Book Length

 You'll pardon me that I never put these two together, but when I read about Sarah Palin believing that Jesus Christ would return in her lifetime, Suddenly I paired that up with young Earth Creationism, and my reaction was visceral.

Jesus Christ, what a piss-poor universe that is.

Now Ms. Shoot-Moose-for-the-love-of-Kali Palin has not come out and said she's a young Earth Creationist, and she may well deny it and have her thuggees accuse us all of sexism once again, so let me speak to the general set of beliefs and leave the topic of Sarah by saying that we can't afford her.

But the idea of a universe that lasts only 6,000 years is just kind of appalling. A hundred million stars in this galaxy, and a hundred million galaxies, and the whole thing to get rolled up like a scroll (real Biblical Simile: Revelation 6:14)? That's not enough time for light to get across one spiral arm. It seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through for drama that's supposed to teach us not to have deviant sex. In fact, it seems not a little insane.

I'll also confess that one of the principal things that repelled me about the conventional Christian cosmology when I was a sprat was its narrowness. No fun stuff allowed. Heaven, the world and Hell, and at the best, Purgatory. No Asgard, no Dark Dimensions, no pleroma of strange universes of strange creatures and marvelous cities, and a heaven that looked as boring as a suburban church? Quite apart from the problem of actual belief, I heartily preferred with a deep yearning the composite world of Fantasy and Science Fiction to that of Religion. As a protected child of America, the promises of no pain and no misery seemed rather lackluster. (They still do.) And while the wonders of space travel and galactic empires were not explicitly contradicted by religion, they didn't have much to do with each other.

And that was against a Christianity that invoked the immensity of the galaxies as evidence for God's magnificence. 

I have no doubt that these fundies look up at the night sky and see the Glory of God, but really, they seem to be hell-bent on denying it as soon as they stop. They would also not have any problems leadfing through a big coffee-table book of the breathtaking pictures from the Hubble, either. But if Young-Earth Creationism trivializes  the Grand Canyon, how much more does it do to the Veil Nebula? It's not even an illustration of the Flood. Was God just cracking his knuckles when he made all those extrasolar planets 4,000 years ago? And do a hundred million galaxies just get swept up when the scroll is rolled up? Even for the God who sent bears to tear up the kids who made fun of Elijah, that's pretty cavalier.

C.S. Lewis, a man who entered into Christianity but didn't want to leave hiss imagination at the door, revealed, probably semi-consciously, some of the problems with Christianity in his Narnia books. The most important one, I think, is in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where Aslan, in explaining the necessity that he be killed on the Stone Table, invokes "Deeper Magic from Before the Dawn of Time." He thus brings up a colossally problematic question in Christian cosmology, namely who wrote the rule that made it necessary that Jesus Christ die on the cross? There's  no real logic to it, and seems awfully ooga-booga to need a blood sacrifice to save mankind. If God loves us, and we say we're sorry for the bad things we've done and strive to be good, why won't God forgive us and let us into heaven? It certainly seems that it's some magic that God has to go through.

But, more to the point here, it's Narnia's time and space that reflect this whole discomfort. The second-best book in the series, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is a journey full of wonders, and is an allegory on the limits of the physical universe. But the overall impression can also be read that Narnia, a way cooler place to be than our Earth, is better because the sky is just a reasonably big upended bowl a couple of thousand miles wide. And its time from creation to Apocalypse, less than one human's life span. it's a toy universe, and by all of Lewis's imaginative efforts, that seems to be a good thing.

And Sarah Palin's universe (oops, sorry! *wink*) tends to the size and shape of Narnia, though without the fauns and fencing mice--and without the kindness. 

Modern science presented Christianity with a two-pronged challenge. The most obvious and well-trammelled is its tremendous success in increasing human power--but it also presented vastly enlarged vistas, both in size and complexity. For a religion whose divinely inspired writings didn't even take into account North and South America, this was a lot to encompass, and while it could easily be made to redound to the Creator's glory, the rest of the apparatus--Fall, Flood, Exodus, Incarnation, Apocalypse--was made rather distressingly small. So small that one might start to think that God had a few other things on his mind than humanity's moderately botched creation. And one should always remember that, while the Church muzzled Galileo for putting the Sun at the center of the Solar System, they burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for making the lights in the sky suns and putting worlds around them.

The ultimate problem with the Young Earth/Apocalypse Now crowd is the problem with the Narnia books. Lewis saw the problem and tried to deal with it in a splendid thrash that the end of this book is the beginning of the real story, and its just the bestest story you ever read, gosh, every page better than the last, and it goes on forever. For all it being terribly hopeful and terribly earnest, it in vain and even faintly ludicrous, and it's just some chin music at the end of the book. In a way the non-ending sums up all of Lewis's limitations as a writer: He's perceptive and clever enough to see the problems and paradoxes (both true and false) in all this divine mess, and wants to resolve them, but isn't deep enough  to accomplish it. The book, despite his best efforts and most magnificent protestations, ends and Narnia does too, ending up as a miniature under a painted bowl, and, ultimately, a small creationthat doesn't redound to the creator's reputation as demiurge.

The Fundie Universe is similarly shrunken down, not to the size of humanity, which is the ordinary and comfortable state of ignorance-as-bliss, but to the size of the book--in this case, the Bible as they understand it. Their belief is not centered around God--for whom trillions of years would not be enough--but around The Story (Told, Greatest Ever). And despite the vast increases in scale complexity and perspective Science (and Science Fiction and Fantasy) has given us, it resolutely stays the same size. 

Might God have created beings in Her image throughout these billions of worlds? Might fall and redemption occur over the billions of years? Might there by planets (as Lewis speculated in Perelandra) where the Fall did not occur?

If your anchor is God, maybe. If your anchor is the story, never. And basing your universe on a story causes the infinities of both God and Man to chafe, and, ultimately, denigrates both.