Originally first published on the web: 9.11.2006
Preface to "ODYSSEY OF MANKIND"
© 2004 - being authored by Michael Fairchild (Blogger's Writer Pseudonym)
The beauty of the world and the orderly arrangement of everything celestial make us confess that there is an excellent and eternal nature, which ought to be worshipped and admired by all mankind. - CICERO
I AM THAT I AM. [i]
Thus spoke God of the Israelites. Who or what is God? Where do we come from and where are we destined? These questions seem to be the essence of all existence.
According to biblical verse and shared by many other religions and philosophies throughout the world, ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ [ii]
The pursuit in finding the solution to this age-old controversy is deep-seated in the collective human psyche. Cosmologists and scientists who are not necessarily God-fearing men will find difficulty in accepting an easy explanation for the creation of the universe.
Our earth and the universe are infinitely older than what was written about, preached about and thought of a few centuries ago. As a matter of fact, people like Cop ernicus and others would have been burnt as heretics if they had openly blasphemed against the early church.
Daily archaeological and cosmological discoveries bring us closer to a more realistic view of our planet and mankind’s origins. So where do we start unravelling this age-old question? Well, some will say this is easy, start at the beginning. It’s easier said than done.
If we want to explain something about the prese
nt state of the universe - why, for example, galaxies have the shapes and sizes they do - we need to work backward in time, reconstructing the past history of the universe using our knowledge of how matter behaves under conditions of very high density and temperature. We would like to check our deductions against pieces of evidence left in the universe from past events; unfortunately, things are not so simple.
The universe covers its tracks very effectively, and there are few pristine remnants of the distant past. But more fundamentally, we do not know all the ways in which matter can behave at extreme temperatures and densities. Experiments on Earth, limited by
economic realities as well as by constraints of size and available power, are unable to simulate fully the conditions that would have been obtained in the universe during the first hundredth of a second of its expansion history. [iii]
Fred Hoyle’s “big-bang theory” with at its core the description of a universe expanding into being from a dense singular state at a finite time in the past, was finally proven by the discovery in 1965 by the radio engineers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of the
microwave background radiation [MF1] left by this cataclysmic cosmic event.
So in order to understand what happened at the birth of the universe, cosmologists had to go back in time to the first fraction of a second after the big bang. This minute ‘explosion’ of light was an undeniable crucible of fierce heat where forces were battling for supremacy.
Spontaneously matter was being created as explained by Einstein’s theory of relativity E=mc² where Energy (E) is equivalent to matter (m) multiplied by the
speed of light (c) squared. But at the same time certain natural rules had to be obeyed; every time a particle of matter was created another particle of anti-matter was also created with opposite properties i.e. positive and negative. But in this cauldron the battalions of matter and anti-matter waged war for supremacy. Every now and then out of the billions of interactions one more particle of matter would exist than the equal amounts of matter and anti-matter which would cancel each other out. And that insignificant extra bit is responsible for everything we see today.
This poses the controversial question: ‘Does this mean that God in his energy is equal to matter and light; therefore the Creator being the creation itself?’
…I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life. [v]
Every good gift and every perfect gift from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. [iv]
If the universe was created from a minute dense singularity as per the theorems of Penrose, Hawking, Geroch and Ellis some 12 to 15 billion years ago and expanding at an increasing rate into all directions, how do we marry or fuse this viewpoint with that of the religious or quasi-religious belief systems stating that God created the Earth and heavens, ready for habitat?
There will always be disagreement on how the universe was created, and if the “big-bang theory” can be accepted as fact, then what was the essence of the void before creation? Or do we talk of recreation, even of many universes or the multiverse that Stephen Hawking talks about?
The creation, maintenance and annihilation of this material cosmic manifestation are completely dependent on the supreme will of the Personality of Godhead. “At the end of the millennium” means at the death of Brahma. Brahma lives for one hundred years, and his day is calculated at 4,300,000,000 of our earthly years. His night is of the same duration. His month consists of thirty such days and nights, and his year of twelve months. After one hundred such years, when Brahma dies, the devastation or annihilation takes place; this means that the energy manifested by the Supreme Lord is again wound up in Himself. Then again, when there is a need to manifest the cosmic world, it is done by his will. “Although I am one, I shall become many.” This is the Vedic aphorism. He expands himself in this material energy, and the whole cosmic manifestation again takes place. [vi]
The Biblical diction reiterate that we humans were created and placed here by an all-powerful force called God. Even the Vedas talks about the creation of the universe by a Supreme Lord. Does this solve the explanations we seek rather than elucidating it through cosmologists, particle scientists and mathematicians? Without knowing for sure the true origins of our universe, we will forever have this great debate. The more we know, the more we want to know. Using scientific experiments to find the truth creates another dilemma. It has been said that when you want a certain result in an experiment, the probability is great that you will find it so. It is almost as if the desire for closure on this age-old quest brings us closer and closer to the truth.
Although men have pondered on the question of the origin of life for many millennia, all metaphysical solutions which have been proposed converge in one regard. They embody some arbitrary feat of creation, one that implies an inexplicable miracle of one type or another. This miracle may or may not involve the intervention of a named supernatural being – such as God in the Old Testament – but, by some form of definition, the event of creation is deliberately placed beyond the scope of empirical science. There is undoubtedly a fairly wide spectrum of belief on this matter, ranging from creation ex nihilo to transmutation of non-living to living material, but when it comes to fundamentals the differences of attitude even between widely separated cultures of the world are surprisingly small. In Vedic as well as Buddhist scriptures, beliefs concerning the nature of life are moulded by the doctrines of karma (destiny) and rebirth. Buddhism does not postulate a divine creator: the assertion is that the universe has no absolute beginning or end and that the creation and destruction follow one another in recurrent cycles. Belief in rebirth also implies a unity of all forms of life, human as well as non-human, and admits the possibility of transmutation from one form to another. [vii]
It is also written:
And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. [viii]
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first earth heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. [ix]
If it is inevitable that our universe will destruct in millions of years and then maybe be recreated, why do mortals occupy the little time they have left on this planet searching for the ultimate answers? It seems that we are born to be inquisitive, to stretch the limits of our knowledge, to search for the Holy Grail so to speak, in our own minuscule way. There is also the hope, and for some the belief that we shall be reborn again and again to ultimately find the answers we seek.
Many theorems relating to the origins of our universe have come and gone, many theories have eventually been proven and as man continues the search into the unknown many more will be actualised.
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[i] The Bible, Exodus 3:14 “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” ALSO SEE John 8:58 “Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I AM.”
[ii] The Bible, Genesis 1:1
[iii] John D Barrow, The ORIGIN of the UNIVERSE, p 46
[iv] The Bible, James 1:17
[v] The Bible, John 8:12
[vi] His Devine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Bhagavad-Gita as it is, p 319
[vii] Fred Hoyle and N.C. Wickramasinghe, LIFECLOUD The Origin of Life in the Universe, p 21
[viii] The Bible, Revelation 20:11
[ix] The Bible, Revelation 21:1
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[MF1] PLATE 1 : WMAP satellite picture of microwave background radiation
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