From the Bible to the Big Bang
I am both a physicist and a Christian, and I hold in tension systems of belief that this age sees as being in conflict. Not every age has held this to be true. Isaac Newton was a devout Christian, albeit he denied the Trinity. Galileo, likewise, was a Christian despite his ill treatment at the hands of the Christian Church.
An atheist friend once suggested to me that these men were the “last” of their kind and that Newton’s own science, by showing how even the planets follow rules, closed the door on any belief that God could be in control. Newton was the “last of the magicians”.
This list from Wikipedia, and, more importantly, all the sources it cites, disagrees:
List of Christians in science and technology - Wikipedia
This is a list of Christians in Science and Technology. People in this list should have their Christianity as relevant…en.wikipedia.org
Numerous Christian physicists have made major contributions since Newton and many are living today.
Juan Maldacena, for example, is a practicing Roman Catholic and also inventor of the AdS/CFT correspondence, the most cited research in the recent history of theoretical physics.
The popular myth that scientists are all atheists and agnostics comes from a few well-known science popularizers such as Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Steven Hawking, and even Neil deGrasse Tyson. I don’t have any data to back this up, but it seems to me that atheist scientists may simply be more evangelical about their religion than Christian ones.
All these scientists, including heavy hitters like Maldacena, believe that God sent his only Son to die for our sins about 2000 years ago and raised him to new life. Now, belief in God is relatively easy to justify philosophically. In fact, it is much harder to justify God’s non-existence because one is forced to replace God’s function as the uncaused cause with something else. Agnosticism is perhaps the easiest to justify because it says nothing. But Christian belief requires a great deal more than that, more than most other religions in fact.
Christianity is unique among world religions in that it is not, contrary to popular belief, grounded in a set of moral and/or ceremonial teachings. It has a set of teachings, of course, but these are secondary to the historical event of Jesus’s death and resurrection. As the Apostle Paul said,
[I]f Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is futile and your faith is empty.
1 Corinthians 15:14.
If the resurrection did not happen, says Paul, you might as well give up your faith.
Hence, to be a Christian, you have to believe in what we now call “the supernatural”. In particular you have to believe in at least one supernatural occurrence, the resurrection.
Most Christians believe in far more than that. Most accept the miracles attested to in the New Testament, for example. Some accept miracles that occurred after the Apostolic age as well, right up until the present day, and the Roman Catholic church has an investigative arm dedicated to verifying such claims.
So, how can one reconcile a belief in the supernatural with a belief in science? Doesn’t science, and physics in particular, disprove events like the resurrection and therefore Christianity as a whole?
Rooted in the Rationalism of the Enlightenment, this kind of thinking has infected our modern collective psyche forcing many to feel like they have to choose between science and religion. Yet this system of belief is itself faulty, and, when you examine it closely, it self-destructs in an explosion of absurdity.
Rules and Miracles
The first faulty belief is that if any phenomenon follows a known rule, it cannot be caused by or influenced by God. In other words, the existence of a law of nature removes God from the picture. Consider that if we were to investigate a supposed “miracle” and find that it has a natural explanation, we would trust the natural explanation of course but moreover conclude that God had nothing to do with the miracle. This is completely wrong!
An alternative point of view is that God has, among His many qualities, the quality of law and order. A God who sets down over 600 rules for the Israelites to follow surely has this quality. It seems that God loves rules almost as much as He loves his creation and that is no accident. For it is by rules that God made his creation possible. This is why physics at its best seeks to know the mind of God.
God is not only a Being of law and order, however. He is also a Being of mercy. What is mercy but making an exception to a rule or more correctly recognizing that there is a deeper law underneath the law? This is what Aslan alludes to when he sacrifices himself in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and destroys the Witch in the process.
[T]hough the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.
In our world, physics is the pursuit of the Deep Magic embedded in our universe, but that only goes back to the dawn of time. Beyond that is a deeper magic still, a magic which comes from God alone, and this is why miracles can occur. They are neither random occurrences nor the result of God’s capriciousness, but flow from a set of rules that is deeper than the laws of the universe itself.
Thus, God established the laws of the universe, and, when we discover them, we know something of what He intended for creation. Knowing those rules does not disprove or remove God from the equation any more than knowing the Federal law code disproves Congress. And just as Congress sets the rules and the Executive branch enforces them, so does the President have the power to make exceptions and pardon in rare circumstances, and we can have no insight into why unless it is revealed to us.
The Word
Christians, in general, consider the Bible to be the word of God in one way or another. Most believe that God inspired the authors to write it or told them what to say. Many modern theologians, particularly evangelicals and post-Vatican II Roman Catholics, have argued that the Bible is “inerrant”.
The Doctrine of Inerrancy came out of a counter-reaction to modern theologians who questioned the validity and authorship of various books of the Bible starting in the 18th century, applying “new” scientific methods of textual analysis (which turned out to be deeply flawed).
Inerrancy is not the same as taking everything in the Bible literally. Rather it simply means that the Bible contains no errors. We are not free to excise parts because we think they are wrong. We are called, however, to interpret which parts are to be taken literally and which are metaphorical. For example, the entire Creation story was likely intended to be taken metaphorically even when it was first written down, and there are certain clues and patterns in the text that tell us that it was not intended to be a literal recounting of creation. The account of Jesus’s death and resurrection, however, was intended to be taken literally, as if it were an account in a newspaper. Again, clues in the text tell us that. Not all areas of the Bible are so clear of course, and some are really hard to swallow.
Some Christians, mostly American evangelicals, have taken inerrancy to absurd levels and tried to argue that the Earth is 6000 years old and that the story of Noah’s ark happened exactly as described or even that the ark itself has been discovered (it has not). Literal interpretations are hard to accept since there are contradictory accounts of creation in books 1 and 2 of Genesis and the story of the ark contradicts itself factually in places. While it is entirely possible that, to avoid a devastating flood, a man built a boat and put a lot of animals on it thousands of years ago at the behest of God, the story is not intended to be a recounting of a literal event. Rather it is a story about how a man’s faith can save him even when the whole world drowns.
Most modern Christians accept that when a part of the Bible contradicts known facts it is because it is intended to be metaphorical. That doesn’t mean that the supernatural events in the Bible never happened since we do not have facts that tell us they didn’t. But we do have facts that tell us that the Earth is billions of years old and that people evolved from animals. And basic common sense tells us that no single person could fit all the worlds’ animals on one boat. The story doesn’t seem concerned about this, however, and neither should we because, if we focus on its making literal sense, we lose the point.
Human Origins
Many Christians choose to believe in a literal Adam and Eve. The story of the Fall is so important to Christians in particular, since Jesus is portrayed as the new Adam, the one without sin, that surely just as there is a literal new Adam, there must have been a literal old Adam. Geneticists have argued that all modern humans are indeed descended from one one man and one woman. They likely lived hundreds of thousands of years ago and tens of thousands of years apart from one another. Genealogists have also argued that all modern humans may be able to trace their genealogical history to a single couple living somewhere in the middle east several thousand years ago.
I think this sort of thinking helps some of the more literal minded of us, but again it seems to miss the point. Their story is intended to explain why the world is, frankly, so awful. Without it, it would appear as if God simply stuck us here and cursed us with all manner of toil, disaster, and disease for no reason. The story of Job, for example, explains to the reader why he is suffering even if God never tells Job. The Bible tells us many things, but it never tells us that we suffer for no reason. The story of Adam and Eve tells us that suffering is largely our ancestors’ fault and, worse, because we share their sinful nature, it continues.
A number of atheists have argued that God cannot have created humans in his image because we have a flawed design. We clearly evolved and like all evolved creatures our design reflects our ancient origins which are vastly different than our current environment. One example is that humans, like all land animals, are basically bags of ocean water walking around. Life started in the oceans and spent so long evolving there that when the first animals crawled out on land they just took the ocean with them and never stopped. This is evidenced in every part of our bodies. We contain parts, notably our eyes, that would work better in the ocean.
Some Christians have countered that God may have simply allowed our ancestors to evolve and made two divine copies which he placed in a special Garden. This would explain where all the other humans came from that Adam and Eve’s offspring meet and marry after their expulsion from the Garden (Genesis 4:17). They aren’t all siblings. These two divine copies, nevertheless, go on to become the ancestors of all present human beings.
Again, maybe that sort of thinking helps some people. The alternative which I prefer is that evolution is simply the means by which God creates. He is unconcerned with whether his creatures are “perfect” at the outset. Rather, He looks to redeem and make perfect that which is not perfect.
The Origin of the Universe
One of the major victories that Christians appear to have gained from physics is the discovery that the universe had a beginning at the Big Bang. When this theory became popular in the mid-20th century, some Christians latched onto it as proof that God created the universe at some fixed point in time; thus, the creation story of Genesis, while metaphorical in the details, had a kernel of truth in the Big Bang.
Many Christians have become so attached to the Big Bang that they attack any attempts to question it. Stephen Hawking, for example, recounts that, when he met with Pope John Paul II along with a group of other scientists, the Pontiff said
It’s OK to study the universe and where it began. But we should not inquire into the beginning itself because that was the moment of creation and the work of God.
Hawking went on to joke that he was glad the Pope didn’t know he was studying that very thing because he
didn’t fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo
Hawking’s own alternative theory, which tried to eliminate the singularity at the heart of the Big Bang, has not held up well over the years but others such as the Big Bounce have gained some interest. While it seems unlikely that the Big Bang will lose its place any time soon, even if there were no beginning to the universe that would not disprove the existence of God.
Even if time itself lacks a true beginning, that does not mean the universe’s existence is solved. In fact, it makes the problem worse. Saint Thomas Aquinas 700 years ago was the first to point out that in an infinite amount of time there exists a non-zero probability that everything ceases to exist. If everything ceased to exist, there would be nothing to cause anything to happen. In that case, nothing would ever happen again. The only way to counter this argument is if you propose that something has the property that it causes its own existence. Aquinas argued that this something was God. Atheists have argued that it is something else like energy, which seems unlikely; Perhaps quantum information?
In any case, given that time has a beginning, there hasn’t been enough time for everything to cease to exist, so the problem becomes: how did time get started?
If time has a beginning, that means that there is no “before” the beginning. There is nothing there. It would be like saying what is north of the North Pole? God could not be present in the void before the beginning getting things set up because there was no time. Time was something that was created, just like space and matter. In that sense, God must exist outside of time, space, and matter. In philosophy, we would call these contingent things. They depend on something outside of themselves for their existence. That thing must be, as in the previous argument, something that causes its own existence, so we find we don’t get away from the uncaused cause either way.
Conclusion
Far from disproving the existence of God, there are unanswered questions in physics that point towards a creator. The goal here hasn’t been to try to prove the existence of God but to explain why physics does not disprove God, not even the Christian God and the miraculous events of 2000 years ago. Likewise, arguments from evolution, biology, archaeology, paleontology, cosmology, and every other ology frequently only attack strawmen, setting up conflict between science and religion where none exists. Debate on theological and philosophical grounds is far more effective in developing a coherent worldview that includes both scientific and religious perspectives. Science can inform that understanding by telling us what is physically possible, what happened in the deep past, or will happen in the deep future. I have always found that my understanding of the universe through science has informed my faith and vice versa. Without science, my faith is ignorant. Without faith, my science is pointless.