Cosmology and Christianity

In November of 2024 a conference was held in the San Francisco Bay, and some of the sharpest minds alive presented papers about cosmology — black holes, the early universe, the shape of the very, very large. I watched on YouTube, and read their papers, and did what I always do. I took notes. I wrote down the lines that captured the spirit, essence, and chief ingredient of each talk. Then the notebook went on a shelf for a year and a half.

This week I opened it again. Eighteen months have passed, and I came to those pages fresh, the way you sometimes reread a letter you wrote to yourself and see it completely differently. And I will tell you: I knew exactly what this week’s Saturday Evening Blog was going to be about. I could not see the black holes anymore. I could not see the expanding universe. Something else was contained in those dozen phrases or so.

Every quote I had written down — every single one — could be lifted out of cosmology and set down, almost unchanged, in a room full of pastors. Change a noun here, a verb there, and these men were not describing the universe at all. They were describing God. They were describing the cross. They were describing the strange, scandalous logic of the Gospel.

I have spent my whole life at the intersection of modern science and ancient wisdom, and I have a stubborn conviction that has only deepened with the years: if you drill down far enough into any subject — physics, biology, poetry, grief, cosmology — you eventually hit Christ. You strike Christology like a vein of ore. These men were drilling about as deep as human beings can drill. And without ever meaning to, without a Bible anywhere in the room, they were talking about the crucified God at the bottom of everything.

Let me show you what I mean. Here are the quotes, as I copied them. For each quote I’ll tell you, plainly, what it meant at the time, then I will imagine they were spoken from a pulpit. 

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“There’s a paradox with these quantum processes — black holes radiate and lose information, and yet the very quantum theory that allows us to discover black holes says that this very thing is impossible. Information appears to be irretrievably lost when black holes evaporate, yet quantum theory says this is impossible.”

What they meant: When a black hole evaporates, everything that ever fell into it seems gone for good — and yet the deepest laws of physics insist that information can never truly be destroyed.

Now hear it from a pulpit: “There is a paradox at the heart of the Gospel — at the cross everything appears irretrievably lost, and yet the very God who gave us his Son says that nothing entrusted to him is ever lost.” That is not a contradiction to explain away. That is the empty tomb. Jesus says it plainly: “This is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day” (John 6:39). The universe will not let information die. Neither will God.

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“It’s only when we admit our ignorance about this entire subject that we can finally acquire new knowledge about it.”

What they meant: Real progress in cosmology only begins after we honestly confess how little we actually understand.

From a pulpit: “It is only when we admit how little we know of God that we begin, at last, to truly know him.” Paul, who could out-argue anyone in the room, wrote it this way: “If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know” (1 Corinthians 8:2). Knowledge begins, every time, on the far side of humility.

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“Our universe must have had a distant past that was unimaginably different from the present condition.”

What they meant: The early universe was so radically unlike anything we now see that we can barely picture it.

From a pulpit: “Creation had a beginning unimaginably different from the world we know — a time before, when the Spirit hovered over a darkness without form.” “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2). The cosmologists reach back toward a beginning they cannot quite imagine. Moses got there first.

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“The conditions at the beginning are the cornerstone as well as the Achilles heel of relativistic cosmology. It’s as if the very thing that is inevitable is apparently beyond our comprehension.”

What they meant: The universe’s starting conditions are both the foundation of the whole theory and the place where the theory breaks down — the one thing you can’t avoid is the one thing you can’t grasp.

From a pulpit: I almost laughed when I reread this one, because the man practically quoted Scripture and didn’t know it. He said cornerstone. “The beginning is both our cornerstone and our stumbling block — Christ crucified, the foundation of everything and the very thing the wise cannot comprehend.” “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone… a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense” (1 Peter 2:6–8). Cornerstone and Achilles heel. Foundation and offense. The same Stone, in the same breath.

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“Our current theory of relativity predicts its own downfall. The beginning of all things is an event without explanation, because the singularity at the bottom of it signals the breakdown of everything we use to explain.”

What they meant: Relativity points back to a singularity where relativity itself stops working — so the theory faithfully predicts the very place it can no longer describe.

From a pulpit: “The Law predicts its own downfall. It was never the explanation; it was the arrow pointing past itself to the One it could not contain.” “The law was our guardian until Christ came” (Galatians 3:24). A guardian’s whole job is to work himself out of a job. The Law explains and explains until it reaches the cross — and there, where human explanation breaks down entirely, grace begins.

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“How can modern physics lead to a violation of itself, or even worse than that, to no physics at all?”

What they meant: How can the laws of physics, followed faithfully to the end, lead us to a point where those very laws are violated — or vanish altogether?

From a pulpit: “How can the righteousness of God, followed faithfully to the end, lead to a cross where the sinless One is condemned — to the place where law-keeping saves no one at all?” Paul’s answer is almost the same sentence in reverse: “God chose… even things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:28). “Even worse, to no physics at all” — the things that are not. The Gospel runs on exactly that engine: God builds his kingdom out of the nothings and the nobodies and the dead.

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“The next great progress will be made when we treat initial conditions and the dynamics acting on those conditions with equal footing. We need to think of the very first noun, or thing acting, as equivalent to the very first verb, or the thing doing the acting.”

What they meant: The breakthrough comes when we stop separating what the universe is from what the universe does, and treat the original “stuff” and the laws that move it as one unified reality.

From a pulpit: The noun and the verb, perfectly equal, perfectly one — they are reaching, in the dark, for the Logos. “In the beginning was the Word… All things were made through him” (John 1:1, 3). The Word is the noun: the One who is. The Word is the verb: the One through whom all things are made. Christ is the thing and the act, the substance and the dynamic, held together without seam. The physicists call it the next great progress. John called it the beginning.

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“It’s only the omniscient observer — the totality of every observer state, containing all of that diverse knowledge — that contains the complete picture.”

What they meant: No single vantage point can see the whole universe; only an all-knowing observer, or the sum of every possible observer, could hold the complete picture at once.

From a pulpit: “Only the omniscient One, who holds every vantage point at the same time, sees the whole — we each see in part, but he sees all of it, all at once.” “O LORD, you have searched me and known me… even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether” (Psalm 139:1, 4). They invented a phrase for a being who could see everything from everywhere.

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“The utility of this theory lies in its capacity to unlock the interconnectedness of all things — to identify novel correlations between what seem at first glance to be independent characteristics of the universe.”

What they meant: The theory is valuable because it exposes hidden connections, showing that things which look unrelated are in fact bound together.

From a pulpit: “The glory of Christ is that in him the interconnectedness of all things is unlocked — what looks scattered and independent is revealed to be woven into one.” “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). Every novel correlation, every hidden thread between things that seemed to have nothing to do with each other — they all run back to the same hand.

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“Holography places the real origin of the universe not in the past but in the distant future, because only the end game can reveal the hologram in its full glory.”

What they meant: In holographic cosmology, the universe’s true meaning lies not at its beginning but at its end — only the final state shows you what the whole thing was really about.

From a pulpit: “The real origin of creation is not behind us but ahead of us — only the consummation, when Christ is all in all, reveals the whole story in its full glory.” “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Revelation 22:13). The beginning is held inside the end. You do not understand Genesis until you have read Revelation. Only the endgame reveals the hologram — and the endgame is a Lamb on a throne.

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“As cosmologists we understand that there is a dual description of the universe — a completely different and radically counterintuitive way of looking at reality.”

What they meant: The universe can be described in two equally valid but utterly different ways, and the second one offends common sense at every turn.

From a pulpit: “There is a dual description of reality — the wisdom of the world, and the foolishness of the cross — and the second is so counterintuitive it sounds like nonsense until the day it saves you.” “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways… as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways” (Isaiah 55:8–9). The last shall be first. The one who loses his life keeps it. A dual description, radically counterintuitive — and entirely true.

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“If we’re careful to always have a proper quantum take on all things, especially the cosmos as a whole, that’s what will guard us from wanting to know too much.”

What they meant: Keeping a properly humble, quantum perspective on everything — above all on the universe as a whole — protects us from the trap of imagining we can know more than we ever could.

From a pulpit: “If we keep a properly humble take on all things, especially the things of God, that is what guards us from wanting to know more than we were ever meant to know.” “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us” (Deuteronomy 29:29). There is a fence around certain knowledge, and the fence is mercy. The very first sin began with someone reaching for too much knowing. Reverence is the guardrail.

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“It is as if the universe is speaking to us.”

What they meant: The patterns woven through the cosmos feel less like silent facts and more like a message addressed, deliberately, to us.

From a pulpit: No rewrite needed. Leave it exactly as he said it. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech… There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard” (Psalm 19:1–3). The cosmologist, at the very end of my notes, in a room full of equations, looked up from his data and said the most pastoral thing of the whole night. It is as if the universe is speaking to us. Brother, it is. It always has been. And the word it is speaking is a Word made flesh.

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I want to be careful here, because I am not claiming these scientists secretly believed anything. Most of them, I’d guess, would be surprised — maybe a little annoyed — to find themselves quoted in a Saturday devotional. They were doing honest, rigorous, beautiful work, and I have nothing but respect for it. That is rather the point.

Because what I am claiming is this. When you push any subject hard enough — when you stop reaching for the easy answers and follow the questions all the way down to where your best theories break apart in your hands — you start using a very particular vocabulary. You start talking about a beginning you cannot explain and an end that gives the beginning its meaning. About information that cannot be lost. About a cornerstone that is also a stumbling block. About a noun and a verb that are somehow one. About an omniscient observer who holds every vantage point at once. About all things held together. About a dual, counterintuitive reality. About knowing your own ignorance. About a universe that speaks.

That is not the grammar of cosmology. That is the grammar of the cross. It is the cruciform pattern stamped into the floor of reality, and you find it whether you go looking for it or not, because the One through whom all things were made left his fingerprints on all things.

Some men spent a November weekend drilling down hard into the deep structure of the cosmos. They struck something. They didn’t have a name for it, so they reached for paradox, and holography, and omniscient observers. I wrote a bunch of things down, and eighteen months later I heard them through a completely different lens.

They had hit the motherload at the bottom. They were standing on the very stone the builders rejected. And without a single one of them intending it, in a room with no altar and no Bible and no prayer, the cosmologists were preaching Christ.

I’m Frank Balgeman, the Physics Pastor from the Santa Cruz Mountains. Drill down far enough into anything, and you’ll find him at the bottom of it too.