1. Creation

The Mystery of Creation 

Paul J. Dejillas, PhD. - September 23, 2023

Creation is described as a process of bringing something non-existent into existence. It is an act of creating something out of nothing, a process of making something new from out of nowhere. It involves three key elements, namely, the creator, the process of creation, and the result or by-product of creation.

There are two differing theories about creation, namely, the God-inspired view of religion and the singularity version of quantum physics. Religion teaches that creation is a direct act of God. It is a derivative of the metaphysical. The metaphysical dimension existed first before the physical. Science says the contrary. Creation is simply physical and material. It does not proceed from the metaphysical.

Let me discuss these two dominant creation stories below.

The View of Religion on Creation

The Book of Genesis represents the thinking of various religions across the globe. “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said: Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:1-3).

The theory of bringing something into existence is regarded as an act of God. In so doing, creation transforms the thing created into something divine. Other religious beliefs share the same view. For example, the Egyptian version said that it all began with the first stirring of the High God in the primeval waters. The world first appeared as an infinite expanse of darkness and directionless waters. However, in the eerie vastness, God Atum existed and created other Gods and Goddesses before he established order in what used to be a chaotic world. Then, they created human beings.

The Babylonians also believed that in the beginning there existed a vast void of nothingness, and earth had not yet been formed. In this vast emptiness were two primordial Gods whose union gave birth to a new crop of lesser Gods. But everything was still chaotic and disordered. Irked by the noise of the lesser Gods in the streets, one of the Higher Gods set out to destroy them. But the plan was thwarted and it failed. He was the one killed; his body was dismembered, half became the sky, while the other half was used to create human beings, plants, and animals, including all the creatures that occupy the land. From the blood of the angry God, the Cosmos emerged.

The Roman poet Publius Naso or Ovid echoed this earlier description of creation:

Before the creation of the earth and ocean and sky,

Alike was the face of nature in all her course.

One indistinct chaos:  rough, disorderly mass

Of inharmonious atoms confusedly mixed

And lacking in all but lifeless and motionless weight.

As yet to luminous sun enlightened the world.

In the Chinese creation story, the universe began as a slimy, muddy soup without any structure. However, on this cloudy soup was a black egg where Pangu, a hairy giant with two horns and two tusks, lives. Marking the beginning of creation was an exquisite pattern of beauty and perfect balance, with an equal amount of darkness and light. But Pangu escaped from the egg, breaking the egg into two. One-half of the eggshell turned into the sky, represented in the yang symbol, while the bottom half became the earth, representing the yin symbol. As Pangu grew taller, he pushed the sky up. When he escaped from the shell, Pangu’s body fell to earth and his breath turned into the wind and clouds, his eyes the sun and the moon, his limbs and head turned into the mountains, his muscles into the fertile land, his thick facial hair the stars and galaxies, and his voice became the thunder.

The Sumerians had another version. As narrated in their 12 tablets, there were three main deities, namely, Anu (the Sky father), Enlil (the Earth Wind God), and Enki (the God of Water, Knowledge, and Mischief). They came from a far, far away planet called Nibiru (the interior of heaven), and during their rendezvous around our Solar System, one of its moons got entangled with Tiamat, the original Earth. The intense collision gave birth to Planet Earth and its moon. However, it was Ninhursag, the Mother Goddess, who created the first human being called Adamu. Together with Enki, they proceeded to mass-produce males and females to populate the entire world with Adam and Eve as their progenitors.

Ancient Greece believed in a world that was in the beginning empty but inhabited by a celestial being known as Nyx, who was known as the Deity of Darkness. Nyx laid a golden egg that gave birth to the Deity of Love, Eros. When the egg was hatched, it became the sky and the earth called Gaia, who was acclaimed as the Goddess of the Earth. However, it was Zeus who was the most prominent among the Gods. He was the King of the Olympians and he commanded Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus to go down to earth and create the first humans and animals.

The Mayan creation legend also spoke of the beginning of time as a vast fabric of nothingness, without any form, structure, and order. Two Gods, namely, Tepeu (the Maker) and Gucumatz (the Feathered Spirit), combined their thoughts to create the universe. Then, they created Man out of maize dough. To make the world habitable, they created the sun, moons, stars, and animals.

The creation stories of the Hindus are diverse and unique. The main theme overarching their stories is the belief in creation as a cyclical process of birth, death, and rebirth. In the beginning was a mighty cobra living in the vast cosmic ocean. On its hands laid the sleeping Vishnu, the creator God, out of whose belly emerged the sacred lotus, a four-headed Brahma and Lord of Speech.

Lord Brahma created the heavens, the sky, and the earth, while Vishnu created the plants and animals of all shapes and sizes. Brahma, the second God, created the first human beings on earth. The third God, Lord Shiva, was responsible for the periodic destruction of the universe so that it could be born again.

Dolores Canon, a past-life regressive therapist and a UFO investigator, gives an account of creation as an act of extraterrestrial beings. Through her personal experiences with aliens and UFO encounters she described how the aliens created the Cosmos and all its creatures. The aliens concocted several mixtures to determine what kind of life was suitable on Earth. They gathered all the needed ingredients from other planets and galaxies in the universe and cultivated them in their laboratories to determine the kind of life that would successfully develop on Planet Earth.

The aliens produced single-celled organisms as seeds that were expected to evolve into complex forms and structures. They distributed these seeds of life in the Earth’s oceans, rivers, land, atmosphere, volcanic vents, and underneath the grounds. Then, they left.

Creation was not done through evolution because the aliens believed it would have taken them eons before they could achieve what they have done through laboratory experiments. Everything was created in the laboratories. Plants and animals were tested first to ensure that they were useful, suited, and nutritious to the physiological, biological, mental, and psychic needs of the earthlings. In the case of humans, they chose the apes because they have feet, hands, ears, nose, mouth, and brains which, they believed, are needed for living creatures to survive, prosper, and populate the universe. There were no missing links because everything was not created through natural selection and random mutation.

When everything stabilized, the aliens came back to Earth to teach the first humans how to build fire, till the fields, plant edible crops, and domesticate animals to ensure their continued nourishment and sustenance. They taught primitive earthlings how to create artificial intelligence with free will so that these machines could take over the tedious, taxing, and repetitive human tasks.

However strange and gruesome the creation accounts might be, we cannot ignore them. They already form essential parts of our entire history that today’s major world religions still espouse. Their main beliefs revolve around their adherence to the role of a metaphysical God as the Creator of the Universe out of nothing.

The View of Science on Creation

In the view of science, creation started in the world of atoms. Atoms were first introduced by the Greek philosophers Leucippus and his disciple Democritus (born around 450 B.C.) who gave a revolutionary twist that became the foundation of the creation story of quantum physics. These two ancient philosophers introduced the idea of atom and void. They viewed the atom as the smallest indivisible unit and the primordial building block of the Cosmos, arguing that in the beginning there was only the atom and void and that these two elements were inseparable. For them, the void simply means the space in which the atom moves. As Leucippus explained:

The worlds are formed when atoms fall into the void and are entangled with one another, and from their motion, as they increase in bulk, arises the substance of the stars. Creation is simply a necessary consequence of the contact and merger of atoms in the void, although may have been brought about by sheer luck and chance.

At first, simple elements were produced but as coalescence became more and more intense, simplicity gave way to complexity and diversity. What was one in the beginning became diverse. The Roman poet Lucretius utilized the alphabet as a metaphor to explain how the combination and permutation of only 26 letters in the English language is able to produce volumes of literature in many libraries across the globe.

Philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1670) also echoed this ancient belief of oneness at the level of the monads, a term that is equivalent to the Greek conception of atoms. In his words:

Reality can be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another … I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine reality … I maintain also that substances, whether material or immaterial … cannot be conceived in their bare essence without any activity, activity being of the essence of substance in general.

Since there were no physical evidences to prove their theories, they were simply ignored for more than two thousand years. In the 21^st century, more theories about the origin and nature of creation began to unveil. Quantum physics discovered that in the beginning was a singularity, described as a point of infinite density and a vacuum where time, space, matter, and gravity could have been hiding within, dormant but not inactive, inert, and passive because they contain an infinite amount of fluctuating energy, technically termed vacuum fluctuation. This energy was so immense that it had the potential to explode into a Big Bang. Its compact density was so immense that the ensuing explosion contributed to the creation of big structures like the planets, stars, galaxies, and dark holes in the vast Cosmos.

Unlike religion, quantum physics views the primal singularity as something physical. From this singularity, everything came into being and existence 13.7 billion years ago. At first, it gave existence to the billions and trillions of subatomic particles that were responsible for the appearance of the primal atoms and, eventually, all the huge forms and structures we see today. The new physics saw no need for an external force, much less a divine or spiritual entity, to trigger a cosmic eruption because the Cosmos is self-propelling, self-creating, and self-generating.

With the construction of high-density particle accelerators, it became possible for atoms to be cut and smashed into pieces. The results revealed that an atom is so tiny measuring only less than two billionths of an inch in diameter, equivalent to a dot or pin of a needle. Moreover, it is 99.00% empty space. Nevertheless, it houses hundreds, even thousands, of sub-particles. The first to be discovered were the electrons, protons, and neutrons. When atoms combined with other atoms, they formed molecules and produced lighter elements like hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, then heavier elements that now appear in the famous Periodic Table of Chemical Elements.

What interested quantum physicists most is the existence of opposites. Physicists found that for every particle, there exists an anti-particle, where one is positive, the other negative. Thus, for every atom, there exists an anti-atom, for every electron, an anti-electron, and so on down the line. What is baffling is that when a negatively charged electron and a positively charged anti-electron are released on one end of the collider, they annihilate each other when they meet at the opposite end. Scientists began to wonder how creation was made possible at all.

Astrophysicists theorized that the number of normal particles outnumbers their twin opposites, in a ratio of one particle more for every billion of anti-particles. They contended that the number might be too small but, according to them, one extra normal atom is just enough to create the gigantic forms and structures we see today. However, it took more than 300,000 years for the electrons to merge with protons and neutrons to give birth to the primal atoms. It took another 400 million years for the first stars to appear and one billion years for the early galaxies to emerge. Our Planet Earth emerged only 3.7 billion years after the Big Bang.

These quantum discoveries only open up a lot of more perplexing questions. What created all these atomic particles? How were they created? How did the quarks and leptons create the first primal atoms? How did the primal atoms create the stars and galaxies, including our Solar System? What led these atomic particles to merge and produce a more complex structure as the universe? How did atoms and their sub-particles manage to create diverse forms and structures? Was it through chance, accidents, or luck? Or, through the Darwinian view of natural selection and random mutation?

Until today, scientists still ponder on these concerns but coming up always empty-handed.

Another revolutionary idea that contributes to the theory of creation is the dual nature of atoms and their sub-particles. As physicists dug deeper into the quantum world, they found that particles can behave both as a solid mass and as a wave. If a particle, like an electron, notices the presence of an observer, its wave nature collapses and immediately presents itself to the observer as a solid mass.

What happens is that the wave nature of the electron freezes in its physical form, allowing the observer to investigate and study it. Meanwhile, the original wave nature of the electron goes its own way journeying in another dimension of existence. For as long as the observer is present, the electron remains in its physical state. But as soon as the electron becomes aware that the observer stops its investigation, it goes back to its original wave state, hidden and undetectable to the observer. Technically, quantum physicists call this the ‘observer effect’.

The observer effect is also demonstrated in Erwin Schrödinger’s hypothetical cat experiment. A cat is placed inside a sealed box, containing a vial of poison, a radioactive atom, and a Geiger counter. If the Geiger counter detects radiation, the poison is released. According to Schrödinger, the observer watching outside has no way of knowing about the conditions of the cat inside the box. Until the box is opened and the cat’s condition is known, the cat is said to exist in a state of superposition, where the cat is considered both dead and alive simultaneously.

From the eyes of a distant individual watching the event, both the cat and the observer are in a quantum state or in a state of suspended animation. The observer can only advance some conjectures. However, in quantum physics, speculations are inadmissible because they are subjective opinions and are too weak and shaky to form a solid foundation for a strong theory.

Quantum physicists observed more weird things and happenings in the atomic realm. At its most fundamental level, they observed that an electron can jump to a higher state when it receives additional energy from the outside. It can also go down to any given state when it gives off its surplus energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation. This phenomenon is known as “quantum leap” because they leave no traces in between states. As Columbia Physicist I. I. Rabbi remarked (quoted in Cynthia Sue Larson, 2013): 

The atom is in one state and moves to another, and you can’t picture what is in between, so you call this a quantum jump. In quantum mechanics, you don’t ask what’s the intermediate state because there ain’t no intermediate state. It passes from one to the other in God’s mysterious way.

Basil F. Hiley and Peat David (2012), writing in memory of David Bohm, agreed that we do not know what precisely happens to the subatomic particles in between leaps because, in some mysterious ways, they could not find any footprints in between. The electron simply disappears from one state of orbit and appears in another station instantly regardless of distance.

Albert Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen (known by their acronym EPR) performed thought experiments to further explain this weird phenomenon. However, the results consistently defied the classical view of cause and effect. It even violated the special relativity theory of Einstein that no material particles can travel close to or faster than the speed of light. In the deterministic and causal world of classical physics, the notion of quantum leap is simply ridiculous. Einstein labeled quantum leap as “spooky.” In his words: “I cannot seriously believe in [quantum theory] because … physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.” 

Meanwhile, F. Hund introduced the concept of quantum tunneling, also known as “barrier penetration,” in 1927. It is a concept used to express the ability of particles to barrel or tunnel through any barrier and appear on the other side, without changing or destroying the original form of the barrier. Examples of these particles are neutrinos, axions, photinos, and gravitinos, which are known as “high-density particles.” They are so subtle that they can penetrate even a block of solid lead light-years thick.

The concept of quantum tunneling in layman’s terms is likened to a man rolling a rock uphill and, upon reaching the top, sliding it downhill to the other side of the hill. In conventional physics, this is the only way and, perhaps, the shortest way to bring the rock to the other side. Another alternative would be to go around the bend until the rock reaches the other side of the hill. However, quantum physics offers another alternative.

The man can push the rock through the thickly forested mountain without destroying or demolishing the shape or curvature of the mountain. The solid rock can pass and tunnel through the mountain as if entering a cave or tunnel, and exit on the other side of the hill. Paul Davies and John Gribbin (1992:207) describe this concept of tunneling more succinctly as follows:  

Tunneling is the quantum mechanical process by which a particle can penetrate a classically forbidden region of space (for example, passing from two separate points A and B without passing through intermediate points). The phenomenon is so named because the particle, traveling from A to B, creates a sort of "tunnel" for itself, bypassing the usual route.

Researchers maintain that this tunneling phenomenon in the world of small things is also happening in the world of big things. Larson cites some concrete human experiences:

Possibly you noticed a sock or two missing after you washed it, somewhere between the washing machine and the drying machine, most inexplicably leaving you one or more lone socks with no mates … What’s most curious is when the socks simply seem to vanish altogether, and all other possibilities have been investigated.

Perhaps you’ve had an experience where you are absolutely sure that you set down your wallet or keys in a certain place, only to return and not be able to find them there. You then search around the place a bit more unsuccessfully, and return again to that same place where you first looked … and there they are.

Another subatomic concept is quantum teleportation, which is quite similar to quantum tunneling except that they differ in the mechanics of transformation. Teleportation at the quantum level is described as the transfer of an electron from one locality to another without passing through the space in between. William J. Chevalier (2011) described it as “the process of making a subatomic particle’s physical state vanish from one place and appear in another location.” It is the same principle portrayed in the TV series Star Trek, where an individual is beamed from one enclosed glass chamber into another chamber located elsewhere in space.

The process involves dematerializing one particle at a given point in space and reconstructing it in another location, carrying the same information it had before the reconfiguration. Scientists demonstrated this with a single photon, later extending it to other material particles like atoms and ions. Several other independent experiments have been performed in many laboratories across the globe proving that quantum teleportation is indeed real. Scientists have teleported quantum bits through more than a mile-long fiber-optic wire and the experiments showed that teleportation works.

Another paradox discovered in the quantum world is quantum entanglement, which describes two or more intimately connected particles responding to each other’s vibration simultaneously when an act of measurement is done on one of them. The response occurs regardless of their distance and whether or not the two particles are in the line of sight with each other. According to this view, when an observer makes a measurement of a particle, an effect on the nature and behavior of another particle located in another region in space occurs, even if they are millions of light years away. This also demonstrates that particles are just one whole web of strings connected to each other as an “unbroken wholeness.”

Moreover, scientists found that the information the particles carry also travels with the particles both forward and backward. Fred Alan Wolf (1981:74, 174) even contends that travel and communication become meaningless concepts because the response is instantaneous: 

Information travels instantaneously, backwards and forwards, in circular motion. In fact, information does not travel at all; there is no need for communication, since everything is already laid down. … The wave spreads throughout the universe faster than light, travelling both backwards and forwards in time.

The exchange is so fast and instantaneous that entangled particles and the information they carry travel at superluminal velocities or speeds faster than that of light. According to Paul Davies: “It is as if the two particles engage in a conspiracy to cooperate when measurements are performed on them interdependently.”

Empirical findings discovered in 2012 at the CERN laboratory confirming that subatomic particles can indeed travel close, near, or faster than the speed of light. What they found out is that electrons whirl about the nucleus billions of times in one second. Because of their nature, size, and speed, they are very illusive, endlessly moving from one region of space and time to another depending on whether they are able to release their surplus energy or absorb additional energy from the outside. Due to the short distance allowed by their confinement, electrons move with an estimated velocity of 600 miles per second. Neutrons and protons travel about 40,000 miles per second.

Neutrons released at the Swiss laboratory arrived at the Italian site “some 60 billionths of a second faster than if they have been traveling at the speed of light” (John Luckey, 2015).  The latest recorded distance is 143 km. or 89 miles. At the atomic level, particles like neutrinos, tachyons, and photos travel at light speed, and even faster, that it is almost impossible to locate them at any moment in time. They can even appear and disappear at will. Quantum physicists maintain that these tiny particles journey to another dimension beyond our physical realm, and are able to come back anytime opportunities come.

This is quite hard to swallow. Quantum entanglement violates the classical and relativistic laws that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. However, this is what is happening in the quantum world and this is how quantum physics would like us to view the macroscopic world also. Mind-boggling as they might seem to appear, two individuals who are strongly entangled with each other, can also communicate with each other simultaneously regardless of time and distance. As Prince Louis de Broglie (1970) said:

After long reflection in solitude and meditation, I suddenly had the idea, during the year 1923, that the discovery made by Einstein in 1905 should be generalized by extending it to all material particles...

Our history demonstrates that we can do strange paranormal events and travel at lightspeed to the metaphysical and spiritual realm, even while we are deeply rooted on the ground. How else can we explain saints, sages, mystics, and yogis who have been seen in other parts of the world without leaving their physical bodies and without interrupting the things they are doing?

Fred Alan Wolf has expressed some reservations about this notion of quantum entanglement because it is closing in on the psychic realm. If, indeed, this is it, then, particles may be following orders that are outside the realm of conventional physics. In his words (1981:201-202): “Real particles may exist, but they follow very strange orders. These orders border on what we now call psychic phenomenon.” But Wolf did not deny the existence of the psychic realm.

Moreover, physicists discovered that quantum particles exhibit some metaphysical and spiritual characteristics because they have no more mass, size, or weight. This finding suggests that science and spirituality are also entangled with each other. Ervin Laszlo exclaimed that today, we can believe in science and have a spiritual view of the world. Therefore, entering the world of atoms is entering into a metaphysical and spiritual world because as Werner Heisenberg observed: “Elementary particles are no longer real in the same sense as objects of daily life, trees of stones."

What explains the occurrence of all these quantum paradoxes is the discovery that everything is energy. We are energy. Our consciousness, thoughts, emotions, and behavior are energy. Our essence and being is energy. Plants, animals, stones, and rivers are energy. Our home, car, chair, table, furniture, utensils, and even what we put on in our body are energy. Each of these forms of energy exhibits its own distinct level of frequency, with some lower, and others higher. The lower the intensity and speed of the energy, the more solid, dense, and rough the particle becomes. Conversely, the higher the intensity and speed, the more subtle and massless the quantum particle becomes.

Moreover, energy is all around us. It passes through us and sometimes stays with us, thereby increasing or decreasing our energy level. We can be entering into other’s energy and may perhaps get entangled with them. But many times, we are unconscious of this energy exchange and dynamics. However, we can neither escape nor can we ignore this. Our energy can affect others in the same manner that other’s energy can affect us.

There is no difference between us and all the other living creatures, except in the form and level of frequency. The Primal Source of Energy gives off its power and attributes such that the manifested forms also inherit all its power and attributes, albeit in differing degrees and levels.

Quantum physicists refer to this Primal Source of Energy as the Unmanifested, Uncreated, Unborn, Undying, making it eternal, immortal, omniscient, omnipresent, and almighty, These quantum attributes parallel the ascriptions given to the nature of God in many religious beliefs. Lao Tsu’s description of essence reflects the picture inside the world of atoms:

One of deep virtue cherishes the subtle essence of the universe. The subtle essence of the universe is elusive and evasive, it unveils itself as images and forms. Evasive and elusive, it discloses itself as indefinable substance. Shadowy and indistinct, it reveals itself as impalpable subtle essence. This essence is so subtle, and yet so real.”

One intriguing issue that baffles scientists is the force that regulates the behavior of the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. What triggers the planets in our Solar System to spin on their axis and at the same time rotate around the Sun? Scientists have identified four natural forces, namely, gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force.

Newton was the first to develop a theory of gravity. He explained it simply as a force set between two separate objects wherein smaller objects are pulled down by the force of higher objects, as is the case of an apple falling from the tree down to the ground:

Just as the system of the sun, planets and comets is put in motion by the forces of gravity, and its parts persist in their motions, so the smaller systems of bodies also seem to be set in motion by other forces and their particles to be variously moved in relation to each other and, especially, by the electric force.

And thus Nature will be very conformable to herself and very simple, performing all the great Motions of the heavenly Bodies by the Attraction of Gravity which intercedes those Bodies, and almost all the small bodies of their Particles by some other attractive and repelling Powers which intercede the Particles.

However, in his theory of relativity, Einstein discovered that Newton did not consider the context in which the apple tree and the ground operate, in particular, the fabric of space on which objects move around and interact with each other. Einstein noticed that it is really the curvature of space that directs the movements of objects. This bent shape of space is created because of the weight of massive objects like planets, stars, and black holes that hang on it, just like the curvature created on a mattress when a heavy object is placed on top of it.

According to Einstein, the space curvature resulting from the object’s weight, size, and mass directs the gravitational movement of smaller objects caught in it. Smaller objects that are caught in the space curvature move in a circular fashion following the bent shape of space. Time represents the duration the incoming objects move from their original position to where the curve leads them. In this way, Einstein united space, time, and gravity.

How about the forces that regulate the behavior of atoms and their sub-particles?

At the highest atomic level, the electromagnetic force holds the atoms and the molecules together. At the lower level, it binds the negatively charged electron to keep itself in orbit around the positively charged nucleus. In cases where there is more than one electron orbiting an atom, the electromagnetic force prevents the electrons from colliding with each other.

But as one goes down to the lower level, electromagnetism can no longer hold the protons and neutrons together. Another force, known as the strong nuclear force, comes into play. However, according to Gamow, the strong nuclear force is not purely electrical since the neutron does not carry any electric charge.  At the lowest level is the weak nuclear force, so called because it is not strong enough to hold the nucleus together and the interactions of leptons.

The quantum world has opened up new vistas and horizons that are spiritual and divine, a world that transcends the boundaries of time, space, and matter. Energy is the ultimate source of creation whose immense force triggered the eruption of the singularity. The metaphysical-physical dichotomy between religion and science remains the only contention that obstructs both science and religion from coming up with a common theory of creation.

We Continue the Act of Creation

Paul J. Dejillas, Ph.D.

April 13, 2022

Creation is handed down to us by our Creator. We continue God’s creation. God gave us the power, talent, and expertise to be Its co-creators or partners in creation. We owe to our Lord God Almighty the responsibility to protect the integrity of Its creation.