Thinking Outside the Universe: Part 1 of 6 - God

Introduction

On a normal afternoon on a normal day, a small meteorite arrived. When it flashed into our atmosphere, it was large enough not to burn up, but not so large as to do any damage. It left a small crater where it landed in a wooded forest. The crater was soon filled in by the effects of weather, and eventually moss and mold grew on the meteorite with wild grasses around it. Over time, the forest completely assimilated its visitor, so that it looked like any other rock on the forest floor. Only with the most careful analysis could anyone learn that the rock did not belong to our earth at all – that it was an alien belonging to an ancient comet from the far reaches of the solar system.

     The famous American scientist Carl Sagan said “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” [Opening his series, Cosmos] I believe Carl Sagan was wrong. Like the meteorite in this parable, I believe our universe has co-opted a number of things that don’t belong to our universe at all – things that are now in our universe but originated outside of it. The purpose of this book is to explore some of those things. We won’t discover them all, and they’re not all the same size, but I do think we can discover a few of them.

     Here are some terms I’m going to use. Naturalism is the term I’m going to use to describe the viewpoint of Carl Sagan – the view that the cosmos, or nature, is all that exists. The expected term to use to describe things outside of the universe, or outside of nature, would be supernatural. However, I don’t want to use supernatural, since that term tends to make people think of God and ghosts and not much else. It’s not that supernatural is wrong, but it may give the reader a misleading feeling. Instead, I want to use the word extra-natural. Some of the things we think are very normal are actually extra-natural.

Chapter 1 – God

I have to start with God. I toyed with the idea of writing about some of the other topics first, but it didn’t work – they all end up dragging God into the picture at an early stage. Now if the reader is not a theist, you could go ahead and skip to a later chapter, but the problem is that God will always be the elephant in the room, and it’s way too awkward to ignore the elephant. I am not going to try.

The God that I am going to talk about is the Christian God. Most of what I say applies to God as described in any of the major monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but I am a Christian and I am writing from a Christian perspective. I am definitely not talking about the god of any pantheistic religion, like Hinduism or some of the other eastern religions. In those religions, God is part of the universe, or everything in the universe makes up God, or something like that. Although I called those eastern religions, they haven’t stayed in the east. The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza was a 17^th century rationalist who advocated pantheism. More recently, the Star Wars movies (which I loved) brought this idea into popular western culture with the concept of “The Force.” “Life creates it” they said about the force, and so on. It was part of the universe. That kind of pantheistic god or force has a lot of appeal nowadays, because it doesn’t make any moral demands on you. You can call on it when you need to and forget about it when you want to. It’s a very convenient god, but it isn’t truth, and so we are going to set it aside for the remainder of this book. The God I’m talking about is the Christian God, and He is outside the universe.

God exists outside of the universe. The Bible begins by saying “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1) The Bible teaches that God made the universe. He is not the universe and He is not dependent on it.

For the Christian reader, I want to say that what I am saying about God is not some novel or private interpretation. Although the ancients didn’t usually talk in the same terms I am using in this book, it is very consistent with what they believed. To demonstrate this, I’d like to quote a few lines from the Nicene Creed as amended in 381. This is one of the oldest Christian creeds and is held as reliable in Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches. The Nicene Creed begins:

“I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.”

This line states that God is the creator of heaven and earth – he is not part of it; but rather he made it. The scope of what He made includes “all things visible and invisible.” The creed continues:

“I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made.”

The main reason the Nicene Creed was developed was to establish a proper understanding of the person of Jesus Christ. The creed says that Jesus was not created but “begotten,” and this “before all worlds.” Using the best terminology they could find, this not only makes Jesus co-equal with the Father, but it places Jesus outside the universe.

“who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man;”

This phrase saying Jesus “came down from heaven” addresses the great Christian doctrine of the incarnation – God who created the universe entering into the universe and becoming a human being. Using the language of the introduction to this book, Jesus was by far the largest meteorite that ever came to be part of our own earth.

“we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”

These words indicate that the Christian church is looking in faith for something to happen that does not happen in this universe. We don’t currently have any resurrections or lives to come. That’s not a part of this universe, but it is part of the Christian faith.