Cosmic Jesus: The Metaphysics of How the God of Israel Became the God of the Cosmos

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WE ARE NOT ALONE

There must be an immortal, unchanging being, ultimately responsible for all wholeness and orderliness in the sensible world.

Aristotle, Metaphysics

The cosmos we live in is like a forest of flawed crystals, where order and disorder compete to determine overall form.

A cluster of salt crystals grown in space.

We live on a beautiful planet, appearing like a blue-white star from a distance, in a beautiful cosmos, orbiting in an almost perfectly circular orbit around a beautiful golden star. But, if we watch the news, we know that our perception of the beauty of the earth is lost on close inspection of human affairs. Likewise, the stars themselves are the site of tragedy, with the most brilliant of stars burning up their ration of fuel recklessly and exploding to shower the surrounding stars, and whatever planets they shepherd, with radiation deadly to all life. Finally, what was a star that ruled the heavens with beautiful light can become a nightmare of blackness, when it’s burnt out core collapses to form a Black Hole. So it is that the beauty of the Heavens and the earth is only part of the truth of our existence.

The Heavens and earth we live in are doomed to perish as surely as we are, expanding endlessly into a cold firmament, long after the stars have burned out and become faint cinders. Even the vacuum itself is unstable, full of chaotic quantum waves, and subject to decay. We also, struggling to live out our lives as well as possible, hoping that our consciousness will live on after our bodies have turned to dust, nurture the hope beyond this that we are not merely ghosts haunting a frozen dead cosmos.

This book is a metaphysical speculation on the nature of existence and its basis beyond knowledge and measurement. It is an exploration of the foundations of what we perceive to be reality, and how those foundations were laid. It is an extrapolation from what we know to what we hope for. We will discourse here on the meaning of existence, of ourselves and cosmos itself. We will explore meaning of the great Cosmic Allegory: what the existence of the cosmos tells us about our own existence. We will ask if the God of Physics and History is the same as the God of Faith. We will explore our role in the Divine Comedy: what awaits us beyond the veil of death. Finally, we will hope to gain metaphysical insight into the future of humanity in the cosmos, and our role in cosmic evolution. It will be a book of questions and not answers, for in the mediation upon the questions, the answers are manifest.

We come by the term Metaphysics (after the Physics), or, ‘what can be concluded from a study of physics,’ because it is the title of one of the principal works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who lived three centuries before Christ and was court philosopher to Alexander the Great. By this book and its title Aristotle defined the branch of philosophy we now know as Metaphysics. Metaphysics is the study of the existence of the cosmos and what it contains–its substance, mathematical descriptions, origins and its Prime Mover, or Creator, which is God. In his book Aristotle examines what can be deduced about existence and things that exist just because of their existence itself, rather than any special attributes they have.

Metaphysics is the study of what lies beyond physics and the speculation and attempt to observe what cannot be seen. There is far more to existence than what we can perceive with our five senses, and this can only be inferred by the patterns we see in what we can perceive. This book is an attempt to extrapolate from the truths we can discern directly through our senses and our scientific measurements to that world beyond perception and measurement, to the time before the Big Bang and the scales of size and energy beyond the limits of the visible cosmos, and the realm of sizes smaller than the Planck scale, where the threads of spacetime break into individual fibers. This speculation is based on the premise that the whole of reality, that which can be measured, and that which cannot, were both designed by the same organizing intelligence.

According to Einstein, "the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible" Therefore, this metaphysical exploration seeks to find the basis for that singular phenomenon of the cosmos, that it can be understood, at least in parts, by the human mind. We explore this based on the premise that the cosmos was the product of an immense and all powerful intelligence, who designed both the universe and the laws that govern it.

In the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom knew not God. (I Cor. 1:21) So wrote the apostle Paul, an Israelite educated in Greek philosophy. Therefore, to glimpse the Supreme Being is beyond the laws of logic. Accordingly, we must explore indirectly, by inductive, rather than deductive, reasoning. We must generalize from specific facts and experience, always a risky venture, to try to derive general truths. This differs from deductive reasoning, which uses widely proven laws and tested logic to derive specific truths. The author will endeavor everywhere to examine evidences derived from science and history. This is like examining planets and stars from afar in their fullest context, as bright spheres in the starry darkness.

The earth and its Moon from a distance , seen as a whole system.

Such a view from a distance in space can be contrasted with a view from earth’s surface.

The earth Moon seen from earth’s surface.

Both views portray valuable truth, but truths of different kinds.

As to the viewpoint of the author, and his objectivity, the author is an Episcopalian, and a Theoretical Physicist, and as such, is stuck in the riddle of existence like the reader. I have my own opinions, since to be without them is to be lost, yet I will try to not let them encumber us, and I will merely point out truths as I see them.

So in this book we will view existence and its riddles in terms of religious philosophy in the context of science and history, a holistic viewpoint. This is very different from undertaking a deeply personal journey of discovery and experience, but it is also a journey of truth. Basically, we will compare trusted sources of truth from as widely separated sources as possible, and see if these truths seem to have the same authorship. That is, does truth seen in the most objective context possible–tried and tested physics, and agreed upon human history–agree with that seen in the most subjective context, the visions of prophets and mystics. Do these truths, both perceived and revealed, bear the same fingerprints? Do the prophet and the physicist, the mystic and historian, all tell the same story? Because the author is a Christian, and most familiar with that religious tradition, Judeo-Christianity will form the basis for the religious portion of this metaphysical discussion. All observations must begin with some point of view, and this will be the author’s.

A great deal of scholarship and controversy exists over textual authority and higher criticism of various passages in the Bible. We have only a human record available to us, consisting of surviving copies of texts, that are themselves copies of previous texts. The author is aware of all of this, and is also aware that the oldest surviving texts of books of Bible, including those found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, read almost word for word with those presently accepted as scripture. The author is also exploring whether an all-powerful Intelligence has intervened in human affairs, including the assembling of canonical scripture. Thus, the possibility that scripture was crafted by imperfect humans under the influence of a perfect supernatural agency will always be entertained. Accordingly, the Bible will be considered a reliable account of the events it records, allowing for a certain level of confusion over exact chronologies and differences in recollection and perception that occur in all human accounts of events. Therefore, the author will concern himself far more with what the scriptures say than academic disputes over their context. The scriptures and the histories and physics that appear to allegorize them will be our road-map on this quest.

Why is so much of the Comos laid out to be seen and understood?

Such a quest as this book cannot ever arrive at proven truths, but it can arrive at useful truths just the same. One cannot prove lightning will strike you on a golf course if you play during a thunderstorm, but it is still not advisable. In as much as our frail human minds can comprehend truth, the truths we find will be truth. We are attempting in this book to understand the nature of comprehensible reality.

We will discover much more than the basis of a comprehensible reality; however, we will discover the character of the Author of the grand design itself. Those who seek Him will discover that it is He who has sought us. The hunters will become, in this quest, the hunted. (Following long-standing tradition, we will refer to God in the masculine.)

It is commonly reported that we are not alone in the cosmos, that Aristotle’s Prime Mover, God, an immense intelligence, whose power is beyond what we can imagine; both created and sustains this universe. Though reasonable persons can disagree on the details of God’s interaction with humanity, all the major religions agree on this: God spoke and the cosmos and all its children stood to be. God has spoken further to His children, revealing truths, and reportedly, He is found by those who seek Him even now.

Therefore, this book will deal, chiefly, with the puzzle of our existence in an imperfect and disorderly cosmos, which is the abode of imperfect intelligences such as ourselves, which, paradoxically, are reportedly created by a perfect Intelligence, whose chief attribute is order. We will call this the Paradox of Imperfection; how is this solved?

We will examine other questions whose answer lies only in Metaphysics: What happens inside the event horizon of a Black Hole, where things fall beyond a point of no return. Is there life on other planets? Is there a choice in dying of fire or ice and what is the significance of this question? What happens to our consciousness after we die? And finally the old mystery: What happened before the beginning of the physical universe?

We will assume in our discussion that God, Aristotle’s metaphysical Prime Mover, interacts with the Universe He made, His first interaction being the act of creation itself, and that He further interacts with the creation and the intelligences that dwell in it. We will take as our test case the Bible, as an example of God’s communication with the beings existing in this cosmos, and compare it in two different ways with what can be seen and measured in this universe.

We will ask ourselves: Is the God of Israel, that is, the God of the Bible, the same as the God of the cosmos, that is, the God of Physics? That is, is their evidence has God intervened in the history of nations as well as individuals?

We can also ask: Is the God of Israel also the God of History? That is, do the claims made by God in the Bible, concerning His works and agents; seem to be borne out in History?

Finally, we will return to the most obvious mystery: Why does Aristotle, 300 years before Christ, the shaper of modern logical thought, from a land traditionally dominated by the Olympic Pantheon of gods–Zeus, Venus, and Mars–speak of One Supreme God, who rules and shapes the cosmos? How had Greece, at the pinnacle of its intellectual development, arrive, by Metaphysics, at the same place of belief as Israel, its neighbor? How did the idea of a supreme God enter into the system by which we seek and analyze all truths, both seen and unseen? That is, why is God even remotely understandable to us?

Aristotle, the greatest of the Greek philosophers

The Bible reports that God has peopled the cosmos with intelligences on a higher plane of existence than ourselves: sons of God, angels, archangels, seraphim, and cherubim, to list hose clearly named. So for those who believe the Bible is revealed truth; we are not alone in the cosmos. Also, for those who follow the truths discovered on this, our own plane of existence–the progress of science– a new threshold has also been crossed.

We now understand scientifically both that intelligence is part of the fabric of reality, and that past and future are illusions. We understand this from quantum mechanics and electrodynamics, the key areas of physics that define reality. In relativistic electrodynamics, Richard Feynman and John Wheeler discovered that charged particles interact not just with the past, but in equal part with the future. This means every electron in our brain is an oracle that can receive messages from the future.

Edwin Schrodinger illustrated the influence of consciousness on reality by his example of a cat imprisoned in an air-tight canister that also contains a glass vial of poison gas that will be shattered when one radioactive atom decays. Until we open the canister, the probability wave of the cat is a combination of both life and death. However, once we open the canister either the cat is dead and still, or else the cat is alive and springs out purring. When we understand the state of the cat, its quantum probability wave changes. That is, our moment of knowledge changes physics. To observe truth is to change it. This means the intelligent observer is part of reality. Thus, even the origins of the universe, when the quantum wave fields condensed into the atoms and stars we see now, these origins cannot be understood without the component of intelligence. Thus, we can understand that even before there was reality, there was intelligence. We were not alone, even before we existed.

This book is an exploration of strange truths from both science and the Bible. These truths are not discussed much in public forums, because they are so paradoxical and difficult to explain. They are also troubling. It is troubling to contemplate, for instance, that the earth, upon which you stand, falls though space with nothing to stand upon itself, and our lives are but a brief spark in an endless starry night, where even the stars themselves will grow old and fail. These are physical truths, but to contemplate mystic truths is even more troubling. We are part spirit; that is, we are not just flesh and blood but also part of a higher reality, but we are dwarfed in that higher realm by creatures far more mighty than ourselves. We are like herring swimming with whales in a deep ocean. We are not alone, and we are not even remarkable.

Cherubim, one type of angel described in the Bible

We are not alone in the physical universe nor in the spiritual one. This is strangely in keeping with the Bible: The Living God presides over a living cosmos. It was His pleasure to make it so. This fact has now been established by our space program, with the identification of fossil bacteria in ancient rocks from the planet Mars, our nearest neighbor in the cosmos in terms of both location and surface conditions. If you imagine you are alone in a city, and then go to the next house and find neighbors, you realize your imagined loneliness was an illusion born of ignorance. You need to get out more often. You were asleep and now you are awake and see the world clearly in the dawn. Mars has told us we are not alone.

It will be discovered later, at the proper time, that Mars holds far more that relics of dead bacteria. It will become known that Mars was once the home of a massive and evolved biosphere before its tragic fall. The author was fortunate to have played a role in the endgame of these great discoveries. But this role was only made possible because of a spiritual crisis that I experienced in 1976 when I was able to come to terms with the living cosmos.

In 1976 I was a graduate student struggling to complete my Ph.D. in plasma physics at the vast Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in Livermore, California. I had been raised a Presbyterian; however, my parents had left that church when I finished high school and had joined a charismatic or neo-Pentecostal church, and I had followed them there. In the charismatic or Holy Spirit Movement I was to find a new level of spiritual awareness and awe. So I had moved from a rather staid and intellectual form of Christianity to a mystical and ecstatic form. My journey through that experience is too rich to explore here; it can be summarized that the fervent certainties of charismatic Christianity armored me against the many hazards of that time of early manhood in the early 70s and found me safely pursuing my education many years later. Many of my friends had destroyed themselves with drugs; by God’s grace, I had survived. However, one by one, the fervent certainties I had embraced as a young man, and which had kept me from many troubles, yielded to my increased experience and education. One of those religious certainties I had been taught was that no extraterrestrial life existed.

It is a remarkable thing to reflect on, that various pastors in the charismatic movement would pronounce themselves experts on exobiology, especially since their education was usually limited to Bible College. Yet, I had heard from several pulpits that no living flesh and blood lay beyond this earth. According to them, the great drama of God’s plan was being played out here on this