We are ambivalent, then, about beginnings, their 'creation myth' aspect appeals to our sense of narrative imperative, but we sometimes find the 'first it wasn't, then it was' lie-to-children unpalatable. We have even more trouble with becomings. Our minds attach labels to things in the surrounding world, and we interpret those labels as discontinuities. If things have different labels, then we expect there to be a clear line of demarcation between them. The universe, however, runs on processes rather than things, and a process starts as one thing and becomes another without ever crossing a clear boundary. Worse, if there is some apparent boundary, we are likely to point to it and shout 'that's it!' just because we can't see anything else worth getting agitated about. How many times have you been in a discussion in which somebody says 'We have to decide where to draw the line'? For instance, most people seem to accept that in general terms women should be permitted abortions during the earliest stages of pregnancy but not during the very late stages. 'Where you draw the line', though, is hotly debated, and of course some people wish to draw it at one extreme or the other. There are similar debates about exactly when a developing embryo becomes a person, with legal and moral rights. Is it at conception? When the brain first forms? At birth? Or was it always a potential person, even when it 'existed' as one egg and one sperm?
The 'draw a line' philosophy offers a substantial political advantage to people with hidden agendas. The method for getting what you want is first to draw the line somewhere that nobody would object to, and then gradually move it to where you really want it, arguing continuity all the way. For example, having agreed that killing a child is murder, the line labelled 'murder' is then slid back to the instant of conception; having agreed that people should be allowed to read whichever newspaper they like, you end up supporting the right to put the recipe for nerve gas on the Internet.
If we were less obsessed with labels and discontinuity, it would be much easier to recognize that the problem here is not where to draw the line: it is that the image of drawing a line is inappropriate. There is no sharp line, only shades of grey that merge unnoticed into one another, despite which, one end is manifestly white and the other is equally clearly black. An embryo is not a person, but as it develops it gradually becomes one. There is no magic moment at which it switches from non-person to person, instead, it merges continuously from one into the other. Unfortunately our legal system operates in rigid black-and-white terms, legal or illegal, no shades of grey, and this causes a mismatch, reinforced by our use of words as labels. A kind of triage might be better: this end of the spectrum is legal, that end of the spectrum is illegal, and in between is a grey area which we do our best to avoid if we possibly can. If we can't avoid it, we can at least adjust the degree of criminality and the appropriate penalty according to whereabouts in the spectrum the activity seems to lie.
Even such obviously black-and-white distinctions as alive/dead or male/female turn out, on close examination, to be more like a continuous merging than a sharp discontinuity. Pork sausages from the butcher's contain many live pig cells. With today's techniques you might even clone an adult pig from one. A person's brain can have ceased to function but their body, with medical assistance, can keep going. There are at least a dozen different combinations of sex chromosomes in humans, of which only XX represents the traditional female and XY the traditional male.
Although the Big Bang is a scientific story about a beginning, it also raises important questions about becomings. The Big Bang theory is a beautiful bit of science, very nearly consistent with the picture we now have of the atomic and the subatomic world, with its diverse kinds of atom, their protons and neutrons, their clouds of electrons, and the more exotic particles that we see when cosmic rays hit our atmosphere or when we insult the more familiar particles by slamming them together very hard. Now that physicists have 'found', or perhaps invented, the allegedly 'ultimate' constituents of these familiar particles (more exotic things known as quarks, glu-ons ... at least the names are familiar) they're starting to wonder whether there are more layers further down, more 'ultimate' still.
Turtles all the way down?
Does physics go all the way down, or does it stop at some level? If it stops, is that the Ultimate Secret, or just a point beyond which the physicists' way of thinking fails?
The conceptual problem here is difficult because the universe is a becoming, a process, and we want to think of it as a thing. We don't only find it puzzling that the universe was so different back then, that particles behaved differently, that the universe then became the universe now, and will perhaps eventually cease expanding and collapse back to a point in a Big Crunch. We are familiar with babies becoming children becoming adults, but these processes always surprise us, we like things to keep the same character, so 'becoming' is difficult for our minds to handle.
There is another element of the first moments of our universe that is even more difficult to think about. Where did the Laws come from? Why are there such things as protons and electrons, quarks and gluons? We usually separate processes into two conceptually distinct causal chunks: the initial conditions, and the rules by which they are transformed as time passes. For the solar system, for instance, the initial conditions are the positions and speeds of the planets at some chosen instant of time; the rules are the laws of gravitation and motion, which tell us how those positions and speeds will change thereafter. But for the beginning of the universe, the initial conditions seem not to be there at all. Even there isn't there! So it seems that it's all done by rules. Where did the rules come from? Did they have to be invented? Or were they just sitting in some unimaginable timeless pseudo-existence, waiting to be called up? Or did they uncurl in the early moments of the universe, as Something appeared, so that the universe invented its own rules along with space and time?
During the becoming of its first moments, our universe kept changing its state, changing the rules it accessed. In this respect it was rather like a flame, which changes its composition according to its own dynamics and the things that it is burning. Flames are all more or less the same shape, but they don't inherit that shape from a 'parent'. When you set light to a piece of paper, the flame builds itself from scratch using the rules of the outside universe.
In the opening instants of the universe, it wasn't just substances, temperatures and sizes that changed. The rules by which they changed also changed. We don't like to think this way: we want immutable laws, the same always. So we look for 'deeper' laws to govern how the rules changed. Possibly the universe is 'really' governed by these deeper laws. But perhaps it just makes up its own rules as it goes along.