Dark Energy and the Sacred Depth of Reality

For most of human history, we assumed that what we could see was what existed. Stars, planets, bodies, rocks—matter felt solid, real, and sufficient. But modern cosmology has quietly dismantled that assumption. Today we know that everything visible—every atom in every galaxy, including our own bodies—accounts for less than five percent of the universe. The remaining ninety-five percent is composed of what we call dark matter and dark energy: unseen, unmeasured directly, inferred only by their effects. And it is precisely here, in what we cannot see, that the most profound questions arise.

Dark matter behaves like mass, shaping galaxies and holding them together through gravity, yet it does not interact with light. Dark energy, on the other hand, behaves like a pressure inherent to space itself, accelerating the expansion of the universe. Neither fits comfortably within our classical understanding of matter or energy. We do not know what they are. We only know what they do. And that distinction matters.

This is where the conversation becomes philosophical rather than merely scientific. In every domain of inquiry, when something is known only by its effects and not by its substance, we are already operating in metaphysical territory. Gravity itself was once such a mystery. Consciousness still is. We know consciousness exists because of its effects—experience, awareness, intention—but we cannot locate it as an object among objects. We infer it, not because we see it, but because nothing makes sense without it.

It is at least reasonable, then, to ask whether dark matter and dark energy are not “things” in the way atoms are things, but expressions of a deeper substrate of reality—one that is closer in nature to consciousness than to inert substance. In fact, this may be the most parsimonious explanation available. If consciousness is fundamental rather than emergent, then it would not be surprising that the universe is mostly composed of something that behaves nonlocally, invisibly, relationally, and structurally—just as consciousness does.

Matter clumps. Consciousness contextualizes. Dark matter provides structure without visibility. Consciousness provides coherence without mass. Dark energy expands space itself. Consciousness expands experience itself. These are not proofs, but they are resonances—and resonance matters when exploring ultimate questions.

What many call “God” has historically been treated as a being within the universe, albeit a powerful one. But this framing collapses under both theology and physics. A god who is merely another object is not ultimate. The more ancient, mystical, and philosophically coherent understanding of God is not as an entity among entities, but as Being itself, or more accurately, as the ground of being. In modern terms, we might say: the field from which all phenomena arise.

If consciousness is that field—and if dark energy and dark matter are manifestations of it at the cosmological scale—then God is not something added to the universe. God is what the universe is doing at its deepest level. Creation is not an event in the past; it is an ongoing expression of consciousness unfolding into form, structure, relationship, and experience.

This aligns remarkably well with the mystical strands of Christianity that were largely sidelined by orthodoxy. The Logos is not merely a historical figure but the organizing principle of reality itself. Christ is not just savior from sin but the revelation of what has always been true: that the divine is not separate from creation, but hidden within it, waiting to be recognized. Sin, in this framework, is not moral failure but forgetfulness. Salvation is not rescue from punishment but awakening to participation.

Dark energy may be the cosmological analog of grace: an unearned, omnipresent force that carries everything forward without resistance or demand. Dark matter may be the unseen scaffolding that allows form to arise at all. Together they suggest that reality is not built from dead particles alone, but from a living, intelligent depth that precedes and sustains matter.

None of this requires abandoning science. In fact, it may require taking science more seriously than materialism allows. Materialism assumes that matter is fundamental, despite overwhelming evidence that matter is derivative, relational, and dependent on observation and information. Consciousness, on the other hand, refuses to be reduced. It remains irreducible, omnipresent in experience, and indispensable to any account of reality.

To say that dark energy and dark matter are consciousness is not to anthropomorphize the universe. It is to acknowledge that the universe behaves more like a mind than a machine. Dynamic, relational, self-organizing, creative. And if that consciousness is what people across cultures have intuited and named as God, then perhaps theology has always been trying—imperfectly—to describe what physics is only now beginning to glimpse.

In that sense, God is not hiding from us. God is hiding as us, as space, as energy, as the unseen majority of reality itself. And awakening is not about believing the right things, but about remembering what has always been true: we are not strangers in the universe. We are the universe becoming aware of itself.