7/6/22

Randomly thinking about the universe and how, at the earliest point in history that we can currently extrapolate, the entire universe was a dense, hot ball of energy roughly the size of a human being or smaller. And that insanely hot, infinitely dense ball containing all the matter and energy that comprises our universe exploded (or expanded very, very rapidly), for whatever reason (quantum fluctuations, conscious will?), creating both space and time and everything else we can see—a universe that's now estimated to be 13.8 billion years old and 46.1 billion light-years in radius. It makes me wonder, where did that dense ball of energy come from? Was there a first cause, or an infinite succession of causes? What did the universe expand into? What lies at the beginning? And does existence and being itself end at its edges? Every possibility blows my mind — naturalistic or otherwise, finite or infinite, single universe or multitudes — but combining what I've been reading about panentheism and what we know about the universe, I've begun to envision the Big Bang as the word of God speaking matter, space-time, and existence into being, and the universe expanding into the infinity that's God, who's both within and without the observable universe. Like the Kabbalistic saying, "God is the Place of the world, but the world is not God's place." Paradoxically immanent yet transcendent. Or as Paul Tillich would say, God isn't a being; God is Being-Itself. And it's worthy of reverence in its own respect regardless of our relationship with it and vice versa.