Nov 2, 2026 · 36 min · 12 segments
Does understanding the universe leave less room for God? Do you have to choose between science and faith? Astrophysicist Dr Alex Merson, a former NASA postdoctoral fellow at the Jet Propulsion…
Yeah.
at a micro scale, at the atomic scale, there's that much complexity and more than 95% of that is empty space.
The vast, vast, vast majority of that is empty space.
And yet to us, you can sit on it and it feels solid.
And yet at the macro scale, at the sort of cosmic scale, there's 95% of the universe is kind of this unknown dark matter and dark energy.
So I think this is kind of getting to the crux of what we wanted to explore in this episode, because we've talked about this a little bit in the past of this idea of science and faith being in conflict with each other.
And that is shrinking all the time.
And yet when you look at this and say only 5% of the observed, well, the entire observable universe, the stuff we can see and interact with is 5% of what we think is actually there.
And the remaining 95% is kind of almost entirely unknown at this point.
And I think that's an interesting one from an atheist standpoint or a standpoint of the God of the gaps theory where, well, there's a lot of gaps out there as it turns out.
So I don't know, maybe Alex, if we can take a step back from this and let's approach that because we've gone in pretty hot with a lot of complexity there.
Yeah.
at a micro scale, at the atomic scale, there's that much complexity and more than 95% of that is empty space.
The vast, vast, vast majority of that is empty space.
And yet to us, you can sit on it and it feels solid.
And yet at the macro scale, at the sort of cosmic scale, there's 95% of the universe is kind of this unknown dark matter and dark energy.
So I think this is kind of getting to the crux of what we wanted to explore in this episode, because we've talked about this a little bit in the past of this idea of science and faith being in conflict with each other.
And that is shrinking all the time.
And yet when you look at this and say only 5% of the observed, well, the entire observable universe, the stuff we can see and interact with is 5% of what we think is actually there.
And the remaining 95% is kind of almost entirely unknown at this point.
And I think that's an interesting one from an atheist standpoint or a standpoint of the God of the gaps theory where, well, there's a lot of gaps out there as it turns out.
So I don't know, maybe Alex, if we can take a step back from this and let's approach that because we've gone in pretty hot with a lot of complexity there.
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