The Unnameable Light: A Meditation on the Creator, Creation, and the Mystery We Will Never Solve

"Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you think you understand." — Job 38:4

There is a thought—an awareness, if I may put it that way—that constantly occupies my mind when I contemplate the nature of God and the omnipotence of His power. It is the thought of His signature on what we, in our limited vocabulary, call the Laws of Nature. We speak of them as if they are autonomous, as if the universe runs on a kind of autopilot, governed by impersonal forces that we are slowly, painstakingly deciphering. But the scriptures will not allow us that illusion.

Concerning these very laws, the Bible records a question that Jehovah Himself posed to the patriarch Job. It is a question that, even now, millennia after it was first spoken, stops the breath:

"Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you think you understand. Who set its measurements, in case you know, or who stretched a measuring line across it? Into what were its pedestals sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars joyfully cried out together, and all the sons of God began shouting in applause?"

— Job 38:4-7, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures

The question is not an invitation to scientific inquiry. It is a declaration of absolute, unsearchable sovereignty. The Creator does not ask Job to calculate the mass of the earth or to estimate the age of its foundations. He asks Job where he was. The answer, of course, is nowhere. Job was not present. Job was not consulted. And neither were we.

This longread is not an attempt to explain God. That would be the height of arrogance, and an exercise in futility. It is, rather, an attempt to stand at the edge of what we know—scientifically, scripturally, and experientially—and to look out into the vast, shimmering darkness of what we do not know. And in that act of looking, to be moved. Not to pride, but to awe. Not to explanation, but to worship.

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The Light That Speaks Without Words

Let us begin, as the creation account itself begins, with light.

"And God said: 'Let there be light.' Then there was light. After that God saw that the light was good, and God brought about a division between the light and the darkness. God called the light Day, but the darkness he called Night."

— Genesis 1:3-5

The language is simple enough for a child to understand. But the reality it describes is one of the most complex phenomena in the physical universe. Light. What is it, exactly?

Ask a physicist, and you will receive an answer that sounds like a paradox. Light is both a particle and a wave. It behaves as discrete packets of energy—photons—that travel through space at a constant speed of approximately 299,792 kilometres per second. Yet it also behaves as a continuous electromagnetic wave, oscillating through electric and magnetic fields. This is called wave-particle duality, and it has been demonstrated in countless laboratory experiments since the early 20th century. But naming a phenomenon is not the same as explaining it. The physicist can describe what light does. The physicist cannot tell you what light is.

The scriptures do not attempt a physics textbook. They do something far more profound. They tell us why light is.

"He is the Maker of the earth by his power, the One who established the productive land by his wisdom and who stretched out the heavens by his understanding. When he thunders, the waters in the heavens roar, and he causes clouds to ascend from the ends of the earth. He makes lightning for the rain and brings the wind out of his storehouses."

— Jeremiah 10:12-13

The light that flickers in a storm, the photon that travels 150 million kilometres from the sun to strike a leaf and power the miracle of photosynthesis, the electromagnetic wave that carries the image of a loved one's face to your retina—all of it, according to the scriptures, originates in the will of a Person. Not a force. Not a principle. A Person who "makes lightning for the rain."

This is the first, foundational humbling. We study light. We harness it. We build lasers and fibre-optic cables and solar panels that convert photons back into electrons. But we did not create it. We did not establish the speed at which it travels or the dual nature by which it operates. We are, at best, discoverers. And the discoveries we have made only deepen the mystery.

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The Shadow That Obeys a Protocol

Consider the shadow. A child knows what a shadow is. Hold your hand up to a light source, and a dark outline appears on the wall. Simple. Obvious. Unremarkable.

Until you begin to think about it.

A shadow is not an object. It has no mass, no temperature, no physical substance. It is an absence—a region into which light, for whatever reason, cannot reach. And yet that absence obeys precise, mathematical protocols. The angle of the shadow. The sharpness or softness of its edges. The way it stretches and distorts as the light source moves. All of this is governed by the laws of optics, which are themselves a subset of the laws of physics, which are themselves—if the scriptures are to be believed—a subset of the will of Jehovah.

"He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has even put eternity in their heart; yet mankind will never find out the work that the true God has made from start to finish."

— Ecclesiastes 3:11

The shadow is a small thing. Insignificant. But even the shadow operates according to protocols that we did not write. A child can predict a shadow. A physicist can calculate its dimensions. But no human being can alter the underlying law that makes a shadow what it is. We can manipulate the light source. We can change the object. But the law itself—the protocol that governs the interaction of light and matter—is beyond our reach.

And this, Jehovah declares through the prophet Jeremiah, is by design.

"Do you not fear me? This is the utterance of Jehovah. Will you not be in pain because of me, the One who set the sand as the boundary for the sea, by a permanent regulation that it cannot pass over? Though its waves toss, they cannot prevail; though they roar, they still cannot pass over it."

— Jeremiah 5:22

The same God who set the sand as a boundary for the sea—a regulation the waves obey without question—set the laws that govern the interaction of a photon and a solid object. The shadow is not a random phenomenon. It is a testimony. Every time you see your silhouette on the ground, you are witnessing a miracle of order. And you did nothing to earn it.

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The Physical Universe: A Cathedral of Ignorance

If light and shadow humble us, the universe at large should bring us to our knees.

The numbers, when you encounter them, are dizzying. The observable universe contains an estimated two trillion galaxies. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, contains an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars. Many of those stars are orbited by planets—exoplanets, we call them—and the total number of such worlds is so vast that even the most powerful telescopes ever built, including the James Webb Space Telescope, can only glimpse the tiniest fraction of what is out there.

And all of it, all two trillion galaxies and all their countless stars and all their silent, spinning worlds, is governed by laws that we did not create.

The deeper we peer into the cosmos, the more we realise how much we do not know. Astronomers speak of "dark matter"—a hypothetical substance that does not interact with light and has never been directly detected, yet is believed to account for approximately 27% of the total mass-energy content of the universe. They speak of "dark energy"—an even more mysterious force, accounting for roughly 68% of the universe, that appears to be accelerating the expansion of space itself. Together, dark matter and dark energy constitute about 95% of the universe. Everything we can see, touch, measure, and understand—every star, every planet, every galaxy, every photon—accounts for roughly 5%.

Let that settle for a moment. The sum total of human scientific knowledge, everything we have learned since Galileo first turned a telescope to the heavens, describes at most 5% of what exists. The remaining 95% is, to us, a mystery. We have given it names. We have constructed mathematical models to describe its effects. But we do not know what it is. We do not know where it comes from. We do not know how it works.

"Look! These are just the fringes of his ways; only a faint whisper has been heard of him! So who can understand his mighty thunder?"

— Job 26:14

Job's words, spoken more than three thousand years ago, anticipated the entire trajectory of modern cosmology. The fringes of His ways. A faint whisper. That is what we have heard. And in our pride, we have mistaken that whisper for a comprehensive understanding.

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The Protocols That Govern Reality

Let us step back from the cosmic scale and consider something closer to home: the laws of physics themselves.

Why does the universe operate according to mathematical laws at all? Why is the speed of light constant? Why does gravity obey an inverse-square law rather than, say, an inverse-cube law? Why do the fundamental constants of nature—the gravitational constant, the Planck constant, the charge of an electron—have the precise values they have, such that if any one of them were altered by even a fraction of a percent, stars would not form, carbon would not be synthesised, and life as we know it would be impossible?

Scientists call this the "fine-tuning problem." It is a well-documented, widely acknowledged feature of the physical universe. The laws and constants of nature appear to be exquisitely calibrated to permit the existence of complex, carbon-based life. The secular mind, uncomfortable with the implications, has proposed various explanations: the multiverse, in which ours is merely one of an infinite number of universes, most of which are sterile; the anthropic principle, which argues that we should not be surprised to find ourselves in a universe capable of supporting us, because if it were not, we would not be here to observe it.

But the scriptures offer a simpler, more direct explanation:

"He is the Maker of the earth by his power, the One who established the productive land by his wisdom and who stretched out the heavens by his understanding."

— Jeremiah 51:15

The laws of physics are not an accident. They are not a statistical inevitability in an infinite multiverse. They are, according to the Bible, the deliberate protocols established by a Creator who "stretched out the heavens by his understanding." The constants that make life possible are not a cosmic lottery win. They are the signature of a Designer.

And yet, even knowing this, we must remain humble. Because knowing that God established these laws is not the same as knowing how or why He established them in the particular way He did. We observe the protocols. We describe them with ever-increasing precision. We use them to build technology that would have seemed miraculous to our ancestors. But we did not write them. And we cannot change them.

"Just as you do not know how the spirit operates in the bones of the pregnant woman, in the same way you do not know the work of the true God, who does all things."

— Ecclesiastes 11:5

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The Advance of Science: A Deepening Humility

The history of science is often told as a story of conquest. Humanity, armed with reason and the scientific method, has steadily pushed back the frontiers of ignorance. We have mapped the genome, split the atom, walked on the moon, and imaged a black hole at the centre of a distant galaxy. We have built machines that can see individual atoms and telescopes that can peer into the atmospheres of planets orbiting stars hundreds of light-years away.

But there is another way to read that history. Every question we answer opens ten new questions. Every discovery reveals a deeper layer of complexity. The more we learn, the more we realise how much we do not know.

Consider the human brain. We know that it contains roughly 86 billion neurons, connected by trillions of synapses. We know that electrical and chemical signals travel through these networks, giving rise to thought, memory, emotion, and consciousness. But we do not know how. The "hard problem of consciousness"—the question of how subjective experience arises from objective physical processes—remains as impenetrable today as it was when the philosopher David Chalmers first formulated it in the 1990s. We can map the brain. We can stimulate it. We can observe it in real time using functional magnetic resonance imaging. But we cannot explain the simplest act of awareness. Why does a particular pattern of neural firing feel like the colour red? Why does another pattern feel like the memory of a loved one's face? We do not know.

Consider the origin of life. The simplest living cell is a universe of complexity in miniature—a self-replicating, self-repairing, information-processing system of staggering sophistication. We know that life appeared on Earth approximately 3.8 billion years ago, relatively soon after the planet cooled enough to support it. But we do not know how. We have theories. We have experiments that demonstrate how some of the building blocks of life—amino acids, nucleotides, lipids—could have formed under early Earth conditions. But we have never created life from non-life. We have never come close.

"O the depth of God's riches and wisdom and knowledge! How unsearchable his judgments are and beyond tracing out his ways are! For 'who has come to know the mind of Jehovah, or who has become his adviser?' Or, 'who has first given to him, so that it must be repaid to him?' Because from him and by him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen."

— Romans 11:33-36

The apostle Paul, writing two thousand years before the invention of the scientific method, perfectly captured the posture that science itself should produce. The depth of God's wisdom is unsearchable. His ways are beyond tracing out. We can observe them. We can marvel at them. We can describe them in ever-finer detail. But we cannot exhaust them. We cannot get to the bottom of them. Every new discovery is not a step toward omniscience. It is a step toward a deeper, more profound humility.

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A Final Reflection

I began this piece by confessing that a thought constantly occupies my mind when I contemplate the nature of God. It is the thought of His signature on the laws of nature—the protocols that govern light and shadow, the constants that make life possible, the vast, silent machinery of the cosmos that operates with a precision we can only marvel at. But that thought is not an end in itself. It is an invitation.

As intelligent beings, we have the need—an obligation, even—to regularly step back and contemplate the big questions. Why are we here? What caused us to exist? What does the evidence around us actually point to? This piece has been an attempt to do exactly that: to look at the unassailable evidence of design, complexity, and order that saturates the physical universe, and to follow that evidence where it leads. Not to a distant force or a vague cosmic principle, but to the personal, powerful, and unsearchable God who set the protocols for every photon and every galaxy.

The apostle Paul, writing to the congregation in Rome, said it plainly:

"For his invisible qualities are clearly seen from the world's creation onward, because they are perceived by the things made, even his eternal power and Godship, so that they are inexcusable."

— Romans 1:20, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures

The evidence is not hidden. It is on display. The same God who set the sand as the boundary for the sea, who makes lightning for the rain, who stretched out the heavens by His understanding—this God has not abandoned His creation. He is present. He is attentive. And He has revealed Himself, not only in the laws of physics, but in the pages of a book that bears His name.

The physical universe will always humble us. There will never come a day when we can stand before a burning bush and say, "I understand everything." The darkness will always outrun the light. The mystery will always exceed the explanation. And that, I have come to believe, is exactly as it should be. Because a universe that we could fully comprehend would be a universe unworthy of its Creator.

"For now we see in hazy outline by means of a metal mirror, but then it will be face-to-face. At present I know partially, but then I will know accurately, just as I am accurately known."

— 1 Corinthians 13:12

For now, we see in hazy outline. And even that outline is breathtaking. What will it be, then, when the haze lifts?

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"To the King of eternity, incorruptible, invisible, the only God, be honour and glory forever and ever. Amen."

— 1 Timothy 1:17

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For comment, reflection, or to share your own thoughts on the Creator and His creation, I would be pleased to hear from you. And I promise to respond to every comment submitted.

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📧 Email: aaronphir@gmail.com

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This longread is intended as an occasional piece—a deliberate departure from the practical and the commercial, into the realm of the eternal. It is not a sermon, but an invitation: to step back from the noise of daily life and sit, even for a few quiet minutes, with the big questions that we are often too busy to ask. Why are we here? What caused us to exist? What does the evidence around us actually point to?

It is offered in the spirit of Psalm 111:2: "Great are the works of Jehovah; they are pondered by all those who delight in them." Pondering takes time. It takes a willingness to be still. And it takes the humility to admit that the unassailable evidence of design, complexity, and order in the universe leads not to a vague cosmic force, but to a personal, powerful Creator whose signature is everywhere—from the photon that strikes your eye to the galaxy that spins beyond your sight.

May this piece move you, as it moved me in the writing, to pause. To ponder. And to honour the One whose signature is everywhere.