The painting shown above, rendered on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by the Italian artist Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, reportedly portrays the creation of the Sun and Moon.
To judge by God’s face and body language, either He was in a bad mood at the time, or else He was taking the job very seriously. Hard to know which, but I’m betting on “took the job very seriously.”
Apparently, back in Michelangelo’s day, God was fond of wearing flowing pink robes. You might almost mistake them for women’s clothes, if you didn’t know better. Most everyone else in Michelangelo’s paintings — the cherubs and angels — ran around naked, or half-clothed. Heavenly fashions have changed, of course, since 1512.
Other things have changed as well, over the past 500 years. The Sun, for example, has become a inconvenient problem, in terms of continuing to crank out the planet-warming heat while most of us, down here on Earth, are engaged in burning fossil fuels and generating greenhouse gases.
Presumably, God had no idea that was going to happen, when He made the Sun.
But maybe it was all part of The Plan?
Another thing that changed since 1512 is the contest between Science and Religion. For a long time, Religion was kicking Science’s butt, in terms of explaining the universe. But around the time Michelangelo was putting the finishing touches on the Sistine Chapel, a group of smart guys in Europe — including Galileo and Copernicus, among others — were wondering why certain things moved the way they did, and why other things didn’t seem to move at all.
Like, for example, the Sun moved, and the Moon moved, but the Earth seemed to just sit there.
And anyway, how did things move, when no one was around to push them? Religion had an answer for that, in the form of invisible spirits. Science, meanwhile, was stumped.
But then Science discovered that, if you applied Mathematics to how things moved, you no longer needed invisible spirits to keep objects motivated. A clever little scheme concocted by the Scientists and the Mathematicians, and Religion never saw it coming, until it was too late.
From The Origins Of Modern Science 1300-1800, written by Herbert Butterfield in 1949:
The modern law of inertia, the modern theory of motion, is the great factor which in the seventeenth century helped to drive the spirits out of the world and opened the way to a universe that ran like a piece of clockwork.
A clock that didn’t need winding, incidentally. Or replacement batteries. Like the Energizer Bunny, it just keeps on running. (But we note the ‘pink’ color has been retained.)
The invisible spirits were driven out, along with whatever intelligence they had lent to the operations of the universe, and everything that happened, happened simply because there was nothing stop it from happening.
Once the Earth started moving in a mathematically-calculated elliptical orbit around the Sun, every goddamn thing started moving. Pretty soon, the Sun itself was moving in a orbit within a galaxy of stars, and beyond our galaxy were other galaxies that were also moving, and soon enough, everything visible in the whole universe was moving… like clockwork. No intelligence necessary.
Mostly, everything was getting farther and farther away from everything else, at an extremely high speed. (Where, exactly, everything is headed, remains a mystery.)
Once the Scientists and Mathematicians got the universe moving and expanding, it started to look like the whole production was kicked off by a big bang — appropriately referred to as The Big Bang — about 14 billion years ago. Or maybe 15 billion. Or 13 billion. What’s a billion years, give or take?
Especially, what’s a billion years, if you’re God? You can change your wardrobe whenever you want.
Here’s how it happened, concluding with the triumphant arrival of “Humans”. (Associated, for some reason, with “Earliest apes”.)
As we can see, Sexual reproduction was one of the first significant things to happen on Earth, about 2 billion years ago, right after Atmospheric oxygen. (Evidence of ‘intelligent design?”)
Anyway, all the numbers seem to line up, based on measurements of outer space microwave energy, and observations of the ‘red shift’, and theories about thermodynamics and about the lifespans of white dwarf stars. 14 billion years ago, there was something called a singularity that contained all the matter and energy of the entire universe, and for some reason, it stopped being a singularity — Bang — and instead became everything that exists.
Somebody lit the fuse?
My actual point being, that there’s something called ‘intelligence’ which we tend to ascribe to Scientists and Mathematicians, and we saw what a mess they made out of a little viral pandemic, this past couple of years. So why would we trust them with something as big as the whole universe?
Maybe the only ‘intelligent’ way to behave is, you light the fuse, and then stand back and watch what happens. And have a good laugh.
And don’t take things so darn seriously.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.