There are some gods one has to love. A particular favourite of mine is Thor. Thunder-gods exist in all cultures and mythologies from every time and place, but Thor has to be my favourite. I am interested by the combination of his incredible gentleness with his goats, as opposed to his harshness with a starving boy, who unwittingly hurt one of the goats. I am more than interested by - I positively like, his tendency to roll his goat-cart over my head!
An hour ago the sky was blue with occasional puffs of grey. Half an hour ago I noticed, peering through my window, that it was that deep midnight purple of heavy storm-clouds, underlit by afternoon sunlight streaming in from a largely clear westerly sky. That underlighting always reminds me of Jeffrey Smart paintings - I would dearly love to hang some of his work in my hovel. With the underlighting and the deep, rich clouds, the electrical wires stopped being black and started being a glowing, numinous, shining white.
Of course, it didn't last - the western sky clouded over and electrical cables dimmed. Then the thunder and lightning started: Thor's goat-cart rattling on the clouds and striking sparks as he passed over. I went outside to greet him. After that, the rain started falling: much less welcome than the thunder, in this sodden landscape, with the river already up. I liked the dry electrical storm much better.
There are all kinds of interesting sciency-bits that go into creating a thunderstorm, but while all of that does the physical work, absolutely none of it stops Thor from existing, and travelling overhead. Richard Dawkins, whose books I like and have, tells us that God is not necessary (the cheek of him, assuming masculinity and singularity of the Divine!), and this is strictly true.
But nobody, not Dawkins, not anybody else, has ever been able to show that gods do not exist. I am reminded of a creation-myth I was told by someone in the Georgian Trad once: In the beginning was nothing. Science says that in the beginning was nothing. The myth says that then, the Goddess in her aspect as a chicken laid an egg. Science says that in the void, a Singularity developed. The myth says that after a period of incubation, the egg hatched. Science says that after a period of rapid expansion, the Singularity exploded. The myth says that out of the egg came the entire universe and all life within it. Science says that out of the exploding Singularity, all matter and all energy in the universe came, and transmuted itself and evolved into what we have now, which is still transmuting and evolving. Orthodox science looks awfully mythological and god-friendly to me!
Gods don't walk the streets like mortals - at least, not often. It is my contention that I am, in fact, a Goddess, and I'm just doing a few lifetimes in human bodies just to see what it feels like to be human. And let me tell you, it doesn't feel good! That thing they keep complaining about, that thing they call pain? Not nice. I've had some of it myself - I know. But in general, gods are not running around loose in the world. And if we/they're not, it becomes hard to prove (and equally hard to disprove!) their existence.
Decades ago I was once told by a teaching-figure that the universe is a kind of very large doughnut, and deity is the hole at the centre of the doughnut. The hole has no independent existence of its own, but without the hole, a doughnut is just a kind of rather unpleasant, heavy fried cake. With the hole, it develops a loveliness in its identity, and becomes a great thing to eat. In the same way, a universe without deity will function mechanically, but it becomes a glorious universe to live in when it has the "hole at the centre", that touch of the divine.
When I was, I think, a teenager, I wrote a short story which expanded outwards. Looked at from a larger and larger perspective, the solar system got smaller and smaller, until the sun was the nucleus of a single atom, and the planets were the electrons in their shells. All humans were subatomic particles on the surface of one of those electrons. One of the gods made a pretty, sparkling paperweight for the coffee table in their living room. That paperweight was our entire universe, each galaxy a single point of sparkle. Of course gods don't interfere personally in every detail of your life! You are too small for them to know you're there. That doesn't mean they are any more unreal than we are, to a nanoparticle. Such was my story.
Fleas live only a few weeks, and that feels like a lifetime to them. We live several decades, and that feels like a lifetime to us. It follows that the bigger you get, the more time it takes to feel like a lifetime. In a scaled-up world where earth is only an electron, then the whole of the Age of Mammals would probably pass in a few minutes.
Scientists are confronted by a dilemma: in a universe many billions of light-years across and at least fourteen billion human-years old, would that really be terribly old? I could set off an explosion of some kind. In the instant of ignition, the potential energy in the fuel heats up terrifically, and expands. As it expands, there is a moment where the velocity of that expansion is increasing - it is accelerating. Once all the chemical energy has been released, the explosion starts to cool and slow, but until that point, at the very beginning of the explosion, it accelerates.
In universal terms, fourteen billion years doesn't seem like a long time. It might be the equivalent of a human-sized nanosecond, scaled up. Are scientists really making the best use of their brains theorising about the Dark Energy that is making the expansion of the universe speed up instead of slowing down? After all, if we are right at the beginning of an explosion where our whole galaxy is just one of the sparks thrown out, then it stands to reason that without any other energy-source, the universe is still expanding. When the explosion has been happening for what the universe considers to be a second or two, then perhaps its expansion sill start slowing down. It is only then that it will need Dark Energy to accelerate its expansion.
And right on cue, Thor has gone away and the rain is easing off.
No comments:
Post a Comment