Surprise: the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore

The modern cosmic picture of our universe’s history begins not with a singularity that we identify with the Big Bang, but rather with a period of cosmic inflation that stretches the universe to enormous scales, with uniform properties and spatial flatness. The end of inflation signifies the onset of the hot Big Bang. (Credit: Nicole Rager Fuller/National Science Foundation)

Surprise: the Big Bang isn’t the beginning

of the universe anymore

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/big-bang-beginning-universe/

by Ethan Siegel

October 13, 2021

We used to think the Big Bang meant the universe began from

a singularity. Nearly 100 years later, we're not so sure.

Key Takeaways

• The Big Bang teaches us that our expanding, cooling universe used to be younger, denser, and hotter in the past.

• However, extrapolating all the way back to a singularity leads to predictions that disagree with what we observe.

• Instead, cosmic inflation preceded and set up the Big Bang, changing our cosmic origin story forever.

Where did all this come from? In every direction we care to observe, we find stars, galaxies, clouds of gas and dust, tenuous plasmas, and radiation spanning the gamut of wavelengths: from radio to infrared to visible light to gamma rays. No matter where or how we look at the universe, it’s full of matter and energy absolutely everywhere and at all times. And yet, it’s only natural to assume that it all came from somewhere. If you want to know the answer to the biggest question of all — the question of our cosmic origins — you have to pose the question to the universe itself, and listen to what it tells you.

Today, the universe as we see it is expanding, rarifying (getting less dense), and cooling. Although it’s tempting to simply extrapolate forward in time, when things will be even larger, less dense, and cooler, the laws of physics allow us to extrapolate backward just as easily. Long ago, the universe was smaller, denser, and hotter. How far back can we take this extrapolation? Mathematically, it’s tempting to go as far as possible: all the way back to infinitesimal sizes and infinite densities and temperatures, or what we know as a singularity. This idea, of a singular beginning to space, time, and the universe, was long known as the Big Bang.

But physically, when we looked closely enough, we found that the universe told a different story. Here’s how we know the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore.

Countless scientific tests of Einstein’s general theory of relativity have been performed, subjecting the idea to some of the most stringent constraints ever obtained by humanity. Einstein’s first solution was for the weak-field limit around a single mass, like the Sun; he applied these results to our Solar System with dramatic success. Very quickly, a handful of exact solutions were found thereafter. (Credit: LIGO scientific collaboration, T. Pyle, Caltech/MIT)

Like most stories in science, the origin of the Big Bang has its roots in both theoretical and experimental/observational realms. On the theory side, Einstein put forth his general theory of relativity in 1915: a novel theory of gravity that sought to overthrow Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. Although Einstein’s theory was far more intricate and complicated, it wasn’t long before the first exact solutions were found.

• In 1916, Karl Schwarzschild found the solution for a pointlike mass, which describes a nonrotating black hole.

• In 1917, Willem de Sitter found the solution for an empty universe with a cosmological constant, which describes an exponentially expanding universe.

• From 1916 to 1921, the Reissner-Nordström solution, found independently by four researchers, described the spacetime for a charged, spherically symmetric mass.

• In 1921, Edward Kasner found a solution that described a matter-and-radiation-free universe that’s anisotropic: different in different directions.

• In 1922, Alexander Friedmann discovered the solution for an isotropic (same in all directions) and homogeneous (same at all locations) universe, where any and all types of energy, including matter and radiation, were present.

An illustration of our cosmic history, from the Big Bang until the present, within the context of the expanding universe. The first Friedmann equation describes all of these epochs, from inflation to the Big Bang to the present and far into the future, perfectly accurately, even today. (Credit: NASA/WMAP science team)

That last one was very compelling for two reasons. One is that it appeared to describe our universe on the largest scales, where things appear similar, on average, everywhere and in all directions. And two, if you solved the governing equations for this solution — the Friedmann equations — you’d find that the universe it describes cannot be static, but must either expand or contract.

This latter fact was recognized by many, including Einstein, but it wasn’t taken particularly seriously until the observational evidence began to support it. In the 1910s, astronomer Vesto Slipher started observing certain nebulae, which some argued might be galaxies outside of our Milky Way, and found that they were moving fast: far faster than any other objects within our galaxy. Moreover, the majority of them were moving away from us, with fainter, smaller nebulae generally appearing to move faster.

Then, in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble began measuring individual stars in these nebulae and eventually determined the distances to them. Not only were they much farther away than anything else in the galaxy, but the ones at the greater distances were moving away faster than the closer ones. As Lemaître, Robertson, Hubble, and others swiftly put together, the universe was expanding.

Edwin Hubble’s original plot of galaxy distances versus redshift (left), establishing the expanding universe, versus a more modern counterpart from approximately 70 years later (right). In agreement with both observation and theory, the universe is expanding. (Credit: E. Hubble; R. Kirshner, PNAS, 2004)

Georges Lemaître was the first, in 1927, to recognize this. Upon discovering the expansion, he extrapolated backward, theorizing — as any competent mathematician might — that you could go as far back as you wanted: to what he called the primeval atom. In the beginning, he realized, the universe was a hot, dense, and rapidly expanding collection of matter and radiation, and everything around us emerged from this primordial state.

This idea was later developed by others to make a set of additional predictions:

• The universe, as we see it today, is more evolved than it was in the past. The farther back we look in space, the farther back we’re also looking in time. So, the objects we see back then should be younger, less gravitationally clumpy, less massive, with fewer heavy elements, and with less-evolved structure. There should even be a point beyond which no stars or galaxies were present.

• At some point, the radiation was so hot that neutral atoms couldn’t stably form, because radiation would reliably kick any electrons off of the nuclei they were attempting to bind to, and so there should be a leftover — now cold and sparse — bath of cosmic radiation from this time.

• At some extremely early time it would have been so hot that even atomic nuclei would be blasted apart, implying there was an early, pre-stellar phase where nuclear fusion would have occurred: Big Bang nucleosynthesis. From that, we expect there to have been at least a population of light elements and their isotopes spread throughout the universe before any stars formed.

A visual history of the expanding universe includes the hot, dense state known as the Big Bang and the growth and formation of structure subsequently. The full suite of data, including the observations of the light elements and the cosmic microwave background, leaves only the Big Bang as a valid explanation for all we see. (Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss)

In conjunction with the expanding universe, these four points would become the cornerstone of the Big Bang. The growth and evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe, of individual galaxies, and of the stellar populations found within those galaxies all validates the Big Bang’s predictions. The discovery of a bath of radiation just ~3 K above absolute zero — combined with its blackbody spectrum and temperature imperfections at microkelvin levels of tens to hundreds — was the key evidence that validated the Big Bang and eliminated many of its most popular alternatives. And the discovery and measurement of the light elements and their ratios — including hydrogen, deuterium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7 — revealed not only which type of nuclear fusion occurred prior to the formation of stars, but also the total amount of normal matter that exists in the universe.

Extrapolating back to as far as your evidence can take you is a tremendous success for science. The physics that took place during the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang imprinted itself onto the universe, enabling us to test our models, theories, and understanding of the universe from that time. The earliest observable imprint, in fact, is the cosmic neutrino background, whose effects show up in both the cosmic microwave background (the Big Bang’s leftover radiation) and the universe’s large-scale structure. This neutrino background comes to us, remarkably, from just ~1 second into the hot Big Bang.

If there were no oscillations due to matter interacting with radiation in the universe, there would be no scale-dependent wiggles seen in galaxy clustering. The wiggles themselves, shown with the non-wiggly part subtracted out (bottom), is dependent on the impact of the cosmic neutrinos theorized to be present by the Big Bang. Standard Big Bang cosmology corresponds to β=1. (Credit: D. Baumann et al., Nature Physics, 2019)

But extrapolating beyond the limits of your measurable evidence is a dangerous, albeit tempting, game to play. After all, if we can trace the hot Big Bang back some 13.8 billion years, all the way to when the universe was less than 1 second old, what’s the harm in going all the way back just one additional second: to the singularity predicted to exist when the universe was 0 seconds old?

The answer, surprisingly, is that there’s a tremendous amount of harm — if you’re like me in considering “making unfounded, incorrect assumptions about reality” to be harmful. The reason this is problematic is because beginning at a singularity — at arbitrarily high temperatures, arbitrarily high densities, and arbitrarily small volumes — will have consequences for our universe that aren’t necessarily supported by observations.

For example, if the universe began from a singularity, then it must have sprung into existence with exactly the right balance of “stuff” in it — matter and energy combined — to precisely balance the expansion rate. If there were just a tiny bit more matter, the initially expanding universe would have already recollapsed by now. And if there were a tiny bit less, things would have expanded so quickly that the universe would be much larger than it is today.

If the universe had just a slightly higher density (red), it would have recollapsed already; if it had just a slightly lower density, it would have expanded much faster and become much larger. The Big Bang, on its own, offers no explanation as to why the initial expansion rate at the moment of the universe’s birth balances the total energy density so perfectly, leaving no room for spatial curvature at all. (Credit: Ned Wright’s cosmology tutorial)

And yet, instead, what we’re observing is that the universe’s initial expansion rate and the total amount of matter and energy within it balance as perfectly as we can measure.

Why?

If the Big Bang began from a singularity, we have no explanation; we simply have to assert “the universe was born this way,” or, as physicists ignorant of Lady Gaga call it, “initial conditions.”

Similarly, a universe that reached arbitrarily high temperatures would be expected to possess leftover high-energy relics, like magnetic monopoles, but we don’t observe any. The universe would also be expected to be different temperatures in regions that are causally disconnected from one another — i.e., are in opposite directions in space at our observational limits — and yet the universe is observed to have equal temperatures everywhere to 99.99%+ precision.

We’re always free to appeal to initial conditions as the explanation for anything, and say, “well, the universe was born this way, and that’s that.” But we’re always far more interested, as scientists, if we can come up with an explanation for the properties we observe.

In the top panel, our modern universe has the same properties (including temperature) everywhere because they originated from a region possessing the same properties. In the middle panel, the space that could have had any arbitrary curvature is inflated to the point where we cannot observe any curvature today, solving the flatness problem. And in the bottom panel, pre-existing high-energy relics are inflated away, providing a solution to the high-energy relic problem. This is how inflation solves the three great puzzles that the Big Bang cannot account for on its own. (Credit: E. Siegel/Beyond the Galaxy)

That’s precisely what cosmic inflation gives us, plus more. Inflation says, sure, extrapolate the hot Big Bang back to a very early, very hot, very dense, very uniform state, but stop yourself before you go all the way back to a singularity. If you want the universe to have the expansion rate and the total amount of matter and energy in it balance, you’ll need some way to set it up in that fashion. The same applies for a universe with the same temperatures everywhere. On a slightly different note, if you want to avoid high-energy relics, you need some way to both get rid of any preexisting ones, and then avoid creating new ones by forbidding your universe from getting too hot once again.

Inflation accomplishes this by postulating a period, prior to the hot Big Bang, where the universe was dominated by a large cosmological constant (or something that behaves similarly): the same solution found by de Sitter way back in 1917. This phase stretches the universe flat, gives it the same properties everywhere, gets rid of any pre-existing high-energy relics, and prevents us from generating new ones by capping the maximum temperature reached after inflation ends and the hot Big Bang ensues. Furthermore, by assuming there were quantum fluctuations generated and stretched across the universe during inflation, it makes new predictions for what types of imperfections the universe would begin with.

The quantum fluctuations that occur during inflation get stretched across the universe, and when inflation ends, they become density fluctuations. This leads, over time, to the large-scale structure in the universe today, as well as the fluctuations in temperature observed in the CMB. New predictions like these are essential for demonstrating the validity of a proposed fine-tuning mechanism. (Credit: E. Siegel; ESA/Planck and the DOE/NASA/NSF Interagency Task Force on CMB research)

Since it was hypothesized back in the 1980s, inflation has been tested in a variety of ways against the alternative: a universe that began from a singularity. When we stack up the scorecard, we find the following:

• Inflation reproduces all of the successes of the hot Big Bang; there’s nothing that the hot Big Bang accounts for that inflation can’t also account for.

• Inflation offers successful explanations for the puzzles that we simply have to say “initial conditions” for in the hot Big Bang.

• Of the predictions where inflation and a hot Big Bang without inflation differ, four of them have been tested to sufficient precision to discriminate between the two. On those four fronts, inflation is 4-for-4, while the hot Big Bang is 0-for-4.

But things get really interesting if we look back at our idea of “the beginning.” Whereas a universe with matter and/or radiation — what we get with the hot Big Bang — can always be extrapolated back to a singularity, an inflationary universe cannot. Due to its exponential nature, even if you run the clock back an infinite amount of time, space will only approach infinitesimal sizes and infinite temperatures and densities; it will never reach it. This means, rather than inevitably leading to a singularity, inflation absolutely cannot get you to one by itself. The idea that “the universe began from a singularity, and that’s what the Big Bang was,” needed to be jettisoned the moment we recognized that an inflationary phase preceded the hot, dense, and matter-and-radiation-filled one we inhabit today.

Blue and red lines represent a “traditional” Big Bang scenario, where everything starts at time t=0, including spacetime itself. But in an inflationary scenario (yellow), we never reach a singularity, where space goes to a singular state; instead, it can only get arbitrarily small in the past, while time continues to go backwards forever. Only the last minuscule fraction of a second, from the end of inflation, imprints itself on our observable universe today. (Credit: E. Siegel)

This new picture gives us three important pieces of information about the beginning of the universe that run counter to the traditional story that most of us learned. First, the original notion of the hot Big Bang, where the universe emerged from an infinitely hot, dense, and small singularity — and has been expanding and cooling, full of matter and radiation ever since — is incorrect. The picture is still largely correct, but there’s a cutoff to how far back in time we can extrapolate it.

Second, observations have well established the state that occurred prior to the hot Big Bang: cosmic inflation. Before the hot Big Bang, the early universe underwent a phase of exponential growth, where any preexisting components to the universe were literally “inflated away.” When inflation ended, the universe reheated to a high, but not arbitrarily high, temperature, giving us the hot, dense, and expanding universe that grew into what we inhabit today.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we can no longer speak with any sort of knowledge or confidence as to how — or even whether — the universe itself began. By the very nature of inflation, it wipes out any information that came before the final few moments: where it ended and gave rise to our hot Big Bang. Inflation could have gone on for an eternity, it could have been preceded by some other nonsingular phase, or it could have been preceded by a phase that did emerge from a singularity. Until the day comes where we discover how to extract more information from the universe than presently seems possible, we have no choice but to face our ignorance. The Big Bang still happened a very long time ago, but it wasn’t the beginning we once supposed it to be.

Love is the center of all bible readings and doctrines

 

Literal, grammatical, historical, contextual... all good approaches except one. Drop the literal reading of the bible where we read our belief sets, cultural mores, and prejudices into the bible. It misinforms and leads to bad theology.

But the last three approaches well informs the Hebraic or Greek Hellenistic beliefs of that day. Not so the literal reading of those ancient cultures.

Which means a good hermenuetic is redactive to the text per the rules (beliefs) of those ancient societal eras.

Which is also why theology is so full of interpretive meanings for different sects and denominations.

The best hermenuetic I have found is this:

"God is love regardless of what religious man thought of God in the OT and NT."

To underscore my point, the Abrahamic Covenant is the same as the New Covenant. God sacrifices Himself in order to enforce and assure His covenant with mankind through Abraham (saved by faith as response to divine act) and later at the Cross through Christ in the New Covenant.

In sum, the best hermenuetic is "Love = Jesus". Put it at the center of all bible readings and not the "bible" per se.

God's Love informs our reading, our faith, our doctrines, our judgments, our actions, our responses, and our worship. Putting any other doctrine in the center removes Love, making God something other than He is.

R.E. Slater

October 13, 2021

Richard Feynman - Armchair Discussions on Everything

“The highest forms of understanding we can achieve

are laughter and human compassion.”

― Richard P. Feynman

Great Minds: Richard Feynman - The Uncertainty Of Knowledge

Mar 4, 2010

“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter.

Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go

into it deeply enough.”― Richard P. Feynman

On religion

May 10, 2015

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

― Richard P. Feynman

Richard Feynman. Why.

Apr 2, 2012

“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.” ― Richard P. Feynman

The best teacher I never had

Jan 27, 2016

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most

undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”

― Richard P. Feynman

Feynman: Knowing versus Understanding

May 17, 2012

“We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible,
because only in that way can we find progress.”

― Richard P. Feynman

Richard Feynman - The World from another point of view

May 28, 2015

“Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.”

― Richard P. Feynman

On teaching

May 10, 2015

“Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is.”

― Richard P. Feynman

Richard Feynman on Pseudoscience

Apr 17, 2016

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself

and you are the easiest person to fool.”

― Richard P. Feynman

Feynman - I Don't Like Honors [longer version]

Dec 2, 2006

“I would rather have questions that can't be answered

than answers that can't be questioned.”

― Richard P. Feynman

Richard Feynman talks about Algebra

Jan 22, 2014

“So I have just one wish for you – the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.” ― Richard P. Feynman Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

 

Feynman :: Rules of Chess

Feb 21, 2007

Richard Feynman talks about light

Nov 2, 2007

Richard Feynman Lecture - Los Alamos From Below

Jul 12, 2016

The complete FUN TO IMAGINE with Richard Feynman

Nov 1, 2018

“I learned very early the difference between knowing

the name of something and knowing something.”

― Richard P. Feynman

CNN, Feynman and the Challenger disaster

May 19, 2015

“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.” ― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

---

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.”

― Richard P. Feynman

---

“I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.” ― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

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“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.” ― Richard P. Feynman

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“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.” ― Richard P. Feynman

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“I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb.” ― Richard Feynman

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“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”― Richard P. Feynman

---

“If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.”

― Richard P. Feynman

---

“You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” ― Richard P. Feynman, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character

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“A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all!”

― Richard P. Feynman

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“All the time you're saying to yourself, 'I could do that, but I won't,' — which is just another way of saying that you can't.” ― Richard P. Feynman,  Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

---

“What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.” ― Richard P. Feynman,  QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

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“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?” ― Richard Feynman

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“It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.” ― Richard P. Feynman

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“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.” ― Richard Feynman

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“I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!” ― Richard Feynman

Relevancy22 - Collected Quotes & Sayings

We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

"Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh" means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, "I AM who I AM Becoming."

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

Why We're Not Going Back to Church After the Pandemic

Why We're Not Going Back

To Church After the Pandemic

https://mbird.com/religion/church/why-were-not-going-back-to-church/

by Sam Bush

September 1, 2021

If the church was actually what they said it was —

a hospital for sinners — then our sanctuaries

would be full of bodies. - Sam Bush

When hosting a party, it’s hard not to take a person’s absence personally, especially if the reason goes unmentioned. Without an RSVP, the host is left to assume the worst. Did the person die on the way over? Or worse still, did they have better things to do and never really like you in the first place? Such is the case, it seems, for clergy who are wondering where some of the pre-pandemic stalwarts have gone. I’m currently in my third year of seminary and, as someone who is hoping to be a future leader in the church, I went to a Sunday service four times this summer. (My kids went once.) I could provide a list of excuses, but none of them feel truly legitimate.

Why haven’t we gone back to church? The most obvious answer is no surprise. The Delta variant has kept at home those who are at a higher risk of infection. The pandemic is a good enough reason to explain someone’s absence in and of itself, but we’d be remiss to not explore other things going on beneath the surface.

One reason for playing Sunday morning hooky is that we’re exhausted. Getting a child dressed and out the door felt like an Olympic event long before the pandemic. For young families especially, church used to be simply another thing to be late to, but now it’s too much to ask. The spirit is willing but the flesh isn’t just weak; it’s depressed, it’s irritable, and it couldn’t find a babysitter last night. As Dan Sinker wrote in his essay in The Atlantic, “Parents aren’t even at a breaking point anymore. We’re broken.” Well, then, all the more reason to go to church, right?

Apparently not. I think an underlying truth is that missing church these past 18 months has been kind of nice. Our inner-introverts have thrived, our inner-extroverts have been tamed. We’ve been lonely, but Netflix has been helpful. The truth is, many of us have begun to wonder "What church is all that good for?"

These days, many Christians feel a general lack of urgency when deciding whether or not to get dressed whenever Sunday morning comes around. Self-discipline is a muscle that quickly loses its tone when not exercised. And it can be nearly impossible to get back in the groove once the momentum of a routine is lost.

For many people, going to church just doesn’t seem practical. Since the early days of the pandemic, we have been channeling the spirit of Marie Kondo, mercilessly ridding our lives of clutter and excess. A year and a half later and we are still in the business of extracting rather than adding to our lives. After all, if one’s ship is on the verge of sinking, the sensible thing to do is to throw things overboard in order to lighten the load. Keeping that family heirloom is nice, but it’s not helping the boat stay above the water. Similarly, if we were only going to church for sentimental reasons to begin with, we may never go back.

The English philosopher Alfred Whitehead once said,

“Apart from religion, expressed in ways generally intelligible, populations sink into the apathetic task of daily survival, with minor alleviations.”

It’s an apt description for believers and unbelievers alike these days. What is Covid but the apathetic task of daily survival?

Sadly, the church has not offered a worthy alternative. It has not expressed Christianity in “ways generally intelligible.” It has led many of us to ask what good going to church is if it’s not going to help in times of crisis.

Two thoughts come to mind. The first is that we have forgotten the urgency of our predicament. Again, I’m not talking about the virus as much as I am talking about life itself. In the apathetic task for daily survival, we have forgotten that we were already dead in our sin and that in Christ we have been made alive again (Gal 2:20). We have forgotten our need for our forgiveness to be proclaimed and received over and over again.

Our current understanding of church is equally apathetic. It’s similar to flossing or dieting. It’s good for you, but its benefits are only long term. Many people see church as a place that leans more toward a health and wellness checkup rather than an emergency room. And now, quite literally for many of us, we are in the emergency room [of faith].

If the church was actually what they said it was — a hospital for sinners — then our sanctuaries would be full of bodies. Which leads me to my second thought, that the church seems to have forgotten about the only actual ace up its sleeve: the proclamation that Jesus Christ loves us unconditionally and has forgiven us everything.

Of all the things that are essential to life (community, a sense of purpose and belonging, etc.), the gospel of God’s love and forgiveness is the church’s unique offering to the world. It is, as the Book of Common Prayer says, “necessary for our life and our salvation,” the very thing that can lift us out of apathy. Unfortunately, it’s a card that we have generally refused to play.

As humans, we are forgetful beings. Thankfully, the structure of our Sunday service is mercifully built upon the act of remembrance. Every week, we take the Body and the Blood as the memorial of our redemption. While Jesus’ death on the Cross was done “once for all,” his Body and Blood are meant to be taken as routine nourishment for whoever is hungry. “Don’t forget that I love you,” Jesus tells us. Of course, we will forget, but, rest assured, he is there to remind us every first day of the week.

I hope the church can serve as an emergency room for people in crisis. I hope it can be a place where people who are struggling feel comfortable showing up late and in pajamas. I hope it can be welcoming to people who are exhausted and offer the life-giving words that all is forgiven. I also hope that we can grant ourselves permission to cease the apathetic task of survival; to sink into the deep waters of God’s love and die, that we might be raised up, any given Sunday.

I’m still quite hopeful about the church’s future. As the great hymn proclaims, its foundation is none other than Jesus Christ our Lord. Yes, it’s a faulty institution, but it is still and will forever be the body of Christ. I can only hope that those of us who haven’t been back to church will eventually do so when they’re reminded of their need for him and that the church will be there to receive them gladly. In such a difficult time for so many people, the hymn is good to remind us that as we cry out, now more than ever it seems, “How long?” we can trust that “soon the night of weeping shall be the morn of song.”

- SB