Miracles of the Gods: A New Look at the Supernatural (390 page)

Chapter Four - Visions Do Exist - My Explanation
This they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

(Genesis 11:6)

Visions are real - they do exist.

Visions originate in intelligent brains.

Every intelligent brain has the prerequisites for creating visions.

The impulse for producing visions is of extraterrestrial origin.

Religious visions originate through an ideal that the visionary has within him and is suggested by his religious environment.

Do these theses of mine conceal a mass of contradictions? It might appear so at first sight. But in order to provide proofs for my theses, I must build on the basis of my theory.

Present-day astrophysics puts forward three theories of the origin of the universe [1]: the Big Bang theory, the Steady State theory and the Oscillation theory. None of these three (or other) theories on the origin of the world explains where the mysterious original matter of the whole universe comes from and what was present before it came into being. Nothing originates from nothing.

Just as it does not matter for my thesis which of these theories may ultimately turn out to be valid, it is also unimportant to me whether the origin of the universe dates back five, ten or twenty milliard years, or whether matter is finite or infinite, or whether it constantly renews itself. My question is: what did original matter originate from?

In public discussions I have made use of a graphic image to explain my views on this question in simple terms. I suggested that my hearers imagine a computer with a hundred milliard thought-units (bits in computer jargon), a computer that can think, i.e. has a 'personal consciousness' (Professor Michie, Edinburgh University). This consciousness is attached to milliards of circuits: it would be destroyed if the computer exploded. Our computer is highly intelligent and capable of, ultra-rapid combinations. There is nothing it does not know.

In spite of its consciousness and omniscience the thinking computer is not 'happy', for in spite of its tremendous performance there is something it cannot think out, reckon out or work out, namely experience. But it wants to amass experience. As it has no rival of anything like the same calibre to obtain experience from, it decides to send the hundred milliard bits off its central body out to get information by exploding itself knowing perfectly well that it would definitely lose its personal consciousness by so doing ... if it had not in its insuperable cleverness programmed the future after its self-destruction long beforehand.

Before the bits are catapulted on their long journey to gain experience, the clever computer has programmed magnetic impulses inside them with the order to reassemble at x place at y time. When this hour strikes, the milliards of bits obediently return to the complicated machinery with its 'personal consciousness' and bring home experiences, like bees bringing honey to the hive.