In the beginning, there was only Godde. There was no time; there was no space; there was no energy, no matter, no light. Nothing. Nothing but Godde.
Godde thought: I’ll make me a Universe. About the only thing we can know for certain about Godde is that Godde is Cosmic Intelligence: wisdom and language, mathematics and logic, imagination and creativity. Because if Godde created wisdom and language and all the rest, how? Such reasoning is circular, chicken-and-egg reasoning. Godde is infinite and eternal.
Before there was a Universe, there was nothing — no time, no space, no matter, no energy, nothing. Then Godde began creating. It is a process that has never stopped.
In a blink no longer than one forty-seven-millionth of a second, Godde created everything. Forty-seven million seconds add up to about a year and a half. We call this moment when time and space began the Big Bang.
The first thing Godde created was time itself, but it wasn’t time as you and I experience it today. In the event that we popularly call the Big Bang, everything that exists suddenly began streaming at incredible speed out of one infinitesimally tiny point.
Go hook up a garden hose. If there’s a nozzle on, take it off. Turn on the water. The water comes out of the hose at a nice, relatively soft rate. Now put your finger over the mouth of the hose and play with making the opening smaller and larger again. The smaller the opening, the faster and harder the water comes out. With a fire hose, the hose is bigger in diameter, the water is coming faster, and the opening is so small that the water blasts out hard enough to do you a serious injury if you’re stupid with it.
Now imagine an entire swimming pool’s worth of water shooting through your garden hose in less than a minute. And a whole ocean’s worth of water shooting through in less than a second. The hose would have to be made of something incredibly tough or it would just explode.
Now imagine an entire Universe’s worth of "water" appearing through a "hose" smaller than an atom, all in one forty-seven-millionth of a second, all at once. That’s why the event was dubbed the Big Bang. Wow!
But there was no noise, because for sound you need an atmosphere, and Godde hadn’t even created matter yet, much less air. That’s why scientists say the event wasn’t really a Bang. But it’s too late. The phrase has captured our imagination.
First came light, and a split second later, gravity, and time and space began. And Godde saw that it was good. Who can know how long each act of creation took, particularly when, until then, there had been no time to measure it by? Let us content ourselves with saying, And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
In the very beginning, matter came streaming out of nothingness at a speed so amazingly fast that as far as you and I are concerned, it was instantaneous. And here’s the thing: Time did too.
Like "water" shooting through a "hose" under unbelievable pressure, time "exploded" into reality. Imagine your VCR on super-fast-forward, and then multiply that by 47 billion. Time has had 12 to 15 billion years (depending on which scientist you’re talking to) to slow down to the pace that you and I perceive as its normal, metronome-accurate, decay-of-a-cesium-atom pace. But remember how, when the Universe was brand-new, time "exploded" faster than water bursting out of a fire hose? If we could perceive the reality of time for our descendants 12 to 15 billion years in the future, to us it would probably look as slow as the "frame advance" feature on your VCR.
The elements began to form: helium and hydrogen and all the rest, streaming outward from Godde and through Godde into another new creation, the unimaginable vastness of space. And Godde saw that it was good. And Godde created the laws of physics, the nebulae, the galaxies, the black holes, and all the other entities and phenomena, and Godde saw that they were good. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.