Advances in Dark Energy Physics Put God Back in the Driver’s Seat

Written by Chriss Street

Physics began 300 years ago as pursuit for the knowable, fixed, and unchanging laws of the universe.  Newton’s 3 laws of motion and law of universal gravitation explained away God on earth for 200 years, then Einstein’s theory of special relativity 100 years ago explained away God in the universe.  But new scientific studies proving dark energy accounts for 68% of everything in the universe, just put God back in the driver’s seat. 

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the world's three major religions are based on Genisis 1:1 that, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”  Although the “heavens and earth” appears 13 times in the Biblical Old Testament, there is Hebrew word for universe.  Each time the phrase is used it refers to the entirety of physical reality, all matter, energy, space and time.  This is an affirmative statement that the universe has a beginning, and it is a created entity.

Sir Isaac Newton is considered the father of the Enlightenment, because he combined the scientific method with naturalism, the belief that nature is the only reality and that there is no supernatural order above it.  Newton described his scientific method as: “from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena.”  His approach to physics led to creation of calculus as a fundamental mathematical tool to submit forces he inferred to calculation.  

Charles Darwin applied the scientific method to create knowable, fixed, and unchanging laws for evolution.  Darwin understood that by “dissociating intellect and morality from God's power of creation, and attributing them instead to self-evolving forces”, he was undermining the British Anglican Church and its Biblical promise of eternal life. 

Einstein challenged Newton's laws of physics that assumed that length and time are absolute.  Einstein proposed a “special relativity”, due to massive objects moving above 1,000 meters/second in the absence of gravity cause the warping of the fabric of space-time in the universe that manifests itself as gravity.

Two years ago at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (desi) with a focal plane containing 5,000 fiber-positioning robots connected to banks of spectrographs completed building a three-dimensional map of the tens of millions of galaxies in the heavens, to investigate the nature of dark energy, a mysterious entity that is known to account for 68% of everything in the universe and which pushes space apart in a repulsive version of gravity. 

Desi was looking for “redshift” of the light spectrum toward longer (red) wavelengths to measure movement of very distant objects.  Similar to the Doppler effect for sound waves, a change in wavelength that results when a given source of light and radio waves and an observer are in motion with respect to each other.  

Astrophysicist believed based on the knowable, fixed, and unchanging laws of the established Big Bang Theory, dark energy density must have been unchanged with the universe expanding at the same rate for the last 13.7 billion years.  Scientists hoped to identify some unexpected distant object movements through their red spectrum 'shift.'

Desi shockingly identified 12.8 million redshifts in the first nine months of observations, indicating that there are tremendous irregularities in the expansion of galaxies across the universe.  When Desi’s 5,000 robots measured changes from data of distant as objects sped-up and slowed-down, the plotted printouts looked like bubbles.   

Contrary to all theories that dark energy density is a constant, the density appears to have been changing over time.  Dragan Huterer from the University of Michigan who has been involved in the project commented: “It’s so bizarre.”  According to Huterer, if the Desi findings prove true, it will catapult cosmology into a crisis.

Christian astrophysicist Hugh Ross presented a lecture regarding the evolving scientific perspective on God and the universe on March 3, 2024: