Negative Space

When I took painting lessons, my teacher explained the term “negative space”. It is the empty space around things or between things, for example, the space between a cup handle and the cup. Artists are taught to pay attention to the shape of the negative space because it can be as important as the solid objects to the composition of the entire work.

As a scientist, I consider what it means to pay as much attention to what we see as what we don’t see. It seems that throughout human history we have understood our world in terms of positive space and negative space. There is the “positive space,” science, our understanding of the physical world that we observe, with its immense power and movement. Even in ancient times we had a rudimentary understanding of how the world works—the sun rises in the east and sets in the west; it is cold in the winter and warm in the summer. But there was also so much negative space, that part of the world that we could not explain.

We humans have assigned that negative space to the divine. We could not see what moves the wind, so we created a wind god. We could not reach the stars so we made that the home of our gods. We created these gods in the image of ourselves, but with added powers. They were really much like our comic book superheroes, and we populated our pantheon with enough of these superhero gods and goddesses to fill all the negative space created by our limited understanding of the world.

But when artists draw and paint the negative space, we are taught not to imagine it as something else—we are taught to see it for what it is, as the shape of something that we do not see. The problem with the superhero gods is that they were simply human imaginings to fill that negative space, and as an aid to our imagination, we made for ourselves graven images of our gods to reinforce our belief in their incredible powers.

But a different way was revealed to the ancient Hebrews. They rejected the pantheon of superheroes and replaced it with the One Lord God. And this was not just a change from plural to singular. Their One God was beyond imagining—no name, no image could contain the One LORD God. And yet throughout scripture they kept wanting to go back to their superhero images. Perhaps it is human nature in that we just cannot see the negative space for what it is.

As our scientific understanding of the universe has evolved, has our understanding of God evolved to match it? Does our negative space—theology—fit with our positive space—science? The Hebrews adopted the Babylonian scientific understanding of the universe that is described in Genesis. Their universe was a flat supercontinent floating on a sea of chaos. Over all of this arched the dome of the firmament. Above the dome was heaven where God resided. The size of their universe was limited only to the area they knew—what we now call the Middle East.

The intellectual Greeks had a greatly expanded understanding of the universe. In the 3rd century BC Aristotle surmised that the Earth was a sphere within a universe of concentric spheres, the innermost being the fiery Hades and the outermost being occupied by the stars. In the 2nd century AD Ptolemy correctly estimated the circumference of the Earth, and estimated the outermost sphere of stars to be25 million kilometers from the Earth. For the Greco-Romans that was an almost unimaginable distance.

Perhaps because of their expanded scientific understanding, the Greco-Romans became dissatisfied with their pantheon of super-heroes. These anthropomorphic beings were just too small to explain such a vast universe. The unknowable Judeo-Christian God seemed to better fit with this new understanding of the Universe, which may explain their attraction and eventual conversion to the Christian faith. So in this case faith and science evolved together.

Ten centuries after Ptolemy, Dante wrote his Divine Comedy, describing an imagined journey through Aristotle’s concentric universe. At the center he replaced the pagan Hades with Christian Hell, and at the outermost limits he placed Christian Heaven as the highest sphere beyond the stars. For the people of that time heaven was still a real physical place in three-dimensional space and time. To deny God a physical location was to deny God’s existence.

Two centuries later when Copernicus published his theory of a Sun-Centered universe, it went almost unnoticed by theologians who saw it as just another boring treatise on astronomy. But later with the Protestant Reformation came theological debates and the need on both sides to be “right” and explain everything. Both Catholic and Protestant leaders condemned Copernicus and his theory posthumously. Thus began the tension that has remained between faith and science that continues to the present day. Perhaps there is a fear among believers (and a hope among nonbelievers) that science will eventually explain almost everything so that nothing will be left to faith.

But this fears assumes that as the positive space of science expands it will displace the negative space of faith. What has happened instead is that as our knowledge of science has evolved, so has our concept of the divine. The present belief about Heaven is much different from what Dante could have imagined. Few Christians still believe that God resides in a place in three dimensional space. Instead we speak of Heaven more ethereally, such as Pope John Paul II who called it, "neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but a living, personal relationship with the Holy Trinity.” Are we returning to that original belief in the unknowable one LORD God? Since Copernicus our scientific understanding of the universe has grown immensely. With Einstein’s theory of general relativity we now know that time, space and matter are not separate but are simply different projections of the same reality. A God who creates space and time must be outside of space and time. How can we possibly imagine such a God? The psalmist speaks of this God always in the present tense, “Before the mountains were born, the earth and the world brought forth, from eternity to eternity you are God.” (Ps. 90:2)

Scientists now believe that the universe is much older than described in Genesis, but still the past is not infinite. Not only did the universe begin 13.7 billion years ago, time itself began. There is no time before then, not even a time with empty space, not even a time before then with or without a god. Cosmologists call this starting point the singularity, a trivial name for something so very profound. Still, itis better than the popular term “big bang.” I will instead call it the first moment, when everything—all matter, all space and all time—were in perfect unity in one place at one time. But with time comes change, and so before the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second passed, that perfect unity began to divide due to quantum fluctuations.

According to quantum mechanics when particles divide they remain entangled, meaning they remain correlated even when separated in space and time (“entangled” is another one of those science terms that trivialize something that is very profound, so I will call it “engagement”). Disengagement only occurs when a particle reengages with something else, and at that point the engagement from the previous reaction continues. What is truly paradoxical is that the reality of the past only becomes3realized during these disengagements, even when they occur much later. Until then, one particle seems to know what the other is doing. In some sense the reality of the past does not yet exist until another engagement occurs.

At the moment of creation everything was perfectly engaged to everything else, but since that time all the particles in the universe have been engaging and disengaging continuously for 13.7 billion years. That chain of engagement connects everything with everything else endlessly over all space and time. That includes us—our bodies, our brains, our friends and our enemies.

In the face of this amazing theory of the cosmos two questions immediately arise in our minds: “How can any God be big enough to create such a universe?” and the other “With such an incredible universe how could there not be a God to create it?” Unfortunately, the theology taught from our pulpits has not caught up with this new science. Our minds cannot see both the positive and negative spaces at the same time, but if we fail to look at the shape of one, we will never see the shape of the other.

Then God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered into a single basin, so that the dry land may appear.’ And so it happened.

Scientists now know that the crust of the earth is made up of tectonic plates. With incredible power, energy from the center of the earth (where Hell used to be) moves whole continents apart. The Red Sea was formed by a plate boundary where the African and Arabian Plates meet. Just east of the Red Sea in a place once call Midian, lava sometimes wells up to the surface. Long ago a shepherd in exile from Egypt saw something he did not understand, what appeared to be a burning bush that was not consumed. Looking into the negative space of his understanding, he realized that he was walking on holy ground. Then the one LORD God told him his life’s purpose—to challenge the injustice that he had fled from so many years before.

Then God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens.’

‍When people look at the night sky they often marvel at how many stars there are. But when I look up I see the negative space between the stars. That is where scientists look to detect the cosmic microwave background, the invisible radiance that is as old as the universe itself, photons traveling continually without engagement, until finally engaging with the scientist’s microwave telescopes in 1964. In that radiance, scientists could see the faint imprint of the quantum fluctuations that occurred at that First Moment. There in the darkness, in the negative space between the stars, is the beginning of everything. And beyond that, beyond space, beyond time is the one LORD God. And so I must take off my shoes, for I am walking on holy ground.