Of God, the universe, and how the more I know the less I know

Imagine if you will the universe. We as humans have a desire to make sense of the world around us as well as the universe around us, and so we send objects in space to take photos of us and then some. What we can see is appropriately known as “The Observable Universe”;

and it is as we zoom out we can see the complexity and the magnitude of the universe. We get lost in the bigness of it all, we are enamored of the complexity and we are compelled to travel farther into space.

and in a similar fashion, that’s how I “observe” God.

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It is true, that God is as big as you’ll allow God to be, so if you make God convenient, bite-sized, put-God-in-your-pocket, manageable, domesticated, and so forth…God will remain that small. God will be knowable, comprehensible, understandable, and you never need wonder what is God up to because God has been reduced to a systematic theory and thus is fully known.

But, if you are one for dreaming big and offering up bold statements to God, try this one on for size; “God I want to know more about you, on your terms and not my own”. It’s not an uttering of magic words, it’s simply allowing God to be freed from the constructs we impose upon God.

It is under these circumstances that we go further and further out and see how small we truly are inasmuch how big God is; the box we once contained God to is a mere blip, and the further out we go the less we know and yet it is because of this we are compelled to go out farther still.

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So let go of the God you once claimed to know and go farther. And as you go out you will see your smallness and fragility, but embrace the fact that God loves you deeply and completely!

~Nathanael~

The first time I watched Cosmos – 28/28

I picked up at a garage sale the television series The Cosmos starring Carl Sagan a few years ago. It was my first viewing of something featuring him. I knew a little about him from his movie Contact and a bit about him from his book Pale Blue Dot. Yet as I viewed that show, and learning about the universe around us, my brain exploded on more than one occasion.

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I will say that as a follower of Christ science is not incompatible with what we know about the observed universe. I for one don’t believe in a literal 6 day creation nor do I believe in a young earth, which is why I winced at times during the so-called “debate” of Ham vs. Nye. I think that there are some followers of Christ who see an incompatibility with science because they want to make the Bible out to be something bigger than what it is, and as I tell my youth ministry students there’s black and white in the Bible but there is a LOT of grey. But back to Carl Sagan and The Cosmos…

It was fascinating to me to find out where we’ve come as far as technology and how to some extent our predecessors were spot on with their understanding of astronomy. Nowadays we have the big guns, the Hubble telescopes that are going further and further out exploring our universe at large. I wept several times when I watched the show; the magnitude of what we already know about the universe, and how much more has yet to be discover is phenomenal and mind-blowing.

I am one to believe that the universe is infinite in size, that we as a human race will never run into a celestial wall and have to go back to whence we came. I also believe in an infinite God, a God who loves ALL of humanity and not just a certain group of individuals who love him back.

As Carl Sagan put it; “if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” because even if we’re going out into the expanse of space to see the bigness that is out there, there is the bigness in everyday life. Atoms and how they interact with each other, other items that can be found solely on the cellular level, how they all go about doing their own thing in a uniform and complex way. It’s freaking amazing at how amazing everything is around us when we start exploring and start letting it engulf our senses and our whetted appetites for what’s bigger than ourselves. We as a human race will keep on exploring the universe around us, and to think that someday we will surpass what Carl Sagan talked about in The Cosmos is in and of itself also mind blowing.

Onward and upward,
Nathanael

Looking for God in the Higgs Boson particle

Lately there’s been a lot of talk in the news that the so-called God Particle, the Higgs Boson, might have been found. That is to say the essence of all there and life itself may have been found. Yet to scientifically paraphrase G.K. Chesterton; every scientist who looks for Higgs Boson is looking for God.

I truly believe if this kind of particle does exist, it won’t be God in itself but God will be in the particle. God cannot be contained in the vastness of the universe or even the span of all of human history, nor can he be reduced to a single particle. He is much too big and cannot be summed up by anything that we as humans place upon him. I have faith in Him, that somehow and someway if this particle does in fact exist, it does deter from the nature of God’s bigness but only adds to it.

I have been in the mountains of New Mexico when it has been a clear night and the span of stars above me just boggled my mind, I’m no man of science but looking at the bigness of my slice of the universe left me stunned and thankful to God for creating every single star I saw, every man woman and child in all the world as well.

Moments like this make me feel small but secure in the fact the fact that God loves me as I am and not as I should be. I cannot truly fathom how big and how great God is, I can only speak at length and detail of what I know He has done in my life.
There is so much that I don’t know, but I love learning and my curiosity for who I am as a human being and who God is drives me forward.

I do appreciate what the men and women of science are doing, and I wish them well as they look for the Higgs Boson particle, may they find what they’re looking for, may they find God in the process.

~Nathanael~