Creation & Physics
July 5, 2009
Ryan Janzen
My message this morning is on Creation and physics, and how the way we think of the two separately, and together, can have a profound impact on our faith. I ask that the Lord bless our thoughts as we think about these things.
For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Ryan Janzen; I work with physics and engineering as part of my Ph.D. work, and I’m also involved with music composition. But enough about me. Where did you come from? Your mother’s womb? ok. How long have you – we – and our people – been roaming the earth? How did we and our world come to exist in the first place?
As Christians we believe in God’s divine work in creating and nurturing our lives, and in fact creating the very beginnings of the world around us. Bringing about earth, sky, stars, and the great kingdoms of animals as well as humankind, inspires the great call,
“All creatures of our God and King,
lift up your voices, let us sing:
Alleluia, Alleluia!”
The sheer exuberance of this hymn, which we sang, was beautifully captured in a piece of music I once heard called “Creation Stories,” by composer T. Patrick Carrabré. This piece actually features a cascade of Inuit throat-singers, African drummers, Anishinabe first-nations singers, and Christian vocalists (including the Canadian Mennonite University chorus), all their voices clashing together in an extraordinary, wonderfully-discordant way. Common to many cultures, indeed, has been the concept that there was a dramatic “creation event,” a great upheaval to bring about the world we see today, in all its majesty.
God gave Adam responsibility for His creation. God also showed to the early Jewish kings that He values wisdom and knowledge. What I’m going to suggest is: if we want to understand God’s creation, we must start by understanding His Word to us through the bible, very clearly, then go out and explore creation. It’s the world he made for us! Clearly we need to understand it, and treat it with respect.
One group of people who have gone out and explored Creation: our good old physicists. Physics and engineering have always had an interesting relationship with spiritual matters. Now, pausing just a moment with the creation of the universe, let’s start with a more common example:
This church – the building itself – is held up because architects, engineers and carpenters (some of whom are here) have carefully calculated and balanced out the forces along all those beams, in three dimensions, so the roof doesn’t come falling down on our heads. I think most of us would say that it isn’t enough to leave out that step, to not bother calculating whether the beams are strong enough, and to only pray that the roof won’t fall on our heads.
But, I ask you, is it enough to go through our lives only based on what is observed; only trusting in what we have already seen? In a world dominated by that which can be calculated, precisely, to 10 decimal places, where do we leave room for God’s presence in our day-to-day lives? And where do we leave room for God’s creative power, spanning all time, since the very beginning?
And that’s what is on the minds of many people in science – people who carry out experiments, carefully testing theories against observed facts, but who also believe there is something more to our lives.
An interesting thing I’ve noticed in scientific research is that if one wants to live out one’s Christian faith, and express it, it seems to be a little more difficult in biology, and a little easier in engineering, physics and chemistry. Somehow, in the life sciences, professing to be a Christian sometimes seems to be welcoming criticism, but among physicists and engineers, being a Christian is perhaps a bit more acceptable, and is in fact quite widespread. (even though there are actually many biologists who are Christians)
Now, both physics and biology deal with time.
Thinking about time: How old is the universe? What is the official age of the universe? Well, believe me, that’s a hard question to answer, in a church! Some people argue it’s 6000 years—10,000 years, based on Biblical records, and some people argue the age is 15 billion years, based on the way cosmic particles interact, and based on star motion. Now, there’s a key issue here: one that has direct relevance to our spiritual walk. Even from the early church, Christian leaders have somehow felt threatened by what some scientists say, and what I am going to suggest is that this is not necessary.
Let’s trace back some history. One of the first complete models of the universe was proposed by Ptolemy (2nd century A.D.): this theory proposed that the Earth was perfectly at the centre of creation, with all the planets revolving around Earth in perfect concentric circles. Centuries later, the Roman Catholic church would throw its support behind Ptolemy’s model. The model seemed to lay out a quite reasonable plan for Earth, and the perfect, heavenly, bodies. Another advantage of Ptolemy’s model was that Ptolemy placed all the stars in the sky along the surface of a round thin shell, where the shell of stars surrounded the orbiting planets and Earth. That way, it left plenty of room outside the shell for heaven and hell. (see Hawking, Brief History of Time) So here we see how church leaders thought that many individual Christians would depend on a certain picture of the stars in the sky, and that picture would help them with their faith.
I find it interesting that faith would be so vulnerable.
Even Thomas’ faith was vulnerable. When confronted with the reincarnated Christ, Jesus risen from the dead, Thomas wanted to touch Jesus’ flesh to be convinced that this was the real deal. For Thomas, faith alone wasn’t enough. In other words, he wanted to do an experiment… And Jesus let him do his little experiment.
For the earliest astronomers, though, experiments were much less tangible. Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus and Galileo, did their best when they tried to come up with some of the very earliest conceptions of the universe, planets and stars. Aristotle, and Ptolemy again, each suspected that the correct model was to have Earth at the centre and all the planets orbiting around Earth. Aristotle’s opinion was that although the perfect, heavenly bodies (planets), must be perfectly round, the imperfect Earth need not be exactly round. Copernicus proposed in the 16th century that the sun was at the centre of the solar system, not Earth. Galileo cast the belief that Earth was the centre of everything into complete disarray, based on what he saw with his brand new telescope.
Amid all this, many people over the ages had the notion of a static universe: the idea that the world was not created, but was always the way it is, and will always stay the same. The book of II Peter actually contains a reference to this belief. (II Peter 3:1-10; E.Adams, “Creation ‘out of’ and ‘through’ water in 2 Peter 3:5”, The creation of heaven and earth, ed. G.H. van Kooten, p.196). II Peter argues against some churches and teachers who were starting to ask: Why hasn’t the second coming of Christ come yet? Why hasn’t the glorious finale of the universe happened yet after years and years? – and thus, really we think that the heavens have always been exactly the way they are, so maybe Christ will never come for us—the world will just remain constant and unchanging forever. The epistle-writer says no!, we need to remember the creation story of Genesis, and no, we believe that God did change our world from nothing to something.
The idea that the cosmos is not constant, but is in a huge state of flux, has gained widespread acceptance in modern physics. As soon as astronomers
started analyzing the colour spectra of stars they noticed the Doppler effect was at play, whereby it seemed that the stars in the sky were all moving at great speeds, and many of them were actually speeding away from each other. What does this mean? Looking at the enormous speeds and calculating backwards in time, leads to the curious fact that all of those stars must have all started out from the same location. Long ago, they were all at the same tiny point. And this provided one of the first clues leading to the Big Bang theory.
Where is Heaven?
Like I said, centuries ago it was thought that Heaven was outside a shell of stars. Now we know that, no, a shell of stars does not exist, but instead, stars extend great distances away from us. In fact, in some current models of the universe, calculations show that you never could reach a wall, or edge of the universe. In one model, the universe curves back on itself: imagine the surface of sphere, with us being a tiny speck on the sphere. If we move along the surface of the sphere, we can walk in any direction but never get to a wall or edge.
Now let’s illustrate some more. Imagine this room represents the entire universe. If I walked forward, I could keep on travelling for a good distance, and as you watched me you would see me moving, moving, moving toward the left side of the room, but then you would actually see me reappear on the other, right side of the room, walking forward and eventually arriving back at the pulpit – right where I started from! – when all the while I thought I was travelling in a straight line. We can see now how the universe can seem to go on forever, but is actually a fixed size.
Is there anything outside this universe? According to the original meaning of the word, “universe” meant all of creation; “Uni-” means one, the unity of everything. But now we know that what we used to call the Universe does have limits and boundaries. I personally believe there’s a lot more outside the boundaries of our own universe. As a kid I convinced myself that maybe heaven is just outside our universe, but it lies forward along the 4th dimension, so thus it lies in our future, and perhaps one way to get there might be to travel at the speed of light, or otherwise perhaps wait until the end of time as we know it. (Of course, it’s not our place to completely understand everything about Heaven.)
Some physicists even proposed that our entire universe might actually exist as one electron in a yet-larger universe. All of history as we know it, beginning and over in a flash. Of course, this is just a hypothetical proposal, probably not true, but it does remind us that Time itself can exist on vastly different scales. Thousands of years of our wars, struggles, revolutions, and debates, to God might seem like quick flashes of activity; simple problems to solve, beginning and finishing faster than it takes to say, “I, the Lord, do not change.” (Malachi 3:6)
How are prayers answered?
Does God listen, and then speak to us? Does God suspend the laws of physics for a moment, and then switch physics back on? Or did God understand our inner yearnings from the beginning of time, and set the answers to our prayers into motion from the beginning of creation?
Can our prayers move a mountain? Jesus calls on us to have faith strong enough to do so. (Mark 11:23) Normally, a mountain (or this glass of water) doesn’t move from one place to another. However, this is exactly what happens in quantum mechanics – when you examine very tiny things like atoms and electrons. Not to make too fine a point on it, but the interesting thing is that there are fluctuations in the universe that science can never fully understand or predict. Most of the time those fluctuations are very tiny — you can hear some of them if you listen to your stereo: put in a CD but just have the CD stopped with no music playing at all, and finally turn up the volume very high: You hear the gentle hisssssssssssssssssss… of the relentless stochastic mysteries that are unceasingly generated throughout the cosmos. Now, those are very microscopic fluctuations. But quantum mechanics does not rule out the possibility that, sometimes, there could be physical fluctuations that are large enough to be tangible and affect our lives.
BUT: My warning is that trying to explain what God does—placing God inside a scientific box, finding a scientific mechanism for God’s work—can be difficult or impossible, and we don’t need to do this.
The mystery of God’s work in our lives is a wonderful thing.
As soon as we try to come up with a physical understanding of the universe and where God fits into it, the problem is: it can make our faith dependent on that physical understanding.
That crutch is what was afoot in the star-shell theory. It was there when heliocentrism—the sun at the centre of the solar system—was called “false” and “contrary to…Scripture” in 1616 (disciplinary rule of the Index of Cardinals, March 5, 1616). It was there when Galileo was being thrown into prison. It causes people to doubt their faith when the world doesn’t look like their preconceived notion of what a holy universe should look like. We can’t let our faith be so vulnerable! Going in the other direction, it causes non-Christians and agnostics to doubt or debunk our religious beliefs, or their own.
All that Jesus requires from us is faith. He doesn’t require us to understand his footsteps through the universe. The most important thing is faith.
I was sitting in a lecture hall one day, and a gentleman, giving a talk on pseudoscience, was trying to argue that the Bible is false. This kind of thing happens commonly nowadays, especially amid the evolution vs. creation debates. What this particular person – a professor of philosophy – did was give an example from I Kings, to argue why the Bible is false. I Kings 7 describes Solomon building his palace, and the temple of the Lord, raised with soaring pillars and adorned with fine cast bronze. In the temple, Solomon builds a Sea, a pool of water for bathing and purification. The scripture gives very detailed measurements of the round Sea: a number of cubits across, and three times as many cubits around. And now this gentleman said: AHA! King Solomon’s temple sea should have been 3.14 (…1592653584…) times as many cubits around as it was across!
Now, I’m not sure whether the Hebrew countryfolk would have understood what a decimal point was. And I don’t think it was God’s divine intention to inspire the scripture writers with a 20-page academic paper on the exact mathematical definition of PI.
(ahem) And it doesn’t need to be PI around if it’s oval and not a perfect circle…
But instead, perhaps what I should have said is this: “We live by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:7)
Again, the danger of making our faith dependent on experimental observation.
Conclusion
Everything in physics points to the enormous scale of what exists in Creation. And the enormous scale of any Creator who is responsible for it.
Everything that physics can understand about the known universe is miniscule compared to God’s plans, and God’s promises to us. Jesus says: “Heaven (or, the heavens, up there in the night sky) – Heaven and Earth shall pass away, but My Word shall not pass away.” (Luke 21:33)
We can honour God’s Creation, by trying to learn about it, und
erstand it, and respect it. But throughout it all, we must remain resolute that Jesus’ salvation and healing hand will come through for us.
We have no proof that God exists. But we can live out our lives, trusting that He does. And trusting in his critical work in our lives. And trying to understand his scripture – his word to us.
Finally, one thing that’s common between science experiments and everyday life, is that sometimes our ideas turn out to be wrong. We’re always tethered back to the ordinary world around us. In the limited world WE live in, we’re often brought back to the ordinary reality of planet Earth, the predictability of our universe.
BUT: Luke Ch. 1: “With God, nothing shall be impossible.” (Luke 1:37)