In any event, what 'something' could be 'eternal'? (the ''Eternal Origins' question)

Birnbaum permanently lays this question to rest with the final answer being Potential.

As he has shown repeatedly, only Potential itself is eternal. Nothing can become real before its potential to be real. That is an irreducible fact. Thus, it is an inescapable truth that Potential is eternal.

Is potential the only thing that can be eternal? Scientifically and metaphysically speaking, yes. Because it is impossible for something to exist without Potential having first existed.

The interconnectedness between the God of religious scholars and Potential is a bit more complex and open to interpretation. But it is a bit out of scope here as this book is about the science of Potentialism and not its application in religiousness.

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As we’ve reviewed thus far, there have been a raft of C+ events over the history of the universe, each causing its own epoch in turn and, like its predecessors, increasing the overall complexity of the universe in new and unique ways. Having the luxury of galactic hindsight, we can look back now and see two very important things.

Firstly, every transition opens up heretofore unseen and unknowable avenues of new complexity. More importantly though, number two, each new C+ event and concurrent opportunities for complexity have a synergy and build upon previous C+ events.

One less talked about feature of Potentialism is that it is extremely efficient. As a general rule of thumb, it will always try and get as much change accomplished with as little energy expended as possible.

C+ events don’t occur often and for good reason. They are very efficient at creating new tools for complexity. Consider the transition when atoms began fusing into molecules. Sure, it turned atoms into Legos to build all kinds of new elements.

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However, it also created a tool for converting mass and energy, fission and fusion, and a ready supply of heavier elements to coalesce into larger objects, giving rise to stars and planets and everything else in the cosmos.

Consider for a moment all of that change based on just deciding atoms could join together with one another. Now you might think it presumptuous to say Potential let atoms do anything, much less bond into molecules, as we know they naturally can.

I would counter by pointing out that even all physicists agree that that is exactly what the universe lets atoms do. See, three is no set rule for any of the physics in our world that is written in stone anywhere. The boiling point of water at sea level could have been anything.

The only thing that makes the laws in our universe what they are is dependent on a very small set of universal constants being set at exactly what they are. But there is no reason for these constants to be the exact mathematical number they are.

The more nihilistic members of the physics community ascribe it to pure luck. But the truth is, if any of those constants were to have been different, life as we know it could never have evolved or even started.

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Picture winning the lottery against one in a billion odds. Now picture trying to win that just four or five times in a row. And if you lose just once, the entire universe collapses and cease to exist. That is the lottery that we won.

So, Birnbaum stepped up to suggest (quite sanely) that maybe random chance didn’t have such a central role in the evolution of the universe as we used to think. Perhaps instead the universe was making intelligent decisions about its growth so that was headed towards a specific destination.

We know that destination now to be Extraordinariation. And it is amazing, when given that simple formula of Q4P → E+, how much of everything that is happening and that has happened before starts making perfect sense.

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