Creation narratives offer purpose and meaning, but how much time do we spend thinking about them? I want to look at creation through a topological lens and then ask a question – how do you write a satisfying creation narrative in 1,000 words or less? Let’s ease in gently…
A haunting childhood memory is of crisp crackling American voices reading from Genesis 1 on Christmas Eve, 1968. In my memory I was sitting on a cool, tiled floor in Dubai, and I was 8 when Apollo 8 with Bill Anders, Jim Lovell and Frank Borman orbited the moon and sent ‘tidings of comfort and joy’ to the earthbound rest of us.
When planning that broadcast, attempts to find a Bible passage had failed to bridge the gap between the Christmas message of peace on earth and the messy war in Vietnam. Finally, it seems Christine Laitin, the wife of one of the managers, suggested going back to creation (see here).
It was an inspired choice (listen here) and the content and context still leave a tingle on my spine. The photograph, Earthrise (above), left us with another moment of awe from that trip, our blue globe of life contrasted with the stark splendours of space. In many ways it was a more thoughtful excursion than its more memorable successor the following July.
That the simple elegance of Genesis should speak powerfully to generations over millennia – first on earth and then reaching into the skies – is remarkable. However, a balance has tipped in the past half century now that so many earthlings are no longer inspired because they don’t believe it. And it won’t move them if it isn’t true.
Everyone has a creation account and a finale account. It’s usually a nested set of brackets that open with where I came from, where my family came from, and where we all came from. Closing the brackets starts with our personal end, on out to the big questions about all that is.
What narratives are out there?
It’s traditional to reflect on ancient literature from Babylon or China, but I don’t know enough about either to be anything but dangerous. I was toying with references to a Babylonian bull in a China shop, but couldn’t quite capture it, so let’s start with what’s around today.
The shortest creation narrative I know (around 230 words?), comes from the Barenaked Ladies and introduces The Big Bang Theory (see here). It’s highly structured (e.g.: ‘Australopithecus would really have been sick of us’) and certainly speaks to our culture and age.
Not that we are short of narratives. The department where I did my PhD was active when the W and Z particles were discovered – a big deal (see here) – so there was a flood of speakers on the topic. Each started by intoning, ‘All matter is made up of quarks and leptons…’ and I realised that even particle physics had its own liturgy.
The trouble is, the liturgy keeps changing. As I see it, before I was born most scientists didn’t believe in a beginning or an end, at all. Our solar system clearly had a beginning, and the show would clearly close one day, but stars were always being born and always dying, spewing their excess into the void for the next cycle. That what we see all came from pre-existing material seems to have been a mainstream belief, too, in ancient times: a belief the early Christians rejected (e.g.: Hebrews 11:3).
Fred Hoyle’s contemptuous Big Bang remark accidentally branded a new consensus that there was, indeed, a beginning. Whether there would be a grand finale, a collapse, or an eternal stretch to an impossibly thin and featureless future, wasn’t clear.
I gave up about three-quarters the way through Sir Roger Penrose’s Road to Reality, after soldiering through too many hand-drawn diagrams and customised nomenclature, but I believe his latest thinking is that, having lost all its scale factors, the featureless soup in the end of all time will be indistinguishable from whatever was before the Big Bang, a sort of back to the future cycle.
I’m amazed that so many Christians struggle over origins where there is, for now at least, a central shared creative concept, rather than endings, where there is not. Whatever happened at the start was blindingly incomprehensible, so anything on fundamentals is desperately wordy. I’ve just put ‘Cosmology’ into Amazon’s book search and even Lyman Page’s Little book of Cosmology (which I haven’t read) is 152 pages long (similar in length to Andrew George’s translation of the Gilgamesh Epic, which I haven’t read, either).
And all that before we get around to our star, our planets, and our moon, with all the things that seem to make us different: atmosphere, environment, geology and, as far as we know right now, life.
If Hoyle was the accidental brand manager for cosmology and if AN Wilson is right (Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker), then Darwin was a very purposeful brand manager for evolution. From what I can make out, nobody believes what Darwin believed, which is why we talk about neoDarwinian models with a short prefix to cover the distance our understanding and theories have moved.
I don’t think we have a grand narrative, but we have a functioning patchwork quilt of ideas to keep us warm. Almost nobody is familiar with every piece and so, as with other creation narratives, even the most secular version has to be taken in faith. The stupendous challenge of believing that everything came out of nothing hasn’t gone away, and even with this one piece of the patchwork there are not many who have, as they say, done the math: maybe a few thousand mathematical physicists in 8 billion people around the world? I always get my zeroes mixed up, but I think that’s less than a thousandth of one percent of the population.
So, for the other 99.999% of us, just that one slice of the story – cosmology – is a matter of faith. We understand key elements – the voice of the cosmic microwave background, (see here) for instance, but still it’s a myth from which we must hang all our hopes of meaning and purpose.
And the myth upon which I hang my hopes and sense of purpose is also a patchwork of narratives, viewed through different lenses over the ages, that needs to be taken in faith. So, what’s the problem?
Dancing with Jane
I have no idea what Austen’s cotemporaries at the time of P&P or S&S actually did for R&R. From the period dramas it looks like they put on their most uncomfortable outfits, formed up into long lines and spent the evening going in and out like the tide. Now and again, people from both sides would join hands or form a ring before returning to their original partners or maybe crossing to join the other side (I’m really not on top of the details).
It strikes me that the same pattern describes the history of creation narratives: now coming together, now pulling back, now holding hands in a circle of fun, now retreating or crossing the floor. Since dance is such a fluid pursuit, it’s hard to say exactly how the faith narrative and the science narrative have moved over the years.
My take is that more Christians knew more science in Victorian times than do now. Many of the fossil pioneers, for instance, were believers who saw their discoveries as puzzles to be engaged with in response to the Psalmist’s reflection:
Great are the works of the Lord;
they are pondered by all who delight in them. (Psalm 111:2, NIV)
My guess is the same applies the other way around and that educated unbelievers in Europe and the US would have had a better working knowledge of theology than their peers today (possibly than most Christians today, I don’t know).
Of course, even that image is too simplistic since there are so many dance bands at the modern hop. Broadly speaking, Christians find themselves divided in two: those who follow a six-day creation and those with a more mainstream worldview who accommodate their spiritual sensibilities in various ways.
Finding a fit
Having explored how today’s creation narratives are a patchwork of disciplinary insights that change with the years, it’s worth remembering that there is no single narrative in the Bible, either. Although we naturally gravitate to the opening chapter of Genesis, there are other passages (chapter 2, for instance, and in the psalms) that cover creation.
I like Tom McLeish’s approach in in Faith and Wisdom in Science where he explores these other passages and in the way he returns to the concept of Natural Philosophy. He’s worth reading if you are still trying to find your fit, but that’s not where I want to go in this essay.
Clearly, deciding whether the six days of creation are 24-hour periods or something more flexible, is important. Around 1,600 years ago, Augustine wrote of, ‘the mystic number of the days’ of creation, so it’s not as though the question of six as a number or six as something one short of the perfection of seven has only been around since the nineteenth century, or indeed, since Ussher’s chronology in the 17th century which set a date for creation that has crept onto the pages of so many Bibles. That date has played an interesting role in the theology of the end of the world, too (see Martyn Whittock’s The end times, again?).
I don’t mind what Ussher tried to do (although when I attempted something similar with marketing reports, I couldn’t make the sums work as I thought they should), but I very much mind putting Ussher’s work on the same page as Moses or Isaiah – did his dates make it to Matthew or Romans? As we’ll see later, I’m not sure the genealogies were recorded for that purpose anyway, given the Bible’s lax approach to what we want to know and its rather greater commitment to what we don’t.
For Christians, I want to see if both huddles can look at the problem in more flexible ways that bring them closer. Here I have two contributions. The first is a reflection on topology and the second is a question: how much do we know about writing creation narratives in 1,000 words or less?
Topology
This is a newish branch of mathematics dating back to the early 19th Century (see here for a potted history) which seemed to throw millennia of geometric certainties out of the window – or was it a teacup? Or a needle!? Nathan, our middle son, did his final year project in topology, so I read a few of the papers he was studying. It was a bizarre experience, each one just a few pages long with several diagrams of knots, as it happened, and hardly any words.
I’ve also heard it called rubber sheet geometry because distances and angles don’t matter anymore. If you draw a circle on a rubber sheet that has the right properties – impossible with anything stretchy on earth – you could coax it into a square, or a triangle – so squares and circles and triangles are all alike in the topological world. However, you can’t turn it into a figure-of-eight because that has two holes and the circle you start with has only one. So, while it’s not about angles and distances, it really is all about the holes. And it turns out that a lot of what we depend upon in modern life, especially networks, drops out rather neatly if you study the topology.
You’ll probably see where I’m going with this and it’s off to the London Underground map, of course, which is a seminal example of a topological map. Apparently (see here), a chap called Harry Beck who worked for London Underground realised that people didn’t really care where the underground lines lay, they just needed to know the connections between stations. From 1931, he produced a series of maps to show clearly how to get from station to station, for which it appears he was paid the grand sum of 15 Guineas (a Guinea was 21s,or £1 1/0, or £1 1s 0d, in old money). However, thanks to a posthumous arrangement, the map now bears an acknowledgement of his original intellectual property.
The London tube map, as you would expect, doesn’t do distance, details, or even direction very well. I came across a newspaper article once that complained the map failed to identify the fastest route about 30% of the time but I haven’t got it to hand, and I don’t want to be sued. Only a newspaper would fail to promote the fact that something so simple could yield the right answer 70% of the time. Needless to say, Bill Bryson waxes amusing while on the subject, too (Notes from a Small Island?).
If you want to know whether this station is North or South of that station, or why it takes much longer to travel between these two dots than it does between those two, the tube map won’t help you. What it gets right and always gets right is the connections between the stations, because that’s the critical piece of information it was designed to capture: the topology of the network.
To me, Genesis looks more like a tube map than a normal map. Those smooth, repeating curves that mark off the days (and the seasons and years) look very topological to me. The invariants also look topological – the Creator, the starting signal with a single creative word that spoke every mystery into existence – as do the sequences. Clearly, the author was trying to preserve something that we no longer value, with a pattern of parting and filling, too.
Getting out at the station
Of course, we can’t live in a map. We have to live in the real world but part of our creative legacy is our ability to interact with abstractions – maps, recipes, guidelines and frameworks – and interpret them into fruitful lives.
As I blink in the sunshine, what do I make of what happened back then? Not surprisingly, I don’t really know. The tube map encourages me not to focus too hard on anything that looks like it didn’t matter to the first readers and a complete description of all that happened is clearly beyond me, anyhow (and beyond you, or you wouldn’t be reading this).
From where I stand, it seems to make most sense to stretch Genesis over all the other theories and see where it matches. And I see a lot of places where it seems to fit.
Back to those days – am I on top of them? There are only two ways in which I can make the two sets of ideas fit from here. Either time was so quick back then that a whole lot more happened in a day, or they are part of a pattern rather than part of the clockwork. I’ve come across some theories about time spinning down from an infinite pace at the Big Bang until it has eased into today’s equilibrium. I don’t think they are in fashion these days, but I’ve wondered from time to time. So, I’m back to my rubber sheet. But still, now and then something happens that makes me wonder.
Back to the moon (and going back is back in fashion). I was nuts about the Apollo programme as a kid, especially in the second half of 1969 when I had a spell with some relatives with a TV in Belfast, while my parents packed up to come home from the Middle East. I was glued to those screens and shaken to the core when an uncle asked me if I knew what the word, ‘simulation’ meant. It was flashing below what I thought was a live telecast of a launch just about to enter orbit and a slice of my innocence fell away like a third stage booster.
At the ends of the legs of the Lunar Module were huge pads designed to stop it from sinking into the dust: deep, deep, dust that was believed to have built up over eons. But like its beauty, the surface of the moon turned out to be only skin deep.
It’s relatively easy to recalibrate the fall of dust onto the moon, but that’s not the point: you only learn something when you make an assumption and discover it to be true or untrue. It was a great experiment, and it was swung on Newton’s laws, but that result was a puzzle.
And still, I wonder.
What’s your story?
If I could ever find a sponsor for prizes – always give prizes if you can! – and a panel of judges, I’d love to launch a creation narrative competition. I don’t care what you believe, but I’d like to know what you’d write that captures all you believe to be important about beginnings in, say, 1,000 words.
I’d want to see how accessible your description was – would it appeal to your neighbours, your colleagues, people on the other side of the world? How well would it have worked 500 years ago, or in 500 years’ time, do you think? I’d also like to see how much of what you believe to be true you could embed in such a short submission and where you’d have to take shortcuts.
We have a few creation narratives, from some of which we want an impossible combination of understandability, sense-making, wonder, and in a very narrow sense, accuracy. I’d like to read a thousand creation narratives to discover if they are as easy to write as they are to criticise.
Anyone want to organise it?