Spaced Out Theology

Sermon by Dwayne Eutsey

When I was in second grade, my favorite drink in the world was Tang.

I didn’t like this orange powdered drink because it was good for me or even because I thought it tasted good. In fact, it could be too sweet and grainy or even weak and watery, depending on how I mixed it.

No, the reason I loved Tang so much is that it was what the Apollo astronauts drank. At least that’s what the commercials said, anyway. This was back in the early ‘70s when a lot of kids my age (and quite a few adults) were captivated by astronauts landing on the Moon and driving their cool Moon buggy around the craggy, lunar surface.

Come to think of it, that’s probably the real reason I hounded my poor Grandmother into buying Tang for me: at the time it came with a little toy Moon buggy shrink-wrapped to the side of the jar.

I remember rolling that toy around on the floor of my Grandmother’s living room, drinking a glass of watery Tang, and watching the historic footage of the actual lunar rover bounding across the Moon’s powdery terrain. My Grandmother sat in her chair watching it with me, but she wasn’t as fascinated by mankind’s giant leap into space as I was. In fact, she was unsettled by it.

I remember her saying in her quiet way that human beings leaving the Earth and venturing into space was making God angry. “God doesn’t like us going out there,” Grandma said. “We’re interfering in God’s domain.”

Aside from the picture in my head of God standing out there in space glowering at Earth with His arms crossed as spaceships left the planet, I didn’t know what to make of my Grandmother’s words. I had rarely been to church, so I didn’t understand what “God’s domain” was. Where was it? None of the astronauts on TV mentioned seeing God anywhere and if He was miffed at humankind for invading His cosmic turf, no news reporter had tracked Him down for a comment.

I don’t mean to make fun of my Grandmother’s view, nor do I mean to imply that she’s a fundamentalist. She is actually far from being a Bible-thumper. In thinking about what I wanted to address this morning, though, her concern over the moon missions reflects for me a theological worldview that has helped human beings understand our place and purpose in the universe for as long as people have wondered about such things.

For thousands of years, religions have offered explanations for why we’re here and where we are. These creation myths have helped to “render the universe comprehensible in human terms,” as one theologian puts it. They have settled so deeply into our collective consciousness that many people like my grandmother, who isn’t much of a regular church-goer, have assumed them to be true for a long time.

However, as the poet Wallace Stevens once noted, if something “has been true for a long time, then I doubt if it is true any longer.”

The modern exploration of space, ranging from the Apollo moon missions to the Hubble telescope’s far-reaching glimpses into the vast cosmos, has proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that the old religious cosmologies are no longer valid. But in debunking these antiquated views that once gave us purpose and meaning, has science’s pioneering push into God’s domain left us adrift in a vast and meaningless void?

That’s one giant leap into a galactic-sized question this morning, I know, but I promise to have us all back here on terra firma in time for coffee hour.

As I’ve already mentioned, nearly all world religions have creation myths that attempt to make sense of this mystery of existence we find ourselves in. How did this world get here and for what purpose? Although my Grandmother believes the world is round and orbits the Sun, the myth that answered this question in her understanding comes from a primitive cosmology underlying ancient Jewish and Christian theology.

Basically, this cosmology saw the Earth as a large, stationary flat disc surrounded all around by water. Over the surface of this disc was the large dome of the sky that was a like an overturned bowl keeping the cosmic waters from flooding the disc. God opened floodgates at the top of the dome to allow rain, hail, and snow to fall onto the disc, while the Sun and the Moon and the stars were inside the dome moving from the eastern horizon to the western horizon and around again. Deep beneath the disc’s surface was Sheol, a cavernous place where people went after they died, and beneath Sheol were the pillars of the Earth that supported the disc.

And far above the top of the dome was what they called God’s domain.

This ancient cosmology wasn’t only limited to early Jews and Christians, though. Many ancient people believed in some variation of it. Even Aristotle, who asserted the Earth was spherical, assumed it was at the center of the universe and that the Moon, planets, Sun, and stars revolved around it in space. Like the early Jews and Christians, he also believed that our imperfect material world was apart from the pure spiritual sphere beyond the stars where a “prime mover” oversaw the workings of everything. In other words, this sphere was “God’s Domain.”

Even all these centuries after Copernicus and Galileo displaced the Earth as the center of universe, vestiges of the old Earth-centric view linger. We still say things like “the sun rose in the east this morning,” when we know that the stationary sun did no such thing; Earth did all the moving. Considering how the Church responded to heretics like Galileo for espousing views it deemed “false and contrary to Scripture,” it’s not surprising that such assumptions have become so entrenched.

Even so, physicist and astronomer Sir Isaac Newton attempted to reconcile the revolutionary scientific insights of Copernicus and Galileo with religious belief. Although he accepted that the Sun was at the center of our solar system, Newton was also an unorthodox Christian theologian who was certain that the clockwork nature he observed here on Earth and in the universe proved God’s supreme intelligence and power. Until recently, his classical view of physics has helped to sustain a kind of détente between scientific and religious cosmologies.

That uneasy truce was shaken in the early 20^th century when Einstein’s theory of relativity challenged Newtonian views. But even Einstein was reluctant to discard Newton’s underlying assumption that the universe is ultimately a fixed and unchanging place. This reluctance made Einstein initially leery of the Big Bang theory, which, ironically, had been developed by a Belgian Catholic priest based on Einstein’s calculations. It also contributed to Einstein’s resistance to a new way of understanding how the sub-atomic realm behaves called quantum physics that he had also inadvertently inspired.

Far from the structured universe that was at the heart of most theological and scientific cosmologies, quantum physics has revealed an erratic and irrational reality existing at the most fundamental levels of all matter. I don’t claim to understand this sub-atomic reality, but at least I’m in good company. World-renowned physicist and bongo player Richard Feynman, who helped build the first atomic bomb, once remarked: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”

So I’m not going to try explaining the particulars of that strange micro-level of reality where everything is paradoxical and nothing is certain. What interests me today is the disorienting impact that the uncertainty of quantum mechanics is having on our understanding of the universe. Perhaps the quote that captures best this sense of disorientation is author Robert Anton Wilson’s description of the weird reality of sub-atomic particles: Wilson said that based on what we know of the quantum level, a particle can be in three places at the same time without being anywhere at all.

Well, that certainly clears it up, doesn’t it?

Although Einstein’s theories helped to ignite the quantum revolution that led to this mind-bending insight, it was the inherent uncertainty of the quantum level that apparently unsettled him so much. In response to the randomness of the universe revealed by quantum physics, he famously quipped that “God does not play dice with the universe.” But more and more, as Stephen Hawking points out, “All the evidence points to [God] being an inveterate gambler who throws the dice on every possible occasion.”

Until recently, the quirkiness of quantum mechanics was mostly limited to our understanding of the sub-atomic level of reality. According to a recent Scientific American article, however, that’s changing. It’s now becoming the dominant way physicists understand the universe in general. The article points out that as strange as the quantum world is the “general belief [among physicists] is that if a deeper theory ever supersedes quantum physics, it will show the world to be even more counterintuitive than anything we have seen so far.”

So in our quest to “render the universe comprehensible in human terms,” human beings have come a long way, baby. We’ve gone from the primitive, Earth-centric view of a stationary flat disc under the control of an all-powerful God in His heavenly domain, to a de-centered, highly uncertain, and counterintuitive cosmos where we can somehow be in three places at once without being anywhere at all.

As accurate as this new cosmology may be (and, of course, no one is certain that it is), most human beings don’t do very well with uncertainty, especially those of us in the linear-minded West. We are a meaning-making species with an inherent need to understand where we are, how we got here, and where we’re going. We want stories, religious or otherwise, that make sense of all that, even if we have to make them up.

I think that’s why we’re seeing so many people today retreating from the uncertainties of modernity and embracing the absolute certainties of extreme politics and fundamentalist religions. We can scoff all we like at a regressive politician like Michelle Bachmann, someone who wants creationism taught as science in schools (assuming she doesn’t de-fund them all first), but the fact that she hasn’t been laughed off the national stage says a lot about how her views resonate with a segment of our population. It’s probably the same segment of beleaguered people left feeling vulnerable by all the financial and political chaos these days, people who want to be reassured that we inhabit a familiar place where God is in control up there in His domain beyond the clouds.

That reassurance is what a website named “Galileo was Wrong, the Church was Right” promises, anyway. The site asserts “that the Church’s position on the immobility of the Earth is not only scientifically supportable, but it is the most stable model of the universe and the one which best answers all the evidence we see in the cosmos.”

That’s very appealing, isn’t it? Who doesn’t want a “stable model of the universe” that provides us with the certainty that we are at the center of it and have a special, divinely inspired purpose? However comforting and simplistic this Earth-centered view may be, however, as we venture further into the outer reaches of what used to be considered God’s domain, science is revealing just how wrong it is...and the more we learn, the less certain we become of just where we fit into the vast scheme of things.

According to a recent report, the Kepler space telescope “has mapped more than 1,200 planets in one tiny corner of our Milky Way galaxy. Based on that sample, scientists say that there are approximately 50 billion planets in the entire galaxy…including 500 million that are theoretically capable of sustaining life.” And that’s just in our galaxy, which is only one of at least 100 billion galaxies. I won’t even go into the conjecture that our universe may be only one of many universes.

Even when using a cosmic scale that I can comprehend, it’s disconcertingly difficult to fathom how we fit into the universe. Not only are we not the center of it, we’re only a very tiny molecule in it. Consider, for example, that compared to Jupiter, this enormous planet we inhabit is the size of a marble beside a basketball. If that makes you feel small, compared to the Sun, Jupiter is like a golf ball next to a large beach ball, and the Earth is no larger than a tiny pebble.

As huge as our Sun is, however, when compared to Arcturus, one of the brightest stars visible in our night sky, the Sun is like a marble next to one of those large aerobics exercise balls. Jupiter at this level is microscopic and the Earth isn’t even visible. As inexplicable as all that may seem, this mind-blowing scale is easily overwhelmed by the red supergiant star Antares. Our Sun would barely be visible beside Antares; the behemoth Jupiter would be invisible; and the Earth would be smaller than a sub-atomic electron.

As in the excerpt I read this morning from 2001: A Space Odyssey, when I consider how such comparisons demonstrate the bewildering immensity of the cosmos and the incredibly minute place we have in it, I can’t help but wonder along with astronaut David Bowman: “Where in God’s name am I?”

Although Arthur C. Clarke was a religious skeptic, I think he intended for that question to have a double meaning: on one level, after passing through the star gate Bowman literally has no sense of where he is in the universe anymore. On another level, though, his invocation of God’s name also suggests a theological dimension to his dislocation. All the familiar cosmological coordinates that once oriented him are gone taking with them any sense of meaning and purpose they once gave him.

With our traditional social structures wobbling near collapse today, combined with the scientific insights I’ve discussed, we are in a similar state of unfamiliar flux. For some people, this sense of dislocation from a stable model of the universe is depressing. For them, our relative smallness underscores a nihilistic view that we are just a random accident in an indifferent and meaningless cosmos.

For me, though, the farther we venture into the outer reaches of God’s domain, the more we, like David Bowman in 2001, are being called to evolve—if not to evolve physically, then to evolve our collective consciousness from old, outdated ways of understanding ourselves.

Modern space exploration has been nudging us in that direction at least since I drank Tang on my grandmother’s rug watching the Apollo Moon landing on TV. In that phenomenal scientific accomplishment, mythologist Joseph Campbell also found in the photos of Earth taken by astronauts from the Moon a new symbol for uniting humanity. Seeing the Earth from God’s Domain, he said, you “don't see any divisions there of nations or states.” All you see suspended in all that velvety blackness is the one sacred world we all share together.

Similarly, when Carl Sagan saw images of the Earth taken by the Voyager space probe from Saturn, in which the Earth is a pale blue dot, he offered this poignant meditation on our true place in the universe and what it ultimately means:

“The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us…To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

In the 16 years since Sagan wrote these words, our excursions into the universe have continued to boldly go where no one has gone before, to quote Capt. Kirk. But no matter how far out we go or however fantastic the cosmic discoveries awaiting us out there may be, I believe they will ultimately serve as gateways into an endless final frontier where we are forever striving to discover who we are, and where in God’s name are we.

Meditation (excerpted from 2001: A Space Odyssey):

“The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God!—it’s full of stars!”

The world around him was strange and wonderful, but there was nothing to fear. He had travelled these millions of miles in search of a mystery; and now, it seemed, the mystery was coming to him.

Where in God’s name am I? Bowman asked himself; and even as he posed the question, he felt certain that he could never know the answer. It seemed that space had been turned inside out…He was moving through a new order of creation, of which few men had ever dreamed. Beyond the realms of sea and land and air and space lay the realms of fire, which he alone had been privileged to glimpse. It was too much to expect that he would also understand.

Closing Words: Mark Twain

…man is himself a microbe, and his globe a blood-corpuscle drifting with its shining brethren of the Milky Way down a vein of the Master and Maker of all things, Whose body, mayhap,--glimpsed partwise from the earth by night, and receding and lost to view in the measureless remotenesses of Space--is what men name the Universe.