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A Sincere Question, Met with Silence

With recent discoveries and theories, one must ask, "How did the universe come to be? The scientists are in a dock with no answer. And yet there is overwhelming evidence of design. Consider proton entanglement:

Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.” Two particles, once linked, retain a bond so deep that even if one is carried to the farthest corner of the universe, the other still knows. Theory predicts if you touch one, the other responds instantly, as though distance were an illusion. Science calls it quantum entanglement. It’s like me turning a dice to six and my friend in Sweden watching his dice turn to six likewise.

It is a puzzle that unsettles even the most rational minds. How can two things remain connected when no visible bridge joins them? How can information pass without a signal, without wires, without time? The laboratory reveals the truth of the phenomenon, yet the human mind strains to accept it.

And that is the point.

We have lived for centuries with the illusion that reality is solid, mechanical, measurable. Drop a stone into a loch, and ripples spread across the water. Simple cause and effect. Yet at the smallest level, the world behaves in ways that defy intuition. Particles exist in clouds of possibility until measured. Distance collapses into nothingness for entangled twins. We discover that what we see is not the whole story.

The writer of Hebrews, two thousand years before the term “quantum” was spoken, captured this mystery in words that echo across time: “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.” Hebrews 11:3.

To the believer, entanglement whispers of design. It speaks of an invisible order binding creation together, of threads unseen that hold the fabric of existence. But even to the sceptic, it poses a question worth lingering over: if the foundations of reality are invisible, then might there be more to existence than our senses allow?

Entanglement does not prove God. But it does invite humility. It reminds us that we do not stand at the summit of knowledge, surveying a completed landscape. Instead, we are wanderers in a vast country whose mountains are still shrouded in mist. What we think solid may dissolve underfoot. What we think impossible may be the very heart of things.

So I ask—not with the arrogance of certainty, but with the gentleness of wonder—if unseen threads bind the particles of the universe, could not an unseen hand bind together the lives of men and women, our sorrows and our hopes, our beginnings and our ends?

The scientist may shrug and say, “It is only physics.” The believer may smile and say, “It is God.” Yet both are standing before the same mystery, staring at the same veil. The difference is not in the evidence, but in the eyes with which we look upon it.

The real question is not whether there is more to the universe than meets the eye. The laboratory has already answered that. The question is whether we are willing to live as though the invisible matters.

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Closely connected with my thought in the top section of this blog is a fascinating book I am reading about this week. There is something haunting in the title, Sounds from Heaven. It suggests more than memory; it hints at an invisible presence still echoing across the years. I’m reading Colin and Mary Peckham’s account of the Lewis Revival of 1949–1952 is not simply to leaf through history, but to hear voices carried forward, prayers, hymns and cries of repentance that speak into our present.

We live in a world that tilts, imperceptibly at times, toward atheism and decadence. In the West, faith is increasingly seen as a relic, a fragile artifact that belongs in museums rather than in the bloodstream of daily life. The modern reader, conditioned by doubt, irony, and distraction, may approach a book like Sounds from Heaven with scepticism. Surely those islanders, with their Gaelic piety and rugged landscapes, lived in a different world from ours? Surely revival belongs to the past, one more curious episode among countless religious enthusiasms.

And yet, as I read, I am struck by the sheer normality of the people involved. They were farmers, fishermen, housewives, ministers—ordinary men and women whose only extraordinary quality was that they took God seriously. Their prayers were not polished but persistent. Their gatherings were marked not by theatrical spectacle but by a trembling sense of God’s nearness. The revival was not a circus; it was a community kneeling.

For modern readers, especially those tempted to believe that secularism is destiny, the value of this book lies in its testimony to interruption. History did not proceed in neat secular stages on the Isle of Lewis. God stepped in, as if to remind us that the drift of nations is not the final word. It is possible, even now, for heaven to break in, for the unseen to become palpable. The question is not whether we are too advanced for revival, but whether we are too distracted, too proud, too dulled by the trivial glow of screens to notice our need.

The testimonies preserved in these pages resist the notion that belief is a private fantasy. Men and women who hours before were indifferent to religion suddenly found themselves overwhelmed by conviction, by joy, by an unshakable sense of God’s reality. This is not decadence, but renewal. It confronts the modern cynic with the stubborn possibility that faith is not mere psychology, but encounter.

There is also a moral challenge here. Sin thrives on the lie that nothing matters deeply, that values are flexible, that indulgence is harmless. But the revival described in Sounds from Heaven insists otherwise: sin wounds, holiness heals, and grace restores. This is not abstract doctrine but lived experience, etched into the lives of those islanders.

To read this book today is therefore to be confronted with a choice. We can dismiss it as an artifact of a more credulous age, or we can receive it as a witness against our easy drift into unbelief. The Isle of Lewis stands as a reminder that beneath the secular veneer lies a human hunger that neither wealth, nor entertainment, nor scientific progress can satisfy.

The real value of Sounds from Heaven is not only historical but prophetic. It whispers to us that the world is not closed, that heaven has not gone silent. The question for us, as modern readers, is whether we will hear those sounds—or drown them out with our own noise.

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