If God created the universe, we should expect to see evidence of this as we study God’s creation. Psalm 19 directly tells us that the universe will teach us about God, therefore we should also expect that when we do science, we should see nature “declar(ing) the glory of God”.
The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals knowledge.
Since God told us to study His creation to see evidence of Himself, science should uncover this evidence! 17th century experimentalist Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry and a devout Christian, thought that we should do science to learn about the nature of God and that we could comprehend the universe because we are made in the image of God. Boyle also expected our comprehension to be limited due to our finite mind’s inability to understand the creation of an infinite mind. Recent evidence from nature, namely relativity and quantum mechanics, has shown us mysteries about the universe that we cannot fully comprehend. Historic Christianity has also taught that we can only partially understand God for the same reasons. The true reality of nature and the true reality of God must be described ways that don’t make sense. The trinity and the dual nature of Christ are both paradoxes that cannot be totally understood by our human mind. In science, quantum mechanics and the nature of light have the same issues of mental obscurity.
The Doctrine of the Trinity teaches that one God is three persons. This is not illogical nor is it contradictory; but it certainly is a paradox! God is three “whos” and one “what”; this is not a logical contradiction. It is stated well in the Athanasian Creed from the fourth century.
Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith. Which faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance.
For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit. But the godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, is all one, the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal.
Our minds cannot comprehend the Trinity, but this is what is described by the writers of the eyewitness accounts of what Jesus taught. This evidence leads us to the conclusion that one God is also three persons. The Trinity may be above reason, but it is not against reason.
Evidence from the Apostolic Writings also lead us to the conclusion that Jesus was God and a human at the same time. Comprehending this doctrine is a bit easier than the trinity, but still a mystery! How can something be two different things at once? Here is a description from the Council of Chalcedon:
We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body; consubstantial with us according to the manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the virgin Mary, the mother of God, according to the manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the prophets from the beginning have declared concerning him, and the Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the Creed of the holy Fathers has handed down to us.
These mysteries are not limited to Christianity! Paradoxes also are forced by the evidence when studying the natural world. Take light and electrons, or any elementary particle for example. Under one set of conditions, they will act in the same manner as water waves and sound waves. Change the situation and they will act as if they are little tiny baseballs. Try to come up with a mental picture of that! Light and electrons acting as if they are both particles and waves is a paradox but is a major doctrine of science.
Paradoxes abound in the world of the very small. We must use quantum mechanics to describe really tiny things. The evidence forces us to believe realities like an electron can be anywhere in the universe at any given moment and can even go back in time. Richard Feynman, who definitely understood quantum mechanics better than almost anyone on the planet during his lifetime, remarked, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” Quantum mechanics and light may both be above reason, but they are not against reason.
In order to understand and explain reality we need to compare our theories, models, and explanations with something familiar. Since we don’t have much experience with God or with very tiny things, so we have a tough time imagining what they are like! The data we have on God and much of the data we get about light and sub-atomic particles is unlike anything we have ever experienced before!
The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, "But how can it be like that?" which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar.
The same difficulty occurs when attempting to understand God.
Objections to the Trinity break down in the fact that they insist on interpreting the Creator in terms of the creature.
One attempt to explain quantum mechanics is the Many World’s Interpretation. On this explanation, every time a decision is made, the universe actually “splits” into both possibilities. This creates an almost infinite number of “parallel” universes with every possible world represented. This is similar to how we explain the theology of God’s Middle Knowledge. In this view, God can know all possible worlds; He knows all future possibilities and knows how we would respond (choose) given any set of circumstances. In our attempt to understand reality, we must resort to the use of descriptions and explanations that often sound impossible; this happens when trying to understand both the natural world and when trying to understand God.
Physicist Bruce L. Gordon takes this one step further. How, for example, can God observe the universe and every moment of time while we as created beings experience the flow of time. An experiment done in 2013 has shown that this is possible. This experiment showed that an external observer of a quantum state will perceive it as static and unchanging while a mathematically correlated subsystem will internally see the same quantum state as changing with time. Dr. Gordon has proposed that the universal wave function can be regarded as divine bookkeeping that has existence solely in the mind of God. Divine omniscience is represented by this wave function that exhaustively maps all the possibilities inherent in God’s created reality. We get to participate in creation by the free-will choices we make that will collapse the wave function and cause us to experience time and events as flowing from the past to the future. Who would have thought that an historic Christian doctrine would match so well with what we have discovered about the quantum mechanical nature of the universe!
Physicist and mathematician Dr. Michael Guillen compares the nature of God directly to the properties of light: He lists five similarities:
1. Light and God are both the embodiment of contradiction. Light exhibits wave-particle duality, Jesus is both mortal and immortal.
2. Light and God do not obey the rules of ordinary matter.
3. Light and God can transform into matter and vice versa. Particles can be created and annihilated, God (who is described as light in the Bible) became a man in the person of Jesus.
4. Light and God have a sacred status in the universe. The speed of light is a universal constant while God describes himself as the one and only God, the “I Am.”
5. Light and God can exist in a timeless world. Light is not constrained by time, and neither is God.
Dr. Guillen also compares our relationship with God to the strong nuclear force. Christianity teaches that you will experience true freedom when you draw nearer to God. This seems to contradict our human nature that tells us we need to be independent to have true freedom. Quarks stay within the nucleus because of the strong nuclear force. This force is the opposite of every other force in that it gets weaker with decreasing distance. A quark is most free when it sticks close to the nucleus and less free as it moves further away from the nucleus; the presence of the strong force is liberating, not enslaving, for a quark. Adam and Eve had a close relationship with God because of their extreme closeness to Him in the garden. They were like a pair of quarks experiencing asymptotic freedom. Christianity teaches that we will experience true freedom if we give up ourselves and follow Jesus.
It should be expected that God and nature are both a mystery. Since God created the universe, we should not be surprised that we see a reflection of the creator when we study nature. Light is two things that are one. God is three things that are one. No one truly understands quantum mechanics. No one truly understands the nature of God. God’s creation and revelation are both hard to understand fully, but neither are illogical. As Psalm 19 tells us, the more science we do, the more we see a correlation between the historic description of God and what we discover about nature.
If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could
make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.
www.natureandscripture.com
YouTube @natureandscripture
Ekaterina Moreva et al, Time from quantum entanglement: an experimental illustration, Phys. Rev. A 89, 052122 (2014), https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.4691
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