Is Dark Energy God’s Hiding Place?
“I was lookin’ for love in all the wrong places
Lookin’ for love in too many faces
Searchin’ their eyes, lookin’ for traces
Of what I’m dreamin’ of
Hoping to find a friend and a lover
I’ll bless the day I discover,
Another heart- lookin’ for love.”
Johnny Lee
When I think of Johnny Lee’s lyrics I wonder if we’ve been looking for evidence of God in all the wrong places?
In a medium.com article ( https://medium.com/@WillmsmithSmith/the-rapture-of-being-alive-fcb4814fc1c7 ) I quoted historian and author of “Origin Story: A Big History of Everything”, David Christian,
“…most modern origin stories no longer accept the idea of a creator god because modern science can find no direct evidence for a god”
The debate among scientists is whether their experiment would have detected the phenomenon of interest ( i.e. God ) if it was there. However, as astrophysicist, Martin Rees reminds us, “the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence”. Can techniques of “modern science” detect the phenomenon of God if it exists? Most fervent religious would say no. For them only religious techniques like prayer and belief can detect the phenomenon of God.
“In Defense of Magical Thinking” Jack Preston King Asks the question a bit differently,
“What if beings and forces beyond the level immediately available to our five senses are real?”
In other words, if God is beyond the level of our five senses is he still real?
King references Philip K. Dick who writes that God is real and ubiquitous but for unexplained reasons, hiding from our perception. Hiding in plain sight but hiding nonetheless, perhaps causing us to look for God “in all the wrong places.
If by hiding God creates an absence of evidence does that also create the evidence of God’s absence? “If God is indeed hiding beyond the level immediately available to our five senses (i.e. creating an absence of evidence) does that create evidence of God’s absence? (i.e. without sensory data is God absent? ) If it does not then how do we find God’s hiding place?
According to neuroscientist Andrew Newberg “If experiences during a child’s formative years don’t support and encourage magical thinking a child’s brain will never develop the neural connections necessary to consider a reality beyond the level immediately available to our five senses….The child will never learn to believe in supernatural dimensions of reality” which generally relate to an order of existence beyond the observable universe.
Yet we all live in “a reality beyond the level immediately available to our five senses” driven by our feelings, every day. According to Dr. Antonio Damasio, “Feelings of pain or pleasure or some quality in between, which arise from emotions, are the bedrock of our minds.” Even though we cannot “see” the supernatural we can feel it and in feeling it we strive to observe it, so what is supernatural today may not be supernatural in the future when we’ve developed the technology needed to observe it.
Galileo was very interested in what had been “invisible” stars because he felt they were critical to understanding nebulae and the Milky Way. Galileo thought that what had previously been seen as a milky gluster in the sky was no more than than these “invisible” stars.
Many of the areas of sky that had been considered nebulae before Galileo’s time were actually start clusters. Galileo was correct in declaring that the nebulae of the time were actually composed of distant stars. He did not come to the realization however that true nebulae could and did also exist. A true nebula is a cloud that is composed of gas and dust and appears hazy. It’s not composed of far distant starts that could be differentiated had we only sufficiently powerful equipment.
The Milky Way then was just the view of these far distant stars from earth. Nebulae or nebulous stars were in fact actually a number of small stars clustered together. Galileo went on to prove this assertion by sketching out two “nebulae” which were indeed clusters of stars. He depicted the Orion’s Head nebula and the nebula of Praesepe (located in the Cancer constellation) shown here. The sketches are from his Sidereus Nuncius.
Dark matter and dark energy make up the vast majority of our universe, and yet we can’t “see” either. All matter as we know it, from muons, electrons and atoms all the way up to planets, stars and galactic clusters, makes up less than a meager 5% of everything in the universe. As far we we know, roughly 25% is dark matter and 70% is dark energy.
But the thing about those two massive chunks of everything is that they are invisible. Basically, never emitting or reflecting light dark Matter can’t be seen. All that we perceive is only a very small part of reality.
Yet scientists know:
- how much mass there is in structures throughout the universe at every level, like galaxies, clusters of galaxies and go all the way up to the largest-scale structures in the Universe.
- how stars work and as long as they can measure the starlight coming from these objects in the universe they can know how much mass is there in stars.
However, These two numbers don’t match, and they don’t match spectacularly. Therefore there has to be something more than just stars responsible for the vast majority of mass in the Universe. Scientists can account for only about 1/6th of the Universe’s matter in the form of normal (baryonic, or atom-like) matter.
Scientists can tell dark matter is there even if we can’t actually see it with telescopes because it has a gravitational effect on space-time. The fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background are only tens to hundreds of microkelvin in magnitude, but definitively point to the existence of both normal and dark matter in a 1:5 ratio
By looking at colliding galaxy clusters and monitoring how both the observable matter and the total gravitational mass behaves, scientists can come up with an astrophysical, empirical proof for the existence of dark matter.
Unless dark matter happens to be of a certain mass with a certain interaction cross-section, none of the designed experiments are going to see it. That doesn’t mean dark matter isn’t real, it just means that dark matter is something else than what our experiments are optimized to find.
Light passing around dark matter mega-clumps is actually bent. Scientists now understand that “whatever” is propelling the expansion of the universe is what they call dark energy.
The ability of Galileo to see nebulae as clusters of stars and modern astronomers to see the cause of the expansion of the universe in “dark matter and dark energy” are examples of looking for evidence in all the right places even though they have not and most likely will not reveal “God’s hiding place”. That may be because God is hiding closer than we think.
“And you came knockin’ on my hearts door
You’re everything I’ve been lookin’ for
No more lookin’ for love in all the wrong places
Lookin’ for love in too many faces
Searchin’ their eyes, lookin’ for traces
Of what I’m dreamin’ of
Now that I found a friend and a lover
I’ll bless the day I discover you-oh you”
___________________________________________________________________
Notes:
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Rees
2 Antonio Damasio, “Looking for Spinoza: For, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain”. Harvest Book New York 2003.
3 A. S. Deller, “The Hidden Universe: The mystery of dark matter and dark energy”, medium.com, June 6, 2019
4 A.S. Deller, https://medium.com/swlh/the-hidden-universe-258a4f44911e
5 Ethan Siegel “This Is The Real Reason We Haven’t Directly Detected Dark Matter”, medium.com, Oct 12, 2018
