Astrophysics is the Closest I have Come to Experiencing God

 Perhaps God is too strong of a word. But the more I read astrophysics, the more my atheism fails me. 

I do not, and will not criticize people's belief in God. Despite it's many faults, I do believe religion gives people immense strength. The belief of God and His miracles have pushed many of us into doing seemingly impossible things. Prayer can bring peace. Relief. Religion can foster love amongst hatred. 

Of course, there are many arguments against God that I personally agree with. I will also acknowledge that God and religion are not the same thing. A person can believe in God and yet not be religious. And then there are the agnostics, obviously. Out of the four quadrants that combine atheism and agnosticism (agnostic atheist, gnostic atheist, agnostic theist, gnostic theist), the gnostic theists are the ones that I can never resonate with. I have- at different points of my life- adapted the other three quadrants. Obviously the phases of my life where I was an agnostic theist was the closest connection I had shared with God

But then came astrophysics. 

Not many people understand exactly how miraculous the birth of our universe is. Sure, we learned about the Big Bang Theory but unless you go down the rabbit hole of astrophysics, you will never know that all of our universe was tinier than the period ending this sentence. You will never know than in the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang- the unified forces were split up into the forces that we know today (strong force, weak force, electromagnetic force an gravity). Trillionth of a second! You will never know that in the first millionth of a second, matter-antimatter pairs were formed in the ratio of billion-and-one to billion. For a cosmos as chaotic (especially back then) this small change in ratio shouldn't have mattered. Yet, it did. The matter-antimatter pairs annihilated each other and what was left was matter. To this date, we still don't know why the universe preferred matter. According to the laws of conservation, both matter and antimatter were supposed to be in equal amounts. 

But if they had been formed in equal amounts, we would never have come into existence. And now isn't that unsignificant ratio very significant? In the universe, even the tiniest details matter. 

Only by reading astrophysics can you truly understand that we are stardust. We are made of the same atoms that originated during the first millionth second after the Big Bang. In his book, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Neil DeGrasse Tyson writes:

We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.

And then there is the beginning itself. We might have come up with a theory of the Big Bang, but do we know what existed before the beginning? Do we know how the small point even came into existence? Did we originate from nothingness? If there was nothing before the beginning, then what forced existence to occur? Why did it not remain "nothingness"? Was it God? Or what if (like the movie, Matrix) this is all some elaborate prank played by a super-intelligent alien species?

Man has still not been able to answer these questions. And perhaps, we never will. Perhaps before we even reach the technology and the wisdom of studying our origins, we will be obliterated. The universe is very, very old, after all. And mankind is so very young. Do we even have the ability to study the universe? 

The best part about astrophysics is that it forces us to wonder. In a world filled with distractions- of social media, of wars, of hatred- astrophysics forces mankind to stop and look up at the sky and wonder. 

And that is the closest I have come to experiencing God.