The other night I watched a PBS program on telescopes, with a large part of it featuring the Hubble Telescope, and the wonders of the universe that it has revealed. It was pointed out that astrophysicists have discovered, thanks to telescopes, that there's a huge amount of what they call "dark matter" out in space; indeed, they believe about 23% of the universe is made up of dark matter, another 73% something they call dark energy, 3.6% intergalactic gas, while only .4% is "ordinary matter" (stars, planets, galaxies).*
And here's the thought that occurred to me as I was listening to all this. Maybe the dark matter and the dark energy are the body of God. Maybe the universe is God, with all the planets and stars and galaxies sort of appendages to that body. Maybe originally, just as it says in the Christian Bible, there was only a dark universe, that is, God, eternal and everywhere, but without form or light. And the Consciousness, the Intelligence that was God got bored, felt like making something happen, decided to try a little experiment, said (or thought) "Let there be light," and there was a Big Bang, and a jillion particles were hurled outward on a long, long journey, during which they coalesced, became stars, planets, galaxies. And God watched, with interest, what was happening, watched the evolution of worlds, of species on those worlds, of cultures among those species. He didn't necessarily take care of any of these results of his experiment -- he let them play themselves out, "naturally," according to the laws that had been set in motion with his first action. But they were all a part of Him.
I could almost accept this idea of God. I have not been able to accept the all-knowing, all-loving God I was brought up to believe in -- have seen too much evidence of an uncaring universe at work -- but such a scenario as I have described would cover the evidence that our sciences have found for evolution, and for the formation of the "ordinary matter" of the universe, while also explaining the sense of God, the ancient sense that there is a God, that all peoples of this world, at least, have had. And it would account for all that mysterious dark matter and dark energy out there!
It's a thought.
*Craig, Matthew and Sara Schultz. Invisible Galaxies: The Story of Dark Matter. The Universe in the Classroom, No. 7, Summer 2007. http://www.astrosociety.org/education/publications/tnl/72/darkmatter.html
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The general idea that the universe "is" god, or was created by god, and then left to run by itself, is called deism, as maybe you already know. Lots of famous people, including Einstein and (probably) Thomas Jefferson, were deists.
Dark matter, however is another story. We actually know quite a bit about dark matter. It is part of the universe, and was created at the same time. We can "see" it by observing its gravitational effects. It behaves just as we expect it to. There is no indication that it has any kind of intelligence. The only problem is that we don't know what kind of particle (or particles) it is made of.
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