Excerpts from a writing project so far, God with Ten Words
__________________________According to modern physics, the universe began with a point smaller than any of us could imagine, an atomic point, if you would. But by that statement, I refer to something much, much smaller than an atom. There was no space outside that point. I cannot even comprehend what that means. There was what we might call in math the “empty set,” not even including zero. There was not even emptiness. Everything of our universe that existed—what would become space, time, matter, energy—existed as a point. There was nothing else from our point of reference.
Except God. God existed before God created that point. Some scientists and philosophers like to talk of a multiverse beyond our universe. No matter one way or another. If there are other universes, we believe God created them too.
But from our perspective, there was no space, no emptiness, and only this point holding all of everything we know, except God. And God was there. God was everywhere present in that point.
According to current theory, a trillionth of a second later—again, a moment of time shorter than anything we know—everything that exists in this universe had expanded to about the size of space between the earth and our sun. And God was there. God was everywhere present in that 93.6 million miles of all existence.
When the creation was one second old, according to the current understanding, the whole universe was about the size of our solar system and the six nearest star systems to us. [1] And God was there. God was everywhere present in that space that is considerable to us but nothing compared to the size of the universe as we know it today.
One key Christian belief is that God is everywhere present or “omnipresent.” We say that God exists beyond this universe and that God exists within this universe. When we talk of God being beyond this universe, we refer to God as “transcendent.” God exists far beyond our reality or comprehension (remember mystery). When we speak of God within this universe, we refer to God as “immanent.” God exists everywhere within this universe.
Psalm 139 gives us one of the best pictures of this truth about God’s “all-presence”...
[1] I don’t mean, by the way, to suggest that the earth was the center of where it started. That would be rather narcissistic of me. In fact, it would misunderstand the nature of space itself, as if it has some sort of fixed location in some other fixed something. I am only trying to give a sense of size to which we can relate.
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