by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

What caused the Big Bang? What all took place to gather up the materials required to initiate an event of such an unimaginable magnitude? Everybody has an opinion to express, even if it’s only to deny the event occurred, or to deny that we can "possibly know what happened beyond the wall" posed by the BIG BANG event, or to claim one of the gods did it, or to alternatively insist the materials have "always been there, so there was nothing that needed to be created. Y'all know how dust gathers up every place it can?" Numerous scientists, along with numerous religionists, shuck the whole conflict aside with statements like, "That’s not my department/belief/field of interest/creed/whatever."

Let’s face it, folks: Those answers are all copouts, each and every one. Those copouts are the reason the fight goes on. People want to talk and fight and pass along the opinions that have the most emotional appeal they’ve been handed from others, that seem most adaptable to their comfortable personal beliefs, atheist and religionist alike. Such actions serve to make a religion of science, and to leave a drafty hole in science that only religion seems capable and willing to provide appealing, stopgap answers for. The fight will go on for so long as this is the case: For so long as scientists remain unwilling to speculate by applying their inductive knowledge to the extrapolation of probabilities from actual events; for so long as religionists refuse to change their minds about their beliefs and their trust in ancient myths about creation; for so long as people on both sides of the argument are willing to settle for authorities’ decrees about what they ought to believe; in other words, forever.

Let’s take a look at each of the copout arguments, and try to determine what makes it unsatisfactory.

To deny the event ever occurred, and to assume the perpetual existence of materials, entirely evades all the issues involved with the natural human insistence upon knowing from where and by what means did all of existence originate. Denying an origin overlooks the obvious: Everything, every event, had a cause to initiate it. Our experiences while living confirm that. To proclaim, "We cannot know that," does nothing to appease the beast in our brains that demands conformity to all our experiences of reality.

To say that space had been filled with dust from the beginning, and that served as material to initiate the Big Bang, fails to answer obvious questions with nothing other than human ignorance. When was the beginning? What brought it about? What caused the dust? What was there before that? Is this really one of those question sets for which no answers are possible? For so long as it can be defended, a gap is offered so that a god will be the answer for most. For many, it will remain the answer long after that.

To say, "Don’t ask, because we can’t know any answers" leaves the knowledge hole that human minds will fill with whatever answers they can make fit. To insist we all must be satisfied with that condition is unforgivable.

To say, "That is not part of my field of science," or, "That is not an interest or belief of my particular religious creed" also leaves the knowledge hole, and increases the level of disrespect with which the common person regards those people, and those praxes, who would express such an unacceptable sentiment.

The common person has always regarded science to be a questionable pursuit, along with all religions other than his or her own, just another belief system playing for our minds. Some go out of their way to accuse science of being a religion. You will convince no one about anything if your stock answer can only be one that leaves behind a sense of dissatisfaction that his religious beliefs have already shown themselves too willing to soothe. All that works to forestall those is the scientific method, when used to demonstrate what skeptical scientists regard to be the truth. All else is apologia.

To insist that one of the many gods, most specifically a god named "God" (with many other names also mentioned in the ancient biblical documents) created the material, aside from whether or not He or She (depends on the religion) bothered with the Big Bang, still leaves a knowledge hole the human mind insists will need to be filled, and that science and religion both deal with by strict, unsatisfactory avoidance.

 Religion refuses to deal with the question, "Where did God come from?" in a manner that science mimics with its refusal to acknowledge the merit of any questions about origins. The refusal remains unsatisfactory no matter the praxis that makes it. Those who support science have no right to disclaim religion’s insistence upon being present in the classrooms of America until or unless they become willing to deal with the pressing issues that arise from human nature and demand to be dealt with as important concerns deserving answers. Science cannot claim accuracy or factuality in matters it refuses to investigate, however forcefully its adherents insist they be overlooked.

First cause is recognized to be an important issue by all those who struggle to have their creeds' agendas introduced into America’s science classrooms. To them, evolution is only a "competing theory" and criticized as being incomplete. Their Orwellian regard of its incompletion serves only to distract adherents of opposing doctrines away from their own prematurely interrupted chain of origins, as many detractors point out, and makes their standing appear less than equivalent to that of the evolutionists at this time. "Where did God come from?" and "Where did material for the Big Bang come from" appear to give both sides equal lack of status, all other evidence aside. Without the First First Cause explained, both sides can stake out their own grounds in the evidence available. Science will maintain its stance on a Second First Cause (the Big Bang) against which our majority-composite religion will argue from its stance on an alternative Second First Cause (the god named God).

Both sides of the dispute suffer from weakness inherent to their methods of acquiring knowledge and gathering of support for their convictions. Religion suffers from lack of verifiability (preverification) and complete lack of a unified system for understanding even their own very most basic precepts. Science suffers from its stuffy lack of creativity and its lack of appeal to common people, inherent to its insistence on narrowness of understanding, its impregnable obtuse language, the apparent irrelevance of any one of its branches to many others (its fragmented factiousness), its constant revisions, its inability to make a simple, systematized presentation of a creed that common people could find relevant, and more.

Science is in a weak spot in comparison to religion because it has made no effort to gain the minds and hearts of a population nevertheless deeply immersed in various systems of belief. "That is not our role," scientists proclaim. That does not, however, halt the need for their interpretation of social problems, nor the development of a truly scientific approach to finding answers for the questions that arise from the processes of living and passing knowledge on to new generations on their way to achieving maturity. Denying that any of that is possible does nothing to solve the problems inherent to creed-based answers to such questions and needs.

All hope is not lost! Almost overlooked in all the arguing, infighting and social bickering is the kind of knowledge attained by the processes of mathematics. The precision by which math processes develop answers and portray the various nuances of existence astounds the most of us. The only method open for arguing against math concepts is to make a choice between tangible evidence and the development of alternative formulae, either of which may be proven or disproved by verification with still other methods of calculation.

Mathematicians have engaged their skills and taken on the task of deciphering events previous to the Big Bang and have made predictions about the nature of the universe as it must have been previous to that event. Several hypotheses (often erroneously called ‘theories’) have resulted from that ongoing effort, several of which may seem more whimsical than real, some of which have been presented in manners that make God seem like something hard and factual by comparison, and most of which is so deeply immersed in mathematical concepts as to seem unintelligible.

One particular view of the multi-dimensional universe mathematicians have learned to describe with their numerical language can be translated to English, however, and presented in a poetic manner the average person should find easy to comprehend and visualize. I am a poet, and my job is to present natural phenomena so the intelligent common person can find it understandable. Poetry makes its appeal to the senses, not always with verse and rhyme. Poetry frames concepts in pictures, and so takes over where science leaves off, to advance human understanding as we march toward the future, so we can better know how to live, to thrive, to seek creative happiness and the joy inherent to the new tools science, through technology, has made available to us.

First, though, we must understand how we can use them, and why we should. To that end, I have dedicated my work in EVOLUTION: The Mad Poet Does Science, available exclusively from lulu.com as a 100 page, easy to read eBook in the common PDF format. Click here to purchase your copy now: http://www.lulu.com/content/309396.  Unless your computer is truly ancient, the Adobe Reader should already be installed on it.

Let me introduce you to the concepts covered in that eBook:

Time, in my Glossary, is described as the distance between events. Time is the first dimension in that is enables all else. Space is that with which time fills all the empty void (mentioned in your Bibles, book of Genesis). Together, they are known as space time, and often expressed as though they are the same thing.

Infinity is a destination within both space and time. As a destination, it represents an ideal because it is unattainable but always something time and space work toward. Infinity remains always beyond our view, whether in the past or in the future. Being unattainable, it remains always the same distance away in every direction, whether through space or through time, and always beyond perception.

The first dimension, then, is a line that runs between the present and infinity of the past and infinity of the future. The second dimension occurs with any singular bending of that line. the third dimension occurs with multidirectional bends or warps, and are known as strings, which get described as helixes in string (matrix, or 'M') theory.

You can purchase the eBook from lulu.com