Eternalism, Reincarnation and the Big Bang

Notions about the Big Bang and the Armageddon, the alleged beginning and end of the Universe, can be found in different versions depending on what mythology, religious text or scientific theory we read. This “Big-Bangeddon” is a worldwide pervasive idea that seems to be engraved in the human psyche since times immemorial and keeps springing back into our conscious every now and then via movies, writings, sermons and lectures.

There’s nothing new about the Big-Bangeddon. We can find stories about the beginning and the end of the world in almost any religion or mythology we can imagine. Greek, Mayan, Inca and Aztec mythologies have them; North-American Indian mythologies have them, Judaism, Christianity and Islam have them; Hinduism has them, Buddhism has them, Zoroastrianism has them. Almost everywhere we look along the history of human kind we find a version of the Big-Bangeddon.

In the western world, the most notable of these versions is the biblical one. The bible tells us the story of the beginning of creation in the book of Genesis and the story of the end of creation in the book of revelations or Apocalypse. This biblical “Genypse” has captured the imagination of the western mind from the inception of that book sometime around AD 325 to the present day.

The fact that the Genypse is found in one form or another in all corners of the world and at most stages of human evolution may often be taken by some people as proof that such theory is true. “It’s a question of genetic memory,” some people may speculate; “it’s a question of psychic intuition,” some others may argue, all of them implying that it’s all a matter of some kind of archetypal idea or collective subconscious memory.

The Genypse may well be a part of our collective subconscious just as much as the idea of “The Devil,” or the personification of evil, may be a part of our collective subconscious too, but if that assumption is correct, how did those ideas get imprinted in our collective memory in the first place?

To accept that Genypse-like postulates emanate from any alleged collective subconscious memory we would first have to answer the following two questions: 1) How can memories of the beginning of time or Genesis be part of our collective subconscious if by definition no human being could have been there to witness it when it happened? And 2) How can the human race have any collective intuition of the end of days if, a) The Apocalypse is an event that by definition has never happened before and, b) It is an event that nobody can possibly have witnessed because it hasn’t happened yet?

Because of its constant and pervasive presence, invalidating the notion of the Genypse in a conclusive manner may prove a difficult thing to do, just as it may prove equally difficult to validate it in an irrefutable manner. The Big-Bangeddon seems to be one of those ideas that linger in everyone’s mind, but no one can categorically prove or disprove. The Genypse idea lives in our imagination like a haunting and fascinating enigma whose legitimacy millions of people take for granted, but nobody can actually corroborate.

Until Georges Lemaitre came up with his tale of the Big Bang in 1927, most postulates about the Genypse were only of the mystical or mythological kind. Up to the moment when Lemaitre dressed his version of Genesis in scientific garb, beginning-of-time theories had been the exclusive preserve of self-proclaimed religious and mystical authorities.

Lemaitre, of course, didn’t prove the Big Bang theory in any convincing irrefutable way. Albert Einstein’s ideas may well have served as springboard for Lemaitre’s speculations, but none of it is based on anything but plausible scientific inference and guessing. Does anybody have any unquestionable proof that the Big Bang theory is true? Nobody does.

Some scientists may claim that some complex analogies and some relatively esoteric formulas are proof enough to give such theory a more than reasonable level of credibility, but in the end most of it is just plain and sheer imagination. Nobody was there when the universe was allegedly created, so nobody has any first-hand knowledge of how it all may have actually happened.

In fact, nobody in this world has ever witnessed the creation of anything out of nothing, not to mention something of such proportions as the Universe being created out of an alleged nucleus of primal matter. Can anyone ascertain with any authority any event of such cosmic magnitude as the one the Big Bang theory pretends to prove? I seriously doubt it.