Resurrection

For those who never studied physics academically but deeply love it, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking explains the problem of the universe’s expansion beautifully.

If the expansion speed of the universe cannot overcome the gravitational pull created by the matter within it, then at some point the expansion will stop — just like a ball thrown into the air pauses momentarily before falling back down. And then the universe will begin collapsing into itself. Just as that ball returns to the point from which it was thrown with the same force, the universe would return to the point where the Big Bang began.

We once used this metaphor for economic expansion as well.

Although the Big Bang will probably never lose its relevance in physics, the Big Crunch has somewhat faded into the background after calculations made in recent years. The “God Particle” searched for with enormous resources at CERN and String Theory have become more popular subjects.

Together with the apocalypse, all humans on Earth — or perhaps in the universe — will die. From another perspective, the apocalypse will occur precisely because all humans die. In the film too, the death of the final mortal coincided with the end of cosmic expansion.

Returning to Hawking: if such an event were to happen, time might flow not forward, but backward. Events in the universe could unfold like a film being rewound.

Though philosophical, this is not something logic accepts easily. Even if physical events were reversed exactly, it is difficult to explain how emotions and thoughts could function backward. Cause and effect themselves would change, and in such a reversing universe there would be no place for human free will. Nobody could act according to their own will.

Even if our minds resist accepting this, according to the religious description of apocalypse, this absurdity may not actually be absurd. Because human beings exercised their free will while time flowed forward; when everything reverses, even if they appear alive again in flesh and blood, they are in fact still dead.

The rest of the matter perhaps does not deserve to be debated too seriously. Yet verses in many surahs describing people being raised from the soil, or verses saying that even those burned, exploded, or shattered into thousands of pieces will be restored to their original form before death — all this would only become possible through such a backward movement in time.

After reminding ourselves that many Qur’anic verses — including these — may actually contain symbolic narratives, and that perhaps we should not take their physical references too literally, let us turn toward Eastern philosophies and the idea of cyclicality that occasionally appears in Sufism as well.

In Reha Çamuroğlu’s book Dönüyordu (Translation: It circled), where he discusses the concept of time in Bektashism, there is an idea — common especially in Eastern religions — that time is not an arrow moving forward, but rather a circle; that what has happened will happen again.

A universe moving one step forward through the Big Bang and one step backward through the Big Crunch, endlessly repeating time like a yo-yo — or perhaps like a pendulum — makes this idea seem reasonable.

What interests me is that expressions inherited from ancient religions and beliefs, without involving mathematical calculations, resemble the implications suggested by theoretical physics. Reality may be different, or perhaps ancient religions perceived this profound physical truth in its simplest form and interpreted it accordingly.