[This entry was originally published as The Christian in the Universe of Einstein: 1. An Overview on 2007/01/11. This is a slightly corrected version which will be printed under the current title, Why I Misuse the Term ‘Universe’ in my upcoming collection of weblog writings to be published as a big ebook.]
In my book To See a World in a Grain of Sand, I used the term ‘universe’ to mean pretty much the Einsteinian universe: all that is bound by the same gravitational field as each mortal man, the Sun, the other stars in the Milky Way, the other observable galaxies, and so forth. This is not quite the usual definition, at least for philosophers and students of the Greek language. The traditional definition of universe is:
Universe: All created things viewed as constituting one system or whole; the whole body of things, or of phenomena; the to pan of the Greeks, the mundus of the Latins; the world; creation. [From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48]
In this more typical definition, the universe is seen as being “All created things”. Clearly, a Christian cannot accept this definition unless he’s willing to say that the World of the Resurrected is in this universe or willing to speak of this universe as being something radically different and more inclusive that the term designates when used by modern thinkers. It seems to me that it makes sense to use the term ‘universe’ for the maximal gravitionally bound system. This definition captures what most modern thinkers are targetting with the term, certainly most physicists. And so there might be much outside of the universe which can be plausibly conjectured by disciplined speculation, but that much is not gravitationally bound to our particular thing-like realm of being, our concrete realm of being.
If we trace the development of the universe back in time, we approach the so-called Big Bang, often wrongly seen as an act of creation. From inside the universe, we couldn’t see a true act of creating a universe from nothing if only because we couldn’t see nothing. What we see is a change of state and we can only speculate on the state of this universe before that event. In fact, we can only speculate as to whether we could even describe that state given what we know from inside this universe, this phase of Creation as I will call it at times.
My speculation is based on the story of this universe as reconstructed by physicists and astronomers. Following that story backward in time, we can see thing-like being melting away to those subatomic entities explored by particle physicists, but also including fields and energy. At some point accessible only to human imagination, these three types of entities, particles and fields and energy begin to melt down into\ldots
What? Well, first of all, note that gravity is not part of this melting process. It remains intact so far as theorists currently know. They may or may not find a way to make gravity melt down in their theories, equivalently — to combine general relativity and quantum mechanics into one theory. I doubt if they will, so far as thing-like being is concerned, though there might well be a way to combine them on the other side of that so-called Big Bang. But I doubt that as well.
Actually, as I understand the views of Roger Penrose, he thinks gravity ‘held’ the degrees of freedom of this universe at the beginning of this phase of expansion — that is, that gravity held matter in the low-probability configuration that was a low-entropy state. This low-entropy at the beginning of the universe brings us the ‘laws’ of thermodynamics and the sorts of processes which underly life. This sort of a view might be analogical to my reason for conjecturing gravity doesn’t melt down into a generic sort of stuff along with electrons, strong nuclear forces, quarks, electromagnetic fields, and so forth.
My conjecture is this:
God is the Creator of truths, including metaphysical truths, and not just the Creator of thing-like being. On the other side of that Big Bang, lies a form of abstract being which could be regarded as the manifestation of truths God chose for this Creation, all of it and not just this universe. Gravity is likely the particularized form of some metaphysical principle of unity.
In To See a World in a Grain of Sand, I referred to this prior state of this universe as the Primordial Universe and conjectured it is the abstract and fundamental stuff of all Creation. The World of the Resurrected, not subject to the same processes of development and decay, is also shaped from that abstract stuff which is the Primordial Universe.
To be more exact, there might be other phases lying before the Big Bang but after the Primordial Universe, but that’s not an important qualification for this discussion.
Before speaking further, I’ll quickly address the question:
How did Christians speak before Einstein gave us a coherent definition of the universe as a single gravitational system?
Traditionally, Christians thought in terms of what I call the Aristotelian Cosmos, because that Greek thinker pulled together the ancient pagan ways of thought into a coherent system and not because he was the discoverer of that model which was the Heavens, the earth, and possibly Hades/Hell. This means pretty much what you might think. The Heavens were the realm of the blessed — those beyond the reach of forces of decay (and development). The higher the Heaven, the greater the bliss. Hades or Hell was the realm of the damned, those who had decayed to some state where they could feel naught but pain and anxiety. The earth was the realm of change and development and decay as we know it.
This traditional model, the Cosmos borrowed from the pagan philosophers, is essentially a static model. Change might be ongoing in the terrestrial realm, but even the earth is itself a setting which can change cyclically but always comes back to being what men have always experienced. The Cosmos was a setting for various stories, moral and otherwise but didn’t really have a story of its own. This is perhaps the greatest difference between the Cosmos and the Einsteinian universe which can almost be described as being itself a story.
The universe is set into a greater context in the Christian view: Creation. So far as I can speculate, all of Creation, all created being, comes from the Primordial Universe, the manifestation of the truths, mathematical and other, which God chose.