Come with me “to the dark side,” to the world of black holes.
Cosmologists tell us that black holes will eventually gobble up all material matter in the universe. This means that the only things that will be left in the universe will be black holes. The question is: do black holes then become the eternal prison for all the information of the universe?
As it turns out, it would seem that the information in black holes is not lost. Stephen Hawking has shown that black holes are not completely black. They glow slightly with radiation (which has been labelled, ‘Hawking radiation’). This means that black holes slowly lose mass, erode and die over a period of trillions of years. Hawking suggests that the information that has been swallowed by the black hole is radiated back out into the universe, or even to another universe. So, as the English cosmologist, Brian Cox, says: “it would seem that black holes are not tombs, but gateways.”[i]
It is significant that the language of scientists is now sounding remarkably theological. Here are two more quotes from Brian Cox.
Black holes tell us that our intuitive understanding of space and time are wrong, and that a deeper reality exists…
Space and time are not fundamentally a property of nature. They emerge from a deeper reality in which neither exists.[ii]
These words cast a shadow over the thinking of ‘materialist reductionists’ who reduce humanity to ‘materials’ and say there is nothing more that makes humans significant. It seems that scientists are now whispering theological truth to us!
Another intriguing thing to emerge from the study of black holes is that evidence it gives for the interconnectedness of reality. (This was something also hinted at by ‘quantum entanglement’.) Scientists are suggesting that information contained within a half eroded black hole becomes the ‘same place’ as distant information emitted eons earlier through Hawking radiation.[iii]If this confuses you, you are in good company. The exact mechanism of this is currently baffling scientists and is still being worked out.
So, where does this leave us?
If we have dispensed with space-time as the fundamental reality and have replaced it with ‘information,’ that is highly significant. Information is not random chaos. It is something that is ordered. This suggests that at the heart of reality is order… and that begins to sound a lot like ‘Mind’.
So, here’s the question: Does this deeper reality have a divine origin? Is this deeper reality God?
Brian Cox would say, quite rightly, that deeper reality may be natural, not supernatural. Certainly, no one can rightly posit God just because they have reduced reality to information. To do that is to fall into the discredited thinking of inventing a ‘God of the gaps.’ But what we can say is that the discovery of a deeper reality beyond space-time is totally consistent with theistic belief.
Wahoo!
[i] Brian Cox, The Universe with Brian Cox(film), Series 1, Episode 4, “Heart of Darkness: Black Holes,” 2021 (see: 41 – 50 minutes). https://view.abc.net.au/video/ZW3171A004500
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
