From the book: That Little Hardback
The Real Beginning
The following is not the real beginning:
The first verse of the King James Bible, Genesis
1:1: In the beginning, God created the heaven and
the earth.
This assumes a "god," who was already existing.
Religion never approaches the question of a real
beginning, before which there was nothing. It's
immensely difficult to imagine a true nothing, and
from that, something happening or coming into
existence. Religion finds that it must start with an
amazing and quite impossible god.
The following is not the real beginning:
The Big Bang Theory is the dominant scientific
theory about the beginning of the universe. The Big
Bang was the beginning of both time and space, a
giant explosion around 16 billion years ago which
expanded rapidly, cooled and coalesced into the
universe of today.
This assumes a "point source" already existing, the
single point containing all that would become the
universe. Science never approaches the question of
a real beginning, before which there was nothing.
It's immensely difficult to imagine a true nothing,
and from that, something happening or coming into
existence. Science finds it must start with an
amazing and quite impossible point source.
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In 1927, the Belgian priest Georges Lemaître may
have been the first to propose, in a scientific way,
that the universe began with the explosion of a
primeval atom. In 1848, however, Edgar Allen Poe
wrote: "In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies
the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ
of their Inevitable Annihilation." It’s interesting
that, when we go back far enough, we often find the
seeds of new science in more or less religious or
poetic thought process.
To speak of a real beginning, we must think of a
time when there was no matter at all, no mass, no
energy, but also of a time when there was no time,
(an internal contradiction), no space, nothing, no
god, no point source, nothing. Not even a vacuum
could exist nor the concept of a vacuum nor any
other concept of anything at all. No place for a
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point source could exist either. No possibility or
condition could exist.
Most of us, probably during our childhood,
experienced frustrating thoughts of the
impossibility of all that is and how it could come to
be. How could it have just always been? How could
it start from nothing? Nobody, it seems, finds a
way to justify the existence of anything at all.
Matter, as we know it, is by any practical thought,
impossible, yet here we are; here is the universe!
Whatever do we do about what is impossible and
still happening all around us?
We can entertain many interesting but insufficient
thoughts about how this might be. An example is the
thought that before the beginning there was
nothing, and that from nothing came a minus 1 and a
plus 1, a bit of anti-matter and the same amount of
matter, the two parts exactly the opposite of each
other, the total still being nothing. This includes a
time of an event, a separation of the two parts,
space and time, distance, the concept of opposites,
and many other things. From nothing, if truly
nothing, all these "ideas" and all this "stuff" could
not come. At least, none of us has figured out a way
for this to be. All our theories, religious
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or scientific, start with something already existing.
Thoughts or faith; it all falls short.
Then we are left only with, "It has always been -
there was never a beginning," and this thought is
equally frustrating. Imagine it all existing not 16
billion years ago, but a trillion times that, and then
that to the trillionth power, and on and on. So far as
we know, only humans, among all the living things,
have ever or could ever be bothered by such
questions. There may be other intelligent beings
somewhere in the universe, grappling with such
thought, but we are not yet aware of them. We
develop many different answers, but all of them
are answers about some secondary beginning, not a
real beginning.
When we search on Google for the words "Real
Beginning," we find thousands of articles about
these beginnings, but in every case, they are not
real beginnings; they all start with something
already existing.
A few of these articles purport a third case,
wherein nothing actually exists even now, but is all
imagined. Then our consciousness of it still exists,
and the question is fully still alive. You may all be
my imagination, but there is I, and that is just as
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impossible as all the rest. This option seems even
less reasonable than the other two, for why would
this imaginer be writing an article for imaginary
readers, and why would he argue his case in a
philosophy class of imaginary students? You, of
course, would not be reading this, for you are my
imagination. No no, if I didn’t think you were there
to read this, I wouldn’t write it.
If there were ever a time when nothing existed,
then it would necessarily be the same now. The
possibility for it to have become what it is now
would need to have been there, and possibility is
not nothing. Possibility is a set of conditions. At the
least, a possibility had to always exist, and thus
there must have been no real beginning. No real
beginning? That’s not possible, but neither is
anything else. We may not know the answers, but no
other species even asks the question. We may be
proud of the question itself.
A real ending is just as illusive. What is, is,
regardless of our inability to understand it.
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