The Universe and Dr. Einstein

By Neil Earle

The computer, cell phones, kidney transplants – Science and its offspring Technology dazzle the world. The Christian church’s persecution of Galileo and slowness to admit the earth was round, these were two factors causing religion to lose clout as the French Enlightenment of the 1700s and the Darwinism of the 1800s took off. Science and its offspring – applied technology – grabbed the spotlight for 200 years. But how strange. Strange because the evidence that was coming in from Albert Einstein (1879-1955) and his generation of New Physicists showed us a Universe calling for a Supreme Intelligence behind everything – at least in Albert Einstein’s mind.

Einstein, born of Jewish parents, continually called God the Old One while going about his search for a unified theory behind everything. In his mind Science and Religion did not live in watertight compartments. In The World as I See It, he wrote: “The harmony of natural law reveals an Intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.” A Swiss biographer reported: “Einstein used to speak of God so often that I almost looked upon him as a disguised theologian.”

This is part of Einstein’s fascinating legacy. He set up theories allowing others to chase beams of light into wormholes, and regularly threw out such statements as “The deeper one penetrated into nature’s secrets the greater becomes one’s respect for God.”

How so? Walter R. Thorson, a scientific theologian, explained: “The practicing faith of a scientist is a faith ultimately in the order, consistency, intelligibility to man of the creation in which we find ourselves [not] faith in man but in a dependable Creator.” Einstein said something similar in his answer to a young girl’s question if scientists ever prayed:

“Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature…However, it must be admitted that our knowledge of these laws is only imperfect and fragmentary, that actually the belief in the existence of basic all-embracing laws of nature also rests on a sort of faith…[E]veryone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, a spirit vastly superior to that of man” (Torrance, page 26).

In the face of the complicated precision of the universe he concluded that “the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort.”

Einstein thus spoke with much more humility on Science than is noised about on the nightly news, the printed press or in too many textbooks. We see a short-sighted, breathless headline such as “’Universe Has No Purpose,’ Says Leading Scientist” and – bang – the old Science/Religion bun fight is on again.

Einstein had pioneered by implication our world of Big Bangs, black holes, wormholes, quarks, photons and other sub-atomic particles. In the end, developments by the 21st century postulated a much stranger universe than even Einstein envisioned in his two groundbreaking papers on relativity from 1905 and 1915.

Cal Tech theoretical physicist, Kip Throne, reminds us in Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy, that the kindly professor had greatly revised Isaac Newton’s “clockwork universe.” No longer did time work the same way all through the universe. No, Einstein showed, time is relative to where you are and how fast you are going. Time and space are warped by gravity, just like longitudinal lines on the earth bend towards the poles. Geometry was now revised: discoveries from the 1500s confirming a round earth should have drawn attention to this elementary fact.

By analogy, Einstein made these insights a key to his statement about light – light being the most constant and dependable factor in the created universe. This helped later scientists such as Stephen Hawking to work out the equations that tracked down black holes – that stars could collapse under their own gravity until the space around them became so curved that they cut themselves off from the rest of the universe. Hawking went on to pursue studies that helped confirm the Big Bang, a central miniature point exploding outward into near-infinity that was supposed to be the origin of everything we see around us.

Of course, this forced a question for Christians and believers in God. Where was God at the Big Bang? Bible believers knew he was at the beginning but when was that and how did it happen? What was the impetus?

Ah, the Creator had not seen fit to show us his flow charts. After all, no human being was there at the beginning, so – and this is easily forgotten – everything we know about Origins had to be either a) an educated guess or b) a reconstruction based on the best evidence we have.

Does God Play Dice?

Sir John Polkinghorne – an Anglican minister and former researcher into subatomic particles – chuckles when he tells people he is a Scientific Theologian. “People look at me as if I said I were a Vegetarian Butcher.” Yet three core statements of Einstein reveal how that sense of wonder and awe almost inevitably hovers over the whole scientific enterprise. The first one: “God does not play dice.”

What does this mean?

As Einstein advanced his researches into light he became aware of his hero Max Planck. In 1900 Max Planck put forth the quantum theory of light, that light consists of very small streams of particles or “quanta.” Then Niels Bohr in Denmark showed that the energy levels of electrons in an atom “jumped” between three quantum locations emitting radiation as they went – the quantum leap. His student, Werner Heisenberg, later showed that these jumps were not predictable, thus introducing the Uncertainty Principle into early 20th century physics.

By 1925 it was clear that quantum activity in the atom, supposedly the stable core of everything, was not predictable to a precise point. At first, Einstein did not like this deviation from orderliness. He argued, in effect, “God does not play dice with the universe.” The great debate was interrupted by World War II. Einstein knew in 1905 that the inner workings of things were designed in such a way as to upset the older “clockwork” physics of simple cause and effect. So he postulated a “super causality” behind things that revealed an Intelligence towering above even what he knew. And indeed, it is now accepted that God could both play dice and know the outcome, says Ian Stewart in his version of Does God Play Dice? The strange world of mid-20th century physics convinced Einstein that the Old One was cleverer than even he had thought. Here was indirect confirmation of the Christian reflection in Colossians 1:17 that “He (God) is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” Or Hebrews 11:3, “the world is not made out of things which do appear.”

Statement two: “God does not wear his heart on his sleeve.”

The God Who Hides

The orderly universe which Einstein believed came from God’s hand required much study to decipher. His early religious upbringing no doubt made him receptive to the thoughts behind such texts as Isaiah 45:15, “Truly, you are a God who hides himself.” And Proverbs 25:2 balances this out with “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.” As an awe-filled seeker after God’s thoughts Einstein “marveled at the mysterious comprehensibility of the universe which is yet finally beyond his grasp” (quoted in Torrance, page 31).

Nature’s hidden order cannot be logically derived from surface study alone but from “tapping into the thoughts of God.” He added: “Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration towards truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion” (Science, Philosophy, and Religion, 1941).

So there it is. Einstein was astute enough – and humble enough – to testify that Science and Religion needed each other. He knew that Religion had often failed to live up to its own best precepts, but at the same time he admired the stand taken by elements of the Christian Church against Adolph Hitler. “No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus,” he told an interviewer,”His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life” (Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929).

Though Einstein did not see God as a personal Being in the evangelical Christian sense, he knew him as the Superior Reasoning power behind all things. This led to a third, statement in 1939: “Science without Religion is lame; Religion without Science is blind.”

The greatest physicist of the 20th century was, in his own way, devout. He bemoaned a Science growing up that was stripped of a sense of wonder and responsibility before the Supreme Intelligence, the Old One. Religion’s excesses are all too obvious in the age of 9/11 and prophecy addiction. But science has a hard time controlling the fruits of its technological horn of plenty. There are heart transplants and Fukushimas, miracle babies and horrendous oil spills. Lame science and blind religion were not part of Einstein’s worldview. The Old One was watching.