Genesis 1: 16-19- two great lights… the stars- The creative act has overrun the rules of creation and time must be allotted by the Creator for a mediation. Light is the energy of a universe being constructed on a platform of rules and linked phenomena. Yet light has no source beyond God’s command and as such would have to be eternally re-created by God to sustain the paradigm. God’s apparent intent is for a self-sustaining system from which the Creator can step back and observe or simply disengage without observation. Having to be the source of the energy of the engine of this system would tie the Creator to the creation for all time. Thus, a greater light (the sun)– in this context the first star and of a different name primarily because of its import to life on Earth– is born. It radiates light, replacing God’s unwanted responsibility and tie to the mechanics of a universe being developed. Yet the sun is insufficient to an ever-expanding universe which may or may not have been intended or may or may not have been the linked consequence of a creative act, the ripple effect, if we can see this as the detritus and perhaps effluvial energy resulting from the rules of physics by which the creative act is being performed. Thus a lesser light is put up, perhaps experimentally, not as a source of light but as a way to use the greater light’s energy most efficiently: this is reflected light (the moon). However, even the sun and its reflection are not sufficient to the needs of the enormous and growing rubble field resulting from the initial explosive act of creation. The sun is replicated smaller and larger in stars across the heavens to provide the energy to fuel the process. This remediation requires an entire God day but is appropriate to God’s purpose and deemed good.

These emanating/reflective light sources will rule over day and over night, and to divide the light from the darkness placing them at the center of the laws of physics as energy is essential for mass and mass is essential to the yet to be created life forms. The word rule is critical here as it represents the rules of physics which govern the creation and evolution of all. This is not a place of illogic or, shall we say, blind faith that all will work out just fine because God is pulling the strings behind every motion across creation. Faith can be sustained more appropriately as faith in a divine or perfect system of rules, the physics of the universe by which God set things in motion. All things will work out as they should because they will follow a set of rules the book of which humanity is hard at work conjuring and testing. There are rules, they work, they will be followed by divine rule. Therefore, don’t, as Douglas Adams insisted, panic.

The process will move forward to ever more sophisticated creations—life forms—culminating in what is purported to be the crowning achievement: man (or, more specifically, woman, as the jewel of the crown being the last and therefore arguably the most perfect creation). As humans are the terminus of creation, we interpret humanity as being the purpose of all. In this way, we see metaphor as it applies to humanity’s existence woven into every particle of the process. If we are the ultimate object of creation, then all creation is aimed at our support and we are part and parcel of all that is. Particularly problematic, however, is the intelligence, the self-awareness, the curiosity of the last life form in the process. Humanity must know. Let us assume in the perfection of all other rules and systems that this urge to figure it all out is right and proper and perfect. Light is the metaphor for illumination, the revealing of what is dark and unknown. Light, the greater light, is self-sustaining. We are born with it within us. But curiosity is a first and chaotic step in the scientific process. The lesser light of reflection, rumination, considering of ideas, pondering the next step and its relation to the previous and its implications into the future—this lesser light is essential to any building of a knowledge base and construction of a great library of knowledge (which may or may not ultimately land us in Borges’ madhouse library of infinite knowledge populated with infinite books of sand ever shifting, without pagination or stable indices, much like the internet or the human mind). Thus the moon of reflection provides the checks and balances necessary to categorize the implosive sun of conceptual existence. Through reflection, we develop lesser but more numerous and so equally important concepts represented in the ever-expanding brilliance of the star system of illumination. We have insights, we think through the significance of these insights, we are led to other, many many other insights. The Word becomes a phrase to build a sentence from which a speech emerges to some purpose for some audience which responds and expects same in return using a system .of unstable signifiers made so most probably from a lack of absolute clarity or illumination of the process defining the system.