God, Love and the Potential of Atoms
My friends and I have had this ongoing discussion for years. It’s about how God, Love, and Atoms are tied together.
We would talk about God. What is God? Why is God everywhere? Why does God control everything? Why does God make everything happen?
As a Catholic kid, I was taught that God is this “Being That One Does Not Mess With”. If you did good things, God rewards you with good stuff or good times. If you did bad things, you were punished. God was supposed to be everywhere, within everybody, but you still had to go to a church to formally talk to God. As if church had better reception. This separation from God kinda confused me growing up.
As I got older and the hormones kicked in, I paid more attention to Love; mostly the urge-induced Romantic Love that’s talked about in poetry and Top-40 songs. As I got older still, I wanted to learn more about Universal Love, and if Romantic Love was a subset of Universal Love, or if the two were separate entities.
And if Universal Love and Romantic Love were separate, does this mean that priests (the no-touchy good ones) don’t really get a complete taste of life, since they’re only getting to feel Universal Love and not Romantic Love? And are priests, because they’re not able to experience Romantic Love, able to experience a really intense God Love, the kind that only holy people can experience? And if so, does this mean that regular non-clergy people like you and me are missing out on the really intense God Love?
Regardless of the categorization, somebody’s missing out on something. Somebody’s not getting the full God treatment.
Now, atoms. Atoms are everywhere, including space. I used to think that because they call it “space” that it’s empty. But here’s an explanation:
Density of Outer Space
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/DaWeiCai.shtml
So space does contain atoms, unpaired hydrogen atoms. This means that atoms are everywhere, including space.
But then I saw this movie called Mindwalk, and it mentioned that each atom is composed mostly of empty space:
Sonya: What’s an atom? Well, Newton thought it was small solid particles. But that’s not what scientists saw when they observed atoms for the first time. What they saw was totally unexpected and shocking.
Jack: You mean they saw that an atom was made of even smaller particles — a nucleus with electrons whirling around it.
Sonya: Not only that. They were moving in relatively vast regions of empty space! That’s what shook the scientists up. Atoms consist mainly of empty space…
The movie goes on to say that if a single atom was the size of a small island, the nucleus would be the size of a small pebble. And the electrons would be even smaller.
Imagine an island with an itty bitty little pebble in the middle of it and a few smaller pebbles scattered along its shore. So what’s taking up all that space in between the little particles inside an atom?
Nobody can confirm this yet, but some say it’s made up of energy, or potential. Nobody has been able to measure it, identify it, or “see” it with any instruments.
What if God is this energy?
Since atoms are everywhere, and all that space inside atoms are everywhere, why couldn’t God be that energy that gives atoms their potential? Why couldn’t God be that energy that really makes things happen?
And as much as we humans try to control the universe, we know that ultimately we are at the mercy of the Bigger Picture. Of God. Of this energy inside everything. Do we fight it, or acknowledge its existence to live in concert with it?
And this potential, this energy, is this where Love comes from? The unexplainable force that binds each atom together, so that the nucleus, electrons and other itty bitty particles inside dance harmoniously with each other. The unexplainable force that attracts atoms to other atoms so that they become molecules, that attracts molecules to other molecules, and so on.
And if Love is attraction, what better model than the atom? Do we all feel the same Universal Love, or do some of us feel more Love than others, or feel a different kind of Love? In terms of rationing out Love, is anyone really left out? Do we all, equally, have access to all the Love in the universe, except in our limited minds?
Is there really a difference between God, Love and the potential of atoms?
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