The New Universe: Where Science Meets Theology…Congenially

By Neil Earle

Old ideas die hard and new ideas take some time to gain acceptance. Prior to the work of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr around the early 20th century we lived (by analogy) in the Clockwork Universe of the great Sir Isaac Newton.

Newton’s math-based theories had seemed to propound a mechanical universe wherein things ran along on the scientific precision of unfaltering Cause and Effect. The universe, or at least our solar system, seemed to work like a giant interlocking set of carousels revolving in more or less perfect orbit around the sun. It ran according to the eternal laws of motion, inertia and especially gravity. Gravity, as we know, was Newton’s bread and butter. Its ineluctable unchanging pressures shaped the orbits of the planets and the galaxies and just about everything else, he claimed. The very predictablity of even such unearthly spectacles as Halley’s Comet described by Edmund Halley (1656-1742) seemed to put Science and Nature in the driver’s seat. Human ingenuity seemed to have dethroned God.

The poet Alexander Pope made a joke about this:

“Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night,
God said ‘Let Newton be!” and all was light.”

“Yesterday’s Universe”

But as Robert Irion wrote in the July 2013 National Geographic, “Newton himself knew that reality was messier. The planets, he recognized, must also interact with each other…God must step in from time to time to fix the clockwork. But he couldn’t say when.”

Today's universe is much less predictable than scientists of the 1700s dreamt.

Nevertheless Newton and Halley’s researches exerted a powerful hold on the minds of the Intelligentsia of Europe. When Napoleon Bonaparte examined a complex design of the cosmos submitted by the astronomer Laplace, the shred French emperor asked where God fit in all this. “I have no need of that hypothesis,” Laplace replied. We now know even his calculations were off.

Still, the mechanical worldview swept all before it…for a while. The analogy of the 1600s showed up in the 1700s as Bach sonatas, or perfectly rhymed poetic couplets (such as Pope’s) and even the steady matching squares of armies lined up like chess pieces on the field of battle.

It affected theology as well. “If there is a God then he has gone off and left it to us to figure out his designs.” Here was the conscious assumption of many philosophers and theologians – what we call today a “worldview.” In came Deism, the idea that God had wound up the universe like a clock and left us to run it. The idea affected even the American Constitution with its “checks and balances.” Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine were definitely 1700s men.

The New Physics

By the late 1800s however researchers and investigators were rising up to challenge the accepted status quo. Clockwork theory had been unable to answer the questions posed by the pseudo-science novelties of electromagnetism, for example, which indicated the existence of other forces besides all-conquering gravity. James Clerk Maxwell’s work on magnetism in 1873 seemed to show that Light itself was an electromagnetic wave, a postulate confirmed by Heinrich Hertz’s experiments in 1888. Herz (herzian waves = radio waves) confirmed that radio waves, light and heat were from the same source. Einstein (1879-1955) drew the conclusion that would help revolutionize physics: “Before Maxwell people conceived of physical reality …whose changes consist exclusively of motions (rather than) continuous fields not mechanically explicable.”

Albert Einstein

Invisible forces were moving the cosmos. Also, Einstein’s peers asked if everything was smooth and orderly out there why is Venus rotating backward and Mercury’s orbit somewhat irregular. “The universe as conceived by Einstein is not Newton’s familiar three-dimensional figure of length, breadth and thicknes,” writes Professor T. Walter Wallbank, ”but a four-dimensional space-time continuum.”

The neat and orderly Newtonian system was crumbling. Newton had described Time, for example, as an absolute. In a famous thought experiment Einstein showed how Time was relative – it depended on where an observer was standing. His famous 1905 paper on Relativity was subtitled On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies showing how much he had learned from his esteemed predecessors. Already in 1900 the Paris Exposition had featured wireless telegraphs, X-rays and a tape recorders. In 1900 Max Planck built on researches into the atom to discover that atoms emit bursts of radiant energy in packets or “quanta” and quantum theory was born.

Things were coming to a boil. This New Physics was challenging the reigning cosmology. Novelist Anatole France wrote to a friend in 1920 about “this great universe that has just died so suddenly…yesterday’s universe, Newton’s universe.”

Albert Einstein was not alone in this rethinking but he soon took the lead in explaining the more complicated reality around us. When his theories linked Gravity to Space and Time to give us “space-time” he was showing – as magnetism had early intimated – that the universe was connected in a dynamic and relational rather than a static mechanical way. The worm had turned.

Tom Torrance

Theology Catches Up

One theologian who paid attention to this new way of seeing things was the Edinburgh teacher Thomas Torrance (1913-2002). By mid-20th century he began to point out that the New Physics had shown a universe put together in a way that privileged connection and interaction and even surprise, what he called “contingency.” The world system was subject to change and the unexpected rather than a smoothly running motor. Einstein had intuited this in his statement that the cosmos “in its profoundest depths is inaccessible to man.” Torrance took the lead in showing that this was a picture of a cosmos where such unlikely events as resurrections and incarnations and the miraculous could occur. The New Physics, taught Torrance, was much more congenial to such a view.

The classical model had seemingly chased God out of his heaven but the new models built around relativity and Bohr’s quantum discoveries had made it necessary for scientists to weigh and contemplate elements of unpredictability and even strangeness in the great scheme of things. According to Torrance, “the widening chasm between the natural sciences and the humanities” could be bridged if theologians understood all that physics was now grappling with (Reality and Evangelical Theology, p. 33).

Torrance agreed with Einstein who had emoted about the mysterious incomprehensibility of the universe to balance out its mathematical rationality. Torrance’s advocacy of “contingency” engaged both views – the universe is indeed rational yet mysterious. “The intelligibility of the universe provides science with its confidence, Torrance wrote, “but the contingency of the universe provides science with its challenge” (Divine and Contingent Order, p. 58).

The religious community was not very receptive at first. Then Torrance’s commitment to basic Christianity began to win out. With Jesus, said Torrance, the infinite Word had invaded Space-Time. With God-in-the flesh, an overwhelming new reality had entered nature. Just as Relativity reworked the Old Physics, Jesus’ resurrection “had transformed all the old conditions of life.” We are indeed surprised by such an astonishing event as the Resurrection, said Torrance, but considering who is behind this event – the eternal Creator Redeemer – we should not disbelieve. This was one of Torrance’s tactics – following the lead of Maxwell, Bohr and Einstein who were in turn flowing where the facts led, as surprising as their own conclusions proved to be. A Jesus who could rise from a rock tomb in Jerusalem and pass though walls and buildings to manifest himself with effortless ease and yet be recognized as human, this seems the stuff of science fiction until we grasp that the Biblical revelation shows the Source of this strange new world called the New Testament.

Thus Science Meets Theology on the high ground of logic-based reason. There is obviously more to this subject but this makes a brief introduction.

(To Be Continued)