Israel Centeno

We live in an age of multiplying knowledge. Science probes the atoms, maps the observable universe, and theorizes dimensions we may never touch. And yet, amidst this expanding sea of understanding, an ancient question still echoes, quietly and persistently: Why is there something rather than nothing?

For centuries, some imagined God as the placeholder for our ignorance — the one who explained thunder, illness, life itself — until science could do the job. That small and shrinking deity is what has been called the god of the gaps.

But that is not the true God.

Not the One who appeared to Moses in the burning bush as “I AM.”

Not the One who sustains every atom in being, moment by moment, with a faithfulness deeper than quantum fields.

The true God does not dwell in the gaps of knowledge. He is the foundation of being.

He is not one cause among others. Not a thing within the system.

He is the reason there is a system at all.

The silent ground of every word. The presence upholding even those who deny Him.

He is not explainable — because He is the reason anything can be explained.

This is how the great mystics and theologians came to see Him:

Augustine sought Him within and found Him “closer to me than I am to myself.”

Thomas Aquinas called Him actus purus — pure act, being in fullness without lack.

John of the Cross adored Him in the dark night, where there is no image, no idea.

And the medieval Cloud of Unknowing taught that He is not grasped by thought, but only known by love.

If the universe has more dimensions — eleven, twenty-six, or infinite — as modern physics proposes, then God is not diminished by them.

He is not inside creation. Creation is inside Him.

Time does not confine Him. Space does not contain Him.

No discovery will ever replace Him, because He is not competing with science.

God is not a hypothesis.

He is the ground.

And here is the great mystery that surpasses all logic:

This ground… is Love.

Not impersonal force.

Not abstract energy.

But a free, radiant Love that calls being out of nothingness.

A Love that does not impose, but invites.

A Love that became flesh, lived among us, died and rose again — so that we too may live in Him.

So when the modern world tells you it no longer “needs” God — because it can calculate orbits, clone cells, or manipulate quantum bits — remember this:

God is not what we don’t yet understand.

He is what makes understanding possible.

He is not what is missing in the theory.

He is the reason there is a theory at all.

And that God — who cannot be fit inside theories or telescopes —

is the same One who waits in the Eucharist,

in the silence of a monastic cell,

in the trembling soul that no longer seeks answers…

but Presence