Galileo was right, but so were his critics (2015)
I&#x27;m surprised that Christianity never went back to its roots to show how Jesus is compatible with our knowledge that the universe contains over 100 billion galaxies. It&#x27;s not too hard, if you&#x27;ll bear with me for 2 minutes.<p><i>Mental health trigger warning</i>: this might unintentionally make an atheist believe in God and Jesus. If you have a background with religious trauma, avoid this post. It is weird stuff.<p>Ok, that said, the first point to make is that &quot;God the father&quot;, in early and orthodox Christianity, wasn&#x27;t a person, except as an allegory. The One God was rather the incomprehensible concept of Oneness -- more akin to a mathematical singularity than Zeus. This was discussed extensively by Philo of Alexandria (b.25 BC), one of the biggest influences on early Christians. That Oneness was also described by Plato and the Pythagoreans.<p>Pausing there -- I find this Oneness concept to be a really fascinating idea, especially as we now accept that the entire universe was born out of a single point in the big bang. Also, Oneness is more or less a culturally universal phenomenon in mystical and psychedelic experiences. This god of Oneness is a very different perspective than the &quot;guy in the sky&quot; perspective -- but it is actually still compatible with Christian orthodoxy.<p>Where does Jesus fit in? Jesus was the &quot;Logos&quot; -- translated poorly as &quot;the word&quot; -- which was understood by the contemporary stoics and jewish-greek philosophers (Philo) as &quot;the eternal emanation of the Oneness&quot;. We need the logos as the oneness is really kind of boring with no diversity.<p>So, Jesus was viewed as the allegorical &quot;son&quot; of the oneness (the father). That&#x27;s why Jesus was there since the beginning of time. But, the mystery of the Christian faith is that the cosmic logos incarnated as a human -- the Jesus story is the story of the logos becoming flesh. Make sense?<p>What troubled me was the Christian idea that <i>you have to believe in Jesus to have eternal life</i>. I found that irritating and disturbing. Why would belief in Jesus give eternal life?? Here is my best-faith interpretation: if you believe that we are all part of an eternal, common, cosmic logos, like if you <i>really believe that we are the logos</i>, then of course we don&#x27;t die, we live on for ever, since we are the logos. So, in shorthand, believe in Jesus and you live for ever.<p>Of course, theology got weird when people wanted the allegorical stories to be true and adopted the absurd idea of biblical literalism. For instance, Theophilus was a 4th century Alexandrian pope who first wrote a treatise on why it was foolish to believe that the One god was a material person -- but then had to backtrack when the monks literally started rioting in the streets [1].<p>So, there you have it: orthodox christianity can be galactic in scope, philosophically sound and compatible with empirical physics. No supernatural required, but plenty of mystery.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.nl&#x2F;books?id=9joABAAAQBAJ&amp;lpg=PA37&amp;ots=xBsDihrVyW&amp;dq=Theophilus riot monks&amp;pg=PA37#v=onepage&amp;q=Theophilus riot monks&amp;f=false" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.nl&#x2F;books?id=9joABAAAQBAJ&amp;lpg=PA37&amp;ots=x...</a>