Imagining the enormity of God.
There are no words to express the power God possesses!
The pomposity of mankind to even begin to think we can comprehend the magnificence of God - the enormity of God - boggles my mind. How can one ponder the universe and not be humbled by its complexity, its beauty, its size, its energy, and wonder in sheer amazement that the mind of God created it and is responsible for keeping it operational.
To put such a thing in perspective is not possible. To imagine a being that lives outside the dimensions of space and time and has complete control of everything that exists inside the dimensions of space and time is incomprehensible. The Apostle Paul said as much:
I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.
And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;)
How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.
Paul didn’t tell us what he saw or heard, but we can know from the words he shared with us that what he saw and heard humbled him.
You see if God exists, and the little I do know, tells me He must assuredly exist, then we are so insignificant to Him in relative terms that we actually don’t have a word to describe that relationship. I wonder what those “unspeakable words” were, and I wonder why Paul tells us it is not lawful for one to utter those words.
We are told in the bible that God must receive all the glory. That we, on the other hand, must be humbled, must deny self, must submit to His authority in all things and yet we seem unable to fully do that.
I have a small list of things to do today. I have been a little under the weather the last few days. A cold maybe or a touch of the flu, and so I have put off doing those tasks for the time being. I needed to rest. One wonders what would happen if God decided to rest for a day or two, or even a second or two. Would that have an impact on me if God chose to take the day off and rest?
If God holds everything of a material nature together by means of a power we can’t even begin to comprehend, and he took the day off, would everything of a material nature just cease to exist?
The bible tells us God created the material universe in 6 days - a universe that didn’t exist until God went to work. And God rested on the 7th day:
And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.
Are we to take the word day literally? Hugh Ross thinks so, but he notes the word day in Hebrew has multiple meanings. You can look the Hebrew word for day up to verify that Ross is right. This is what yom means according to Wikipedia:
Although yom is commonly rendered as day in English translations, the word yom can be used in different ways to refer to different time spans:
Point of time (a specific day)
time period of a whole or half a day:
Period of light (as contrasted with the period of darkness),
Sunrise to sunset
Sunset to next sunset
General term for time (as in 'days of our lives')
A year "lived a lot of days" (in the plural use)
Time period of unspecified length.
A long, but finite span of time.
That definition is sufficiently broad enough to overcome the young earther’s view that God created everything in just 7 earth days with day being the English version - that is, one 24-hour period of time. But back to the question - can God really rest for a time without causing our material universe to collapse into nothing?
I don’t know the answer to that question. In Genesis Moses tells us He did rest on the 7th day. In fact, according to Hugh Ross God may still be resting as there was a morning and a night on the first 6 days of creation, but no morning or night on the 7th day.
On the other hand, Jesus tells us the Father is always at work. He offers that information in response to the Pharisees condemning Him for healing a man on the Sabbath. Can we extrapolate that to mean God is consistently involved in maintaining all the complex systems that exist in the universe? In other words, if God stops working will all of the material universe cease to exist?
Or is there another answer regarding the way in which the material universe continues to exist absent any outside force? Could it be that God employed a very sophisticated and complex program similar to the programs we create and put that program in motion? I actually wrote a paper on that idea titled God’s computer. Here’s my opening paragraph:
Just as a thought experiment, can we not imagine it is possible that God created a database containing the building blocks of matter - protons, neutrons, electrons, etc. He then constructed programs for how each and every physical thing in the universe would look and function. He then wrote extremely complex algorithms that would create each and everything that exists by combining the building blocks into shapes, and then energizing them via light (photons) in order to set them in motion. He then created DNA and embedded instructions in the DNA that perpetuated this process, but with the caveat that the DNA replicate itself, but not forever thus ensuring that all living things would die over time.
Of some note is the fact that we have taken the computational capacity of computers to extreme levels in our time. Imagine for a moment what you can do with your cell phone. Google maps for instance can guide you to any location you have an address for. Your cell phone knows exactly where you are with incredible precision, and it knows exactly where you want to go, and it knows exactly what path you need to take to get there, and it knows approximately how long it will take you to get there, and it adjusts the time window for your trip based on traffic conditions. That computer system is watching you and taking note of every move you make, and it is not only doing it for you, but for every person on the planet who is using Google maps. Google states that over a billion people use the program every month. Imagine also the raw data needed to accomplish all this. For instance, all the roads, streets, and highways must be contained in Google’s database. And consider this. Your location is being monitored as you move along the path to your destination.
The computational power of Google maps is amazing, and it doesn’t even begin to approach the computational power of a quantum computer. Consider this excerpt from a paper titled How is a quantum computer faster than a regular computer?
In the past two decades, the computing world has made significant progress in quantum processing. Big players like IBM and Google and newer competitors like IonQ and PASQAL are all in the race to make quantum processors available to consumers.
Quantum computers have shown that they can process certain tasks exponentially faster than classical computers. In late 2019, Google claimed that it had managed to solve a problem that would take 10,000 years for the world’s fastest supercomputer within just 200s using a quantum computer.
Those working with quantum computers tell us the processing speed of these quantum machines is roughly 100 million times faster than the computers we now use on a daily basis. But would such power be able to handle God’s algorithm if it exists?
I am not sure of the answer to that question. What would that entail? Well, it raises some questions in my mind. How fast can God process information for instance? If God created everything of a physical nature, he surely didn’t use a computer - at least one of the type we use as it is made of atoms - physical matter - and there was no physical matter at the start of God’s creation.
How do I know there was no physical matter when God started to create? Well, the bible tells us so in the first three sentences in the bible:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.
That is the way the bible describes the beginning. Here’s the way scientists explain it:
Run the universe clock backwards, right to the beginning, and you get to a place that was hotter and denser than it is today. So dense that the entire universe shortly after the Big Bang was just a soup of protons, neutrons and electrons, with nothing holding them together.
The universe was continuing to expand, and finally, just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, the universe was finally cool enough for these atoms of hydrogen and helium to attract free electrons, turning them into neutral atoms.
This was the moment of first light in the universe, between 240,000 and 300,000 years after the Big Bang, known as the Era of Recombination. The first time that photons could rest for a second, attached as electrons to atoms. It was at this point that the universe went from being totally opaque, to transparent. Source: Phys.org
The biblical version of the creation of the material world and the science version of the creation of the material world correlate perfectly. Both claim there was no matter in the beginning, and both take note of lights role in the creation of atoms and therefore physical matter.
That is a pretty big deal to me by the way. The bible got it right thousands of years before science did, and that brings me to a point I want to make regarding what God told Daniel about the secrets He revealed relating to the end times:
But you, Daniel, roll up and seal the words of the scroll until the time of the end. Many will go here and there to increase knowledge.”
Knowledge will increase. Are you kidding me? That is all God had to say on the matter. Has knowledge increased in our time? You know the answer, but another question - does that verse in Daniel and the first three sentences in the bible regarding the creation cause you to have an epiphany moment - a moment in time where you realize God does exist, and the bible is God’s words conveyed to man. If it doesn’t then perhaps you are not among God’s elect and that should bother you.
Moving on - the really big question - how many things would God have to control in the first place? We are back now to the matter of the enormity of God. We’ve learned so much in the last 100 years or so. Can you imagine what our recent ancestors would think about the world we live in? The sharing of information for instance. It is done via wireless transmission at almost instantaneous speeds. It is transmitted via electromagnetic energy - i.e., radio waves.
Still, the numbers of things God would have to control boggles the mind. Gary Nolan came to my attention of late. He was mentioned by Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson. Here is a brief bio on Gary Nolan from Wikipedia:
Garry P. Nolan (born c. 1961) is a British-American[1] immunologist, academic, inventor, and business executive. He holds the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Professor Endowed Chair in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine.[2][3] Nolan founded biotechnology companies, and wrote numerous medical research papers. Since 2022, most of his public appearances have been related to his research in ufology and his belief that extraterrestrial intelligence has visited or resides on Earth.
In the linked video below he states he doesn’t know if he believes in God, but listen to just the first 90 seconds of this video:
In the first 90 seconds of that video he says if you ever want to believe in God just look inside the cell. His point is my point. The complexity of the universe we live in is simply beyond our ability to comprehend. The way organisms live is so incredibly complex and it would not be possible to replicate a computer that keeps all the living organisms alive - even with multiple quantum computers. Granted there are algorithms in play here - even for God - but the sheer magnitude of the things we would need to control, and at multiple levels and all the while making decisions for us based on decisions we’ve already made - kind of like a giant decision tree with an infinite number of variables to take into account - would take a very, very long time to write.
In programming we can create decision tree algos - for instance, with the use of nested if statements. If d, do b, else if c, do a, else if x, do y, else if r, do p and the list can go on and on. A simple spreadsheet will allow for up to 64 conditional ifs in a single statement, so we do have the capacity to do a lot and do it quickly. When I calculate the value of a cell containing a nested if statement, I get the answer at what appears to me to be instantaneous.
Think about it. Each decision we make has an effect on the world in some way, and so if we have two choices and choose one of them the outcome is different than if we choose the other. A decision tree algo is so complex and contains an infinite number of possible outcomes. Our free will makes the enormity of the things God controls beyond description.
Still, as noted above, Google claims it solved a mathematical computation in just 200 seconds that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer to solve in 10,000 years by using a quantum computer. The gap between the computers we use, and quantum computers is massive in size, but one wonders how much more massive God’s computer might be relative to quantum computers. We can’t know that without knowing all the variables involved in the first place, and all the possible values of each variable.
Suffice it to say the number of variables is huge. Just consider the atom. How many atoms are there in the universe. One source sets the number at between 10^78 to 10^82. Those numbers are massive in size. To put the matter in perspective I calculated the value on Excel of 10 to the 78th power:
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.00
That’s just the atoms that are estimated to be in the universe, but there are subatomic particles contained in each atom, and then there are molecules, cells, organs, DNA, etc., etc., etc. Gary Dolan states in the first 90 seconds of that video above that DNA is at the heart of everything and goes on to say there are layers and layers of instructions (he calls it codes) pertaining to DNA. Dolan asks, “what do we believe in?” and he answers by saying “we believe in technology,” but he also says if you want to believe in God just look at the complexity of a cell.
Obviously, Dolan hasn’t crossed over to the side that believes in God as yet, but for the life of me I can’t see why not. I would like to spend a few hours with him as I think I might persuade him, and I would attempt to do so by correlating scripture with science, with current events in our time, with the nature of man, with biblical prophecy and the list goes on and on.
As I ponder all this I am in awe as to the complexity of the world we live in. Physicists should feel the same, and so too biologists, and chemists, and cosmologists, and mathematicians, and yet in our time they choose to believe in technology and not in God.
I want to say more on this subject, but I guess I don’t have the words - words that correctly describe God, words that explain how God can do what He does, how he can keep all the trillions and trillions and trillions of parts and pieces of the material world in perfect synch? Actually, to use the word trillion is absurd, but I used it as it is the largest number we use in common day language.
Moving out of the common language realm and into the scientific realm we do have numbers of immense size to ponder. For instance, Graham’s number:
Graham's number is an immense number that arose as an upper bound on the answer of a problem in the mathematical field of Ramsey theory. It is much larger than many other large numbers such as Skewes's number and Moser's number, both of which are in turn much larger than a googolplex. As with these, it is so large that the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of Graham's number, assuming that each digit occupies one Planck volume, possibly the smallest measurable space. But even the number of digits in this digital representation of Graham's number would itself be a number so large that its digital representation cannot be represented in the observable universe.
Suffice it to say Paul was right when he stated, “How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.”
Of course, we have a conceptual number that we are all familiar with - infinity. The essence of infinity is that whatever number you come up with it is not the largest number as it can be bigger by just adding a one to it. That doesn’t really help us in terms of understanding the enormity of God though. On the other hand, Graham’s number does help a little. Graham’s number is so large that the number would itself be a number so large that its digital representation cannot be represented in the observable universe.
What do we make of that? We know that we can’t actually observe most of the universe - that part that is not made up of matter. Consider this excerpt from an article What’s 96% of the universe made up of? Astronomers don’t know:
All the stars, planets and galaxies that can be seen today make up just 4 percent of the universe. The other 96 percent is made of stuff astronomers can't see, detect or even comprehend.
These mysterious substances are called dark energy and dark matter. Astronomers infer their existence based on their gravitational influence on what little bits of the universe can be seen, but dark matter and energy themselves continue to elude all detection.
"The overwhelming majority of the universe is: who knows?" explains science writer Richard Panek, who spoke about these oddities of our universe on Monday (May 9) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) here in Manhattan. "It's unknown for now, and possibly forever."
Imagine that - everything in the universe that we can observe makes up just 4% of the universe. I can’t think of a better way to explain the enormity of God than to take note of the fact that the visible universe represents just a pittance of the totality of all the things God controls, and He controls it with a precision that boggles the mind, and He does it every second of every day, and one wonders what would happen if He decided to take the day off.
Great points! This is excellent! Everyone should read it.