And God said, “Let
there be light!”
And there was light,
or would have been, had God been crafting a cosmos intelligible to the Bronze Age mind, or mine.
Scientists—specifically, astrophysicists—tell us1 that we can detect light from the Big Bang, the background microwave radiation all around us. We can see into the past via light that has spent nearly the whole life of the cosmos chasing us down from the unimaginably rapid expansion of the emerging new universe during the first part of its first second of existence. What’s more, we can “see” the origin of the universe; but as I understand it (huge caveat there), it’s less through telescopes and more through mathematical calculations I don’t have the language to even name correctly. But we—well, they—know, more or less, how it went down.
Ancient theologians, myth-makers, and story-tellers, however, had their own infinitely dense, infinitely expanding kind of truth: truths about God, about our place in the cosmos, about the near-infinite depths of the human condition. It’s completely different from (and compatible with) scientific truths. Through observation and reflection of a different sort, some Hebrew poet(s) (which is to say, theologian[s]) told us God spoke the world into existence, in all its “endless forms more beautiful,” to co-opt Darwin’s phrase. Just stood there, I guess, and spoke, one “let there be” command, maybe two, every day for the better part of a week.
Meanwhile, our scientists confess that we currently have no idea why there is anything in our universe at all. Matter and antimatter resulting from the Big Bang in equal measure ought to have canceled each other out. Yet here we are.
“Let there be,” God said.
As a twenty-first century theologian and poet, I’m going to take some liberties here. The Hebrew behind that phrase (first translated into English as “let there be” by William Tyndale) is in the jussive mood, which means that while it is a command, it’s a command softened by an almost asking permission2—a polite command, if you will, like when your boss asks if you’d like to come into their office or do a certain task. They’re not really asking.
But the liberty I’m taking is to take the “let” more literally.
In my own poetical/theological cosmogony (such as it is), the most astounding thing about creation is that there should be anything at all other than God. Whether you follow the twentieth-century existential theologians3 in describing God as “being itself” or “the ground of being,” or take some other tack, God is certainly not a being alongside my left shoe, the Empire State Building, Jupiter, your dog, and all the other beings in our universe. God is necessary in the philosophical sense; we are not. We are contingent. Contingent on God. Contingent on Being Itself. As with all theological language, my ideas are also contingent and time-bound, crafted from the available words and the logic of English, my mother tongue and from my late twentieth- / early twenty-first-century education about the nature of things. Like God, we speak; but, unlike God, when we make, we must use what is already around us.
The same goes for scientists. In their pursuit of knowledge (of a specific kind), they are—at least ideally—ready to let go of ideas that data doesn’t support. I think we theologians and believers of all vocations must do the same with our ideas about God. The biblical writers also did as much. As ancient Israelites lived out their long history, individuals emerged who transmuted the communal experience of the Divine into text using language and concepts that were available. New experiences, such as the Babylonian exile, brought new insights, and the old texts were redacted and new texts were written. The prophets argued with their own tradition, largely because their own times required it of them. As theologians and scientists also do.
So for now, we don’t understand why matter exists in our universe. That may change. It may not. Either way, as our universe continues to expand (at a slower rate than its initial blast) so does our knowledge and understanding. The process involves learning, observing, reasoning, and making corrections.
But what is stunning is that anything exists at all. Right now, in this moment, theologians and scientists can agree about that.
My own poetical way to imagine creation is that God, eternally super-personal4 (we say tri-personal based on our forebears’ reflections on their experience of the Divine in Jesus Christ), infinitely dense and expansive Love, somehow, mind-bogglingly, made a space (so to speak) for that which is not God. “Let there be…”
Let there be Darwin’s “endless forms more beautiful.” Let there be fragility, impermanence, imperfection. Whatever is not God is not immortal—by nature, by the laws of physics, by philosophical fiat. Theologians have cast this fact as a fall from the perfection of God’s original creation. That original, perfect, death-and-decay-free creation is a mytho-poetical expression not of scientific or historical data or brute fact but of God’s intention, God’s dream, what God is lovingly commanding to be, to become.
However the physics works, theologically there is something rather than nothing because of God’s superabundant, prodigal, promiscuous5 love.
“Let there be.”
This piece was prompted by Katie Mack and John Green, “The First Fraction of a Second,” Crash Course Pods: The Universe, an audio and video podcast. The video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqRF8jTF74c, April 2024. Accessed April 28, 2024.
with other resources, including
Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, “Let There Be Light,” Grammarphobia. Blog, available at https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2015/03/let-there-be-light.html, March 18, 2015. Accessed April 28, 2024.
Rebecca M.M. Voelkel, “Incarnation and Incarnations,” chapter two of Carnal Knowledge of God: Embodied Love and the Movement for Justice. Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2017. Available at Project MUSE. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/book/51767.
and with background insights from other sources, including
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Alejandro García-Rivera, Community of the Beautiful: A Theological Aesthetics. (Link is to Liturgical Press)
John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology (Link is to Google Books)
Elaine Scarry, “On Beauty and Being Wrong,” one of two essays in On Beauty and Being Just (Link is to JSTOR)
Paul Tillich, various works
- All of this is to the best of my understanding of what I’m hearing the scientists say; my theology doesn’t rest on the details of the science. ↩︎
- While I took a couple brief classes in biblical Hebrew many years ago, I found the explanation of the grammar here on the Grammarphobia blog most helpful. ↩︎
- Among them, Paul Tillich and John Macquarrie. ↩︎
- That term is from Macquarrie. ↩︎
- I borrow this descriptor via Rebecca M.M. Voelkel. ↩︎
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