Westward Lies The Sun

By Robert Kono

Greg Sonoda, a Japanese American attorney, embarks on a quest to determine what influence God has in his life. In the back of his mind is the question, first and foremost, of whether God exists at all. God is such an elusive concept to a humanist, who, from his earliest years, was made to question God's very existence""he suffered in the concentration camps for the duration of WWII""and he doubts his efforts will ever come to fruition. In Westward Lies the Sun, Greg's search for truth is given voice during the frequent debates with his poker foursome, although the late-night discussions produce more questions than answers. But they do serve to articulate thoughts and feelings about sundry issues such as the search for Greg's family heirloom: a samurai sword stolen during Greg's incarceration in the camps. More significantly, Greg is forced to ponder God's hand in his family's survival after being shipwrecked on a small, uninhabited Micronesian island. Greg and his family make several discoveries on the island that lead to financial success and miraculous physical healing. But will the island also heal Greg spiritually? The family sword""Onimaru""is ultimately used in a showdown on the island with Greg's quest for God, together with his mental and physical survival, hanging in the balance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781642588163

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Westward Lies The Sun

Robert H. Kono

Copyright © 2018 by Robert H. Kono

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

For my sons, David and Kevin, their wives, my grandchildren and in loving memory of my wife, Carol.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to a living person is purely coincidental and unintentional.

Chapter One

The day was calm on Big Bear Lake in the San Bernardino Mountains, a two-hour plus drive from Redondo Beach, California. A slight breeze blew in from the west but hardly stirred the surface of the water. The sky was cloudless, and the sun shone warmly on the lake and surrounding landscape—the mountains, trees, the small town of Big Bear. It was early summer, too early for the main crowd of tourists to come flocking to the lake but not too early for good fishing.

Greg Sonoda, a Sansei Japanese American, sat in the boat with his two young sons, Brian and Craig, who were twelve and ten. Greg had stopped the boat near the shoreline to eat their lunch. As they munched on their sandwiches, they watched an osprey circle overhead, then plunge into the water to scoop up a trout.

He caught his lunch, observed Brian.

It was a big one too, Craig said.

And it looks like the kind of trout we’ll be catching as soon as we finish eating, said Greg.

Are we going to troll or fly-cast? asked Brian.

Both, said Greg. We’ll troll the greater depths toward the middle of the lake, and toward the end of the day, we’ll fly-cast the eastern shoreline where there’s bound to be big ones.

Can’t wait to tie into a big one, Brian said.

Me neither, Craig said.

I recall that Craig caught the biggest one last time we were here, Greg said.

Yeah, Craig said. That was a whopper, eighteen and a half inches!

You just got lucky, Brian said, ever competitive with his younger brother. The one I lost was bigger than yours.

But you lost it, Craig said. You never boated it.

Today I’ll catch the biggest one, you’ll see.

"Maybe I’ll get lucky again… Skill is what counts, and I have the mojo."

You’ll need your mojo when we go deep-sea fishing one of these days, Greg said.

Craig whooped. Boy! I’ll catch the biggest fish you ever saw. When are we going?

"Don’t know—yet. Someday soon, I hope. Depends on what’s going on at the office. Hard to break away… maybe on my sabbatical, in the South Pacific somewhere. I always wanted to explore the South Pacific ever since I read Blue Capricorn."

Greg poured out some OJ from a plastic liter bottle and passed the cups around. As he was sipping his drink, he thought about the slander suit he was writing a brief on, how intractable it was and how becoming a lawyer had been a totally unexpected turn in his life.

I wonder if you’ll even find the Masamune sword, Dad? Brian said, referring to the conversation they had as a family the night before.

I showed you a picture of it because even if I don’t find it within my lifetime, I want you two boys to take up the banner and look for it no matter what.

What’s so special about it? Craig asked.

It’s a family heirloom. It’s been in the Sonoda family for centuries, and my father snuck it in when he emigrated to America in the early 1920s.

And it was stolen from us? Brian said.

That’s right. While we were in the concentration camps, thieves broke in to our house and ransacked it and somehow found the Masamune hidden in the wall. My father took pains to conceal it as well as he could, but the thieves were too clever. They must have seen the boarded-over area and decided to break in.

It’s been a long time since you came back from the concentration camps, Brian said. How come you’re just now beginning the search for it?

That was a long story, thought Greg. He had initially given up hope. As the only sibling residing in the United States, he felt it was up to him to seek its whereabouts rather than his older brother who was in Japan but despaired in the wake of discovering how many cherished things had been looted when they returned from the camps. Not only had they been incarcerated by their own government, but the general citizenry had plundered their personal belongings as well. It was a blow that took him a long time to recover from. But recover he did, with a vengeance. It took a sojourn in Japan to rekindle an enthusiasm for life and putting things in order. The idea of looking for the Masamune had been with him for a long time now, but it was only recently that he was able to finance the search. He posted a $10,000 reward for the whereabouts of the famous sword. He was just beginning to spread the word along with photographs of the blade to the various dealers, the notable one being Samurai Sword International in San Pedro.

In reply to his son’s question, Greg said, I suppose it’s because I didn’t have the leeway to offer a reward for the discovery of the Masamune—yet. It’s a long story of waffling between letting bygones be bygones, the war, the camps, the ransacking, and recovering something of our family’s past. It’s a matter of dignity and honor, Brian.

It may be gone forever, Craig said. You may never find it. What then?

Then I want you to pick up the ball and look for it after I die. And you may want your offspring to do the same. It’s the striving that counts.

What’s that mean, Dad? Brian asked.

It means a noble goal is always worth striving for, even if you don’t attain it, because the striving is its own reward. Remember that.

Brian balled up the plastic sandwich wrapping and tossed it into the lunch sack. He stood up and stretched.

I’m ready to go fishing, he said and picked up his rod.

Me too, Craig said.

Greg finished the last mouthful and bent around to start the motor. With its growling sounds penetrating the surrounding stillness, Greg pulled up the anchor and pointed the boat toward the deeper water close to the middle of the lake. In a few minutes the boat was cruising along at trolling speed as the boys stripped out their lines. They were experienced fishermen, accustomed to both trolling with worms and fly-fishing. Greg manned the motor and did not fish. He reserved the fun for later in the afternoon when they would anchor off the shore and fly-fish.

As they were cruising under the warm sun, Greg’s thoughts turned to the slander suit that had been dumped into his lap. He had become acquainted with the prominent LA businessman, Henry Miyamoto, who wanted to sue a white man by the name of Dick Simpson for defamation of character.

It seems that Simpson, a business rival, had started rumors about Miyamoto to the effect that he was the illegitimate son of a Japanese army general who had been sought by the Tokyo War Tribunal for having committed atrocities against American POWs during World War II and that he was a degenerate playboy in Tokyo with ties to the yakuza.

All lies, said Miyamoto. He was born in America and never even been to Japan. He wanted to take Simpson to court to clear his name. But the problem was that Simpson did not specify Henry—Henry Miyamoto. He merely spread the rumor about one Miyamoto presumably in the United States, and Miyamoto was a common Japanese surname. It could have been just about anyone, in the United States, Japan—or the entire world. Being a business rival of Miyamoto’s, he apparently meant to slander Henry, but that would be hard to prove in a court of law. And Henry Miyamoto was adamant; he wanted his day in court. Greg had tried to point out the difficulties to him but to no avail. There was bad blood between the two, although they had never met and there was no common meeting ground, as far as Henry Miyamoto was concerned.

Greg was low man on the totem pole at Crossett, Bigelow & Tyler, a huge law firm based in LA with offices all over the world, and he was often handed the more onerous cases—much to his chagrin. He sometimes wondered why he wanted to become a lawyer in the first place, but he knew why. He chuckled inwardly. It was his wife’s doing… her and her mellifluous voice. It was such a soft, gentle voice that Greg longed to match it with a face. She was a legal assistant at CBT’s LA office, and he met her when he inquired about a summer office job while going to UCLA. He got the job mainly due to her insistence. When he showed up for the interview, he met the voice and was not disappointed with the match. She was beautiful. Her soft brown eyes looked gently into his, and there was a stillness of a quiet soul in their depths. He fell immediately in love with Caroline Lister.

But… he had had to put the brakes on his feelings. This was the 1950s, and interracial marriage was not acceptable yet. His own people frowned upon it. There was the feeling that marrying a white woman only meant that one was trying to elevate oneself out of the underdog status… the snootiness factor. And the white majority would only look down on such a union, making sure they would stare them out of existence. Many states had anti-miscegenation laws on the books, and racial hostility was still high. Better to just blend in and not rock the boat. But his heart was not in it. He wanted freedom of choice.

At UCLA Greg majored in anthropology. He had also taken Japanese language courses with the idea that he would someday do research on a small farming village in Japan, his father’s birthplace. He wanted to delve into his ancestral roots and trace the history of the village and to see how it prospered, how the people lived and how the general culture influenced their lives. His father was an Issei, a first-generation immigrant, and his mother, a Nisei (second-generation), which made him a Sansei (third-generation), although he tended to be intergenerational. His father, Tomoyuki Sonoda, spoke little English, and his mother, Jean, didn’t speak Japanese. They communicated haltingly and often used him as an intermediary. He grew up bilingual and provided an effective bridge between the two. His mother refused to learn Japanese, saying she was an American and English was her mother tongue.

A degree in anthropology would normally lead to a PhD and to teaching, but Greg did not want to teach. In fact, he did not know what to do with the degree, other than having a vague desire to understand how the Japanese culture impacted on the villagers and thus understand how Japaneseness affected his consciousness as an American. It seemed that two polar opposites were pulling at him, threatening him with confusing choices, choices to become either a Japanese or an American or to become something else—like himself. As an entity who understood both countries, he figured he could straddle both countries culturally and still remain Greg Sonoda, but it was no easy task as the two worlds of his mother and father clashed. With the outbreak of World War II and the mass evacuation from the West Coast, they were thrown into concentration camps, a violation of their civil liberties as Americans, there to question their loyalties to Japan or America.

By and large the Japanese Americans chose to be loyal to the United States (after all, they were Americans), but a number of them branded themselves as disloyals when they refused to answer a rigged questionnaire speciously separating the loyals from the disloyals. Then there was the Fair Play Committee movement at the Heart Mountain, Wyoming, camp where Greg was interned along with his mother. (Tomoyuki had been arrested by the FBI and county sheriff the night of Pearl Harbor and sent to separate detention centers.) The insistence of the Fair Play Committee on reinstituting their civil liberties as Americans before they would agree to be drafted caused widespread repercussions. The members of the movement were tried and convicted of being draft dodgers and spent time at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary until pardoned by President Truman.

Going into anthropology was Greg’s attempt to understand his own background better. What he was good for as a person was beyond him at the moment. He wanted to do many things: start a business, make a lot of money, write a novel. But he had to get his military service out of the way first.

After graduation he enlisted in the Army and took officer training at the US Army Intelligence Center, Fort Huachuca, Arizona. He was then dispatched to Japan where he acted as a bilingual aide to the head of Provost Marshal Liaison Office in Tokyo. It was there that he tied up with his older brother, Dan Sonoda, a sporting goods manufacturer.

Greg gunned the motor after having the boys reel in their lines and made for the shore for a pit stop. Relieving themselves among the trees, the three got in the boat again to make their way across the lake. The sun was going down, and its last rays were warming the shoreline. It had been a splendid day, Greg observed, looking up at the sky, which was clear except for a bunch of cumulus clouds to the west, and the trout had been cooperative. Now he was anticipating catching a few big ones fly-casting and brought the boat to a stop, dropping anchor in the shallower eastern half of the lake. When he had rigged his pole and tied on a Light Cahill, he made sure Brian and Craig were ready to fly-fish themselves before making the first cast. There were rises all around them.

Greg didn’t have to wait long before he caught a fish. There was a stir in the water, and Greg raised the tip of his pole sharply. He had hooked into a large one. Stripping in the line carefully, he brought the fish to the side of the boat where he deftly netted it. It was a handsome twelve-inch rainbow trout. Just then both Brian and Craig caught one, and Greg netted them and brought them in. Craig’s measured fourteen inches, Brain’s only ten.

Looks like I win again, Craig cried.

Day’s not done yet, said Brian.

They cast their flies again and repeated the process, false-casting and shooting their lines toward the shore. The caught a few more, but soon the fish left the area.

Looks like we spooked them, said Greg.

Yeah, all that thrashing around did it, said Brian.

Let’s move to another spot, there’s still time, said Craig. I’ll catch a bigger one yet.

Braggart, Brian said.

Naw, just fact, Craig said.

I think we have enough fish, boys, Greg said. Counting the fish you caught trolling, I’d say we have two limits.

Don’t you want to fish some more, Dad? Brian asked.

I’d like to, but it’s getting late, and we should be heading back, Greg said.

Phooey! Craig said.

Greg yanked on the starter and motored toward the dock in the distance and upon reaching it expertly guided the boat to its berth. They got out, and trundling their gear, fish, and belongings, they made their way to the car where they deposited their loads. In the car they broke out some snacks to tide themselves over till a late dinner at home where the boy’s mother, Caroline, awaited them. It would be a two-hour drive back to Redondo Beach, and that would put them back home around seven. Greg started the car, a late model Toyota Camry, and left the parking lot to enter the highway that would take them to CA-210 W. Then it would be a straight shot home.

Chapter Two

Caroline Lister was the love of his life. He later learned that she had vouchsafed for him at the initial interview for a summer job at Crossett, Bigelow & Tyler. He was able to work closely with her the entire summer and breathe in her presence—as from afar. Though they sometimes shared a table in the downstairs cafeteria during their breaks, Greg felt awkward with her, a Japanese in the company of a beautiful white woman. There were stares from passersby and the neighboring tables. He himself wasn’t bad-looking, standing over six feet with strong eyebrows and chin and bright, intelligent eyes. He was muscular and athletic, having played tennis at school since he was a child. They talked about his plans for the future in anthropology; he loved listening to her speak in her mellifluous voice.

His Japaneseness was a stumbling block. He felt culturally rough around the edges, as though the concentration camp experience, which had turned him into a second-class citizen, was an albatross around his neck and would remain there for the rest of his life. The experience compelled him to be 200 percent American—an impossible psychological drag. He had grown up on a farm near Torrance before the evacuation—his older brother, Dan, having been sent to Japan before the war for his education. Dan had lived with their grandparents on the island of Shikoku, fought with the Japanese army in China, and upon his return to Japan turned his attention to manufacturing sporting goods.

On the farm Greg worked hard as a youth and learned to drive a tractor when he was just eight, often relieving his father, Tomoyuki, so that he could ply his other job as a fisherman working out of San Pedro. Somehow the family, along with his mother, Jean, working as a domestic, managed to make both ends meet during the Great Depression and put food on the table. With the payment of the loan on the farm and fishing boat taken care of, they had little leftover but managed to save a good portion of it toward Greg’s college education, which in Tomoyuki’s mind was Greg’s ticket out of financial misery.

Get a college education and find a good job, he often told Greg as young as he was.

So Greg was all geared up to go to college to follow his father’s dream (Tomoyuki himself had had only a fourth-grade education in Meiji Japan), but he did not major in the sciences or engineering, which was his father’s first choice. Instead his followed his instincts and enrolled in anthropology, the better to study his own consciousness of what it meant to be a Japanese in a land which was dominated by Caucasians. He was torn between two cultures and needed to figure out which one he belonged to, the Japanese or American. Studying anthropology seemed to be a way to understand his roots and ancestry while affording him an overall view of what it meant to be an American.

His was a 200 percent commitment. But he couldn’t eclipse his Japanese consciousness, try as he might. As a child, he, of course, wore American clothes, ate American food as often as he could (he always ordered an American dish when they went out to restaurants), read American books (mainly comic books, however, aside from school textbooks). He listened to Fibber McGee and Molly, The Fred Allen Show, The Shadow on the radio. But he went to Japanese school after regular school hours and learned a little Japanese; he learned about the culture mainly. So when the evacuation order came through, he felt as though he were being punished for thinking like a Japanese, not enough like an American, and liking things Japanese. After the camps, he was a gung ho American—with a nagging kind of undertow. He could never break out of the cultural mold.

He wanted to date Caroline but couldn’t see where it would lead. A dead-end, one in which they would simply part as friends? He had fallen in love with Caroline, but was it a kind of puppy love? One which was shallow and only skin-deep? He would have to get to know her better—get to know himself better.

One part of him said, Yes, this is the woman I could love for life. The other part said, Who are you to reach for the stars?… You’re just a racial underdog. Better not get your hopes up too high lest you’re shot down.

On the other hand, hadn’t the concentration camps sparked a desire in him to be free, free of the barbwire fence around his soul, free of racial constraints, free as the white man? Such a freedom would require him to delve into himself as an individual, as a singular human being who was able to stand on his own two feet; but he had no model to follow, no Nisei to pattern his thinking after, for they all appeared to think alike in an ocean of shared presumptions. One of the presumptions was that being alike made for security (the herd instinct), that the nail that sticks out gets pounded down. Greg was willing to be pounded down, for according to his way of thinking, the nail that gets pounded down is precisely the one that holds the structure (of society, of the relationship between the races, of racial goodwill) together in an orchestration of beliefs, idealism, and personal will.

He felt as though he were a pioneer or explorer, out to hack his way through the wilderness of the identity question. Perhaps every human being felt the same way at the outset: the need to define oneself as an individual. He was no different. He even went so far as to want to change the world from a world that could incarcerate 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans at the drop of the hat, stripping them of their civil liberties in the name of war hysteria to be sure and on the pretext of race—you look like the enemy; therefore you are the enemy—to a world that was more equitable.

As in any wilderness, the terrain was unknown and dangerous, fraught with inner and outer pitfalls, with wild beasts bent on attacking and destroying one, with instances of trial and error. One may advance in a certain direction only to hit a barrier that causes one to find another route to the resolution of the question. But one thing is certain: once a person is embarked on the exploration, the search for an answer is never-ending. It will haunt the mind until one finds God.

In two hours, Greg, Brian and Craig were back in Redondo Beach. They unloaded their gear and stashed it in the garage and made their way into the dining room, famished. Caroline had set the table and now began serving up the food. They set the creel of fish on the kitchen counter; Greg would clean them afterward.

And how was fishing? she asked in her mellow voice.

Fine, Craig said. I caught the biggest one, a fourteen-incher. It was a fat one.

That’s good, she said. And you’ll probably catch a bigger one yet next time.

You bet, Craig said.

They set upon their meal hungrily with little conversation to interrupt. Caroline looked fondly at the three of them, proud of the men in her life. The two boys were going to be tall and handsome like their dad. She herself was five feet six. She had dark-brown eyes, and her straight auburn hair hung shoulder length. Her soft, gentle smile revealed a straight row of teeth. Like an old-fashioned mom, she plied them with more food when their plates were empty. She didn’t want any of her men to go hungry.

Gary called, she said to Greg, and said the poker game was being moved to Sunday night.

That means we’ll have to cut it short and quit around midnight, Greg said.

Instead of an all-night session?

Right. Something must have come up.

Mondays, you always go in early, said Caroline.

So I’ll have to quit by midnight.

After dinner Greg called Gary Simmons, who was his buddy since the Fort Huachuca days. They took officer training together and were shipped out to Tokyo at the same time, but Gary went to his military intelligence job in Korea with the Eighth Army while Greg began his job as an aide to the colonel heading Provost Marshal Liaison Office, using his Japanese language skills as an interpreter and translator.

It turned out that Gary had stomach cancer. He would be in another part of the country consulting with a naturopathic doctor to seek an alternative treatment. Gary was a great believer in naturopathic medicine and had been in excellent health until his recent diagnosis, having exercised prevention by taking a number of herbal supplements. But he would be damned if he was going to submit himself to the ravages of chemotherapy and radiation, the standard forms of treatment after surgery. He believed in the body’s ability to heal itself. He was flying back late Saturday. Though the diagnosis was unsettling, Gary managed to take it in stride, being a tough-minded individual who always tried to see things as they were, not as they should be. He was very much a man who was given to the present rather than the future and lived according to the dictates of whatever the current conditions were in any given situation, be it business, financial, or medical issues. Greg said he would be seeing him and hung up.

On the last Sunday of the month, they all gathered at Greg’s house to play poker. There were four of them: Gary and Greg, Bill Terada and Hank Mochizuki. Bill was the same age as Greg (forty-five) and was one of his contacts in Tokyo. Hank was from the same camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, and they knew each other. Caroline served them up some sushi treats to go along with their beer and retired to the living room where she watched TV. The foursome sat at the dining room table.

I heard the bad news, Bill said to Gary.

Yeah, Gary replied, it could be worse. It could have metastasized, but it hasn’t. It’s in its early stage.

It’s funny that you couldn’t find a doctor in this area, Hank said.

I wanted to consult with the top doctor in the country and had to fly to Baltimore, but he referred me to a naturopathic specialist here, and I’ll be contacting him tomorrow.

Gives you a lot to think about, Greg said.

Yeah, it does. Too many things… everything. How long have we been meeting for poker? Ten years, thirteen years? In all that time none of us has gotten sick. We’ve been as healthy as horses and rightly so. We’re still young and are supposed to enjoy good health. We don’t smoke, we watch what we eat—within reason—and we get our exercise. In spite of that, I come down with stomach cancer. It’s not right. I’m only forty-eight, for God’s sake.

There you have it, Greg said. It’s the spin of the wheel.

And where the ball falls, no one knows, said Gary. It could have happened to any one of us. Not that I’d wish it on anybody. But life has a way of throwing you curves.

We’re too young to be philosophers, Greg said, but too old to not have some healthy premonitions.

Too young to think about death? Gary said.

Something like that, Greg said.

As kids we’re fascinated by death, Gary said. We accept it for what it is—a termination. Our pets die, our grandparents die, a classmate’s parent dies. It’s a permanent goodbye. It’s only when we get older that we turn it into something metaphysical and ask questions like where does the soul go after death. Do I go to heaven or hell? We’re hardwired to believe in a good place or bad place, and everybody would want to go to a good place—which begs the question: What do I have to do to go to a good place?

In other words, is there a God who rewards good deeds? said Bill as he popped a sushi morsel into his mouth and washed it down with a swallow of beer. He began shuffling the cards and dealing them.

Right, said Gary, is there a God to begin with? That’s the $64 trillion question. Does God exist as a separate entity, or is he a figment of the imagination?

If he’s a figment of the imagination, Hank said, there must be as many gods as there are people.

Which makes the universe a very busy place, indeed, said Greg. But if there were a God, what good does he do, besides creating nature and the universe? There’s such a tussle between good and evil in the world that you wonder where God is in all of this. Sometimes the ball falls on the good side of the net, sometimes on the evil side. It’s an ongoing battle with no winning side—ever.

Maybe creating all the immutable laws of nature and the universe is all God can do, said Bill. He dealt out the cards.

And let the human race seek its own glory or demise, said Gary. There’s something to be said for that view. But what if the universe came about by chance rather than design? What if the universe were all a matter of luck? What if the universe were a free lunch? And all the life forms and their intelligence a matter of evolution?

Does the intelligent life forms include plants and insects? asked Hank.

You bet it does, Gary said. The insect-eating plants have to know when to clamp shut their trapdoors, and the insects have to know how and when to insert their eggs into a caterpillar, for instance. So the question is… can intelligence evolve? Yes, it can. It can evolve from the simple to the complex, from solving the problems of survival to abstractions.

But intelligence implies consciousness, said Bill. Where does consciousness come from?

That’s another big question, said Gary. Did it come from DNA and its progressive mutations serendipitously, evolving from the simple to the complex, or did it always exist? And if it always existed, do we call it God? That’s the sticking point, it seems. Accepting consciousness will always be a matter of faith, but we know we have consciousness—we are either conscious or we are not—so it’s a no-brainer. The big question is whether there has been a greater consciousness all along, before the Big Bang, that generated the circumstances that led to the Big Bang—and all of creation. Or is the Big Bang not the singularity we think it is? Could it be that there have been innumerable singularities throughout the history of the universe—our universe and all universes? It could be that the Big Bang is just one in an eternity of Big Bangs and that there has been no beginning nor will there be any end.

It’s the master-architect concept or the something-from-nothing concept that’s the conundrum, Greg said.

Who’s to decide? Hank asked. Each and every one of us? There would be as many gods as there are people, four billion and counting.

Therefore you have the rise of different religions and beliefs throughout history, Greg said, "and the human propensity to form cliques around a concept or an idea. It gives rise to all kinds of theologies and philosophies in all human endeavors—from Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam to social organization, politics, commerce and education, I’d say. There can be as many different ideas about human existence as there are people, and not one of them is the true form, although