observable universe

I came across a slashdot article today estimating that the size of the
unobservable universe (i.e. the universe which light hasn’t reached us yet),
is about 250x bigger than the visible universe, which, if true, means that
what hamlet said to horatio is still true today. the class of things that i
can’t know is much larger than the set of things i don’t know–at least
250 times in size! (a factor of 2 (base 10)).

i am humbled by this estimate. i have known for a long time that i don’t
know much, but this scale has helped make my smallness even keener: How
Glorious is our Father, and expansive is His dominion. How peculiar it
is for our pettiness to seem to fill this expanse, and how thankful we are
to have our inconsequence be put into the proper perspective.

so where does that leave rationalism? the statement that science will unlock
the secrets of the universe just smacks of arrogance right now, and in a few
days, it will probably sound comedic. science BEGINS with observation.
suddenly the purview of science feels as if it stretches no farther than my
navel, and rationalism no more satisfying than gazing at those parts.

maybe that was too far. a method of organizing the objective universe may
be helpful, in the same way that threading the experiences of our lives: in
both we have tokens/marbles/slivers of TRUTH–memories, data, that harness
so that our stories may cohere.

but let us not fool ourselves: as coherent as our stories may be, there’s a
much larger part of TRUTH which we may be missing out on–which we can’t
experience or observe–not in this form at least.

so it is best to marry rationalism, objectivism, and science with something
MORE: I know that these all are woefully incomplete. that
they don’t even begin to begin, but that they may satisfy some whose navels
may be quite interesting. that this program of objectivism, where the
objective universe is the TRUTH and that the TRUTH is equally the objective
universe, currently pushed by neo-atheist like Dawkins, Hutchens, and Dennet–
feels rather like a Stalinist Progrom: their propaganda being that utopia
is ours, if only we give up faith. And as with many communist messages,
the irony is bald.

We must marry science and rationalism with our faith that we are SMALL and
that we don’t know and that almost all cases we CAN’T know; we must marry our
personal experiences with the faith that there are things that we do not know,
that which we have not seen, that which we can’t see.

The unobservability of (most of) TRUTH may be a non-starter for some. How
do you even grab hold of that which you can not observe or experience? Here
is a start: Just as the observable universe is subsumed by the unobserable,
so too is ALL subsumed by GOD–that we can start by acknowledging HIM–the
WHOLENESS which is TRUTH so that our most gracious creator may open our
eyes to things which we can not see on our own. Amen.

ref: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26333/
ref: http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/02/01/2015250/Universe-250-Times-Bigger-\
Than-What-Is-Observable

quote:
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

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~ by lentaing on February 6, 2011.