From the Daily Lectionary, October 26, 2011:
For this people’s heart has grown dull,
and their ears are hard of hearing,
and they have shut their eyes;
so that they might not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and understand with their heart and turn...
and their ears are hard of hearing,
and they have shut their eyes;
so that they might not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and understand with their heart and turn...
-- Matthew 13:15
Galileo was still living less than five hundred years ago. At that time, most people still believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Through scientific inquiry, factual evidence and critical reason, we now know that relative to each other, the earth, in fact, revolves around the sun. When it came to Galileo’s message, the people’s ears were certainly hard of hearing and they shut their eyes to what he could show them.
The discoveries of the last five decades show an overwhelmingly beautiful universe, one that is impossible to fathom. When I think of all that we have discovered as we have looked through ever more powerful telescopes and ever more powerful microscopes, I am reminded of the start of the 19th Psalm:
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
Scientific discovery declares the glory of God. Even though the universe uses no human words, its voice goes out to the ends of the world, through the progressively more amazing details we learn about creation.
Yet many people look at our scientific advances and reach a completely opposite conclusion to mine – they conclude that there is no God. How can this be? Simply put, I think their ears are hard of hearing the beautiful music being played throughout the universe and they have shut their eyes from seeing the beauty of creation.
Ask an astrophysicist to discuss the big bang with you. She will describe for you the fact that we have a fairly good grasp on the first 10-9 second after the big bang and can tell you how hot things were at that moment as well as give a good estimate of the velocity of the universe's expansion. Our understanding of these details was accomplished through reasoning and scientific inquiry. Ask the same astrophysicist to describe that moment which is equidistant before the big bang, and she will be stumped. In fact, she may very well tell you what a Princeton astrophysicist told me: that is the realm of theology.
How do we deal with the unprovable uncertainty of this space/time singularity? How do we deal with any such mystery? Let me start with something whose vastness I can describe in measurement terms I do understand. When I look at the ocean, the mountains or the night sky, I am faced with two possible interpretations. One, this majestic beauty is part of a universe that is much bigger than I am, with mysteries greater than I can even guess at. This universe has an order that we are slowly discovering through our limited human inquiry, and the more we discover, the more majestic the universe appears. In the alternative, I can view all of this as a grand random occurrence. You probably know which of those two I choose.
Open your eyes. Open your ears. Dare to be part of the greater universe, and all of its mystery.
The whole universe is breathing as our breath; we limit the process by our assumption that we are doing the breathing.
-- Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, Alchemical Wisdom
