscious mind appeared?
Time Waits for No Man
It’s calculated that it may have taken at least 3.77 billion years before life appeared on this planet.
Or did it?
It’s obvious that the awareness of time requires a Mind. So before the Mind existed there couldn’t have been a concept of time. So how long did it take for the conscious mind to appear? Well, as far as the Mind is concerned, it took no time at all.
Think about it.
I looked for a suitable analogy and thought of someone who’d just emerged from a deep coma. To them no time at all would have passed between going into the coma and coming out of it.
At this point it was getting a bit heavy so I amused myself by considering what this could do to those religions that relied on the existence of a deity. And I reckoned that even devout Christians may concede that a conscious Mind comes before there’s an awareness of God. So, using the Law of Cause & Effect, Sciencology argues that it was conscious minds that created God, not the other way round. And to argue that God gave us the conscious mind merely adds a complication.
Occam’s Razor, right?
There’s worse news for God. These are human conscious Minds. Without humans there’d just be the beasts of the field, the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea. All of them blissfully unaware of their creator’s existence! Oh, dear! To me it certainly looked like God had to create us in order to exist!
So who really is running this show?
Genesis According to Sciencology
So here’s Sciencology’s final stab at Genesis. Sciencology argues that in the beginning there was Mind and before that there wasn’t even nothingness. It takes the Holy Bible 30,046 words to describe their version of Genesis!
Whereas we can do it using only 13 words! 30,033 words less, Making Sciencology the economical religion!
The Nature of Mind
Does our Mind (conscious and unconscious) have physical properties? If so what shape is it? Is Mind square, round, oblong? How heavy is it? If it has weight then we should be able to weight it. But, like the elusive soul, so far no one has managed to do that. Needless to say, you’d need a conscious Mind before you can weight it. Before you can do anything at all, in fact! The chicken and the egg. I then considered it might be non-physical. Perhaps it’s a purely abstract concept. But there’s a problem: if it’s non-physical what separates my conscious mind from everyone else’s? A non-physical barrier is a contradiction in terms.
Perhaps there is no barrier. Using the principle of entanglement which has been virtually proved, quantum physicists believe that ultimately everything is connected.
Now you can see why Mind is considered to be the hard problem.
My Epiphany
As you probably know, computers work on the binary system. They only understand two things. 1 or 0, On or Off. If this was a human we’d be saying the lights are on but there’s no one home.
That’s what I thought until I read the book “Programming the Universe” written by Seth Lloyd, a professor of Quantum Mechanics at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Apparently he was the first person to develop a model for quantum computing.
Of course Lloyd is not as impressive as Xenu, by a long chalk. As far as I know Seth hasn’t killed one alien, let alone billions of them. Yes, all right, he could conceivably have killed billions playing computer games all night and then taught at the university during the day.
But, according to Scientology, Xenu killed real ones!
Anyway, Lloyd explains that the universe is a physical system made up of “bits. In other words, the universe contains “bits” of molecules, atoms, and particles (to computer geeks a “bit” is the smallest data in a computer with a value of either 1 or 0). And each of those “bits” interacts with another and this interaction alters those “bits.” Therefore Lloyd tells us the universe itself it could be simulated by a computer.
Lloyd then points out that to simulate a few hundred atoms from the universe for a fraction of a second on your PC or Mac would take more memory than there are atoms in the universe. To make matters even worse, it would take longer then the current age of the universe.
But that’s if you’re using a conventional computer.
But Lloyd’s expertise is with quantum computers!
And Lloyd tells us the universe is indistinguishable from a quantum computer.
Instead of an electric current, this quantum computer uses quantum fluctuations (a temporary charge in the amount of energy in a given point in space) to represent the binary On/Off sequences.
It sounded really red-pill weird. So what would be so special about this universe sized quantum computer?
Not Your Average Laptop
Super-powerful computers have been the stuff of dreams for science fiction writers. Douglas Adams gave us a version with his “Deep Thought.” And what about Arthur C. Clarks’s “Hal” who raised havoc aboard “Discovery One” as it headed out towards Jupiter.
Seth Lloyd is no exception. Except that his computer is based on science fact, not fiction!
The thing that sets the quantum computer apart is the fact it has the power to perform a number of calculations simultaneously! This makes it a bit faster than your PC or the Apple Mac I’m using to write this. And I can just see the words: APPLE MAC — THE COMPUTER THAT GAVE THE WORLD SCIENCOLOGY! proudly displayed on the Apple HQ in Cupertino.
Now try and imagine how powerful a quantum computer the size of the known universe would be. Professor Lloyd worked out that a quantum computer that’s given just 300 bits of input…
Which is just 2400 bits of data.
2400 one’s and zero’s.
Can do more more computing simultaneously than there are elementary particles in the universe! And how many of those are there? A rough estimate puts it at the number 10 with 84 naughts after it!
Then I recalled the Dark Matter scientists are talking about. Has he included that?
Dark Matter makes up 84% of the universe so if he didn’t include that what number are we thinking about? I didn’t try to imagine how many extra calculations a quantum computer this size can crunch simultaneously because it just gave me a headache!
So I was pretty confidant that any universe sized quantum computer would have no trouble creating a simulation like Bostrom’s virtual reality. In fact, it could create as may as you wanted! And, what’s more, you wouldn’t need Bostrom’s race of super-intelligent humans to build this computer. Because it’s already been built and its working away all around us.
The Grand Hypothesis
So I decided there and then what Sciencology’s Grand Hypothesis would be. The hypothesis is that we’re the result the ultimate form of computer simulation. That the universe has constructed the ultimate online Multi-User Domain. A multiplayer, real time, virtual world.
Just what sort of computer program are we talking about?
Well, the best analogy I could come up with was to compare it to a popular computer game called “The Sims.”
For those unfamiliar with this game, The Sims is described as a series of life-simulation computer games in which you create virtual people and control their lives.
Which, according to our hypothesis, is what the universe is doing right now. Unless, of course, you believe that it’s God or Xenu that’s controlling it.
I took this a step further. I remembered that bit about Mind; how the universe wouldn’t exist if there was no conscious awareness of its existence. That’s when I decided Sciencology would teach that there’s no difference between Mind and the universe. That the universe exists in Mind and Mind exists in the universe.
Both are inextricably linked.
Let me leave with this thought.
Is it just a sheer coincidence that the universe is based on duality; that there are two sides to everything? Big and small, good and bad, on or off? That quantum particles exist in two states? That using just two instructions even ordinary computers can create virtual realities almost indistinguishable from the reality around us? Are computers trying to tell us something?
Just how many coincidences does it take to make a certainty?
We Sciencologists call it the Power of the Obvious! And it’s all in the mind.
Your mind.
About the author —
Mike Knowles has, by his own admission, spent 40 white knuckle years as a writer working in comics, TV, radio, magazines and animation. Now totally spent out — a mere husk.
You can find him here — https://www.facebook.com/mikeknowlescomicauthor
About the article —
ScienTology was created by a SF writer called L. Ron Hubbard. Having myself written SF stories for the defunct “Starblazer” comic, I decided that if Ron could do it, so could I! Hence the birth of ScienCology. Unlike Hubbard or Martin Luther, I would create it around my fascination with the metaphysics of quantum physics and computer technology. The downside is that if this caught on I could end up being catapulted into some form of cult figure. But perhaps human nature will save me. The human brain seeks complexity and recoils from anything that appears too simple or obvious. ‘It can’t be THAT simple!’ people will cry.
Of course, I could argue that logic tells us an infinite regression — where a thing can go on forever — cannot be supported and ends up explaining nothing at all. So surely there must be an ultimate simplicity; a full stop; a bottom line; a brute fact, beyond which we cannot go. But happily people will ignore that and I’ll enjoy my existence of obscurity.
