The Universe

This is really cool!

It's an interactive display of The Scale of the Universe. It starts at the left end with a planck length (theoretically the shortest length that can have any meaning) and scrolls all the way to the projected size of the universe.

When I think about this stuff, I find it both humbling and awe-inspiring. It amazes me to think of the vastness of creation and how small we and out planet are in the scope of things. At the same time, it amazes me how we are made up of such small things, cells, molecules, atoms, quarks, prions. Almost inconceivably tiny things come together in intricate ways to create all that we can see.

It amazes me to think of someone I know and imagine that every part of them, even every thought and feeling, can be described at some level as the interactions of tiny forces and particles.

I've been asked whether I am a creationist, and I don't have a simple answer. I do believe that God created the world but I am very aware that the complexity of things is not anything like scientific proof of God's existence. In other words, I believe in God, but I have no faith in "Scientific Creationism" which seems to me to misrepresent scientific method for it's own purposes.

When I contemplate the universe, one of the things that strikes me is how little I really know. We human beings have learned an amazing amount about the universe but the more we learn the more questions are revealed.

But what we do know paints such an intricate and beautiful picture that it fills us with the most religious of all feelings, a sense of wonder and awe.

That doesn't make for a very hard-headed and practical blog entry, I know, but I think that hard headed and practical might be missing the point here. Explanations and proof shift the focus back to us and our limited understanding. While I hope that science never stops seeking to understand things better, I also hope that faith never stops seeing the wonder of all we cannot know.