I. King Kong and Crosses

I’ll never forget my first visit to the Empire State Building in New York City.  It was 1977.  I was a Boy Scout, traveling with my troop on its way to the National Jamboree in Moraine State Park,  Pennsylvania.  As we packed ourselves tightly into the elevator on the bottom floor of the skyscraper, I was proud to show off the King Kong button I had cleverly devised as a neckerchief slide as we ascended – a nod to the fact that we were headed to the very place where the colossal gorilla had made his last.

Arriving at the observation deck, we scurried outside and … wow!  I had never seen anything like it.  Buildings stretching for miles and miles in every direction, virtually as far as the eye could see.  The population of New York City at the time was just over seven million souls.  For the first time I tasted what it was like to feel very small; to feel utterly lost in the crowd.  I also got my first significant taste of our modern-day existential crisis with respect to us crisis over our relationship with God.  I asked myself, “How could God know who I am or what I’m about when there are so many people in the world?”

Of course, seven million souls were but a small fraction of the world population, which hovered just over four billion in 1977.  This fact wasn’t lost on me as I stood on the observation deck gazing at skyscraper after skyscraper.  God just seemed that much farther away.  And the idea that God could be aware of us seemed to be just as much of a fantasy as King Kong.

Since 1977 the parameters of human civilization have only widened.  New York City has gained another million inhabitants, and the world has gained another three billion.  Our perspective has grown since then, too.  We now understand ourselves to be situated in a universe that is considerably larger than we had expected.  The observable part of the universe alone is 93 billion light years in diameter.  Hundreds of billions of galaxies fill this universe, each containing hundreds of billions of stars.  If the latest Kepler space telescope data are correct, then most – perhaps all – of those stars may have planets orbiting them.  And if even one out of a million planets is home to intelligent life, then God has trillions more souls to worry about than just us!  Seen from this angle, it seems easier to believe in the existence of King Kong than in a God who could be consciously aware of us, much less one who is actively in relationship with us.

Yet today I wear a Cross around my neck, not a King Kong button.  I wear a Cross rather than a King Kong button because in my 49 years of life, I have yet to see a real-life King Kong; but thousands of times I have encountered a God who, as best I can tell, is not only aware of me, but is more aware of me than I am aware of me; a God who seeks relationship.  And this God doesn’t seem to be a figment of my individual imagination.  Amazingly, the experiences which I would consider most intimate and personal – and indicative of the highest degree of conscious awareness of me – seem to be widespread and common.  People have written for thousands of years about experiencing such a God.  Had I not experienced this God myself so many times, I might have thought such belief was merely “primitive superstition.”

II. God Consciousness

Consider the words of Psalm 139:

¹O Lord, you have searched me and known me. ²You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. ³You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. ⁴Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. ⁵You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. ⁶Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it. ⁷Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? ⁸If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. ⁹If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, ¹⁰even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. ¹¹If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,” ¹²even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

God’s awareness is so intimate and personal in the Psalmist’s experience that the Psalmist concludes:

¹³For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.¹⁴I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. ¹⁵My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.¹⁶Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.¹⁷How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! ¹⁸I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end—I am still with you.

Given the vastness of the universe, how can it be that we keep running into a God who seems to be so intimately aware of us?

III. Will the Most Absurd Claim Please Stand Up?

Below is a photo of a human brain cell known as an astrocyte – a star-shaped glial cell of the central nervous system.  Some neuroscientists today are suggesting that we are not experiencing a God at all.  Rather, they claim, our brains are wired in such a way that we are prone to believing in a God.  Our wiring is the product of our evolutionary need to be attached to authority figures we believe will protect us.  This impulse originally led us to feel attachment toward our mothers.  Then it extended to our wider family, our tribal chiefs, our religious leaders … and by extension, their gods.  Many conclude, therefore, that belief in God is a mistake triggered by our biology.

I find this conclusion that God can’t exist simply because our brains are wired for belief in God is rather remarkable given that scientists don’t turn around and make a similar conclusion about our other senses.  For instance, they don’t claim that the fact that our heads are wired for eyes make us prone to believe we can see things, or that the sense of sight is simply a biological mistake.  In fact, as we learned last week, eyesight seems anything but an evolutionary mistake.  The fact that our brains are wired to be vaguely aware of God, and aware of God’s awareness, might be considered a faculty like any other.  For my money, God-awareness is one of those “preferential pathways” taken by evolution that Harvard astrophysicist Owen Gingerich (Last week’s Darkwood Brew guest) speaks of.

While it is true that God’s conscious awareness and interaction with us sounds absurd in light of the vastness of the universe, it is equally true that science keeps uncovering facts about the universe that far outstrip this idea of God in the absurdity department!   For instance, if you didn’t have any proof to back up a particular claim, which one sounds most absurd: (a) that God exists and is consciously aware of us, or (b) that the entire universe – which is greater than 93 billion light years in diameter and includes hundreds of billions of galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars and probably trillions of planets – was once contained in a single dot of energy, or (c) that we human beings are literally made from the dust of stars that exploded billions of years ago?

Short of any scientific proof, all of these claims strain the limits of credibility.  Yet we know that at least the latter two claims are verifiably true.  One unexpected result of scientific inquiry is that it keeps showing, over and over, that just because something sounds absurd is no reason to rule it out; that the whole universe is fraught with possibility.  It operates on the basis of absurdity upon absurdity!

IV.  Dark Matter

I don’t want to belabor this point, nor do I wish to imply that because the universe is absurd, then absolutely every absurdity must be true!  But I do invite you to consider this particularly absurd claim because it has to do with the existence of something that exerts significant influence over the entire universe that is completely invisible, non-material, seemingly everywhere, and whose very existence can only be inferred indirectly, by the effect it produces on everything else.  I’m speaking not of God, but of Dark Matter.

Dark Matter is neither dark nor matter, at least not in any sense we’re used to thinking of it.  Scientists call it “dark” because it’s invisible, neither absorbing nor emitting light of any kind.  They call it “matter” because even though it’s not made of anything we would typically call “matter,” like atoms, it exerts gravitational pull like matter does.  Approximately 84% of the mass of our universe is thought to be Dark Matter.  We infer this through its gravitational pull.  Yes, this is just as weird as it sounds!

To put it another way: If you were to measure the gravity generated by every material object, gas, and vapor in our universe, we now know that this staggering amount of gravity would be surpassed by a ratio of more than 3-to-1 by “material” that is completely invisible, that would pass through any solid object without resistance, that in fact cannot be reduced down to any atoms that exist on the Periodic Table.  Whatever this material is, it is so elusive that up to a billion “particles” of Dark Matter pass through our bodies every second and it doesn’t interact with our bodies in any measurable way!

This is a little like finding scientific proof that there are three Invisible Men standing beside every person in the world; or three invisible planets and suns for every visible one.  Only, unlike the Invisible Man, you could pass your hand right through this one.  This Invisible Man would not interact with you in any way you could measure except that he has gravity.  Now, you and I each exert gravitational pull in the universe, only we’re so small that our personal gravity can’t be measured.  Even with a mass as large as the earth, gravity is so weak that even a frog can overcome the effects (momentarily) simply by jumping in the air!  If the amount of force that a frog’s leg exerts could be maintained indefinitely, the frog could leave the Earth’s atmosphere and go into orbit.  That’s how weak gravity is.

Yet even though it is weak, its effects are clearly noticeable across the vast scale of the universe.  Since there is apparently more than three times the amount of Dark Matter as there is regular matter in the universe, scientists can “see” it indirectly, through the gravity it exerts.

How do they “see” it?  According to Einstein’s law of relativity, gravity causes light to bend.  If you were to look up to the ceiling at a light bulb and the light being emitted from it curved at some point between you and the light bulb, you would know that there was an invisible clump of something with extremely strong gravity between you and the light bulb.  Of course, the gravitational pull of Dark Matter isn’t great enough to affect the light coming between you and a light bulb, but over vast distances it is big enough to bend light streaming from stars.  Studying where light is bent in the universe where no visible object exerts enough gravitational pull on its own to bend it is one of the ways that scientists can “see” Dark Matter.  In fact, recently they have been able to assemble maps of Dark Matter like this one.  Bear in mind that without this map, these clumps of material would be completely invisible.

If the concept of Dark Matter fries the circuitry of your brain just a little, hang on for just one more moment before shutting everything down.  You’ve got to meet Mira.  Mira makes all this incredibly interesting … incredibly strange … and perhaps relevant to our supposition of an unseen God whose influence cannot be directly detected yet whose connection with us is substantial.

V. Meet MIRA

Mira is the name of a supercomputer at the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago.  It’s made up of approximately 2,000 powerful computers all strung together and is capable of making 10 quadrillion calculations per second.  Still, Mira is only the third fastest computer In the world!  In any case, Mira is fast enough to crunch the staggering amounts of data needed to simulate the creation and evolution of the universe since the Big Bang.  And that’s exactly what the Mira scientists have done.

What these scientists have found when they ran simulations of the Big Bang is that the universe does not contain enough mass to exert enough gravitational pull to hold stars and galaxies together.  There simply would have been a giant explosion that dispersed a lot of material that never formed anything solid.  So they turned the “dial” and raised the amount of hypothetical gravity in their simulations, and kept upping it until the universe created by Mira matched what we actually observe in the universe.  This is one of the ways scientists came up with the estimate of how much Dark Matter exists in our universe.  It’s so large that it’s over three times greater than everything else combined!

Once scientists were sure of their calculations, they let Mira rip, recreating the entire universe over the course of several weeks of number crunching.  And do you know what they found?  They found that the stars and galaxies were neither evenly nor randomly distributed in the Big Bang.  Stars and galaxies cluster around clumps of Dark Matter to form networks of galaxies that follow the contours of immense filaments of Dark Matter millions and billions of light-years long.

Here, for instance, is a photo of a “small” portion of our universe recreated within Mira. The scale is so great that the length of the white line in the center is 125 Megaparsecs, which is over 400 million light years long.  (For an amazing fly-through of the universe as it appears inside Mira, click here!) Do you see what unfolds when you pull back this far?  We are not part of a random, disconnected universe.  Rather, we are part of a vast cosmic web.  It looks rather like a sponge!

Now, look what happens when you zoom in a little.  By “a little” I mean a very little.  The scale is still so enormous that every dot of light represents neither a star nor a galaxy, but a cluster of galaxies!  Does this look like anything you’ve seen before?

This “sponge” looks like something else that is more personal to us.  Consider the human brain cell on the left.  The size of that brain cell is measured in thousandths of a millimeter.  The size of that patch of universe above is measured in millions of light years!

VI.  Who Woulda Thunk It?

By showing the similarities between the structure of our brain cells and the structure of the universe, I do not mean to imply that Dark Matter is really God.  Scientists have no idea what Dark Matter is, and I certainly don’t claim any “insider knowledge!”  The only thing I can say about this striking similarity is, “Who woulda thunk it?”  Who “woulda thunk” that our brains would be wired like the universe is wired, or that the universe is wired like our brains?  Without any scientific backing, you’d think this claim was crazy.

Could it be that the encounters we keep having with an invisible, non-material Presence who cannot be seen, whose existence can only be inferred through the effects this Presence has on others, are real?  Could God in fact be consciously aware of everything in the universe and seek relationship with us?

All I can say for sure is that in my lived experience of the world, the answer is overwhelmingly, “Yes!”  And when I look at the photographs above through the eyes of my lived experience, one of them may be showing a view that is far vaster than anything that can be viewed from the top of the Empire State Building, but I do not feel small or insignificant when I behold it.  In fact, hear the words of Psalm 139 as if they are echoing throughout the universe:

¹O Lord, you have searched me and known me. ²You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. ³You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. ⁴Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. ⁵You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. ⁶Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it. ⁷Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? ⁸If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. ⁹If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, ¹⁰even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. ¹¹If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,” ¹²even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

¹³For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.¹⁴I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. ¹⁵My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.¹⁶Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.¹⁷How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! ¹⁸I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end—I am still with you.

To these works I can only add, “Amen!”