Which came first, God or the Universe? This is a question for which philosopher scientists in the West, have no answer.

Steven Hawking in ‘The Brief History of Time’ put the problem like this;

So long as the Universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place then, for a creator?

The so called ‘Big Bang’ theory is seriously under review by scientists. They have no proven model on who started the Big Bang, and who started the starter. Steven Hawking is quite rightly asking how a universe without limits could have been created.

The problem, it seems to me is one of thought patterns and in particular logic anomalies. Such an anomaly is simply the notion of infinity. Even mathematics cannot contain the concept. It just describes numbers that keep getting closer to zero but never quite being small enough to be zero; clearly nonsense.

It is easy to demonstrate infinity in a three dimensional shape as a ball (or for space travel, a torus). The infinity experienced, say as a sailor going around the world, is indeed without boundary…but only for the sailor. In an infinite universe there are an infinite number of balls because not everyone is a sailor.

It is interesting that Steven Hawking chooses to describe the Creator with a small ‘c’. It subtly gives away what he thinks the answer is. As a scientist he cannot sign up to the improbable and even less so the impossible. He doubts there is a God.

But in my humble opinion, what we are discussing here is our own perception created by the phantoms that logic sometimes produces. The most famous example of this is the old question; which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Just as the circumnavigating sailor fails to introduce ‘space’ into his world view, so observers of chickens are limited by the time it takes to make a chicken. If we accept Darwinian ‘natural selection’ as the creeping process of improving the DNA of living beings, we can understand living things a little better.

We accept that chickens were one time flying birds and before that dinosaurs. Dinosaurs also reproduced by laying eggs, so at some point in the DNA mutation, the bird family split from dinosaurs and became egg laying birds. We must therefore change our question to; ‘which came first, the dinosaur or the egg?’

Are we now approaching the point of mutation? Possibly, but like the differential equation, dinosaurs became dinosaurs infinitely slowly.

If you are still following, let me introduce a counter intuitive observation on how nature works. They say that in the plant kingdom, the first plants had no flowers, just leaves and plenty of them, presumably for dinosaurs to eat. Then one extraordinary day something made a flower appear on a plant – just like that! Evolution sometimes takes giant leaps. Instead of the minute steps in evolutionary change, nature takes a giant risk and does something completely new. Evidence of this willingness to take a completely new track are the rare and often unique animals found on islands like the Galapagos Islands, Madagascar and Australia.

With this idea in mind, evolution does not have to be by micro steps, although most of the time is clearly is. One day, there are no plants without reproduction by the production of spores, then there is a whole new system of stamens and pollen and receptors.

If we can accept that at one time dinosaurs or their predecessors or their predecessors, went from non-egg / sperm reproduction to the full Monty, then we can see that the baffling question is using false logic.

There never was a first egg or first dinosaur. There does not have to be, as the process leading to this mode of reproduction is a combination of imperceptibly small most of the time, plus one or more inspired leaps.

This whole question is a useful metaphor for the more philosophical question about who created the Creator?

In my view, when modern scientists propose the theory that the universe is infinite in space and time, then the question of how it started is a logic fallacy. At the same time the question of who created the big bang is also irrelevant, as no one did.

This is where I express a view, in favour of spelling Creator with a capital. In my view, the model of an infinite space time universe is correct. There never was ‘nothing’ in the same way as there never was an egg before the chicken. It is impossible for a universe or even a chicken to appear without a cause. As Shakespeare says in the character of King Lear; ‘Nothing comes from nothing, speak again’.

So here I am expounding the cause for the Creator who is contained within, rather than without the Universe. Such a Creator can be as large as the Universe and as old as the Universe. Such a creator can make things within the Universe without contradiction, because it is simple for an infinite creative intelligence to exist in an infinite universe or even multiple universes!

Ancient Hindu scriptures describe the universe as an Ocean which is being churned by a giant snake being stretched by two opposing teams in a tug of war. One team are devils and the other team, humans. The movement of the snake in one direction is the expansion of the universe and visa versa. Scientists know the observable universe is expanding and accelerating in it’s expansion, so no contradiction there.

At some point the motion of the churn will stop and change direction. Then the universe will shrink, but never down to nothing. The notion of ‘singularity’ proposed by the Big Bang theorists, stretches or rather shrinks one’s logical understanding to absurdity.

It is impossible for the universe to shrink into an infinitely small space. What does it even matter how small or how large the universe gets? The question is similar to the chicken and egg question because it is playing with words, not realities.

Just because the question can be asked, does not mean there is an answer. This is the essence of the understanding koans give in Zen Buddhism.

The Old Testament has an interesting take on ‘how the world began’. All human cultures ask this question and come up with various ideas. The Old Testament however is uncannily parallel to the modern scientific view of the stages of the evolution of the ‘world’ or universe. Once you realise that ‘day’ in old Testament terms means an infinitely long era, you can examine the stages more thoroughly. I shall not go into these here and leave that journey to the reader. However if we start with the universe being no more than an infinitely large cosmic cloud – we have travelled long before dinosaurs and eggs.

Intelligent energy in the form of light was introduced into the void;

1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Place in every particle of this cloud a Divine intelligence, and you get the idea of how ‘stuff’ started.

1:6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

Interesting to note that light was introduced (a transverse wave form) and then sound (a compression wave form).

The waves started to ‘sift’ the cloud and ‘islands’ of matter appeared amongst the ‘waters’ or what I am calling ‘the cloud’.

The intelligence is very much part off the creation process, the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, is not a separate intelligence operating from afar.

Such a belief in the ‘separateness’ of God is a problem for many people today.

The old Renaissance idea of ‘God on high’ floating around in the sky has permeated this ‘otherness’ into modern human assumptions.

There is no chicken that makes eggs, like cars coming out of a factory, when it comes to trying to understand the Universe. Our thinking has to be so precise that it includes the biases within the observer’s observations. Scientist have also come to the understanding that we ‘change what we observe’ just by being. What is extraordinary and not generally realised, but this capacity, is exactly the same capacity of a Creator. But then I am a believer in a Creator contained in every essence of the creation the hearts of each one of us. Call me radical.