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Sidebar 2
Who Do You Think You Are?
One of the most important and emotionally fulfilling functions of religion is its articulation of the relationship between people and God. Religion comforts us with the understanding that we are special and we hold a unique and valuable position in the mind and heart of the Creator. Our lives mean something beyond the simple act of living. We know this because God has dignified our being with this special status.
But we now have an explanation of an eternal universe, and a universe with no point of creation effectively eliminates God as Prime Creator. Does this mean then that we have no special grace and our individual lives have lost their significance? I do not believe so.
Imagine now that our blue spaceship is the planet Earth. We understand that all the atoms, molecules, rocks and trees, every drop of water and every human being come together to create the reality that is Earth. Equally important, the other planets, the sun and stars, galaxies, nebulae and super clusters, all the marvels and mysteries of space and time collaborate in elegant concert to help create, define and give meaning to that same reality. And one of the lessons of both relativity and quantum mechanics is that the conferring of reality works both ways. We can now see that our Earth, a small planet on the edge of an average galaxy in a tiny corner of reality, just as truly creates, defines and gives meaning to the rest of the universe.
Equally empowering is an understanding of our own relationship with that immense and complex universe. Each of us is the sum of our physical parts, our thoughts and emotions, our hopes, our spirit, our will and our consciousness. We are who we are, but each of us is equally defined by all of those people who we are not. If I am tall, my height is defined relative to the height of others. If I am a good person, my goodness is in part defined by the evil that men do – as well as their good. The reality of who I am comes both from me and from my fellow humans. All of humanity is essential to my being; I depend on them, I am who I am because of them.
And just as truly, each of us individually is essential to the rest of humanity, indeed to the rest of the universe. Just as you are defined both by your own characteristics and by the rest of the universe, so too is the rest of the universe defined by you. You are an absolutely essential and defining part and parcel of this whole marvelous, intricate and encompassing universe, and if that doesn’t empower you, no God could. But that essentiality, that grace, is not conferred on you by some outside force called God; it is built into the very mechanism of the universe.
(See also the sidebar: How Big is this Universe?)