Stuff
My favorite space image may be the “deep field.” Here’s a picture from the James Webb Space Telescope. This section of the sky is about as big as a grain of sand held at arm’s length, yet it reveals thousands of magnificent galaxies, most with a hundred billion or more stars. Many now think the universe has at least two trillion galaxies.
I started one talk with a similar picture, and noted the universe sure has an awful lot of stuff. (I then asked one gentleman to let me know if I was getting too technical.) Truth is, the universe contains a staggering, mindboggling, incomprehensible amount of “stuff.” And that leads to a very simple question: Where does “stuff” come from?
There are only two possible answers. Either “stuff” has always existed, or it was somehow, in some way, created. Now let’s turn to modern science for an answer, yes this “science” that some think is contrary to religion. You may be surprised by the answer.
Start with the laws of thermodynamics. They are so basic that I call them the laws of existence. The first is that matter/energy can neither be created or destroyed. You can change of the form of matter/energy (think of atomic bombs) but you can’t create it or destroy it. So that answers our question, right? If you can’t create or destroy stuff, then stuff has always existed, right? End of story.
Not so fast. We have another fundamental law of existence, technically known as the second law of thermodynamics, also known as entropy. The second law is that the universe is running out of usable energy. It is going downhill; it is dying. The second law tells us the universe can’t have an infinite past, it had to have been created.
Wow! Two fundamental laws are, if you take God out of the picture, in conflict! What now? Well, let’s go deeper into science.
We’ve known, for about a hundred years, that the universe is expanding. Because of this, and other evidence, it’s now commonly accepted that the universe had a beginning. The secular (no God) “big bang” theory says this beginning was about 13.8 billion years ago. As you may know, because of the recent discovery that the most distant galaxies are fully formed, some secular scientists now want to backdate the universe even further, but let’s ignore that for now.
This conclusion – the universe had a beginning – is profound. And here’s what’s really profound. We also know from modern science, and the theory is called General Relativity if you want to look it up, that time and space and matter are all connected. So yes “stuff” was created, but there’s more. Space was created! Time was created! The so-called “big bang” wasn’t some sort of explosion of stuff into already existing space and time. Space and time were also created! Wow!
How does one create time? I don’t think our culture has processed the implications of that question. How did time get started? What – or who – created “stuff,” and created space and time?
Science leads us to one conclusion – something – or some mind – outside of space and time and “stuff” created all of that. Put another way, space and time and “stuff” are not all there is. We are in a massive fishbowl, and we can’t see outside the fishbowl, we can’t see what is outside of space and time and “stuff.”
That leaves a lot of room for God. And when we look at our universe, our space and time and stuff, we find that it is exquisitely designed for life to exist.
Stuff, and science lead us to God.
Thanks for reading.
Doug