What can science tell us about the mystery of God? Recently I responded to a friend’s quotation of Philip Yancey in his devotional book Grace Notes about the “fine-tuning” of the universe. Here’s a replay of Yancey’s point:
“Rumors of another world sneak in even among those who restrict their view to the world of matter. Scientists who dare not mention God or a Designer speak instead of an “anthropic principle” evident in creation. Nature is exquisitely tuned for the possibility of life on planet Earth: adjust the laws of gravity up or down by one percent, and the universe would not form; a tiny change in electromagnetic force, and organic molecules will not adhere. It appears that, in physicist Freeman Dyson’s words, “The universe knew we were coming.”
To those who know it best, the universe does not seem like a random crapshoot. It seems downright purposeful—but what purpose, and whose? I find more of a spirit of reverence among secular science writers than in some theologians. The wisest among them admit that all our widening knowledge merely exposes our more-widening pool of ignorance. Things that used to seem clear and rational, such as Newtonian physics, have given way to gigantic puzzles.”
In the 20th century, a scientific revolution even greater than Newton’s profoundly changed how we understand our world. It was quantum mechanics. Subatomic particles do not follow the laws of classical Newtonian physics but behave in quite aberrant and even whimsical ways.
Fritz Rohrlich speaks to the challenges of moving from the familiar world of classical Newtonian physics to quantum mechanics:
“There is no reason other than prejudice to expect the quantum world to be expressible in classical terms. Since that world is admittedly strange to us, being very far removed from our experience, it should come as no surprise that many of the problems we have in comprehending it are due to our lack of proper words for its new and unfamiliar concepts and for its peculiar nature.”
As with the classical Newtonian physics, most Christians operate within “classical” Christianity most of the time. When asked for his definition of the gospel, Karl Barth, theological giant of the 20th century, is said to have replied, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so!”
But as with Newtonian physics, it is dangerous to assume this is all there is. Einstein and others showed that the quantum world revealed deeper mysteries. The quantum world did not mesh well with what classical physics had come to expect, and while this new world was not irrational, it was rational in a way never before considered (or different from what Newton might have defined as rational).
If God created reality in such a way that the subatomic world operates on a completely different set of principles than the world we see and touch, why might the same not be true in the realm of the Spirit? And if the paradoxes discovered in natural phenomena (light exhibiting properties of both particles and waves, for example) stimulated scientific seekers to discover the quantum world in the first place, why might biblical paradox not stimulate spiritual seekers in the same ways?
Saint Jerome had a notion of such levels of spiritual reality in mind when he wrote: “The Scripture’s gospel is shallow enough for babes to wade in and never drown and yet deep enough for scholars to swim in and never touch bottom.”
Are you wading… or swimming…or somewhere in between?
Question: Up to now, have you seen science as the enemy of faith? Why or why not? Please share a comment.
Science knows, or seems to know many things that were not known at the beginning of my life. Newton created a mathematical model for what he could see happening in the physical world. But his work did not explain what was happening in the larger universe. Einstein came up with general relativity to describe that. But that did not explain what was happening in the small world of, say, atoms. Quantum theory was developed to explain the small world. I see all of this work as really good, but they are crude mathematical formulae that we constructed to roughly describe the universe that we know. We cannot reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics. I don’t know that we will. There is much that we do not know. A substantial part of the mass or energy of the universe is called dark matter or dark energy because we simply do not know what it is. We see things with modern technology in space that we have difficulty in reconciling with general relativity. Many of us have seen things in our lives that we call miracles–events that have been seen or otherwise witnessed that seemingly cannot be explained by science as we know it. All of this science interests me greatly, but I don’t see it as threatening my belief in God, Christ and the Holy Spirit. There seems to be some rules that govern physical activity in the universe that we partly understand, but that does not mean to me that God did not have a hand in constructing the Earth on which we depend. The physical record documents the apparent fact of evolution, and I have no problem in accepting that, although we really do not fully understand how it works. But that does not mean to me that God did and does not have a hand in making us (men and women) who we are and how we think and what we feel. It’s all good, and I don’t see that any of it is in conflict with the rest of the puzzle.