Origins

In the beginning was the Element. It was an undifferentiated mass of infinite entropy. It would take an Omnipotent being to sort it into order. What happens when an Omnipotent Being meets an Impossible Task? We get a logically flawed universe, with two contradictory elements in it. And yet, a merely possible task is not fit for a truly Omnipotent Being. The universe thus begins with a paradox at its heart.

Out of the Element the Being creates Order, otherwise known as the World. The World is different from the Universe. The Universe is a totality of possibilities and realities, with nothing to distinguish the two. The World is unmistakably real. It is made up of dry dust, wet water, and the fiery firmament. It is where we wake up in the morning, where our feet touch the cold, hard ground as we yawn and stretch.

The Being has left the traces of his identity all over the World. He has wrestled with the elements. He has tamed them and sculpted them into the World. Much as the fingerprints of a potter on a vase conatin his idenity, the marks of the Omnipotent Being on the Order unerringly point to him.

No origin story worth its salt can have a prequel. We cannot ask for the origin of the Element, or about the formation of the Being. All matter originated in the Element, and that’s where the final bedrock of material existence is to be found. The order in the World may be traced all the way back to the Being, but no further. Our childish insistence on asking an infinite sequence of where-did-it-come-from questions is a sin, or worse, a fallacy.

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Some legends have it that the World has existed forever. Every moment is the end of an eternity. The present bears the terirble burden of an infinite past.

No amount of reasoning can rule out this absurd notion. But it is a welcome idea to those who believe that a universe of finite age cannot host a truly cosmic drama. It is also of comfort to believe that things have always been, and therefore will always be. Time, of neccessity, is timeless.

This raises consternation among those who believe in the Origin. Time, they insist, began at the Origin. If so, asks the skeptic, what were the Element and the Being doing before the origin? The believer replies that doing could not exist before the Origin. To do is to change things, and for things to change, time must pass. Where there is no time, eternity is identical to an instant. Those who believe in an infinite past really believe in no more than an instant. It is the instant of Origin, when change and time began.

The moment of the Origin or the eternity preceding it is called the Chaos or the Void. The terms are identical. Complete randomness has no more subsatnce than utter non-existence.