Deep Structure of the Universe

At whatever point in time you believe the universe came into existence, there must have been a moment before. Yet, astrophysicists today agree that everything—time, space, and the rest—began in an instant, with the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago. Few dispute this.

It is a mystery, beyond human comprehension, why a creator, if one exists, chose one particular instant at which to launch the universe, and billions of years later, to create human beings. Why not twenty-eight billion years ago, or a billion years from now?

What seems logical to us confronts us with dilemmas of infinite progress and infinite regress. Space, we may believe, must end somewhere, and yet we can theoretically double space, and double it again, without limit. Time must have had a beginning, yet we paradoxically assume that there must have been a moment before it began.

Like much else in life, there are no obvious resolutions to the dilemmas of space and time. We are awkwardly suspended between two infinities, and also it seems, between two eternities. Such dilemmas seem to suggest, but of course do not prove, the existence of a creator.

Another mystery is why many people, from the dawn of history, seem to have had a need to believe in something or someone supernatural, above and beyond the natural order of things. Some believe these religious inclinations came about as a result of human helplessness in the face of nature. But such inclinations may also have emerged because people have an innate sense, an intuition, that a creator exists, even if they know little else about God.

Human morality confronts us with a similar puzzle and comparable alternatives. Some insist that the human sense of right versus wrong and good versus bad is rooted in humanity’s need to devise contracts out of self-preservation. Without them, to quote the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But even if this is so, the emergence of social contracts may also point to how built into the nature of the human person is an innate ethical sense. We appeal to that sense when, in the face of insult or injury, we insist it “isn’t fair.”

There are many physical realities that operate in our world, uphold the fine-tuning inherent in our galaxy, planet, sun, moon, and stars, and enable life to go on. Aside from the effects of what appear to be random accidents or natural disasters, or the operation of wilful human malevolence, life as we know it is strikingly dependable. Some contemporary scientists insist that the probability of everything falling into place as it does life is immensely improbable, even within the span of fourteen billion years. They also regard as fantastically unlikely the suggestion that even simple forms of life, such as bacteria and viruses, spontaneously emerged from some sort of primordial slime.

Some Christians believe that, behind what we perceive through our senses, there is a shrouded God. Out of respect for human freedom, coupled with the desire for am ongoing relationship with people, God operates within self-imposed limits. At the center of human life sits the question of how we respond to this partially hidden God and the deep but invisible structure of the universe God created.