Having imbibed at the Frosty Mug Lecture # 003 ["P.H. GOSSE, ADAM’S NAVEL & TIME," Issue 10] I was reminded of a time in my own life. Reading about the surmisings of P.H Gosse I was not horrified that such hermetic, subjectively rationalized thinking could have ever existed, much less in the Dawn of Geology. In fact, I used to entertain such thoughts myself.

As a lad I was studying science books even before I could read. I began collecting rocks in California when I was seven years old and by twelve I was a pretty darned good mineralogist. I studied crystallography and was well on my way to a career in hard-rock geology. Alas, my family moved to Louisiana, and all there was mud. I was not interested in sedimentary geology, only the minerals and features of igneous and metamorphic geology. Then I took to gardening and the medium of soil. In college I studied soil instead of geology because the latter curricula in Louisiana taught sedimentary. I did not realize at the time that by studying soil I was actually studying the very principles of sedimentary geology. I was studying the processes of living ecosystems, which are the story of the accumulation of sediments becoming soil and their subsequent erosion to form new sediments and other rocks.

It so happened that science was not my only fascination. I had an inherent, essentially obsessional, interest in understanding everything. What is consciousness? What did we come from? Etc., etc. I think it fair to say that I was not your typical happy-go-lucky kid. Most people could not stand to be around my constant rambling and need for discussion. I did find a few here and there and fortunately even to this day I find an occasional few who not only tolerate such things but have much to contribute of their own—including lager, ideally. Cheers.

After several years of deliberations and various attempts at my own self-styled asceticism, informed by Protestant theology, I decided that the only thing that could satisfy me was a cold, absolutely literal interpretation of the Bible (whatever that  actually means, of course). At this time I was in college and studying botany and biology and geology. In order to correlate all these things (dinosaur bones are pretty hard to ignore) I came to a conclusion that once had been imputed to P.H. Gosse by a “hasty press” and critics: that, in fact, God had made fossils and the like just to deceive people.  À la Gosse’s deterministic universe, my idea was that only those who were predestined would share in divine bliss, and all the others were s.o.l.

I am glad to say (or embarrassed?) that I held that belief for approximately three-and-a-half days and then decided that it simply made no sense. I did not know what made sense but this could not be it.[1] Long story short, let me toss a beer nut to you firm-and-faithful out there by suggesting that the first chapter of Genesis can be read harmoniously with evolution and that evolution as a mechanism of creation does not preclude the divine. That said, the popular idea of “intelligent design” also misses some points of a subtle but important nature.

To begin with, the idea of 24-hour literal days of creation can easily be refuted. The sun and the moon were not made until the fourth "day." Since a literal 24-hour day is based on the rotation of the Earth relative to the sun, a literal day for the first 3 "days" is not possible.[2]  What I must recommend is that you go to the source and see for yourself. "The Bibe," as one extraordinarily hip young cogitator called it, mentions “morning and evening” being the first day, third day, etc. This was happening even though the sun and the moon were not made until the fourth day—so what is going on?[3]

Needless to say (perhaps), this all revolves around the subject of time in its most ultramodern astrophysical understanding.  The surmising of P.H Gosse is of course also intimately bound with time, including residues of a past that never existed.  How do we deal with the fact that we live in the present yet have a past and a future?  None of them really exists, as most of us have reflected.  The future is just a concept that only approaches physical meaning as we get there, but then it becomes the present, so it never actually achieves existence. Even the “present” doesn’t really exist because it is slipping from the unknown to the known to the remembered and the forgotten.[4] In one sense we are actually eternal and in another sense we are so insignificant as to approach nonexistence.

How can anyone really expect a document, a statement, a phrase, a poem, to express the insanely enigmatic nature of reality except that it be insanely enigmatic itself? Just because it took an Einstein to figure out in a physical context that time is not constant and everything is relative to the observer and their current speed and mass, it does not follow that the idea had not already occurred in various spheres of experience. I accept the scientific theory that if a person could be accelerated to the speed of light for only one second, upon return not only would their friends be old and gone, the entire planet would have been obliterated by the sun because to be at the state of light is to be at eternity and beyond the realms of time. So, this “evening” and “morning” business slipped into the Bible is not about literal 24-hour days but may be regarded as representing the pulse of the eternal creative life—light in its own time frame. The evolving manifested physical universe has its own time frame which is different from the time frame of eternal light. General relativity is implicit in the book of Genesis.

Could my hurried closing itself be more enigmatic? Sorry, gentlemen and ladies, but you'll need to buy the book at the door to really get going in this. Complete citations, illustrations, elucidations. All proceeds to the reglaciation initiative, details available.

Thank you, and again,
Cheers!

Professor Loose