We have discussed many issues pertaining to Christianity. What I have endeavored to do is give you a fresh take on what Christianity teaches. Granted, it is merely a skeleton that needs to be more fully clothed but you still have a lot to digest and think about because I am sure it challenges some of your accepted thoughts about the faith. There are many additional facts that can be looked at – the role of the Holy Spirit, the Church, the eschaton, prayer, the Church – but I think that the time has come to change gears and to deal a little with the mechanics of the world – science.

Because of its immense success in explaining how the world operates and using this information for the material betterment of people, science has received a status of being the best, and sometimes the only way, of speaking about the world and man.

In talking about the world the question arises about God and his role in the world. There are a very limited number of options here. The first is that there is no God and everything that happens occurs by chance and has no meaning. Although some may espouse this position but, very frankly, very few people live by the tenet that there is no God and there is no meaning to existence since it is a mere chance occurrence.

There is the theistic position that there is a God and He stands behind the universe and upholds it. We discussed many points of this view in previous letters and at this point I will not add anything additional but I will be referring to this position as we discuss various points.

The third position, which is held by Eastern religions, is that god is everything that exists. This is called pantheism. But the extreme weakness of this position is that it has nothing to say about the existence of evil. If everything represents a component of god, then the cancer that is killing a patient, this cancer is also part of god. To be very frank with you, I find this position untenable and very few people can live by being complete pantheists.

The fourth position is really, in spite of all the rhetoric of the Christian West, the default position of many and especially scientists. God created the world and retreated away from it and does not interact with the world. This position is referred to as deism. There is no call to prayer, no need for worship – the world is really on its own. There are no miracles because the world is strictly under the control of laws of nature which have been discovered by scientists. It is these laws that govern how the world behaves. They have made God redundant. This position is called deism and probably represents the majority view in the West and many of us slip into this position without even being aware of it.

For deism, many religious beliefs are mere superstition and are now replaced by the solid results of science. Religion is an outdated attitude to the world and this groundless belief needs to be replaced by the hard facts and findings of science. Attractive and simple (and this is one of its features that draws many people) as this view is, it has its weaknesses because we are finding that the discoveries of science are not eternal but changeable. We used to think of atoms as hard indivisible particles and we have come to see that atoms themselves are constituted from smaller components and atoms can be broken down to yield, for example, nuclear power.

The other challenge to the mechanistic view of the world has come from, ironically, the theory of evolution. This theory has shown us the importance of history and underlined the fact that this world is less a mechanical machine as an organism that grows, changes and forms new types of living substances. The history of the universe is undeniable but it is also unique in that it cannot be replayed and yet, the theory of evolution is acceptable science. Our basic concept of science as something that is repeatable and therefore testable cannot be applied to historical events. In fact, our concept of what science is or is not is being transformed as we learn more about nature. The mechanistic view of nature has been replaced by the view which stresses the importance of novelty and change as this is especially shown in the biosphere. We are coming to see that seemingly random events approach law-like behavior when we apply probability studies to these phenomena.

So, let’s take a closer look at the world and God’s relationship to this world. It is important to remember, that when we use the word create in theology, it does not just refer to the action of causing something to come into being, but also, even more importantly, it brings to mind the idea of relationship. Christianity teaches about creatio ex nihilo, which says that God is not dependent on the world nor is He a part or even the whole of it. The world is contingent, it depends totally on God and not on laws of nature. In a sense, laws are secondary – they themselves have come into existence and we have merely discovered them and use them to describe how the universe operates. Scientific laws cannot and do not bring the world into existence as Hawking has pointed out.

It is highly ironic that the laws of nature are mathematical in form and these laws themselves cannot be touched or seen. They are totally non-material and it should cause materialists who claim that there is nothing else except for material reality, to think deeply about whether their philosophy is correct. It has often been said that the reliability of physical laws points to god being superfluous, an unnecessary complicating factor. But we should always remember that laws do not open our understanding to the depths that are there within creation and which science has no language to speak of.

If we consider elementary particles such as atoms and others, we realize, and science cannot really argue against this, that these particles represent a world of potentialities and possibilities as a Nobel prize winning physicist Heisenberg argued. We are finding that the solidity that we had expected and predicted underlying reality turns out to be ephemeral as particles dissolve into even more basic particles with dizzying rapidity and we are left with the question – what is material reality at its most fundamental level and we have failed to come up with an answer.

Deism proposes that God creates the world and then He calls on the laws to kick in and drive the world forward. This strict control of the universe by laws is sometimes referred to as determinism. But with the advent of the twentieth century, the underpinnings of determinism were shaken. Quantum mechanics – which is the physics of very small objects, and relativity – which is the study of very large objects, and chaos theory all pointed to the fact that the neat and ordered mechanical view of the world given by nineteenth century physics was not so much wrong, as incomplete because it was an approximation which worked but it had its problems. This mechanistic view of the world is not and cannot be the final and most complete description of the world.

Determinism was coupled with reductionism whereby complex systems were studied by breaking them down into simpler packets which could then be handled more easily by mathematics. With the early part of the twentieth century we start to work with a statistical view of the world. And we come to realize that knowledge of the behavior of matter at the very level of atoms and molecules, cannot describe completely what this matter can do when it is combined into the large bundles that we deal with in everyday life. We start to talk about a new concept – emergence. The term emergence is used to describe properties that arise in bulk material and are not predicted by simple reductive laws. These emergent properties arise from many particles behaving cooperatively. This sounds very abstract; so I will try to illustrate with an example. The element chlorine is a gas and consists of molecules of chlorine, that is, two atoms of chlorine bonded together. If you were able to see the chlorine molecule, and at this time we cannot but we have other means of ‘seeing’ the chlorine molecule, we would realize that it had no color. And yet, if we were to look in the lab at the chlorine gas which consists of many billions of chlorine molecules, we would see that they look green. The color green is an emergent property which individual molecules of chlorine could not tell us and by looking at one molecule of chlorine, we would not be able to predict. There are many properties which we value such as color, time and others which exist in the world that we interact with on a daily basis but are absent from the tiny world of subatomic particles. The point that I am making is that reductionism has been very successful in enabling us to deal with the world and to try to explain its mechanisms of operation. But reductionism has limits as to what it can achieve. It has been a very powerful way to study nature but it does not even start to give us a semblance of an answer to some important aspects of reality.

But, enough for today. Keep your questions coming.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas