For most of my life, a God that was real seemed a contradiction in terms. Every idea of God I had ever encountered seemed either physically impossible or so vague as to be empty. I was an atheist married to a famous scientist. But a time came when I needed a higher power. I was forced to acknowledge that, but I didnt know if it would be possible for me. I have no interest in a God that has to be believed in. If I am going to have God in my life, it has to be a God that cannot help but exist, in the same way that matter and gravity and culture exist. We dont need to believe in these things; they just exist. We can choose to learn more about them, or not.

I have had the extraordinary privilege of a ringside seat for one of the greatest scientific revolutions in human history. For thirty-eight-years I have been married to a man who studies the entire universe as a single evolving entity. My husband, Joel Primack, studies cosmology, the branch of astrophysics that researches the origin, nature, and evolution of the universe. In the early 1980s my then-young husband and three collaborators proposed a theory to solve the great mystery of why there are galaxies. After all, if the Big Bang was symmetrical in all directions, why isnt the universe just a bigger soup? What caused galaxies and clusters of galaxies to form?

Their new theory challenged the assumption that everything is made of atoms. It postulated that the vast majority of matter in the universe is in fact not made of atoms or even made of the parts of atoms. Its something completely different, something invisible, called cold dark matter. The theory calculates how the peculiar behavior of cold dark matter could have created the galaxies over time. It was a daring theory, making specific predictions in a field that had scarcely any believable evidence. Some astronomers dismissed it as wildly improbable, but my husband and his collaborators kept developing it with increasing success, realizing a few years later that the other key actor in the evolution of the universe was the even more mysterious dark energy. Thats the energy making the universe expand faster and faster. To test the theory countries around the world have built great observatories on the ground and in space. After three decades the evidence is overwhelming and still pouring inand it confirms the theory without a single discrepancy. As unlikely as it seemed at first, even to my skeptical husband and his colleagues, the double dark theory, based on dark matter and dark energy, has now become accepted in astronomy as the foundation of the modern picture of the universe.

For me a God that is real has to be real not in our commonsense world but in the double dark universe, where we now know we live.

The double dark theory tells a big piece of our origin story. For thousands of years and in virtually all cultures, people have told origin stories, but this is the first one to be based on science and therefore the first origin story in the history of humanity that may actually be accurate. The story is not what anyone, not even Einstein, expected. Were living in a stranger universe than earlier generations ever dreamed. The implications of this discovery for intelligent beings are almost entirely unknown, but inevitably they will be life changing. We have a new picture of the universe. What does a new picture of our universe mean for who and what we are?

And what does it mean for God?

The modern world is certainly confused about God. Surveys consistently find that about 90 percent of Americans, and a somewhat smaller majority of people in many other countries, say quite definitely that they believe in God. But when they are asked to explain what they mean by God, they become less certain, and theres much divergence of opinion. Is God something authoritarian or supportive, engaged or distant, physical or in the heart? Some describe God as all knowing, all loving, all wise, a careful planneran entity embodying human characteristics raised to perfectionthat created and controls the entire universe, including alien worlds where there could be intelligent creatures with little resemblance to humans. Some believe there is no law of physics an all-powerful God could not break.

Religions opponents jump in and claim that God does not exist, end of story. This claim is understandable: abuses in the name of religion provide plenty of temptation to feel that the human race might be better off abolishing the whole idea of religion. From this perspective God is at best a fantasy and a distraction, and there are saner and more useful ways to contribute to society.

There was a time when I felt this way.

I remember sitting in Sunday school when I was in the second grade, reading a picture book that showed God as an old bearded man sitting on a cloud and giving orders. I thought, of course that couldnt be real! I watched clouds all the time, and I never saw anyone up there. Metaphor was quite beyond me as a child. I took things literally, and then I made my own judgment, which would always seem like the obvious conclusion. The greatest mystery to me as a child was how grown-ups could believe the religious stories they were teaching us. Did they really? Were they crazy or were they intentionally tricking us? The implications either way were confusing. I suffered through eight years of Sunday school. When I was fifteen, the rabbi had my confirmation class write an essay on our personal view of God. God didnt create us; we created God, I wrote, honestly concluding that God was a fiction invented by weak or illogical people for reasons of convenience or comfort. The rabbi ordered me into his office and yelled at me. Who do you think you are, he railed, to question the wisdom of your ancestors? It was more than a decade before I entered a synagogue again.

See the rest here:
My atheist search for God: Were debating science and religion all wrong