A Theory of Everything

As an amateur astronomer, I closely follow the discoveries made almost daily by the professional and amateur astronomers world wide. Great strides are being made in understanding the breadth and scope of our universe, and with each discovery comes hundreds of new questions to be answered. Fun stuff, if you are a geek. Scientists have pretty much nailed down the age of the universe, based upon residual radiation left over from the Big Bang, to exactly 13.7 billion years. Due to some very sophisticated telescopes and probes (like the Hubble) they have also discovered our universe contains billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars and a good indication of billions of planets revolving around those billions  This is about the point where my mind ceases to be able even to imagine the numbers and the space involved. So I just say that we have billions upon billions upon billions which simply translates to “gazillions” and “mega gazillions” of pieces of matter floating around the universe.

And I begin to wonder, with all those mega gazillion places in the universe, why God picked our little mote of dust to create us in his own image? Why this particular piece of real estate in a rather ordinary spiral galaxy, somewhere our on a remote arm, in a pretty ordinary Solar System containing a pretty average star? Just lucky I suppose, considering the fact that we discovered our one God only several thousand years ago. Before then,  human beings were quite satisfied by having multiple gods, like the Sun god, the god of the oceans, of fire, of water, of the north wind, etc . With the advent of a monolithic God as opposed to multiple gods a strange thing occurred. Seems like the minute we discovered the one God,  he started talking to us. So Moses gets the Ten Commandments, then God sends his own son Jesus to teach us tolerance and salvation, and since that didn’t seem to work very well, he talks to Mohammad and sets up an even more specific way of following what God wants us to do. And strangely enough, human beings have been killing one another ever since over which prophet was right.

Of course, I have a theory about what is going on here. Ever since Einstein, scientists have been searching for  “The Theory of Everything”, which can explain our Universe in a single mathematical formula. It is a complicated problem, because we keep discovering things about our Universe that were unknown just a few years ago. For instance, it now turns out that all that mega gazillion “stuff” we see out there is only about 4 % of the Universe. The other 96% is something the scientists call “dark matter” and “dark energy”  because they haven’t a clue as to what it is. It is a thorny problem, but I am sure they will figure it out someday. And when they do, I think we will finally know who God is--he is the energy that glues this universe together. That’s my theory, and is probably as good as any out there. In the meantime, I wish God would quit talking to our prophets.

JP