The basics of all things…..
Colossians 1:15-20 ~
JESUS…
….is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
Below are two really great reads. One by Lambert Dolphin and the second by Matt Ward. It is a bit lengthy but well worth the time. Enjoy…
(1) What Holds The Universe Together?
by Lambert Dolphin
Jesus and the Creation
Several separate passages in the New Testament make reference to the creation of the universe. John’s gospel speaks of an earlier state of existence than is described in Verse 1 of Genesis,
This passage of the New Testament teaches that Jesus was eternally existent with God the Father prior to the creation of all things. Further, this Word, the Son of God, was and is fully God in his own right. At a point late in the history of mankind the Son of God became a man and was born into the human race in order to solve the problem of death and to repair a broken universe. (See Philippians Chapter 2, and Hebrews Chapter 2).
Chapter One of Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians gives a further description of the role of Jesus in creation which is consistent with John,
[Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the first-born [prototokos] of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities [i.e., hierarchical angelic powers]—all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
The Holy Spirit, in giving us this inspired passage of Scripture, now explains that all things (both visible and invisible) in the entire universe were created through this same Jesus, the Eternal Word. We may think of the universe and its intricate design as being conceived in the mind of the Father then spoken into existence by the Son (who makes the invisible, visible). The Holy Spirit is the One who energizes and supplies life to the creation, not only at the time of creation but also moment by moment after that.
We are also told that all things were created for Jesus. He is “the heir of all things.” That means that we are house guests in Someone Else’s universe. There is a future accountability to be given by all of us—history is headed somewhere and at the end of road stands Jesus to whom all power and authority has already been given:
One of the key words in the Colossians passage above (“…and in Christ all things hold together”) is the Greek word sunistemi which means “to stand-together,” “to be compacted together,” “to cohere,” “to be constituted with.” This passage can be applied to the structure of the atom, for example. The nucleus of every atom is held together by what physicists call “weak” and “strong” forces. (Physicists today are familiar with four basic forces in the natural world: gravity, electrical forces, a “strong,” and a “weak” nuclear force which act at very short ranges. The first two forces decrease in strength inversely with the square of the distance between two objects. Recently two additional close-range, weak gravitational forces have been suggested. These are thought to be quantum mechanical corrections to Newton’s Law of Gravitation.)
The nucleus of the atom contains positively-charged and neutral particles–to use a simplistic model. Mutual electrostatic repulsion between the like-positive protons would drive the nucleus apart if it were not for the “strong force” which binds the nucleus together.
The third New Testament passage which talks about atomic structure and physics is 2 Peter:
The Greek word translated “elements” in this passage from Colossians is stoicheion which means the building blocks of the universe, or “the ordered arrangement of things.” It can also mean the “atomic elements.” The word translated “dissolved” is literally (in Greek) luo, meaning “unloosed.” This suggests a further, future letting-go of the nuclear binding force that holds the nucleus together. This passage strongly suggests that the active power of God is behind the mysterious strong force that holds every atomic nucleus together. If this is so, all the other fundamental forces of nature are likewise forces that originate with Christ and His sustaining direction of the old creation.
If this is a correct view, were God to merely relax His grasp on the universe every atom would come apart “by fire” (that is, by nuclear fire). God dynamically sustains the universe, including the atoms themselves. They are “stable” only because force from the spiritual realm is being supplied into the physical nuclear binding fields. Whatever we may think of God and physics, the Bible leaves us with no room to doubt that God does care about the sparrow that falls to the ground, the widow, the orphan, and the homeless. He does not lose track of His children and watches over them with infinite, patient, intimate Fatherly care. He sustains the universe by His mighty word of power. He also alters the status quo and, in response to prayer, frequently changes the course of entire nations.
Another important claim of scripture about the old creation is that God is the present Sustainer of the universe. That is, He is not uninvolved, remote, detached and impersonal, leaving things to run by themselves by any means. Among secular scientists today there are many who acknowledge that God exists. But He is usually considered as only a First Cause—the One who brought the universe into existence and set it into motion. But most of these same scientists assume God was not involved after the initial act of creation. This is contrary to clear statements in the Bible that God is very much involved in every event that takes place in the on-going history of the entire universe:
Again, the fact that Jesus is presently sustaining the universe from the realm of the spiritual raises the question whether there are inputs of energy as well as force into our physical world which ultimately show up as energy added “from the outside” of our physical world considered as a closed system. This is discussed in the next section.
Is Empty Space Empty?
Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) taught that the physical world was made up of four elements: air, earth, fire and water. Tying these all together so that the “elements” intercommunicated was a “subtle” medium, a fifth element: the aether–later to be known as the vacuum. (The Latin root vacuus means “empty”). In a sense the aether was the substratum of the material world. The Greeks believed that “nature abhors a vacuum” so they could not imagine space as being totally empty.
The Greeks believed the stars were suspended from, or attached to, a rotating crystalline shell at a fixed distance from the earth. When some of the “stars” (planets) were observed to be moving with respect to the “fixed” stars, a series of rotating crystal spheres was postulated. The earth was believed to be fixed, immovable, and at the center of the creation. Not until the 16th Century were these Greek (Ptolemaic) ideas challenged by the Copernican revolution. One of the most mysterious concepts in western physics since Aristotle’s day is the concept of the vacuum. Until Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) challenged the notion, the velocity of light was assumed by most everyone to be infinite, so the nature of the space between the earth and the crystal spheres was not of great concern.
Rene Descartes (1596-1640) championed the theory that the aether was a plenum, from the Greek word meaning “full.” Because it was so difficult for the scientists of that era to understand “action at a distance,” Descartes imagined that a very dense medium of very small particles pervaded everything. This medium was capable of transmitting force from one object to another by collisions. The aether “particles” were in constant motion and there were no spaces between the particles. In a sense the aether was more solid than matter, yet invisible. Descartes universe was purely a “mechanical universe” and his theories were soon superseded.
Galileo’s former secretary, Evangelista Torricelli filled a long glass tube with mercury in 1644. Inverting the tube into a dish of mercury he observed that the mercury dropped some 30 inches at the closed upper end of the tube, thereby creating what was obviously a vacuum. Blaise Pascal (1623 -1662) took this work even further and soon everyone was convinced that the vacuum of space was empty after all.
If light were corpuscular in nature as some believed, it was not difficult to image light “particles” (we now call them photons) could traverse a pure vacuum without the necessity of a real medium pervading all of space. But other experiments soon began to show that light was a wave phenomenon. Of course waves could be travel through the plenum aether by collisions, however at the time only compressional waves were imagined. [Sound waves or seismic waves are compressional in nature, for instance, but light waves proved to be transverse]. In parallel with all these growing controversies, the velocity of light was finally measured by Olaf Roemer in 1675 and found to be finite, although the values he obtained were a few percent higher than the present value, 299,792.4358 km/sec.
By the time of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) the aether was believed by many scientists to be “luminiferous.” That is, the aether was said to be more fluid than solid, though it was elastic, and therefore it was a medium which would support waves. James Clerk Maxwell (1839 – 1879) enjoyed great success when he found a set of equations which beautifully described how light waves could travel through such a luminiferous aether. He showed that light waves are composed of oscillating electric and magnetic vectors in an x-y plane for a wave traveling in the z-direction. For a waves to exist at all, it is natural to suppose that there is some sort of supporting medium. Such a medium must possess elasticity (a spring-like property) and also inertia, (a mass-like like property). In fact, the velocity of a wave in any medium is equal to the square root of the stiffness divided by the density of the medium.
In the case of electromagnetic waves (gamma rays, x-rays, radio waves, heat, and light of various wavelengths), Maxwell found that the aether possessed an electric-field scaling parameter, called “dielectric permittivity,” and a magnetic-field scaling parameter, called permeability, such that the velocity of light was equal to one over the square root of permeability times permittivity. In support of the notion that the aether was a real medium it was observed that empty space behaved like a transmission line with a “characteristic impedance” of 377 ohms, (which is the ratio of permeability to permittivity for “free space.”)
This new theory also explained how light slows down in glass, in gases, in water–because media other than the vacuum had a different permeability and permittivity. The aether was once again thought of as a very real medium which could be stretched or compressed–it had resilience or compliance, and inertia. Yet no known physical substance had a stiffness to mass density ratio anywhere near 9 x 10,16 which was required of the aether as a medium. The aether appeared to possess elasticity but negligible inertia.
The idea that some kind of aether medium existed prevailed until 1887 when Michelson and Morley utilized the Michelson interferometer in an attempt to detect the relative motion of the earth and the aether–the aether must be viscous and should be dragged along at least partially with the earth. According to 19th Century preconceptions the velocity of the earth going around the sun should be about 30 km/sec. Yet when the measurements were made no motion of the earth relative to the ether could be detected at all. In other words, the aether apparently did not exist. Until Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was published in 1905 the negative result of the M-M experiment baffled scientists.
Einstein showed that the velocity of light has the same value in all reference frames, whatever their velocity may be relative to other frames. From this point modern physics took off in the direction of Special and General Relatively Theory, and Quantum Mechanics. For many scientists the notion that an actual aether medium existed was simply discarded. Yet the apparent non-existence of an aether raised many problems and the M-M experiment is not the end of the story. (For one possible explanation of the negative results of the M-M experiment see The Sagnac Effect) The whole history of the aether is fascinating and complex (Ref. 1-5).
To return to basics, if all the air molecules are pumped out of a chamber, the chamber still contains residual radiation (electromagnetic noise from stars, x-rays, and heat radiation). Even before quantum mechanics, it was shown by classical radiation theory that if the temperature of the container is lowered to absolute zero, there remains a residual amount of thermal energy that can not by any means be removed. This residual energy in an empty container at absolute zero, was named “zero-point energy.”
Suddenly the once-empty vacuum was seen as a seething sea of potential energy. (Ref. 6, 7) Physicist Dr. Hal E. Putoff, notes that the “vacuum” is a vast reservoir of seething energy out of which particles are being formed and annihilated constantly. The energy potentials in the vacuum are staggering, but most of the time the forces involved balance each other out to zero.
Zero Point energy, he says,
“is the energy of empty space. There were arguments starting way back at the time of the Greeks about whether space is really empty or isn’t it. Democritus thought that it was empty and that is how you have room for the atoms to bump around. You had Aristotle coming along saying no, I think space is full of something because we have waves of heat energy and they must travel in something. That argument went back and forth but finally when quantum theory was developed, it became absolutely clear that space, if you look at in a microscopic scale, is more like the base of a waterfall with a lot of frothy, seething activity going on, rather than just something like a placid, empty space. In fact John Wheeler likes to point out that in the volume of a coffee cup, for example, in empty space, there is enough energy to evaporate all of the world’s oceans. This is, by the way, not a fringe concept. It is a basic underlying concept in modern quantum theory.”
Putoff continues,
“When the idea of the hydrogen atom was first put forward in the form that you often see it on textbook covers, where it looks like a tiny little solar system with the electron planet circling the nuclear sun, one of the questions at the time was: why doesn’t the electron simply radiate its energy away and spiral into the nucleus, in a way similar to the way our satellites have certain losses and spiral into the planet? At the time, the answer was simply, well it is just the magic of quantum theory, it doesn’t obey classical rules, and for some reason hydrogen atoms are like little perpetual motion machines. But in fact, from the standpoint of the zero point energy approach, we now recognize – and the calculation has been done, in fact I published on it myself – we show that indeed you expect an electron in a hydrogen atom to radiate its energy away, but it picks up energy from the background zero point energy and therefore is sustained by it. What that means in terms of physics is that is shows why atoms can be seen as perpetual motion machines, it is just that they always have an energy input from the background to make up for the losses.”
Australian Astronomer Barry Setterfield has, in the past year, picked up on this theory of the vacuum to explain the red shift of light from distant galaxies. (Arizona astronomer William Tifft’s research has recently shown that red-lifted light from the stars is quantized, and this also needed to be explained). Setterfield’s new model takes into account the statistical evidence that the velocity of light is not a fixed constant–c has evidently decreased in time by a large factor since creation, see On the Constancy of the Velocity of Light. Setterfield’s new cosmology concludes that the universe is not expanding at all, (as the Big Bang model has long supposed) but is static (it has a fixed diameter), and that the original energy input of outside energy on Day Two of creation–when God stretched out the firmament to its maximum expanse–accounts for the red-shift and the subsequent velocity of light decrease.
Setterfield has also provided a rough calculation at the rate at which “outside” energy from the “vacuum” would have to be fed into the universe per square meter per second if Hal Putoff is correct and electrons orbiting the nucleus do radiate energy after all. The compensatory energy that must be constantly supplied from the vacuum is a staggering 1.071 X 10117 kilowatts per square meter! (In scientific notion that is 10 followed by 117 zeroes, kilowatts per square meter).
It is an old tenant of philosophy that ex nihilo nihil fit–out of nothing nothing comes. To imagine that vast amounts of energy flow into our physical universe from nowhere, from empty space, out of the “vacuum” at first appears impossible. To save the day we must resort either to magic or we must seek some rational explanation in Biblical revelation. (Ref. 8) The latter is not hard to do.
One the Second Day of creation week, God said,
The Hebrew word usually translated firmament (raqia) strongly suggests an originally super dense medium stretched out very thin (“like a tent”) on the second day of creation week. This means that what God created on Day One and Two was time, matter, energy, and space (the aether). These are the building blocks from which He constructed the universe evidently.
A careful examination of Biblical references to the terms “firmament,” “the heavens” and “the heavenly places” and how they are used will show that the Bible depicts the spiritual realm as more solid, more substantial, more permanent than the present, observable, material world. When God created the universe he created it “two-storied.” (Ref. 7) The spiritual realm is where the angels dwell. It is a so much more solid and substantial and permanent than our fading material world, that we can best describe ourselves as ghosts in a shadow-like world surrounded and embedded in the more substantial world of the spirit. This view of heaven is beautifully portrayed by C.S. Lewis in his fictional study The Great Divorce. Thinking of heaven as more solid that the material world suggests the aether is intensely solid with objects in the physical world being akin to voids in the plenum of space. It is as if we had come full circle all the way back to Descartes!
If the vacuum is not no-thing, what is the aether made of? It can not be pure spirit or even “condensed spirit” or we would be flirting with pantheism, because God is a Spirit, the angels and men are created spirits and each of these is a “life-form.” The aether is not alive. The aether does appears to have real metric properties which can change as space is expanded or contracted, yet it appears to be a substance that is more a part of the created spiritual world than a tangible physical substance.
Is the aether the substrate, the boundary layer between our physical material world and the created world of the spirit (called in Scripture “the heavenly places”)? This is probably not an unreasonable working hypothesis.
The Bible does speak of God as “the ground of all being” in that He is not only “above” but also “below.” In a famous address to the philosophers of Athens in the First Century, the Apostle Paul confronted them with a challenge to their existing polytheism,
Let us take a small leap of faith at this point. Assuming the universe is indeed “two storied” and not “one storied” as the Bible teaches, then surrounding us there exists a real and “substantial” spiritual world. Our material world is in fact embedded in the spiritual. The two realms are coupled, and the Source of all things is in the spiritual world,
Since, as we have already seen, Colossians and Hebrews credit Jesus with holding all things together and with sustaining the entire universe “with His mighty word of power,” then it is possible that the apparent vast reservoir modern scientists perceive as being an inherent, resident power potential of the vacuum—a property of “empty space” itself has its source in the Upper Story of the universe. That is, it is the power of God Himself we now feebly glimpse, or “see through the glass darkly.” This power is seen at the boundary between two worlds, the physical and spiritual.
From behind the curtains of our present world, God supplies not only force but it would seem He also supplies also vast amounts of energy to sustain the Creation. In more ways than one we owe not only only lives but the moment by moment sustenance of the physical universe to His energetic involvement, both now discernible in the conceptual understanding modern physics has given us. Knowing the Creator personally gives us every reason to feel secure and to stand in awe of Almighty God who has by no means left us alone in the cosmos–it’s very existence is a direct expression of His power and His will.
Surely therefore we must stand in awe of our great God and Creator, along with the Psalmist who wrote,
*** Please click on the highlighted article title link above at Lambert Dolphin’s site for the notes to this article…His sight is a bit dated but he has a TON of other links and articles that are of interest as well ***
(2) A Digital Universe
By Matt Ward
Science has made huge recent advances in the field of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the scientific study of anything smaller than an atom. It is interested in the composition of sub- atomic matter, how matter behaves and how these really, really small pieces of matter interact with each other. In efforts to further and deepen scientific understanding, researchers have been on a quest to divide matter down to its absolute smallest component part.
It had been presumed that it was theoretically possible to sub-divide matter down almost into infinity, assuming the technology and scientific expertise were sophisticated enough to accomplish this task. This assumption has recently been proved wrong. Scientists working in the field of quantum mechanics have discovered that there is in fact a point that is reached where it becomes impossible to sub-divide matter further than a specific, absolutely tiny point of matter.
Once matter is divided to this infinitesimally small level it doesn’t get any smaller, matter at this point is as small as small can be! It is the ultimate original building block of absolutely everything else.
To reach this point is in itself an astounding accomplishment. However what scientists have discovered because of this is staggering in its implications. When matter is broken down to its absolute smallest component part, to the amazement of scientists, it actually seems to lack locality.
Matter in this tiny state disappears and appears everywhere all at once. It lacks locality, a single location in space and time. Even more amazing is the evidence indicating that all these tiny parts of matter seem to know where every other component part of matter is, in the universe, all at the same time.
It also seems that each tiny piece of matter in the entire universe, when in this very smallest state, is being controlled and maintained on an individual basis by something else. The reason for this assumption is that matter when in this smallest of small states naturally acts in a fundamentally unstable and unpredictable way.
So unstable and unpredictable is this matter that the universe itself should not exist. Matter is that unstable. In fact, matter in this state repels all other matter. Without a force binding this matter together, a force which science does not yet know or understand or can yet detect, the universe would simply self-destruct. The universe should self-destruct, yet it doesn’t.
Matter in this state has a natural disposition to chaos but is somehow being kept in a state of perfect order, individually and piece by piece.
This and the fact that this matter lacks locality has led an increasing number of scientists to conclude that our universe is some form of highly sophisticated digital environment. In other words our universe is a digital simulation, a digital universe that is being actively maintained by some outside force, power or intelligence.
This conclusion has also led scientists to conclude that this therefore means that there must be another universe or dimension outside of our own known realm of existence and that our known universe makes up just a small part of some other, greater, much larger whole reality.
Equally, other unrelated statistical scientific studies also indicate that our universe carries tangible signs of design and support the notion that we are living in some grand, highly sophisticated computer simulation.
In a recent scientific paper titled “Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation” published in arXiv and co-authored by Silas Beane from the University of Bonn, the overwhelming conclusion of the study was to indicate that our reality as we know and experience it, is simulated.
What this study suggests, in scientific terms, is that the laws which govern electromagnetic radiation are in fact confined by the resolution of the three-dimensional simulation we call a “universe.” What this means in layman’s terms is that just as the computer screens and the televisions we use are defined by a predetermined number of pixels per screen, which determine its quality, so our world, as it turns out also seems to be “pixelated.” The only difference is that our world has really, really high definition.
Just as it is impossible to display an image on a computer or television screen that exceeds the pixilation limit for that monitor or television, so in our own universe it would seem that the energy level of cosmic rays “snaps to” the “resolution” of the universe in which we live.
Most scientists at the moment refuse to acknowledge this discovery because the only inescapable conclusion that can be drawn from it is that our universe is a product of some external design from a designer external to our known universe.
But this should come as no surprise to science. Other fields are corroborating this conclusion.
Biogenetics testifies to the existence of a creator. Recent discoveries in the fields of DNA also indicate that we ourselves are digital beings. We are not simply “flesh and blood.” As human beings we are imbued with a non-material consciousness that transcends our physical body and our physical environment.
The only logical and inescapable conclusion from these studies is that there is a Creator God, who conceptualized, created and keeps this universe, each and every second of every day. As Christians we know and acknowledge that Creator as God and we also recognize the unseen force that serves to bind all matter together, even at subatomic, fundamentally unstable levels, as Jesus Christ Himself.
“He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:17)
We also know, from scripture that at some point in the near future this “holding together” will be loosened by Jesus Christ. It is no coincidence that the predicted scientific effect of this binding force loosening is exactly the same outcome depicted by Peter when he revealed how Jesus Christ will loosen his control of creation, if but for a fraction of a second at some point in the future.
“By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the Day of Judgment and destruction of the ungodly” (2 Peter 3:7).
The same Word that holds the universe together will be the same power that loosens it and allows its destruction by fire. The power and Word of Jesus Christ Himself.
How ironic it is that right now, underneath the border areas of France and Switzerland the scientists at Cern using the Large Hadron Collider are searching for that very same power or force that binds these subatomic particles together and are actively attempting to breach the divide between these very different and incompatible domains.
They are searching for the “glue” that they believe holds the universe together, this invisible, unknown force we know as Jesus Christ. Their intention is that if they can discover this “glue” and understand it, then perhaps they can rebuild matter as they see fit, rebuild creation as they see fit.
It is the spirit of Nimrod in the building of the Tower of Babel all over again, trying to tear down boundaries set in place by the Sovereign Lord God Himself. God allowed judgment to come upon the world because of this kind of rebellion.
What these same scientists have no conception of, or willfully refuse to acknowledge, is that the Bible does validate some of their scientific speculations. The bible does teach that our universe exists alongside other spiritual realms. Scientists at CERN refer to these domains in their speculations as “other dimensions.”
As a part of the process of discovering this “glue” that binds the universe together they wish to “… open the door, something might come through it into our reality! Or, we might send something through it into their reality!” (General Rolf Heuer, Director General and its Director of Research, CERN)
David La Point, physicist and scientist, describes Cern’s chief concern as being the attempt to use immense magnetic power in order to overcome the constraints of time and space. In other words, they want to enter the spiritual world, where constraints of time and space as we know and experience them, do not exist.
In their efforts to breach this invisible divide into other dimensions, Cern increased its power output to dangerous and untested levels in September 2015. The Large Hadron Collider was powered up to run at more than double its previous output record, leaving many scientists feeling deeply uneasy about the safety question marks and potential implications of this.
The scientists at Cern clearly feel that as they have come this far, they are evidently not going to be deterred from further efforts to rend an opening into this new and unknown domain, irrelevant of safety concerns.
Scripture describes these other spiritual realms as being exceptionally dangerous places for human beings, where there is almost constant battle between the spiritual forces of good, and the spiritual forces of evil. The bible, ominously, also details a time in the near future when the boundaries separating these two domains begins to crumble.
It will be a time of chaos and suffering the likes of which this world has never seen before. It will bring terror to all on the face of this earth. Revelation suggests the rise of the Man of Sin, the final world dictator, whom the Lord Jesus will personally overthrow with “…the breath of his mouth…” will somehow be connected to this other spiritual realm,
“Now when they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up from the Abyss…” (Revelation 11:7)
Cern’s main facility today is located above a quaint French hamlet called Saint Genis-Pouilly. In Roman times, Saint Genis-Pouilly was known by another name, Apolliacum. The whole area was dedicated to the god, Apollyon, known in the Bible as the Destroyer. Apollicaum was widely believed to be the gateway into the Abyss itself. This where CERN is currently trying to tear “…open a door.”
Though they will flatly refuse to acknowledge it, in their search for the force that holds all things together, these scientists are actually searching for Jesus Christ. What they may well end-up getting instead is the unleashing of the all the powers of the Abyss itself, and then literally all hell will break loose.
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