THE EXACT LOCATION OF GOD

Good morning! Welcome! Before we begin, I'd like to introduce myself. I'm not the minister. I'm Alan MacRobert, a member of this church. We have a tradition here of many of the services being led by members of the congregation, and this is one of those times.

I'm an astronomer. At least I've been an amateur astronomer since I was a teenager, and now I'm an editor at Sky & Telescope, the world's leading astronomy magazine. I've always looked up at things out there in the universe as a hobby, and my day job is also about dealing with the celestial spheres -- literally, what are called "the heavens."

Astronomers are supposed to know about higher realms. That's what Mike Lally of the Religious Services Committee must have been thinking when he cornered me a while back and said, "So you should be able to tell us where God is. Can I put you down for a sermon on that?" That seemed reasonable, so I said yes.

I'm up here to tell you truly and correctly what the heavens are about, and what we can tell from them about the literal and exact location of God. No parables here, no hoc-est-pocus, but actual straight truth.

Of all the sciences, astronomy is supposed to have the closest connection with religion. The sky has always been the abode of deities, angels, saints, and the blessed elect. When you die and go to Heaven, up is the direction you go. Dead Roman emperors went up to Heaven on comets. Modern astronomy has gotten somewhat removed from that, but now it deals up close and personal with fundamental matters of origins -- the Big Bang, how the Earth and life came to be -- and the universe's ultimate, final destiny.

The idea that God is Up There is something we absorb very young. "At about the age of four," wrote the British historian Arthur Koestler, "I had what I felt to be a satisfactory understanding of God and the world. I remember an occasion when my father pointed his finger at the white ceiling, which was decorated with a frieze of dancing [Greek] men and women, and explained that God was up there watching me. I immediately became convinced that the dancers were God, and henceforth addressed my prayers to them, asking for their protection against the terrors of day and night.

"Much in the same manner" Koestler continued, "did the luminous, starry constellation figures on the dark ceiling of the world appear as living divinities to Babylonians and Egyptians. The Twins [Gemini], the Bear, the Serpent were as familiar to them as my fluted dancers to me; they were not very far away, and they held power of life and death, harvest and rain."

That was a comforting, enclosed world, even if the gods could be capricious. The universe of the ancients was a nice closed box, with god-filled sky like a ceiling, and people-filled land below.

As the Greeks figured out more about astronomy, this box became more complicated. The Sun, Moon, and the five planets that are visible to the naked eye were observed to move in regular ways against the background of the stars, so to explain this, each one was assigned a layer of heaven, a rotating crystal sphere to ride on, like shells of an onion. Earth was at the onion's center.

This picture was taken over by the Hebrews and the Christian church. As you rose through the heavens toward God, you first passed through the sublunary sphere, the realm below the Moon containing air, weather, change, decay, and Earthly ills. You passed the sphere carrying the Moon -- the first level of perfect heaven -- then, in order, the spheres of Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, to reach the sphere of fixed stars: seventh heaven. Beyond the layer of stars was, as you see engraved on old celestial maps, the abode of the Lord God and all saved souls.

In the Middle Ages this nice, comfortable onion of a universe was elaborated on by many scholars and philosophers. Everything in Creation was assigned its place in a hierarchy from high to low, from celestial to base -- a Great Chain of Being. At the top beyond the stars was the infinite God, then as you came downward were angels, then saints, then on down through the layers of the planetary and lunar spheres, to the highest mortals: kings and princes, then the nobility, then commoners, then serfs -- then animals, from the most noble down to the lowly worm, then plants, and the rocks in the Earth itself. Below them came the damned, underlayered by a whole inverse hierarchy of demons, and finally, anchoring the very bottom, the bitter end of the Great Chain of Being at the center of the Earth, Satan himself. Everything had its place -- from God outside the onion to the Earth in the middle, down to the devil at the center point. The medieval universe was literally devil-centered.

That is the image of the world that underpins all our Western heritage of ideas about divine geography.

This is also the picture that the science of astronomy knocked apart, beginning in the late 1500's with Copernicus. The new astronomical discoveries put the Earth spinning adrift in empty space like any other planet, with the Sun at the center of things, not the devil. When Galileo turned the newly invented telescope on the sky, what did he see beyond the stars? Just more stars. The smashing of the medieval onion was what set the established Church so severely against Copernicus, Galileo, and their supporters.

>From there it only got worse. The next few centuries of astronomy revealed that the divine, perfect, eternal stuff of the heavens themselves is nothing better than the base, changeable stuff of Earth: rocks and gas drifting around in the sky. The heavens even proved to be made of the same mundane chemical elements and compounds as the stuff around us. God's heavenly abode, in the old sense, could no longer exist. It was all Earth -- literally earth -- dirt and rock. The flip side of this is that we are already in the heavens -- our planet and we ourselves are truly made of star-stuff -- but no one much thought of it that way.

By the early 20th century the location of God, and the need for him to play any role whatever in the workings of the cosmos, had been pushed pretty much clean out of the picture. If you asked where God was located, he was nowhere, or everywhere -- vague answers that didn't seem to mean anything. Heaven was in some other dimension, unreachable by flying a rocket anywhere in our known three-dimensional space. This was routinely believed by people who, at the same time, believed that other dimensions were science-fiction poppycock.

To grasp astronomy by the early 20th century was very largely to dismiss religion as the superstitious relic of ignorant ages. That was certainly the status of religion with regard to explaining the physical universe and man's place in it.

The new, correct picture that had been found by actually observing the universe was summed up in one of the standard college astronomy textbooks in use about 50 years ago:

"Not so very long ago," the last page of the textbook summed up, "man regarded himself as the center and crowning glory of the universe. 'For him did His high Sun flame, and His river billowing ran.' The purpose of the Sun was to give [man] light by day, and that of the Moon to light his way by night, and the stars were mentioned as having been 'made also.' Copernicus... showed that the Earth was but one of a number of little balls which revolve around the Sun. Modern astronomy has gone much farther and shown that the Solar System is but a tiny speck in the great Galactic System [our Milky Way galaxy], and that the latter is only one of myriads of other galaxies.

"Man has lost his exalted position not only in space but also in time," the textbook pointed out. "It appears that the stars existed [thousands] of millions of years before the Earth was born; that it was thousands of millions of years later that terrestrial life began at the shore of the primordial sea; that hundreds of millions more elapsed before man appeared; and that during all but a small fraction of his few hundred thousand years of existence, he has been only little superior to other animals. The characterization of human history as 'a brief and discreditable episode in the life of one of the meaner planets' is not indefensible."

That picture is still true and correct today, filled in and solidified by much more detail.

But human attitudes toward the universe are more than just physical descriptions in textbooks. They always embody the social and philosophical trends of their times. And at the beginning of the 20th century, amid the other triumphs of the Industrial Revolution, modern astronomy was assumed to bring along some deep philosophical baggage that later seemed like overstepping.

Given the tenor of the times it could lead to extreme conclusions, contempt for humanity, and social Darwinism.

These attitudes were recorded perfectly by the New England poet H. P. Lovecraft of Providence, a lifelong amateur astronomer who wove the prevailing scientific view of the cosmos into his stories of the supernatural and early science fiction. I discovered his stories as a teenager and loved them. And as another amateur astronomer, I could certainly identify with part of what he had to say as an artist:

"My... dominant sensation," he wrote, "has been a kind of ecstatic wonder at the unfathomable reaches of nighted space and the glittering jewels of nebular, solar, and planetary fire. Amidst this colossal, kaleidoscopic, undying and unbounded drama of infinite time and space, everything terrestrial and human shrinks away to insignificance. There is, to my mind, a kind of hideous irony in the assumption of the human point of view at all -- in the exaltation, celebration, or even detailed notice of the contemptible organic processes of the filthy louse called man.... When Kleiner showed me the sky-line of New-York, I told him that man is like the coral insect -- designed to build vast, beautiful, mineral things for the moonlight to delight in after he is dead."

People who had seen the universe revealed in this light had no use for the comforting notions about ultimate causes and purposes that these coral insects had invented for themselves, or for the bigger insect they imagined above them:

"I have never been able to soothe myself with the sugary delusions of religion," Lovecraft wrote to a friend, "for these things stand convicted of the utmost absurdity in the light of modern scientific knowledge. With Nietzsche, I have been forced to confess that mankind as a whole has no goal or purpose whatsoever, but is a mere superfluous speck in the unfathomable vortices of infinity and eternity.... However, I have never permitted these circumstances to react upon my daily life; for it is obvious that although I have 'nothing to live for,' I certainly have just as much as any other of the insignificant bacteria called human beings."

The human race as insignificant bacteria. Among people who paid attention to the meaning of science and astronomy, that was thought to be the end of philosophy, where it all had finally led. If you judge by physical size and importance and power, which were the standards of the Industrial Revolution then, "bacteria" is a very accurate description. Humans on the surface of the Earth are proportionately smaller and less numerous than bacteria on the surface of a basketball. Those are not what anyone sees as important about the basketball.

This new scientific philosophy, at least among the few who faced up to it, led to other attitudes far removed from astronomy. As an example, if you'll allow me one last quote from Lovecraft: "I... feel a certain tranquillity which comes from perfect acceptance of my place as an inconsequential atom. In ceasing to care about most things, I have likewise ceased to suffer in many ways. There is a real restfulness in the scientific conviction that nothing matters very much."

Nothing matters very much. The religious world was outraged and terrified by this seemingly clear implication of what science had discovered. And outraged and terrified it still is.

I'd like to pause here a minute to consider where this leaves a church like us. To me, the essence of Unitarian-Universalism is that this is the church where you don't have to fake it. You don't have to stand up and say you believe things, or pretend you believe things, that, in light of common sense and experience, you actually find implausible. We're all familiar with, and a little tired of, Unitarian jokes in this regard. You know, What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with a Unitarian? Someone who comes and knocks on your door for no particular reason?

We may not have a lot of pat answers, but what we do have is the small core of what we honestly, genuinely think, "in light of reason and experience," to actually be real! When you strip away all the falsehoods and absurdities from religion, all the plainly made-up fairy tales and sugary delusions -- which immediately removes you from any hope of mass-market appeal -- some people decide there's nothing left at all. Those are true atheists. But some people conclude that after you strip away all the fake stuff and junk, there actually is some real and solid substance left. If you think about it, that's probably what brings you here on Sunday mornings. We may not have a whole lot in the way of set beliefs, but what each of us does hold is that small core remaining that seems to us to be actually real. We don't have to switch off our minds, or close off knowledge of things like astronomy and biology, or engage in the crippling Sunday doublethink this would require. Or pretend to. The strong point of our members' faith is quality, not quantity. Truth and plausibility, not fairy-tale completeness.

Where does this leave a location to put God? Where, in this vast, blazing, inhuman, uncaring cosmos, can he fit? That's what I'm going to tell as we wind this up.

We left off at the height of the Industrial Revolution in the early 20th century. Intellectual trends come and go, and today we're in the information age. Simple mechanical bigness and power now take a back seat in the hierarchy of values to smallness, smartness, and intricacy. And here the human bacteria on the basketball look much more interesting.

In fact, if you pass your judgments by the simple criterion of information content, the human brain turns out to be the most interesting and important thing in the cosmos for maybe a thousand light-years in any direction -- taking that as a reasonable guess for the distance to the next closest intelligent civilization. This newer attitude, influenced by the computer economy, has put humans back up on the throne as the crown of known creation.

But it still doesn't put God into the picture. We may be the crown of creation, but we've got nowhere to go. Our species was formed by happenstance, got here by no design, and has no particular destiny. Other than whatever destiny we make.

The heavens out there, with today's knowledge of astronomy, prove to be even more hostile and uncaring than was imagined a century ago. At least, it used to be thought, all those other worlds and planets -- they must be there for some good reason. It was assumed a century ago that many or most planets would harbor life. Not so. It's clear now that the vast majority of worlds are forever lifeless, sterile, and seemingly pointless.

Space is beautiful but hostile. It is almost always unimaginably cold, empty, and changelessly dull, or unimaginably hot and violent. Whole galaxies are sterilized by x-rays blazing from their cores where stars happen to fall together -- without regard for any living things -- blind, uncaring, ignorant. The outer heavens, so beautiful and inspiring from a distance, have zero moral content. This certainly seems like no seat of a caring God.

Compared to this, nature on Earth, which has been called "red of tooth and claw," is positively benign. The biosphere takes care of its own. To find those qualities we think of as Godlike, what used to be called Christian, you have to come down from the sky to Earth. Only here do things get remotely friendly and supportive. Only here do you begin to find anything that could at all be seen as sign of a benign God's presence.

Yet even here, nature is red of tooth and claw -- and shows no sign of having a trace of guidance. It's all happenstance. There is no ecological niche so disgusting, so immoral, that something will not occupy it -- exactly as if blind processes of nature and evolution were blundering along alone.

The green trees and white clouds of the transcendentalists, such as our own Emerson, may to some look in their beauty as if they embody the living God, but they too lack any moral content. The beauty tells you only about the eye of the beholder.

So you need to look not just down from the sky... but in from outdoors. Can you see the presence hovering down, narrowing in? On us.

If anywhere in the universe you want to find such things as values, compassion, direction, purpose, a sign of anything higher, you have to look to people. There is no other place you will find them.

And not many people show these Godly presences very much of the time. These usually come out only in our better moments -- and at times when we deliberately pay homage to them -- times like we have right here. Do you see it hovering in closer now? "The kingdom of Heaven is among you," someone once said... And maybe that means right within these walls. "Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I." The exact location of God, as best I can tell, is in those small, close places where the unnatural, unphysical values of compassion, and love, and truth, and justice, and higher direction and purpose are present. Wherever things do matter very much. Wherever things do matter very much.

Where Francis David froze in his cell at Deva, where Michael Servetus was burned in Geneva, where you transcend yourselves a little bit to do right in your lives -- and perhaps within these walls -- there can be found God. And, from an astronomer's perspective -- nowhere else.