By Larry Leonard
A piece of the debris almost as large as the Earth slams into what in ten billion years will be California. It has been shaking ever since.
9/24/2012 — Looking back from our viewpoint, we have progressed as a species to the point that we have french fries, FOX news channel and a mirror on the chunk left over from that collision above. This mirror, when you bounce a laser off it every Hallowe’en, tells us that the moon and the Earth are, like the ditch in Iceland that represents the separation of the European and American tectonic plates, about the length of a human fingernail farther apart.
Now, here’s the interesting part. The numbers.
For years nobody believed what Einstein had said — that a key proof of his theory of gravity would be provided by a telescopic observation of a solar eclipse caused by that very same moon. A star, just like the one Christianity uses as a signpost for the birth of Christ in their lovely tale about the season we call “Christmas,” will , he said, lead the three wise cosmologists to the manger which contains a sun that shouldn’t be there. (Gravity will cause the light from a star behind the sun to curve around and be visible.)
So, after various attempts that failed to photograph an early 20th Century eclipse, it was achieved on a remote island and presto, as things developed, a star appeared on the glass plates exactly where the prophet Albert said it would, and, being proof of Einstein’s prediction, changed the world for ever and ever, Amen.
But, there was more …
This sign which changed all future science was more miraculous than even the cosmologists (the wise men) could imagine, for there were things about the experience which they did not see with their long eyes, because they were men who reject mathematics when the numbers displease them. Of these signs, the most important are equations which relate to “cause and effect.” 
Some of those numbers should force themselves between a deity and a roulette table with an infinite number of slots for the ball to land on. These scientific questions should force the cosmologists to make scientifically heretical propositions commonly called “magic” in science.
Here is an example:
Set aside the non-God solution to First Cause they must believe and promote if they are to keep their job at the university, and avoid becoming the target of abusive humor within their profession. Just focus on the mathematics related to that one famous solar eclipse. Just that one, isolated, event.
For that observation to be of use in a secular manner, all the cosmologists needed was the accidental formation of the cosmos, followed by at least three generations of suns, the formation of a particular star called “Sol,” the condensation of planets in orbit around it, one of which objects would eventually have to be made into a moon via an impossibly oblique collision with Earth, 
whirling around our aforementioned planet which luckily because of the collision was relocated in the Goldilocks zone where life is possible, and so in this case became inhabited by creatures that could build telescopes and cameras at exactly the right time to take the photograph.
Exactly when Einstein needed a total solar eclipse, the moon had retreated enough, but not too far, for the measurement to be possible.
You understand, I hope, that I have been describing a series of events that had to happen at the exactly right place, and develop in the precisely right way over the exact amount of time required to perfectly match the evolution of the species needed so as to allow them to take a boat to the only location possible on the very day that their emerging technology, telescopes and cameras that could take the only photo that would capture a solar eclipse that would provide the proof of Einstein’s theory, existed on the planet. That combination of ideas and machines appeared at the first time in human history, the tiny microscopic segment of deep time in the history of the universe, that the moon which originally covered roughly half of the horizon (and which thereafter would be too far away to perfectly cover the sun) was positioned to do the job.
You may call the time window — perhaps ten thousand years wide — a pretty big hole. 
When compared to the age of the universe that hole was so small that you could fit a trillion of them in a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Pull your arrow back, close your eyes and let fly at a passing Ferrari, attempting to hit the horse decal in one particular hoof.
The timing here was miraculous beyond belief. The number of coincidences needed to bring it about were incalculable.
Science at times forces me to write stuff like that. But, it’s the only way I have to portray the cosmologists, physicists, chemists and mathematicians involved in this particular crap game — the acolytes of the church of science. If you expanded one of their atoms to where the nucleus would be the size of a pinhead, the orbiting electron would be two counties away. If you look at a night star, it is probably not there, having blown up billions of years before its light left to come and visit this planet.
Astrophysicists are lunatics. Idiot-savants
They think of the labyrinthine series of events described above, taking place over 14 billion years, and in the order necessary, as statistical accidents. It is so ingrained in them that the castaway, England’s Stephen Hawking, until he released the second edition of A Brief History of Time, recanting his heresy (admitting the quantum possibility of God in First Cause) was persona non grata. 
Their denial of the presence of the elephant in the living room (the unnamed other option) is like saying that the lithium (a substance common in some types of incoming junk from space) strata found in the same geological levels all around the planet is incidental information when working on the disappearance of the Tyrannosaurus Rex at the same time from downtown Montana prior to the rise of the mammals.
They say, “Well, the fact that we cannot disprove the existence of a God (capital “G”) does not mean he,she or it is there.”
I repeat, the process described in this story contains so many servile events that chance is ridiculous. Pick your denial. Alcohol, excessive attraction to belly dancers or God, it’s all the same. Denial is denial. They must deny intelligent design at all costs, every way possible, to keep their key to the Scientist’s Club. They defend that titanic jumble I described above as a cosmic-sized series of statistical accidents that combined to make a gigantic super-cosmic statistical accident — all to get God out of the story so as to save their income and the annual invitation to the Scientist’s Ball.
That is why in their classes they date things C.E. and B.C.E.. (Current Era and Before Current Era) instead of A.D. and B.C. (Anno Domini, Year of our Lord in Latin and Before Christ in common parlance)
I would happily defend their Constitutional secular denial if they would just also say, “But actually, we don’t know.” But they can’t if they wish to be employed. Their premise must be: “if we can’t find a cause, then there must be no cause. It just happened.”
String Theory
If the Cosmos is made of strings
Then Time began when they
Were strummed.
LL
(Written for Michio Kaku, a string theorist, and a Professor Learned I frequently pester.)
