Out of the singularity
All energy, matter congealed. Life.
Integral to the Christian faith of many is the separation between CreatOR and CreatED. That God spoke, and the universe became.
Lately in the halls of Physics the brightest of the feeble human minds have tried to conceive of the unified theory of everything. It’s a desire to bring together two different physical worlds: the tiny and the huge. Theory of Quantum Mechanics governs the tiny. Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity the huge. But bringing the two together has been a problem, though it has spurned a great deal of creative mathematics far beyond my ability to perceive!
One artifact of all attempts to unify the theories, though, is profound: Time cancels out of the equation. Equations that don’t have time in them are not useful for doing things in a universe governed by time. Instead, the theory reduces to truisms. Theoretical truisms that are nonetheless profound.
E= m c ^ 2
That great truism that heralds our own self destruction or liberation to utopia stands at the heart of many issues in today’s world. In the end, it equates matter and energy. Stuff. The same stuff, different forms. Back at the earliest reaches of our universe, the distant past, the very first femtoseconds, all of the universe was energy. Quark soup, teeming with heat that random perturbation disturbed. Out of that soup came the neutrons and protons and atoms and molecules and fusion and elements and galaxies with stars and plantes and life and me.
God is Will. The Word of God is the Will of God born on Spirit. Energy.
The thing is, before quark soup when the universe was an apple sized orb, there was no time. Time itself congealed.
Time is a perceptual artifact of causality.
Perceptual. Artifact. It seems to exist because the mixed state of atoms in my brain do not have in them the capability to perceive the future well. Perceive the future well. But to perceive the future…. at all???? Does that not point to a symmetry between future and past from this present moment?
To separate God from Creation is to have a God outside – impotent – without Energy. And to allow God in, to allow a divine working presence in the universe, to grant energy, necessarily grants matter. For how can there be anything outside of what is except to be what is not? And if God exists, then God is not outside what is. Or God is not.
Christians often propose the problem with a creator-creation tie: If God is creation, who made? In Physics, that’s like asking what is before the big bang. There is no “before”. Because time itself is part of it. Just because it is not in our feeble mind’s capability to understand that creator and created can be one and the same and still have created be creator, that doesn’t make it not so. The absence of a conceivable alternative does not predicate the truth of a limited, easy-to-understand one.
God forbid that me, oh tiny little bit of creation that I am, could begin to conceive of an infinite universe far…. far far… far bigger than this puny brain!
When Newt Gingrich spoke here at Montreat College this past weekend, something bothered me deeply. Deeply disturbing. It was peppered through the crowd. It was the knowing nod. You’ve seen it. It’s the “we’ve got it right!” nod. The Evangelical SUV-American GEEZUS grin. Pastic and prideful and imperialist. I do wish, that we in general as humans, were at least smart enough to realize that our brains are very very very very very very PUNY! And that if there is one truth that stands above others, that is more than anything for sure, it’s this:
We don’t know, and we will never know, what the hell we are talking about when it comes to GOD.
