Jun 24, 2018

 

12 Steps to Joy (10)

The Word of Life (3)

            In the beginning the Word already existed.

                        The Word was with God,

                        And the Word was God.

            The Word existed in the beginning with God.

            God created everything through the Word,

                        And nothing was created except through the Word.

            The Word gave life to everything that was created,

                        And the life of the Word brought light to everyone.

            The light shines in the darkness,

                        And the darkness can never extinguish it.”

                                                                        John 1:1-5.

 

            The Word gave life to everything that was created,

                        And the life of the Word brought light to everyone.

Up until 1998, the physicists believed that matter made up about 15% of the universe, and dark matter the remaining 85%. It was believed that the universe was slowly starting to collapse, and we would, in time, reduce to a single immense dark hole and vanish, perhaps to start over again. They raged many arguments about how long that would take. Then in 1998 careful measurements made of many locations in the universe revealed that instead of collapsing, the universe was expanding. Yet they had measured (remember, distance in space in light-years really is looking backwards in time: the light that we see from distant stars and galaxies was immitted light years ago, so we see earlier in time. When we say that the star is so and so light years away, we mean that the star light we see is that many million years ago, and we have no real idea what the star is doing today. Did the star explode? We will only find out several million years after it exploded.) the expansion rate decreasing in time as expected with the pull of gravity, and almost (but not quite) coming to rest about 5 billion years ago – but still expanding slowly. Then, to everyone’s amazement, the expansion started to accelerate and has been accelerating an ever-increasing rate ever since then.

This completely flummoxed everyone. The only explanation that seems to make sense is that the new volume of space itself contains negative energy that is overcoming the attractive force of gravity, and since the rate of expansion never reached zero, it eventually overcame gravity as space expanded and the force of gravity was reduced by distance, and is increasing at an ever-increasing rate.

It was determined that this force, now called ‘dark energy’, since we only know what it does to space itself, now holds 73% of the energy in the universe, and will hold more and more as the universe ages.

When I bring this up to those who claim the science proves there is no God, they just skirt the issue and pretend that now that we understand that all is well. All this, despite that we know almost nothing about this new force that dominates everything, named dark energy. Dark, because we see that some force is becoming more dominant that is forcing galaxies to separate at an ever-increasing rate, but we know nothing beyond that, and no real clue to what this force is. this new energy source does not overcome gravity where the mass is high in galaxies, but where the effect of gravity is low, as the effect of gravity reduces by the square of distance from mass. That is, if we go twice as far from the center of mass, the gravitational effect is reduced by a factor of 4. (R squared).

We know very little about the universe. There may be hidden forces that do unusual things within both dark matter and dark energy, and we will never know what other possibilities exist.

Next we will look at the anthropic answer that is so common: we exist to ask the question why we exist; therefore we are, and all the odds be damned.

Meditation

Oh beloved Lover, I rest in Your care each day. I do not know for sure what each day will bring, but I trust that it will be good and full of joy, no matter what happens. You have always lifted up my heart when I turn to You, and I know that You always will continue to make my heart sing, even if pain occurs in this life. I look with wonder at this marvelous universe we are in, the beauty that fills my being is breathtaking. Each breath is a miracle, and the wonder of all is truly a gift of love to all of us, each to their own.