What Holds The Universe Together?

Several separate passages in the New Testament make reference to the creation of the universe. John's gospel speaks of an earlier state of existence than is described in Verse 1 of Genesis,

In the beginning was the Word, [logos] and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; [before creation] all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it...And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father...No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known. (John 1:1-17)

This passage of the New Testament teaches that Jesus was eternally existent with God the Father prior to the creation of all things. Further, this Word, the Son of God, was and is fully God in his own right. At a point late in the history of mankind the Son of God became a man and was born into the human race in order to solve the problem of death, and to repair a broken universe.

Chapter One of Paul's Epistle to the Colossians gives a further description of the role of Jesus in creation which is consistent with John,

[Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the first-born [prototokos] of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities [i.e., hierarchical angelic powers]---all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

The Holy Spirit, in giving us this inspired passage of Scripture, now explains that all things (both visible and invisible) in the entire universe were created through this same Jesus, the Eternal Word. We may think of the universe and its intricate design as being conceived in the mind of the Father then spoken into existence by the Son (who makes the invisible, visible). The Holy Spirit is the One who energizes and supplies life to the creation, not only at the time of creation but also moment by moment after that.

We are also told that all things were created for Jesus. He is "the heir of all things." That means that we are house guests in Someone Else's universe. There is a future accountability to be given by all of us---history is headed somewhere and at the end of road stands Jesus to whom all power and authority has already been given:

Jesus said, "The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son, even as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternal life; he does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life. Truly, truly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself, and has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of man. Do not marvel at this; for the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment." (John 5:22-29)

One of the key words in the Colossians passage above ("...and in Christ all things hold together") is the Greek word sunistemi which means "to stand-together," "to be compacted together," "to cohere," "to be constituted with." This passage can be applied to the structure of the atom, for example. The nucleus of every atom is held together by what physicists call "weak" and "strong" forces. (Physicists today are familiar with four basic forces in the natural world: gravity, electrical forces, a "strong," and a "weak" nuclear force which act at very short ranges. The first two forces decrease in strength inversely with the square of the distance between two objects. Recently two additional close-range, weak gravitational forces have been suggested. These are thought to be quantum mechanical corrections to Newton's Law of Gravitation.)

The nucleus of the atom contains positively-charged and neutral particles--to use a simplistic model. Mutual electrostatic repulsion between the like-positive protons would drive the nucleus apart if it were not for the "strong force" which binds the nucleus together.

The third New Testament passage which talks about atomic structure and physics is 2 Peter:

"But the Day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise and the elements (atoms) will be dissolved with fire and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up." (2 Peter 3:10)

The Greek word translated elements in this passage from Colossians is stoicheion which means the building blocks of the universe, or "the ordered arrangement of things." It can also mean the "atomic elements." The word translated "dissolved" is literally (in Greek) luo, meaning "unloosed." This suggests a further, future letting-go of the nuclear binding force that holds the nucleus together. This passage strongly suggests that the active power of God is behind the mysterious strong force that holds every atomic nucleus together. If this is so, all the other fundamental forces of nature are likewise forces that originate with Christ and His sustaining direction of the old creation.

If this is a correct view, were God to merely relax His grasp on the universe every atom would come apart "by fire" (that is, by nuclear fire). God dynamically sustains the universe, including the atoms themselves. They are "stable" only because force from the spiritual realm is being supplied into the physical nuclear binding fields. Whatever we may think of God and physics, the Bible leaves us with no room to doubt that God does care about the sparrow that falls to the ground, the widow, the orphan, and the homeless. He does not lose track of any of His children and watches over them with infinite, patient, intimate Fatherly care. He sustains the universe by His mighty word of power. He also alters the status quo and, in response to prayer, frequently changes the course of entire nations.

Another important claim of scripture about the old creation is that God is the present Sustainer of the universe. That is, He is not uninvolved, remote, detached and impersonal--leaving things to run by themselves--by any means. Among secular scientists today there are many who acknowledge that God exists. But He is usually considered as only a First Cause---the One who brought the universe into existence and set it into motion. But most of these same scientists assume God was not involved after the initial act of creation. This is contrary to clear statements in the Bible that God is very much involved in every event that takes place in the on-going history of the entire universe:

Again, the fact that Jesus is presently sustaining the universe from the realm of the spiritual raises the question whether there are inputs of energy as well as force into our physical world which ultimately show up as energy added "from the outside" of our physical world considered as a closed system. This is discussed in the next section.

He's Got the Whole World in His Hands

Aristotle (384 - 322 BC) taught that the physical world was made up of four elements: air, earth, fire and water. Tying these all together so that the "elements" intercommunicated was a "subtle" medium, a fifth element: the aether--later to be known as the vacuum. (The Latin root vacuus means "empty"). In a sense the aether was the substratum of the material world. The Greeks believed that "nature abhors a vacuum" so they could not imagine space as being totally empty.

The Greeks believed the stars were suspended from, or attached to, a rotating crystalline shell at a fixed distance from the earth. When some of the "stars" (planets) were observed to be moving with respect to the "fixed" stars, a series of rotating crystal spheres was postulated. The earth was believed to be fixed, immovable, and at the center of the creation. Not until the 16th Century were these Greek (Ptolemaic) ideas challenged by the Copernican revolution. One of the most mysterious concepts in western physics since Aristotle's day is the concept of the vacuum. Until Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642) challenged the notion, the velocity of light was assumed by most everyone to be infinite, so the nature of the space between the earth and the crystal spheres was not of great concern.

Rene Descartes (1596-1640) championed the theory that the aether was a plenum, from the Greek word meaning "full." Because it was so difficult for the scientists of that era to understand "action at a distance," Descartes imagined that a very dense medium of very small particles pervaded everything. This medium was capable of transmitting force from one object to another by collisions. The aether "particles" were in constant motion and there were no spaces between the particles. In a sense the aether was more solid than matter, yet invisible. Descartes universe was purely a "mechanical universe" and his theories were soon superseded.

Galileo's former secretary, Evangelista Torricelli filled a long glass tube with mercury in 1644. Inverting the tube into a dish of mercury he observed that the mercury dropped some 30 inches at the closed upper end of the tube, thereby creating what was obviously a vacuum. Blaise Pascal (1623 -1662) took this work even further and soon everyone was convinced that the vacuum of space was empty after all.

If light were corpuscular in nature as some believed, it was not difficult to image light "particles" (we now call them photons) could traverse a pure vacuum without the necessity of a real medium pervading all of space. But other experiments soon began to show that light was a wave phenomenon. Of course waves could be travel through the plenum aether by collisions, however at the time only compressional waves were imagined. [Sound waves or seismic waves are compressional in nature, for instance, but light waves proved to be transverse]. In parallel with all these growing controversies, the velocity of light was finally measured by Olaf Roemer in 1675 and found to be finite, although the values he obtained were a few percent higher than the present value, 299,792.4358 km/sec.

By the time of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) the aether was believed by many scientists to be "luminiferous." That is, the aether was said to be more fluid than solid, though it was elastic, and therefore it was a medium which would support waves. James Clerk Maxwell (1839 - 1879) enjoyed great success when he found a set of equations which beautifully described how light waves could travel through such a luminiferous aether. He showed that light waves are composed of oscillating electric and magnetic vectors in an x-y plane for a wave traveling in the z-direction. For a waves to exist at all, it is natural to suppose that there is some sort of supporting medium. Such a medium must possess elasticity (a spring-like property) and also inertia, (a mass-like like property). In fact, the velocity of a wave in any medium is equal to the square root of the stiffness divided by the density of the medium.

In the case of electromagnetic waves (gamma rays, x-rays, radio waves, heat, and light of various wavelengths), Maxwell found that the aether possessed an electric-field scaling parameter, called "dielectric permittivity," and a magnetic-field scaling parameter, called permeability, such that the velocity of light was equal to one over the square root of permeability times permittivity. In support of the notion that the aether was a real medium it was observed that empty space behaved like a transmission line with a "characteristic impedance" of 377 ohms, (which is the ratio of permeability to permittivity for "free space.")

This new theory also explained how light slows down in glass, in gases, in water--because media other than the vacuum had a different permeability and permittivity. The aether was once again thought of as a very real medium which could be stretched or compressed--it had resilience or compliance, and inertia. Yet no known physical substance had a stiffness to mass density ratio anywhere near 9 x 10,¹⁶ which was required of the aether as a medium. The aether appeared to possess elasticity but negligible inertia.

The idea that some kind of aether medium existed prevailed until 1887 when Michelson and Morley utilized the Michelson interferometer in an attempt to detect the relative motion of the earth and the aether--the aether must be viscous and should be dragged along at least partially with the earth. According to 19th Century preconceptions the velocity of the earth going around the sun should be about 30 km/sec. Yet when the measurements were made no motion of the earth relative to the ether could be detected at all. In other words, the aether apparently did not exist.

Until Einstein's Theory of Relativity was published in 1905 the negative result of the M-M experiment baffled scientists. Einstein showed that the velocity of light has the same value in all reference frames, whatever their velocity may be relative to other frames. From this point modern physics took off in the direction of Special and General Relatively Theory, and Quantum Mechanics. For many scientists the notion that an actual aether medium existed was simply discarded. Yet the apparent non-existence of an aether raised many problems and the M-M experiment is not the end of the story. (For one possible explanation of the negative results of the M-M experiment see The Sagnac Effect) The whole history of the aether is fascinating and complex (Ref. 1-5).

To return to basics, if all the air molecules are pumped out of a chamber, the chamber still contains residual radiation (electromagnetic noise from stars, x-rays, and heat radiation). Even before quantum mechanics, it was shown by classical radiation theory that if the temperature of the container is lowered to absolute zero, there remains a residual amount of thermal energy that can not by any means be removed. This residual energy in an empty container at absolute zero, was named "zero-point energy."

Suddenly the once-empty vacuum was seen as a seething sea of potential energy. (Ref. 6, 7) Physicist Dr. Hal E. Putoff, notes that the "vacuum" is a vast reservoir of seething energy out of which particles are being formed and annihilated constantly. The energy potentials in the vacuum are staggering, but most of the time the forces involved balance each other out to zero.

Zero Point energy, he says,

"...is the energy of empty space. There were arguments starting way back at the time of the Greeks about whether space is really empty or isn't it. Democritus thought that it was empty and that is how you have room for the atoms to bump around. You had Aristotle coming along saying no, I think space is full of something because we have waves of heat energy and they must travel in something. That argument went back and forth but finally when quantum theory was developed, it became absolutely clear that space, if you look at in a microscopic scale, is more like the base of a waterfall with a lot of frothy, seething activity going on, rather than just something like a placid, empty space. In fact John Wheeler likes to point out that in the volume of a coffee cup, for example, in empty space, there is enough energy to evaporate all of the world's oceans. This is, by the way, not a fringe concept. It is a basic underlying concept in modern quantum theory."

Putoff continues,

"When the idea of the hydrogen atom was first put forward in the form that you often see it on textbook covers, where it looks like a tiny little solar system with the electron planet circling the nuclear sun, one of the questions at the time was: why doesn't the electron simply radiate its energy away and spiral into the nucleus, in a way similar to the way our satellites have certain losses and spiral into the planet? At the time, the answer was simply, well it is just the magic of quantum theory, it doesn't obey classical rules, and for some reason hydrogen atoms are like little perpetual motion machines. But in fact, from the standpoint of the zero point energy approach, we now recognize - and the calculation has been done, in fact I published on it myself - we show that indeed you expect an electron in a hydrogen atom to radiate its energy away, but it picks up energy from the background zero point energy and therefore is sustained by it. What that means in terms of physics is that is shows why atoms can be seen as perpetual motion machines, it is just that they always have an energy input from the background to make up for the losses."

Australian Astronomer Barry Setterfield has, in recent years, picked up on this theory of the vacuum to explain the red shift of light from distant galaxies. (Arizona astronomer William Tifft's research has recently shown that red-lifted light from the stars is quantized, and this also needed to be explained). Setterfield's model takes into account the statistical evidence that the velocity of light is not a fixed constant--c has evidently decreased in time by a large factor since creation, see On the Constancy of the Velocity of Light. Setterfield's Cosmology concludes that the universe is not expanding at all, (as the Big Bang model has long supposed) but is static (it has a fixed diameter), and that the original energy input of outside energy on Day Two of creation--when God stretched out the firmament to its maximum expanse--accounts for the red-shift and the subsequent velocity of light decrease.

Setterfield has also provided a rough calculation at the rate at which "outside" energy from the "vacuum" would have to be fed into the universe per square meter per second if Hal Putoff is correct and electrons orbiting the nucleus do radiate energy after all. The compensatory energy that must be constantly supplied from the vacuum is a staggering 1.071 X 10¹¹⁷ kilowatts per square meter! (In scientific notion that is 10 followed by 117 zeroes, kilowatts per square meter).

It is an old tenant of philosophy that ex nihilo nihil fit--out of nothing nothing comes. To imagine that vast amounts of energy flow into our physical universe from nowhere, from empty space, out of the "vacuum" at first appears impossible. To save the day we must resort either to magic or we must seek some rational explanation in Biblical revelation. (Ref. 8) The latter is not hard to do.

One the Second Day of creation week, God said,

"Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day. (Genesis 1: 6-8)

The Hebrew word usually translated firmament (raqia) strongly suggests an originally super dense medium stretched out very thin ("like a tent") on the second day of creation week. This means that what God created on Day One and Two was time, matter, energy, and space (the aether). These are the building blocks from which He constructed the universe evidently.

A careful examination of Biblical references to the terms "firmament," "the heavens" and "the heavenly places" and how they are used will show that the Bible depicts the spiritual realm as more solid, more substantial, more permanent than the present, observable, material world! When God created the universe he created it "two-storied." (Ref. 7) The spiritual realm is where the angels dwell. It is a so much more solid and substantial and permanent than our fading material world, that we can best describe ourselves as ghosts in a shadow-like world surrounded and embedded in the more substantial world of the spirit. This view of heaven is beautifully portrayed by C.S. Lewis in his fictional study The Great Divorce. Thinking of heaven as more solid that the material world suggests the aether is intensely solid with objects in the physical world being akin to voids in the plenum of space. It is as if we had come full circle all the way back to Descartes!

If the vacuum is not no-thing, what is the aether made of? It can not be pure spirit or even "condensed spirit" or we would be flirting with pantheism, because God is a Spirit, the angels and men are created spirits and each of these is a "life-form." The aether is not alive. The aether does appears to have real metric properties which can change as space is expanded or contracted, yet it appears to be a substance that is more a part of the created spiritual world than a tangible physical substance.

Is the aether the substrate, the boundary layer between our physical material world and the created world of the spirit (called in Scripture "the heavenly places")? This is probably not an unreasonable working hypothesis.

The Bible does speak of God as "the ground of all being" in that He is not only "above" but also "below." In a famous address to the philosophers of Athens in the First Century, the Apostle Paul confronted them with a challenge to their existing polytheism,

"The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything. And he made from one [man, i.e., Adam] every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him. Yet he is not far from each one of us, for `In him we live and move and have our being'; as even some of your poets have said, `For we are indeed his offspring.' Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the Deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, a representation by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all men everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, [Jesus] and of this he has given assurance to all men by raising him from the dead." (Acts 17:24-31)

Let us take a small leap of faith at this point. Assuming the universe is indeed "two storied" and not "one storied" as the Bible teaches, then surrounding us there exists a real and "substantial" spiritual world. Our material world is in fact embedded in the spiritual. The two realms are coupled, and the Source of all things is in the spiritual world,

"By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear." (Hebrews 11:3)

"...we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal." (2 Corinthians 4:18)

"Of old thou didst lay the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of thy hands. They will perish, but thou dost endure; they will all wear out like a garment. Thou changest them like raiment, and they pass away; but thou art the same, and thy years have no end." (Psalm 102:25-27)

From behind the curtains of our present world, God supplies not only force but it would seem He also supplies also vast amounts of energy to sustain the Creation. In more ways than one we owe not only only lives but the moment by moment sustenance of the physical universe to His energetic involvement, both now discernible in the conceptual understanding modern physics has given us. Knowing the Creator personally gives us every reason to feel secure and to stand in awe of Almighty God who has by no means left us alone in the cosmos--it's very existence is a direct expression of His power and His will.

Surely therefore we must stand in awe of our great God and Creator, along with the Psalmist who wrote,

Gravity is a very tiny force compared to the other remaining atomic and nuclear forces! A leading edge group of researchers compromising The Electric Universe have brilliantly shown that the universe is held together not by gravity but by electrical force fields. Walt Thornhill's Explanation for the nature of gravity is the best I've seen.

Barry Setterfield and others have recently shown the Bankruptcy of the Big Bang Model.

Population growth data says clearly that our race is only a few thousand years old.

The Bible infers the active governance of the cosmos by Jesus Christ.

As shown separately (See: The Limits of Science, and What is Revelation from God?) science is limited to investigations within the material, physical world. For information on the realities of the spiritual world, we depend upon "revelation." It is God who gives us clear information about this realm. Contrasting the best of human wisdom and scientific information, with the revelation that comes from God to all who trust Jesus Christ as Lord, Paul says the following,

A fourth great passage concerning Jesus and His place in creation is found in Revelation Chapter 1,

Here Jesus is called "the Alpha and Omega," "the First and the Last." Not only is Jesus the Son of God to be found at the beginning of history, He also stands at the end of history and at the end of every life. He is the Judge of all, and He is the heir of all things.

Truth from science must in the long run must agree with Biblical revelation, if the Bible is true. If the Bible "says what it means and means what it says" (to quote Chuck Missler) then it is Jesus who holds the universe in his hands. Our moment-by-moment existence depends on His gracious sustenance of every electron, every atom, every molecule and every spiritual entity as well.

Original References and Notes

1. A History of the Theories of the Aether and Electricity, by Sir Edmund Whittaker. Dover Publications, New York, 1989. 2 Volumes.

2. Thomas G. Barnes, Space Medium,. Geo/Space research Foundation, El Paso, 1986. The mysterious properties of the aether as a medium are discussed in this excellent book by a well known Christian physicist.

3. The Classical Vacuum, by Timothy H. Boyer, Sci. Am. (August 1985) is a very good review of the history of the vacuum in classical physics.

4. Is the vacuum really empty?, by Walter Greiner and Joseph Hamilton, Am. Sci. Mar-Apr. 1980.

5. A detailed discussion of modern views of the aether, pro and con are to be found in a book by Ken Seto, Model Mechanics: A New Interpretation of Nature. KHS Publishing, PO Box 275, Englewood, OH 45322-0275, 1-800-519-0149 (USA Only). For a comparison of different views of the aether see Two Views on the Aether, by Ken Seto. Ross Tessian has recently proposed some fascinating new views of the aether which have been gathered from various newsgroups for the reader's convenience. Fort a brief summary and additional references see Amara Gaps, Ether: What is it? Various models of space-time are well described in The Speed of Light - A Limit on Principle? (By Laro Schatzer, Swiss Physicist)

6. Physicist Dr. Hal E. Putoff, formerly of SRI International and the University of Texas at Austin, writes and speaks eloquently on the topic of the Vacuum and Zero-Point Energy. See "Quantum Vacuum Fluctuations: A New Rosetta Stone of Physics?", Everything for Nothing , and The Energetic Vacuum: Implications For Energy Research.

Putoff and others note that the "vacuum" is a vast reservoir of seething energy out of which particles are being formed and annihilated constantly. The energy potentials in the vacuum are staggering, but most of the time the forces involved balance each other out. However Putoff notes that energy from the vacuum may be flowing into every atom in the universe from the vacuum at a rate that balances the energy radiated away by electrons, because electrons orbiting atomic nuclei are supposed to radiate in classical theory. (For more on ZPE see for instance, A Foundation for the Unification of Physics, by Paul Stowe)

6. Professor Rupert Sheldrake, former director of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Cambridge University, was recently featured in an interview along with the former Dominican priest, Matthew Fox conducted by Richard Scheinn, Religion and Ethics Writer for the San Jose Mercury News (Ref. 4-6.) In the course of the discussion Sheldrake said the following,

The whole of nature and all the universe is supposed to have come forth from what we call the vacuum, or the vacuum state. It's not just empty space, as you would form by sucking everything out of a vessel. The vacuum in quantum theory is a plenitude of potentiality from which virtual particles are emanating all the time spontaneously, and then being absorbed back.

The vacuum state underlies everything in the universe, and is the ground of all being. If you say to modern cosmologists, "How did the whole universe come from nothing, with the Big Bang?" they tend to talk in terms of a fluctuation in the vacuum. But by "in the vacuum" they don't mean total emptiness. They mean such overflowing fullness, that just a fluctuation in it can give rise to an entire universe. The vacuum is this primal, undifferentiated potentiality, and it corresponds rather closely to the Godhead.

Now, as you say, there's also dark matter, which is not the vacuum state. Dark matter is more differentiated than the vacuum and is supposed to have a kind of existence which is invisible to us, but is reflected in its gravitational force. Ninety to 99 percent of the universe is supposed to be made up of it. And this is what I compare to the discovery of the cosmic unconscious. Because just as our conscious minds are now recognized to be part of a vastly larger unconscious mental system, so the visible and detectable universe that science has been studying all these years, turns, out to be floating on a sea of dark matter, which is like the cosmic unconscious...

Sheldrake's thoughts could be easily construed to suggest that he adheres to a Hindu or similar pantheistic world view. In pantheism, everything is God or an extension of God. God is all that there is. See the San Jose (California) Mercury News, October 14, 1995. San Jose Mercury News and Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and of God, Park Street Press, One Park Street, Rochester, VT 05767, 1994. Sheldrake is clearly fascinated with Christianity, and New Age religion in general, breaking with the prevailing secular humanism in the academic world. This is an excellent book and highly recommended. Also, his Seven Experiments That Could Change the World: A Do-It Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science, by Rupert Sheldrake, Riverhead Books, New York, 1995. The author is a former research fellow at the Royal Society and former directory of studies in biochemistry and cell biology at Cambridge University. Chapter Six is a discussion of the possible variability of the "Fundamental Constants." His statistical analyses are not in-depth, however he raises important fundamental questions concerning the constants of physics.

7. Theologian and philosopher Frances Schaeffer several decades ago provided us with a brilliant analysis of the changes in Western Civilization in the past two hundred years. Schaeffer showed that the older world view held to a "two-storied" universe, but modern, modern man now believes the universe has only one story. In other words, prior to the Darwinian revolution and the period known as the Enlightenment, "everyone" assumed there was both a material universe and a spiritual universe. This tacit assumption that God and His angels were in the heavens, and man was on the earth---was reflected in music, art, literature, philosophy and theology pretty much throughout the western world. Gradually this world view was replaced, step by step, with the present views of secular humanism and scientific naturalism. The universe is now believed to have only one story. That is, the spiritual world does not exist or is irrelevant. God probably does not exist, or if he does, He does not interact in any way with the universe today. At most He was possibly a "First Cause" but beyond that need not be considered. The physical world is all there is and man will eventually be able to explain everything on a purely naturalistic basis. Of course, in our time this view is mostly encastled in the leading universities and think tanks. The general public continues to hold to "archaic" religious views. In fact an increasing number of respected scientists is calling for a re-examination of atheistic materialism in favor of a non-Christian but definitely spiritual world-view, commonly called "the New Age Philosophy." See also, The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian World view, Crossway Books, Wheaton, Illinois 1982. Update for 2022.