The Shortest Story of Everything

He had also found qubits and magnetars, proteomes and morganucodontids, ids and memes, e-commerce and virtual reality, fundamentalism and postmodernism. And thousands of other things he couldn't even name. He had, in truth, found too much. He had come across a glut of information. The problem was . . . he wasn't gluttonous. (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 21)

Last Saturday I asked if the Bible was a Story of Everything and I answered no. The irony, of course, is that the Bible contains a Story of Everything--the creation account that opens the Book of Genesis. How can a brief narrative cover all of existence better than two thousand pages?

This is the age in which to ask that question. It's been estimated that a weekly edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person living in the seventeenth century England came across in a lifetime. Researchers at the University of California Berkeley have concluded that the amount of new stored information doubled between 1999 and 2002 and is now increasing at the rate of 30% a year.

How can you cover it all?

Google is trying. The company's name is derived from "googol," the term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. Imagine 10,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
bits of information. Now imagine organizing them, which is how Google defines its mission. Now imagine getting them into a single human brain, which you have to do if you want to tell a story. It's tough but not impossible:

You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebuds, giraffes and humans.

That's from Brian Swimme, who used it to sum up The Universe Story, which he wrote in conjunction with Thomas Berry. It's one of the shortest Stories of Everything I've ever seen.

How do you boil things down? Maybe the trick is to let a child do the talking, as poet Charlie Finn did in Deep Joy, Steep Challenge. This is his seven-year-old daughter:

Let me tell you a story.
First there was nothing and then there was something.
Then there was a little something that became a big something.
Then the big something became human beings.
The end.

In The Story of Everything there's an Old Story and a New Story. You can get each down to six words:

Old Story: First Spirit, then Matter, then Life.
New Story: First Matter, then Life, then Spirit.

Not much character development there, but you get the idea. It's a matter of order, of sequence. To tell a Story of Everything, you don't have to know everything. You just have to know where everything goes.

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COPYRIGHT (C) 2007 JOHN N. KOTRE

Is the Bible a Story of Everything?

The Story of Everything thought he was remembering his birth, but it was only his birth in print. He was the first story ever to be printed, the first to become a book like the one you are holding in your hands. (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 6)

Does this passage imply that the Bible--the first book ever to be printed--is a Story of Everything?

Just for the record, Johannes Gutenberg's Bible, published in 1455, was not the first book to be printed. In the West, it was indeed the first complete book (Gutenberg had actually printed part of a Latin grammar a few years earlier.) In the East, however, moveable type was in existence some 400 years before Gutenberg and an iron printing press was in operation some 200 years before. The oldest printed book that we know of is not the Bible, but the Korean work Jikji, a collection of Buddhist teachings, which was published in 1377. Take a look at both, however, and you will see that Gutenberg's Bible was a far more complex production.

Still, is the Bible a Story of Everything? I remember a discussion about Galileo discovering Jupiter's four moons. No one had seen those moons before, so I asked the group: were they in the Bible? Everyone said no except one young man. He "kinda thought" the moons were in there somewhere, hidden in symbol or code.

Galileo tried to save the Catholic Church from such thinking in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615). Only the "faintest trace" of the sciences can be found in the Bible, he wrote. "Of astronomy, for instance, so little is found that none of the planets except Venus are so much as mentioned, and this only once or twice under the name 'Lucifer.'" Further, the authors of the Bible "intentionally forebore" to speak of these things, even though they knew about them.

I'd love to know if Galileo was serious about that "intentionally forebore," but other than that I appreciate his counsel. The Bible is a Story of Spirit. But it's had to carry the burden of mistaken identity: down through the centuries it's been seen as a Story of Everything. The error has created mischief--and far worse--from Galileo's day down to our own. In the long run, it has diminished the status of the Bible.

The last time I checked, sixty-two moons had been observed circling Jupiter, some at enormous distances. I wonder what Galileo would think about them. I wonder even more what the young man would. Would he believe that all sixty-two were in the Bible? That everything was?

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"The Whole Story of the Whole Cosmos for the Whole Person"

It's humbling when someone else says it better than you do, especially when you've been trying for a while. It's also tempting, because it'd be awfully easy to steal their stuff. I've been humbled and tempted twice as I thought about starting this blog.

The Metanexus Institute said it better in the heading of several of their newsletters: "Seeking the whole story of the whole cosmos for the whole person." "Whole story" said to me, science and spirit. "Whole cosmos" said, inner space as well as outer space. "Whole person" said, heart as well as head. And "seeking," well, that was the whole point. Wish I had said it first.

Then Michael Wilt, editor of the online Nimble Spirit Review, said it better too. In plugging the Story-of-Everything Place, the web site from which this blog originates, he celebrated the "cosmology cavalcade":

Stories of ultimate beginnings have always fascinated me. That there are so many of them is no surprise, given the diversity found on the planet in terms of geography, climate, and general living conditions. One could hardly expect peoples, preliterate or otherwise, to come up with common expressions of their origins when day-to-day experience ranges from Arctic ice to Saharan desert to Amazon rainforest to Rocky Mountains. Life experience at the 65th parallel will undoubtedly lead to a different cosmology than that at the equator. The cosmology of people who are enslaved will be different from that of those who enslave them. And then science brings its own vast set of empirical observations to bear on our exploration.

Wilt saw the Story-of-Everything Place as a kind of "cosmological bazaar" where people bring their stories, exchange them, and create new ones. Well, it's not that yet--it hasn't even gotten going--but that is indeed the idea. Wish I had said it first.

But I didn't. Which means I'm going to have to give in to a little temptation and "borrow" some language in order to launch this blog. Its subject matter: those whole stories of the whole cosmos for the whole person. Its spirit: the bazaar. Next Saturday's question: Is the Bible a Story of Everything? If you drop in, bring a friend. Even better, bring a story.

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