From Space Bends to God

It began simply enough. I was listening to my song Space Bends, and one of its central ideas caught my attention again: space is not the empty, rigid stage we once imagined it to be. Space bends.

Of course, even saying “space bends” is incomplete. One of the great discoveries of modern physics is that space and time are not really separate things. They are dimensions of a single reality: spacetime. Move through space and you are also moving through time. Change your relationship to one and you change your relationship to the other. That alone is difficult to wrap our minds around.

But as I listened, another thought occurred to me. If mass bends spacetime, perhaps our familiar categories are misleading us again. We speak separately of space, time, and mass because separating things helps us understand them. But in reality, they are profoundly connected.

Then comes light. Photons have no rest mass, yet light follows the curvature of spacetime. A beam of light passing near a massive object bends, not because gravity is simply reaching out and pulling on another mass, but because the geometry through which the light travels has itself been curved.

And the connection goes deeper still. It isn't merely mass that curves spacetime. Energy and momentum do as well. Light therefore participates in shaping the very spacetime through which it travels.

The more closely we look at reality, the harder it becomes to maintain the neat divisions we use to describe it. Space and time become spacetime. Mass is a form of energy. Electricity and magnetism become electromagnetism. Matter and light, once regarded as fundamentally different things, both belong to the strange quantum world. Reality seems deeply interconnected.

That led me to another question. If spacetime is curved all around us, why don't we perceive that curvature directly? We experience its consequences constantly. We fall toward Earth. Earth travels around the Sun. Light follows paths through curved spacetime. Every cell in our bodies exists within that geometry. But we don't experience spacetime as something bending around us. We cannot step outside it and look back at its shape. We are inside it.

Perhaps that is true of much more than spacetime. Our senses reveal only a small portion of reality. Other creatures experience parts of it that remain invisible to us. Birds can detect magnetic fields. Some snakes sense infrared radiation. Insects see wavelengths of light we cannot see. Sharks detect electrical fields. Each creature experiences the universe through the narrow window its biology provides.

Human beings have done something extraordinary, however. We have learned to reach beyond that window. We cannot see spacetime curvature, but we can discover it. We cannot watch atoms with our naked eyes, but we can understand something of their structure. We cannot live for billions of years, yet we can reconstruct much of the history of stars and galaxies. Somehow, this small creature on one small planet has developed the ability to ask questions about the whole.

     That thought connects for me with another song idea, We Just Woke Up | Briefly Awake. For almost all of cosmic history, human beings were not here. The universe existed for billions of years before any of us looked up and wondered what those lights in the sky were. Then, very recently, we appeared. Or perhaps it would be better to say that we emerged.

     We are not strangers who have been dropped into the universe from somewhere else. The atoms within us belong to it. The carbon in our bodies was produced through cosmic processes long before there were human bodies to contain it. The physical laws operating within our brains are the same laws operating in stars and galaxies.

     We are part of what the universe has become. And now this part of the universe can look back at the rest of it. For a brief moment, the universe contains beings capable of asking what the universe is. That is an astonishing thought.

     But the more we discover, the more apparent it becomes that we will never completely wrap our minds around the fullness of reality. Every answer seems to reveal another question.

     We discover atoms and then discover that atoms are made of smaller things. We discover stars and then galaxies, galaxies beyond galaxies, black holes, dark matter, dark energy, quantum fields and curved spacetime. We discover that time itself does not behave the way ordinary human experience tells us it should.

Knowledge does not seem to be eliminating wonder. It is enlarging it. And somewhere along that path, at least for me, wonder begins to become something more.

     The question changes from “How does this work?” to “Why is there something capable of working this way at all?” Why is reality intelligible? Why does mathematics describe it? Why should a universe of matter and energy eventually produce beings capable not only of experiencing it, but of understanding some portion of it? And why do those beings experience beauty, love, longing, gratitude and awe?

Science can take us extraordinarily far into those questions. But eventually we cross a boundary. Physics can describe relationships within the universe. It cannot establish whether there is a purpose behind the universe or a Mind behind its astonishing intelligibility. That is where philosophy and faith enter.

     For me, the immensity of what we cannot comprehend does not point toward meaninglessness. It points in the other direction.

My inability to comprehend the fullness of reality suggests that reality is larger not merely than my knowledge, but larger than the kind of knowledge my mind is capable of containing.

     And that raises an extraordinary possibility. Perhaps there is a Mind that can comprehend what mine cannot.

Then an even greater possibility follows. Perhaps that Mind can know me.

     This is where cosmic wonder becomes something much more intimate. God is no longer merely an explanation placed at the end of a chain of scientific questions. God becomes the possibility that behind all this incomprehensible reality is not simply greater complexity, but intelligence; not simply intelligence, but consciousness; and ultimately, not simply consciousness, but love.

     Then the direction of the search reverses.

     I began by trying to wrap my mind around the universe. I couldn't.

     I tried to imagine the Mind that could. I couldn't do that either.

     But perhaps I don't have to.

     Perhaps the deepest truth is not that I can wrap my mind around God.

     Perhaps it is that God can wrap Himself around me.

     That is where this particular journey unexpectedly ended, with a phrase that may someday become another song: Wrapped in God's Love.

     I cannot comprehend the universe in its fullness. I certainly cannot comprehend the God who might stand behind it. But I can wonder. I can reach. I can love.

     And if the Christian claim is true, the astonishing conclusion is that the Mind behind this vast, interconnected and incomprehensible reality is not waiting for me to understand Him completely. He is inviting me to know Him.

     We are not strangers to this universe. We belong to it. We are part of what it has become, briefly awake and capable of looking around in amazement and wonder.

     And perhaps, in reaching beyond the universe toward its source, we discover something greater still: We were never strangers to God either.