Sunday 15 June 2008

Mega Omega

This is a lovely little paragraph on the theological habit of associating the Big Bang singularity with Biblical Creation: "The Big Bang singularity provides little or no evidence for creation in the finite past and hence for theism. Whether one dismisses singularities or takes them seriously, physics licenses no first moment of (space-)time ... The analogy between the Big Bang singularity and stellar gravitational collapse suggests that a Creator is required in the first case only if a Destroyer is needed in the second."

It wouldn't persuade a devout religious individual, I suppose: they would be likely to say 'there is a destroyer, the alpha is also the omega, He who rolls the universe up like a blanket.' Of course, that's to miss J Brian Pitt's reducto ad absurdum; but no matter. I like the cosmological-fictional possibilities of this idea: a universe ruled for precisely half its life by a creating God, who then smoothly passes the crown and sceptre over for the remaining half to a destroying God. The Big Alpha; the mega-omega.

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