We have killed the heavens and space is the knife. We killed the heavens by contorting it into space. “Space” draws visions of a cold, dull, silent place. Dead worlds around dead stars. Spinning monotonously along for no purpose in particular. Going nowhere very slowly.
This thinking is the Death Heavens. Life killed to push life forward, and in this climb, we have forgotten something: God did not make a bland universe. He made a vibrant place full of color and motion. When we look into the stars we see a cosmic portrait, the pigments of which are not limited to white and black. It is a vibrant and energetic universe; it is beautiful in its consistency and symmetry and perfectly follows the script laid out by God. We are like cavemen watching a clock and judging it as boring. No, the universe is beautiful to mathematicians, and artists.
When the ancients looked into the skies, they saw what was there, stories. Or rather, the story. God made the whole universe. To say that this is the only interesting place is an unimaginable folly. Imagine the stories never told, great dramas shared only by God and rocks.
Yes, the ancients were right to see stories, but that’s not all they saw. They saw themselves in the stars and the constellations because they were constellations; strings of atoms spiraled and clumped around a soul. There are 10¹⁸ solar systems in the universe. That is a one with 18 zeros, or, a trillion trillions. That, of course, is a massive number but that is only one side. 7 × 10²⁷, that is the number of atoms in the human body; 7 trillion trillion trillions. Now, some of us have more atoms than others, but nonetheless we are but one part of a fractal spiraling inward and out. Is it any wonder that when we look up to the stars we see ourselves looking back? paintings spread across the firmament. The great canvas shared by all.
If space is the knife that killed the heavens, who forged it? Was it science, philosophy perhaps nihilism? No, or at least not wholly, it doesn’t truly describe what caused this. In reality, it is the cleaving of knowledge, placing partitions where they do not belong. The death of the heavens is not the heart of it; it is the death of what Plato called the geometer that we must concern ourselves with.
We think of geometry as the required, painful, and boring hell where you learn to look at a shape and then spend an hour stating the painfully obvious or deeply irrelevant with larger words than you need. I ask you to leave that definition and those experiences behind for a moment and unpack the meaning of the word. The root of the word hails from the Greek geo, meaning earth, and metry, meaning to measure. So, the word means “measuring the earth”. Above the entrance to the first academy started by Plato resided the phrase, “Only geometers may enter”. Plato was a philosopher, but artists, theologians, and mathematicians were all welcomed as earth measurers. All knowledge is knowledge of God in one way or another. So, to divide so forcefully between them is a failure to appreciate all of his creation
The life and spirit of the universe were torn out when we started proclaiming theology and philosophy as unscientific. Of course, they are right, they are systems in their own right. After all, science is not very philosophical, and theology combines the best of both. This is one of the largest problems with our culture. Nietzche said, “God is dead and we have killed him,” which we see as a victorious statement reveling in the destruction of the spiritual. But it was not: it was a trembling realization, a statement of horror. He saw the death of God and staring back was the death of civilization. We should count our lucky stars that we are here. And we should look at those same stars and let ourselves wonder without apprehension at their beauty and glory and the story they tell.
In short, the heavens have died, and we have killed them.