What We Talk About When We Talk About God Read Free Page B

my hope is that by the end you will say,
    â€œNow that’s what I’m talking about.”

CHAPTER 2
    OPEN
    One time I was asked to speak to a group of atheists and I went and I had a blast. Afterward they invited me out for drinks, and we were laughing and telling stories and having all sorts of interesting conversation when a woman pulled me aside to ask me a question. She had a concerned look on her face and her brow was slightly furrowed as she looked me in the eyes and said, “You don’t believe in miracles, do you?”
    As I listened, I couldn’t help but smile, because not long before that evening I’d been approached by a churchgoing, highly devout Christian woman who’d asked me, with the exact same concerned look on her face, complete with furrowed brow, “You believe in miracles, don’t you?”
    It’s as if the one woman was concerned that I had lost my mind, while the other woman was concerned that I had lost my faith.
    There’s a giant either/or embedded in their questions, an either/or that reflects some of the great questions of our era:
    Faith or intellect?
    Belief or reason?
    Miracles or logic?
    God or science?
    Can a person believe in things that violate all the laws of reason and logic and then claim to be reasonable and logical?
    I point this either/or out because how we think about God is directly connected with how we think about the world we’re living in.
    When someone dismisses the supernatural and miraculous by saying, “Those things don’t happen,” and when someone else believes in something he can’t prove and has no evidence for, those beliefs are both rooted in particular ways of understanding what kind of world we’re living in and how we know what we know.
    Often in these either/or discussions, people on both sides assume they’re just being reasonable or logical or rational or something else intelligent-sounding, without realizing that the modern world has shaped and molded and formed how we think about the world, which leads to how we think about God, in a number of ways that are relatively new in human history and have a number of significant limits.
    So before we talk about the God who is with us and for us and ahead of us, we’ll talk about the kind of world we’re living in and how that shapes how we know what we know.
    First, we’ll talk about the bigness of the universe,
    then
    the smallness of the universe,
    then
    we’ll talk about you and what it is that makes you you,
    and then
    we’ll talk about how all this affects how we understand and talk about God.
    This will take a while—so stay with me—because the universe is way weirder than any of us ever imagined . . .
    Â 
    I. Welcome to the Red Shift
    The universe,
    it turns out,
    is expanding.
    Restaurant chains expand, waistbands expand, so do balloons and those little foam animal toys that come in pill-shaped capsules—but universes ?
    Or more precisely, the universe?
    It’s expanding ?
    Now the edge of the universe is roughly ninety billion trillion miles away ( roughly being the word you use when your estimate could be off by A MILLION MILES), the visible universe is a million million million million miles across, and all of the galaxies in the universe are moving away from all of the other galaxies in the universe at the same time.
    This is called galactic dispersal, and it may explain why some children have a hard time sitting still.
    The solar system that we live in, which fills less than a trillionth of available space, is moving at 558 thousand miles per hour. It’s part of the Milky Way galaxy, and it takes our solar system between 200 and 250 million years to orbit the Milky Way once . The Milky Way contains a number of smaller galaxies, including
    the Fornax Dwarf,
    the Canis Major,
    the Ursa Minor,
    the Draco,
    the Leo I and the not-to-be-forgotten Leo II,
    the Sculptor, and
    the Sextans.
    It’s