The Quest for Infinite Potential

In 1960, a 10-year-old Birnbaum was struck with two questions: What is eternal and why? As he grew, this became the larger question of what dynamic is eternal and what, hiding in plain sight, might account for the trajectory of the universe from its ethereal, Eternal Origins to the Cosmic Order of today? At 38, in 1988, Birnbaum finally released his first masterwork, God & Evil (now, Summa I), to tackle this problem.

Birnbaum states that the universe exists because of the nature of Potentialism. Potential, to Birnbaum, is not neutral. Once something has the Potential to exist, the universe has an obligation to strive towards its creation.

Birnbaum calls this inherent drive of the universe the Quest for Infinite Potential, or Q4P. Looking at the beginning of the universe through the eyes of Potentialism, it is not some random, crazy accident that the universe came to be. To Potentialism, it was the unavoidable result of an endless buildup of Potential that finally burst the dam of creation.

Scientists are often puzzled by the exact nature of our universe. There are so many constants and rules and laws that must be perfect for anything to exist, including people. It seems an impossible bit of luck that cannot be explained by randomness. 20

To Birnbaum, this isn’t a puzzle at all. Things are just the way they are because they absolutely had to be. Had they been anything else, the universe would be less complex, and that simply isn’t its natural state.

If this metaphysical force seems a bit of a stretch, don’t worry. We’ll tackle this in far more detail later. In the interim, I’ll give you a purely physical definition to work with that is easier to understand. Think of Q4P as similar to potential energy in physics. In fact, potential energy is just a single physical manifestation of Q4P at work.

Let’s consider a simple ball. With potential energy, the higher up on a hill our ball sits, the more potential energy it has. That is, it has more energy it can release, as kinetic energy, if it starts to roll downhill. Now picture an infinitely high hill. Our ball, in this instance, now has infinite kinetic energy stored up inside it, waiting to be released.

This is Q4P – an infinite amount of energy stored up inside everything in the universe, including the universe itself, just waiting for a hill to roll down. What that “hill” actually is leads us to the other side of the equation: Q4P∞ → E+.

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