“Am I only a God nearby,”
declares the Lord,
“and not a God far away?
Who can hide in secret places
so that I cannot see them?”
declares the Lord.
“Do not I fill heaven and earth?”
declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 23:23-4).
The Privileged Planet by Guillermo Gonzales and Jay Richards (another element of my recent refresher course on science-faith) spends a fair amount of space refuting the mis-called “Copernican Principle,” which states that we are an insignificant species on a run-of-the-mill planet orbiting a mediocre sun… and so on, until it nowadays often includes being in a lucky universe amid an infinite number in a multiverse.
The book works hard to base its thesis (that our cosmos, and our planet, are significantly fine-tuned both for intelligent life and scientific discovery) on the findings of science. The last “Copernican” counter-claim, on the multiverse, is particularly egregious in being entirely detached from current science, which still stubbornly points to our living in a universe whose space and time, and well as its matter and energy, began to exist 13.8 billion years ago.
We have forgotten, perhaps, just how wedded many scientists, before the final demise of steady-state cosmology in the 1960s, were to the universal scientific axiom of an infinite, past-eternal universe, despite the lack of any evidence for it.
For example, in 1938, a decade after Hubble published his work on red-shift, physical chemist Walther Nernst still complained angrily that the infinite duration of time was a basic element of all scientific thought, and to deny this would mean to literally betray the very foundations of science. And yet science still exists, despite the background cosmic microwave radiation confirming the Creation from every part of the sky.
But Olbers Paradox (in an infinite universe the sky should be uniformly bright) had confuted spatial infinity since 1828, and in a past-infinite world it is mathematically impossible for “now” to exist (any more than it’s possible to reach the last day of an infinite future eternity). “The very foundations of science” actually meant nothing more than “materialist prejudice,” much as Dobzhansky’s “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” does.
The inseparable link between the Big Bang and the creation of Einsteinian space-time not only points inevitably towards a transcendent God, but to one whose Being is neither in space nor in time. It’s actually rather astonishing that centuries before Einstein biblical religion anticipated this. For example The Westminster Confession of 1647 lists among the attributes of God that he is “immense” and “eternal.” It is crucial to realise that they did not mean “huge” and “ancient.”
My introductory quote from Jeremiah is one of their references for “immense,” and shows that the meaning is, literally, “beyond measurement.” God is as comfortable hiding in a cranny (in modern thought, crafting a quark) as he is filling heaven and earth.
As for “eternal”, since at least Augustine the Church had been familiar with the concept of God as timeless, rather than “past-eternal” in the crude, materialistic, sense of nineteenth century science.
What follows is that, under orthodox Christian theology, the “Copernican Principle” is quite meaningless. The modern cosmology and astronomy described by Gonzales and Richards show how, wonderfully, we needed the long (temporal) history of the cosmos, and generations of stars and galaxies, amongst other things to manufacture the heavy elements from which we are made. I love the thought that the universe had to be this big to make us this small.
But theologically, it’s more the case that the dimensions of space and time are simply irrelevant to the unmeasurable Spirit who creates in eternity. Such a God has infinite “time” to consider as equally important the entire cosmos, an individual quantum event, or the concerns of an individual sinner maybe halfway between in both size and natural longevity.
Given our own restriction to this finite, and entropic (aka perishable) Creation, God’s decision to wow us with extremes (yet conceivable) of space and time is actually as good a lesson as nature can teach us about the true meaning of immensity and eternity. He thus points us towards recognising God’s “eternal power and divine nature” (Romans 1:20) whether we are looking at stars or fleas with the naked eye, or at extreme red-shifted galaxies or mesons with the tools of science.
These thoughts, to my mind, counter the tendency of physicists like Einstein or Planck, overwhelmed with the divinity of the macro- or micro-cosmos, nevertheless to baulk at the idea of a God concerned with individual human lives. Part of their atheism (or pantheism, or Deism) is explicable by the universal human desire to evade our accountability to God. But part, surely, is simply failing to grasp that an eternal, immense God is no more prevented from providential or electing care, whilst maintaining the stability of the entire universe, than they themselves are appreciating their wife’s sandwich whilst writing a paper on cosmic inflation or quantum superposition.
Christians, too, need to get a handle on the complete irrelevance of space-time dimensions to God’s involvement in the world. “Why would God be concerned with such details as what I have for lunch?” Or, if you’re a theistic evolutionist, his unconcern might even extend to not caring if sparrows (as the particular species Passer domesticus) evolved at all, let alone concerning himself with individual sparrows falling to the ground.
The obvious answer to why he is concerned with such meticulous providence is that Creation is the work of love that this unmeasurable, time-independent Father is performing (by the Son and through the Spirit), and not simply an artefact he set off with a bang long ago. The Lord is… loving towards all he has made (Psalm 145:13), and it would appear from the standard cosmology that he made everything, initially infinitesimally small, and now inconceivably big.
A one-off performance from a leading musician is expected to be perfect, embodying both regularities, such as rock-steady rhythm for dancers and a consistent “groove,” and contingencies like variations or improvisations. The work of the artist has both regular, and spontaneous, elements. In God’s case, it’s not just the music. He can’t leave the perfection of his instrument to Stradivari or George Lowden, or its wood to nature, or even the acoustics of the hall to an architect. All things come from the hand of God – where else could they originate, in cosmos that came from a divine singularity?
Infinity and eternity are, as I have said, impossible in a material world. But they are, it appears, possible not only in the conceptual world of maths, but in the realm of divine Spirit. And that’s how the Cross and the Empty tomb – and the individual Christian’s interest in them – can be of equal, or greater, cosmic significance than the universe itself.
I think it’s time for a re-run of this old song of mine:
