©2001 Jon Youngblood Unity Through Understanding A Guidebook for the Recently Alive

Part Two: Physics

Chapter Five: Creation

 The most difficult part in writing Faith and Physics is not a shortage of material. Indeed, the biggest problem has been trimming it down. Faith and Physics is not intended to be an encyclopedia of Religion or a text book on physics. 

All of the subjects that we have and will touch upon have volumes of material that are both fascinating and readily available. I encourage the inquisitive individual to seek out as many sources as possible. All the collective discoveries of a million minds and all the ways in which we have lived and thought for thousands of years is right at your fingertips. I would love to explore in more detail the fascinating particulars of the sciences we will discuss in this Part of F&P, but (for now) I leave that to the educational system, the libraries, and the other web sites referenced in the Links Section.

All I hope to accomplish is to provide you with some general understanding of a given subject. A little narrative of those subjects of concern to the person on a path towards a better Understanding of our place in the Universe. And to assure you that it is no small matter that we are here at all. The Universe is so big that at first we often feel very small in comparison. What I hope to show is that this comparison is one that does not necessarily minimize our importance as individuals in it, or as a species of it. 

I am working hard to find the best links for further information and to have those links associated with the text, but it is a daunting job to say the least. There are a lot of "used tires" (Walter Mosley - personal letter) out there to be sifted through to find the really concise and useful sites. Please understand the slow pace at which this site is developing. I hope I can show you the tip of the iceberg to stimulate your interest in learning more about any of these fascinating topics having to do with Faith and Physics.

As we have seen from our investigations of Religious history and Comparative Theology in Part 1, we came to trust that there was, in the world around us, a purposefulness and order. We came to call this supreme order God. We devised ways of communicating with god; usually through chosen or appointed representatives. We devised ways of showing our gratitude for the life He provides and to ask for His assistance; usually through worship, sacrifice, and later on, prayer. For thousands of years this would serve to define our relationship with God and with the spirits and other denizens of the Unseen World. However, as the minds of His peoples became increasingly complex, they wanted to know more of this supremely beneficent being. Copernicus and Galileo were unquestionably driven by more than the mandate of the Church to study the natural world. The Unseen world was the territory of the Church and its’ representatives. Here was a whole new world to explore. A world which the ancients had understood, and as texts were coming in from the Arab world, it seemed to be a world that just might be understood once again by renaissance scientists.

This was the beginning of not only the Renaissance, but of a new age of Mind. One where worship and prayer was no longer sufficient for the inquisitive beings which He had created. We wanted to know our creator (or creative force, etc.) and we wanted to know His ways and wherefores. How did He do it? How does He maintain it? What will He eventually do with it? These questions (initially asked ostensibly “so that we may better follow His will”) became the driving force behind the earliest of scientific inquiry.

“Since ancient times, cultures around the world have asked how the universe began and whether it is finite or infinite. Through a combination of mathematical insight and careful observation, science in this century has partially answered the first question. It might begin the next century with an answer to the second as well.”¹

Is it possible that science can provide us with answers to life’s greatest mysteries? Can we now hope to understand existence with our Mind rather than believe religious “truths” because they provide comfort emotionally? I believe we can.

Ok. We have heard the story of the mysterious arrival of this concept of Spirit, and the development of Religion to attend to it. We have seen how religious truths provided the answers to our ancestors about how the world came into being. It told them who they were and what their place in existence was. It answered the fundamental Questions of Life. It provided the rules of The Game and the penalties for breaking His Laws. How we should behave and what is important in developing and maintaining God’s creation.

Now. What does science have to tell us? Lets take a guided tour of sciences’ side of the story and see what IT has to tell us about how the world came into being, who we are, and what our place is in the scheme of things, and perhaps even clues to our purpose for being. As we saw in Part One, the two primary purposes of religion is to answer questions about our origins and purpose and to dispense law.  An important similarity between science and religion, as we will investigate further in Part Three, is that like religion, science also has two primary purposes:  1.  to answer questions about our origins and purpose.  2.  Understand the laws of nature (not do dispense them like laws that govern the behavior of man, but to reveal them as the inherent and unvarying laws that govern the behavior of all of the natural world - and beyond). 

Before I begin, however, I would like to pay particular homage to the medical sciences. No other of the individual scientific disciplines has had a more profound affect on our lives in this past 100 years. I don’t think there is one person in this country over the age of 20 who has not at some time in their live, been helped through an illness or even had death defeated. I have perhaps the strongest feelings regarding this subject for obvious reasons. And I have found a Great Cause in exposing and denouncing those charlatans who usurp credit for medical proficiency with their “ancient arts of healing” nonsense. Be forewarned. I have no patience for Alternative Medicine. I am very clear on who and what is keeping me alive - long past the time when others in my condition have perished. I will get into this in painfully specific detail in part 7.2 Biology and Healing. Whatever is still beyond the ability of science to fully understand or prove, one way or the other, about the existence of God, is has unquestionably provided an easing of pain and suffering greater than any set of religious ideologies or houses of worship has in thousands of years. I ask therefore that the hard core theists consider this before poo-pooing science, particularly what follows next, out of hand. Try to exercise the same humility that the atheists must have shown to get through Part One.

Before we continue looking at Human kind and his place in Creation which is the focus of this chapter, let’s redirect our interest for a moment towards an inventory of just what science tells us Creation is. Once we have a better understanding of the setting, or “stage”, it will be easier to see the “actors” in context to an environment in which they are inextricably bound.

What follows is not intended to be a complete examination of physics or any kind of scientific primer. It is only meant to give a general introduction or refresher course in some of the areas pertinent to our discussion of the Other World and Deity. JY

5.1 In the Beginning....

In the beginning was the Word. And the word was.....Bang! So goes the scenario presented by Ralph Alpher in his 1948 Ph.D. dissertation. Only recently receiving credit for his theory (because, like many great scientists, nobody believed him at the time), he showed mathematically how the universe began in a super hot explosion 14 billion (roughly) years ago. It was not until 1964 that radio astronomy was able to provide tangible evidence that his theory was on the right track. What scientists now believe is the origin of the universe, the Big Bang Theory, presents the idea that everything that exists in the universe today started out as one very tiny point (about the size of a pin head) that “blew up” and expanded, and continues to expand, as the space (and time) in which we now exist. Our devoted men of science have discovered, through various means of investigation, the step by step events of the Big Bang to within a matter of seconds (actually to within fractions of a second so small it‘s hard to conceptualize. For example the ‘epoch’ of rapid inflation began 10^-38 second after the Big Bang). Using mathematics to predict it, astronomy and physics (among many other fields of research) to confirm it, the big bang theory is not really so much a theory these days. It has been validated through observation across a wide range of scientific disciplines. But for the sake of the doubting Tomas types, and certainly the religious right, educated (and diplomatic) individuals still leave the word “theory” attached when discussing the Big Bang. We will examine The Big Bang in more detail when we discuss the revelations of the study of matter. See 6.3.

Where this original material, however small or compacted, came from remains a mystery. Like many creation myths that depict the world originating out of water or some other primal material, the source of that material is never revealed. Like the later God of the Big Three, it is presumed to have always existed. Although it took the hand (or whatever) of deity to evoke life out of the lifeless raw materials. How was this accomplished? By the gradual (over billions of years) increase in sophistication or complexity of “random” chemical interactions? Like a crystals which form and grow under the right circumstances, life formed and grew and spread out on the face of the planet? Or was it created about 6,000 years ago in pretty much the same state that it exists in today? Scientists will overwhelmingly vote for the former. But they will also (hopefully) acknowledge that the Ultimate Origins of the universe is anyone’s guess.

The exact means by which the first “living” beings came about is also poorly understood and today is suspected of having origins somewhere other than the earth - the earth being ‘seeded’ by asteroids, possibly fragments from mars ejected into space eons ago by a large meteor impact. The word living is in parenthesis in the above sentence because what constitutes life can sometimes be tricky. It depends entirely on what terms one uses to define it. One could say it is movement or self mobility, like the single celled amebas are free to move about. However, strictly chemical processes can produce movement as a side effect of their interaction. What about replication as a definition of life? The ability to reproduce? Well, the protein that causes Mad Cow disease is not alive by all reasonable arguments and yet, unfortunately for cow and man alike, it has learned the trick of replicating itself even though it has no DNA, no nucleus, no cell body - just simple ’dumb’ proteins. So the moment when those early molecules, which had formed into the long, folded up, chains called proteins, became “living” is not clear. We do know that at some point these replicating protein stings started lumping together for protection - or whatever reasons a simple protein can be said to have. Soon another ’colony’ of proteins discovered they could benefit from the company of the first group of proteins and because they were hardier, formed a protective shell around their newfound friends. The newfound friends likewise provided some chemical that their protector needed but could not create in adequate quantities on its own. It is believed that through this symbiotic relationship, the first single celled life form came into existence. This is of course an oversimplification but hopefully conveys the general idea of what was presumed to have occurred.

Later two different tribes of single celled creatures would develop a similar symbiosis and lead to the creation of the first complex cells and subsequently all the animals that would arise from this most ancient of ancestors. We carry with us to this day the remnant of this early co-operation between these two early cells within every cell of our bodies. The mitochondria, the part of each cell responsible for converting raw fuel into usable energy to the cell at large, is endowed with its own independent set of DNA. DNA which, interestingly, is always conferred by the mother. Normally both the father and mother’s DNA combine to produce the new and unique DNA of the offspring. No so for the mitochondrial DNA. It contains no DNA from the Father at all. This fact has proved to be a useful tool for determining lineages (from the mother’s side anyway). What happened from here on out made one man a household name and one of the most famous, and infamous of scientists in modern times.

To be continued...

#1  Scientific American, April 1999, “Is Space Finite?” by Jean-Pierre Luminet, Glenn D. Starkman and Jeffrey R. Weeks, pg. 90  [Back to Text]