Colossal explosions and transformation of matter are often entertainment, military, or terrorist ventures in our contemporary world. They mostly represent things of destruction.

Creation is something else: basically the concept that matter comes from nothing or is explained by Creation narratives in holy books.

For older fundamentalist generations, such things are traditionally more apt to be things of myth or miracles, based on articles of faith, described in the holy books. For Christians and perhaps Jews, they are agreeably depicted dramatically in movies like the 1956 production of The Ten Commandments – Israeli slaves, Rameses, and their rescuer, Moses, a movie portraying a teeming cast of thousands embedded with symphonic sound, a narrated authoritarian voice and God-like commands by the Biblical legend, Moses, with Charleston Heston’s booming voice. Miracles abounded and drama unfolded.

Perhaps this is why religious fundamentalists in our contemporary society feel threatened. Life’s meaning and its explanations are told in ancient books and played out in the temples of organized religion. In their world, something from nothing only has God as the nexus. God is not hidden behind the process.

Many scientists — physicists, biochemists, molecular biologists, cosmologists, etc — don’t seem to agree. In fact some mock religious ideas.

Many, like Lawrence Krauss, a theoretic physicist and a great debunker of religion and the concept of God, say that the universe began from nothing. Somewhat akin to this, in process, anyway, biochemists and molecular biologists think life can arise from nonlife.

Krauss in his new book, A Universe from Nothing, describes empty space as “a boiling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time so short we cannot see them directly.” Applied to a universal scale,  he says that the Big Bang arose from a singularity, a vacuum energy of nothing, and with it, the dizzying growth of the vast universe was sustained by the force of cosmic inflation, this starting a micro-second after the Big Bang. While combined matter and antimatter turned into energy, virtual energy never dissipated.

According to Krauss, no God needs to intervene in this process. The virtual particles inherit energy from this autonomous cosmic force, inflation.

How quickly do you gobble up empty space on a crowded airplane: for example, the unoccupied seat next to you? According to two University of São Paulo scientists, Daniel Vanzella and William Lima, neutron stars can do the same thing, though we are talking about the void of space observed from a few thousand light years away.

The neutron star that Vanzella and Lima observed, with a gravitational force a trillion times that of the earth, riotously ripped at  empty space around it (in micro-seconds) until virtual particles became so densely packed that their small mass was denser than the mass of  2 suns. This runaway effect in apparently empty space produced an energy greater than the neutron star itself, resulting in a supernova type explosion or a black hole.

In the cosmic world, these are all explosions of not only destruction but also of creation. The Big Bang led to our universe, a creation story of fledgling stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies — then us.

The power and glory of the Big Bang’s creation, starting a fertile cosmic womb, and by 400 million years later, the repeated birth and death of stars, their life spans increasing from a few million years to billions of years. Supernova (WhirlpoolGalaxySupernova) produced neutron stars  and black holes (super-massive black hole are anchors for galaxies) – and the process supplied matter for our formation as individuals, a connection billions of years in the making.

Do you feel threatened that the world did not start 6,000 years ago but over 13 billion years ago? Does the world have to start with God holding the baton directing the Big Bang? Who set nothing in motion or was it only a virtual nothing that became something?

Should we stop and smell the cosmic roses, and then ponder these questions?

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