Essays in Unitarian Theology by Kenneth Twinn Lindsey - General ...

ESSAYS IN UNITARIAN THEOLOGY IMAGES OF GOD 47
should be tempted to answer in human terms. To ask
why is to seek for a purpose, a motive, a goal; it
suggests desire and will, and it is hardly legitimate to
apply such terms of personal motivation to the nonhuman
world.
We will ask the simpler questions. How has it
come to be what it is? How does it work? How does
it change or develop from minute to minute and from
epoch To epoch? *~hese questions are still difficult
enough in all conscience. But answers to them are
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mounting generation by generation. The universe,
as at present * understood, is described as a system of
energy taking different forms. Expressed predominantly
as intense radiation, it produces the rudiments
of atoms diffused as rarefied gas and coalescing into
giant swarms of protogalaxies. Expressed as electrostatic
attraction and repulsion, it produces atoms and
colonies of atoms making the stuff of the stars within
giant galaxies. Expressed as orbital momentum and
attraction of mass upon mass, it produces the fall-in or
the swelling out of stars, the sweeping up of stray matter,
producing suns and planets and maintaining the
dynamic balance of well-integrated sys tems. Expressed
as high molecular binding, synthesis and metabolism,
it produces life as we know it on earth, and
possibly other forms elsewhere in the starry worlds.
Expressed as electro-chemical activity within a highly
complex nervous sys tern, it yields mental awareness
and the higher activities of human ability.
These forms of energy. are interlocking and interchangeable;
we have to learn both the nature and
direction of the interchanges before we can begin to
understand such order and process as we detect in the
~niverse. When we have done that as adequately as
we are in a position to say that the part of the
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universe now exhibited to us is the consequence of
prior arrangements and transformations of energy.
Within the context of this descriptive analysis we
may then speak of " creation " either as the inherent
constantly changing activity, the continuous process
by which conditions at any given time are transformed
into conditions at the next, or else as the total sequence
of prior events which has led to the present situation.
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What we cannot say is that creation " is the pro-
duction of something out of nothing. One form of
energy expression, though undoubtedly a novel emer-
gent occasion, is the resultant of prior forms. There
is no conceivable first term in this infinite series of
energy exchanges, nor any energyless void out of which
forms appear. No First Cause is required, no Creator.
If, for psychological or theological reasons, we still
need the notion of a first term, being or maker, then
the infinite series of connected and successive energy
exchanges can stand for it. That which lies behind
and prior to our present observable universe and upon
which the present moment or epoch depends is another
universe, and so on ad infinitum. What the universe
is at any moment arises out of this infinite nexus.
Revised speculation in cosmology encouraged by
astronomers . and as trophysicis ts has possibly raised the
hope that the scriptural and Augustinian doctrine of
creation out of nothing can be reinstated. Inferences
from the calculated rate of recession of the farthest
galaxies suggest a definite time, about 3,400 million
years ago, when all the energy of the universe was
concentrated into a volume only thirty times as large
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