The 3D God Box - pt. 3

Ever wondered how "The Big Bang" got its name?

I mean, everything that blew out of The Big Bang ... the stuff that would eventually slow down and cool off to become stars, galaxies and planets, all of it ... came from a single point scientists estimate was no larger than one molecule across. So why isn't it called The Itsy-Bitsy Bang?

Regardless, people sometimes have a hard time grasping that not just matter but space, billions of light years' worth of emptiness for the universe to expand into, also came flying out of The Big Bang.

But folks have an even harder time grasping that time itself came blasting out from The Big Bang, too.

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Some of us visualize Time as a river: the past flows off behind us as we're paddling to keep up with the present, while the future is somewhere "up ahead," about to come smashing into our lives like a runaway train if we don't carefully plan and provide for its arrival. (It's time I stopped mixing metaphors :-)

The paradox is that Time is a quantity, a man-made concept, "a capacity for change" we've created to help our puny brains sequence events. We'd stay confused, for example, if we couldn't determine the chronological order of non-casually related events (imagine if the correct answer to "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" was Always).

That's one reason we have a hard time (sorry) imagining how God can exist independent of what's familiar (our space and our time) to us.

So, mistakenly believing Time's on their side, the last step for folks trying to fit God into a box is to make him stay in there ... by folding all the corners, squeezing down the Time lid and wrapping the box with man-made rules and theologies.

(concludes next time)