The Unseen Reality
By Tom Gilbreath
In film and television, you often hear the male hero, say, “I only believe in what I can see.” It’s hard to fathom a more ridiculous comment. I did a Google search for, “How much of the universe can we see with our eyes?” The AI Overview answered, “With our eyes alone, we can only see a tiny fraction of the universe's total volume, a mere 0.0000000000000000001%.”
There are several reasons we only see such an unfathomably small part of what exists. First, our eyes are equipped to see only 0.0035% of the total electromagnetic spectrum. For instance, we can see violet light, but not ultraviolet or anything on the spectrum beyond that.
Distance also keeps us from seeing much of the universe. Under ideal viewing conditions, we can see light from the Andromeda galaxy, about 2 ½ million light years from earth. Light travels 186,000 miles in a second. So, millions of years of light travel means extreme distances that our eyes can perceive light from. But even that is a minuscule part of the universe which has a diameter of at least 93 billion light years — maybe a lot more… maybe even infinitely more.
We haven’t talked about the unseen things all around us — atoms, subatomic particles, gravity, etc. It’s true that scientific instruments allow us to see farther and deeper than with our eyes alone. But even before people had such instruments, materialists used the line, “I only believe what I can see.” If someone said that fifty years ago, how foolish they must feel today when science has allowed us to see so much more. How much more will we see in the future?
Science estimates that dark matter comprises 27% of the universe, but we can’t see it with our eyes or telescopes. Dark energy, they say, makes up about 68% of the universe, but none of us have seen any. We can’t even see air. We feel it. We see evidence of it, especially when it’s moving. If it stirs things up, we see that. But we can’t see air itself.
On the closest heavenly body, the moon, there are rocks beneath the surface that no one has ever seen. There are also rocks here on earth that no one has seen. Now think about how many rocks there are in the universe that have gone unseen by human eyes. But they’re real. We haven’t even talked about things that may exist in other dimensions. As a Christian, I would call some of those, “spiritual dimensions.”
In the epic 1667 poem, Paradise Lost, John Milton wrote, “Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep.” What a stunning statement! It sounds like science fiction. Yet throughout history and even today, most human beings have believed it. Majority opinion doesn’t make something true, but such widespread belief in something so fantastic does make the idea worth thinking about.
Of all the unseen entities people believe in, the most interesting by far is God. I haven’t seen Him, but I feel Him, especially when He moves. Everywhere I look, I see evidence of Him.
If you’re of a certain age, you will distinctly remember the 1995 trial of football star, O. J. Simpson. Americans were obsessed with the case for over a year. Though prosecutors and defense lawyers rarely agreed, there were two facts neither side ever disputed. First, Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, had been brutally murdered. Second, somewhere there was a brutal murderer. How did they know the second part? Because murder stands as irrefutable evidence of a murderer.
In the same way, design throughout the universe (and especially in us) proves the existence of a Designer.
