N THE EARLY 1940s PRINCETON physicist John Wheeler set graduate student Richard Feynman to work translating electromagnetic fields traveling through space, one electron at a time. Young Feynman ultimately proposed the highly intuitive “sum-over-histories” equation for describing quantum movement.

Puzzled, then elated, Wheeler rushed to inform Albert Einstein of this breakthrough in describing the erratic paths of subatomic particles. In his upstairs study Einstein listened patiently to Wheeler’s explanation. “Professor Einstein,” Wheeler finally enthused, “doesn’t this make quantum theory absolutely beautiful, simple, inevitable?” To which Einstein soberly replied, “I still can’t believe God plays dice.”¹

The philosophical basis of modern science began in Europe 400 years ago, culminating in the grand themes of Newton (1642-1727). All of the major scientists at that time were Christians, more or less, and some were actually quite learned in Scripture. Though Copernicus, Galileo, and Descartes endured severe censure for their perceived secularism, scientists such as Kepler and Newton were seen as espousing views quite in keeping with their fellow religious believers.

Additional Resource

What’s So Amazing About the Universe?

Two distinct attitudes strongly influenced scientists during this period. Galileo exhibited the first in his letter to the Grand Duchess Christina: “The Bible tells us how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go.” That is, the focus of the Book of Scripture is different from that of the book of nature, and should not be unduly pressed into the daily service of science. Because the book of nature has its own riddles to be unraveled through mathematics and experimentation, the questions of natural law should not (indeed, cannot) be decided merely by an appeal to Scripture.

The second attitude, exemplified by Kepler and Newton, viewed science as the celebration of the works of God. Indeed, they “regarded themselves as the priests of God in the temple of nature.”² Although endorsing Galileo’s distinction between the book of revelation and the book of nature, they considered their own focus on the tenets of natural law to constitute a veritable hymn of praise.

Prior to the scientific revolution, and even during its initial phases, scientific “truths” were subjected to theological, and particularly biblical, authority. Yet by the end of the revolution such authority had little bearing on the “discoveries” of natural philosophy. From the eighteenth century onward the theological hierarchy lacked the power to influence in a major way either the theory or practice of science. Within a century after Newton’s death, Pierre-Simon de Laplace—sometimes referred to as the French Newton—sought to banish completely the “God hypothesis” from science.

This “enlightened” approach presupposed an increased mechanization of the world and despiritualization of nature and humankind, and was soon imitated by most of the other sciences, and even various ones of the humanities. This occurred primarily because of the new science’s precise, quantitative formulations of the laws of nature, as well as its remarkable success in controlling and predicting natural phenomena.

Science is today kept pure by application of the “correspondence principle,” which states that all newer, more comprehensible theories must include, and reduce to, earlier theories under the appropriate limiting conditions. We may observe this principle in the mature Feynman’s response to a rather bizarre request that he invent a miniature antigravity machine. After flatly stating that he didn’t know how to make such a device, Feynman went on to explain the self-embraced constraints under which he labored as a physicist:

“The game I play is a very interesting one. It’s imagination, in a tight straitjacket, which is this: that it has to agree with the known laws of physics. I’m not going to assume that maybe the laws of physics have changed, so that I can design something or other. I operate as if everything I know is true. . . . The game is to try to figure things out, with what we know is possible. It requires imagination to think of what’s possible, and then it requires analysis . . . , checking to see whether it fits, whether it’s allowed, according to what is known.”³

The general theory of relativity marked a break with the classical physics of Newton and its absolute mechanical universe, and with the equally absolute classical geometry of Euclid. Einstein showed that Euclidean geometry applied only to “empty space,” an idealized abstraction at best. In reality, space is not “empty,” but quite inseparable from matter.

The material universe does not consist of perfect circles or absolutely straight lines. Rather, it is full of irregularities. The curvature of space is just another way of expressing the curvature of matter that fills space. Even light rays bend under the influence of the gravitational fields of space matter.

In our “earth” view, parallel lines never meet or diverge, and the angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees. Einstein’s space-time, however, synthesizes three-dimensional space (height, breadth, and length) with time. This four-dimensional geometry deals with curved space-time. Here the angles of a triangle may not add up to 180 degrees, and parallel lines can cross or diverge.

Einstein certainly realized that his theory’s attraction reached far beyond physics. He was fond of stating, in fact, that more clergy appeared to be interested in the implications of relativity than physicists.⁴

In the late 1960s British astrophysicists Stephen Hawking, George Ellis, and Roger Penrose showed that if their equations were valid for the universe, then space and time must also have an origin, concurrent with that for matter and energy.⁵ In other words, time itself is finite.⁶ Time has a beginning, and a relatively recent beginning at that (estimated at 17 billion years, plus or minus 3 billion). The common origins of matter, energy, space, and time strongly indicate that this beginning must have transcended the dimensions and substance of the universe.

Thus no space or matter existed in “our” universe prior to time. However, an ever-expanding universe presumes a point before time (or the beginning of time), or as Christians would say, a “Creation.” Still, while the evidence for a transcendent “creation event” may have achieved a slightly stronger foothold within the physical science community as a result of this “finding,” more than a few holdouts remain.

Pagels. Theoretician Heinz Pagels has refused to acknowledge the existence of physical singularities. He argues, “The appearance of such a singularity is a good reason for rejecting the standard model of the very origin of the universe altogether.”⁷ While admitting that Einstein’s equations, along with observationally verified conditions, do require an inevitable singularity, he believes that prior to the beginning of time a loophole must have existed. He states simply that the Penrose-Hawking-Ellis theorem does “not prove that these extreme conditions were really present at the beginning of time.”⁸ Pagels contends that he is not demeaning their perceived phenomenal achievement, but merely pointing out that there is a tiny interval of time about which science has no knowledge.

Tryon. Physicist Edward Tryon has proposed that a quantum mechanical fluctuation (or random expansion) in an initial vacuum created the universe.⁹ He has been joined by several additional American and Russian theoreticians,¹⁰ all of whom assert that because nothingness is physically unstable, the laws of physics could have brought the universe into existence as they worked toward stability. Although this explanation circumvents the need for a singularity, at least one of Tryon’s colleagues holds that such reasoning constitutes “speculation squared.”

Hawking and Hartle. By 1984 Stephen Hawking and James Hartle had proposed one of the most sophisticated vacuum fluctuation models.¹¹ Because the universe may be described by the same quantum mechanical wave function as can a hydrogen atom, they also eliminated singularity by “permitting” the entire universe to pop into existence at will, just as had already been observed with subatomic particles. Pagels, however, has been highly critical of this presumption:

“This unthinkable void converts itself into the plenum of existence—a necessary consequence of physical laws. Where are these laws written into that void? What ‘tells’ the void that it is pregnant with a possible universe? It would seem that even the void is subject to law, a logic that exists prior to space and time.”¹²

According to quantum theory, energy exists in tiny, discrete amounts or units (quanta). Quantum mechanics is therefore the application of quantum theory to the motions of material particles, and is responsible for explaining the structure and behavior of atoms and molecules. However, as physicists endeavored to increase their accuracy in measuring one observable quantity, it increased the uncertainty with which other quantities could be known.

After finding that he could identify either the exact position of a given particle or its exact trajectory, but not both, German physicist Werner Heisenberg developed the indeterminacy principle. If, for example, we watch a proton fly through a cloud chamber, by recording its track we can detect the direction in which it is moving, but in the process of plowing through the water vapor in the chamber the proton will have slowed down, robbing us of information about just where it is at any given instant. Alternately, we can irradiate the proton (take a flash photograph of it, so to speak) and determine its exact location at any given instant. However, the light or other radiation we employ to take the photograph will knock the proton off course, thereby robbing us of precise knowledge of where it would have gone had we left it alone.

The more intensely physicists examine the subatomic world, the larger the indeterminacy phenomenon looms. When a photon strikes an atom, boosting the electron into a higher orbit, the electron moves from the lower to the upper orbit instantaneously, without appearing to traverse the intervening space. Because the orbital radii themselves are apparently “quantized,” the electron simply ceases to exist at one point while simultaneously appearing at another. This famously confounding “quantum leap” is not a mere point of philosophical trivia. Unless it is taken seriously, the behavior of atoms cannot be predicted accurately. In fact, by virtue of quantum indeterminacy, protons leap the Coulomb barrier, permitting nuclear fusion to occur at a sufficiently robust rate to keep the stars shining.

The universe is therefore not tightly deterministic and mechanical, but strangely probabilistic and relational. Once two quantum entities interact with each other, they have been found to retain a very surprising and counterintuitive power to influence each other, however far they separate. Apparently the world cannot be taken altogether objectively, but requires a much more subtle approach.

Ferris, for one, rejoices in this uncertainty. “Strict causation, for all its classical pedigree, was ultimately a monstrous doctrine.”¹³ There is, after all, a striking absence of humility in the grandiose pronouncements of Laplace:

“An intelligence knowing, at a given instance of time, all forces acting in nature, as well as the momentary position of all things of which the universe consists, would be able to comprehend the motions of the largest bodies of the world and those of the lightest atoms in one single formula, provided his intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to him nothing would be uncertain, both past and future would be present in his eyes.”¹⁴

Hawking presupposes a time not of our time, i.e., an imaginary time. In his view imaginary time is the once and future time, while time as we know it is but the broken shadow of that original time. A hand calculator displaying “error” when asked the value of the square root of –1 is telling us, in its way, that because it belongs to this universe (along with the rest of us), it does not know how to inquire into the universe prior to the genesis moment. Unfortunately, that is the present state of all scientists, until they find or create the tools to explore the very different regime that pertained before time began.

In his consideration of the genesis question, physicist Wheeler emphasized the quantization of space itself. Just as matter and energy are made of quanta, so space itself must be similarly quantized. Wheeler often compared quantum space to the sea: Viewed from orbit, the ocean appears smooth and tranquil, but when we cast a rowboat upon its surface, “we see foam and froth and breaking waves. And that foam and froth is how we picture the structure of space down at the very smallest scales.”¹⁵

The Bible, among all holy books, stands uniquely apart in its pronouncement of God outside, above, and before cosmology. No other traditional “sacred” writings that I know of teach an extradimensional reality independent of the dimensions of our universe. Most, in fact, flatly contradict it. Numerous scriptural references underscore a God without beginning or ending:

• God exists totally apart from the universe, and yet can be everywhere within it (Gen. 1:1; Col. 1:16, 17).
• God’s existence precedes time (2 Tim. 1:9; Titus 1:2).
• Christ has no beginning and was not created (John 1:1-3; Col. 1:16, 17).
• God created the universe from what cannot be detected with the five senses (Heb. 11:3).
• After His resurrection Jesus could pass through walls, an evidence of His extradimensionality (Luke 24:36-43; John 20:26-28).
• God is very near, yet we cannot see Him, a further evidence of His extradimensionality (Ex. 33:20; Deut. 30:11-14; John 6:46).

God is the ground of all being and the God above God (i.e., all our finite conceptions of God). Scientists are able to explore only the dimension in which they exist. Based on the unreasonableness of the constraints that the speed of light places upon the movement of holy Beings, science and scientists still have a ways to go.

Although in our world all things must be somewhere, some things (God, for example) may be several or more places at once. That also appears to be true in quantum mechanics, in which some things can be here and there, with no evidence of traversing the space in between. Whether or not God “plays dice” with the universe, in the words of Einstein, from our circumscribed vantage it may often appear as if Divinity wishes us to believe in ultimate randomness.

Just as most scientists probably believe that the Bible was not specifically designed to explain natural laws, so most Christians likely believe that scientists cannot by searching quantify God. Although thinking about God may not be considered on par with the thought experiments of Einstein and others, if done properly and humbly it may prove both enlightening and transforming. Many Christians are likely to view the cosmic intellect referred to by numerous scientists as a type of “unknown God.” In his beautiful yet humble recognition of that unknown and largely unknowable intellect, Einstein confessed his “rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”¹⁶

Einstein’s words of awe are strangely reminiscent of a point made from within our own ranks. In their elaboration of Hebrews 1:2,

F. D. Nichol and his fellow editors concluded: “When we consider the magnitude of God’s creation, the unnumbered millions of worlds circling the throne of Deity, not only do we gain an enlarged concept of God; we are led to say with the psalmist, ‘What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?’ (Ps. 8:4). Wonderful in wisdom, knowledge, and power must our God be; and with this, wonderful must be the love of Him who created and upholds all things and invites man to become a partaker with Him in glory.”¹⁷

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¹ Christopher Sykes, ed., No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman (New York: Norton, 1994), p. 44.
² Mircea Eliade, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987), vol. 11, p. 319.
³ Sykes, p. 98.
⁴ K. C. Cole, The Universe and the Teacup: Mathematics of Truth and Beauty (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), p. 172.
⁵ Stephen W. Hawking and George F. R. Ellis, “The Cosmic Black-Body Radiation and the Existence of Singularities in Our Universe,” Astrophysical Journal 152 (1968): 529-548; Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, “The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology,” in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, series A, 324 (1970): 529-548.
⁶ Hugh Ross, “Astronomical Evidences for the God of the Bible,” Reasons to Believe (P.O. Box 5978, Pasadena, CA 91117).
⁷ Heinz R. Pagels, Perfect Symmetry: The Search for the Beginning of Time (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), p. 243.
⁸ Ibid., p. 347.
⁹ Edward P. Tryon, “Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation,” Nature 246 (1973): 396, 397.
¹⁰ David Atkatz and Heinz Pagels, “Origin of the Universe as a Quantum Tunneling Event,” Physical Review D.25 (1982): 2065-2073; Alexander Vilenkin, “Creation of Universes From Nothing,” Physical Letters B, 117 (1982): 25-28; Yakob B. Zel’dovich and L. P. Grishchuk, “Structure and Future of the ‘New’ Universe,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 207 (1984): 23P-28P; Alexander Vilenkin, “Birth of Inflationary Universes,” Physical Review D.27 (1983): 2848-2855; Alexander Vilenkin, “Quantum Creation of Universes,” Physical Review D.30 (1984): 509-511.
¹¹ James B. Hartle and Stephen Hawking, “Wave Functions of the Universe,” Physical Review D.28 (1983): 2960-2975; Stephen Hawking, “The Quantum State of the Universe,” Nuclear Physics B.239 (1984): 257-276.
¹² Pagels, p. 347.
¹³ Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 290.
¹⁴ Pierre-Simon de Laplace, in Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York: World, 1971), p. 34.
¹⁵ John Wheeler, in Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 364.
¹⁶ Einstein, in Eliade, p. 322.
¹⁷ Francis D. Nichol, ed., The Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 1957, 1980), vol. 7, p. 396.

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Gerald F. Colvin is superintendent of public schools in Etowah, Tennessee, and serves as an elder, pianist, and Sabbath school teacher at the Bowman Hills Adventist Church in Cleveland, Tennessee.