Thief
Rogue Theologian
by the pinch and snap of God's Fingers upon the primordial singularity
the resulting rotations , spins, orbits and spirals are the evidence
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How Did the Universe Come to Be?
- Thread starter SalixIncendium
- Start date
the resulting rotations , spins, orbits and spirals are the evidence
shmogie
Well-Known Member
The classic model of the Big bang says that time was created at the "explosion" of the singularity.
The universe didn't exist, then it did. No one knows what existed or did not exist before the big bang.
No one knows if there was or was not a singularity.
God was the singularity, and He created the universe,
from nothing.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
Here's my answer:
halbhh
The wonder and awe of "all things".
Hearing various Christian ideas about details of how this Universe and Earth came into being won't help many people in any way, usually, though it could be helpful to some that already believe in God, and might help a few that wonder about God, to help remove some popular misconceptions that have been spread around.
As a Christian, but aware of physics pretty well (a life long interest is astronomy and all related fields such as cosmology), I don't even assume we are in an only-universe, as if there is certainly no other. This might be the only one, or it might be that it is only one of very many. Both would equally well fit my belief as a Christian. There are many Christians that have reasonably had various theories, and we can simply account that they are guesses, even when educated guesses. God has not revealed to us details about creation, but instead we have a Poem of Creation, as it were, and also a sweeping statement that 'all things' were created through Christ, but not any detail on what that would mean very precisely.
For instance, it could mean that God spoke and this physics -- meaning this Universe -- came into being.
And then from that physics, this Universe has unfolded over time like a flower from a seed, perfectly.
That would be a perfectly reasonable way of trying to understanding the wording in the Bible.
Also many believe that in addition to creating everything -- meaning physics then, necessarily -- that God may have specially intervened also here on this planet, Earth, in various ways, even before the revealed ways we see later in time after humans are in our fallen state. So, there you'd have the common belief of many (not all!) that God simply created or modified this particular physics we have, and then later additionally did some specific interventions also. This is of course merely a theory, though we do learn about interventions after humans are living on Earth, which we don't generally consider to be all metaphors, though some could be, such as how some of us believe the Garden of Eden is a parable (and some believe it is both a parable and literal, and some believe yet another idea, and some yet another, etc.).
Audie
Veteran Member
If I were to be a god-believer, I think I would favour one who
was actually omnipotent, and knew how to set up a universe
so that it would bring forth wonders without he has to tinker
and meddle with it to get it to work.
The Great Green Arkleseizure is the creator of the universe, as claimed by adherents of the faith on planet Viltvodle VI. The Jatravartids of this faith believe that the Universe was sneezed out of the Great Green Arkleseizure's nose.
Douglas Adams
As good an idea as many
Douglas Adams
As good an idea as many
halbhh
The wonder and awe of "all things".
That's exactly the most sensible view. One of the huge clear to me flaws in the YEC theories is exactly that they make out God as if to be sorta incompetent and unable.
Philip J Fry explains space...
A Vestigial Mote
Well-Known Member
I can't say that I know, or have an "understanding" of how the universe is here, though my beliefs on the subject (based on my own observations and my understanding and contemplation of the shared findings of those of much stauncher scientific background) are best summed up by @Polymath257's first post in the thread:
There was no "explosion". It was not "something from nothing". There was an expansion of energy, and maybe matter too, pinched off from another universe. It's probably still happening today, always happened, always will happen. That's my guess.
it creates but itself is uncreated in recreating itself. in other words the forms change but the action doesn't
I tend to not care.
I'm a singular biological organism with a lifespan so short that it barely even registers on the cosmic calendar. As far as I need to be concerned, the universe always was and always will be.
I'm a singular biological organism with a lifespan so short that it barely even registers on the cosmic calendar. As far as I need to be concerned, the universe always was and always will be.
Unveiled Artist
Veteran Member
I'm not a scientist, but I do lean towards the evolution. I also feel it makes sense that something cannot come from nothing. Our universe has been "formed into" being rather than created. We can never create only form things into being from pre-existing things. I'd find it odd that only in the universe something pops into thin air but we can't see that same phenomena on earth (and anything we observe today).
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
I think it was always there.
Elephant in the room?
Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
In a way the question could be broken up in two questions:
1) Did the creation (or "come to being") of the universe have an external source or influence? (God, multiverse, ...)
2) If so, what properties, characteristics, etc would that source might have? (Intelligent, natural, etc)
My answers would be:
1) Yes, some external source, not a being per se, but some super-reality like multiverse, branes, or such.
2) If that is an external entity and if it's intelligent is harder to say, but I believe it's not. At least not in any normal sense. Intelligence, consciousness, and such is still quite a mystery to us humans. What makes something intelligent? And what makes it conscious? I'm not sure we can fully answer that yet.
When I think about this question I have to remind myself to not think of the universe as something "out there". The cosmos in Greek thought was not like what we imagine today as the stars and galaxies and whatnot. Rather they considered it as all that exists, which includes all of those things that pertain to our existence; consciousness, awareness, thought, mind, feelings, societies, culture, natural systems, and the whole gambit.
It was an all-encompassing view of Creation, or the Kosmos as they termed it. Our adaptation of that term to mean stars and galaxies misses that understanding of the Universe. That tends to reduce our thinking to more harsh dualistic terms today, excluding ourselves from the Universe.
With that in mind, the question can be asked this way. How did I come into being. How did everyone of us with our minds come into being? Why am I? Why do I exist? And the like.
My thoughts to that, are ever-adapting.
I think in the simplest, existential terms, perhaps theological terms is Love. I see all of existence, the whole Kosmos as the Greeks called it, as an expression of being. What the mechanics of how that materializes into being, through the processes of evolution, all the way from particles and atoms, to the muscles of the face on a child smiling at the beautiful sky on a sunny morning, are great inquiries of the mind to inform and entertain itself about the world it lives within.But ultimately, that's just like a child discovering the parts of his body in an attempt to understand what and who it is. It's the same thing, just at a more sophisticated level, beginning using the mouth to investigate its world, to using math and telescopes to expand upon that quest for self-knowledge.
I think the only way to really understand the Universe, is to find it within ourselves living right there inside of us. We are after all, 14.5 billion years of evolution alive and breathing and sharing our thoughts on a computer screen with one another. If we truly want to understand the universe, we need to understand who and what we are from the inside, not just biting my hand with my mouth to discover that.
What insights I've personally gathered in that discovery is that we come from Love, as an infinite wellspring of Life, Light, and Joy. So from a holistic perspective, the Kosmos or the Universe, which is us as well as everything else, arise from that fully transcendent, and absolutely immanent __________. Call that what every word you want to attempt to capture that meaning. But that is an experienced reality of that All, to give it a word.
How the planets and whatnot were formed, I defer to science.
Transcendent Love.
I should add though, it's good to not think of creation as an event in the past. That implies that this is a static world, which it is not. The real truth about creation, is that it is continuous. It is not a past activity, but a present reality in every unfolding moment. It's all just reforming and evolving patterns, or habits of nature. But everything dies and is recreated constantly. Nothing is static, except the dead.
This is why we can actively see what's going on right now through investing within our own nuclear furnace inside of us. We can look directly into the sun and see it, but not without the price of loss of self.
stvdv
Veteran Member
Once I thought about this question for quite a while and asked Sai Baba to explain it to me. Sai Baba came in my dream and explained it to me. Was amazing, His explanation. Since that dream I never think about "how the universe came to be". Now I have a bigger thing to solve "Who Am I"