Nov 05, 2017

Why Pain? (5)

How do we respond to seemingly

Random acts of terror:

Makes us wonder:

If this pain is present,

Is there a loving God?

I described in the last post how the first generation of stars formed. Deep within these stars the tremendous pressure and heat began the job of creating some heavier elements. These stars were unstable, and soon exploded violently in various forms of supernovas to scatter their elements throughout their space. This precipitated the second round of stars, larger and more dense than previous. Within the greater pressure and higher temperatures of these second-generation stars greater complexity formed, creating great masses of carbon and other higher complexity elements. Again, sometime about 5-7 billion years ago, these second-generation stars began to collapse into supernovas. The supernovas scattered dust and star clouds throughout a vast interstellar areas covering hundreds of millions of light years.

Now the stardust contained a surprising amount of the higher elements (cosmologists are not exactly sure how so much carbon could have been generated, but the second-generation stars have proven to be giant carbon manufacturing structures). Once again, these explosions scattered stardust and energy clouds over vast distances, covering hundreds of millions of light years of space. Note the violence of creation: God moves all creation (the Christ that John and Paul talk about so often) to achieve cognition based on the more complex molecules. We understand this to mean that, as a minimum, cognition was achieved in our universe when humanity arose only about 70,000 years ago: we have looked at the universe, and wondered how and why, and seek and find the answers as to how. But not understand the Why.

It appears that for some reason, something swept a portion of the stardust to several hundred light years away from its origin, putting our proto-star in a sort of isolated spot within the Milky Way galaxy, such that the various pull of gravitational force that tears apart so much of all galaxies, was greatly reduced in this location, and we still have not identified which star group (within our galaxy) we came from. Be that as it may, the action of gravity continued, and a third-generation of stars began forming, which included our star, about 5-6 billion years ago. The violent collisions and gathering of stardust from several previous supernovas built up the next process, spinning out of stardust our sun and planets. Since our proto-star (the sun) and planets were just forming, the orbits around our sun became almost spherical. Thus our planet could maintain a reasonably fixed orbit with a minimum of temperature variations due to orbit eccentricity. This constancy is considered extremely rare, and some cosmologist have suggested that the odds put it such that there is the possibility that we could be the only stable star system, especially stable for almost 5 billion years, in the universe. At best, there would only be a few other places where such a long list of conditions could exist.

But notice that still the violence of nature is the basis of natural evolution, not only among the stars, but even the evolution of our planet over the past 4.5 billion years. The original planet, while still forming itself from the residue of stuff floating in space, contained much carbon and iron. However, the atmosphere, or what there was of it, was a roiling mass of mostly CO2 with a smattering of many other elements, dense smoke from the mostly molten surface, high temperatures, and many other conditions that would see inhospitable to any form of life as would know it.

The surface cooled, such that giant plates formed of solid matter, and as temperatures lowered water came down and filled up lower areas of the surface. interestingly, even to this day, it is the movement of the plates, pushed by the relentless shrinking of the planet by cooling and internal gravity, create enormous friction, which continues to heat the subsurface into melting rock and all forms of solid material.

And then, about 4 billion years ago, wonder of wonder: life appeared. Amongst all this turmoil, life appeared. Not like life as we experience it, only single cell life, but still the incredibly complex cell that was self-reproducible appeared and spread almost overnight (in galactic time) to cover the earth.

We will continue to look at this fascinating and very violent history of life, and how it pertains to what we perceive today as pain and loss.

And all this is the birth of the Christ, ‘And the Word was God’, which is still birthing.

Meditation

My God, all is created in Your Being, Your very substance as we can see it, a constant pattern of growth and change. It seems to be wonder to me that my life is so seemingly calm and flowing, considering all that is present in the universe, and on our tiny portion of that universe. It seems, like it or not, that the universe has conspired for 13.7 billion years to bring us here, and to my great humility, to bring me here right now at this moment of Now. For it is in this Now, and only in this Now, that I exist, the result of 13.8 billion years of evolution. I rest in peace in Your Being, knowing that Your love fills my being and all I can conceive.