The Living Universe, God, and Everything

Discussing current events and how they relate to Biblical prophesy. What are some critical signs are pointing to the imminent Rapture of the Church?

Whenever the living creatures give glory, honor, and thanks to the One seated on the throne, the One who lives forever and ever, the 24 elders fall down before the One seated on the throne, worship the One who lives forever and ever, cast their crowns before the throne, and say:

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The Living Universe

The glorious unfolding of the Universe builds up in a series of thresholds. Each threshold creates the “Goldilocks” stage, with emergent properties, for a new order of complexity.

From a scientific perspective, this is a synopsis of the story of the Universe:

First Threshold: Physics About 14 billion years ago, the universe is born, incredibly hot, busting, expanding faster than the speed of light. At this threshold, the basic components of matter, energy, space, and the arrow of time are created.

Second Threshold: Astronomy Stars are born, as gravity pulls together hydrogen and helium.

Third Threshold: Chemistry Stars die and explode, creating temperatures hot enough to make complex chemicals, as well as rocks, asteroids, planets, moons, and our solar system.

Forth Threshold: Planetary Sciences Gravity pulls together dust and rocks to create solar systems with planets.

Fifth Threshold: Life Sciences Life appears, with molecules growing from the Goldilocks conditions, with neither too much nor too little energy.

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The four key elements for life are Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen. A typical star produces these elements more than any other, with the exception of Helium. In other words, the Universe is predisposed for promoting life!

There are billions of stars in our galaxy alone, with one to five planets in their Habitable Zone orbiting them.

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One in five stars has Earth-sized planet in habitable zone / EarthSky, November 5, 2013

Scientists from University of California, Berkeley, and University of Hawaii, Manoa, have statistically determined that twenty percent of Sun-like stars in our galaxy have Earth-sized planets that could host life. The findings, gleaned from data collected from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft and the W. M. Keck Observatory, now satisfy Kepler’s primary mission: to determine how many of the 100 billion stars in our galaxy have potentially habitable planets.

“What this means is, when you look up at the thousands of stars in the night sky, the nearest sun-like star with an Earth-size planet in its habitable zone is probably only 12 light years away and can be seen with the naked eye. That is amazing,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Erik Petigura, who led the analysis of the Kepler and Keck Observatory data.

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Subsurface lakes discovered on Mars / Nature, September 29, 2020

Planetary scientists have confirmed the presence of a large saltwater lake under the ice at Mars’s south pole — and have found three more. The discovery was made using radar data from the European Space Agency’s Mars-orbiting spacecraft, called Mars Express. It builds on evidence, gathered two years ago, of the first body of liquid water ever detected on the red planet. The largest, central lake measures 30 kilometres across, and is surrounded by 3 smaller lakes, each a few kilometres wide. Life is able to survive in subglacial lakes in places such as Antarctica, but the lakes on Mars might be too salty.

“We identified the same body of water, but we also found three other bodies of water around the main one,” says planetary scientist Elena Pettinelli at the University of Rome, who is one of the paper’s co-authors. “It’s a complex system.”

For the time being, the prospect that these lakes are remnants of Mars’s wet past remains an exciting possibility. “There may have been a lot of water on Mars,” says Pettinelli. “And if there was water, there was the possibility of life.”

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BREAKING NEWS: Possible evidence of life found on Venus / National Geographic, September 14, 2020

Phosphine has been detected in Venus’s atmosphere, raising the thrilling question of whether the molecule might be a sign of life on the planet. On rocky planets, life is the only known source of the compound — although it forms without a helping hand near the energetic cores of the gas giants. Life seems impossible on the surface of the Solar System’s hottest world, but the middle of its cloud layer offers a more promising environment in terms of temperature, pressure and presence of water and organic molecules. Even if it’s not a sign of life on Venus, the unexpected observation is exciting: “Whether it’s life or not, it has to be a really exotic mechanism,” says quantum astrochemist Clara Sousa-Silva, who co-authored the study. “Something weird is happening.”

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It is overwhelmingly likely that our vast Universe is teeming with life. 

God

If we could stand outside of our Universe, we would see an expanding bubble that contains everything we experience. The Lord told us about our expanding Universe from the very beginning. Over and over in the Holy Bible, the Lord speaks of “stretching out” the heavens:

A declaration of the Lord,
who stretched out the heavens,
laid the foundation of the earth,
and formed the spirit of man within him. (Zechariah 12:1)

For most of history since Adam and Eve, philosophers believed in a “steady state” Universe, where there was no beginning and no end. In the 1960’s astronomy advanced enough to prove that the Universe began with an enormous explosion of light, and has been expanding ever since. This explosion was the beginning of time.

Our Earth is incredibly old – 4.5 billion years. And yet, the Bible tells us that the Lord had you and me in mind, before the foundation of the world. His plan for us has been unfolding for billions of years. Deep time refers to the entirety of geologic history, an unimaginable length of time that goes far beyond our human scale. Only an infinite God could plan at such scales.

In fact, the Lord’s plan was in place before He even created the Universe:

Paul, a slave of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, to build up the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness, in the hope of eternal life that God, who cannot lie, promised before time began. (Titus 1:1-2)

The Bible has a lot to say about the Lord, the creation, and time:

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning.
All things were created through Him,
and apart from Him not one thing was created
that has been created. (John 1:1-3)

However, we do speak a wisdom among the mature, but not a wisdom of this age, or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. On the contrary, we speak God’s hidden wisdom in a mystery, a wisdom God predestined before the ages for our glory. (1 Corinthians 2:6-7)

He has saved us and called us
with a holy calling,
not according to our works,
but according to His own purpose and grace,
which was given to us in Christ Jesus
before time began. (2 Timothy 1:9)

A human lifetime averages about 71 years. We can not comprehend a Universe that is 13.7 billion years old. This is deep, deep time.

Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables, and He would not speak anything to them without a parable, so that what was spoken through the prophet might be fulfilled:

I will open My mouth in parables;
I will declare things kept secret
from the foundation of the world. (Matthew 13:34-35)

Praise the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens. For He chose us in Him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless in His sight. In love, He predestined us to be adopted through Jesus Christ for Himself, according to His favor and will, to the praise of His glorious grace that He favored us with in the Beloved. (Ephesians 1:3-6)

Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. (Matthew 25:34)

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The Theory of Everything

A Theory of Everything? London School of Economics and Political Science, 23 March 23, 2021

The biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Is there an even more general theory that can make sense of all the sciences? The various scientific disciplines each have their own methods, theories, and practices. This is the case even when different sciences try to explain the same phenomena. Can we translate between these distinct disciplines? What does this even mean? Might all of science be reduced to physics one day? Our panel discuss reduction, emergence, and the unity of the sciences.

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A theory of everything is a framework of physics that fully explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe, and is one of the major unsolved problems in physics.

Over the past few centuries, two theoretical frameworks have been developed that, together, most closely resemble a theory of everything. These two theories upon which all modern physics rests are general relativity and quantum mechanics.

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General relativity is a theoretical framework that only focuses on gravity for understanding the universe in regions of both large scale and high mass: stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies etc.

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On the other hand, quantum mechanics is a theoretical framework that only focuses on three non-gravitational forces for understanding the universe in regions of both small scale and low mass: sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules, etc. Quantum mechanics successfully implemented the Standard Model that describes the three non-gravitational forces – strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and electromagnetic force – as well as all observed elementary particles.

General relativity and quantum mechanics have been thoroughly proven in their separate fields of relevance. Since the usual domains of applicability of general relativity and quantum mechanics are so different, most situations require that only one of the two theories be used.

However, the two theories are considered incompatible in regions of extremely small scale – the Planck scale – such as those that exist within a black hole or during the beginning stages of the universe (i.e., the moment immediately following the Big Bang).

To resolve the incompatibility, a theoretical framework revealing a deeper underlying reality, unifying gravity with the other three interactions, must be discovered to harmoniously integrate the realms of general relativity and quantum mechanics into a seamless whole: the theory of everything is a single theory that, in principle, is capable of describing all phenomena in the universe.

At the Human scale, all of the world seems solid to us. We sit on a chair, which is held in place on the floor. But, if we were to see the Universe with the Lord’s eyes, we would know that everything we see consists of only vibrations.

Each subatomic particle acts as a wave, and each atom is just a collection of waves. As solid as it appears, all of the Universe is only made up of vibration, frequency, and energy. The electron cloud that circles the atomic nucleus is just a wave.

In other words, what we consider to be “something” is actually nothing – but vibrations in space-time. In the beginning was the Word – the VIBRATION is He who spoke everything into existence.

In pursuit of the theory of everything, quantum gravity has become one area of active research. One example is string theory. According to string theory, every particle in the universe, at its most microscopic level (Planck length), consists of varying combinations of vibrating strings (or strands) with preferred patterns of vibration.

String theory further claims that it is through these specific oscillatory patterns of strings that a particle of unique mass and force charge is created (that is to say, the electron is a type of string that vibrates one way, while the up quark is a type of string vibrating another way, and so forth). 

String theory (or, more technically, M-theory) is often described as the leading candidate for the theory of everything in our universe. But there’s no empirical evidence for it, or for any alternative ideas about how gravity might unify with the rest of the fundamental forces. 

The fact is, more we know, the more we discover what we don’t know.

At any level – from microscopic to cosmic – we discover that all of creation is linked together. The Universe is far more complex than we can imagine. 

For example, one of the greatest of all puzzles in cosmology is “dark energy.” Discovered in 1998 by two teams of astronomers, dark energy is generally described as being responsible for accelerating the cosmic expansion, apparently acting as a kind of stretchy force on the very fabric of space. It makes distant galaxies move away from one another as if they were on steroids.

Current measurements attribute their amount to the 69 percent of the stuff of the Universe. We have no clue what dark energy is, although we model it as a very smooth fluid that fills the whole of space, like water in a bathtub. In other words, dark energy is omnipresent.

Is it possible that this so-called dark energy is the fingerprint of the Holy Spirit? In fact, the life force of the Spirit intersecting with the physical world can explain why we have a living Universe. Life gives birth to life.

Imagine that the Spirit is the “potter” and the quantum particles are the “clay.” The Holy Bible described it perfectly thousands of years ago:

He is the image of the invisible God,
the firstborn over all creation.
For everything was created by Him,
in heaven and on earth,
the visible and the invisible,
whether thrones or dominions
or rulers or authorities—
all things have been created through Him and for Him.
He is before all things,
and by Him all things hold together. (Colossians 1:15-17)

The Holy Spirit permeates the Universe and directs the evolution of the thresholds. It is the awesome “hidden hand” of God, and explains deep mysteries like the expanding Universe, the nature of gravity, and consciousness. 

For in Him we live and move and have our being. (Acts 17:28)

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Sixth Threshold: History God makes Man to rule His creation.

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.”

So God created man in His own image;
He created him in the image of God;
He created them male and female. (Genesis 1:26-27)

Seventh Threshold: Divinity The Lord completes His plan for the Universe by joining with the Body of Christ. This includes our transfiguration at the Rapture.

As Christians, we know that God Himself became a man as Jesus Christ, took on man’s nature, lived, died, resurrected, and ascended as a man, and now is ruling in the heaven:

But Stephen, filled by the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven. He saw God’s glory, with Jesus standing at the right hand of God, and he said, “Look! I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” Acts 7:55-56

We should also know that we, as Christians, are heirs with Christ:

All those led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father!” The Spirit Himself testifies together with our spirit that we are God’s children, and if children, also heirs—heirs of God and coheirs with Christ—seeing that we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him. (Romans 8:14-17)

and…

On the last and most important day of the festival, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone is thirsty, he should come to Me and drink! The one who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, will have streams of living water flow from deep within him.” He said this about the Spirit. Those who believed in Jesus were going to receive the Spirit, for the Spirit had not yet been received because Jesus had not yet been glorified. (John 7:37-39)

Even with all the troubles we are experiencing with the trauma of these End Times, we can look forward to our Rapture into a new, eternal life as the Body in the Lord’s kingdom!

Current events are aligning with Biblical prophecy