Isaiah 40.26 (NWT): Lift up your eyes to heaven and see. Who has created these things? It is the One who brings out their army by number; He calls them all by name. Because of his vast dynamic energy and his awe-inspiring power, not one thing is missing.
Brian Greene The central idea of string theory is quite straightforward. If you examine any piece of matter ever more finely, at first you’ll find molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles. Probe the smaller particles, you’ll find something else, a tiny vibrating filament of energy, a little tiny vibrating string.
Richard Rohr, the famous Franciscan author and spiritual guru, often speaks of God as the “unified field” that connects everything physical to the metaphysical of God. Now, in our society, “metaphysics” has taken on an occult and negative connotation, but metaphysical is not supernatural, it’s merely “meta” in its truest sense as the framework of a system. For example, every day we hear about corporate misuse of metadata. This isn’t data about ghosts or UFOs, it’s data about the structure of data—specifically, our personal data. Millions of spiritual progressives across many faiths think of God as the metadata of reality, the underlying creative and sustaining structure of this tactile cosmic experience we call life.
Electricity, magnetism, gravity, time and space—these are all data points in the meta of God’s creative energy. Quantum physicists study these data points, and what they’ve discovered over the last century or so is mind-blowing.
Quantum physics describes a different world from the elementary school Newtonian physics lessons of our youth. Rather than describing the way levers work, the property of action and reaction, and the natural forces of gravity, magnetism, and electricity, Quantum physics investigates the particles and forces that make all that happen. Newton discovered and recorded well the way our macro world operates. The problem is that our macro world is a bit of an illusion because it turns all us big humans (and the rest of our big world) are just the sum of a bunch of incredibly tiny, micro-microscopic (quantum) parts–atoms and things smaller than atoms (protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks, gluons, leptons, tachyons, etc.).
Currently, there is no single, agreed-upon theory that reconciles quantum mechanics and Newtonian physics. The laws of these worlds don’t necessarily contradict each other, but it’s apparent they are but portions of a more encompassing something. So, for a long time now, physicists have been struggling with a way to find and prove what it is that ties together our big, Newtonian physical world, and the small, metaphysical quantum world.
String Theory Vibes With God
My favorite explanation is known as string theory. In a nutshell, the theory is that everything that exists is made of atoms (which we know is true). Every atom is made of smaller and smaller particles (which we also know is true) until you finally get down to what is essentially an energy vibration that looks like a string (this is where we run into theory). Hence the name string theory.
Here’s a terrific video that explains the basic idea of string theory
It is highly likely that energy is the fabric of the universe—both the creative force and the force that holds it all together. Now, doesn’t that sound like our most common religious concept of God? I find this new, quantum language to describe God as creator and sustainer, the force that literally vibrates life into us, exhilarating.
The difference between the way we might (and probably should) think of God as creator and sustainer today, and the way we’ve thought of God in the past—and it’s a biggie—is that God as the fundamental, invisible thread, as energy, makes God a very intimate part of us. God is the substance not of some esoteric soul, but of every molecule of our being! There is no separating us from God. Ever.
As a method of expanding our notions about what it means to be human, it’s incredibly helpful to think of God as the vibrating energy that is us.
Thinking of God as the fundamental string—a cosmic vibe from which all things are formed, allows us to move past the ancient, restrictive, too-often abusive patriarchal model of God. God as the meta energy of all things is a gateway to knowing God as the essence of every female, male, plant, bird and fish. In tune with God’s energy, our awareness expands to see God in every color and gloriously diverse ethnicity, no matter what sort of name we invent to talk about God, no matter the religions we create to experience God.
And by the way, we should be experiencing God.
To fully understand God as fundamental to being (there is no reality, at least from our perspective, without God’s energy), we need to think about God—and Jesus, differently from the orthodoxy. Christians, need to rediscover the mind of Christ and let Jesus make us fully aware of our intimate relationship with the universe—of God not only within all things but God literally all things.
When Jesus says things like “I and my father are one,” (John 10.30, e.g.) he means it. He understood that there was only one ultimate substance in the universe—God, the fundamental string, which created Jesus and his ability to see beyond human turmoil and suffering, just as surely as God the fundamental string created you and me—and continues to connect you and me together as part of God’s whole, ever-lovin’ being.
God is the Quantum Invisible Thread, the string that creates and weaves all of us into this rich tapestry of multicultural, multi-spiritual, multi-sexual, many-gendered God experiences. The disciple, Paul, wrote thousands of years ago: From God, through God, to God are all things (Romans 11.33-36).
Today, quantum physicists are proving how right he was.
Amen.
Meditation: Guide us, Holy One, in our quest to become more aware of You within us. Help us see You as we interact with others. Help us live in sacred service to one another, as humans existing in the singularity of God’s Meta Consciousness. Amen.
