I just don't know what it says about God that in creation we find inter-filament (a filament is a collection of super-clusters of galaxies) voids that are areas of space with NOTHING in them for spans of 500 million light-years! in case you forgot your math - that's 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles, WITH NOTHING - NOT EVEN DUST - IN IT!
That's just crazy amounts of space. And for some reason it freaks me out. Such large quantities of absence just don't fit with the character of YHWH as he has revealed himself in specific revelation, no?
Anyways - it troubles me.
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I like the passage in Lewis' Perelandra where it comes to light that the "empty" space are where most of the interesting activity is - deep heaven, kind of like the deep sea, where things have to be intense and crazy to exist at all (and thereby, less bothered by matter? maybe Lewis reveals more Plato-leanings than usual there). It does, in a weird way, make me wonder about what, exactly, we're talking about with dark matter and dark energy making up the lion's share of mass in the universe. We can't tell what the heck is going on, but those spaces/unintelligible zones bend the rest of the rules of the cosmos. The specific example here is of the normal rules of gravity being suspended in each and every universe, since the edges of the galaxies mostly spin at the same rate as the insides - a fact that contradicts Newton explicitly, but also places an enormous question mark over what really holds the galaxies together: merely a theorized force that cannot be detected as such, almost an updated "wind in the trees" sort of sermon analogy.
Hmmm. yes - i forgot that these 'voids' and the like don't fit coherently into a Newtonian universe, and therefore aren't fully the stark, scary geometric facts i named them as. I like that wind in the tree's thing. Q: what's the source of your cosmos knowledge? where did you learn about that galaxy spinning thing? Because I'd like to learn a bit more about some of these science-unknowns.
Also, I feel like I caught wind one time of some christian author who sort of fancifully interprets crazy cosmos stuff theologically. You ever read anyone (good) like that?
I was just reading the wiki pages on Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Oh man. I keep fluctuating between 'Science has got it going on!' and 'Science is still as fundamentally inept now as it was in the 16th c. at really explaining things'. The amount of unknowns and ambiguities on the wiki pages have drifted me back towards the latter.
There's an Anglican Priest / scientist named John Polkinghorne that I remember reading about 6 years ago, but I'm sure he's not the only one who filters into my memory. This is a topic that I used to pay tons of attention to - to the extent of going to conferences with Aaron WIlliams (did you know he was a physics guy at U Chicago? I always like to tell the story of how Keanu Reaves' character in Chain Reaction was directly based on AW, to the extent that the former followed the latter around to learn mannerisms and factoids for weeks during production).
I feel like the 16th century versus 21st century thing is more apt than anybody wants it to be. In both cases, we've been coming up with really good models for one set of phenomena that end up not translating at all onto a larger picture. I recall the tidbit in Kuhn about how Ptolemaic astronomy was actually the most accurate model for predicting the position of planets for decades after Copernicus. It was only aesthetes who accepted heliocentrism immediately. The numbers guys stayed away from the theory for a very long time because of it's lack of usefulness and perfect circles.
Tim -
What you say about the "numbers guys" waiting a few years (decades even) before joining up with the Copernicus Crew rings so true. It's a great example of reading the wrong kind of ignorance/enlightenment into history -- we look back and assume, wrongly, that all people should have flipped the switch on truth. It's just not that simple. Truth emerges, is formed by its functionality. It has a place.
I agree - there is something very profound in that anecdote.
Thanks, Tim! And i shall look up Polkinghorne when next I feel that scientific hunger.
and yes - I did know that about Aaron Williams. What a stud. Also - I liked 'Chain Reaction', despite what anybody says (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1072457-chain_reaction/)
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