E17 “Can God and Science Share the Same Space?”

Is there a God — or at least, is it possible? In this episode of Spiritual Hot Sauce we explore a fresh bridge between Scripture, archetypal wisdom, and modern physics: the tabernacle as a three-part template for body, mind, and spirit, Einstein’s and Newton’s intuitions about a unifying substrate, and the ancient idea of namarupa (name‑and‑form) that everything visible arises from the same energetic source. Philosophically, can God and science share the same space?

Episode 17 of “Spiritual Hot Sauce” by Chris Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Is there a God? Maybe the more correct question is, is it possible there is a God? In science, every answer leads to a question in a state of constant growth. But in religion, we operate with an assumed conclusion that people from hundreds and even thousands of years ago, from perspectives and understandings of their world, gave us the final answer. This seems to have led to a growing disconnect between science and religion. But if we start looking at this question through an archetypal and universal truths lens that incorporates science, we might begin to see the possibility of God differently, maybe even more accurately aligned with Scripture and Science. Welcome. This is where believers and skeptics alike are invited to embark on a journey of faith, philosophy, and life from a different perspective. Whether we are joined by an insightful guest or we just jump into the deep end, this exploration promises to challenge us all. Are we getting it right? This is Spiritual Hot Sauce. All right, this is going to be a really fun one. I mean, I'm going to address something in 20 minutes. You know, that's but I, in all honesty, I think if you will keep an open mind as I go through this, and if you hear it in the way I mean for it to come across, you might not be able to unhear it. And because we are going to be speaking from biblical text, but it's not going to be exclusively to itself. It's going to be with universal truths and ideas. But that's what Paul did, did he not? In the Bible, in X, he quotes two different Greek philosophers and he uses their ideas as universal truths to shed light on understanding spiritual things. And people that are more materialist and scientific in nature, Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientists of all times, if not the greatest, could not conceive of a universe that didn't have a God. But he saw God as being on the outside of the universe, in an eternal state, having no beginning, no ending, has always been and will always be. Albert Einstein believed in a God, but not in the classical dogmatic traditional sense. But rather he saw God as in the energy at the substrate of the quantum, that at the very foundation of the universe is energy, either in fields or in waves. It's from this belief that he came up with the unified field theory. Now, since then, modern physics has moved on to theories like the universal wave function. It's a different way of arriving, pretty much, though, at the same conclusion, which is that all the energy in the substrate, once you get down to the foundation of the universe, it's all in waves or in fields or strings of energy, and it all interacts together in unity to almost behave as an entity. So from this idea of all of this energy in the substrate that works together, it brings order. And because of that, that's why Einstein saw God as not just possible, but probable in the idea that God is the foundation of the universe, the substrate, the quantum energy itself. So let's start here. What does it mean that we are made in the image of God? I mean, it actually says in different places, in multiple places, that we are made in the likeness of God. And in Genesis it says that we have made man in our image. So if you start taking all of the different ways it is said and you start bringing them together, it starts becoming very difficult to land on the idea that God made us to physically look like Him. Or in other words, that God looks like this giant human being that walks upright. And that would be a weird thing anyway, since God is a spirit, is what it says. So what does that mean? That brings up imagery of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And if we start looking at it through that lens, that speaks to more of us being made in a three-part being, as we are in three parts rather than physically looking like God. See, that's a whole different kind of an idea. That's a different way of seeing God. And if we go to where it says that we are a living tabernacle and we start comparing ourselves in that way, I think it confirms it and it even solidifies the idea and brings it into a more comprehensive understanding. Let me explain what I mean. In episode 15, we talked through the physical layout of the tabernacle. It was an outer courtyard, then a holy place, and then finally a holy of holies. Now, in order to kind of help us understand what it was actually like, imagine approaching the tabernacle from the outside. It was surrounded by this very large fence with gates in the front. Now, as you walked through the gates, you would be standing in the outer courtyard, and this is where the tabernacle itself interacted with the external world. Now, towards the back of the courtyard was a structure that had only one entrance. Now, this was very restricted. Only a priest could go through that entrance. And as they went through, they would be standing in the holy place. Now, towards the back at the holy place was this very thick purple veil, which even they couldn't go past. Only the high priest could go past once a year. And when he did, he would be standing in the Holy of Holies, and he would be seeing the Ark of the Covenant where they believed the Spirit of God resided. Now, through what we just walked through, you start to realize that the outer courtyard represents our physical bodies, and the holy place represents our minds, and the restricted place, the holy of holies, represents our spirits. So you might be asking, what does this have to do with the image of God? The outer courtyard represents Jesus, the Word made flesh. The holy place represents the Holy Spirit, the will of God, just like we talk about, our will, our essence, our cardia, the heart of. And past the holy place, the purple veil where no one can go to, is where God is, the restricted area, God's Spirit. That's where He resides. So now I think we start to understand what it means that we are made in God's image, that we are living tabernacles. I hope that's not confusing, that the tabernacle represents symbolically how we look like God, that it's not physically we look like God, but it's how we are structured is how we look like God in a three-part being. If you look up like an architectural rendering foreplan of the tabernacle, you'll see what I'm saying. And then you'll start to realize that the outer courtyard looks like our bodies, which also represents Jesus, the word made flesh. And then in the middle, towards the back of the courtyard, is the holy place, which represents our minds. This represents the Holy Spirit, the will of God. Now the holy place or our minds, or the Holy Spirit, is attached to but separated by this very thick purple veil, which no one can go to, the holy of holies, the spirit, our spirit, God's spirit. So the outer courtyard represents Jesus, the flesh that came to us. The holy place represents the Holy Spirit. It's Einstein's idea of God. It's the quantum, the energy, the will of God. Past the purple veil, which represents moving to outside of the universe, is where God is. This is how Isaac Newton saw God. Now, this wouldn't be spiritual hot sauce if I didn't stop and talk about the number three, because in most archetypal ideas and universal truths, especially ancient ones, it's considered to be the most important number there is. It's widely regarded as the number of completion, balance, and synthesis. It signifies resolution of the duality. What duality? Our duality. By adding this third, it gives us higher understanding and higher purpose. This starts speaking in a weird way to a higher truth. I mean in art we call it the rule of thirds. It brings balance and allows things to be created in a much more balanced and dimensional way. Now in music, you cannot have a chord without the third. You can have two notes that's in harmony, but they're not complete. Now, when you add the third, it determines whether it's major or minor, what skelet belongs to, and if it's in tune with itself and with something bigger. So the statement of the third is the resolution to our duality, speaks to us being in tune with ourselves, but missing the bigger picture. It's the third that brings purpose and determines major, minor, and being in tune with something bigger. So three speaks about life. So now we have to talk about life, and we have to talk about this word Zoe that pops up. And it means life here and now as well as after we die, the beyond. And it also speaks to God and his place in all this, the holy of holies. It's where Jesus gives the parable of the Good Samaritan, and it's a lawyer that comes to him and asks, How do I inherit eternal life? And that phrase right there, if you start digging in, it starts changing things because it's not how we traditionally receive it or understand it. Now, Zoe means life here and now as well as after we died. That is the meaning of life. But the lawyer says, How do I inherit it? So he's saying that it's not his. That's not everlasting. See, if something is everlasting, it had a beginning point. Eternal had no beginning point, it's always been. See, even the universe itself cannot be eternal because we believe it had a starting point, which means at most it could only be everlasting. This means there is nothing that is in the universe that is eternal. So when the lawyer asks Jesus, how do I inherit eternal life, a life that's not from here, this universe, and a life that is not his, because it must be inherited, it takes on a whole different meaning, doesn't it? So that means that we are not eternal beings, that we're not going to live forever. We could be everlasting, I mean, hypothetically, but in context, against what Jesus is saying with this conversation, because he never corrects the man, that this life that Jesus brought us, according to John chapter one in the prologue, was from outside the universe before the universe, and that God knew there was going to be a problem with us, so he sent Jesus, his word, with his Zoe that we might inherit it. All right, so let's get into where I got this from, this whole idea and this concept that I'm presenting to you, and let's go even deeper. Now, these ideas I got and how I'm presenting it is kind of from, like I said, that Paul used philosophical ideas, and through that lens of a universal truth is how he presented spiritual ideas and understanding. Now, in the Upanishads, which just literally translates in the Vedas, there's a philosophy called Avaitanta. And from Avaitavadanta, there is Namarupa, which means name and form. Now, this philosophy came from India between the 8th and 5th century BCE, about 2,500 to 2,800 years old, it is. This ancient knowledge. Now, the same time these Indian Rishis are coming up with Namarupa. In Greece, we have philosophers coming up with the same thing around the same time, this universal connection, which is called logos. Sound familiar? And there's a variation of it that pops up in Iraq called occasionalism between the 800s and 1100s CE. Spinoza would give us the philosophy of pantheism. I mean, there's all these different ideas and concepts around the same thing, this idea that everything is connected. Now, I'm not trying to break each and individual one of them out and look at them. I present them all as kind of a singular idea of a grander thinking that involves all of them. But I present it through Namarupa. I think of it like this: it's this huge dark warehouse, and none of us can see it all. But through different cultures and different times and through different understandings, we turn on a light. But it doesn't illuminate the entire building. It just lights a part of it. But as each culture, as each thinker comes up with these ideas, we start to get a collective idea of something bigger. And that's kind of how I see this. As universal truths and archetypal information and knowledge, we might arrive at a different conclusion of how we see God. All right, so what does Namarupa say? So it says this. It just means that everything you see, including yourself, is nothing more than name and form. Let me give you an example. Imagine a room. Walls, floor, ceiling. That's the structure holding everything. Now picture yourself sitting in a chair at a table with a cup on it. What's makes up the room? Drywall, wood, concrete? Well it makes those atoms, molecules? Dig deeper, it's protons, neutrons, electrons, subatomic particles. If you keep going past the quarks, the smallest known bits, and science reveals it's all vibrations, quantum energy fields, or strings, pure potential. But here's the thing your body, your bones, your skin, your blood is built from the same layers, cells to atoms, to quarks, to energy waves, the chair, the table, the cup, the air you breathe, even desmites or stardust across the other side of the universe, same source. It's all from the same place. It's just energy. So, in other words, everything we see in shape and form ultimately is all the same thing. And once you get down to the quantum, this energy, there's something interesting about it. There's this thing called quantum entanglement. And you can take some subatomic particles like protons and you can entangle them, but you can take one of the protons and put it on the other side of the universe. And then the original protons, the group it was attached to, entangled with, you can make them spin. But as you do in real time, that single proton on the other side of the universe will spin in real time without any latency or delay. So what's that mean? It means that the universe itself that creates space is not subject to its own laws of the space it creates. It's almost like an entity, a single entity. See, the speed limit that you can go in the physical world that we understand it is 186,282 miles per second. But see, the universe is expanding at a faster rate than the speed of light. That's why we don't have any idea what's on the other side of the universe. Because light cannot travel fast enough to escape the speed and the velocity of the universe itself. So it cannot bring us the information on what's on the other side. It can't escape it. Thus, it's the purple veil. We cannot see or go beyond it. So the late Dr. Wolfgang Smith said that our bodies are subject to time and space, that our minds are subject to time, but not space. And that spiritually, that we would be subject to neither time nor space if we did have like a living spirit. So that would mean that the tabernacle at the outer courtyard, Jesus represents the physical body, which was subject to time and space. But in the holy place, that would mean that it is subject to time but not space. But that starts sounding like the universe, the quantum, like it is the will of God. But at the edge of the universe, that place we can't see. Past that thick purple veil. Past that represents the eternal state, the place that has no beginning, no ending. It's always been and it will always be. God in his eternal state. This is a much, much bigger God than we've ever thought of in religion. It's so big, in fact, that we can't even comprehend the magnitude of how big this really is. And a God that's that big, does that mean that he doesn't interact with us on a personal level? Well, absolutely not. Through the quantum, his will, he can do whatever he wants to do. So it's the hearer's perspective of what you believe. That is between you and God. Now, if we are a living tabernacle, do we have three parts that says that we spiritually are dead, there's nothing there. That would speak about our duality, and that the third piece that puts us in tune, the third piece that determines our major, our minor, and how we fit in to everything else is that third that goes into our Holy of Holies and brings this Zoe, this life, the resolution. Now, the tabernacle, the original tabernacle, the physical one, it would later become a temple. Built and comprised the same way as the tabernacle, it was just built on a much bigger and more grandiose scale. So there were two incarnations of this temple. Now, the first temple in its holy of holies had the Spirit of God. It had the Ark of the Covenant. But later on, when Jesus shows up, there's a second temple. Well, the Ark of the Covenant is missing, so there is no Spirit of God in that Holy of Holies. So that temple serves itself instead of the people. We talked about in episode 15, there's no servants outside the gate. They've replaced these servants with merchants outside the gate. See, without that third in our holy of holies, it's our duality. We can be in tune, but it's only to ourself. We're not in tune to humanity or the bigger picture. And that's what was going on. See, it's the serpent's venom we we talked about. It's pride, which allows you to put your throne above everyone else's. And that's what that temple did. And it was serving itself in greed and its own lust of what it wanted. And because of that, it served no purpose other than itself. It wasn't in tune. See, we as a living tabernacle, if we have that third part in our Holy of Holies, it tunes us. Now we have resolution. Now we are complete. We are a complete cord. We fit into a bigger scale. We are a part of humanity. We serve us, not just me. Now I think we can see that there is a way that God can exist. That there is a place where both spirit and science do come together. That science speaks to the external of what was created, and spiritual things speaks to the internal about tuning us to serve that creation. Thanks for joining me here on Spiritual Hot Sauce. I'd love to hear from you. So please reach out with questions, comments, andor concerns. And don't forget to like, subscribe, and review us. You can follow us on Facebook for updates and information. And if you enjoy the flavor of the sauce, then please share it with others. I would appreciate that. We'll see you next time.