Cosmology

Bridging between science and the divine

Hubble Ultra deep field By NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team - http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/21/image/aThe bright galaxy is UDF 423 with an apparent magnitude of 20., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2149279

Topics: Faith, Science

Context: I was discussing the nature of the divine with a relative and decided to write an essay on the topic. I suppose it is a good starting point for this substack.

Cosmology

Just as it wasn't until the 1500's that scientists began to understand that the heavens don't revolve around the earth, but that it spins, and the earth goes around the sun, it wasn't until a hundred years ago that we understood that we are in one of many galaxies.  

I'm not sure how much prior knowledge to assume, but I recently realized that some knowledge that I take for granted is not exactly common, so I'm going to build up a distance ladder starting with the distance from the sun to the earth.

The sun is so far away that it takes 8 minutes for its light to reach us.  But the next closest star is so far away that it takes 4.5 YEARs for its light to reach us  That is, it's 4.5 light years from us.  The Milky Way, which has 100 billion stars, is so big it takes just over 100,000 years for light to travel from one far edge to the other.  The closest galaxy that is similar to ours is the Andromeda Galaxy, and it is 2.5 million light years away.  

Take a moment and google "Hubble ultra deep field."  This image is of a portion of the sky that is 1/10th the size of the moon, and it contains 10,000 galaxies, and that's just counting the ones that weren't too faint.  The furthest in the image took over 13 billion light years for its light to reach us.

Consider, not only is it 13 billion light years away but that that light is 13 billion years old.  Most of the stars that emitted that light have probably exploded and their dust generated new stars, some of which have also exploded.  Our sun is only 4.5 billion years old.  

I am one of 7 billion people on planet earth, which circles one star out of 100 billion in the galaxy, which is one of... wait I can hardly fathom the numbers up to this point... but our galaxy is probably one of an even bigger unfathomable number.  

Ok, that was just building some basis for what I really want to say.  What's an even bigger deal is that the tapestry of galaxies across the universe, it's expanding.  Its not exactly that everything is moving away from each other so much as the universe is stretching, like points drawn on a balloon with a ballpoint pen move away from each other when someone blows it up.  And this stretching is speeding up.

When astronomers first realized this explained some of their observations of the skies, and coupled it with the equations in Einstein's General Relativity, they extrapolated back in time and were able to show that if you reverse time, the universe "shrinks" down to a single point.  And expanding from that point to generate the universe is what is referred to as the "The Big Bang"

Scientists have since considered how the rules of quantum physics, which are dominant in the extreme small domain which usually is the opposite of astronomy, would also dominate the initiation of "The Big Bang" since all of reality was in this extremely small scale.  On this extremely small, quantum scale, things can and do fluctuate randomly.  

Apparently, some big thinkers have been able to demonstrate mathematically(1), that our entire reality of space and time blossomed from quantum fluctuations in a singularity of whatever pre-existed space and time, and those quantum fluctuations happened to have just the right properties necessary for a stable reality as we know it.  They extrapolate this further to how there are other quantum fluctuations in this pre-existence that are outside our own that generate realities in a broad array of possibilities, some of which have rules that aren't stable and collapse.  

Soooooooo, taking all that and turning it around to contemplate the divine...

Our understanding of reality is very personal and based on what we can view, or what we can understand of what others have determined about it.  But it has been demonstrated that the entirety of our universe is huge, much huger than we can normally fathom.  In space, and in time.  

Yet on an entirety of the universe scale, the one thing science has shown is random and effectively outside of the cause and effect requirements of our reality, but is generally only on such a small scale it's outside of our experience, actually did determine how our entire reality unfolded.  

And as we as individuals can individually experience only a tiny fraction of that reality, perhaps that experience is a sliver of a divine being responsible for it all.  

The heavens declare the glory of God;

    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech;

    night after night they reveal knowledge.

They have no speech, they use no words;

    no sound is heard from them.

Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,

    their words to the ends of the world.

Psalm 19:1-4

(1) https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/a-mathematical-proof-that-the-universe-could-have-formed-spontaneously-from-nothing-ed7ed0f304a3