Someone else said there was no Roman numeral for zero. The Arabs and some Eastern cultures invented zero. I'm no expert, but it seem Westerners have some difficulty with the existence of nothing. In science, cold is the absence of heat and darkness is the absence of light. I don't think science has anything for the absence of space. The cold, black void represents nothing. That is only three dimensions: no heat, no light, no space. One can add many other zero items, such as no mass. The idea is: at some point only nothing existed. Even if other things exist, nothing also exist. Nothing is the only thing that always exist.
Reification is the process of making an abstraction real. "Time marches on" expresses the idea that time is real. In fact, only events and intervals between events exist. The law of gravity did not cause the apple to fall on Newton's head, rather the Earth's gravity caused the apple to fall. The gods did not write the book of natural laws and then construct the material realm to obey the laws.. The material realm fell into place naturally. Humans, after the fact, discovered the laws.
One of the natural laws says entropy is always increasing. Entropy is a measure of disorder. Something with perfect order has zero entropy. Any degree of disorder results in a positive entropy. The cold, black void is perfectly ordered with zero entropy. The law allows a prediction of a natural occurrence that will increase the entropy.
Out of the cold, black void came two equal and opposite things. Then there was some disorder and entropy increased. The two things were positive and negative spirit. Since the spiritual and material realms have mostly mutually exclusive dimensions and the spirits were unformed, almost nothing came out of nothing. Call this the boom. Opposites attract, so the two spirits were pulled together. Call this the bust. If they canceled each other, entropy would return to zero. However, as with the creative cycle, the boom and bust cycle is imperfect and biased. The two spirits were not equal and they hit with enough force that only part of each was canceled. The remaining pieces recoiled. As a result there were still two things, so entropy remained the same.
The story has been somewhat grossified, because I don't know any other way to tell it. Spirits are not solid material objects that can collide and recoil. They did the spiritual equivalent.
To be continued.
Copyright 2013 Dennis Wayne Dapremont
