There Has To Be God

(A Chapter from Ordinary Lives: Part II - Reflections)

(Now available at: Amazon)

***

My academic background is mostly in technical fields. I have an undergraduate degree in Architecture and later, when I switched to another line of work, earned a certificate in computer programming and systems analysis. Later, years later, to be called the IT field

In Architecture, I learned to appreciate the great efforts put in creating a structure of any kind: a house, a fifty-story hi-rise, a highway overpass, a long-span bridge, a church, a school building, a ninety-thousand-seat stadium. I consider the human efforts that go into each of these creations collectively. The engineering, artistic and intellectual disciplines and all the legal and economic requirement that are imposed and adhered to in their design, development and construction, for aesthetic, health and public safety reasons.

That's why every time I see the destruction of any of these structures, I feel sad, aggrieved. Likewise, for some reason--an insight of some kind I don't know where it originates--I feel the same seeing a tree felled. Cut down by man or toppled by nature

Later, as I thought more about this parallel, I began to understand my feeling about the tree. There were a few occasions that brought about this understanding. One of them was the day my wife Nancy and I planted a baby Japanese red maple in our front yard.

It was a sapling less than a foot high. The first couple of years, I didn't think it was going to make it--rise to a full-grown tree. It looked weak, dried up in the summer. But it survived and over the years, it got stronger, grew tall and developed a blazing crown of magenta leaves. It still needed time to grow taller so I could sit in its shade as I thought I would someday in the summer.

So the thought of it one day being chopped down for any reason or an east coast hurricane ripping it off the ground pains me a lot. After all these years of taking care of it and watching it grow.

There is a tree in Alexandria, Virginia, by a trail through a place called Holmes Run Park, alongside the shallow water. A plaque on a fence in front of it reads:

A quick arithmetic says it was planted around the year 1706, seventy years before the birth of the United States of America through the Declaration of Independence from England by the Continental Congress in 1776, and twenty six years before George Washington was born (February 22, 1732).

At this writing (July 31, 2020), the tree is 314 years old. I hadn't been back to see it again since we moved from Alexandria, Virginia to here in College Park, Maryland back in November 2003. Perhaps one of these days on a good-weather day, we'll revisit. Hopefully, it would still be there, strong and healthy after three centuries and would remain so the next three hundred years, long after we've all passed.

*

I spent twelve years in architecture, three years in Canada and nine in the U.S., on top of five grueling years in college as a working student in Manila: working during the day till three in the afternoon and rushing to classes that went to nine o'clock at night. Bone tired by the time I got off the bus for home in Pasay City at ten at night.

Seventeen years of my life getting educated in that profession and then applying my training and knowledge of it. And I have nothing to show for it. Materially, that is. But I enjoyed the work. The discipline--multi-discipline, involved. You have to be a planner, an artist (draftsman, renderer), a designer, an estimator, part engineer, lawyer, writer, businessman, marketer, advertiser and ultimately part a politician. Of all that, I enjoyed the most doing the disciplines on the drawing board. The parts that distinguish the role of being an architect.

The twelve years I went through trying to make a living in the profession was a struggle. It started, two months after college, with the entry-level first job in West Orange, New Jersey that paid $70 a week. I had to learn--basically get exposed to--the current standards of the time in the practice of the profession. I practically had to put aside everything I learned at school and start over with how the actual work of designing a building from the client requirement specs is done.

And then--producing the working drawings (blueprint or construction drawings) out of the design drawings, coordinating with engineers and other specialists involved.

And then--writing the contracts and specifications of the entire project.

And then--finally putting out the project to bid by general contractors.

And then--going out to the jobsite as the architect-clerk-of-work to see the job is getting done according to contracts and specs.

There's more but I'm not going to drag you through the rest of that. I should mention here that after getting more into the whole picture of the practice of architecture, I chose to specialize not in design, not in contracts and specifications, not in construction management, but in production (of working drawings). Making sure the design is buildable without too much alteration to incur the wrath of the designer.

*

After five years of bouncing from job to job, from New Jersey and Canada to Detroit, I've built up enough experience to have some confidence and a sense of stability in what I do. By this time, early in 1970, I was in my eighth job working for a seven-man firm in downtown Detroit as a production team leader.

The job I was assigned was the renovation of some eight mid-rise (six to eight-story) apartment buildings in downtown, several of them right in the city block from where the '67 race riot started and spread. After several field trips, I decided to call the job a reconstruction instead of a renovation project. But right from the start, the office had officially named it the Rehab Project with the consent of the client, the city of Detroit.

The buildings were a total wreck. Plumbing, HVAC and electrical were mostly shut. The entire interior finishes needed to be replaced including doors and windows inside out. Overall, the whole building needed to be disemboweled, leaving only the structurals that hold it up, before the architectural work is done.

As work progressed both at the jobsite and on the drawing board, some days I would look back to the year before, in Toronto in my last job there before I got my green card and immigrated to the U.S. in July 1969. I was employed at Page & Steele, Architects, then one of the most prestigious firms in Canada for decades.

I was working on a project designed by I.M. Pei and Associate Architects called Commerce Court for the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in the financial district of downtown Toronto. It's spread over several city blocks and included upgrades of existing buildings and construction of several new skyscrapers, one of them a 57-story tower that was to become the tallest building in Canada at the time when finished. The city was undergoing a building boom then, along with the influx of immigrants to Canada from all over the world.

Sitting at my drafting table one day eyeing the drawings of the Rehab project on it, I thought what a contrast it is working to bring life back to these derelict buildings in riot-torn Detroit versus working on those brand new skyscrapers in Toronto just a year ago.

I had one draftsman working with me on the Rehab job drawing up a set of plans on deconstructing--gutting--the apartment buildings and another set to rebuild and dress them up like brand new, following the design done by the design architect sitting behind me who happened to be another Filipino. Last year in Toronto on the Commerce Court project by I.M. Pei and Associates, I was working with dozens of architects, engineers and drafters, many of them recent immigrants from different parts of the world--Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, England, Asia like myself, the Caribbean, South Africa, South America, along with Canadian locals.

It was exciting taking part in an august project designed by a world-famous architect. More so that I was working with guys named Sammi Suomalainen (Finnish), Dimitar Petkov (Bulgarian), Jaroslav Kalivoda (Czechoslavakian), hearing them speak in different exotic European accents, sharing and exchanging knowledge of one another not just concerning the job but our personal lives as immigrants to Canada from different parts of the world.

Years later in the early '70s, when I visited my relatives in Toronto, I would take the route that brought me to the elevated Gardiner Expressway downtown to get a good view of the Commerce Court West towers, structures of glass and stainless steel curtain walls gleaming high in the sky overlooking the shores of lake Ontario. I would drive as slow as possible to gaze at the buildings, feeling the satisfaction at the thought of having a hand in their creation even in some small unheralded way.

*

In spite of the striking contrast between these two projects I worked on, however, I never cast any aspersion to one based on its value or appearance or elevate one over the other for the same thing. Architecture is architecture be it a village hut in Africa, a chateau in France; a basilica in Rome or a tiny chapel in Arizona.

The same with a tree. A tree is a tree, be it a 200-foot tall redwood in Big Sur, California or a 5-foot high Japanese red maple in our front yard.

*

When I first moved to Detroit in 1969, I had a job interview at an architectural firm in the northern suburb of Troy. I didn't get hired because the office was looking for a design architect, not a production one which I was. During the interview, they gave me a tour of the office. I was shown into a room where scale models of projects were displayed. One of them took up a prominent place in the middle of the room. It was a hi-rise project so tall that the ceiling tiles had to be removed to make room for the skyscrapers--the twin towers of the New York World Trade Center designed by Minoru Yamasaki & Associates.

A friend of mine, Claro Cruz, also newly immigrated from Toronto and looking for a job was a design architect. So I told him about the firm. He called and got an interview. He and his wife were newer in town so I offered to drive them the 23 miles to Troy from Detroit.

He got the job. So did his wife who was also an architect. He did design work on the towers and several of the other smaller buildings planned of the complex while his wife, he told me, worked on the landscape design studies of the 16-acre site of the project.

*

Three years later, I got fed up with the weather and crime in Detroit. I was mugged at gunpoint in broad daylight in front of my apartment building. I took a one-week vacation to California to see what life is like out there, had a job interview at Charles Luckman Associates, Architects, in Beverly Hills and got hired. Three weeks later, I packed everything in the brand new 1972 Chevelle Malibu two-door sedan I bought the week before and drove five days straight to Los Angeles.

Like Page & Steele in Toronto, the office was another prestigious firm I was fortunate enough to work for. Some of its projects, to name a few, were the L.A. Forum, the LAX, the 62-story United California Bank skyscraper in downtown L.A., Madison Square Garden in New York, the LBJ Space Center in Houston.

I was assigned to the project already under construction, originally called Broadway Plaza in downtown L.A., a shopping mall and hotel complex, completed and opened for business in 1973. Southern California, Los Angeles specifically, was a total departure from the climate and culture of the Midwest and the East. Palm trees and sunshine, and smog. A humongous interlace of freeways, 35 of them, in and out of greater metro L.A. So much diversity some places you can't tell if you're in Tijuana, Hong Kong, Manila, Tokyo. And of course there's Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Disneyland and all the beaches.

It was fun when I first soaked all that in the first year but soon I saw through the facade especially that of Hollywood, the underside of it--the stardom dreamers, the weirdos, the druggies and hookers, the race and ethnic divide, and more later on in my second and third year there when the economy tanked. The stock market crashed early in 1973 resulting in high inflation, followed by the recession and high unemployment.

Then it was the OPEC oil embargo in October during the Yom Kippur Arab-Israeli war. People lined up at gas stations carrying 5-gallon containers or sitting in the driver's seat inching one at a time.

I was unemployed and lived on state unemployment most of the year 1975. That, after ten years in America.

Bummer, huh?

Every two weeks at the unemployment office in Hollywood, I lined up with a lot of those Hollywood dreamers to collect the check. Once in a while I'd be standing in front of a well-known commercial star or a recognizable bit-part or supporting actor I've seen in some movies.

Near the end of the year, after two months of another short-term employment at an architect's office in Pasadena, I finally decided to move back east, encouraged by my sister who worked at the World Bank in DC saying there's more jobs here where lots of federal government money come from.

I couldn't wait to get out of L.A. then, at the same time feeling sad that things didn't turn out in the end as I first saw it. Now that I'm going back east, things started coming back to when I first arrived.

One of the things I recalled the most was the day, a few months after I arrived in 1972, I sat at a neighborhood bar next to this Japanese guy, a businessman. Suit and tie, middle-aged, very polite and friendly.

I was on my way home from work, I told him, in an architect's office in Beverly Hills. He was on his way home too, a longer journey, to the home office of Nippon Steel where he worked, in Tokyo. He had stopped by L.A. for a day at their office in downtown, he said, coming from New York where they had a sizeable contract in a big construction project there supplying structural steel.

We got into a limited conversation due to his lack of English. At one point, talking about his job, he took out from a shirt pocket a pendant of some miniature structure. He held it by its chain and handed it to me. That's the project, he said, and I looked at it closely, dangling and turning slightly on the chain, a miniature of the 110-story twin towers of the New York World Trade Center.

I moved to give it back but he said no, keep it. My gift to you.

Twenty-nine years later, on the morning of September 11, 2001, two jumbo jets smashed on the towers minutes after each other and two hours later both collapsed, damaging the other five buildings around them which eventually collapsed too and had to be completely demolished later on.

When that happened, I was working at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in DC three blocks from the White House, as a computer specialist. I had been long removed from architecture since I switched to computer work and entered the federal government service in 1980. Yet, I felt a stab when news came to our office. Even when we heard next that another plane crashed at the Pentagon only three miles across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, the news of the twin tower destruction weighed heavily on my mind. I thought about Claro Cruz and his wife, the work they contributed to the creation of those magnificent structures along with that of all the other people who designed, engineered and those who actually built them. And now all the people who perished in the destruction.

I never had such a strong sense of loss for something I barely had anything to do with outside of that interview at the architect's office and having that miniature pendant from the Japanese man, at the bar in Los Angeles, whose company supplied the structural steel for the towers. As I wrote here earlier, every time I see such a destruction, I feel sad, aggrieved. But this time more so, and mournful, as if feeling it for a living being. I wouldn't mind it so much if it were a structure that had come to its age of obsolescence over time and has outlived its usefulness. A sports arena, a theater, a tenement. The same perhaps with the living, man or beast, who had come to the end-of-life stage and the merciful and legal act left was the release from life.

From then on, whenever I see the collapse on television, days, weeks, years later, I get reminded of the movie The Bridge On The River Kwai which I saw dozens of times in the movie house in Manila where I worked as an usher for three years while going to night school in college for my Bachelor of Science degree in Architecture. I remember the end scene of the movie when the bridge was blown up just as the train came on it and plunged in the river one car after another.

"Madness! Madness!" echoed Major Clipton, a British POW character in the movie, watching the destruction of the structure, an engineering marvel hewn out of the jungle around it by the raw strength and perseverance of captive men under severe physical conditions and cruel treatment.

"Madness! Madness!"

That's exactly the same thing I think every time I see the collapse of the twin towers on television, watching them disappear into a pile of rubble.

*

In Architecture, as I said earlier here, you have to be an artist--a creator--an engineer, and the rest of that. An Architect. The dictionary says the word derives from the latin architectus and from the Greek architecton which is composed of archi (to be the first, who commands or a master) and tecton (mason, builder, artisan).

As an artist, you have to learn how to draw, compose a picture. Learn the basics--the elements of composition which are perspective (horizon, vanishing point/s, viewpoint), foreground/middle ground/background, light source, shades and shadows, contrast, scale and proportion, mass and volume. Then you got to learn to 'render' the composition. In architecture, you don't paint. You render a picture which is done in either charcoal pencil, pen and ink, water color or pastel. Not in oil or acrylic.

Once you've progressed enough, enhanced your aesthetic awareness, then you get into the major study of architecture--Design. Architectural Design: Planning, economics, building codes, all that makes the part of being an Architect.

As part Engineer, you study Physics, Mechanics of Forces and Strength of Materials and, of course, Mathematics. From Algebra all the way through to Integral Calculus. All that, prerequisites to the next major study--Structural Design: doing stress calculations to size up structural members (beams, columns, trusses, bearing walls, floor and roof structures, foundations)--to contain the forces of nature. Gravity, wind, fire, water and bad people.

That's what it takes to create, to build the Twin Towers of the world trade center, the Colosseum in Rome, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the St. Peter's Cathedral, the Taj Mahal, the Chateau d'lf in France, the Tower of London, Alcatraz. All that, and now, in the time I write this sequel to my life story in this hi-tech age we live in--to create and build the Space Shuttles, the Hubble, the International Space Station, the rockets that send people into orbit to explore space, the moon and someday other planets, other worlds.

Why am I getting into all these now?

My answer is with another question: 'What makes all these possible?' Actually, a few other questions, among them: 'Who are we? Where did we come from? Who or what designed and built us?'

*

When I went back to school in 1976 and studied computer programming and systems analysis, I had no idea what it was all about. All I knew and heard about it was that it was hot. Lots of jobs were being created. Programmers, systems analysts and designers were in demand.

The school got me a job at the National Association of Homebuilders in DC when I got out. There I did numbers crunching of data gathered from SMSA (Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area) housing surveys to produce socio-economic statistics reports. I used RPG and COBOL--computer languages I learned from school--to compute the mean, median, average and mode of household size, income, age, formatted in dozens of matrix reports NAHB published and submitted to Congress. In April 1980, with a couple of years experience in the private industry, I got hired in my first job in the federal government by the Department of the Navy, Arlington, Virginia, at the Navy Annex (now demolished) a mile walk to the Pentagon.

The knowledge of computers--and electronics--I learned from the school was a good foundation in the field, but there was a lot more. Most of it came from many OJT (On the Job Training) I got from Uncle Sam over the twenty-six year service I put in. From the Navy job as an entry-level Computer Programmer to an IT Specialist at OPM in DC.

One of the things I learned early on in data processing is that computers don't know shit but two things. Two things that represent logic, that's all. And to make it do what you want it to do, you write instructions, in codes using those two things with their presence or absence (a light on or off), in their places, or as is commonly used digitally (a 0 or a 1), in their places. A coding method called binary system. Numbers and letters and special characters to construct words in any human language thus can then be represented, coded, to execute commands. From writing an office memo to playing a movie on your ipad to launching a space satellite or to calculate the size of columns to hold up a skyscraper.

Of course building a computer program to do any of that, you feed millions, billions, trillions of those light-on-off indicators or 0 and 1 bits into the machine using coding systems--computer languages--as I learned earlier at school called, among others, COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG, Visual Basic, and lately--C++, Java, Javascript, HTML, XML, PHP, SQL and dozens of other newly developed languages and scripting I never even heard of to this day.

This processing capability of computers is made possible not only by the inventiveness of the human mind in devising those coding languages but by the phenomenon uncovered of the nature of--the electron. Free electrons in metal, not those bound in its orbit around the nucleus of an atom. This sub-atomic particle is the one used to code the binary system with its presence or absence. It travels in the central processing unit (CPU) of the computer at or near the speed of light called the signal speed. That's how it's possible to process, in nanoseconds, those billions, trillions of bits (electronic signals)--coded into human logic using those computer languages--and make the machine do what we humans 'instruct' it to do.

That's the bare-bones fundamentals of the technology, originally called ADP, then EDP and now--IT.

Now, the question: 'Why am I getting into all these?'

Out of curiosity during my 'architecture days', I sometimes wondered at the ingenuity of those human minds that dug into and acquired the knowledge of physics, mathematics, chemistry, electricity, thermo-dynamics. And then applied those knowledge in the use of construction materials, namely: metal, wood, glass, stone, masonry, concrete, plastic.

Then when I switched to computer programming, again out of curiosity upon learning of the inner workings of the CPU, the computer 'brain', likewise I wondered about the people who first looked beyond the external makeup of materials, peeked into the microscopic world of particle physics and saw the smallest unit of matter--the atom. Its structure, what it's made of--the nucleus consisting of the hadrons neutrons and protons, and the electron in orbit around the nucleus.

Knowing how this one single subatomic particle makes the CPU work, combined with the human ingenuity of using it to signal the on and off binary logic coding system never ceases to amaze me. And that's not all.

When I think about the immensity of what the electron has made possible in the advancement of just about all technology, it is mind-boggling in its entirety.

It has made possible the creation of electric current.

Atoms of metal are made up of free electrons. The flow of these free electrons in conductors is what we call electricity.

Imagine a world without electricity! We'd be back in the age of horse and buggy for transportation, candlelight and gaslight for lighting. And no air-conditioning, no refrigeration, no automobiles, no trains, no airplanes, no computers, no cell phones, no internet, no radio, no television.

But all that automation and technology did develop, made possible with the existence and manipulation of that one single subatomic particle--the electron. Imagine that!

When I think about the parallel between Architecture and IT, from my training and experience in both fields, I see one as an end-user--to use a geek term--and the other the systems designer.

I see one as the creation, the other as the source of the creator.

And where do we, humans, fit into that?

Now come the questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? Who or what designed and built us?

Do we look up at the stars, the heavens, to seek an answer? The answer? Or is it here in the world we live in that we find the answer?

I submit that the answer is in both. Out there in the immensity of the heavens, and here in our world, and more so--within ourselves.

First, let's look into where we are; into here and now and what we're doing in it. We've ventured into space, blasted out of earth gravity and are now tiptoeing into outer space, the solar system, so far, and seen the vastness of creation.

Terrestrially, we have seen the smallest unit of creation--the atom. Examined it, observed and identified its parts, what they're made of down to its elementary particle--the quark.

I don't want to get too deep into astronomy and particle physics here. But in an attempt to find an answer to those questions, let me just take us back to the first couple of pages, back to the tree in our front yard.

That Japanese red maple, like any other tree, any other living thing is made up of cells. Now we're into another area of the study of nature: Biology. Another realm of creation.

First--atom. Now--cell.

Talking about cells, we can't help going into--genetics. And talking about genetics, we go, top to bottom: cell-organelles-nucleus-molecule/chromosome-DNA (double helix)/alleles/gene/nucleotides (ACTG). You can google what all that is about unless you're a geneticist or some kind of a bio-engineer, or one of those scientists who worked on the Human Genome Project; in which case you don't have to.

Again, I don't want to get too deep into this. So to be brief about it, the cell is a biological unit, a living thing. An organism called--in humans and other complex organisms--eukaryote.

The atom is a chemical unit. That tree in our front yard, in all its appearance, is made up of cells, tiny living parts. And it grows, nourished by the earth, the sun and the rain. So is Miko, our cat, from head to tail. And so are you and me, our entire body. Whereas a skyscraper, in all its appearance, is made up of atoms. All of it. All the materials that hold it up top to bottom. And it doesn't grow.

But comparing cells to atoms is not a parallel comparison. Like architecture and IT, one is a creation from the other. Cell is architecture, a finished creation. Assembled and created with atoms, the source of the creation.

The question is--who is the Architect, the Creator? Who built the cell? Who or what designed it? Who or what decides that a typical cell should be made up of 100 trillion atoms? And who or what decides that the number of cells in the human body is to be about the same number?

Now the questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? Who or what designed and built us?

*

The size of an atom is about one ten billionth of a meter (1/10,000,000,000 meter or 1 nanometer). Again, there are 100 trillion atoms in a human cell. A trillion is 1,000 billion, so there are 100,000 billion atoms in one single human cell. And again, there are about the same number of cells in the entire human body. So then the entire human body is made up of 100,000 billion atoms x 100,000 billion cells = 10,000,000,000 billion billions of atom. In measures, each of us is made up of 10,000,000,000 billion billions of atom / 10, 000,000,000 meter = 1,000,000 trillion nanometers of atom.

That number of atoms distributed to build all the cells in the design of every part of the human body, every organ and skin and bone of you and me.

The question is--what or who made this happen from the start? For now, let's drop the 'what' in that and facilitate our perception of the Creator, the Architect, by personifying the entity.

Who made this happen? Who made us? Who designed and built us?

As I said earlier, I submit that the answer is both out there in the heavens and here in our world, and within ourselves.

We've just looked--literally looked--within ourselves, physically, genetically and chemically. We now know how we're put together, what we're made of: 100 trillion cells. Living, regenerating, multiplying organisms that make it possible for us to do what we do: see, smell, hear, eat, drink, sweat, digest, reproduce, feel, laugh, cry, emote, think. And more. Much more.

We have now mapped and catalogued all of our genes with the completion of the Human Genome Project in the year 2003. All the genes in every one of those DNAs in the nucleus of every cell of the human body. At a glance, it seems unfathomable looking into those 100 trillion microscopic cells and discovering what's in them. Those genes that determine the color of your eyes, the pigmentation of your skin, the color of your hair, the size of every bone of your body, and define your personality--physically, emotionally, mentally, even spiritually--as one unique creation. And not only that. We have now found a way to edit those genes to correct the ones that cause certain diseases and abnormalities. A method called CRISPR/CAS9.

That's looking within ourselves and in our world, weighing the question of who made all that happen. Who concocted all that 100 trillion cells, arranged the genes in them methodically in certain specific sequence to create you and me.

I find it curious when I consider those humongous numbers in billions and trillions, and I look at the sky on a clear summer night. And there they are again--'billions upon billions' as famously spoken by the astronomer-cosmologist-astrophysicist-astrobiologist Carl Sagan in his PBS TV series Cosmos: A personal Voyage.

What's with these numbers? I read some astronomy materials and looked up in the sky again some clear nights and thought: Hm-m, someone ought to be awfully good with numbers to be able to keep track of all that creation. Out there in the heavens, and here in our world.

Out there, in the cosmos, modern astronomers have been peeking into the universe and estimated that our galaxy the Milky Way, a disc-shaped spiral type, is about 120,000 light-years across. A light-year is distance traveled by light in one year. Light travels at 186,282 miles per second. A light-year is (don't bother with the math on this) 6 trillion miles.

So to hop across from one side of the disc to the other, you'd travel a distance of (6 trillion miles a year x 120,000 years) 720,000 trillion miles for 120,000 years.

Imagine that!

But wait! (Now I'm beginning to sound like a TV commercial.)

Some more numbers-crunching before we get back to earth. Scientists estimate:

There are 100 billion or more stars in the Milky Way.

There may be one Earth-like planet for every five Sun-like stars in our galaxy.

There are as many as six billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy.

Finally, estimates suggest there are between 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the universe.

Imagine that!

So, back to earth, again the question: Who made all these happen? Right from the start, which brings to mind the theory of--the Big Bang. Okay. But then who started the BB? This theory posits that it began with a single particle, some 13.8 billion earth-years ago, and it expanded, grew to what it is now.

Now that triggers a point of curiosity in me. The idea of size. That single particle, a single point that started it all, what is it? What is it made of? And how small was it? The size of an atom? A hadron like a proton or a neutron, or that of an electron?

If it is some intelligence that's behind this, and it has to be, whoever it is, wherever it came from, must have control of everything with whatever power of creation it possesses. And that power must be immense, backed up by an equally immense intelligence. Intelligence capable of designing--for instance--eukaryote cells, 100 trillion of them to create a human being.

Here again, talking about numbers in quantity and size, I find it curious that pretty much the same figures are involved in all of Creation, and in both directions.

Out there in the heavens--billions, trillions of stars and planets far out there in space. And here in our world--in nanoseconds and nanometers of our own body. It's as if the Creator, with that intelligence, equates our existence, each and every one of us, with the whole of Creation. Like the Creator is saying 'you are the world and the world is you.'

The thought of that prompts me to believe in that immense intelligence, the Architect, the Creator, the Designer, the Builder. And whatever else anybody might say or believe--Creationism, Evolution-Darwinism, Intelligent Design--I'm sticking with the belief that There has to be a Creator, an Architect, a Designer, a Builder that makes all our world exist and makes it possible to exist as it does.

And for brevity, simplicity--and for lack of a better word, I would simply say:

There has to be God.

**********

*

In tribute to a beautiful Creation:

TREES

Alfred Joyce Kilmer

1886-1918

*

I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest / Against the sweet earth's flowing breast

A tree that looks at God all day / And lifts her leafy arms to pray

A tree that may in summer wear / A nest of robins in her hair

Upon whose bosom snow has lain / Who intimately lives with rain

Poems are made by fools like me / But only God can make a tree.

*

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Credit: By the beloved Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona - "Noche Azul"