Idolism Read Free Page B

that these were proof that everything we see around us may have come about without a God. Julian taught me even more about the Big Bang and about evolution than school did, and even though I was just an average student and nowhere near as smart and intelligent as Julian was, I was able to grasp the basics of those theories with a little help.
    “If people came from apes,” I asked him one day, “then why are there still apes?”
    He just smiled at me and said, “If Americans came from the British, then why are there still Britons?”
    That seemed to make sense. I could see how the universe could have come from the Big Bang, and I could see how all life on Earth could have come from evolution. Fine. But nobody I ever talked to could tell me who made the Big Bang go bang or who invented evolution. I could see how once the universe was there, even if it was incredibly small, it could have evolved into what it is today. But how did the universe start in the first place? How could something, everything, anything, have come from nothing? Julian told me that even the best physicists in the world didn’t know the answer to that yet, but they were working on it. That made me mighty proud; to think that a simple guy like me would think about the same deep questions that kept the best scientists in the world up at night. But even most physicists said that something cannot come out of nothing. They said that all the matter and all the energy in the universe were already there, squeezed into an infinitely small point at the beginning of time. I found it difficult to wrap me head around that. I once asked Julian what was before the Big Bang and suggested to him that God was there and that he sat down, cracked his knuckles and made the Big Bang. But Julian threw the question right back at me.
    “And what did God create the heavens and the Earth from?” he asked.
    “From nothing,” I said. “He’s God, he can do that.”
    “Well there you go then. You just admitted that it’s possible to create something from nothing. Whether it’s done by natural forces or a supernatural entity may be debatable, but if you say God did it, you open another line of questioning: who or what created God, what did they create Him from, and how did they do it? You’re just shifting the problem.”
    Julian also said that there was nothing before the Big Bang. Time itself was created in the Big Bang, and there was no before . I found it difficult to wrap me head around that as well. I didn’t understand how time could not have been there forever. A word like ‘forever’ didn’t even make any sense to me if time was not eternal. The Bible talked a lot about eternity. But if there was a beginning of time, wouldn’t there also have to be an end of time? The thought of that proper scared me, and that’s why I believed it. That the end of time would come before eternity is up.
    But I was just a guy, just an average student. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to understand such things. Maybe none of us were. Maybe God didn’t want us to understand them, and maybe that’s why it would have been better to just leave them be.
    In the beginning, God created the universe and time and space. The end.
    As I was sitting there, munching on me salt and vinegar crisps and pondering these imponderable questions, I suddenly realized that although I had been staring at the TV screen the whole time, me brain had completely failed to register all the things I had been watching; how the Pope’s airplane had touched down and come to a halt, how they had rolled out a red carpet for His Holiness, how thousands of people were cheering and chanting in excitement and waving little paper flags of Honduras and of the Vatican, and how the ground crew had moved the boarding stairs in place at the front door of the aircraft.
    It was Julian who ultimately forced my attention back onto the scene at Tenochtitlan. As I already said, Julian was a very quiet person and very soft-spoken,