The opening of the Paralympics had a cosmological theme and emblematic celestial sphere. “Ever since the dawn of civilisation, people have craved an understanding of the underlying order of the world,” Stephen Hawking said. “Why it is as it is and why it exists at all.” The answers keep changing.
According to Saul Perlmutter, a winner of the Nobel prize last year, the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate because of an entity called dark energy. A generation ago, the orthodoxy was that the expansion of the universe was slowing down.
The uncertainty of facts about the physical world makes it hard for those who hope to use them to prove the existence of God. Indeed, if most of the universe, in the form of dark matter and dark energy, is not detectable, it almost seems that the existence of the universe needs proving first.
In setting out to prove God’s existence, however, the task is not to say something extra about the universe. The God whose existence is to be proved, or disproved, is not part of the universe. If God by nature could be seen, he would lack the attributes that are part and parcel of what we mean by God.
Thus the infinity of God is not the mathematical infinity of time and space (whether it is “curved” or not). The kinds of infinity applicable to God are unlimited intellect, will (love) and power. Nor is God a cause in the universe like other secondary causes. He is the cause of the cosmos in the sense of explaining “why it exists at all” in Professor Hawking’s words. God is called transcendent because he is not in the universe as one object among many. He is called immanent because he is intimately present to the cosmos as the cause of every bit of it existing.