"The Spark"

Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash

When I was 22 and started going to sea aboard commercial merchant vessels as a junior officer, I sailed aboard tankers carrying various petroleum products to ports on the coasts of the United States, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. The tankers I sailed on in those days carried about 20,000 tons of a product such as gasoline or jet fuel which translates to about 7 million gallons.

Now 7 million gallons of gasoline or jet fuel has a lot of explosive power, so the mariners who work on tankers have to be very, very careful of preventing sparks, because the tiniest of sparks can cause an explosion if the spark comes in contact with a flammable vapor and, of course, gasoline and other petroleum products give off a lot of vapors. Unfortunately, tanker explosions from a stray spark are not uncommon. When they do occur, investigative teams make every effort to identify the cause of the spark in an effort to prevent a similar situation from happening again. Usually, these forensic teams can identify the cause of the fire and explosion, and they generally know what caused the spark.

When it comes to talking about the “cause” of the explosion that resulted in the creation of the universe, investigative teams, that is, cosmologists, have a lot more trouble. Modern cosmology is all about delving into the mysteries of creation and endeavoring to explain how our universe was created. Actually – up to a point – cosmologists do a pretty good job; at least we think they do.

Our modern science tells us that the entire universe – everything we know and see came into being some 13.6 billion years ago in an explosion of unimaginable power. Some recent estimates put the age of the universe at 26 billion years not 13.6 billion years. In any case, before the instant of the explosion there was nothing, and I mean nothing. There wasn’t even time or empty space. There was not even a void. There was quite literally – nothing; a nothing the human mind cannot even conceive of. Then something happened to cause a huge explosion which we refer to as the “Big Bang.” The Big Bang explosion started in a tiny dot much, much smaller than the head of a pin and it quickly spread outward creating space and time and energy and matter and with it came all the laws of science that we know about and probably many more we do not know about.

Of course, we have many scientific reasons for accepting the Big Bang theory and we can even see and hear the residual background radiation from the event. Some portion of the static on an old T.V. or a radio which is not properly tuned is remnant energy from the Big Bang. So, you can actually hear the Big Bang today – at least the leftover energy from it.

So, the bottom line is we seem to have pretty good theories about the beginning stages of the universe. Just like a forensic fire investigative team that can deduce what happened after a fire and explosion on a seagoing tanker, cosmologists have plausible theories about what happened just after the Big Bang and after that and after that – all the way down to the present day. Science is, indeed, a wonderful thing. The real problem is that unlike probing the causes of the spark that caused a tanker explosion – we have no way of determining what caused the “spark” which created the Big Bang. Why did all of this come to be? What is the purpose? What is the ultimate destiny? We know our universe will end, but will a new one begin again? Are we in a universe that is but one in an infinite number of universes that have been created and destroyed through an infinity of time as we understand time? We just do not know and seemingly we cannot know.

Frankly, human cultures since the dawn of civilization simply do not like the messy problem of not providing answers for why we humans exist or even why the universe and our world came to be. And so – since civilization began about 5000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent in what is present day Iraq, countless creation stories have been passed down through the generations in oral or written form. There are about as many creation stories as there are civilizations although some borrow from stories established by earlier civilizations. It is impossible for me in a short period to provide even a very small sampling of creation stories but let me provide a few.

The oldest known civilization is the Sumerian/Babylonian civilization which was established in the Fertile Crescent which is the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq. The Sumerians left behind clay tablets which were discovered in the 19^th century. Some tablets describe a creation story On these tablets it is noted that the gods An, Enlil, Enki and Ninhursanga create the black-headed people (humans) and created comfortable conditions for the animals to live and procreate. After a missing section in the tablets, we learn that the gods decided not to save mankind from an impending flood. Enki, the god of the waters, warned the hero, Atra-hasis, and he gave him instructions to build an ark and take aboard his family and pairs of the world’s animals.

Later in the story is a description of a huge flood. A terrible storm rocks the ark for seven days and seven nights. After another break in missing text, the story resumes. The flood is apparently over and the animals disembark. The animals are preserved as is the seed of mankind". (Condensed from Wikipedia) If all of this sounds familiar, it should. The Book of Genesis in Hebrew scripture (what Christians call the Old Testament) tells the story of Noah and the flood. The story is taken from the Sumerians according to most Biblical scholars.

According to one of many Chinese creation stories, “in the beginning, the universe was a black egg where heaven and earth were mixed together, and in this egg was contained a dog like creature - Pangu. Pangu felt suffocated, so he cracked the egg with an axe, and the light, clear part of the egg floated up to form Heaven while the cold, heavy part stayed down and formed Earth.

When Pangu died, his breath became the wind and clouds, his voice the rolling thunder and his eyes the sun and the moon. His hair and beard became the stars in the sky, the flowers and trees from his skin, the marrow in his bones became jade and pearls, and his sweat the good rain that nurtured the Earth. There are several versions of the Pangu legend, but one that is common says that Pangu was King Gao Xin's dog. King Gao had great hatred for a King Fang and he offered his daughter’s hand in marriage for the one who would kill King Fang.

One day Pangu slipped away and went to King Fang's court and killed him returning the head to King Gao Xix. King Gao Xin was overjoyed to see that Pangu had brought King Fang's head, but did not want to marry his daughter to a dog. Pangu would not eat for three days, and the king asked, "Why do you not eat? Are you angry that I would not marry my daughter to you?" Pangu said, "No, just cover me with your golden bell for seven days and I'll turn into a man." The king did so, but the princess peeked under on the sixth day. He found that Pangu already had man's body but retained a dog's head. However, once the bell had been raised the magic change stopped, and he remained a man with a dog's head. The princess married him and they settled in southern China, where they had four children, who became the ancestors of humankind. (Summarized from the Oracle Think Quest Education Foundation).

According to Hindu system, the cosmos passes through cycles within cycles for all eternity. The basic cycle is the kalpa, a “day of Brahma”, or 4.3 billion earthly years. Brahma’s night is of equal length. Brahma is the creator god, along with Vishnu the protector god and Shiva, the destroyer god. (Don’t confuse this with Brahmin, the highest caste in India)

360 such days and nights constitute a “year of Brahma” and his life is 100 such years long. The largest cycle is therefore 311 billion years long, after which the whole universe returns to the ineffable, indescribable Brahman or ultimate reality, until another creator god like Brahma is evolved.

In each cosmic day the god creates the universe and again absorbs it. During the cosmic night he sleeps, and the whole universe is gathered up into his body, where it remains as a potentiality. The end of each time period is marked by confusion of classes, the overthrow of the established standards, the cessation of all religious rites, and the rule of cruel and alien kings. Soon after this the world is destroyed by flood and fire. (Condensed from Wikipedia) It is this Hindu creation story that suggests the universe is created and destroyed repeatedly through the eons of time.

The creation story most familiar in the west is that contained in the Book of Genesis – the seven days and seven night’s story with Adam and Eve. The same story is similar in the Muslim Qur’an which, no doubt borrowed from the Hebrew texts which borrowed from Mesopotamian texts. Actually, what a lot of people who take the Old Testament as the literal word of God don’t realize is that the Book of Genesis contains not one, but two different creation stories woven together. The two different stories come from different Hebrew oral traditions. In one God is referred to as Elohim and in the other as Yahweh. If you carefully read the Book of Genesis, you will see many contradictions. This is because the two Hebrew creation stories are spliced together and are not in harmony with each other.

Naturally, most people in the west today do not take the creation story in the Book of Genesis at face value. We recognize it is a myth partly taken from other middle eastern cultures and written down to explain why the world exists and why human beings were created. It is only Biblical fundamentalists who refuse to acknowledge that the stories in Genesis are just that - stories.

What is notable in the Judeo, Christian, Muslim creation stories is that God is particularly human. God is referred to as a “he” and he has many human qualities and emotions. As Genesis says, humans were created in the image of God – therefore, God must look like a human. In fact, in Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil (not an apple), Genesis says they “hear God walking in the Garden in the cool of the day and they hid themselves.”

For humanists, atheists, agnostics and even a lot of religious people, the notion that a being, particularly a being looking and acting like a human being was responsible for the creation of the world seems quite absurd. This is why many people simply do not believe in God – because to them, the God as described in Hebrew, Christian and Muslim scripture makes no sense. For that matter, the gods as described in other religions do not make any sense either – because in all cases – there is no apparent proof of them.

As Richard Dawkins the noted atheist says, “I do not deny that God exists, I just do not see any proof of a God. Dawkins and others also note the problems inherent in attributing the creation of the universe – the spark – to God. If you say that the universe could not have come from nothing and it therefore needed to have a creator, i.e. God, then where did God come from? This, of course, is quite a good question and it is one that will never be answered. The bottom line is that we can describe the unfolding development of the universe after the Big Bang, but we cannot explain the spark – what caused the Big Bang to occur in the first place.

So, does all of this mean there is no God and a God was not the source – the spark of creation? Well, I think it depends on how you define God. Certainly, a lot of people have “faith” in the God of the Hebrew, Christian and Muslim scriptures. They believe in something that they cannot see nor proven, but they intuitively believe that this God exists. In varying degrees they may or may not accept the Bible or the Qur’an literally, but they generally accept God as the creator – the spark of creation.

In this context, God is the “supernatural” cause of the universe meaning that God is ultimately the creator and “he” (as God is generally described) lies outside of the creation; hence the word “supernatural” or not part of nature or the universe. God is “out there” somewhere looking down on us. God has a personality; one that a person can relate to personally or perhaps by following particular religious rituals and practices.

I certainly fully respect the religious views of people who believe that this type of God exists but to me, this version of God is quite human made. In fact, in my view, it is not humans that were created in God’s image; it was this God that was created in human’s image. Nearly all religions around the world anthropomorphize the God or gods of the particular religion.

The idea that the spark – the cause of the universe is a being with human characteristics and a personality doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. And I particularly do not like the word “supernatural” when describing what I call the “God Event.” The idea of the supernatural suggests that there is a God – a being – that exists outside of the laws of nature and can, if it sees fit, change the laws of nature at a particular moment in time because of some kind of human action or intercession or worldly event. I just cannot accept this.

But this does not make me an atheist per se. Far from it. I use the word “God” because it is a common term, but my view of God is NOT that of the Hebrew and Christian Bible or the Qur’an. I do not see God as a being; separate from the universe. I certainly do not think God has a personality or emotions like a human being much less that it has a sex and is a “he” or, for that matter, a “she.”

Instead, I refer to what I term the “God Event” to describe something that is really beyond words and certainly beyond description because it is so all encompassing the human mind cannot fathom it. I see this God Event as the sacred source of creation – a force that permeates the universe in all ways and manifests itself in all the scientific laws we know and in the ones we do not yet know about. It is imbedded in the very energy and matter and forces of nature. It is part and parcel of all that exists; material and immaterial and, in my view; it is the spark of creation.

As I respect those that have a fervent religious faith, I also respect those that cannot perceive or accept what I term the God event – people like Richard Dawkins. He makes a very good point when he says that if God created the universe; what created God. This is impossible to explain but if God is all that exists there isn’t a need for the creation of God because God is not a being. It is the universe and the cycle of the universe (or universes) and all the laws of science that we understand. This is why I refer to the universe as sacred and even as holy. You could use the word “magnificent” but this falls short of the human emotions that are contained in the word “sacred.”

Dr. Dawkins sees no proof of God, and I don’t see any proof of the Judeo, Christian Muslim God either. But I certainly perceive the God Event I am talking about. When I look into a telescope on a dark and clear night; when I walk along a beach or in the woods; when I look into the eyes of someone I love – I see God all the time. To me, the fabulous order out of chaos; the predictable and magnificent laws that govern the universe and the beauty of it all are proof of the sacred; proof of the God that I perceive; proof of the spark of creation. In other words, God is hiding in plain sight.

When the universe was created, matter and anti-matter were created. When matter and anti-matter come in contact with each other, they annihilate each other. Yet when the universe was created, there was an imbalance and slightly more matter was created so our universe was able to exist. That there is such order out of chaos, to me, is proof of the sacred.

Some religious people, particularly fundamentalists who hold various scriptures to provide the explanation of the creation, do not like science because, to them, it apparently disproves the existence of God. I disagree. To me, science continually uncovers an incredible complexity and intricacy and beauty in the universe. Dr. Dawkins does not see this as proof of the God Event, but I do.

Astrophysicists have identified at least 26 constants in the universe. These are qualities that are identical throughout the entire universe. Some are difficult to understand but many are familiar. For example, the speed of light, the mass of a proton, the charge of an electron, and the force of gravity are examples. These 26 or more constants are the same everywhere in the universe.

What is particularly interesting is using supercomputers, physicists have discovered that if you change any one of the constants by a tiny fraction, the entire universe would not exist. All that we know, including ourselves would not exist if just one of these constants was changed just a little bit. In other words, our universe is fine turned for everything to exist. I find this very fascinating. Now it is true that some cosmologists suggest that an infinite number of universes have been created and destroyed over countless eons. (This is the “Many Worlds” theory.) So, according to this theory, at some point, the universe we have with the constants as they are now was bound to happen. The problem with this theory is there is absolutely no proof this is true. Could it be true? Possibly, but this seems to me a weak attempt to disprove the obvious. Cosmologists who hold this view have no proof, but they have faith that this is true, just like fundamentalists have faith that the Book of Genesis is true.

In looking at the universe, you can reduce its workings to scientific laws. In looking at human beings, you can reduce all of our actions to chemicals, biological processes, electrical functions and evolution – yet, to me, there is much more to every human being. Our ability to love is sometimes explained in evolutionary terms, but I think this is a big stretch, and it misses the whole truth and the whole point. There is something sacred in human beings and I define this as the God Event.

Of all the religions I have studied and encountered, I think Taoism got it right.

The Tao (the God Event) that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless Tao is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named (the universe) is the mother of ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Every desiring, one can see manifestations of the Tao. These two spring from the same source – the Tao – but differ in name; this appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery.

Reverend Christopher McMahon

UU Chatham

May 3, 2026