The Divine Universe

How many people treasure the image of a location in outer space where good people enjoy eternal bliss? It doesn’t fit with the images of heaven in Jesus’ parables, but it is interesting to explore outer space anyway. It’s a fascinating subject and opens up wonderful possibilities to the fertile imagination. We now know much more about outer space than we did even a few decades ago.

It is unimaginably enormous. Astronomers tell of galaxy formations that span millions of trillions of kilometres. They measure distances in light years or parsecs (about 3.26 light years). A light year is 9,460,000,000,000 or nearly 10 trillion kilometres. Galaxy clusters have been identified which span more than 300 million light years. With the Hubble telescope it is possible to see galaxies nearly 10 billion light years away.

Although the universe is mostly empty, it contains a mind-boggling number of things. There are billions of galaxies, each with about 100 billion stars. These include some astonishing items. There are dark, cold neutron stars that weigh 100 billion tons per cubic centimetre and spin 38,000 times a second, and intensely hot white dwarfs that are 100,000°C at the surface. (The Sun is 8,000°C). The scariest objects are massive black holes at the centre of galaxies. These are, in effect, balls of concentrated gravitational energy. Nothing, not even light can escape once it is captured. One that has been photographed (black holes have a luminous halo round them) is about 1.2 billion times as massive as the entire Solar System but about the same size. In the last ten years, planets have been observed orbiting other stars, more than 200 of them so far, just in our own galactic neighbourhood. There must be trillions of planets in the universe. Would it be absurd to imagine that the kind of self-consciousness and intelligence possessed by humans is not unique to Earth but is distributed, however sparsely, across the galaxies?

But only about 20% of all matter is detectable to us. 80% is called “dark matter”. It is only known to exist because its mass and gravity are needed to stop the universe from flying apart. It has never been directly observed and no one knows what it is. But in spite of the dark matter, the universe is expanding, and the expansion is accelerating. As it expands it cools. Eventually it will be so cold that there is not enough kinetic energy to form the fundamental particles of matter. This is called the ‘heat death’ of the universe. Then there will be nothing except frothy but formless and chaotic potential energy – the quantum vacuum. But this is where it all began, and no one knows how or why.

The universe is even weirder than the things it contains. In 1905 and 1915, Einstein produced his theories of relativity. He proved that space and time have to be regarded as a single structure – four-dimensional space-time. The universe is not a three-dimensional sphere that grows and evolves along a linear chronological timeline; it is a four-dimensional hypersphere with a three-dimensional surface in which space can be bent, squeezed and stretched.

The starting point of Einstein’s theories was the discovery that light travels at the same speed, no matter what the motion of the observer is. Light approaches and leaves everything at the same speed. If I stand on a station platform, the light from signals down the track will meet me at the same speed that it meets an express train rushing towards or away from them. This gives rise to Einstein’s complicated cosmic geometry. The universe has no spatial centre. The singularity, from which the universe theoretically began with the Big Bang, did not happen at some point in space or moment in time; it contained all of space and time. It is everywhere. It is the physical universe. We are part of its expanding, evolving form.

With Einstein’s insights, astronomers do strange history too. They don’t pore over ancient documents; they look through telescopes. When they look into the sky they are looking into the past. The light from each star has taken time to reach us. We see the Sun as it was eight and a half minutes ago. We see Sirius as it was about nine years ago. With the most powerful telescopes the universe can be seen as it was billions of years ago, approaching the Big Bang. There is no ‘before’ the Big Bang. In the singularity time is infinitely shrunk. And the heat death of the universe is not the end of time; time is infinitely expanded.

The universe is not just an inert collection of innumerable material objects; it is mutating, evolving from something absolutely simple into something more and more complex and ordered. The universe is also metabolising. It makes use of its raw materials to make new things, stars, human beings and so on, to replace those that decay and die. These are criteria by which biologists define life. The universe is alive. The only thing we don’t know is if the universe can reproduce. Stephen Hawking and others think it can.

The universe is also intelligent. Intelligent life is not an added, separate extra; it is a faculty of the living universe. Humans and other animals are the eyes and other senses of the universe; our lives, emotions, hopes, thoughts and knowledge are cosmic experiences. Intelligent life is not only a local terrestrial phenomenon; it is of the universe, even if it only exists on planet Earth.

Brian Swimme, an American physicist and cosmologist, holds that the universe is not just a physical entity; it is a spiritual event. If humans have a spiritual life then, Swimme argues, the universe does, even if only in us. Stars, rocks and plants don’t have a spiritual life, but nor does a human brain if you separate it from the rest of the body. I am alive, conscious and sensate, thoughtful, imaginative, hopeful, not as an objective observer, but as an integral part of the universe. The universe is a community of interconnected, interdependent things, from subatomic particles to human beings to galaxy superclusters. According to Christian belief, even God is communal.

The heaven I began talking about is a religious idea, so let’s leave cosmology and turn to theology. What do I mean by heaven? I don’t really know except that I know it is not a place; it is a state of being. Theologians call it the beatific state. The nearest I can get to saying what it is is the final perfection towards which the cosmic process is developing, the fulfilment of the divine purpose, the full and perfect manifestation, the cosmic and eternal incarnation of divine love. I cannot possibly imagine what that might be, but Jesus’ parables give me some down to earth and helpful hints.