In the Beginning

by Isaac Asimov

  This, too, fits the scientific view, in a way, for the original cloud of dust and gas out of which the solar system was formed (or the larger clouds out of which the galaxies were formed) was dark.

  11. The word “was” is printed in italics in the King James Version. This does not have the usual indication of emphasis that italics often do.

  In endeavoring to translate each Hebrew word of the original Bible into English, there are occasions when additional English words had to be added to make sense. Thus the Hebrew words, literally translated, would be “and darkness upon the face of the deep.” In English “was” has to be added, and it is italicized to indicate that it does not stand for any word in the original.

  Later English translations of the Bible did not display the exaggerated respect for the literal Hebrew words and showed no embarrassment at having to add words to make English sense. In this book, therefore, the italicizations of the King James Version will be ignored.

  12. Another symbol of Chaos is “the deep”; that is, the ocean. Compared to the dry land surface upon which human beings live, the ocean is a random tumble of matter, always moving and heaving and, in the course of a storm, raging with a power incomparably greater than anything human beings could control.

  The picture of the Universe at its beginning is as of something that is as chaotic as the sea, a concept the Biblical writers obtained from the Babylonians.

  The first chapter of Genesis is taken from the P-document and did not appear in its present form until after the Babylonian captivity. It seems to have been adapted by the priestly leaders of the Jews (the “P” of “P-document” stands for “priest”) from the Babylonian myth of creation, which was itself a modification of an earlier Sumerian one.

  In the Babylonian myth, the forces of Chaos were represented by Tiamat, as wild, as lawless, as powerful as the sea. The gods who represent the forces of order quail before her, but finally Marduk, the chief god of the Babylonian pantheon, dares to oppose her. Marduk overcomes and slays Tiamat in a vast, cosmic struggle. Then, out of the remains of Tiamat, Marduk fashioned the orderly Universe.

  “The deep” is the English translation of the Hebrew word tehom, and it is possible that this is related to the word “Tiamat.” God, however, is not pictured here as engaged in single combat with the “deep,” wresting order from it by force of arms. The writers of the P-document were too sophisticated for that. In their view, God was the ruler of the Universe, and his word and will were sufficient. There was nothing, not even Chaos, that could do anything but obey.

  Nevertheless, there are verses elsewhere in the Bible that seem to hark back to an older view of single combat between the God of order and the dragon of Chaos, out of which combat the Universe was created. Thus, we have:

  “Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou brakest the heads of Leviathan in pieces…”(Psalm 74:13-14)

  “Awake, awake, put on strength. O arm of the Lord; awake, as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab and wounded the dragon?” (Isaiah 51:9)

  It is likely, of course, that the references here are to Egypt and to the parting of the Red Sea, but even if that is so, the choice of words makes it sound like a physical combat with a dragon, and that is an irresistible reminder of the Babylonian tale of Marduk and Tiamat.

  If we seek for the dragon of Chaos in the scientific view of the origin of the Universe, we might find an analogy in the waste of swirling dust and gas out of which the solar system formed, or the far larger one out of which the Galaxy formed. Those whirls of dust and gas were an even better representation of Chaos, perhaps, than is the sea.

  13. The word “spirit” is the translation of the Hebrew word ruakh, which means “breath.” It seems a great stretch from the prosaic “breath” to the mysterious and transcendent “spirit,” but it seems so only because we have invested “spirit” with mystery and transcendence it perhaps doesn’t deserve. It is from the Latin spiritus, which means “a breath,” and we find it as such in the English “respiration.”

  The phrase “Spirit of God” is therefore “the breath of God.” God is viewed by the writers of the P-document as the most immaterial thing with which they are acquainted—invisible, impalpable air. (In the scientific view, air is as material as water, soil, or metal.) The breath of God—and wind—blew over the waters, and that is all that is left, in this account, of the cosmic battle between the principles of Order and Chaos.

  3 And God said, 14 Let there be light;15 and there was light.

  14. God speaks for the first time. Having begun with Chaos, he now begins to impose Order.

  15. If we were writing the Bible today, we would enclose God’s first remark in quotation marks, thus, “Let there be light.” and this is indeed done in contemporary translations such as the Revised Standard Version. At the time the King James Version was prepared, however, quotation marks had not yet come into use, and they have been omitted from all later editions of that version.

  Nor can I bring myself to insert quotation marks with the same careless shrug with which I omit the italicizations. Quotation marks would somehow alter the flavor of a book which (together with Shakespeare) represents the supreme achievement of the English language, and this I am not willing to do.

  This command, by the way, represents a significant departure from the Babylonian myth of Creation. In the Babylonian myth, Tiamat lies enveloped in darkness, and from the gods, who approach her and must somehow overcome her, there emanates light. Light is an attribute of the gods.

  The writers of the P-document, however, will have no aspect of Order coexistent with God—not even light, the quintessential symbol of Order as darkness is the symbol of Chaos. Even light must be created or it cannot exist, and God creates it.

  16. There are two places in the scientific view of the beginning of things as they now are where the command “Let there be light” might seem to have an application.

  First, consider the formless, chaotic mass of dust and gas slowly collapsing on the way to the formation of the solar system. As the mass collapses inward, its energy of motion is converted into heat, and the center of the whole, where the gathering matter is densest, grows hotter and hotter. The temperature rises into the thousands of degrees and, eventually, into the millions of degrees.

  As the heat at the center rises, the atoms of which the matter is composed move more and more quickly and smash into each other in random collisions with greater and greater force. The outer shells of electrons boil off and are smashed off. The bare nuclei at the centers of the atoms smash into each other without being impeded by intervening electrons and fuse with each other into more complex nuclei. This “nuclear fusion” produces a great deal of energy that is in part, converted into electromagnetic radiation that streams out from the central regions of the cloud, which has now condensed into the sun. The electromagnetic radiation streaming out from the sun in all directions, we can detect, in part, as light.

  In short, as the cloud condenses to form the sun, there comes a point when the sun ignites with a central nuclear fire and begins to shine. At that point, the sun “turns on,” perhaps quite rapidly, and it is as though there were the command of “Let there be light.”

  Secondly, there is an earlier and an even more dramatic point at which we might view the command as having been given.

  The solar system was formed nearly five billion years ago and the Galaxy, of which it forms part, billions of years before that. The Galaxy, however, is only one vast conglomeration of stars among many others like itself. There may be, in the Universe, as many as a hundred billion different galaxies, each containing many billions (or, in some cases, trillions) of stars.

  In the 1920s, it was discovered that these galaxies exist in clusters that are receding from each other. It was found to be consistent with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (advanced in 1916) that the Universe was steadily expanding.


  This means that, in the future, the Universe will be larger than it is now and that the matter within it will be spread out more thinly. It also means that, in the past, the Universe was smaller than it is now and that the matter within it was less spread out.

  In fact, if we look far enough back in time, we can imagine a period when all the matter in the Universe was clumped together into a single body. The first to propose this was the Belgian astronomer (and Catholic priest) Georges Lemaitre in 1927. Calling the single body that existed at the beginning “the cosmic egg,” he suggested that its explosion led to the formation of the Universe as we now know it and that the galactic clusters recede from each other as part of the effect of that long-ago explosion.

  Since Lemaitre’s time, astronomers have done their best to figure out what the cosmic egg was like and what the stages of its explosion were like.

  If we imagine the Universe running backward in time, then we see all the galaxies coming together, and the effect is just that of the matter in a cloud of dust and gas coming together. The center grows hot.

  Just as the sun grew hot as it formed forward in time, so the cosmic egg must grow hot as it forms backward in time. The heat of the sun, which resulted from the contraction of just one star’s worth of matter, is nothing at all compared to the heat of the cosmic egg formed from the contraction of the matter making up a billion trillion stars.

  The cosmic egg was therefore inconceivably hot.

  Suppose we begin with this super-hot cosmic egg and imagine time flowing forward again. The cosmic egg explodes in the largest conceivable explosion (the “big bang”), and its fragments are at first entirely too hot for matter, as we know it, to exist. Initially, the products formed in the explosion are energy. In tiny fractions of a second, the temperature dropped precipitously, and the Universe became cool enough to form certain fundamental particles of matter. Today, however, the Universe is too cool to allow these particles to exist.

  A full second after the big bang, the temperature of the Universe had dropped to ten billion degrees, about what it is at the center of the largest stars, and the ordinary subatomic particles we know today came into existence. Later, ordinary atoms formed.

  It was, however, not until about a million years after the big bang, by which time the temperature of the Universe had dropped to five thousand degrees (that of the surface of the sun), that matter came to predominate in the Universe. Until then, it was energy that predominated.

  (By now, fifteen billion years later, the temperature of the Universe has dropped to an average of three degrees above absolute zero, though, obviously, there remain hot spots.)

  It is rather dramatic to imagine that “Let there be light” marked the big bang and the initial period of energy-dominance. Light, after all, is a form of energy.

  In fact, we might paraphrase the first three verses of Genesis as follows to make them fit the scientific view of the beginning of the Universe:

  “To begin with, fifteen billion years ago, the Universe consisted of a structureless cosmic egg which exploded in a vast outpouring of energy.”

  There are some points that must be made, though. The cosmic egg may be structureless (as far as we know), but it apparently represented a very orderly conglomeration of matter. Its explosion represented a vast shift in the direction of disorder, and ever since, the amount of disorder in the Universe has been increasing. (Scientists have invented the term “entropy,” which, among other things, is a measure of the amount of disorder in a system.)

  Within the vast shift toward disorder involved in the big bang and the expansion of the Universe, it is possible for there to be local shifts in the direction of order, so that the galaxies can form and within them individual stars, including our sun. Earth can form along with the sun, and on Earth there can be a growth of complexity and order to form life and for that life to evolve.

  Nevertheless, on the whole, the Universe moves, with time, from order to disorder, from low entropy to high entropy. It is possible that in the final end of the Universe, the situation will be one of maximum entropy, or complete chaos. In short, the Universe is moving from Cosmos to Chaos, from Order to Disorder, in the reverse direction of that imagined by the various mythological accounts of the Creation—including the Biblical account.

  The existence of the cosmic egg is, however, itself something of an anomaly. If the general movement of the Universe is from order to disorder, how did the order (which presumably existed in the cosmic egg) originate? Where did it come from?

  It is tempting to suppose that we can expand on the Biblical account for the answer. The Spirit of God, moving upon the face of the deep (Chaos), collected all the matter of the Universe into an ultimately compressed cosmic egg (Cosmos) and then allowed it to explode into energy (“Let there be light”), cool down into matter and the Universe as we know it, and then run downhill according to the laws of nature (presumably also designed by God) until it is Chaos again.

  There is, however, no scientific evidence for that.

  Nor is there any scientific evidence for any other form of creation for the cosmic egg.

  If we study the distant galaxies, we are, in effect, studying the distant past, for the light of those galaxies took billions of years to reach us. However, even the farthest object we can detect existed after the big bang, and there seems to be no way of penetrating to a time before the big bang.

  Yet there may be a way through what seems an absolute barrier to knowledge.

  For instance, it may be that the Universe will not expand forever. It is expanding against the pull of its own gravitational field, which is constantly sapping the rate of expansion. It may be, then, that eventually the expansion will slow to a complete halt and that the Universe will make a slow turnabout and begin to contract again.

  If so, it may be that the Universe, which is now winding down to chaos as it expands, will begin to wind up again as it contracts and will eventually form a new cosmic egg. Naturally, this should happen over and over again, and we should have an “oscillating Universe.” In this case, there is no true beginning and no true ending; the Universe exists forever, with no problem as to where the infinite number of cosmic eggs came from or where the order came from.

  Yet in order for the Universe to end its expansion, its gravitational field must be intense enough to bring about that end. The intensity of the Universe’s gravitational field depends on the average density of matter in the Universe, and as nearly as scientists can now make out, the average density of the Universe is only about one one-hundredth of what it should be to enforce a stop in the expansion.

  The evidence to that effect is not yet completely conclusive, and I have a hunch that the “missing mass” required to raise the density to the proper figure will yet be found and that the Universe will yet be discovered to oscillate. Experiments have been performed which seem to show that certain particles, called neutrinos, have a tiny mass. There are so many neutrinos in the Universe, however, that if the conclusions are correct, they may supply sufficient mass to bring about a contraction, and oscillation.

  4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided 17 the light from the darkness.

  17. Light and darkness seem here to be viewed as opposite and, perhaps, equal phenomena that can be divided (that is, separated), each into its own domain.

  This is a natural point of view for early man, who could not help but observe the alternation of day and night. It had to seem to people at the start that light ruled during the day and darkness during the night and that, on the whole, the time was divided equally between them.

  This alternation and this equal division may have helped give rise to the thought that the Universe was a battlefield between the principle of Light and principle of Darkness, and that had, perhaps, existed from the beginning and were equally powerful.

  Light would be a symbolic representation of a god that reduces Chaos to Cosmos, while darkness is an anti-God that strives to turn Cosmos back in
to Chaos. (There is somehow a whisper of the Oscillating Universe here, where the Universe is formed out of a cosmic egg and then returns to a cosmic egg over and over. We might therefore imagine, if we had a very good imagination, that God’s division of light from darkness marked the establishment of a period of expansion of the Universe and a period of contraction.)

  The ancient Iranians worked out this notion of the battle between light and darkness in considerable detail. To them, the principle of light and good was Ahura-mazda, while the principle of darkness and evil was Ahriman. Both had an eternal and indestructible existence, and between them the Universe was created as a battlefield. The fight between them (and between immense armies of subordinate beingsangels and demonson both sides, in which even human beings took part by the devotion of each to good or to evil) forever continues, though generally (perhaps out of wishful thinking) the mythologists assume that good is assured the final victory.

  Eventually, when the Jews spent several centuries as part of the Persian Empire, this “dualism” entered their system of thought, and Satan arose as the equivalent of Ahriman, as the “anti-God” trying to negate the Creation.

  The P-document, however, was put into writing during the Babylonian captivity, just before the Persian era, and Satan makes no appearance in it. Yet, although God is specifically described as creating light, he does not create the darkness, for darkness existed at the beginning, along with, and as part of, Chaos.

  Nevertheless, since God can confine darkness by his word, he is as much master over it as over light, and dualism (the equal existence of principles of Good and Evil) is expressly denied.

  From the scientific standpoint, of course, darkness does not have the same kind of existence as light; darkness is only the absence of light.