The more I see the Less I Know by Dean J. Seal

The More I see the Less I Know, by Dean J. Seal

There's a catchy tune on the radio, and all i can remember is half the chorus which goes, "...every where I go/ the more I see the less I know." (if you know who made that song, drop me a line). This comes to mind because I saw a friend of mine, Peter, at my home church, and he said he passed a test in actuarial work because there isn't anything happening for him in physics. This caught my attention.
I said, "Hey, i was listening to a radio show about the Hubble Telescope, and they said it had changed everything about how we (us, the deep and powerful scientist/philosophers of the universe) how we thought about the universe. What can you tell me?"
A couple things you have to know about the Hubble. It is up there because the telescope in it isn't hindered by our atmosphere. It is in space and can look into space. Second, if it is looking at a star ten million light years away, then what it sees happened ten million years ago. So that means the farther it sees, the farther into the past we can see- that means the closer to the Beginning of Time we can see. Okay? That's pretty amazing on the face of it., Now. What do we get from actually looking in it?
Peter spoke in the collective We of people who actually know what they are talking about. "First off," he said politely to me, "we used to think that the universe started in a big bang, a big explosion that started in one spot and everything is now moving away from everything else at a uniform speed that is gradually slowing. We don't think that anymore. It turns out things are in clumps, and we don't know why, and they are moving at different rates, and we don't know why, and they are actually moving away from each other at a faster and faster speed."
"Clumps?" That's as far as I got.
""Clumps," said Peter in a warm professional tone. He understood that I knew this was something amazing to not know about.
I moved on. "What about dark matter? I remember reading that Einstein was working on a theory that explained it, and he threw it aside because it didn't make sense."
"Well, what is was was Dark Energy, not matter, and he was on the trail, and he said giving up on that was the biggest mistake of his life. So, Dark Energy is something we didn't know about because we can't really see it."
"It's Dark." I added, feeling pretty smart.
"Yep," said Peter. " We can learn about stars because we can see them. So iDark Energy all over the place, and we really don't know much about that either."
Peter said more, and I'm not sure I got this right either, but I just wanted to lay out a small list of astonishments to make my point. There used to be a time when scientists all thought they had most things figured out, that there wasn't a god because we could explain everything, and that sooner or later everyone would give up this stupid nonsense of believing in supernatural superstitions. God was Dead, they said.
So let's go in the other direction. Molecules are made of atoms; atoms are made of a nucleus plus protons and neutrons. Protons are made up of up quarks or down quarks; up quarks are held together in a gluon field (yes, it comes from the word glue) of vector guage bosons that mediate strong color charges of the QCD... let's just stop here, because we are now talking about things that we cannot actually see or detect, but we can guestimate they exist because of the effect they have on the things we can see.
In other words, whichever direction you go, into the infinate extra-terrestial universe or into the infinate sub-atomic universe, The More We See the Less We Know. It has become, in our lifetimes, an immutable fact of science. The universe, like God and like a human soul, is unknowable.
There is a Scottish Presbyterian Minister named Philip Newell, who is bringing people back to a Celtic spiritality (Keltic, phonetically) and he says we are not so much made By God as we are made Of God. We are made in God's image, of the stardust of the universe. God is energy and matter, as are we and the universe is, and what we are going through is the change from one to the other ad infinitum.
What can we take home from this excercise?
First, no one can pin down what God is, and anyone who says they can should be left alone at the bar as qucikly as possible.
Second, if we can't define God, then we can't define who someone else's God is.
Third, God is all, God is one, God is the universe. This is not in conflict with a loving God. It actually explains a lot. Like, where was God during the Holocaust? God was everywhere in the Holocaust, feeling the pain and suffering of every man, woman and child. That means God feels our pain too, and we are not alone in our pain. We are not too small for God to know us. That makes God's love accessible.
Fourth, if we cannot define God, that does not mean God doesn't exist. We cannot define gluons yet, but we have pretty good notes on its existance. We cannot define dark energy yet, but we can begin to talk about it. And essentially, the spiritual experience is one to be experienced individually. We are neither too great or too small to each have a different experience.
Then where is relgion? Religio is Latin for coming together, and when you come together in a religion it is because you share enough of your beliefs that you can work together; for a wprship service,. or a service work project, or to pray, whatever you can agree on. And it does not mean you all have the same experience or believe the same thing. It means you are sharing the experience of a spiritual moment, and you find it healing, and bonding, and uplifting, beyond our own mortality.
And that means the Great Mystery is going to remain mysterious. And the more of it we experience, the more mysterious it gets.