| When I was a child, I read that God created the heavens and the earth, the dry land and the sea... And on the first day, He separated day from night. He commanded that the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures... the cattle, and every creeping thing, each after its own kind... On the sixth day He made man, male and female, in His own image. And God saw that it was good. When I grew to be a boy I asked myself: "Who made God?" I could find no answer. Some spoke of an everlasting God, but that was as hard to imagine as a God who had a beginning. I turned to the philosophers and discovered that the question has been pondered through the ages. From what I have since gathered, every culture has puzzled over the beginning, and many myths have been told. Perhaps the beginning can never be fathomed. But what happened after the beginning... [?] From the evidence that has been gathered here on the Earth and in the heavens by giant telescopes and sensitive apparatus carried aloft in balloons and satellites, cosmologists have been able to piece together the story of the universe and how — in one brilliant moment about 15 billion years ago — time was born in the instant of creation of an immensely hot and dense universe. From such a fiery beginning, the universe began its rapid expansion everywhere, creating space on its outward journey where there was no space, and time where there was no time. Through the known laws of nature, scientists are able to chart the course of cosmic history in quite some verifiable detail. Now we have a basic understanding of how, in the course of these billions of years, the hot and formless primordial clouds of matter and radiation slowly cooled and began to collapse under the universal force of gravity to form galaxies of stars and billions of planets. It was truly a miracle... But how that greater miracle — life itself — arose on the Earth, no one seems to know. Yet, if the miracle happened on this planet, then it surely also happened on others far away. For, in our galaxy alone, an estimated hundred billion planets circle other suns. Even as children, we try to penetrate the mysteries. How, when, and why? Was there a time before matter, or did time and matter come into existence together? How did life arise from the inanimate world, eventually to form the human minds that contemplate and seek the answers? These are deep mysteries that perplex us. | — Norman K. Glendenning, After The Beginning: A Cosmic Journey Through Space And Time | Indexes/11 |
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Even children, we are trying to penetrate the mystery. How, when, why? As a matter of time before, or do not have the time and material inputs exist? How life from non-living world, and eventually formed a human wisdom, meditation, and to seek answers?
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