Long before anyone called me the Rain Man, I had another idea that sounded just as strange.
It was about God, energy, death, and why the universe never stops creating.
About fifty years ago, I began wondering about something scientists themselves were still trying to understand.
The universe was expanding.
At the time, one of the possibilities being seriously discussed was that gravity might eventually stop that expansion and everything would begin collapsing back upon itself.
That did not make sense to me.
Something had to be providing the energy that allowed creation to continue.
Many years later, scientists would discover that the expansion of the universe was not merely continuing.
It was accelerating.
They eventually gave names to things they could not see but believed had to exist because of what they could observe.
Dark matter.
Dark energy.
I had another name.
The Creator.
I never claimed this was science.
It was simply what I believed I had been allowed to understand.
My belief was that everything alive contains energy.
People contain it.
Animals contain it.
Plants contain it.
Even the Earth, a living world filled with life and energy, contains it.
And when something dies, I do not believe that energy simply disappears.
It returns to the Creator.
The energy of everything that has lived becomes part of something greater, returning to the source from which creation came.
And perhaps that returning energy helps fuel a universe that continues expanding, creating new stars, new planets, and perhaps new worlds filled with life.
Scientists may someday discover what dark matter and dark energy really are.
Or perhaps they will never see all of it unless the Creator wants to be seen.
That may sound strange.
But strange ideas about the universe have been around for a very long time.
More than two thousand years ago, Democritus proposed that everything around us was made from tiny particles that human beings could not see.
He called them atomos.
He had no microscope, particle accelerator, or laboratory capable of proving that such things existed.
Centuries later, science discovered that matter really was built from atoms.
Around the third century B.C., Aristarchus looked toward the heavens and proposed something else almost unimaginable for his time.
The Earth was not the center of everything.
The Earth traveled around the Sun.
He could not prove it with the instruments available to him.
Humanity would require many centuries before observations could establish that he had been looking at the universe more correctly than most of the people around him.
Democritus imagined an unseen reality beneath matter.
Aristarchus imagined an unseen order in the heavens.
Meme imagines an unseen energy behind creation.
There is one important difference.
Democritus and Aristarchus eventually made claims that science could test.
What I believe about the Creator may never be testable in that way.
Perhaps it is not supposed to be.
Maybe fifty years ago I simply imagined an explanation for the universe that will someday be forgotten.
Or maybe, like Democritus and Aristarchus, I saw something long before mankind possessed the means to see it.
I am 77 years old.
I probably will not be here if science ever discovers the answer.
That does not bother me.
I already know what I believe.
Scientists call it dark matter and dark energy.
I call it the Creator.