The Encounter (Part II)

Two nights prior, Stephen lay in bed unable to sleep.  He spent so much of his days sleeping that he often had trouble sleeping at night.  Now his head and back ached from the excessive slumber.  He threw the covers off himself and painfully rolled out of bed, thinking that maybe going for a walk would help.  He carefully picked his way across the dark room, groping blindly with his toes for the many piles of clutter strewn about the floor.  He stumbled out into the living room where the moon beamed through the window, lighting up the shadowy mountain of dirty clothes.  Upon reaching the pile, he pulled the most recent additions from the top and slipped them on.  He donned his coat, started to pull open the front door and then paused.  Slowly backing away from the door, he turned and scanned the room, his eyes ultimately returning to the mountain on the couch.  Then with surprising energy he dug through the mountain until reaching a worn out pair of jeans at the bottom.  He reached inside the pocket and pulled out a smooth black case that glinted in the moonlight.  Slipping the case into his coat pocket he returned to the door and strode out into the cold winter night.

Though the moon was out, it was clear that the weather was deteriorating.  A gusty wind blew in from the north and small wispy clouds whipped past the moon.  Upon reaching the street, Stephen set off down the sidewalk, the cold wind quickening his step.  The road was lined with old brick houses with small but neatly kept yards. At the end of the block Stephen crossed the street to head into a wooded park.  Given the time of night, and the weather, no one else was around.  The walkway through the park was lined by rows of giant oak trees.  They towered over Stephen like rows of sentinels peering down disapprovingly at the disgrace that passed below.  Given Stephen’s recent slothfulness, he quickly tired of his brisk walking pace and gradually began to slow.  He had also now generated enough warmth that the cold wasn’t quite as unbearable.  The path approached a pond with a small wooden dock that stood out into the water.  As he walked out onto the dock it creaked and groaned as if Stephen had woken it from a peaceful slumber.  At the end of the dock he sat and dangled his legs over the water.  It was still early in the winter and the pond had not yet frozen over.  The wind died down slightly and Stephen starred off into the depths of the water – beyond the depths of the water.

By now the moon was completely enshrouded in clouds and a steady snowfall had replaced the wind.  Thousands of dense flakes dropped into the pond instantly melting at the surface like hopeless kamikazes.  A dusting of snow had covered Stephen’s coat and hat – leaving him as a white figure against the dark water.  Had Stephen then simply returned to his house and gone back to bed I might not be telling you this story.  However, at this point, something unusual happened.  Stephen’s trance was broken by a sudden creaking and groaning as the dock was once again woken from its slumber.  He turned to see a figure in a dark suit standing behind him.

Turning Over a New Leaf

It wasn’t until after-the-fact that I realized the apparent genius that lay dormant in dark recesses of my mind.  I had not the faintest idea that Stephen’s story parallels our own.  The state of our blog is in utter disarray, and something must be done.  Matt, I think you know what to do.  You have been officially challenged.

James, the younger brother

The Metamorphosis (Part I)

Over the past weeks, it had become common knowledge that something was wrong with Stephen.  Since beginning his job at the engineering firm last March, he had only arrived on time to work a handful of times.  Stephen’s lifestyle was the prototype of disorder, disfunctionality, and utter disarray.  On any given day in Stephen’s apartment, there would be a growing pile of dirty laundry piled up on his living-room couch, and another on the kitchen table, shrinking proportionately.  He never bothered to hang his clothes up, put them away, or iron them.  Although in terms of personal hygiene, Stephen’s manner of life was comparably commendable–that is, he showered and brushed his teeth daily–his bathroom was in a style of even greater anarchy, if that is imaginable.  A stench, far too familiar to Stephen personally, rose from his toilet vengefully, while soap scum and filth lied his tub like a group of conspirators, huddling to exchange their venemous plots of chaos.  The kitchen was a grade better, on account of the daily inevitability of eating, but upon a closer examination of his grocery receipts, which lay scattered in the corner by the overflowing trash-can, anyone of even the mildest sense would realize that the kind of food Stephen most typically consumed was hardly fit for the human body.  Altogether, Stephen lived as if he had never had a mother.

The first sign of a fresh wind of change blowing into Stephen’s life was three weeks ago, to the day.  Marcus, Stephen’s boss, came into the office holding his hot cup of Starbuck’s coffee in one hand, and his laptop case in the other.  Coming through the door, he mechanically reached out to turn on the lights.  When his hand reached the switch, he realized that the lights were already on.  “I’m going to have to have a word with Phillip, the new janitor.  He must have forgotten to turn the lights off,” Marcus thought to himself.  Marcus was walking down the prematurely-lit hallway to his office, when he passed Stephen’s small cubicle, and to his surprise, a well-kempt, nicely-dressed man sat in Stephen’s chair, typing away at his computer.  “Who are you, and what are you doing in this office?” Marcus inquired.  The figure swivelled around as he straightened his tie and looked up into Marcus’ puzzled face.  “I just thought I would come in a little early today, boss, to try and get these reports in order for the big meeting next week,” articulated Stephen.   Marcus almost dropped his coffee when he realized that the man sitting in front of him was no stranger, but that certain misfit and protagonist of this story, who was surely going to be “laid off” when he went up for review next month.  To use the old familiar phrase, he hardly recognized him, but in this case, Marcus really could hardly make and concrete connection between the Stephen he knew and despised, and the collected, business-man in front of him now.

Although Marcus was utterly shocked at the morning’s singularity (which was on its way to becoming a plurality), having grown to be disgusted by the disheveled appearance and disgusting habits of his underling over the past months, and justifiably so,  the greater shock lay in the fact that back at Stephen’s apartment, his dress shirts comfortably lined his closet next to his freshly pressed black pants.  The bathroom glistened with freshness, the carpet bore the striations caused by the comb of the vacuum cleaner, and the refrigerator was filled with food that was palatable, healthy and unexpired.  Marcus had never visited Stephen at his home, nor would he ever have dreamed of doing so, but if he had, reality would have been in such incongruity with his perception of reality, that the shock would have more than just caused him to drop his coffee.  I will now try to explain the cause of this rather queer metamorphosis.

Pickin’ a Little Bluegrass

As many of you know, I’ve been visiting James and Allison for the last couple of days.  With James getting pretty good on the banjo we’ve had a lot of fun playing bluegrass (and probably driving Allison crazy).  Yesterday James and Allison played hooky from class and we’ve made a little video about our day.

-Matt, the elder brother

Looking at the Text: Part II

In my previous post, I brought up some textual issues from Genesis 1 that may clue us in to a non-literal interpretation of the creation account.  Now we will take a step back and have a look at the bigger picture, to try and answer two basic hermeneutic questions:

• What is Moses’ purpose in recording the Genesis account?
• What is Moses’ writing style (in terms of genre)?

It is actually interesting that I am writing about this topic right now, because Allison and I started a BSF class this semester, and we are studying Moses (in Exodus right now), so I have been thinking about this a lot recently.

Caveat: For the sake of this argument, I am operating on the assumption that Moses was, in fact, the author of Genesis.  Although this possibility has been quite controversial in the past, I think that the current consensus is in favor of this hypothesis.  (Some of the main evidence against it was that there was no writing system at the time that Moses could have used to record these early books, and so they must have been written at a later date, but that has since been disproved).

Let’s start with the first of these two questions: why did Moses write Genesis?    One interesting trend that I have observed in the Pentatuch is a kind of temporo-centrism (I made that word up), which could be an independent argument for Moses’ authorship.  The focus of the Pentatuch is the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt and the inheritance of the promised land (that is, the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant in Genesis 12).  (One interesting observation that supports this is that the detail of stories generally increases as you approach the lifetime of Moses).  Abraham (Gen. 12-25) and Joseph (Gen. 36-50) are perhaps the focal characters of Genesis, since they set the scene for the Exodus of God’s people from Egypt.

As for Abraham, the covenant comes through him, part of which is an explicit promise of deliverance from a foreign land where the Israelites will serve as slaves for 400 years (Gen 15:13-5).  So much detail is given here to the specific circumstances of how the Israelites will escape from Egypt.  Why is this, if we now understand the true purpose of the Abrahamic covenant to be the deliverance of Jesus, the true Deliverer?  From Moses’ temporo-centric perspective, God was fulfilling the covenant in his lifetime, so when he wrote Genesis, he emphasized parts of the promise that he (and Israel) could identify with.  We have the same tendency to see how God is working in our lives and have a very limited vision of how he may be using us to work a greater purpose in generations to come.  This is simply part of the human condition, and a beautiful demonstration of how God’s blessings multiply themselves.

As for Joseph, so much attention is, no doubt, given to him in Genesis, because it is through his story that the Israelites come to Egypt in the first place.  Moses is not just giving a year-by-year account of the Israelites’ history (if he were, he left out about 400 years of history between Joseph and himself).  Rather, he is using Genesis to explain how God had been working.  From the perspective of Moses, the story starts in media res and he has to go back in time to explain how they got there.  It does not seem like he is simply writing an account of the Israelites starting from the beginning.  His history is selective and thematic.  From this point, it becomes clear that my two questions are actually related: Moses’ stlye is a function of his purpose.  This should not be surprising though, because form usually follows function.  Who would ever use a limerick (form) as the pattern for eulogizing (function) a beloved relative?  Hopefully no one in my family will do so when I pass away.

Let’s examine another passage from Exodus 2:10-1, which starts

She named him Moses, saying, “I drew him out of the water.”

This is how the rescue-story of baby Moses ends.  It is interesting, though, that the next verse begins:

One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor.

Now how old was Moses where verse 11 picks up?  Some say as old as 40.  In less than a verse, Moses ellided over basicly twice as much life as I have even lived.  This just serves as further evidence that Moses is emphasizing parts of the narrative only if they directly contribute to the development of his plot (God’s deliverance of Israel and establishment of them in the promised land).  Notice that the same time-gap occurs after Moses meets his wife in Midian and has his first child Gershom (Ex. 2), where the next chapter begins the account of the burning bush (another 40 years later?).  A few interposed verses explain that the Israelites’ suffering is increasing during this time, and that they are calling out to God for deliverance.  This also serves as another kind of evidence for this same point: not only is Moses eliding events, he provides moralizing summaries of long periods of time, to show how they fit into his greater plot.  To Moses, events aren’t important in of themselves, but only inasmuch as they serve his narrative purpose.

So, at this point you are probably thinking: “James, this is such a long-winded post, and I see what you’re saying, but what does this have to do with interpreting the Genesis 1 creation account?”  Actually, it is entirely unrelated, and I was just trying to take up space (just kidding).  But seriously, this analysis of Moses’ writing would interpret Genesis 1 in terms of fulfilling the Abrahamic covenant and bringing the Israelites out of Egypt into the promised land.  God is the true main character of this entire account (Pentatuch) and the whole Bible, really.  Genesis 1, then, is developing an understanding of who God is, what his relationship to man is.  It shows he is all-powerful creator and redeemer, that he loves us and seeks to bring himself glory through reconciliation.  Most importantly, is how it relates to the Abrahamic covenant.  God created us, and even after we fell, he still chooses to pour our his mercy and goodness.  I think that the Israelites (or at least Moses) would have been much more interested in how the creation account “begins the story” than the details of how the creation took place.  This meshes with our internal evidence that Genesis 1 should not be interpreted literally/scientifically.  It simply does not seem to be consistent with Moses’ authorial purposes.

I have by no means exhausted this discussion, however.  I have simply tried to outline my own reasoning and provide some exemplary examples (redundant?) from Moses’ texts.  I would appreciate any feedback on your opinions or specific problems with my argument.  I have grappled with this issue for some time but have never tried to formalize my thoughts about it, so this exposition is somewhat rudimentary.

James, the younger brother

Creation: The Story from Science (Part II – Geology)

Yes I have been remiss in writing this post.  This is particularly ironic since as James was late on his last post I was beginning to think about what I should put in my “Because James is a Slacker” post.  James posted before I had a chance to follow through with that idea.  In any case, I will continue with the discussion of the picture that science gives us of the world we live in and how it came about.  I previously posted on Astronomy, my real area of expertise, but now I will delve into another subject near to my heart – earth science.  For me, the convincing aspect of scientific cosmology is that it has produced an overarching, coherent theory that explains essentially all of the data.  There are still missing puzzle pieces, but by in large when we look out at the cosmos we see a concordant story of its history – Big Bang Cosmology.

Over the past century, geology has also experienced a revolution and much of the overarching framework of the history of earth has come into focus.  The theory that produced this revolution was plate tectonics.  The motion of earth’s plates and the eroding power of water are the primary forces that have shaped earth’s surface over its history.  In addition, earth scientists now have dozens of dating techniques available for the purpose of studying the timing of past geological events.  These widely varying techniques provide a means of double-checking and further solidifying hypotheses of past events.  In order to help you appreciate this picture I will take one particular example dealing with both plate tectonics and dating – as well as some basic physics.  What I hope to show you is not a comprehensive picture of why geologists think the earth is old, but rather a specific representative example to demonstrate the kinds of coherent stories that geology is now producing.

Oceanic plates begin their life at a mid-ocean ridge, where molten rock is constantly spewed forth to cool and produce more and more solid rock.  The plate then gradually marches its way across the bottom of the ocean like a conveyor belt to be pushed back into the depths of the earth and melted once again in a subduction zone.  Because this process is constantly recycling the oceanic plates, they are all relatively young (up to about 200 million years) compared to continental plates.  Thus the youngest oceanic crust is near mid-ocean ridges, and the oldest is near subduction zones.  However, another curious correlation can be observed.  If you look at the average depth of the ocean along with the age of the crust at that location you find a strong correlation between the two.  Specifically, the depth of the ocean is roughly proportional to the square root of the age of the rock beneath it.  So, the ocean is relatively shallow near the mid-ocean ridge and drops off gradually as you get further and further away.  This is demonstrated in the figure below.

Taken from a draft verson of Anderson and Anderson's upcoming book on Geomorphology.

The obvious question is why does ocean depth correlate with age of the rock at the bottom, and why is it specifically with the square root of age.  The earth can be divided up into two zones: the lithosphere, which is the part of the earth near the surface where rock behaves like a brittle substance, and the asthenosphere, which begins at the depth at which rock starts to flow like a fluid and can deform plastically (like silly putty) over geological time scales.  We’ll leave it to James to give us the etymology of those words.  Near the mid-ocean ridges, where the plates are being formed and are very young, the lithosphere is very thin because it is so hot.  Rock also is a very good insulator, and cools very slowly through conduction.  However, as you get further and further away from the mid-ocean ridges the rock has had a lot of time to cool, and because of this the lithosphere is much thicker. Another thing one must realize is that rock is more dense when it’s cold.  So, the dense, cooled-off lithosphere is floating on top of the hot plastic asthenosphere.  Because the lithosphere is more dense it actually wants to sink, but it can’t because the strength of the rock holds it in one piece.  It’s kind of like when you have some hot grease and as it starts to cool you get a thin skin of solid fat on the surface.  That fat is denser but doesn’t sink because it’s all stuck together.  However, since the cooler parts of the lithosphere are thicker they want to sink into the fluid below even more than the thin hot parts.  So, as the rock cools it thickens and sinks further down into the fluid below until it obtains a state referred to as hydrostatic equillibrium, when all of the pressures in the fluid balance out.

So this nice little story explains why the deeper parts of the ocean are also the older parts.  However, we can even show with a simple calculation that this relationship should go with the square root of age.  As I alluded above, the heat loss from the rock is mostly through conduction.  If one sets up the proper equations then one finds that the temperature follows the equation below, where kappa is the thermal diffusivity of the rock (how quickly it conducts heat):

The math buffs will immediately recognize this as a diffusion equation, and in its solution the temperature will vary with the square root of time.  Thus, since we know the thermal diffusivity of rock, one can do a back of the envelope calculation to confirm the sort of relationship we see above.  Hence our story has completed a circle.  Basic physics provides a mechanism to explain what we observe, and since we know the conductivity of rock this can be used independently to verify that the observed ages of the rock are in the correct ballpark.  All of it hangs together. This is the hallmark of a solid scientific theory.

The young earth creationist would not throw out the theory of plate tectonics.  Rather, by my understanding, they typically hypothesize that a huge amount of plate motion and disturbance occurred during Noah’s flood.  However, were this the case, it destroys our nice story above, for one would expect that the plate all formed at about the same time and would be cooling and sinking roughly uniformly.  If the young earth creationist wishes to throw out this idea of rapid plate movement then there is still a problem, because the sort of sinking discussed above takes millions of years to occur (because rock is a very good insulator).  One can at least say that the burden is on the young earth creationist to provide an equally convincing mechanism to explain this striking observational result.

Hope I haven’t bored you all to death.  This one turned out to be quite scientific.

-Matt, the elder brother

Looking at the Text: Part I

In Matt’s last post, he gave an overview of the Big Bang time-line. I remember when I first heard about the Big Bang; my gut reaction was “that’s not what it says in Genesis. It can’t be right.” In this post, I am going to take a look at Genesis 1 and begin to address how we are supposed to reconcile Big Bang cosmology and Genesis cosmogony.

The Genesis account begins with those very familiar words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This sentence has had such a deep impact on our English-speaking culture. One interesting thought is that I have never seen any translational variance on this verse, but perhaps there isn’t any other good way to say this. It is at least note-worthy, though, that the NIV, NLV, KJV, NASB and ESV all say the exact same thing (give or take a comma). One might think to argue that even from these first words “in the beginning,” we know that the following account is not meant to be understood in a literal sense, but this is not necessarily the case, as other markedly historical passages begin with the very same phrase (e.g. Jer. 26:1).

Gen. 1:1 is nonetheless doing something quite unusual for the greater body of scripture, which, excluding the books of poetry and Revelation, operates on a largely factual/historical plane. Gen. 1 is not merely the beginning of the history of the Israelites, but the beginning of everything. It is almost impossible to put such an event into words (if you can even call it an event, since you can normally observe an event’s passing). What the writer of Genesis is doing here seems parallel in my mind to the way John begins his gospel: he prefaces a historical account of the life and suffering of Jesus with a theological metaphor, speaking of Jesus in abstract terms (word, light).  Gen. 1:1 is the ad hoc answer to the proverbial “why?”  You simply have to start somewhere.  One can see, though, a trend throughout Genesis towards the concrete/factual/historical, even immediately after the Fall (starting in Gen. 4), but the amount of detail and realism even progresses throughout the entire book (from Cain to Noah to Abraham to Joseph).  Part of this is of a practical nature.  If Moses wrote Genesis, then he surely knew more about Jewish history that was closer to his own time.  But this also reminds us of the inherent temporo-centrism of the Genesis account, which I plan to address in my next post.

Perhaps one of the clearest arguments in my mind for a non-literal/poetic interpretation of Genesis is the style of the passage.  I really wish I could read the Hebrew in its original form, but from the English, there are certain stylistic features that signal a different kind of literature.  The biggest component of this stylistic argument is the repetition.  “And God said…” is repeated each day, as well as “And there was evening, and there was morning—the first/second/third/etc. day.”  This kind of writing style seems to fit a more general “cosmogony” genre, and may signal to us that we are not to read it the same way as other passages.  In the same way, if you pick up a dictionary, open it to a random page and read “blog; /blag/-a website used to post personal ideas,” or something like that, because of the formatting, you know that it is a dictionary entry.  Or if you read “once upon a time…” you immediately know that the following account is not true; rather, it is a fairy-tale.  Similarly, Moses may be giving a metaphorical/theological/abstract/loose account of creation, and not a scientific treatise.  It is very difficult, though, to really hone in on exactly what genre the author of Genesis is indicating without a much more technical reading of the text (this process is referred to as “discourse analysis” and is the highest level of linguistic analysis).

In closing, I would like to bring to light our underlying motive for wanting to accept a literal interpretation.  We tend to feel that if we reject a literal reading, then we are rejecting the truth of the content, or at least on a slippery slope in that direction.  This does not have to be the case, though.  To say that a statement is “true” means one thing, but to say that a poem, or a proverb, or a sermon is “true” means that resonates deep within your heart or rings true to your experience.  We tend to try to evaluate truth in the most objective and scientific way possible, while there is more of a spectrum, but there are certain cases where this is not what we should do.  Take Jesus’ parables, for example.  If we ask “are they true?”  In the strict sense of the question, the answer must be “no.”  They are made up stories.  On the other hand, the truth they express is very real and often quite deep.  Perhaps we should not evaluate Genesis 1 on a True/False dichotomy, buy try to find the truth in it. We do not necessarily have to feel like we are sacrificing something or weakening our theological position by adopting a non-literal interpretation.  On the contrary, the most important thing to try to come to terms with is what the author intended for us to understand, and that provides us with the paradigm by which to evaluate the text, not our preconceptions.  We don’t read the Word of God; it reads us.

Also, one website I looked at was http://www.godandscience.org/youngearth/genesis1.html, and it might be a good place to poke around for more information.   I didn’t read the whole thing, but it seemed pretty level-headed to me.

James, the younger brother

Creation: The Story from Science (Part Ia – The Big Bang)

In my last post in the Religion and Science series I discussed astronomical evidences for the antiquity of creation.  As part of the discussion John asked some questions about the Big Bang theory, and I promised to write a post answering his questions and explaining the theory.  So, in a thousand words I will do my best to convey the current model for the evolution of the universe since its creation.

Big Bang cosmology is inherently a general relativistic theory, so I begin with a brief explanation of how this theory relates to cosmology.  In general relativity, mass and space have an intimate relationship.  Space is not a static homogeneous entity as it is in Newtonian theory.  Instead space is capable of being stretched and bent and warped, and in fact any object with any mass will warp space.  In turn, space affects how masses move through it.  When they aren’t undergoing acceleration due to external forces, masses always like to move on the shortest path through space (a geodesic), but if space is warped, then that path will not be a straight line.  This is analogous to the great circles on earth.  The shortest route for a plane to fly from one point on the surface to another is not a straight line but a curved geodesic. So in general relativity space affects mass and mass affects space.  Though it has many bizarre and counter-intuitive implications, general relativity is actually experimentally one of the best-confirmed of all scientific theories.

When one applies general relativity to a really big chunk of space, like, say, the universe, then one can derive a set of equations that govern the behavior of the space and how it is affected by the distribution of mass.  As it turns out, it is difficult to have a static configuration.  The space always either wants to be contracting down or expanding out, depending on how dense of a mass distribution you have.  Einstein found this idea philosophically repulsive, because it meant that you couldn’t have a static universe just sitting there, and consequently it implied that the universe had a beginning.  Consequently, he added a constant, called the cosmological constant, into the equation that would perfectly balance the contraction and create a static universe.  Twelve years later, in 1929, Hubble discovered through observations of galaxy spectra that the further away a galaxy was the faster it was receding from us.  This is precisely the sort of relationship that one would expect if the universe (space itself) were expanding.  The further away something is, the more space there is between you and it, and therefore if space is expanding objects further away will be moving away from you faster than nearby objects.  This was the first physical evidence for an expanding universe.  Einstein later referred to the cosmological constant as his greatest blunder.

If all of space is expanding then it doesn’t take a genius to realize that if you extrapolate back in time eventually everything will be really close together.  Eventually you reach what is called a singularity, where the equations break down and the universe has an infinite density.  This singularity is called the big bang, and when scientists refer to the age of the universe they are talking about the time since the big bang.  The way cosmologists calculate the age of the universe is by carefully adding up the mass within the observed universe and using the equations governing the expansion to extrapolate back the amount of time since the Big Bang.

John also raised an interesting point when he asked, “Where in the universe are we?”  This is an age-old question that historically has often taken a central role in cosmology.  Ever since the Copernican revolution  each successive step forward in scientific theory has taken earth to a less-central place in the universe.  However, with the discoveries made by modern cosmology this progression has reached an end.

Let’s do a thought experiment in order to understand the map of the universe as seen in modern cosmology.  At the beginning of the Big Bang space and time as we know it have just been created.  Therefore light has had no time to travel anywhere.  We can imagine ourselves at some point in this universe looking out into total darkness in all directions.  As time goes on, light has a chance to travel to us from other places.  However, to begin with all of the matter in the universe is so hot and so dense that all you can see is the stuff right in front of your face.  No photons can travel very far without bumping into something else and getting redirected.  Basically, it’s thick as pea soup.  At about 400,000 years after the big bang things have cooled down and thinned out enough that photons can travel on their merry way without getting bumped around to much.  This is the age at which the universe becomes transparent.  Now with each passing second light is able to travel to us from further and further away.  Imagine a sphere.  We are at the center and the edge represents the distance that we can see – the distance that light could have travelled in that amount of time.  As time goes on, the edge of that sphere is moving outward at the speed of light and more and more of the universe comes into view.  Cosmologists call the edge of this sphere the cosmological horizon.  At the horizon we can still actually see that dense pea soup, because the light from the pea soup is just getting to us from those distant locations.  This pea soup light is called the cosmic microwave background radiation, and is another key evidence that supports the big bang theory.  Now we can imagine today’s universe where the horizon has receeded to the extreme distance.  With today’s space-based telescopes we are actually able to see all of the way out to the cosmological horizon.  It is the same distance away from us in all directions.  Thus, we are in the center of the observable universe simply because observations are limited by light travel time.  So far as we know, the universe extends to infinity in all directions.  However, we will never be able to see anything outside of our horizon.  In fact we are at a special time in the universe’s history where it is starting to expand faster and faster.  Because of this the horizon will eventually begin to shrink and the observable universe will get smaller and smaller.  So at this point in the life of the universe we’re able to see about as much as any astronomer will ever be able to see.

There’s actually a nice movie that depicts the current map of the observed universe.  The rainbow colored sphere at the end is the cosmic microwave background and we are at the center of the sphere.  Also the strange pie-shaped structures aren’t real structures but are just the parts of the universe that we’ve observed so far.  There are more details and a newer movie with more galaxies and no narration here.

-Matt, the elder brother