It’s as if the one woman was concerned that I had lost my mind, while the other woman was concerned that I had lost my faith.
There’s a giant either/or embedded in their questions, an either/or that reflects some of the great questions of our era:
Faith or intellect?
Belief or reason?
Miracles or logic?
God or science?
Can a person believe in things that violate all the laws of reason and logic and then claim to be reasonable and logical?
I point this either/or out because how we think about God is directly connected with how we think about the world we’re living in.
When someone dismisses the supernatural and miraculous by saying, “Those things don’t happen,” and when someone else believes in something he can’t prove and has no evidence for, those beliefs are both rooted in particular ways of understanding what kind of world we’re living in and how we know what we know.
Often in these either/or discussions, people on both sides assume they’re just being reasonable or logical or rational or something else intelligent-sounding, without realizing that the modern world has shaped and molded and formed how we think about the world, which leads to how we think about God, in a number of ways that are relatively new in human history and have a number of significant limits.
So before we talk about the God who is with us and for us and ahead of us, we’ll talk about the kind of world we’re living in and how that shapes how we know what we know.
First, we’ll talk about the bigness of the universe,
then
the smallness of the universe,
then
we’ll talk about you and what it is that makes you you,
and then
we’ll talk about how all this affects how we understand and talk about God.
This will take a while—so stay with me—because the universe is way weirder than any of us ever imagined . . .
I. Welcome to the Red Shift
The universe,
it turns out,
is expanding.
Restaurant chains expand, waistbands expand, so do balloons and those little foam animal toys that come in pill-shaped capsules—but universes?
Or more precisely, the universe?
It’s expanding?
Now the edge of the universe is roughly ninety billion trillion miles away (roughly being the word you use when your estimate could be off by A MILLION MILES), the visible universe is a million million million million miles across, and all of the galaxies in the universe are moving away from all of the other galaxies in the universe at the same time.
This is called galactic dispersal, and it may explain why some children have a hard time sitting still.
The solar system that we live in, which fills less than a trillionth of available space, is moving at 558 thousand miles per hour. It’s part of the Milky Way galaxy, and it takes our solar system between 200 and 250 million years to orbit the Milky Way once. The Milky Way contains a number of smaller galaxies, including
the Fornax Dwarf,
the Canis Major,
the Ursa Minor,
the Draco,
the Leo I and the not-to-be-forgotten Leo II,
the Sculptor, and
the Sextans.
It’s part of a group of fifty-four galaxies creatively called the Local Group, which is a member of an even larger group called the Virgo Supercluster (which had a number of hit singles in the early eighties).
And happens to be traveling at 666 thousand miles an hour.
(So be careful out there, and look both ways before you cross the supernova.)
Back to our original question:
Expanding?
Around a hundred years ago, several astronomers, among them Edwin Hubble, he of telescope fame, and Vesto Slipher, he of awesome name fame, observed distant galaxies giving off red light. Red is the color galaxies emit when they’re moving away from you, blue when they’re moving toward you—hence the term “red shift.”
Fast-forward to 1964, to two physicists working for the Bell Telephone Company, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. These men were unable to locate the source of strange radio waves they were continually picking up with their highly sensitive equipment. As they searched for the source of these waves, cleaned the bird droppings (which Penzias called “white dielectric material”) off their instruments, and shared their findings with other scientists, they realized that they were picking up background radiation from a massive explosion.
An explosion, it’s commonly believed, that happened a number of years ago—13.7 billion, to be more exact.
Apparently, before everything was anything, there was a point, called a singularity, and then there was a bang involving inconceivably high temperatures, loaded with enough energy and potential and possibility to eventually create what you and I know to be life, the universe, and everything in it.
The background radiation from this explosion, by the way, is still around in small amounts as the static on your television. (And you thought it was your cable company.)
Now when we get into sizes and distances and speeds this big and far and galactic and massive, things don’t function in ways we’re familiar with. For example, gravity. Jump off the roof of your house, drop a plate on the floor in the kitchen, launch a paper airplane and you see gravity at work, pulling things toward our planet in fairly consistent and predictable ways. But in other places in the universe, gravity isn’t so reliable. There are celestial bodies called neutron stars that have such strong gravity at work within them that they collapse in on themselves. These stars can weigh more than two hundred billion tons—more than all of the continents on Earth put together . . .
and fit in a teaspoon.
And then there’s all that we don’t know. A staggering 96 percent of the universe is made up of black holes, dark matter, and dark energy. These mysterious, hard to see, and even harder to understand phenomena are a major engine of life in the universe, leaving us with 4 percent of the universe that is actually knowable.
Which leads us to a corner of this 96 percent unknowable universe, to the outer edge of an average galaxy, to a planet called Earth. Our home.
