The Divine Universe

Whether people think theologically or scientifically, they believe the universe emerged from nothing. Catholics use the Latin word nihilo; scientists use the word vacuum. For centuries scientists and philosophers have been pondering about the vacuum, a region in which there is no matter. In recent years they have gone further and explored a theoretical vacuum where there is not even radiation – light, heat and all the other manifestations of electromagnetic energy. It would be extremely difficult, but theoretically possible I suppose, to create something close to such a vacuum. But we cannot eliminate space and time, and space and time are not nothing, so the total vacuum would have to be outside space and time. (Space and time do not exist independently; they come into being with matter.) It is within this kind of nothingness, where there wasn’t even space or time, that our physical universe came into being. So say scientists and so, in effect, says the Church.

There are regions of the universe where matter is very sparse: about one molecule in a cubic meter, but there is no region where there is no radiation. Light and other particles of electromagnetic energy are whizzing around every part of outer space at 300,000 kilometres a second. We can see the emissions from luminous bodies, stars and so forth, but even in the darkest regions there is a faint background radiation, left over from the fiery beginning of our universe.

Although it is impossible to create, or even to detect the total vacuum in our universe, some of our greatest minds have studied what it must be like. Today they call it the ‘zero point field’ or ‘quantum vacuum’ and they believe it exists everywhere, both within our universe and beyond space and time. Far from being nothing in the absolute, philosophical sense the quantum vacuum is intensely energetic, though it does not contain actual things – particles of energy such as atoms, electrons and photons (light). Nevertheless, it has the potential to form them. Bear in mind that matter is a dynamic formation of energy and can be converted back into energy (hence atomic power and the famous equation, e = mc2 ).

Theoretical physicists believe that the quantum vacuum is full of intense energy and seethes with activity, producing particles and their partners, antiparticles, continuously. But the particles and antiparticles mutually annihilate each other instantly, before real particles can establish themselves, so they are called ‘virtual particles’. The quantum vacuum or zero point field is described crudely as a kind of foam of virtual particles and antiparticles within which real particles can exist in space and time, and evidently do.

The quantum vacuum is not a finite quantity, nor does it have a boundary in space or a beginning or end in time. Within it virtually anything can happen in terms of physical phenomena. The probability of a universe of such complexity as ours, containing living organisms that have consciousness and feeling, is incalculably small, yet it has happened. Actually, it has been argued that, where there are no boundaries of space or time, as in the case of the quantum vacuum, anything that can possibly happen must eventually happen. A somewhat mind-blowing thought! Nevertheless, the question remains: why should anything at all happen in the quantum vacuum. It is, after all, a state of potentiality, not, in itself, a state of actuality.

You have already, I hope, begun to think more deeply about what we mean by “nothing”. I will now turn to what the Church means by it. Here too we need to think carefully. If we take the strict philosophical meaning of the word nothing, we would have to say that even God is excluded. That debases our concept of God; it makes Him a finite, limited being. I think we have to say that “nothing” means “nothing except God.” We could say then that the universe was created by God, not out of absolutely nothing, in the philosophical sense, but out of God’s own infinite being.

This agrees with Paul and John, writing in the New Testament, and with the later doctrine of the Holy Trinity and Christ as the only begotten Son of God. To the Colossians Paul wrote that, in Christ, “all things in heaven and on earth are created” and, “In him all things hold together.” In the prologue of John’s Gospel he calls Christ “the Word” (Logos) of God: “The Word was God,” and, “All things came into being through him.” In the liturgical doxology God is commonly referred to as the “Source of all Being, Eternal Word and Holy Spirit”. Christ is often referred to as the Cosmic Christ as distinct from the historical man, Jesus. Rather than saying that God created, in the sense of crafting or manufacturing, it makes better sense to say that God gave birth to everything.

So, to sum up: contemporary scientific theory calls “nothing” the quantum vacuum or zero point field, an infinite sea of seething energy. The universe is not the quantum vacuum but, in and through the vacuum, everything has come, is coming and will come into being. The vacuum is, so to speak, alongside, permeating everything in the universe: the universe is of the vacuum and in it, yet distinct from it. The vacuum is both transcendent to the universe and immanent in it.

The philosophical notion of nothingness where even God is not is contrary to Christian belief in God’s universal immanence. As the Psalmist sang, “If I climb up to heaven you are there, and if I plunge down to hell you are there also.” So traditional Christian theology declares that God created the universe when there was absolutely nothing except Himself. God is incarnate, embodied in physical nature, the universe, but He is also transcendent and distinct from it. None of the things in the universe is God, yet God is everywhere, even in things.

The Christian doctrine of God is immeasurably richer than the scientific theory of the zero point field, which is basically abstract mathematics. Yet there is a remarkable similarity (and theology can be very abstract too). Contemporary scientific theory creates a resonance between our knowledge of the world we know through observation and our knowledge of God through Christian revelation and theology. While the agenda of science is certainly different from the agenda of theology, they are profoundly compatible in their thinking. Nowhere is this more evident than when we reflect in depth about what we mean by “nothing”.