Primordial
What is the beginning of everything? I don’t know, but I do have thoughts:
I’ve written before “According to the ancient God-loving prophets, we are made in the image of the ultimate power in the history of reality. According to our present-day secular priesthood (the astrophysicists) 14 billion years ago our universe expanded at an inconceivable rate & scale. 10 billion years later, a massive molecular cloud collapsed onto itself, leading to an immense concentration of dust, rock & gas into its center, creating our solar system and our Earth.”
The initiator of this second theory of primordial cosmology (the Big Bang Theory) is Georges Lemaître, who was a Belgian Catholic priest and a theoretical physicist. He aimed to reconcile Einsteins theory of general relativity with Aristotles prime mover argument and Lemaître’s own abiding belief in the existence of God.
In some sense, the Big Bang theory and various religious origin stories are a feeble human attempt to declare and accept the origins of the universe. As beings made of both love & entropy, we strive to invoke coherence and meaning. This helps us understand even something like the Gregorian calendar as an attempt to impose human understanding and control over time. It is of course no mistake that both the Big Bang as a hypothesis of the origins of space and the Gregorian calendar as a mechanism to control and direct human time are Christian inventions; too often the so-called Christians have attempted to impose upon the world a kind of self-assured human arrogance that Christ himself lived his life in opposition to.
It of course is confounding when I come across social media posts and internet slop suggesting Jews control the world, when in reality it was the imperial ambitions of the white so-called Christian people who took possession of the geography of the Earth via colonialism, human time via the Gregorian calendar and human understanding of spacetime via the Big Bang theory.
I believe the only certainty is uncertainty and that the only thing that is ceaseless is change. I believe the universe and our place in it are so incredibly and extraordinarily more profound than we have yet been liberated to possibly imagine. Even our feeble instruments have detected a cosmic cold spot that throws a wrench into the theory of the Big Bang. Even our primitive tools have posited a cosmological axis of evil that suggests we may be much more important to the universe than most post-modern science might suggest.
This is not to suggest that science as a wisdom tradition brings nothing to the struggle for liberation. Science is the wisdom tradition most open to innovation and self criticism among all those available to us, and innovation and self-criticism are necessary for the work of liberation.
But I do mean to suggest that science can be both a force for ill and for good, depending on who controls its aims and directions. And I do mean to suggest that science must be one of the array of wisdom traditions (traditions which include religion, history, culture, the arts, economics, politics and mythology) in our repertoire as we uncover and accept our rightful and righteous place in the universe.
photo credit: Jacob Lawrence, Genesis Creation Sermon I: In the Beginning All Was Void (1989). Courtesy of SCAD MOA.