Cosmic God

Credit: NASA

This one of the cosmic caves where God forges new stars from the simple stuff that flows, collides, and tumbles in mostly empty space.

Genesis

Infinite Time

The Great Spirit has no limit in time and space. The Spirit creates stars, gathers them together in galaxies, clusters galaxies into great swarms, and casts the swarms into the infinite forever. Stars may glow for millions of years, until they are old and lose their power and their stuff returns to the dark, formless void, and yet there are always stars and galaxies. God recycles everything, including stars.

We humans are finite. We don’t live forever like God & the universe. We believe man was made in the image of God, but miss an important characteristic of God: Forever. We as individuals cannot conceive of the universe existing forever. We invent a theory of physics and cosmology that is not forever: A Big Bang. More than four thousand years ago our tribal ancestors looked up from hunting and gathering to see the sky and wonder: Where did it all come from? What does it all mean? Why are we here?

To answer these questions, the tribal chiefs called together the wisest and most vocal of their shamans and prophets. The consensus was memorized into an oral tradition that was later written down as the book of Genesis. In the first seven days of the beginning God created heaven and earth, the oceans and animals, man and woman. The first women gave birth to sons and daughters, and the daughters gave birth to more sons and daughters, and so forth, up to now. Out of God’s Will exploded everything – a Big Bang. So modern cosmology is Genesis dressed up in modern scientific language. We are comfortable with that. That which is born, we know, must have an end, a death, like us. Fundamentally, we have not made progress in our understanding of the universe, only updated the language.

Birth of a Star and Planets

Sun and planets

Before there is a star, there is only the formless void. The Spirit gives to each bit of stuff drifting in that void a small spirit, a will to seek out other stuff and join with it. The spirits dance, responding to each other within the subtle attraction across great distances. The smallest piece moves mindlessly for a time, except with the sense to move toward others. When they meet, they hold onto each other, seeking their common center, and their joined spirits increase the will to move toward others. Then they go on gathering more and more together over long stretches of time and space until the spirit has become so great, and they embrace so tightly, they release great light. A star is born. The Spirit sees the first morning of the first day.

When a star is growing, not all the stuff attracted to it becomes part of the star. Some of it winds up flying around the star, keeping at a distance. This stuff does not fall on the star and does not fly away. It flies around at just the right distance and forms into balls that are too small to light up. That stuff becomes planets.

Birth of a Galaxy

Galaxies


Stars are attracted to other stars and so they fly together in huge dancing collections that stretch over great distances. Sometimes there are so many that they form islands in infinite space called galaxies. Looking out from one star to the rest of the collection, some galaxies look like milk flowing across the sky and falling down into a deep, slow-turning whirlpool.