GOD THOUGHT THE UNIVERSE INTO BEING

 Quantum biology, consciousness science, and the ancient wisdom of Ifa are converging to tell us about reality and about ourselves, contends OLUSEGUN AYO-ADEBANJO

There is a question beneath every scientific discovery and every human life: why is there something rather than nothing and why does that something have the character of a mind? Three of the biggest puzzles in modern science are, I want to suggest, three expressions of that single question.

Three Crises, One Question.

The first is the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness  why we feel anything at all. Neuroscience can map which neurons fire when you feel joy or pain. What it cannot explain is why there is any subjective experience at all  why there is something it is like to be you, rather than just an information-processing system running in the dark.

The second is the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. The most successful physical theory ever devised describes a universe of pure potentiality  particles existing in superpositions of all possible states simultaneously, until observed. The act of observation collapses that superposition into definite reality. But what counts as an observation? What does the collapsing? After a century of debate, nobody agrees.

The third is the fine-tuning of the universe. The physical constants of nature  gravity’s strength, the electron’s mass, the energy of empty space  are calibrated with a precision so extraordinary that the slightest deviation would produce a universe with no stars, no chemistry, and no life. The odds against this occurring by chance are, on most calculations, incomprehensibly large.

Each crisis is, at its root, a question about the relationship between mind and physical reality and which one is more fundamental.

What If Consciousness Comes First? The thesis I am advancing is this: consciousness is not what the universe accidentally produced after fourteen billion years of mindless chemistry. It is what the universe fundamentally is. Matter, energy, space, and time are the expression of a primordial awareness. The universe is, in the most technically defensible sense available to post-quantum physics, the ongoing cognitive act of what the world’s great traditions have called God.

This is not a retreat from science. It is an argument from science itself. The physicist John Wheeler proposed the participatory universe: the cosmos is not a pre-existing object observed from the outside but a self-referential system that brings itself into being through acts of observation “It from Bit,” his idea that reality comes from information. If physical reality is constituted by observer-participatory acts at its most fundamental level, then the boundary between thought and physical event is not sharp. A universe that requires observers to be real is a universe whose description converges on what theology has always asserted: mind is prior to matter.

Evolution Is Not Blind It Is Willed. The standard neo-Darwinian picture is not false, but it is deeply incomplete. The Cambrian explosion saw virtually all major animal body plans appear in a geological instant. Eyes evolved independently at least forty times. Echolocation developed separately in bats and dolphins. The same elegant solutions keep appearing across the tree of life  as if evolution is navigating a possibility space whose shape was established in advance.

At the quantum level, where proton tunnelling in DNA may influence which mutations occur, the “randomness” of evolution is quantum randomness: not mere unpredictability but genuine ontological openness. If consciousness participates in resolving quantum potentiality into actuality, then what looks from below like chance may, at the level of the ground of being, be intention. The universe is not running down toward disorder. It is building upward toward consciousness elaborating itself, through evolution, into ever-richer forms of awareness. The Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin called this movement toward an Omega Point, the idea that evolution is moving toward ultimate consciousness. It is, I believe, correct.

Evil Is Not A Refutation It Is a Summons.

The hardest objection is suffering. If the universe is the thought of a good God, why does that thought include the death of children and the long history of pain that saturates the natural world?

A God who is genuinely creative must create a universe that is genuinely open. Real openness means real risk. A universe in which only predetermined good outcomes could occur would not be creative; it would be a puppet show. The cost of authentic becoming is authentic suffering.

But this does not make suffering acceptable. It makes it a moral summons. If the universe is an unfinished creation whose purpose is the growth of consciousness, then evil is not evidence against God  it is an invitation to conscious beings who have evolved precisely the capacity for moral reasoning to participate in the ongoing work. We are not passive witnesses to a completed cosmos. We are co-creators in an unfinished one. The question evil poses is not “Why did God allow this?”  which produces paralysis  but “What is this calling us to become?”  which produces agency.

Ifa Clocked This. The Ifa tradition of the Yoruba people  recognised by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity  is built around a corpus of 256 primary Odu generated by a binary combinatorial system whose structure has attracted the attention of information theorists. Its cosmological framework holds that Olodumare  the supreme, uncaused ground of all being  creates through Ase: the divine energy-word that permeates and sustains all reality. Ase is not magic. Ase is what this paper has been calling quantum field energy actualised by primordial cognition. Olodumare creating through Ase is “Let there be light, and there was light”  Genesis 1:3. It is the Logos doctrine of John’s Gospel; it is Wheeler’s participatory universe; it is Max Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe Hypothesis.

What is routinely dismissed as “juju” deserves radical re-examination. If consciousness genuinely participates in actualising quantum states, then disciplined, aligned intention operating at the quantum interface of mind and matter is not superstition. It is physics applied at the level of awareness. The Babalawo’s years of rigorous initiation  cultivating alignment with cosmic Ase  is an analogue of the scientist calibrating a sensitive instrument to detect deep structure.

Ifa appears to have arrived independently at a model of reality convergent with quantum biology, cosmology, and consciousness studies: that reality is conscious at its root; that energy and thought are not separate; that the universe is a living, directed process.

 The Question We Cannot Avoid. When a tradition developed on the western coast of Africa over two millennia arrives at the same structural description of reality that Cambridge mathematicians, Berkeley quantum biologists, and MIT physicists are approaching from entirely different directions, we face a moral obligation to ask: what does this tell us about knowledge itself? What has humanity lost by spending five centuries treating African thought as the object of anthropological curiosity rather than a source of genuine insight into the structure of reality?

The universe is a thought. We are among the thoughts within it. And some of the deepest thinkers about what that means have been African all along.

 “Rex” Ayo-Adebanjo was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and Articles Editor of the Columbia Business Law Review. S.adebanjo2025@gmail.com