“The One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the Lord who does all these” Isaiah 45:7.

Physicists christened the force responsible for the acceleration of the expansion of the universe as “dark energy.” Space was once thought to be empty with nothing between the bodies of mass it holds, and its expansion from its initial Big Bang was believed to be slowing down. The radical theory and subsequent observation that the universe is instead accelerating in its expansion led to the discovery of what literally fills that so-called empty space: dark energy. Physicist Alan Lightman says, “…dark energy apparently hides out in empty space… and comprises a whopping three-quarters of the total energy of the universe” (The Accidental Universe, p.15). It is the massive force that is ever pushing the universe’s boundaries outward and at an increasing rate.

Dark energy is not something we can see; it is invisible, and no one knows exactly what it is. What is widely agreed upon, however, is that if there were more or less dark energy in the universe than there is, life could not have come into existence. Too much and the universe would have expanded at too fast a rate for bodies of space to form or atoms to even unite, and too little and the universe would have collapsed back in on itself quickly after it had erupted (p. 17-18). Our existence was made possible by the presence of this oh-so-perfect amount of dark energy in our universe. In this respect, we owe our lives to dark energy.