Yahweh of the Cosmos

Introduction

Anyone who has ever been interested in the question, who or what is God, will gain insight from reading this book.  But we don’t stop there.  The how and the why are also discussed by focusing on clues left behind by the creator of his creation. As a natural consequence, this book focuses on the known scientific facts of the universe versus what we don’t know, along with theories of creation, and it dares to tackle fundamental theological questions about the nature of God and our relationship to him.  Many books by scientists often focus on “the what” of our universe because that is what they know.  Albert Einstein once stated "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."  Of course, that’s easy for someone like Einstein to say; but what about the rest of us?  This book tries to examine “the what” from a layman’s perspective; and then goes on to speculate somewhat on “the why”, something most scientists will treat like a hot potato, as in don’t touch it.  Those who enjoy not only science, but theology, philosophy, or cosmology will take a keen interest in the ideas that follow, as we explore the topic of creation along with identity and personality of God, and our place and relationship to him in the universe, from two very distinct cultures of thought – science and religion.

This book is not intended however to be an academic study of cosmology, theology, or science however.  It is rather meant to give the reader a philosophical approach toward God and our universe based on what we know.  It is presented in a way that people with diverse backgrounds can appreciate the concepts and speculations that are laid out, and should be understandable to people of any background or interest.  People interested in philosophy will be particularly interested because we discuss the implications of recent discoveries that impact our knowledge about how we got here, their meaning for the universe as a whole, and the nature of a God that could have done this.  Issues from both scientific and religious perspectives are explored and common ground is sought wherever possible. 

Postulates in this book that relate to God or the origins of the universe are formulated by using a mix of common sense, logic, and available scientific information and theory, given what we already know about the origins of the cosmos versus what we don’t know; some of the ideas presented here are profound, and others more obvious. The reader can decide.  Postulates, where they occur, are not the major focus of the book however; they are the author’s ideas and not meant to be misunderstood as widely accepted theological or scientific thought.  They have not been proven or unproven, and the reader can choose to agree or disagree.  But the real aim here is not to prove a new theory, but rather to enhance and enlighten the debate about God and our own universe based on what is now known from various circles of research in theology, archeology, cosmology, and yes, basic experimental and theoretical physics.

Speculative and interesting models that extrapolate on known facts are also presented that try to explain things, such as why extraterrestrial intelligence hasn’t been found, which led, for instance, to the infamous question of the legendary physicist Enrico Fermi, “Where is everybody?”, or what caused the Big Bang and breakdown of perfect symmetry that gave rise to our universe to begin with.  Geometries of the universe are also discussed that try to explain cosmological problems that still exist among theorists and philosophers alike today; you could say that maybe things are wrapped up in a way nobody ever expected.

As an author, I write this book to present my own unique perspective, brought up as a practicing Christian, yet trained as a doctoral scientist in experimental high-energy physics, with several years of post-doctoral research experience; and thus while retaining my own insight into both religion and science, any personal bias toward one view over the other (where they could still disagree) hopefully is removed.  Part of the fun in writing or reading about topics that are in this book is in the learning and discovering of various biases still exist today in the scientific or theological communities, and then trying to account for them.  As we continue to learn more about our universe through scientific observation and theological deliberation, my guess is that scientists and theologians, as they begin to put away those biases, will one day find out that they are speaking much of the same language.  And that is what we hope to commence here.

When someone asks me how to picture God, I often respond that a doctoral thesis advisor as seen by his poor graduate student is a good starting reference point.  He knows how to strike the fear of God into you, he knows how to make or break your future, and he’s often smarter and certainly more experienced than you are.  No better was that made clear to me than the night that I realized for the first time whether I was truly going to finish my thesis.  It was 1987, and we were preparing to show preliminary data from an initial test run of my thesis experiment to the directorate at Fermi National Laboratory (Illinois) the very next day.  One set of detectors in that data had an almost dead zone that made it difficult to see the signal we were looking for, although another set of detectors was working fine.  If we could present agreeable results from both sets of detectors, it would be much more likely that our collaboration would be granted another full year of data taking from the laboratory, so that I could finish my thesis with another run of the experiment.  Little did I know at the time, as a naïve