Our entire solar system doesn't make a speck in space and the age of the world cannot be reckoned, for time has no value, no existence in the super-material world.
It is frequently urged by sceptics that to an all powerful consciousness it should be easy to assume a personal character without employing the complicated process of producing mankind and awaiting humanity's slow growth to a divine perfection. But when it comes to preparing plans and specifications for a better and simpler method they have never shown ability superior to the divine thought.
Leaving out the consideration of time and the immensity of the finite world, which are of no importance to the Supreme Architect, the plan seems simple enough. There was a divine desire for expression. The Supreme was alone and unmanifest. There was consciousness but no knowledge, for there was nothing to know. The impulse to Be, produced the world, every atom of which is part of the Creator that produced it. The world is synthesized in man, for man holds in his physical body the essence of everything that is in the world. There is nothing, mineral, vegetable, animal, solid, fluid or gaseous that has not its place in man's organization. Man is pressing forward, evolving to a condition of purity that shall make him perfect and divine, a God enriched with the knowledge gained from numberless lives on earth. He becomes again a spark of the Supreme, but individualized and omniscient. And thus is the divine purpose accomplished and the divine impersonal self made divinely manifest.
Whether this be the true theory or not cannot be determined by any process of reasoning. The Finite mind is unable to comprehend the Infinite. We cannot analyze the act of the super-mundane power or find a reason that we can understand and prove by mental progress.
So therefore we can not trace involution even as we can evolution, for it is not of this plane. Whatever we note that seems to us to be involution is only some variation of the other. It has to do with our material progress while involution is a product of the impulse of a consciousness beyond our comprehension.
We may then consider involution briefly as the descent of spirit into a material condition and evolution as the refinement of matter into spirit. We may safely believe that under this stupendous plan the present is not the first and will not be the last cycle, but that they stretch their never ending spirals in both directions without limit. Whether or not there ever was a beginning to this endless coil of cycles of involution and evolution is beyond our feeble comprehension.
Logic and reason are but the dull weapons of conquest over problems of the Finite, and are entirely too crude to be used with confidence in giving battle to the mysteries of the Infinite.
Only the intuitions can help us beyond the boundaries of the super-material world and they tell us that there never was a beginning to the things which are and that there will never be an end. This condition of Being, without ever a time of actual commencing, is paradoxical and confusing to the mind and we cannot easily realize that although apparently impossible it is true. But it is only one of many similar contradictions that attend upon the Contemplation of Infinity.
We cannot even comprehend a beginning to the present cycle of our existence. The birth of this world is lost in the misty obscurity of the infinite Past and is as hopelessly beyond us as is the record of the countless myriads of similar creations which preceded it. It is therefore of little value to attempt to fix an era from which to begin tracing the evolution of man from the irresponsible, mindless monster that archaic teachings describe him to have been before he assumed conscious domination over the other creatures of this world. And it is equally vain to seek for information regarding the various changes through which he arrived at even that primitive condition of being only a mass of inert semi-conscious matter. Perhaps in this as in the other aspects of the transmigration of the Divine into the Finite, there never was any beginning.
The Vedanta, which is that phase of Indian Philosophy that treats specially on this subject, says that the world proceeded from an inscrutable principle, darkness, neither existent nor non-existent and from "one that breathed without afflation, other than which there was nothing, beyond it nothing."