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Michael Guillen argues that dark matter and dark energy reveal how little science knows about the universe – and, in his view, make religion more credible.
Guillen recalls how his first microscope and telescope revealed worlds he could not see with the naked eye. He says science was long presented as a force that would dispel superstition, including religion. He points to Carl Sagan’s book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark as an example of that outlook; Sagan was Guillen’s professor at Cornell.
This is reported by Fox News.
But, Guillen writes, scientific discoveries have also exposed how much remains unseen. As a graduate student at Cornell, he learned about the “missing mass problem,” which dates to 1933. Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky used observations from the Mount Wilson Observatory’s Hooker telescope to study galaxy clusters and found that galaxies within them moved faster than conventional physics could explain. The clusters would need roughly ten times more mass to account for that speed. Zwicky called the unseen mass “dunkle materie,” German for dark matter.
Scientists still do not know what dark matter is, Guillen says. The prevailing view is that it acts through gravity, tugging on galaxies and speeding them up, but it does not emit or reflect light. He also recounts how Edwin Hubble used the Hooker telescope in 1929 to discover that the universe is expanding. Astronomers assumed the expansion would slow under the pull of gravity, until two separate teams found in 1998 that it was speeding up. At a symposium that year at the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra, University of Chicago cosmologist Michael Turner named the unknown force behind the acceleration “dark energy.” Guillen says it, too, remains unexplained.
Guillen writes that scientists estimate dark matter and dark energy together account for 95 percent of the observable cosmos, leaving the other five percent visible to our instruments. He argues that this means science’s understanding of reality rests on only a small part of what exists, and that each new discovery can reveal how much remains unknown. In his view, that makes religion more credible, rather than less.
He closes by invoking the Apostle Paul’s words, written nearly 2,000 years ago: “For now we see through a glass, darkly.”
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