God wants to be recognized and known. In Lystra, Paul and Barnabas declared that God has not left himself without evidence or testimony (Acts 14:17). Paul to the Romans said that God’s invisible qualities are seen in creation (1:19-20). This week, the scientific world is all aflutter again because of “dark flow”, first reported by scientists in 2008. Dark flow describes a phenomenon in which hundreds of galaxies appear to be streaming in the same direction at an incredible speed more than 10 times the speed of light, apparently pulled or influenced by some “unseen structures” on the fringe of creation (according to the perspective that affirms nothing supernatural exists outside of the created universe). Those of us who believe in the God who is bigger than the universe and exists outside of and independently of the universe can think of another possibility.
Scientists are puzzled by the observed coordinated streaming motion because it cannot be explained by current models that explain how mass is distributed in the universe. Thus, some researchers have made the controversial suggestion that the clusters are being tugged on by the gravity of matter outside the known universe. The researchers say that the flow clearly points in the same direction, very coherent.
Scientists have a natural explanation: chunks of matter got pushed outside the known universe as a result of or shortly after the big bang, so our universe is part of a larger “multiverse”. A similar explanation is that the universe we have observed to this point is not all there is, and that there are much larger portions of the universe which are unseen.
I find all of the discussion interesting–it buoys my faith that God is still at work! God is still fashioning, molding, sustaining, perhaps even still creating? (Why not?) The “unseen structure” which so powerfully moves parts of our universe where he wishes them to be I call God. Evidence continues to mount–some see God, some cannot! Interesting!