The Alpha, the Omega, and the Bee Orchid (part one)

Where are we, and where could a loving creator be, between the birth and death of all vast existence? What of the very first alpha, the very last omega, and the bizarre creations of life scattered around us betwixt the beginning and end? How could all we know now of science ever permit us to consider ourselves more than tiny, insignificant specks of dirt, thrust up from muddy chaos by chance? How could we, a scant two meters in height, be of any personal pertinence to any almighty God, while molecules are pummeled by sparse gamma beams from our sun, a mere 93 million miles away, to forge our individual genetic inadequacies?

As much as we can imagine, a divine and loving Creator could not possibly consider the dimensions of physical space and time in the same manner as we simple mortals. From all that we have learned via scientific inquiry, that much should be obvious to any person. Around us are vast galaxies, from the one in which we live, to ones so distant that, even with the incredible speed of light, telescope images captured of them are already as they were billions of years ago, by the time their dim photons reach us.

A ‘big bang’ started it all, 43 billion years ago, science now tells us. Yet even as hydrogen still boils in gigantic balls of heat, sucking in dark matter to spew fused atoms and deadly particles across the immense distances of emptied space, we are told that this same Creator cares for each and every single, tiny, imperfect human being on this far flung planet, somewhere near the rim of a spinning spiral galaxy containing 400 billion stars—and around this galaxy, apparently randomly, countless more galaxies congeal, then perish, sucked into gigantic black holes at galaxies’ centers, where gravity is so intense that time and space collapse into an unknowable dark fury.
• Across billions of years, any divine Creator could not possibly consider our paltry lifespans to have any meaning at all, if such a Being considered time in terms of linear, equidistant ticks of some clock with undefinably small movements of quantum-flicked gears.
• Across galactic space, any divine Creator could not possibly consider space in terms of simple, Euclidean geometry, yet still look with unabated love to our hollow sphere of life, 8,000 miles across and scant miles thick.
Yet still the debate rages on! Every year, new classes in schoolrooms throughout the world struggle to comprehend how cold scientific laws, gathered with such unquestionable force within the indubious lecture halls of modern knowledge, could ever even coexist at all with the six mere days of Creationism, so awesomely, wondrously sung as Holy truth, throughout far more ancient, doctrine-decked halls of vaulted churches. Is any real reconciliation even possible at all?

Perhaps a loving Creator would not see time not as we do, in the regulated spirals of days into months and years. Perhaps such a Being, in desire to create not only life, not only free will, but also to enable us to know the transcendentally sublime, perhaps such a Being sees time in terms of eras, or epochs, each of which could be billions of years, or shorter than a microsecond in length--But regardless measured length and count of ticks of clocks, perhaps such a Being sees each irregular epoch, bounded by events significant to his own power, perhaps such a Being sees each corridor of time, as long or as short as it may be, with equal significance.

Some way the Hebrew word for ‘day,’ as used in Genesis to describe the six days of creation, could also mean ‘epoch.’ If so, such speculators observe, the epochs of Genesis miraculously match the actual evolutionary stages of the universe and life we now learn about in science.

Similarly, in ancient Greek, there were two Gods of time, and two words to describe time. There is the God CHRONOS, who not only orders time into regular intervals, but permits mere humans to comprehend such measured ticks of his divine clock. This is the most common conception of time. Yet we do also sometimes consider time in terms of eons, and there is also the Greek God EON, who looks upon spans of time that are delimited by major changes of worldly conditions at their beginning and end. The great philosopher Hegel defined the epochs of history in this way, saying sufficient wisdom is not available to understand each era until it is over, in his phrase “The owl of Minerva (the Goddess of wisdom) spreads its wings only at the falling of dusk.” Must time itself end before we can truly comprehend how a loving Creator might be able to see through time?

Then what of the end? If the beginning of time was measured in epochs, rather than days, then could the apocalypse likewise span some manner of eons here on earth? How could the end of the physical world, as we know it, even be imagined by St. John the Divine in the Revelations? How could he know that cloning, and other scientific techniques, could make everlasting life possible here on earth, as well as in any afterlife that could exist? How would he even be able understand the massive destruction of the modern age, other than seeing steel-sided artillery as angels of metal, and their gunsmoke as incense? When humans blasted the very atoms of matter apart, killing thousands with nuclear explosions after World War 2 was already virtually over, could that be seen as the beginning of the true Apocalypse?

If the creation lasted billions of years, instead of days, then how long could the Apocalypse, described in mere spans of instants, also be prolonged more than a day? If the epoch of Apocalypse lasts years, ending in a war between those with biologically-enhanced bodies and those without the means to make or buy them, then how many must die, how much suffering, how much more must war destroy our precious hollow shell, 8,000 miles wide and scant miles thick, before we find ourselves together in bodies renewed by science as often as needed, and surrounded by foreseen love of Jesus, forever knowing everlasting joy beyond the eternal, here in the kingdom of heaven in our own world, whatever may be of the afterlife--or not?