Two Realities

    You know what is interesting about the story of Adam and Eve? While they are still in the garden of Eden, they are actually able to directly interact with God as evidenced by the fact that "they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden" and they feel the need to hide their nakedness "from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden" (Genesis 3:8).  Clearly, God himself is in the garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, or at the very least, is present in some sort of auditory/visual sense. However, once Adam and Eve are driven out of the garden, man NEVER again gets to interact with the actual presence of God in such a direct manner. 

    This singular point is rather important in the Bible as it forces man to adopt a sort of blind faith in God with little more than fleeting visions or voices to support said faith. Now, there is no shortage of miraculous happenings that, at least as the Bible explains them, have to be acts of God, but these miracles are only a secondhand interaction with God. Despite this limitation, the Bible takes advantage of this distant relationship to set God's most holy followers from the rest of man. Perhaps the most blatant example of this is the story of Noah's Ark and the flood; a story where Noah and his family are literally the only humans on the planet allowed to continue living after "God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth" because "Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations," though perhaps most importantly, "Noah walked with God" in spite of the obvious disconnect between the rest of man and God. Because Noah listened to God's instructions on how to construct his Ark and how to preserve the rest of the animals of the Earth, his family is basically given dominion over all the life of the Earth as far as that is possible for a mortal; his lineage becomes the only one on the planet, and his descendants are the first allowed to eat meat!

    Keeping all this in mind, I wanted to show off a recent photo by the James Webb Space Telescope showcasing M74, the "Phantom Galaxy". The far-right image above displays a hypnotizing network of white filaments of gas, dotted with pink and blue regions full of abundant star formation. What's amazing about this image, among other things, is that it is taken in the infrared spectrum, so we would never be able to see such underlying structure and detail with our bare eyes. Instead, we are stuck with the beautiful, though obviously limited in detail image by Hubble on the far left. I think this brings to mind an interesting connection with the Bible: God intentionally divided the Earth from Heaven. On the second day, God divided the waters above and below the firmament from each other, with the firmament itself becoming a uncrossable boundary dubbed "Heaven". While the Earth is amazing in its own right, it is only half the story of creation. In a similar manner, while the Hubble image of M74 is splendid by itself, the image by JWST shows an entirely new side of the galaxy; a fantastic, unimaginably intricate side we never will be able to truly see with our own eyes without the help of technology.

    However, the combined images of Hubble and JWST show off an undeniably magnificent spectacle that I can't help but feel was how we were meant to see M74. It is like the garden of Eden on Earth: a perfect combination of two worlds fundamentally separated by God forever. While we may never be able to walk in the Garden of Eden ourselves, or frankly, be able to see the "Phantom Galaxy" as it truly is, perhaps we can take a page out of the Bible. Despite not being allowed to see certain aspects of our universe- whether they be black hole singularities, galaxies accelerating away from us faster than the speed of light, dark matter, dark energy, different wavelengths of light itself, tardigrades, cells, bacteria, viruses, molecules, atoms, quarks, electrons- we shouldn't stop looking at or for them. There is a lot of science to be done in the invisible, but that doesn't make its benefits any less visible for our lives on Earth.