“At the beginning of time, The Nothing is all that existed, or to say that it existed would be wrong, for nothing was. One would describe it as the vast abyss of nothingness, the great plains of darkness may be a boundless pit of unfathomable emptiness, however to describe an ‘it’ would be wrong, for there was no it, there was nothing, nothing existed. Nothing but a small, condensed, insanely energized ball. A coalition of all the masses that could ever exist, a concoction of all the forces that would ever exist, a highly dense ‘singularity’. Then all at once, in no time at all, there was everything.”
The Big Bang Theory. A globally accepted and proven to be true hypothesis of how the world and the universe it is in came to be. The theory that describes the start of time itself. This theory that suggests the birth of the universe cropped up in post-war Belgium in 1920, more as a philosophy than scientific discovery, surprisingly from a priest named Georges Lemaître, when he theorized that the universe began from a single primordial atom.
Many think the pseudo-war fought between science and religion is one that goes back not only centuries but also millennia. The popular opinion is that they describe two different theories that have opposing views, however, more often than not, this proves to be a falsity. This stands to be most true in the subject of one of the most important subjects of all, the birth of existence.
“THEN was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. What covered in, and where? and what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water? Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day's and night's divider. That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever” — Rig Veda X.129.1&2
According to Hinduism (and by extension Buddhism and Jainism) creation and destruction go hand in hand, somewhat of a cyclic nature. There was no fine line of distinction between what was and what wasn’t, there was no distinction between the calm and the chaos. In the beginning, there was a great serpent who lay curled, interpreted to represent this cyclic peak and fall of everything. This great serpent every once in a while would hum ( kind of like when you chant “ohm” in yoga) and would create vibrations that were saturated with so much pure energy that it lead to the creation of existence (hence the relations in Hindu myth that “ohm” is the sound of the universe). Though one could elaborate on the entire philosophy of the Hindu culture’s origin of the universe, we know that Hinduism acknowledges that the creation of their gods and deities are only facilitators of nature and not the creators of nature itself.
In Norse mythology, ‘The Ouroboros’ a large self-eating serpent dragon symbolizes the rise and fall of different eternities. This large ‘entity’ lays at the bottom of a large tree, which connects the nine realms which are all subject to the harshness of time itself. What is truly fascinating is that the string theory, a recent breakthrough in theoretical physics, which if proved to be right might be more substantial of a breakthrough than Einstein's theory of relativity, predicts nine spatial dimensions and one time dimension, much like the nine ‘realms’ of Norse mythology.
The Chinese philosophy of Taoism dictates that there was an egg. This egg wasn’t that which contained the universe, it is described to be the universe, with no distinction between the calm and the chaos. This is somewhat similar to the modern science’s predictions of the state of the universe, where in all matter was of the same type, strange matter( a highly stable form of matter) and all energy was of the same type (the electroweak force, an ‘unholy’ concentrate of all the forms of energy under pressure). Furthermore, Taoism speculates that from the egg came a third entity, often described as a force, called Pan Ku, a giant that helped give shape to everything that is matter with the help of a tortoise, a phoenix, a dragon, and a unicorn-type creature. What is miraculous to note is that while these philosophies are created out of deep thought and intense observations, Taoism inadvertently describes the main forces of nature, wherein the giant is drawn in parallel to gravity, a force associated with immense mass, and four other forces, the turtle, phoenix, unicorn and dragon, are drawn in parallel to the electromagnetic force, the electrostatic force, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force.
“And God said,” let there be light", and there was...” Genisis, 1 : 3
Though more popular religions like Christianity and Islam think of the birth of existence to have been brought about by some catalyst-like God, most religions and cultures have sought explanations for the things around them by a more observational method. This can be chalked up to the similar origins of the two religions.
“Such is Allah, your Lord. There is no God but He, the Creator of all things, so worship Him. And He is guardian over everything.” Qur'an
Every religion is a metaphor system, and like scientific theories, every religious myth is limited. Perhaps progress in religion can occur as it does in science: without invalidating a theory, a greater myth may encompass it respectfully, the way General Relativity encompasses Newtonian Mechanics or the way the worship of the Sun God Ra encompassed the worship of fire. In the next few decades, powerful ideas of modern science could inspire a spiritual renaissance, but they could also be totally ignored by almost everyone as irrelevant and elitist. In the worst of circumstances, they could be abusively interpreted and turned into a tool of exploitation-as some would contend that the medieval textual religion was interpreted as a justification for a hierarchical organization of society in which the vast majority of people were oppressed. How well our religions and scientific breakthroughs are interpreted in language meaningful to ordinary people will determine how well its elemental stories are understood, which may, in turn, affect how positive the consequences for society turn out to be thus, the questions to ask ourselves is that is there a moral responsibility involved in tampering with the underpinnings of reality?
- By Shivam Panda
Loved the concluding paragraph.