The Revealing Science of God © 2000 The Church of Yahweh
PART 5: "WHAT?"
What did God make the universe out of? What is the universe? We have said that the truly great question is Why? or How? the thing ever came into existence at all. Why, once again, wasn't the universe forever simply an empty nothingness of vast immeasurable blankness? And we have looked at the notions of God being the ground of all existence. The source and origin of everything that exists. We have seen the root formula of the universe, I plus will equals being. We have discovered and defined God as being the end of all of the chains of dependencies.
Now, in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth. What is it that he created? Well, the vastness and complexity of the universe is a subject which has absorbed humanity's quest for knowledge since the beginning of time. And what we have found is a universe so immense and so detailed in every aspect of it's being, that it completely defies any attempt of the human being to comprehend it.
When God said, "Let there be light." We now know that he created a substance which travels 186,000 miles every second. And we now know, based upon our most detailed astronomical calculations that the expanse of the heavens which he created is at least 12 billion light years across. That means that light traveling 186,000 miles every second, will take 12 billion years to pass from one end of the creation to the other.
That's the breadth of the universe, and within that universe there are literally billions of galaxies. And inside of each galaxy there are literally billions of stars. This is quite a vast place.
And yet if anything is more stupefying then the breadth of the universe it is it's depth. You see, all of those stars are made of absolutely completely uncountable numbers of electrons, neutrons, photons, particles of light, particles of energy, atoms and molecules which go to such a small measure that there is no way for the human mind to conceive how small they are. Just as we are incapable of imagining how truly vast the universe is we are completely incapable of contemplating or conceiving of how truly detailed and microscopic the universe is.
And we have upon last count discovered well over 200 subatomic particles. That means that inside of each of these uncountable trillions of atoms, there are hundreds of subatomic particles. Scientists have not found an end to the universe in terms of a border line, after which there are no more galaxies. And we have also not found, yet, a single fundamental building block for matter.
Now, with The Revealing Science of God ladies and gentlemen, we cannot hope to explain all of the scientific and mathematical structures that God has placed into this universe. But the fundamental question as to what this is we can indeed address. For you see, if anything we have said so far about God is true then certain things become logically extended from our previous conclusions.
For one, God operates in harmony with law and logic. God could not for example make a round square. God has self limited in order to make the universe. And therefore abides by the form, structure, laws and logic of the universe. They are his creation and he has placed them here for a purpose and a reason.
Otherwise we could not learn anything about Him. God would then be seen as being utterly capricious and not in any sense being genuinely connected to the universe.
But there is something of a much more profound nature here. In terms of the what? of the universe, which I have found over the years to have caused more controversy and more uneasiness and more upset among my students then any other single topic I have ever discussed.
But regardless of how people react, I cannot alter the conclusions which The Revealing Science of God has inexorably pushed me to. It all boils down to one simple thing, which is the subject of this section.
What is the universe made out of?
According to the laws of logic, which we are comfortable concluding God works within, there are logically only two choices. Either God made the universe out of himself or he/she made it out of something else.
And this seemingly innocuous statement has threatened people for years. Because it leads us to some rather startling but absolutely undeniable conclusions.
Many people feel that God is a shaper and molder of matter. Some teach, for example, that within the procession of the gods matter is eternal. And that God is a spirit who molds and shapes the matter.
There are other groups of people on this planet who share similar views, that there are indeed two eternal beings. 1) The eternal spiritual being or beings which we call God or gods, and 2) physical matter. And that what God was doing was shaping and molding the physical matter. This winds us to a situation wherein you actually have two separate eternal beings. And you have a much greater problem discovering the actual foundation of existence. Because you must determine not only the self existent nature of the gods, but the self existent nature of matter.
Within the scientific community matter is the only self existent entity. Matter has combined into planets, out of which developed life and that life has theorized this fantasy of a god.
But as I said in the introduction that position for me ultimately is a complete violation of many of the tenants of science.
So if matter is not eternal and matter is not what generates God, then perhaps matter is eternal and God is eternal. At which point we really have complicated things. Such discussions are completely silly. The whole purpose of what we are trying to do with The Revealing Science of God is discover the root and foundation of all existence. That is exactly the explicated purpose of our previous chapter. And we have discussed the chain of dependencies. And have come to the conclusion that God is the source and origin of all things and is the root and final anchor of all chains of dependencies.
Therefore when God created the heavens and the Earth, what did he create them out of? Well, if in the beginning the only reality was God, one self existent being, "I plus will equals being," and that being is the soul source and foundation of all existence, then logically and simply everything that exists must have come from God.
Now to this point the Christian church has very little trouble with hardly anything that I've said. The classical Christian position is "ex nihlio", meaning out of nothing. God created out of nothing, God did not have a co-eternally existent entity called matter, which he shapes and molds. That he actually created everything out of nothing.
However, upon deeper examination that statement does not hold up to any tests of logic, and is fallacious. To say that God created out of nothing is true, in that, yes, there was no thing outside of God for him to mold and shape. However, to say that he created out of nothing, to imply then that the physical creation has a separate existence apart from God, is completely wrong. When God said, "Let there be light," the only thing in the universe to generate that light was himself/herself!
Therefore when we ask, "What did God make the world out of?" to say that he made it out of nothing is an incomplete answer. The complete answer is he made it out of nothing other than himself! The only energies that were there to create anything, were the energies of this self existence, I will be.
In other words God took part of him/her own energies and transformed them into light and matter. In short form, what is the universe made out of?
The universe is made out of God.
To say that God made everything out of nothing, most people imply then that the physical creation remains apart from him. The most common illustration used is that he is the potter and we are the clay. The difficulty with this is that God first had to find the clay, and where did he find it? Well, he had to pull the clay out of himself, first!
Internal and External Creations
You see, there are two and only two forms of creation, internal and external. An internal creation is one wholly within the creator. And an external creation is where the creator takes his energies and molds and shapes something outside of himself.
Most people conceive of God as a molder and shaper. However, if this is an external creation then we are left once again with the inexorable question as to where this material came from for God to shape and mold.
Everything that we do inside of the world is either an internal or an external creation. Every creation begins with a will, which we have discussed before. Which is an internal impulse. Within the realm of imagination we are able to create things within our minds. We can design elaborate patterns, we can tell stories, we can create brand new worlds. The entire realm of fiction and storytelling and television begins as an internal creation with our imagination, image-nation. Which we then, in order to communicate with other people, project onto the external creation in forms of video tape and words and song.
We can do that because we have something outside of ourselves to project our internal creation upon. However, if you are the source and origin of all existence, if you are the anchor of all chains of dependencies then you have nothing outside of yourself upon which to project your internal creation.
You see, the Bible is clear that God said, "Let there be light." And God said, "Let there be mountains." And God said, "Let there be oceans." Ladies and gentlemen, you share that exact ability. You can close your eyes and within your imagination create whatever you want! Let there be a mountain, and upon that mountain let there be a river flowing down from the mountain. And inside of that river let there be purple avocados that have four eyes and sing French marching songs.
As simple, as complex, as sublime and as silly as you want, you can create just by saying, "Let there be, let there be, let there be!" Let there be light.
The Universe is God's Imaging
The conclusion then is that the entire universe is God's imagination. God is thinking about himself and placing his thoughts about himself into his realm of imagination. But his being is so much more powerful then ours that we actually appear to be alive, and the creation takes upon itself the appearance of reality.
So the "what" of the universe is God. The entire universe is simply God.
There is much Biblical and scientific evidence to support this. But, it still makes people very nervous. Mankind currently is much more comfortable thinking of God as being utterly separate and apart from mankind. That there is an inseparable gulf between God and us. He is the potter and we are merely the clay.
It makes people uncomfortable to think that they might, in fact, be part of God's mind. And yet the witness of science and the witness of the Bible is that that is exactly what the truth is. What the universe is, is God.
#1. The Bible says that God made us in his image. The connection between that and imagination cannot be denied.
#2. Acts 17:28 says, "Inside of God we live and we move and exist." The Bible itself, if you will simply read it, as a part of The Revealing Science of God, will tell you that we live inside of God. Just like your liver lives inside of you, you live inside of God. That message is reiterated in Psalm 139, where the psalmist indicates that no matter where I go, I'm still there with God. "If I go to the highest heavens or the deepest hole, the farthest sea, into the darkness or into the light, you are evermore with me."
Well, we are also told in the book of Colossians, that inside of him all things hold together. Colossians 1:17, he is before all things and in him all things hold together. Romans 11:36 tells us, "From him, through him and to him are all things." That message is so clear that it is easy to overlook. It is telling us:
1) Everything comes from God.
2) Everything is currently passing through God.
3) Everything returns to God.
4) Therefore everything is inside of God.
The Body of Christ
The Biblical message is quite clear, it is absolutely clear. The Bible also gives us this very astounding and startling and shocking vision which most people ignore and take merely allegorically. That image being the body of Christ. If this is one of the parts of the Bible you wish to take literally then you will see the Bible is describing that we are being built up into becoming the physical body of God.
You, ladies and gentlemen, have many parts, as we have discussed. You have a divine will, you have a mind. You have emotions and desires and it's all placed inside of your physical body. Why then would it be so shocking to see that God's "I plus will equals being" has placed itself into the realm of mind. Into the realm of desire and emotion. And is actually inside of the material world creating for himself a body.
But he is growing his body, not from anything outside of himself. But he is growing himself a body out of his own powers and energies.
God is becoming born again through the universe. That is the what, God is taking upon himself a body and that body is essentially his reincarnation. Reincarnation simply means to be put into a body again. And the greatest, grandest image of all, God is forming the body of Christ and shall live in it.
We can see, then, that the procession of the gods could be seen as developing different cells within the cosmic body of the "I WILL BE."
God is Light
The witness of science however, is no less convincing. You see, part of the revelation tells us that God is light. And universally, across all centuries and across all generations and across all continents, God is associated with light. And the Bible tells us literally, actually and clearly in 1 John 1:5, "God is light."
This is another verse which we tend to take very symbolically. Most Christians will take this to mean that God is somehow the inner illumination to make us all able to see how beautiful he really is. But the overwhelming evidence of science is that this part of the Bible is speaking a literal, actual fact. That God is light.
This gets us into some very weighty deep waters. We as a human race have been spending centuries studying light. And trying to figure out what it is. We know certain things about light. And in short form it all adds up to an understanding that light completely defies all our laws of logic and science. And is the absolute foundation of all existence. Let me explain.
This will be in very sketchy form, because it is a very deep and weighty subject deserving of it's own treatment.
Some of the most significant aspects of light that we have learned are among the following.
#1. Light exhibits all characteristics of operating as a wave and life exhibits of operating an particles. And we know absolutely that particles cannot move in waves. And waves do not consist of particles. A wave is a disturbance. If you look at an ocean wave some of the ocean water moves up and some moves down. But the actual water molecules are not flowing. There is simply a disturbance in the water.
A bullet is a particle. Now for a particle to move in a wave defies all laws of physics because the law of inertia states that an object will continue to move in the direction it's moving unless acted on by an outside force. So if the bullet begins to move up then there is nothing to make it move down again, so a particle is not going to move like a wave. And a wave being a disturbance is absolutely not a flow of particles. And yet with all of the tens of billions of dollars of research we have done, we can prove absolutely, scientifically that light behaves like a wave and behaves like particles. Light therefore stands completely outside of the bounds of what we can comprehend.
#2. Another very important aspect of light is that it is the foundation of all time. If you took a clock and were on a spaceship and wound up being accelerated to the point that you were traveling exactly at the speed of light, your clock would stop. There is no time within the realm of absolute light. This is completely consonant with the understanding that God is eternal and outside of all time and space.
#3. Light is the absolute foundation of all existence. Nothing can move faster then light. And light is pure energy. We know through Einstein's theories of relativity, which we have actually been able to verify in the laboratory, that the mass of an object is directly related to it's speed. The mystical equation, E=MC2, simply states that the total energy in a system equals it's mass times the speed of light squared.
In other words, light is pure energy, and that energy divided by the mass is always going to equal the same thing, the speed of light. Energy can change and mass can change but they will always be related in terms of the speed of light. In other words if you take pure energy and you slow it down it begins to become matter.
I will repeat that. This is a finding from nuclear physics and relativity, which we have been able to verify inside of a laboratory. If you take pure energy and slow it down it turns into matter. It takes on mass. And if you take matter and speed it up then it's energy as it approaches the speed of light becomes freed. This is the theory behind nuclear weapons. What happens with nuclear weapons is we take matter and we accelerate it to the point of releasing all of the matter and turning it back into pure energy. These results have led scientists to make a startling conclusion, that energy and matter are different sides of the same coin!
The Energy/Mass Continuum
Scientists now speak of the energy mass continuum. That energy cannot be created or
destroyed, it merely changes form. And matter cannot be created or destroyed, it merely
changes form. And that energy can become slowed down and form matter. And matter can be
sped up and returned to pure energy. If you look at a rock, what you are seeing is simply
condensed energy slowed down, light slowed down. And if you perform the proper acts you
could release all of that matter from it's confines and return that rock into it's pure
energy state. This completely astonishing result happens to be 100% consonant with The
Revealing Science of God:
God is light quite literally. And the first moment of creation the "I will be," limitless source of all being manifested him/her self as pure infinite light.
Through acts of absolute will that being has been slowing parts of him/herself down into ever denser forms of energy.
Matter is simply God in a different form.
All of physical existence then is made out of God, and is completely connected to him.
The laws of science therefore tell us that we do in fact live inside of God, move
inside of him and live inside of God.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the proclamation of The Revealing Science of God. The answer to the question: What is the universe made out of? The universe is not made out of anything. The universe is the manifestation of God's absolute will. The only reality is God.
That is another logical, derivative conclusion from the statement that God is the root of all dependencies. If God is the root of all dependencies then everything else is derived one way or the other from God. This is simple logic.
If the only thing we have in the universe is water, infinite masses of water, and that water has the ability to manipulate itself by putting more or less energy into it, then no matter how many ice cubes or ice ages or clouds of steam there are the only reality is water, H2O, simply sped up and slowed down!
That is the essence of the universe. That is the greatest proclamation and that is the greatest mystery. It has many religious implications.
Panentheism
The tendency for pantheism, while understandable, must be avoided. Pantheism says that everything is God, and that is very close to what we are stating. However, pantheism focuses on some part of the creation as being God and worships that part of creation. Pantheists will find a particular mountain or a rock and worship that rock as God.
We are not espousing pantheism. And this has been a very difficult concept for people to understand. The nature of the universe is not pantheistic, it is pan-en-theistic. Panentheistic religion states that everything is in God. "Pan"-all, in "theist"-God. Everything is in God. And that is exactly what science tells us and that is exactly what the revelation tells us.
The Revealing Science of God tells us that the only reality, the anchor of all dependencies, is God by definition or postulate or conclusion, however you wish to state it. And, that everything therefore must be an aspect of God. Panentheism does not seek to worship any part of the creation as God, because Panentheism recognizes that only the totality matters.
I do not seek to worship my big toe, although I do not wish to harm it. I do not want my liver to run my life, although I certainly do no wish to abuse it. I, as a human being, am a total entity. And all aspects of me are important. My body and all of its organs. My personality, my thoughts, my emotions, all my desires, this is me. This is the totality of me. And to ignore that totality is of an ultimate shame.
Therefore, we must resist panicking and allowing misuses of the truth to cause us to shy away from them. We are in God and everything is God. But God remains outside of all of this.
The best illustration I can give you is, once again to return to the notion of the body. I use my right arm all of the time, and I would be devastated if I was to lose my right arm. But you could in fact cut my right arm off, and I would still exist. I would still have my thoughts, memories, hopes, dreams, desires, emotions and the rest of my physical body. What we can say, then, is that the whole is greater then the sum of its parts. As it pertains to the body I am not my arm, but at the same time my arm is a part of me. It is not a part of you or anyone else. This is the simplest illustration I can give you to explain the relationship of the creation to the creator.
Before God created the heavens and the Earth, before he limited any of himself and began to condense into light, energy and mass, God remained the self existent one capable of manifestation through a divine and absolute will. Being the self existent one God forever remains that way. Therefore, while it is true that the universe is inside of God and is a part of him and is nothing other than God, it is also true that God forever remains beyond the creation.
The simplest way this can be stated is
God is not the universe
and
the universe is God.
It cannot be anything else. If there's nothing outside of God for God to have shaped and molded, and if God out of his own divine will, "I plus will equals the existence of the universe," then this universe must be God.
But God remains beyond this universe, for he could indeed roll the heavens and the Earth up like a scroll. Bring all energies completely back into himself and start again.
Now the religious implications of this I believe are obvious, but of course must be stated very clearly. The relationship of the material universe to God is exactly the same relationship that you have to God. The temptation is one of ego. And I have written quite extensively about this in other places.
The nature of ego is the appearance of a separate self. Wherein the energies which God has placed within the human being begin to feel that they are completely separate and apart from God. And that they do not need God and that there is in fact no God. And that the only thing in the world that is real is the individual human being. This is separation, this is a fracturing of the unitive state and this the essence of sin.
Sin is not disobedience to external laws. That is a very shallow understanding.
The religious pathway consists of enabling the individual personality and the individual ego to transcend this individualization, and to become reunited with the totality. That is what is meant by the commandments to love God with the fullness of your being, to give and share all that you are and have with him. And to love your fellow man as yourself. To serve others, to take care of them. To recognize that each individual is sacred and divine. To die to the illusion of ego and self and rise into the realm of the redeemed.
This is the purpose of the revelation of Jesus' life, death and resurrection. And The Revealing Science of God will echo with that, with every fiber of it's being. If the only reality is God and if we for a time see that we are separate from God, and act apart from him, the only thing that we have to act apart from him is the energy that he has given. In other words God has taken a little bit of himself and placed it into us.
A little bit of that cosmic stuff has been placed into each and every human being. That is what we call the spirit. We are all too familiar with our bodies, the soul encompasses your emotions, desires, thoughts and memories and will. And the spirit is the actual spark of God pure and unmanifested.
This is why in the true proclamation everything is grace. This is why the notion of self works and work righteousness is so anathema to the truth. Because there is no self in reality to work. There is no individual in reality to perform any deed to in any sense be worthy of anything. All that is left to be done is to gain the realization that we are simply particles in the great stream of life. That we are a manifestation of grace. Grace, not just in a limited fallen sense of God loves you and will let you go to Heaven when you die. Because while there is truth in that, that is a very small and fallen conception focusing as it does upon the immortalization of the individual's self. No, the higher proclamation of grace is that all things, all energies and abilities come from God. The ability to curse is a manifestation of God. The ability to murder, the ability to love, the ability to procreate, all things that we do are manifestations of God's energy. Because every single one of those is dependent upon something and ultimately that something is God.
Therefore God has slowed a part of himself down. The result is you. We all become miniature gods and goddesses. Not that we should be worshipped as such, but that we should die to ourselves. And recognize our oneness with the totality to find our place inside of the body of Christ. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the what of God.
Summary
And as we work together to understand the nature of The Revealing Science of God, we can see that not only does this have cosmological implications, but is important for each of us individually. And that the religious pathway of dying to self and rising to newness of life, that the commandments to love God with the totality of your being and to love your fellow man as yourself are in fact 100% in harmony with all revelations and comprehensions that we have been given.
You are a part of God, every breath you take you take by his grace. Every bird you see and every click of every clock you have ever heard is a heart and manifestation of the divine mind. That is what this universe is. God voluntarily through a act of his divine will slowing himself down into matter, into pencils and into people.
The what of the universe is nothing more nor less than God's energies. God cannot have
made the universe out of anything other then himself because there was nothing to make it
out of. Therefore everything lives and moves and exists inside of God. The energy mass
continuum is a literal association with the divine presence. And The Revealing Science
of God finds immense perfect harmony between the revelation of God being light and the
science of understanding that light with our knowledge.
