The Unfolding

For the past few weeks I've been thinking deep thoughts and out of my subconscious has surfaced a memory of reading (or trying to) Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father. An ardent feminist, she rejected not only the gender identification of god but also the concept of god as a static noun (supreme being) rather than active verb (Be-ing). To be honest I never quite got it (perhaps because I simply could not finish the book) but upon thinking about this once more I've come to the conclusion that it's not Be-ing that should be used to describe god/the universe but the verb becoming.

We now know the universe is forever expanding, changing, evolving, unfolding*. Some religions have acknowledged this; for instance, according to the Buddha, all things are impermanent and change is the natural order of things unlike the Catholics who believe, "As it was in the beginning is now, and ever shall be, world without end." All that there is began some 14 billion years ago in the Big Bang; the universe is certainly not as it was then nor as it will be billions of years from now. We tend to think of ourselves as the end all, be all of evolution but we are just part of a biofilm covering the third rock of a minor star in a galaxy among 100 billion to one trillion others. Our brief span of existence, whether as an individual or even as a species, is less than a blink of an eye compared to the large amount of time our universe will exist, ever changing, on a time scale we find hard to grasp. We are insignificant mayflies which bothers many of us who prefer to see us as the reason for all existence, the center of it all.

The universe is continually becoming something different from what it is now and we are becoming something different too. This journey began long ago and where it will end no one knows but we are part of it, here on spaceship Earth, and I sincerely hope our species survives to enjoy the show and perhaps contribute to the end result whatever that might be.

Everything is in motion though on our level it's so easy to ignore as our senses can't/won't register it. Electrons orbit the nucleus and the planets orbit suns which revolve around the center of galaxies which are both flying away and toward each other. The timescale of the orbits of electrons is extremely fast while the timescale of galaxies is very long. To find out what truly exists in the universe we need science not mythologies from the Age of Ignorance. As Carl Sagan once wrote, “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known” and I want to know it.

*The English noun evolution (from Latin ēvolūtiō "unfolding, unrolling") refers to any kind of gradual change.