Before the Beginning
By Paul Kellam
University Unitarian Universalist Society, September 19, 1999
Copyright © 1999 by Paul W. Kellam. All rights reserved.
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As some of you may have noticed, I like to eat. As a matter of fact, I like it so much that I do it almost every day.
And of all the meals I have eaten, one stands out. This memorable event took place about 30 years ago. I don’t remember what I ate. I do remember that the check was humongous, but I’ve long forgotten the amount
What I will never forget is the setting of the meal. It was in the elegant revolving restaurant atop Seattle’s Space Needle.
We were seated just before sunset and as we slowly revolved we were treated to a view of snow-capped Mount Rainier, just beginning to be tinged red by the light of the setting sun. From our vantage point it seemed as if we were looking down on it. Of course we weren’t. Mount Rainier soars to 14,410 feet and we were only 600 feet above the ground.
As we revolved to the west with Puget Sound and the Olympic mountains spread out before us it seemed as if we were looking down on that scene, too, with the sun slowly sinking behind the peaks into the Pacific Ocean.
By the time we came east again it was quite dark and there, close to us below, was a football game in progress in a lighted stadium.
As the Space Needle swayed a bit in the breeze, a lady at the next table turned and said, "It’s really a God’s-eye view isn’t it? But I’m not sure I want to go to Heaven if it sways like this."
My dinner guest, a Seattle native, told me the football game was a big local event — two arch-rival high school teams waging their annual battle on the field of honor. He also told me that had I not been in town he would be at the game because the rivalry between the two schools had a special meaning for him. When he was in high school he had been the quarterback on one of the teams.
I think he was more interested in what was going on down on that football field than he was in the meal and the business we had to discuss. But from our height and distance he had to settle for relayed reports from the kitchen by way of our waiter to know that his team was winning.
One of the incredible aspects of human mind is the ability to recall such special events in vivid detail. Now, 30 years later, I can relive the experience in my mind. I can not only hear again some of the words that were said but also the timbre of the voices — the fellow who was my guest and the lady. She was wearing a green dress, pearls, and a perfume that made me want to sneeze. I can even feel the Space Needle’s slight sway. Don’t ask me what I ate, though. It wasn’t all that great — just expensive.
Now how did all that come together out of the depths of my mind as I sat down to write what you are hearing me relate? As you may recall, last month I announced my intention to try to present a series of verbal essays that would hit some of the high points of the dramatic story of human evolution and discovery.
This scene came together in my mind, I think, because as I sat down to write I had to think about point of view. And the Space Needle dinner, which I hadn’t thought about for years, popped into conscious mind complete with sound effects and a bit of the seat-of-the pants feel of it, maybe because that’s one of the most memorable points of view I have ever experienced.
The God’s-eye view, the lady called it. Tells you a little bit about what she thinks God is, doesn’t it? In touch, but remote. Seated on a throne, being fed, looking down on it all, and swaying a bit in the wind.
The human mind — what goes on in the brain — is a wondrous thing. Think on one thing, such as point of view, and it automatically assembles related thoughts that haven’t been thought of for years.
As Dan Quayle once said when he was vice president, "What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is."
The Quayle’s-eye view is nothing like the God’s-eye view — the big picture. It’s a wondrous thing. It can show you the grandeur of things, but you can’t see much detail. But maybe God can zoom in. From atop the Space Needle we couldn’t.
If we had wanted to follow that game closely we’d have been eating hot dogs in the stands. But even with good 50-yard-line seats we’d be limited in what we could see in the most important and most exciting moments, such as a goal-line stand-off.
In order to see and feel what’s really going in all its detail one must be close to the action, as we human beings are here on earth. But we are really too close to be objective. We are not just running up and down the sidelines. We are part of the action, and you can get hurt that way.
It’s also hard to see the big picture from where we are. From what little sand-lot football I have played I can tell you that about all you see of the game when you’re in the game is the face of the guy on the other side of the line of scrimmage. Or maybe his behind when you wind up on the bottom of the pile.
I wonder what you would see if you were the football? From that point of view it would be hard to put together the big picture, wouldn’t it? Oh, you’d have some soaring moments high above the field as you were passed or kicked. And some pretty jarring moments, too, when the guy who had you in his protective arms suddenly went down.
But what if you were inside the football? What would you see from that point of view? Not much. From that viewpoint it would be pretty hard even to figure out what is going on out there, much less why it is happening, who the players are, what the rules are, what the score is.
As humans on this planet, engaged in this game of life, our limited perspective is from inside the football — as if we are something like a grain of sand. Unaided, our visual equipment can barely penetrate the pigskin of earth’s atmosphere.
The picture we get, we have found, is grossly misleading. It looks as if we are the center of the attention of the entire cosmos.
And it is from that self-centered perspective that we have constructed the rules of the game and have ascribed their origin to a supernatural something created in our own image — a supernatural something that existed before the beginning and now watches over us. A supernatural something that can, and does, zoom in at will and get deep inside of us — to the very center of our being that some call the soul.
Curiosity about how this all works has driven us to discover ways of penetrating the pigskin obscuring our vision. We can’t see nearly as much as we’d like, but we can now see in enough detail to be quite confident that this place where we live, and we who have come to live here, are a part of the action of the vast cosmos of the great stadium we call the universe. Now we are even beginning to understand the game and the rules by which it’s played.
That is pretty incredible, considering our limited perspective. But not only are we beginning to figure out what’s going on out there. We’re beginning to figure what’s going on in here — inside this grain of sand that is us.
What we are — what’s inside this skin, what makes us alive and sensitive to the universe and to one another — is perhaps even more intricate in its interlocking symbiotic symphony than the intergalactic orchestration that makes planets, suns and galaxies function as a vibrant, living universe still engaged in its evolutionary creative process.
We are awed by the intricate systems within our bodies. Now we’re looking inside the cells of those organs and systems. We’re looking at what’s going on inside the molecules that are inside the cells that are inside our organs that are inside our bodies.
What makes us so curious? Why do we want to know all this stuff? Do we dare try to know? Is our insatiable curiosity, our persistent probing of the depths without and the depths within, going to be our undoing? Are we in violation of some unknown law of nature yet to be discovered?
What we have come to know is directly at odds with what we thought we knew just a few generations ago. That’s pretty unnerving.
Why do we have this insatiable curiosity about ourselves and how we got here? Why should we care about our role in the universe, who we are, and why we are?
If what we have come to know about evolution by natural selection is substantially correct — and I think it is — we have evolved to this state of mind and body in which we find ourselves in spite of ourselves. We were not designed to be this way. There is no grand designer.
The only purpose in evolution is survival, and that doesn’t mean survival of the individual creature or the species of which that creature is a part. Evolution by natural selection means that the genes that have combined to make us the individual creatures we are have naturally selected themselves so as to enhance their chances of survival.
Through a long, long process our genes have selectively combined in such a way that the creature we call human is the result. The natural selection process has created for this creature a physical body that walks upright on two legs, has two limbs free and equipped with sensitive fingers for manipulating things, and has a huge brain relative to its body size.
What the genes have caused to go on in this brain — a complex process we call mind — seems to have had an influence on the bodily qualities the genes naturally select for survival enhancement. For example, this creature we call human has evolved a larynx and voice box, together with the mental processes for language, to enable it to communicate with audible sound signals that can represent not just information about what is but also concepts and ideas about what might be.
And then further evolution of mind, again through the process of natural selection, has resulted in the invention of visible marks on stone and then the invention of paper.
I think that must have happened when mind discovered that big stones in the pockets not only slow you down but wear the pants out pretty fast.
Well, that’s not really the way it was, but it was something like that. I have no idea whether pockets came before paper or if it was the other way around. I don’t know and I don’t care. That was merely a metaphor that suddenly popped into mind.
And speaking of metaphors, as I just did, those are another great invention of human mind, again by natural selection. Or are metaphors a discovery? Did we invent them or have they always been there since before the beginning, awaiting discovery? Our genes love metaphors. Remember, all our genes care about is survival. They are very much interested in seducing us into the kinds of actions that will cause them to get passed on to become part of someone else.
I will not go into specific detail about the romance metaphors we use with one another to get that passing-on job done. It would not be appropriate here, but I think you get the idea. Our genes love it. And those who are most skilled and adept with the romance metaphors pass on more of their genes.
Those who are really good with the romance metaphors show the rest of us how to do it. We revere Shakespeare for his memorable words and plots, which can be read or, better yet, acted out on stage. Now we can see those same themes and plots acted out in a wide-screen theater with surround sound or on the screen of our living-room TV. Some people, I’ve heard, even have romance instruction machines in their bedrooms.
Well, I’ve jumped way ahead of the human story, but some of you did became more alert when I mentioned romance metaphors and the transmission of genetic information. We’re not all dead yet.
Among languages and metaphors, we have to give appropriate recognition to a very special language — mathematics. We are not sure whether it is a human invention or something inherent in the universe that we have somehow discovered. I’ve never had much of a feel for mathematics, but I have come to have a lot of respect for it.
Mathematics is metaphorical in the sense that it enables us to use symbols to model things, processes and relationships. It is a universal language, unconstrained by ethnic, regional or political differences. Even when the cold war was at its coldest (note the metaphor) Americans and Russians readily understood one another’s mathematical metaphors and the scope of consequences in the deadly what-if scenario we were playing.
An especially useful mathematical language — or dialect, if you prefer — has recently come into widespread use and is rapidly changing the world and the way we relate to it. I’m speaking of electronic binary code.
Useful as this is, I seriously doubt that mathematical metaphors, powerful as they are, will ever replace romance metaphors. I don’t think our genes would stand for it. Our genes prefer real-life action to abstract concepts. But they seem to have figured out a way to induce this organism that’s us to event an electronic tool and use it to test concepts and distinguish between those that are illusions and those that correspond to reality.
I am not trying to make a case for computers now. I know a few of you don’t exactly cozy up to them. But like it or not this very recent development has greatly enhanced our ability to see — see in the sense of understanding — what’s going on out there and in here.
I don’t know whether you’ve ever noticed, but in our culture the best-known story of how we came to be — the creation stories of Genesis — that well-known story is not told by God. God is merely one of the players on the stage. The story is told from a point of view that is larger than God, told from a third-person perspective. The author sees it all from afar and even sees what God doesn’t see — you know, all that sinful business involving the serpent, Eve, Adam, and the forbidden fruit.
Who is this third person looking on? Some say it was Moses, not looking on but sort of taking dictation from someone who was there before the beginning. Who is this third person who knew what all the players were doing all the time? It couldn’t have been God. God was one of the players, and he didn’t know what was going on in the garden. Genesis starts from before God did anything — before the beginning, "when the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep."
The incredible thing about the human story is that from the darkness of our obscured vantage point inside the football we are able now to see back to the beginning and hypothesize about before the beginning. The picture of after the beginning isn’t as clear as we would like it to be. There are still many puzzling and contradictory aspects to it.
It really gets dicey when we try to go further than that — to see back to before the beginning, to before the Big Bang, to before the universe began. The big problem with that is not so much a technical problem as it is a mental problem. Before the beginning there was nothing. And it is very difficult for human mind to comprehend nothing.
We didn’t know there was a beginning to the universe until 1929 when the astronomer William Powell Hubble discovered that the velocities of nebulae increase with distance. That meant the stars were moving away from one another and from us. That meant the universe was expanding. That meant that at some point in time the universe had been smaller than it is today. How small? So small there was nothing.
But nothing is incomprehensible to human mind. So there must have been something before there was nothing.
The mental leap to the recognition of nothing as a legitimate quantity was not made in human mind until the sixth or seventh century AD, probably by Hindu mathematicians, although some argue that the Chinese got there first. We do know that a hollow symbol "O," which stood for nothing—for the empty column of the counting frame—was in use in India before 630 AD. The Hindu word for the hollow symbol is sunya, which means "empty." An Indian document from 630 AD not only uses the symbol for zero but states the laws of ciphers:
a times sunya = sunya
a plus sunya = a
a minus sunya = a
The Hindu mathematicians saw that you cannot divide by sunya, or zero, and they also found that when some numbers are divided by other numbers the result is a fraction, which can be represented as a decimal for ease of calculation. They used paper or scratching in the sand to multiply or divide by any number.
Interestingly, the Mayas of Guatemala seem to have independently invented a symbol for zero. Perhaps they discovered the hidden secret of the counting frame. But they seem not to have worked out the law of ciphers, nor did they learn to multiply and divide or to use fractions.
It took about 300 years for the concept of zero and its accompanying symbols — 1 through 9 — to get from India to Europe. Although Roman merchants were quick to seize the advantages of the "new math," the religious authorities of the day were not amused. An edict of AD 1259 forbade the bankers of Florence to use the infidel symbols. In 1348, religious authorities who ran the renowned university of Padua ordered the booksellers there to price the books in "plain" letters, not in infidel ciphers.
Sir Isaac Newton's experiments on gravitation and his invention of differential calculus in 1665 are big ideas that follow from the discovery of zero and the ability to calculate. The calculus, as it is called, is the mathematics of motion. It opens the doors of astronomy and of physics. Newton's really big idea was the notion of universality — the theory that everything must behave everywhere in the universe as they behave here on earth.
That big idea is one of the key foundation stones of modern science. It is also a direct affront to religious orthodoxy. From Newton's day on the relationship between religion and science becomes increasingly strained and muddled. If you make room in your mind for Newton's notion of universality there is no place in your mind for the doctrine that the earth and the people on it are God's unique and special creations.
Although Einstein's theory of relativity declares that things separated by the vast nothingness of space behave quite differently than things close to earth, the theory of relativity does not destroy Newton's theory of universality. It merely adds another aspect, another dimension. It also adds another challenge to religious orthodoxy. If we live in a universe of universal relativities, not absolutes, can there be moral absolutes, as religious orthodoxy insists?
Relativity theory and its related atomic theory hit us smack in the face with the fact of the predominance of nothingness. Not only is the universe pretty empty of matter, but so are we. Our bodies are collections of atoms. The nearest thing to the nucleus of an atom is an electron. If you think of the nucleus of an atom as the size of a BB-gun pellet, the electron is the size of a speck of dust.
And the electron is separated from the nucleus as if the nucleus were on the ground and the electron were on top of a 55-story building. There is nothing in between. That's a lot of nothingness.
I hate to bring up quantum mechanics and the discomfort of what it says about nothingness, but I can't resist. If you separate the nucleus of the atom and the distant electron into their components — elementary particles — you will find that those particles have no mass. What little bit of something you had in the whole atom becomes nothing when you take the atom apart. The elementary particles do have properties, such as spin and velocity, but they have no mass until they come together as an atom.
That is like saying you can have a brick if you like, but you cannot have a brick as an independent entity. The brick has physical reality only if it is a part of a structure. Then, and only then, it becomes something. Until then there is nothing.
I will try to state the central point I have been trying to make this morning very simply, lest it slip away from us.
From our very limited physical point of view inside the football, as it were, we have become able to "see" both backward and forward in time — back to the beginning of the Big Bang and back to before the beginning.
With our science, based on the universal language of mathematics, which is based in large part on the concept of zero, we have become able to model — to conceptualize — in human mind possible realities that may or may not be accurate reflections of actual reality. Hypotheses, we call them.
And then, using the principle of consilience — the notion that knowledge that is truly real must not be self contradictory — we have been able to sort through all the possible realties and distinguish the more probable from the less probable, arriving on the eve of the 21st century at the beginning of a web of interlocking understanding of how we came to be here, what the rules of the game of life are, and what the score is.
All of what we think we know is subject to change, of course, as we discover what remains to be discovered. And what remains to be discovered, we now know, far exceeds what we have discovered so far.
In the words of John Maddox, who for 23 years has been at the helm of the world’s preeminent science magazine, Nature, "What remains to be discovered is not, of course, the same as what will be discovered. It is possible to tell what loose ends are dangling before us, but not how they will eventually be pulled together."
"Science at present is a curious patchwork," Maddox says. "The lode of discovery is far from worked out." The agenda for future "constructive discovery will undoubtedly change our view of our place in the world as radically as it has been changed since the time of Copernicus. . . How shall we feel when we know the true history of the evolution of Homo sapiens from the great apes? And how shall we feel when there are found to be, or even [found] to have been, living things elsewhere in the galaxy?"
How shall we feel, indeed?
I think we shall feel further humbled by what human ingenuity has led us to discover from this insignificant position in which we find ourselves.
To borrow further from the wisdom of Dan Quayle. In 1990 he said, "We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur."
I don’t think we’re any more ready now than we have ever been. But I think we Unitarian Universalists are more ready than most for the discoveries of what was before the beginning — before the Big Bang, as it were.
I’m not quite ready to proclaim that God is a UU, but I will say that what lies before the beginning is more universal than we can imagine and more unitarian than any of the divisive dogmas that constitute any of the world’s "great" religions.