So I’m reading this article on BBC’s news site, which I finally understood after the third read, and it got me thinking bigger thoughts than I probably should have been having. Soon thereafter I needed to lay down and take a nap. In the hopes that I’m not the only one that will give himself a headache contemplating this article, here are a few of the questions and thoughts that popped into my head.
Okay, so black holes might be a precursor to the formation of a galaxy. That’s cool. We can see back some 13 billion years to study this phenomenon. That fact boggles the mind. So we’re getting a clearer picture of what happened in the beginning. But here’s my question; what was there before the beginning?
I know, I know, the beginning is the start of stuff so there isn’t anything before the beginning, but how can that be? If you’re a creationist, then God made everything. If that’s true, what was God doing before he made everything and where did he come from? Was he just hanging out in darkness doing nothing?
If you’re a strict evolutionist/Big Bang Theorist, then the Universe was created when an extremely dense, hot mass of stuff exploded and everything has been expanding since then. So my question here is what was all that mass doing before it exploded and what was it sitting in. Was it just a ball of mass sitting in a huge emptiness, and what was the catalyst for it to actually explode? And where did the mass come from in the first place?
This is about time my head started to hurt, and its doing so again so I’m going to leave it at that. Someone really smart answer my questions for me.
Faith is the answer to your questions. The irony in this discussion and all similar ones is that no matter which side you’re on, faith is required. Faith, with a simple definition, is merely believing in what is unseen and unproven. Your string of questions never ends so the best way to quit hurting your head is to stop asking the questions, pick a path, and just believe. I’m not sure when we, as humans, became so arrogant that we felt like we should and could know the answer to all. One reason I believe in God is because this all-knowing state is definitely impossible for us to achieve. And seeing that everything works a little too well together for me to have faith in an accidental existance, I choose to believe in a purposeful one founded in a creator I call God whose existence I find explained in the Bible.
But let me ramble a bit further. The funny thing about “the other side” is that they hollar about proof all the time when in actuality there is none. I mean, your comment (I assume from the article) mentioned 13 billion years or something like that. The only reason that is a “fact” is because a group of people have faith in whatever age-dating methodology they used to quantify the age of whatever it is they were looking at. In essence, they cannot prove it. Remember carbon dating? Yeah, that didn’t turn out so well. But I don’t want to get into an argument about which side, I just want to show that both sides require faith. If we could all just see that, we’d avoid a great deal of conflict. It takes faith to imagine and believe in evolution since evolutionary chains cannot be proven with fossil records and the like. Just like it takes faith to believe that one being potentially thought all of this stuff up.
Your line of questions is exactly the ones I’d use when I taught the youth group at church. Where did God come from? Where did the stuff for the big bang come from? If you believe in science, then it is impossible for something to be created out of nothing. That is a basic biological fact according to text books and yet at some point that would have had to have happened because that is the only answer to “Where did (blank) come from?”
If you’d like to make your head hurt more, replace your “where” questions with “why” questions. I’ve found the best answers to those are “why not?”.
What you should start doing is asking yourself why you’re moving to LA because that one makes my head hurt!