I have been dipping into a fascinating, closely printed 2000-page volume The Book of Urantia (a talismanic name for Earth). It is a manual for living and thinking with strong theological ramifications. The book avers that the Universe, or Deified Reality, “originates in the infinite volition of the Universal Father,” which differentiates in a series of levels ranging from the Absolute to the personal in various stages. The numinous source of Deified Reality is what lies beyond the curtain, but can be known by initiates.
This is no less quixotic to me than scientific notions liker Decoherence, General Relativity, the Singularity, Loop Quantum Gravity, or Calabi-Yau manifolds. We can no more fathom these mysteries than we can explain the existence of a complex, marvellous, incredibly vital, infinitely various world in which we find ourselves. Why the “Creative Factor” had to bother with the multiple steps at the embryo of the universe, with the elements of primordial nucleosynthesis, with successive bouts of inflation, with temperature and densities beyond human conception, with complex generations of particles and wave-particle duality, with exploding stars and the emergence of heavy elements from lighter ones, with the triple-alpha process bridging the “carbon chasm,” a finely calibrated stellar resonance that allows for the formation of carbon-12 from beryllium-8 and the possibility of life—all this and more is the Moses Basket of a miracle that flows from the syllables of the Let There Be.
Whether God blew into a patch of dust to create mankind or life arose from clouds of stellar dust is beyond conceiving. Whether a rib bone was part of the great mutation or evolution evolved from lobe-finned fishes to land-living tetrapods to chiral primates to introspective hominoids is equally incomprehensible. It seems needlessly complicated, but only to the human mind. Here’s the thing. Merely being present to fetch the cosmic bassinet from the darkness and to witness the miracle unfolding before us on a tiny planet in infinite space is also a miracle, part of the structure on the universe itself.
It is the greatest of all prodigies, of all unsolved problems, the thing itself, the world we live in, the universe whose very being defies comprehension. It is inconceivably multifarious — far more detailed than even Darwin could have imagined. Its creatures are indescribably heterogeneous and singular. It is both terrifying and teasingly beautiful. It is governed by laws and properties and constants which have created a totally improbable Goldilocks planet whose fine-tuning enables us to survive and even flourish. It is spirit in a twin symmetry. There is a there here and a here there. Spiritual particles are everywhere.
What is most astonishing is that the laws that govern the matter, forces, and energy fields of the universe have no material existence. Mathematical and physical equations are a sibylline language that describe these laws, but cannot account for the fact that the laws of nature in themselves precede the operations they determine. They do not exist in matter nor are they inherent in the energy fields that invest the universe, but control how the stuff of the universe must behave.
Such laws are immaterial. They enter Creation almost supernaturally, the way a spirit would impose its signature on reality, suggesting an origin that is antecedent to the physical universe, but an origin we cannot know or measure. It is as if the rules of the universe were written invisibly in the “ether” before the universe itself came into physical being.
It is hard not to be enchanted by the various aspects of cosmology and the questions they table and encourage. True, we have only “chauffeur’s knowledge,” a well-known jape about theoretical physicist Max Planck’s chauffeur having impersonated his master during a lecture in Munich. It is nonetheless obvious to the reader that cosmology’s Standard Model of reality, the theoretical framework describing the universe's origin, evolution, and composition from the Big Bang origin to the present moment, seems largely viable though inordinately far from completion and, in essence, utterly baffling.
Naturally, the Standard Model is constantly changing and no one knows when a new candidate will arrive to bring the old model crashing down or change it in unforeseeable ways. Theorists and experimenters are always looking for the point at which the Standard Model breaks. We are on unsteady ground. We do not have the instruction manual for the entire universe, probably never will. In any case, we would require a skytale to unscramble the message the universe is presumably sending wrapped in the cosmic microwave background map.
In the same way, the “Kingdom” of the Divine, including the involute and multifold theories and insights holy thinkers have offered, is a mystery that exceeds by degrees of magnitude our ability to absorb it. We cannot find the portal code that permits clear and undeniable entry. How “unsearchable” are the causes and reasons and inner workings of the creation of the universe. To use the language of 1 Kings 8:27, even the heavens cannot contain the Lord. One may think that nothing can contain the Lord but rather that the Lord contains all that is. Still, the fundamental question I am addressing remains. How did all this happen? God help us.
Editor's Note: Do you enjoy PJ Media's conservative reporting that takes on the radical Left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member