Essays in Idleness

There is — we learn, on the authority of “scientists” — a massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. What it is doing there, and how it came to be, are questions to which we do not know the answer, for there are aspects of the history of the Milky Way which might not be intelligible after a few billion years, even in a commonplace barred spiral galaxy like the one we live in. Nevertheless, they (the scientists: astronomers presumably) were reasonably comfortable in the assignment of the number and size of black holes that we shall have encountered, when we complete our extra-terrestrial explorations.

Imagine their surprise to discover, through the James Webb Space Telescope, that there were galaxies just like ours well over thirteen billion years ago; and moreover, black holes a thousand times bigger. These things do not have a right to exist, so close to the time of the Big Bang, according to current models of galactic protocol, in which each large star bundle and its regulating black hole grow together over billions (and billions) of years. They don’t just scandalously appear in (perhaps) the first hundred million.

Moreover, stars within the “thick disk” in the middle of our galaxy are now inferred to be much older than the scientists were previously allowing. Note, the Doppler-effect red-shift cannot be used to check for age over very short distances, of fifty thousand light-years or so, and is entirely defeated by the Big Bang. Nothing beyond 13.61 billion earth-years back can be calculated or observed, for reasons that you will not find in this (Idlepost) space. But trust me: I am not a scientist.

It was the same sort of outrage when life on earth was developing. This planet and its moon go back only four-and-a-half billion years, by radiometric dating of our oldest rocks, &c — and for the first three-and-a-half billion nothing much was growing here that was not tediously microscopic. Then, in a flash, around 540 million years ago, we had the Cambrian explosion, in which all or most of the designs for the full-size creatures we have since spotted in the fossil record (and some additional) simply bounced into being. Out of nothing, and from nowhere, don’t you know.

But why then, precisely? And why weren’t developments more evenly distributed, given the huge expanses of time in which the Creator is left with little or nothing to do?

Alas, not having created us yet, God could not consult us on these critical aesthetic matters.