Seven laughs, one Big Bang

Originally published 25 May 1992

“Hha Hha Hha…”

An ancient cre­ation myth from the so-called “Eighth Hid­den Book of Moses” has God bring all things into being with sev­en laughs.

“…Hha Hha Hha…”

Now that’s my kind of God. A God who isn’t dead­ly seri­ous, even when cre­at­ing a uni­verse. But not friv­o­lous either. That “Hha Hha Hha” was not a snick­er but a bel­ly laugh, a roar­ing out­burst of good clean fun. Not a guf­faw but a celebration.

Sev­en laughs are bet­ter than sev­en days. Sev­en days lend them­selves to being tak­en lit­er­al­ly — and to dead­ly seri­ous debates about Scrip­tures vs. sci­ence. Laughs call for laughs in return. Laughs call for a light­heart­ed appre­ci­a­tion of what it means to cre­ate a universe.

Just think about it.

God sits down with his pals and say, “I think I’ll cre­ate a uni­verse.” I mean, how do you go about it? Here’s how the ancient cre­ation myth gets it start­ed (from a trans­la­tion by Charles Doria and Har­ris Lenowitz): “First Laugh/ showed up/ Light (Flash)/ All splitter/ born uni­verse god/ fire god.”

Sound famil­iar? Have you ever heard a bet­ter descrip­tion of the Big Bang? A blaze of infi­nite ener­gy, pure radi­a­tion, split­ting into a mul­ti­tude of par­ti­cles, atoms, galax­ies, stars — a fiery uni­verse rush­ing out­ward. And that was just the first laugh. It gets better.

“Sec­ond Laugh/ Water fill­ing everywhere/ he echoed/ Earth heard/ she saw Flash/ she was afraid/ and writhed/ the Wet wav­ing ten­der smooth.”

OK. Now we’ve real­ly got things going. The Flash and all that ten­der-smooth water. It’s a potent mix, Dar­win’s “warm lit­tle pond,” ready to spring forth with life.

You can see it. God hav­ing the time of his life. His pals look­ing on with amaze­ment, big grins on their faces, wait­ing for the next peal of glee, the next Hha. This cre­ation busi­ness is fun.

All this came to mind a few weeks ago as I read the news­pa­per sto­ries about rip­ples in the Big Bang.

A lot of folks took those rip­ples very seri­ous­ly. Head­lines: “Bumps in the glow prove the Big Bang.” “COBE satel­lite finds echoes of cre­ation.” Peo­ple asked: “Does this prove there’s a God?” Or: “Does this prove God does­n’t exist?”

Hey, if I were going to believe in God, or not believe in God, I would­n’t base my deci­sion on tem­per­a­ture vari­a­tions of one hun­dred-thou­sandth of a degree in the cos­mic back­ground radi­a­tion. The results beamed back by the COBE satel­lite were 90 per­cent mean­ing­less sta­t­ic, any­way. Maybe they were all static.

Cer­tain­ly, it is excit­ing and fun to watch cos­mol­o­gists probe the ear­li­est epochs of the uni­verse. A stun­ning achieve­ment of the human mind. But let’s not get car­ried away. “If you’re reli­gious it’s like look­ing at the face of God,” exult­ed George Smoot, leader of the NASA team that announced the results. Lat­er, he tem­pered his enthu­si­asm, as well he should. It is not so much like look­ing at God as hear­ing an almost inaudi­ble rever­ber­a­tion of his dis­tant laugh.

Should we take this stuff dead­ly seri­ous­ly? Seri­ous­ly, yes, but not dead­ly seri­ous­ly. Lis­ten to this, from a Boston Globe sto­ry on the rip­ples: “The infla­tion the­o­ry holds that dur­ing the very ear­li­est stage of the Big Bang, a peri­od that last­ed only a mil­lion tril­lion tril­lionth of a sec­ond and end­ed when the uni­verse was about the size of a soft­ball, there was an extreme­ly rapid expan­sion rate — a rate a bil­lion tril­lion times faster than the speed of light.”

Imag­ine! A uni­verse the size of a soft­ball, expand­ing a bil­lion tril­lion times faster than light! The lick­ety-split soft­ball con­tained as pure ener­gy every­thing that exists today — the bil­lions of galax­ies we observe with our tele­scopes, each galaxy con­tain­ing hun­dreds of bil­lions of stars, many of those stars whirling a fam­i­ly of plan­ets, plan­ets (for all we know) crack­ling and pop­ping with life. That’s one heck of a soft­ball. That’s one heck of a Hha.

You’ve got­ta have a sense of humor to be a cos­mol­o­gist. Imag­ine cal­cu­lat­ing what hap­pened in the first mil­lion tril­lion tril­lionth of a sec­ond of the uni­verse’s expan­sion 15 bil­lion years ago. Cos­mol­o­gist Steven Wein­berg wrote a delight­ful lit­tle book called The First Three Min­utes, a mod­ern account of the ori­gin of the uni­verse. It took 155 pages to give just an out­line of what hap­pened dur­ing the first three min­utes. When you think about it, it’s crazy — won­der­ful and crazy. We’re talk­ing about cre­ation here, and we’re talk­ing about the human brain. We’re talk­ing about some­thing the size of a soft­ball that can fig­ure out what was going on when the uni­verse was the size of a soft­ball. Got it?

OK, take it seri­ous­ly, after all, it is the best cre­ation sto­ry we have today. But let’s not get over­wrought about it. Those rip­ples in the Big Bang are just the lat­est rip­ple in our quest for ori­gins. Take ’em with a grain of salt. Take ’em with a wink. Any Cre­ator who cre­ates with a laugh meant us to have fun.

“…Hha. Sev­enth Laugh/ wheezed while He did it/ bore SoulBreath/ every­thing got moving/ God said: ‘You’ll keep them that way/ on the move/ and happy.’ ”