Why Theology? - Part II
In which Teófilo continues to explain why he chose to major in Theology. Also, Happy Sunday of the Resurrection of Our Lord!
God is Big. Very Big.
Once we learn that God is a personal being who cares for his creation, we enter a zone of personal vertigo. There seems to be a disproportion between God's size and our own. Beyond that, the size of the universe we have been able to determine requires an even bigger Creator.
Modern astronomy has shown, since the invention of the telescope, the universe's boundlessness. Our place in the universe has become very small. Astronomers using observations from space-based telescopes have illustrated this well. Photographs from the Hubble and James Webb's telescopes have shown a sprawling cosmos in places in the sky once believed empty.
Light is slow. Very Slow.
Although light is the fastest thing we know about, its speed is slow considering the size of the universe. At approximately 186,000 miles per second, it takes light 8 minutes to travel from the sun to the Earth. Light takes about 4 years to reach the closest star to the Sun, called Proxima Centauri. Light takes 2 million years to reach the nearest giant collection of stars, M-31 galaxy in Andromeda.
Light's relative slowness means that when we look at distant objects, we see them as they were in the past. We don't see the Moon as it is, but as it was a little over 1 second before. We see the Sun as it was 8 minutes ago. If God were to turn off the Sun as we turn off a light bulb, we wouldn't know it for 8 full minutes. The same applies for the planets in our Solar System and the distant stars. We see Proxima as it was 4 years ago and Andromeda as it was 2.7 millions years ago.
Yet distances only increase in intergalactic space. Astronomers have observed galaxies that formed a few hundred million years after the beginning of the universe. Physicists believe this beginning was about 13.8 billion years ago. What we see of these the most distant galaxies are their ghostly afterglow. We see where they used to be, but not where they are now. The actual objects are so far away and moving so fast we will never see them again, ever. This is because space expands between them and us, carrying these galaxies away from us at faster than the speed of light.
If we make our current position the arbitrary center of expansion, we can see as far as 46 billion light years away. Scientists call this the observable universe. That's as far as we can see in the universe. Beyond this mark, scientists suspect there's even more universe to see, if we could.
All things considered, we human beings are microscopic compared to the outer immensities. We are like tardigrades, riding a mite, standing on a flea, lost in a dog.
We're lost to the dog, but not to God.
Paul Believed God Permeates the Universe
Paul the Apostle referred to God in his discourse in the Areopagus (Acts 17:28), as follows:
For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,
‘For we too are his offspring.’
Paul was quoting from a poem by Greek poet Epimenides' poem Cretica. He was using a pagan source to make a Jewish-Christian point. Paul recontextualized an older Greek poem, thereby unleashing a new meaning through it. As it happens to many such sayings from the Bible, it takes centuries for exegetes to unwrap them. Each generation finds something new in these kinds of verses.
This is what I find in it: God is not outside the universe looking in. The universe isn't a fishbowl in God's study. Though apart from the universe, God suffuses it and since God has no parts, He is present in His fullness, everywhere, at all times. There's no dimension of time or space in which He isn't present in all His fullness.
Is in God in which everything has its being. God is not outside us. He is the Ocean in which we live. God isn't unaware of us, but will us to be in Him and without Him, we cannot exist. Nor can we exist outside of Him.
Using our faith-inspired imagination can help us visualize God's presence everywhere. C.S. Lewis, the famous English writer and apologist, did so best. In his Space Trilogy, Lewis conceived the eldila - angelic powers - inhabiting a universe that was blazing white to their perception, not dark as it's to us. That's because these beings see God permeating everything in a way we can't see. The presence of God is immediate for them and so hot, that they camp on stars to refresh themselves. God's presence is dark to us, and stars, the hottest places we know of, are beaches on which the angels bathe.
God's presence extends to the very small too. Our God is very, very small, as we'll see next.