Creation...
"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going. Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist". Astrophysicist Stephen HawkingCreation. Existence. The Universe.
That is an immense topic. Mind-blowing, in the popular vernacular. Who made us? How was the Universe created? What occurred in some dim, dark recess of an unknowable time that resulted in the creation of everything that exists?
From the vaulting immensity of the black and distant atmosphere we can only imagine, in which galaxies spin and within them endless stars and planets, and where comets and shooting stars flaunt their brief icy star-dusted glories then go on their endless forays into the vast beyond, down to the minutiae of the mundane; our puny existence.
How, when, and above all why? Well, why not. Matter is everywhere, and it coalesces and becomes something. And boundless energy, and gravity, gases and minerals. And then there is the whisper of dark matter, energy suspected to exist but not yet quite discovered to exist. Proof of its existence, like that of a Spiritual Adviser to Mother Nature exists as an educated hypothesis.
And who more capable of hypothesizing than the world's currently-foremost brilliant theorist, physicist Stephen Hawking. Whose boundless mind encompassing the kind of speculative genius seen rarely, few quite understand.
But now we have it on authority, none other than he having come to the definitive conclusion that God is but a frantic figment of fearful humans' feverish imagination. In our need did we create Him.
Cowering before the monumental forces of Nature unleashed in great shifting quakes of the Earth, in powerful winds bringing typhoons and lashing rainstorms drowning our feeble structures and our food sources, hurricanes that shred everything into splinters and take hapless lives.
There must be a kindly Spirit looking over us. To save us from savage, relentless Nature.
But no. Nature is what we have, and it is Nature alone that conspires to make us miserable, for we are as nothing to Her, but a fragment of existence among her immense and complex creations.
The Grand Design, written with American physicist, Leonard Mlodinow, concludes that a Creator other than Nature is completely redundant to the purpose and the practise and the origins of the Universe. Who are we mere mortals to argue?
But we will, of course; that is, those among us and they are legion, who will not lose grasp of their faith. For that is their nature.
Simply put: faith rewards the faithful. Belief in the Almighty brings solace and hope, and trust in the future.
But our magnificent, immense Solar System is an infinitesimally tiny portion of a vast Universe, more insignificant than a grain of sand on a wide, open beach. And we, within it are ourselves even less significant as part of Nature's creation.
True, Nature did excel in our creation and that of the other living organisms that exist upon the Earth, for we are complex and amazingly adept at manipulating our environment. So much so that from time to time Nature exerts her power to remind us precisely who reigns supreme, and it is not we.
Nor is it, alas, a Supreme Being.
Who might ever have suspected that God would become a footnote to the history of the infinite?
Labels: Environment, Nature, Religion, Science
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, September 05, 2010
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