A brief moment in time

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Okay, and then what? Physicist Stephen Hawking recently gave an interview in which he believes there is no afterlife. Heaven is nothing more than a fairy tale for people who are afraid of the dark. (Not a direct quote but close enough.)

He bases his thoughts on the philosophy that science is the end-all, be-all, so to speak. In the end science will win out. How can we expect an afterlife as we are such an insignificant speck in the cosmos. Everything must be proved by science. Science has taught us a great deal from when we as a species looked up at the stars and wondered. The earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old. That is a difficult number for most of us to wrap our brains around. 4.5 billion. But it does give us a quantifiable number. The universe is 13.6 billion years old. Another number hard to define but it is in perspective due to the 4.5.

But what came before that? What was around 20 billion, 50 billion or 100 billion years ago? Is this the only universe that has ever taken hold? Has the universe constantly expanded and collapsed again upon itself to expand once again? At some point there was a trigger to start it all. In essence, that trigger was the first heartbeat for us all. It is the spark of life as we know it. It is no different than the spark which started our own hearts; creation is life.

I am a scientific being as well, however I do not hold myself up as such an intellect as he. I believe science is a way to prove the existence of ourselves. But much of what we believe has no proof, it only has hypotheses from which we draw logical conclusions. We believe in dark matter yet we have no specific proof. We believe in the 'big bang' but that theory is based on observation of our physical surroundings. Stellar background radiation is a remnant but it is only a clue. The rest is theory, hypothesis and conjecture.

I do not begrudge him his opinion. I just don't share it. We are an insignificant speck but we are the only speck we know of. At some point in our time I believe we will find other life in the heavens. Perhaps that will be the heaven some seek but it is a heaven never-the-less. Then maybe we can see what heaven thinks of us. As Jack Ryan said, God started it all. Somewhere along the line he put a soul in man and at some point he will end it.

Perhaps He is the trigger for the big bang. Why not? Science will get us closer to the answers but even science can't explain everything.