Our Wondrous Cosmic-Web Universe

So with that, we're ready for the second message about science and the Bible. Because, after all, God is the great artist, and this is our creation that He designed so carefully for all of us. So if you could look up beyond the Milky Way galaxy, if you were able to see the entire universe, one of the things that has struck astronomers is that these are not stars that are randomly distributed, as if you took some glitter and just threw it up in the air. And I'll just show you one thing here, just like this. See? They're not that way. It's not just throwing glitter. It's very carefully organized, the whole universe. Now there are enough powerful telescopes, like the James Webb Telescope, and also in Chile, they have the MUSE telescope, which actually were able, finally, to see for themselves what is called the Cosmic Web.

And so instead of this haphazard stars in the universe, no, everything is carefully designed and held together. So there's this stately expansion of the universe. It's all balanced out. Scientists can't explain how all of this can still expand and not collide. And this universe, if it was just random, things would be flying all over the place, just like a scatter gun with bullets or munition going whatever way.

What does Isaiah 40 verse 22 tell us? It says, God stretches out the heavens like a curtain. Isaiah 40, 22, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in. Well, as you know, a tent is not something you just put up without, first of all, putting in the framework to hold it together. And so now astronomers are talking about the scaffolding of the universe, that all of these are all guided together.

So you see here a picture of the cosmic web with all of these threads, just like a huge spider web. And nothing is left to chance. So now let's uncover this for a moment. So this is what it looks like, the cosmic web. Just like King David said in Psalm 19 verse 1, how clearly the sky reveals God's glory. How plainly it shows what he has done. So now we do have confirmation.

Now in this year, 19, oh, 2025, they have been able to detect more and more of this cosmic web. It's an orderly universe, like a cradle where life can exist. We just heard that in one of the hymns that we're singing, like a cradle. Paul Sutter in the Astronomical or Science Magazine Nautilus says, galaxies are not scattered about randomly in our universe.

Instead, they exist in a pattern dubbed the cosmic web. The cosmic web holds the vast majority of the content of the cosmos, roughly 5% of matter, such as gases and solids, 27% dark matter, and 68% dark energy. And it spans the entire universe. See, you can see the stars, you can see the galaxies, but the web is just beginning to be now discovered. These very thin strands or filaments where everything is guided.

The galaxies are all guided, and it's like a superhighway, where all of these things are extending outward and then with the voids in between them. So, he says, it serves as the scaffolding responsible for carrying the plasma lifeblood of our universe.

So, this is an aesthetic universe. Gas is flowing in, giving power to the stars, forming all this whole system. He says, it is the reason we exist at all. God didn't have this orderly state if it was all random and chaotic, as Dave was saying the first message about people don't believe in that first verse of Genesis. How blind you truly can be.

There's a twin brothers that are physicists in France, quite famous. They're called the Bogdanov twins. When they were asked about why order exists in the universe, one of them answered, this is a fundamental question. The most striking feature of the universe is that order began from the very start, at its initial stage. According to some physicists, everything occurs as if mankind was born in a universe created for them, intentionally designed for human beings. It is similar to preparing a bedroom before the birth of a baby.

The Bible tells us that the order and design of the universe comes from God. In Hebrews 11, verse 3, Hebrews 11, verse 3, it says, by faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible. So when it talks about the worlds, it's talking about the universe was framed by God. Everything, a framework, all set up, prepared so that the physical things were not made by other physical things.

No, they came out of the spirit world. God created matter from spirit. Scripture also tells us that God is not the author of confusion but of order. In 1 Corinthians 14, verse 33, it says, God is not the author of confusion but of peace. And then, and that's 1 Corinthians 14, 33, and then verse 40, it says, let everything be done decently and in order. God inspired that.

So he set up the universe to function in a stable and harmonious way. Jeremiah 33, verse 25 states, this is in the Good News translation, it says, but I, the Lord, have a covenant with day and night, in other words, with everything that happens here on the earth, with the sun and moon, and I have made the laws that control earth and sky. So God set up what physicists call the universal constants because there are laws that are steady, they're constant, you can mathematically examine each one and see how they all fit together.

These laws of physics are carefully fine-tuned in relation to one another. With the discovery of the cosmic web, we can better grasp how the universe maintains its equilibrium, dynamism, and stability while expanding outward. So what about this mysterious dark matter and dark energy? Professor Sutter says, the cosmic web fills up the volume of the universe and contains up to two trillion galaxies. Now, maybe five, six years ago, we thought there were 200 billion galaxies. Now it's two trillion, so that's 200 multiplied by 10. So they've actually been able to see that much more of the observable universe. So what do we have? What they have discovered is that these filaments that unite just like a big giant spider web, these filaments are the highways where the galaxies flow and then they meet in different parts. So you have, just to give you a little background, we have our solar system with the sun as a source of heat and light. Then we have the Milky Way galaxy made up of approximately 200 billion stars. But this is just one galaxy. So what they talk about, just like in a spider web, you have the strands, but you see each one is united and see these are called nodes. That's where they're united. So you have these flowing into the nodes and then those nodes are where the galaxies eventually start converging. So we have in our solar system, we're part of about 60 galaxies called the local group. And the Milky Way is the second largest of the galaxies. We have the Andromeda galaxy and there's another one that's less known, but then the rest are dwarf galaxies. They're smaller. So this would be like one of the nodes that we're looking at.

But our Milky Way galaxy and this local group is going to a larger node. It's coming in here and these are called the Virgo cluster, made up of 2,000 galaxies. So this is a larger group that we have now. And these are all tied up in nodes because the Virgo cluster is just 200, I mentioned 2,000 galaxies, but they're also going toward what they call a the Virgo super cluster, which are around 47,000 galaxies. And astronomers calculate that you have 10 million of the super clusters. So when you see that picture, you see the white parts are those super clusters. And these are still immense dimensions. The large percentage of the universe is empty space. So you don't have to ever worry about things crashing. Everything is bound up.

Notice here what it tells us about the super clusters. Pulling from a new data gathered by the James Webb Space Telescope, confirmed that these filaments, the strands, were important structures right from the earliest days. So this web from the very earliest days. Now it's already designed. Just like God isn't going to make a human body and forget the bones. No, this is what sustains it.

In addition to the gravitational pull of normal matter, there are, of course, the forces of dark matter and dark energy at work shaping the cosmic web. Combined, dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of all the energy, talking about energy and matter, of the universe.

How carefully calibrated is all of this? As astrophysicist Hugh Ross gives an analogy. He says, picture a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, the USS John Stennis. Now imagine a tiny fleck of paint from the ship. We have in San Diego, right, some of these big aircraft carriers. Just think a little fleck of paint from so small against your hand you can barely see it. I just pull out a little fleck of that paint. If such a vehicle were compared to the universe in its earliest moments, removing that speck or holding an extra drop of paint so it would be enough to alter the vehicle's mass so much as to make it completely useless for transporting passengers. You know, just throw things out of kilter. He says, in reality, the delicacy of that ratio is far more extreme than the ship analogy reveals. For the reasons noted above, and if no other density factors influence expansion of the universe, at certain early epochs in the cosmic history, its mass density must have been as finely tuned as one part in 10 to the 60th power. Now, they basically calculate that the atoms in the universe are 10 to the 80th power. So here you have 10 to the 60th power to allow for the possible existence of physical life at any time. This degree of fine-tuning is so great that it's right after the universe's beginning, someone would have destroyed the possibility of life within it by subtracting a simple dimed mass, a little 10-cent dime from the whole of the observable universe or adding a single dime's mass to it. That's how carefully calibrated things are.

Astronomer Gregory Rudnick from the University of Kansas says the universe is crisscrossed by something like an interstellar superhighway system. So here, the superhighway system, just like the state of California, has all this superhighway system. And it's got places that are smaller, small cities, towns, villages, and these are like isolated galaxies that are still part of the cosmic web. But you have the nodes, which are the big cities.

It says filaments, the strands of aggregated matter that stretch millions of light years across the universe to connect galaxy clusters, are the freeways. Galaxies will flow along filaments from less dense parts of the universe to more dense parts of the universe, kind of like cars flowing down a highway to the big city. In this case, they are going toward big clusters, being pulled by the gravity of those large concentrations of matter. So going back to Dr. Sutter, he compares the formation of the cosmic web to the difficult art of origami folding. How many know how to fold origami? Okay, we got one or two. Well, I'm an origami folder. If you take a sheet of paper and start folding it, you will find a series of nodes and filaments. So here, I started here while you guys were singing, I was making little folds. And you see, all of these are the parts where you have the points, which would be the nodes.

He says, if you take a sheet of paper and start folding it, you will find a series of nodes and filaments. The filaments are the simple creases. So basically, it takes me about 14 folds to make something with it. And each one of these creases is just like the filaments. They're all guided. And the nodes are the places where the creases intersect. Mathematicians have studied the relationships of the creases and folds of origami structures. And astronomers have taken that language and applied it to the cosmic web. Something that complex to put everything in its place. On the other hand, if you ask them how a spider web came to be, and for what purpose, they would readily answer that a spider made it to catch insects to eat. Doesn't it stand to reason that the vastly more complex of the universe was also made with a purpose and design?

To say that it just happened with no intelligence or foresight involved is denying reality. Let's look at Psalm 14. Psalm 14.

Verse 1.

It says, the fool, and by the way, the translation, better translation, is the godless fool.

So that's kind of like an atheist or an agnostic. The fool has said in his heart, there is no god. They are corrupt. They have done abominable works. There is none who does good, who thinks that way. And so, as we have this origami folding, like I said, it takes me about 14 folds.

All the last creases I have, and what do I have? I have a little swan.

And what does this little swan do after 14 folds? Well, it does this.

Now, if a human being can design something like that, that's how God keeps things in order in the universe. As we saw in Hebrews 11.3, God made the universe from what is invisible to the human senses. Further, He made it and sustains it through Jesus Christ. Hebrews 1, verses 2 and 3 says, God created the universe by His Son. God's Son has all the brightness of God's own glory and is like Him in every way. By His own mighty word, He holds the universe together. That's from the contemporary English version. And so, the Bible, because it's the word of God, reveals that they're never going to be able to discover this dark matter thing because it's all over the universe and it holds up things. It holds up the galaxies, it guides them, and what is dark matter made of? Well, just they can detect the power of it, but it doesn't have any particles or physical elements that they have been able to find.

Plus, you have dark matter and then you have gravity working together and the matter, what you can see, the physical matter. And of course, then you have dark energy, which is what maintains the expansion of the universe, goes forward. So, it's the one that is pushing outward. While gravity is pushing inward, dark energy is even stronger. Now, gravity, at least, you can detect it, you know, it's still invisible. They once asked Isaac Newton, he said, well, you described how gravity works, but what is it? And he said, I have no idea, but it works! That's so important. And so, we have that as a comfort. And God not only worries about the macro universe, and Dave gave you a little bit of the micro universe, what it's like with a little acorn and everything else. But God is concerned about the acorn and he's concerned about the universe and all the galaxies all working together so they don't crash into each other and cause chaos. We read in Matthew 10, verse 30, about how much God cares for us. He says, He has the very hairs on our head counted. That's how much God cares for us. He's also able to count all the stars in the universe and guide them like an orderly army throughout space. He even gives each one a name. Notice in Isaiah 40, verse 26, Isaiah 40, verse 26, it says, Lift up your eyes on high and see who has created these things, who brings out their host. It's an old term for army. By number, He calls them all by name, by the greatness of His might and the strength of His power, not one is missing. I'd like to read this also now in the New Living Translation. Just look up into the heavens. Who created all these stars?

He brings them out like an army, one after another. Now, when you bring an army, do you just have a whole bunch of people rushing forward? No, they've got ranks, right? They've got placements that they go. So it's the same way with the stars. They all have an orderly way of following these laws of God, calling each by its name because of His great power and incomparable strength. Not a single one is missing. God once asked Job, can you count stars? Can you do some of these things? And of course, Job knew he was way out of his league, didn't he? Questioning what God does. Similarly, God is now in the process of preparing this universe with Christ coming to bring, quote, many children to share His glory. Hebrews 2, verse 10. A good news translation. So scripture tells us that we have the potential of one day reigning under Christ as co-heirs of this universe. Let's turn to Romans chapter 8, verse 16 and 17. Romans chapter 8, verses 16 and 17. It says, the Spirit, and it should say itself, bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. We're part of God's family, and we're going to be glorified one day. And if children, then heirs, heirs of what?

Heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. If indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together. For I consider that the suffering of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us, for the earnest expectation of the creation. This is a term, a universe, eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons or children of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope. Again, we have a fallen world, but God's going to change that. Make it beautiful, because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation or universe groans and labors with birth pangs together until now.

And it says not only that, but we also have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves, groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, which should be the sonship, the redemption of our body. We're looking forward one day. God has not created all this in vain. He's put a lot of investment in all this real estate.

And then he goes on to say in this chapter 8, it says in verse 31, no, let me a little bit before that. Verse 28, And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose. We know what the purpose is of mankind now, to be part of that family, to reign under Christ. And certainly things are being discovered. This 2026, there are going to be huge telescopes, which will open up and be able to show us more about this cosmic web, which is God's framework that he prepared for the universe, because it has a long time that is going to be useful to God's purposes.