Stardust and the Big Bang

 In recent Sunday services the idea that everything we know about the Universe and all its contents arose at the time of the Big Bang, and with the expansion of matter into an empty cosmos, the flinging about of elements and energy has created the environment we see and experience.  Stars, suns, planets, moons, galaxies, and so forth are all products of this original act of creation, so that the matter of which we are composed is just "the stuff of stars," hence we are made from stardust.

This Big Bang idea is on every philosopher's List of  Big 10 Key Questions.  Ethics, consciousness, meaning of life, life after death, and so forth make up the whole list, but first among them is the question, essentially, Where did we come from?  If you click on the link just shared you will find a website where everyday people (non-philosophers) ask life's hard questions, and philosophy students and instructors answer them in as common a language as can be managed, to make the answers "understandable."  In the Ivory Tower of the university the modes of speech can become quite jargonistic, especially so in philosophy, so the effort of making the key ideas accessible is welcome.

If you click through to the discussion of the Big Bang on this website there are a series of questions posed by people that are answered, and I think in a main-stream sort of way, exposing what is known and thought by most philosophers.  Key ideas, for me, are the presumption that the expansion of the universe after the BB was into a nothingness of empty space, that the eternal expansion of the cosmos will continue (pending the influence of dark matter and expansion-curbing gravity), and the concept that there was no possibility of the existence of time before the BB.  Many of these topics are addressed in a very accessible way in the novel mr. g by Alan Lightman, which I think I mentioned before.  He uses the concept of god as an eternal, all powerful being who is behind it all, but he doesn't control its every action.

That we are made of the stuff of stars seems indisputable.  What other stuff is there?  That we inhabit a planet were life developed and grew is self evident.  That some of us developed consciousness, which feels like something other than a purely physical thing (like most of life feels), which gives rise to philosophy.  So there you have it - the circle of existence explained in a few simple sentences.