Why Me? In the beginning
20/January/2010 10:08 Filed in: Weekly Column
Volume 12, Issue 3
>>PDF copy
>>Print view
Psalm 8
O LORD, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth,
Who have set Your glory above the heavens!
Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
You have ordained strength,
Because of Your enemies,
That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honor.
You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,
All sheep and oxen—
Even the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air,
And the fish of the sea
That pass through the paths of the seas.
O LORD, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth!
I shall assume that I am not alone when I consider the transcendence revealed in these words impossible to reconcile with the fact that so many say that this nature, this creation, all happened as the result of a freakish random event called the Big Bang some fourteen billion years ago. I don’t really see that calling it the Great Singularity really makes any change in that reality!
Of course, perhaps the result of my eccentric audacity, I also find it almost as difficult to believe that God began creating the heavens and the earth, as in the biblical creation account, on October 23, 4004 B. C., based on the Julian Calendar. This creation date was proposed by James Ussher in “The Annals of the Old Testament” published in 1650. The Protestant Ussher was Bishop of the Church of Ireland at this time and was hopeful that his chronology would help Irish Roman Catholics convert to the Protestant faith.
Furthermore I assume that both of these theories of creation stem from a basic but ignored truth. The sixteenth-century reformers, especially Martin Luther and John Calvin assumed that the minds of men were basically idol factories. This is verified first of all by empirical observation, but also in the Bible illumination of Jeremiah 17:9, The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?
Calvin went so far as to compile a little pamphlet called the “Inventory of Relics” that listed all the divine antiquities of the established church. Whether that included just those of the Roman Catholic persuasion, or included also those of the Eastern Orthodox, I do not know. In any event, I would imagine the list was rather long and quite boring reading for twenty-first century tastes, but snippets are available on the Internet to get the general idea.
If God thought that the actual date of creation was a requirement for his plan of redemption of humanity, that date surely would have been codified within scripture. The same is true for the actual date of birth of Jesus, but that is a different story, and only listed here to show mankind’s idol making enthusiasms.
So starting at the beginning, let us begin to see if we might create some meaningful insights on how it all began. At this point in our journey it is not so much “Why Me?” but more so “How Me?”
Both creation paradigms begin with the assumption that we live in a three dimensional universe comprised of time, space, and matter. Well that is not actually true in the spirit of the metaphysics. We call matter and space three-dimensional but we have defined time as pretty much a linear function. That is even true when Einstein showed that time and matter were relative, and we have learned elsewhere that even the atoms are mostly empty space. However even Einstein based his research or conclusions on the assumption that the speed of light was a constant.
We now have defined that speed of light in a vacuum (space) at approximately 186,000 miles per second (300,000 km/s). Furthermore for the Big Bang Theory to be correct we must assume that constant, to be constant, for approximately fourteen to fifteen billion years. Beyond furthermore, during that time this causeless beginning slowly and randomly assembled into stars, planets, black holes, galaxies, comets, dark matter, space junk, and a whole bunch of other forms of coagulation.
Then about ten billion years after the Big Bang, the earth sort of appeared in a planar solar system, revolving around a star we call the sun. This all takes place at the edge of a galaxy we call the Milky Way, because it has so many stars that it forms a river of muted starlight across the night sky.
This mass of ninety-two natural elements continued to evolve into compounds and divided into plains, mountains, seas, and very importantly an atmosphere. Some of these seas became very concentrated for some random reason, and then when random circumstances were just right a bolt of lightning created the first simple amino acid.
Somehow along this random course of events, the amino acids combined into just the right sequences to form proteins, these proteins found random order to form DNA, and given enough time, it all came together in such a way that a shepherd boy, near the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea composed this poetry of Psalm 8, focusing on a God and his creation, all of which are based on just primitive religious superstitions and myths.
Now thank our lucky stars, we humans have evolved to the point that we can save the planet, from ourselves, because our evolving intelligence has become so wisely integrated with all of nature that we can do a much better job than these random events, even though we really have no knowledge of the nature we plan to control, and really no desire to even learn. If atheistic evolution is such a wonderful plan to create a better world, perhaps a more precise definition of evolution is in order.
Evolution: A theory of nature, as understood exclusively through human enlightenment, which holds that progressing natural entropy, or chaos, is the only instrument of positive change.
Diverting back into the Biblical religion for a moment, Christianity is based upon the stated truth of a Triune God, comprised of the Unity in Diversity of three distinct personalities. Those three being the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. We find in John’s gospel that the Word, Jesus, and the Creator basically are synonyms for the second person of the Trinity. Furthermore the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, is generally associated with both power and space. Finally Jesus himself spoke of the first person of the Trinity his - the Father is in control of the unfolding of time. (Matthew 24:36 Mark 13:32)
So if we all agree that matter and space are three dimensional, why not time? Probably because we simply cannot think of it in any other way, even if there really is no true basis in reality for this assumption other than what we call recorded history.
Much ink has been spent in creationist Christianity, of which I have a developing responsibility, defending the Biblical creation account of seven literal twenty-four hour days of creation, even though the account of creation itself doesn’t create our measurement of time paradigm until the fourth day, and even when it does that it does not create a linear account, but a circular one. The earth rotates on its axis and also around the sun. However, as we generally assume, that time as some sort of distance traveled, that distance is much different near the rotating poles than it is near the equator of our big blue globe. Morning and evening of the forth day. Furthermore this also assumes just as the Big Bang that the speed of light is also a constant.
I was taught in my Lutheran Catechism classes that God created the heavens and the earth through a process called theistic evolution. Such is the entropy of liberal accommodation. I really couldn’t believe that when I was a we lad, chances are that will not change as I age. Notice it really even isn’t called deistic evolution, in which there is a true deity, but rather a theos; may the force be with you.
The major problem with the whole, or commons, of the twenty-first century, is the reality that our God (and gods) are too small, and our understanding of ourselves and our relationships, in the great scheme of the cosmos, is too large, to the point of being a conceited narcissist, to be accurately redundant.
The, “In the Beginning,” is really about the Universe of God, the Almighty, Yahweh, The Lord. Let us assume for a moment, the requirements for the creation account as described in the Bible. Those three attributes are Universal Power, Universal Wisdom or information, and Universal Timelessness, three in one, in at least four dimensions.
The fourth dimension being eternity or a timeless natural reality, and is not just myth or science fiction. We already think in three dimensions, we don’t know how it works, but if, for instance, we want to recall something about our historic relatives, our mind goes through three dimensional pathways in our brains, by really complex chemical reactions, to retrieve that data and then form somewhat a visual image of our relationship with them in their time and place.
In that same way, in true eternal three-dimensional time we can meet with our Bible heroes, and to paraphrase a Native American proverb, we can walk a couple of miles in their sandals, and they can come to walk a couple of miles in our hiking boots, and we both can travel to some Christian American Indian, and learn how to make real moccasins. In the process we can learn, and in the words of the Westminster Catechism, to know God, enjoy him forever, in the accompaniment of our past, present, and future adopted brothers and sisters.
Within a universe created by such a God there is no need to have a Big Bang or a Great Singularity. Furthermore there is no need to create a Great Watchmaker, because ex nihilo creation is accompanied with ex nihilo power, within an ex nihilo time related cosmos. Therefore what we call creation, or nature, is created, where needed, with the required inherit informational coding, with the appearance, or imprint, of the eternal essence of God.
So in that respect the seven days of the creation, as outlined in Genesis One, are really a metaphor, not of compressed eons of time, but rather an account which best fits the limited human faculties of the created humanity, essentially twenty- four hours days flowing from a planar annular pattern of hours, days, and years.
So in Genesis on the first day, and throughout the creation account, we see pretty much the sequence outlined above described within the limitation of the unique human ability of language. Only in this lifetime to we understand that light as being both a carrier of power but also information. So in the process, chaos is reordered into all the attributes of the physical elements and compounds. Since water is the prime prerequisite of all life, it gets the leading role.
It should be again noted that the Bible does not specify creation’s time in what we call history, but that has not kept many well-meaning men from creating or adopting creation chronologies, the most currently prominent among them being Bishop Ussher. In the essence of human idol makers, his date has been relatively recently adopted to show unity with the number seven, God’s number of perfection, by those looking to bring simple numeric sense to their attempts to bring heaven and eternity down to the level of human understanding.
In that endeavor there was four thousand years from the creation to Jesus,, and then two thousand years until The Rapture and Christ’s return, and this cumulates in the thousand year millennia of Jesus ruling on earth, before the White Throne Judgment of Revelation and the re-creation of a sinless eternity. Nice an tidy, but sixteen years ago some began wondering if this date setting is not all that much different than others who have set the day for Christ’s return, especially when the above references from Matthew 24 and Mark 13, state that only the Father knows the time of Christ’s return.
On the second day God took the results of the first day and continued to form the created, into a world and a universe we essentially see today. The specifics of this verse relates to hydrology, which makes life possible. Creation scientists state that much of the water now present on earth became a vapor canopy that protected the climate of the whole earth from the extremes of continual climate change. This water vapor canopy also protected the earth from harmful radioactive radiation. After the collapse of this canopy during the Noah great flood, radioactive radiation from space gradually reduced the life spans to what we see today.
With the beginning of the third day of creation, we see the emergence of a physical world that in the Bible is called a garden. This includes specific separation of the biosphere into ecosystems to become the home of both aquatic and terrestrial life. As the day progresses we see the introduction of plant life into those ecosystems. On this day we also see the introduction of the two terms, one is “kinds,” in respect to the living creations, the other is “good,” which continues into and through our era. As much as we try to fabricate human distinctions where God created none, there are not human races, and only one kind.
It has been a gross disservice to humanity, for the “People of the Book” to allow quantum leaps of organizational energetics to be dumbed down into a discussion of a wise Watchmaker or Intelligent Design. Watchmakers and Designers, even competent ones, and in this case Christian and the Jewish people who promote this anathema, cannot create life out of nothing, wherein the mathematical probabilities of life creation other than by God alone, is essentially indefinably impossible. The wishful thinking that by this design nonsense, that pagans, heathens, or others of their defined reprobates, will be converted by these schemes, calls into question the Divine creation they are attempting to demonstrate.
Beginning on the fourth day we see the creation of time as a planar circular phenomena that we can understand. Here we see the creation of the 24-hour day, the seasons, and years that are a prerequisite to the intelligence necessary for the ultimate creation of humanity as well as all other forms of life. Again we see the usage of the term good.
On the fifth day of creation we see God filling the aquatic and terrestrial worlds with their respective creatures. It is however interesting to note that these particular creatures do not seem to be bound by the laws of gravity, as subject to land based life creation, as it soon continues. So in this fifth day we see added to the good creation a certain aspect of transcendence, or in this innocent sense, a dimension of wonder. How do birds fly, and how do fish float?
During the sixth day we see the creation of true terrestrial animals, herein defined as cattle, creeping things, and beasts of the earth. Here is a good time to reflect on where we are, in this creation account, for we have a created planet earth filled with all sorts of kinds.
Even today if we use our imagination, we still are left with these basic three classes of animals, but they really don’t have any relationship to size. For example we all would consider a dinosaur a creepy thing first, and a beast second. Furthermore, a bear or a lion we would consider a beast, but it is a stretch to call it creepy, even though we might be afraid. The cattle are likewise pretty much confined to animals that primarily eats grass or other plant vegetation. These animals were, as created, all good also.
Finally on the sixth day God created in his image humanity, male and female, who we call Adam, which is the Hebrew word for mankind, and Eve, which really, in the English language, means the closing of the creation event, so that something significant can then occur. In the creation account that became the seventh day, the Sabbath, the day that God rested from his ex nihilo creation work and on that eve, the Trinity of the Godhead then states it was all very good.
>>PDF copy
>>Print view
Psalm 8
O LORD, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth,
Who have set Your glory above the heavens!
Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
You have ordained strength,
Because of Your enemies,
That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honor.
You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,
All sheep and oxen—
Even the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air,
And the fish of the sea
That pass through the paths of the seas.
O LORD, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth!
I shall assume that I am not alone when I consider the transcendence revealed in these words impossible to reconcile with the fact that so many say that this nature, this creation, all happened as the result of a freakish random event called the Big Bang some fourteen billion years ago. I don’t really see that calling it the Great Singularity really makes any change in that reality!
Of course, perhaps the result of my eccentric audacity, I also find it almost as difficult to believe that God began creating the heavens and the earth, as in the biblical creation account, on October 23, 4004 B. C., based on the Julian Calendar. This creation date was proposed by James Ussher in “The Annals of the Old Testament” published in 1650. The Protestant Ussher was Bishop of the Church of Ireland at this time and was hopeful that his chronology would help Irish Roman Catholics convert to the Protestant faith.
Furthermore I assume that both of these theories of creation stem from a basic but ignored truth. The sixteenth-century reformers, especially Martin Luther and John Calvin assumed that the minds of men were basically idol factories. This is verified first of all by empirical observation, but also in the Bible illumination of Jeremiah 17:9, The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?
Calvin went so far as to compile a little pamphlet called the “Inventory of Relics” that listed all the divine antiquities of the established church. Whether that included just those of the Roman Catholic persuasion, or included also those of the Eastern Orthodox, I do not know. In any event, I would imagine the list was rather long and quite boring reading for twenty-first century tastes, but snippets are available on the Internet to get the general idea.
If God thought that the actual date of creation was a requirement for his plan of redemption of humanity, that date surely would have been codified within scripture. The same is true for the actual date of birth of Jesus, but that is a different story, and only listed here to show mankind’s idol making enthusiasms.
So starting at the beginning, let us begin to see if we might create some meaningful insights on how it all began. At this point in our journey it is not so much “Why Me?” but more so “How Me?”
Both creation paradigms begin with the assumption that we live in a three dimensional universe comprised of time, space, and matter. Well that is not actually true in the spirit of the metaphysics. We call matter and space three-dimensional but we have defined time as pretty much a linear function. That is even true when Einstein showed that time and matter were relative, and we have learned elsewhere that even the atoms are mostly empty space. However even Einstein based his research or conclusions on the assumption that the speed of light was a constant.
We now have defined that speed of light in a vacuum (space) at approximately 186,000 miles per second (300,000 km/s). Furthermore for the Big Bang Theory to be correct we must assume that constant, to be constant, for approximately fourteen to fifteen billion years. Beyond furthermore, during that time this causeless beginning slowly and randomly assembled into stars, planets, black holes, galaxies, comets, dark matter, space junk, and a whole bunch of other forms of coagulation.
Then about ten billion years after the Big Bang, the earth sort of appeared in a planar solar system, revolving around a star we call the sun. This all takes place at the edge of a galaxy we call the Milky Way, because it has so many stars that it forms a river of muted starlight across the night sky.
This mass of ninety-two natural elements continued to evolve into compounds and divided into plains, mountains, seas, and very importantly an atmosphere. Some of these seas became very concentrated for some random reason, and then when random circumstances were just right a bolt of lightning created the first simple amino acid.
Somehow along this random course of events, the amino acids combined into just the right sequences to form proteins, these proteins found random order to form DNA, and given enough time, it all came together in such a way that a shepherd boy, near the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea composed this poetry of Psalm 8, focusing on a God and his creation, all of which are based on just primitive religious superstitions and myths.
Now thank our lucky stars, we humans have evolved to the point that we can save the planet, from ourselves, because our evolving intelligence has become so wisely integrated with all of nature that we can do a much better job than these random events, even though we really have no knowledge of the nature we plan to control, and really no desire to even learn. If atheistic evolution is such a wonderful plan to create a better world, perhaps a more precise definition of evolution is in order.
Evolution: A theory of nature, as understood exclusively through human enlightenment, which holds that progressing natural entropy, or chaos, is the only instrument of positive change.
Diverting back into the Biblical religion for a moment, Christianity is based upon the stated truth of a Triune God, comprised of the Unity in Diversity of three distinct personalities. Those three being the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. We find in John’s gospel that the Word, Jesus, and the Creator basically are synonyms for the second person of the Trinity. Furthermore the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, is generally associated with both power and space. Finally Jesus himself spoke of the first person of the Trinity his - the Father is in control of the unfolding of time. (Matthew 24:36 Mark 13:32)
So if we all agree that matter and space are three dimensional, why not time? Probably because we simply cannot think of it in any other way, even if there really is no true basis in reality for this assumption other than what we call recorded history.
Much ink has been spent in creationist Christianity, of which I have a developing responsibility, defending the Biblical creation account of seven literal twenty-four hour days of creation, even though the account of creation itself doesn’t create our measurement of time paradigm until the fourth day, and even when it does that it does not create a linear account, but a circular one. The earth rotates on its axis and also around the sun. However, as we generally assume, that time as some sort of distance traveled, that distance is much different near the rotating poles than it is near the equator of our big blue globe. Morning and evening of the forth day. Furthermore this also assumes just as the Big Bang that the speed of light is also a constant.
I was taught in my Lutheran Catechism classes that God created the heavens and the earth through a process called theistic evolution. Such is the entropy of liberal accommodation. I really couldn’t believe that when I was a we lad, chances are that will not change as I age. Notice it really even isn’t called deistic evolution, in which there is a true deity, but rather a theos; may the force be with you.
The major problem with the whole, or commons, of the twenty-first century, is the reality that our God (and gods) are too small, and our understanding of ourselves and our relationships, in the great scheme of the cosmos, is too large, to the point of being a conceited narcissist, to be accurately redundant.
The, “In the Beginning,” is really about the Universe of God, the Almighty, Yahweh, The Lord. Let us assume for a moment, the requirements for the creation account as described in the Bible. Those three attributes are Universal Power, Universal Wisdom or information, and Universal Timelessness, three in one, in at least four dimensions.
The fourth dimension being eternity or a timeless natural reality, and is not just myth or science fiction. We already think in three dimensions, we don’t know how it works, but if, for instance, we want to recall something about our historic relatives, our mind goes through three dimensional pathways in our brains, by really complex chemical reactions, to retrieve that data and then form somewhat a visual image of our relationship with them in their time and place.
In that same way, in true eternal three-dimensional time we can meet with our Bible heroes, and to paraphrase a Native American proverb, we can walk a couple of miles in their sandals, and they can come to walk a couple of miles in our hiking boots, and we both can travel to some Christian American Indian, and learn how to make real moccasins. In the process we can learn, and in the words of the Westminster Catechism, to know God, enjoy him forever, in the accompaniment of our past, present, and future adopted brothers and sisters.
Within a universe created by such a God there is no need to have a Big Bang or a Great Singularity. Furthermore there is no need to create a Great Watchmaker, because ex nihilo creation is accompanied with ex nihilo power, within an ex nihilo time related cosmos. Therefore what we call creation, or nature, is created, where needed, with the required inherit informational coding, with the appearance, or imprint, of the eternal essence of God.
So in that respect the seven days of the creation, as outlined in Genesis One, are really a metaphor, not of compressed eons of time, but rather an account which best fits the limited human faculties of the created humanity, essentially twenty- four hours days flowing from a planar annular pattern of hours, days, and years.
So in Genesis on the first day, and throughout the creation account, we see pretty much the sequence outlined above described within the limitation of the unique human ability of language. Only in this lifetime to we understand that light as being both a carrier of power but also information. So in the process, chaos is reordered into all the attributes of the physical elements and compounds. Since water is the prime prerequisite of all life, it gets the leading role.
It should be again noted that the Bible does not specify creation’s time in what we call history, but that has not kept many well-meaning men from creating or adopting creation chronologies, the most currently prominent among them being Bishop Ussher. In the essence of human idol makers, his date has been relatively recently adopted to show unity with the number seven, God’s number of perfection, by those looking to bring simple numeric sense to their attempts to bring heaven and eternity down to the level of human understanding.
In that endeavor there was four thousand years from the creation to Jesus,, and then two thousand years until The Rapture and Christ’s return, and this cumulates in the thousand year millennia of Jesus ruling on earth, before the White Throne Judgment of Revelation and the re-creation of a sinless eternity. Nice an tidy, but sixteen years ago some began wondering if this date setting is not all that much different than others who have set the day for Christ’s return, especially when the above references from Matthew 24 and Mark 13, state that only the Father knows the time of Christ’s return.
On the second day God took the results of the first day and continued to form the created, into a world and a universe we essentially see today. The specifics of this verse relates to hydrology, which makes life possible. Creation scientists state that much of the water now present on earth became a vapor canopy that protected the climate of the whole earth from the extremes of continual climate change. This water vapor canopy also protected the earth from harmful radioactive radiation. After the collapse of this canopy during the Noah great flood, radioactive radiation from space gradually reduced the life spans to what we see today.
With the beginning of the third day of creation, we see the emergence of a physical world that in the Bible is called a garden. This includes specific separation of the biosphere into ecosystems to become the home of both aquatic and terrestrial life. As the day progresses we see the introduction of plant life into those ecosystems. On this day we also see the introduction of the two terms, one is “kinds,” in respect to the living creations, the other is “good,” which continues into and through our era. As much as we try to fabricate human distinctions where God created none, there are not human races, and only one kind.
It has been a gross disservice to humanity, for the “People of the Book” to allow quantum leaps of organizational energetics to be dumbed down into a discussion of a wise Watchmaker or Intelligent Design. Watchmakers and Designers, even competent ones, and in this case Christian and the Jewish people who promote this anathema, cannot create life out of nothing, wherein the mathematical probabilities of life creation other than by God alone, is essentially indefinably impossible. The wishful thinking that by this design nonsense, that pagans, heathens, or others of their defined reprobates, will be converted by these schemes, calls into question the Divine creation they are attempting to demonstrate.
Beginning on the fourth day we see the creation of time as a planar circular phenomena that we can understand. Here we see the creation of the 24-hour day, the seasons, and years that are a prerequisite to the intelligence necessary for the ultimate creation of humanity as well as all other forms of life. Again we see the usage of the term good.
On the fifth day of creation we see God filling the aquatic and terrestrial worlds with their respective creatures. It is however interesting to note that these particular creatures do not seem to be bound by the laws of gravity, as subject to land based life creation, as it soon continues. So in this fifth day we see added to the good creation a certain aspect of transcendence, or in this innocent sense, a dimension of wonder. How do birds fly, and how do fish float?
During the sixth day we see the creation of true terrestrial animals, herein defined as cattle, creeping things, and beasts of the earth. Here is a good time to reflect on where we are, in this creation account, for we have a created planet earth filled with all sorts of kinds.
Even today if we use our imagination, we still are left with these basic three classes of animals, but they really don’t have any relationship to size. For example we all would consider a dinosaur a creepy thing first, and a beast second. Furthermore, a bear or a lion we would consider a beast, but it is a stretch to call it creepy, even though we might be afraid. The cattle are likewise pretty much confined to animals that primarily eats grass or other plant vegetation. These animals were, as created, all good also.
Finally on the sixth day God created in his image humanity, male and female, who we call Adam, which is the Hebrew word for mankind, and Eve, which really, in the English language, means the closing of the creation event, so that something significant can then occur. In the creation account that became the seventh day, the Sabbath, the day that God rested from his ex nihilo creation work and on that eve, the Trinity of the Godhead then states it was all very good.