1. In the beginning

Dear children,

I must say at the start that I do not know much and that what I seem to know a little is hard to share. I'm going to spin a web to catch ideas, and I hope for some help from that spider, Charlotte, whom you know and who has the skill to spin webs. 

The sort of thing that Charlotte builds

I will start in the past and work forward in my records. I hope to be able to write to you about many things, some hard to get, and some easier. It may take several letters before I get there. Then you will have to decide if what I say is still curious or strengthening in any way.

A net to hold a fast-moving gecko may not last past your childhood. A set of puzzles may be too hard at the beginning, but each time they are done, methods to solve them become clearer.

I begin with the first verse of Genesis. I have sung this to you when you were very young. You were a bit shocked at hearing the strange Hebrew tongue. Genesis is the Greek name for a book I read in English that begins the Bible. The original text is of course Hebrew and its name for that book is brawit. The w is pronounced sh.

In the beginning - God. 

The cosmic microwave background (Nasa image - a map of the universe)

Sentences containing God are always going to be unknown in part. Also unknown in this case is the beginning. When the writers of Genesis wrote this first chapter, they use a form of the word that is ongoing. So we might render their words as: 

In the beginning of God's creating,
the heavens and the earth,

We don't know everything about the heavens and the earth either. Creation, Time, Material, Energy are all contained in that first verse. And the sentence goes on:

when the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the face of the abyss, and the wind of God brooded over the face of the waters, God said, Let there be light, and light was.

This is about the formation of the place we know as home. It is without form, and void, and dark. There is a wind (or spirit) of God brooding - something is in birth - and there is speech, creating light. When we read this, we make the beginning of everything, the past, a part of our present.

Perhaps you will study physics, then these words will make some sense.

A black hole imagined
Quantum entanglement and preserving information

The limited speed of light makes a crack in the way we think about time and all our talk about past and future. 

So backing up to the beginning for a moment, the traditional translation of the first half of verse 1 is fine: In the beginning, God created -- just so long as you don't make the mistake of assuming that you know the difference between God doing something in the past, and God doing something that remains present.

It is most curious to me that these ancient writers chose to name light as the first element of creation. It's not really a thing itself since it has no mass, but it is what we see by, and it allows us to measure. Science also postulates a 'beginning' for various reasons. Among them are the observed expansion of the universe over time, and the limited speed of light. 

Skip a little further to verse 16: 

And God constructed the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night, and the stars.

The ancient writers did not distinguish stars from stars. The greater light they are referring to is the sun; the lesser is the moon; and the stars are mentioned. The ancients observed stars and planets, their patterns and their motions, but they did not know in the ways our telescopes reveal to us today. In particular they did not anticipate that the greater light is our local star. And they did not distinguish stars from galaxies. Nor in this story did they distinguish stars from planets.

Galaxies

I think that's enough for now. So I'll sign off with all my will towards your good and your life to come, ...

Till the next letter ...