another view Other wisdom seekers through the ages have seen the beginning in a softer, fluid, always unfolding flower metaphor. Their story contains eggs and lotuses and magic, and in it all matter is born from waves and nurtured in a field of comprehensive creativity that some people call Nature and some people call God or God's mind. If they are right, that means God is everywhere, always. Everything floats in a mysterious field that is commonly called space, but it is not empty space, and it is sometimes called the Quantum Vacuum, but it is not a vacuum. It is also called the Zero Point...

the machine view The mainstream Creation Story of the Universe is called The Big Bang and in science it’s largely about mathematics. In this story, enormous explosions blow more or less discrete bits and pieces adrift in space at great speed and they come together with some violence to form Everything. In philosophy, this view is said to be mechanistic and reductionist, supporting a view that the Universe is without purpose. Philosophy is not attracted to purposelessness, but science doesn't care. Science is attracted to this story, perhaps because it is helpful in the search for a beautiful...

Cosmos The so-called Universe is said to have started in an instant (a measure of Time, which itself did not exist just before that instant). From an infinitesimally small singularity, science argues, everything erupted more or less at once in relative Time terms. It expanded by a factor of a million trillion trillion times in a fraction of a second. As the story goes, the Universe continued to unfold for 13.798± 0.037 billion years to the present moment, and is still unfolding. No one knows what preceded that original instant. Stephen Hawking says nothing did. We know a lot about what...

about Science is largely unclear about what the Cosmos is and how it works. There is particularly mystery at the interface of the vast and the tiny. But the old paradigm of a clockwork universe of organized parts is fading behind an emergent story in which a seamless web of energy and information stitches waves and particles together to form matter and life, including humans. The seamless web is thought by many to be driven by some sort of consciousness, which is also pervasive, that is to say, everywhere, always. The idea of the individual is fading too, as the concept that all is one seeps...

EVERYTHING (parts of) Nothing is certain, but a field of energy and information pervades the Universe and everything in it. NEXT