PREFACE: What follows is a frothy mixture of whimsy and speculation, whipped up by one with neither a theological axe to grind, a kilogram of scientific background, or a desire to inspire angry rebuttal. It is merely the writer's way of dealing with matters far beyond his intellectual ken, such as why wagon wheels spun backward in the old cowboy pictures.

From time to time, often during bouts of insomnia induced by excess ingestion of 3-alarm chili and/or cheap booze, I have pondered the puzzlement of creation.

Let me first assure the strict religious constructionists that I have no quarrel with those who take the biblical version literally, although wondering why so few of them embrace the six-day work week observed by the Almighty, presumably a non-union toiler.

Okay, okay, I realize that the Genesis account was not relevant to forty-eight hours punched into a celestial time clock, excluding lunch time and whatever then passed for coffee breaks. Clearly, it referred to arbitrary divisions of the job at hand.

I'm perfectly content to allow for the same literary license that regarding the story about Jonah and the whale, which gives me considerably more pause.

From early childhood, I was admonished not to mess with what God had reportedly wrought, and, since I already have enough trouble with traffic cops, I still make it a point not to nay-say what it does say in the Good Book.

I was also taught that belief in the evolution of the human species from apedom, as opposed to the hairless pair that ate the apple in Eden, was a no-no, although certain NFL linemen and professional wrestlers seem supportive of the former theory.

Again, I don't buck the Bible, partially for the reason earlier cited, but also because I don't find tree-swinging ancestors an especially flattering image.

All that said, I believe in God, mostly because I want to and choose to, and because I have the same right to believe in what I believe in as have those who believe otherwise.

Now then, on to the Big Bang Theory, which many folks think is a divisive issue between Deists and the rest of personkind:

The BBT holds that the known (and yet-to-be-discovered) universe came about maybe 10- to 20 billion years ago as a result of a cosmic explosion or other spontaneous process that continues to this day and promises to go on forever.

There is ample scientific evidence that "stuff" - of which our earth and everything in/on it is now an infinitesimal part - has been flying about for all those billions of years, making a literal belief in the biblical "begats" a major leap of faith.

However, if some people choose to so believe, off whose other noses is skin being peeled?

And why is it necessary that the Big Bang believers be at odds with the Adam-and-Evers? Could not humans have been a late entry in the universal development process?

And might not humans and apes be physically related, despite their disparate characteristics? After all, right in our own government, extreme Rightists and Leftists are similar in appearance, although miles apart in their thinking (assuming, of course, that they engage in that activity).

Neither should atheistic Bigbangers completely rule out the probability that SOMEDURNEDTHING created the original "stuff" those billions of years ago. To hold that there was nothing before "stuff" of some sort makes no sense, and if there WAS "stuff" in the beginning, how did it get there? Hmmmm?

One ongoing phenomenon deserves the attention of both humanists and scientists. As the late Edwin Hubble (he of telescopic fame) proved, the galaxies spun off by that prehistoric "something" have since been moving away from each other - and from us - at a hell-for-leather pace, perhaps suggesting that we are anything but ideal neighbors.

The recent history of this troubled planet suggests that they, not us, are moving in the correct direction, but that's a whole 'nother subject, for at least a billion or so future columns.

Hubble's discoveries, by the way, refuted Albert Einstein's educated guess that the spin-offs were moving toward each other, raising the frightening specter of a future traffic pile-up of super-Californian proportions in another few billion years.

Anyhoo, it's nice to know we don't have THAT to worry about, and also comforting to learn that Old Al's crystal ball occasionally clouded up the same as ours does, albeit less frequently.

Class dismissed!