Sermon 20 - Science vs Faith

Sermon 20 - Science vs Faith

I believe in God because I am a physicist.

That may sound strange to some of you.  An awful lot of you, and an awful lot of other people, consider science and faith to be enemies.  A lot of people think that evolution means God can't exist.  As far as I'm concerned, that just means that you don't know what evolution actually is, and says.  Evolution doesn't say anything about god.  It just gives a mechanism for the variation, distribution, and growth of different species of animals and plants and life in general.

The thing is, science is simply believing what the evidence says, until you get more and better evidence, that definitely says something different.  Now this is really interesting, because C. S. Lewis writes somewhere that faith means that once you have made a decision to believe in God, you don't change your mind, until you have a very good reason to change your mind.  And, even if you do come up with a reason, you make sure that it's a very good reason before you change your mind.

Don't those two statements look an awful lot alike?

I am not having a good time right now.  As a matter of fact, I am not having a good life right now.  I am a grieving widower, and lonely, and depressed.  (Which may have to do with each other, or are maybe separate and cumulative.  In any case, it's not fun.)  I don't want to live this life.  My life is not worth living right now.

The thing is, that's my experience right now.  Well, and for some time now, but, even so, it's now.  And it's me.  And an awful lot of you keep telling me that your life is good, that God is good to you, that God supports you, that the church supports you.  So, that kind of contradicts my feeling about my life.  And, in addition, I can remember times when my life was good.  I can't remember how they felt, now, but I do remember it happening.

I even have proof that it happened, once upon a time.  Gloria, when we first got married accused me of making what she called "happy noises."  I didn't know what she meant.  I thought that, since I was way worse at singing than she was, that sometimes when I was singing under my breath, I may have been singing so badly, that she couldn't tell that I was singing.  And then, one day, after our first grandson was born, and we had, for various reasons, bought a video camera, and we had been out with our grandson and I had been videotaping what had been going on, and we were watching this video afterwards, Gloria suddenly cried out, "There!  That's the happy noises!"  And, sure enough, you can hear, on the video, that I am making a sort of vaguely-but-not-really-musical, tuneless, and rhythmless, humming.  It's very hard to describe, but if you heard it once, you would know what Gloria meant.  So, I have documented video evidence that once upon a time I was happy.  So, I've been happy, once upon a time.  Just not now.

So therefore, even though my life feels really terrible right now, there's still reason, and even evidence, to hope that my life might be happy at some time in the future.  That I might get to the same kind of life that most of you seem to be living.  So, that's faith.  The evidence against life, the evidence that my life is terrible and always will be terrible, is not strong enough to overturn the evidence of your testimonies, and even my own remembrances.  As well as that video.

So, science and faith would seem to be very similar.  God doesn't ask us to believe without any evidence.  Jesus famously, on one occasion, said that we shouldn't put God to the test, but the Bible also says that we should taste and see that the Lord is good.  That we should, in fact, try God, and see if He works.

Okay, that's one part of why I believe in God because I'm a physicist.  But there's more.

We are asked, as Christians, to believe a lot of very weird stuff.  And I'm not even talking about bread from heaven, or virgins giving birth, or parting seas, or other stuff like that.  I'm talking about things that seem to be not only unlikely, but inherently, and logically, contradictory.

We are asked, for example, to believe that Jesus is both fully God and fully man.  At the same time.  Now this, of course, is flatly impossible.  Inherently, and logically, impossible.  So, obviously we can't believe it.

Except that there are things that seem to be impossible, but just happened to be true.  I am, as I say, a physicist.  I know a little bit (a very little bit) about quantum physics and quantum mechanics.  This is new stuff in the scientific realm, and it will definitely make your head hurt.  For example, a photon is a particle of light.  So it is a particle.  A particle is a pretty much a point: it is here and it is not there type of thing.  So a particle cannot be a wave, which is not a specific point, but is spread out over an area.  Except that a photon is, also, and at the same time, a wave.  We have done experiments to prove that a photon is a particle.  And we have done experiments to prove that a photon is a wave.  And both experiments turn out to be true, and both conditions turn out to be true.  A wave is distributed across space, and even time.  And so it can't be the same as a particle.  That's just logically impossible.  It's got to be either one thing or another.

So, we've got something that should be logically impossible, and just happens to be true.  So, we have to believe in something that seems to be contradictory.  I don't know how a photon is both a wave, and a particle, at the same time.  But it is.  That's just a fact.  I can't figure out how it works: I have absolutely no idea how that could possibly be.  It seems inherently, and logically, contradictory.  But it's true.

So what *seems* to be logically contradictory, can't be.  Because it is true.  It is provable.  It is a fact.  And because it is true, it means that we don't understand everything, and what we *think* seems to be a logical contradiction, isn't.

So, believing that Jesus is fully man, and fully God?  Okay.  I don't know how that works: I can't figure out how that could possibly work.  But, it happens to be true.

Same with Jesus being the same as God, and being distinct from God.  That seems to be impossible.  It logically contradicts itself.  It's inherently contradictory.  But it's also true.  Just like the photon.  So, because I'm a physicist, I am asked to believe impossible things before breakfast.  So, believing that Jesus both is and is distinct from God, well, I just have to accept that.  It's the truth.  I don't know how and why, but science means that you believe the evidence, until you get a better explanation.  Maybe I will get a better explanation, sometime.  Maybe I will get a better explanation in heaven.  Or maybe not.  But it's true, and the evidence points that way, so, I've got to believe it, because I'm a scientist.

There is another aspect of science and faith.  This is possibly a bit more complicated.  Although, it seems relatively simple, on the surface.

There is one worship leader who annoys me.  He, on occasion, in introducing certain songs, lauds the wonders of God's creation.  I don't really have a problem with that.  However, in his view, the wonders of God's creation seems to be limited to the fact that galaxies are immense.  The thing is, God's creation is much more wonderful, much more complex, and much more immense than he could ever imagine.

The annoying thing is, that, as a scientist, I know the complexity of God's creation.  Or, at least, I know more about it than most people.  I certainly don't know all of it.  That's one of the things that you learn, as a scientist: the more you know, the more you realize you *don't* know.

But in terms of the immensity of God's creation, well, let's start at the other end.  We have already talked about photons, one of the smallest of items in God's creation.  So, we come up to our size, and it's difficult to imagine how much bigger we are, than a photon is.  When we get down to things that are about 10,000 times smaller than we are, that seems to be the limit at which we can perceive things.  After that, we just call them microscopic, and we figure that everything microscopic is about the same size.  They aren't, of course.  In fact, there are about seventeen orders of magnitude in sizes below the microscopic limit.  There's only four orders of magnitude between microscopic and us.  So the range of difference in sizes between the smallest things in the universe, and the microscopic limit, is more than a billion times a billion.  I know, I know: it's getting really hard to wrap your head around that.

And when we go in the other direction, things are about the same.  We have a hard time figuring out difference in sizes between us and what we can see with the naked eye.  What we can see with the naked eye, even when it's as big as a mountain, tends to be limited to about two orders of magnitude difference in size from us.  So there's another 19 orders of magnitude between the farthest distance that we can conceive of, and the size of the universe, itself.  That is quite a spread.

Yes, we live on a big world, at least in terms of what we consider to be big.  Our world is much bigger than we can readily imagine.  And our world is a pretty small speck in terms of the size of even our solar system.  If you want to get an idea of how big are world is, in comparison to the solar system, you can go to UBC.  Somewhere on the UBC campus is a globe which has been set as the size of the sun.  Then, in order to get the size, and the spacing, of the planets in the solar system, you have to drive out Marine Drive, and then 41st Avenue.  On light standards along 41st Avenue, there are signs indicating the relative distance to the Sun of the planets, and the relative size of the planets, in relation to the size of that globe on the campus that is set to the size of the Sun.  Before you get to the end of our solar system, you drive all the way across Vancouver and into Burnaby.  That's how big our solar system is in comparison to the world which, we have already noted, we really have a hard time figuring out the size of.

And our solar system is a minor, pedestrian, uninteresting star, among millions of stars, in the Milky Way galaxy, where our solar system resides.  And the galaxy, well I won't even try and express how big the galaxy is in relation to our tiny little solar system, which is already more immense than we can imagine.  But wait, as they say in the advertisements, there's more!

Galaxies aren't the biggest things in our universe.  In the same way that stars, collections of millions of stars, make up galaxies, galaxies seem to be grouped into things called galactic clusters.  Galactic clusters are, again, much huger than mere galaxies.

This next bit is something that we have only learned in about the past twenty years, since people started doing all kinds of math in terms of measuring how far away stars, no sorry galaxies, no sorry galactic clusters, are from us, and in what direction, and then using graphics software to map the stars, no sorry, galactic clusters, into a map of the overall universe.  And, having done that, a very interesting pattern emerged.

Gloria was very interested in quilts, and she once showed me a picture of a quilt that she very much liked, which had different size rings and circles on it, seemingly somewhat randomly placed.  I told her that that was the shape of the universe.

That's what we have learned from the mapping of the galactic clusters in the universe.  The galactic clusters themselves seem to be structured on a kind of a framework.  There are enormous voids in between the galactic clusters and the clusters themselves seem to be placed, or at least lie, on curved planes and surfaces.  This means that the universe, when you look at it from the outside, when you can see the shapes of all the dots that are enormous galactic clusters, the surfaces, surrounding empty voids, seem to be remarkably like soap froth, when you're washing dishes by hand, or when your kids are playing with bubble bath in the bath at the end of the day.  The universe is shaped like a foam of soap bubbles, with the galactic clusters on the surfaces of the bubbles, and enormous voids of empty space in between them.

And we have only now discovered this.

We discovered it because of math, and science, and computers that allow us to physically view representations of data that were just numbers before.  Science has discovered something about the universe, that nobody, in all the centuries and millennia before us, has known.

Looking at this representation of the universe, it is interesting to note that the universe is somewhat more regular than most soap foams.  There seems to be a periodicity to the surfaces and voids that is more regular than the randomness we see in ordinary soap bubbles.  Why is this there this regularity?  We don't know.  As I say, the more you know, the more you know that you don't know.

This is very much in line with the old hymn, How Great Thou Art.  Oh Lord my God, when I in *awesome* wonder, consider all the world thy hands have made, I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Science, if you use it properly, doesn't disprove the existence of God, or even argue against the existence of God.  Science lets you see, more clearly, just how awesome God is.  How fantastic his creation is.  How complicated are the aspects of his universe.  How far beyond our understanding are the ways of God.

Which brings me to one final point.  As I say, as I have repeatedly said, the more that you know, the more that you know there are things that you don't know.  This is true in science.  But it's also true in the Christian life.  There is always more to study about God.  There is always more to know about God.  The title of the book, by J. I. Packer, "Your God is Too Small," is, quite literally, true.  Whatever your idea of God; however far you have gone in studying God, theology, and the Christian Life; there is always more to know.  The more that we get to know God, the more we know about God, the more we realize that we do not know God, not fully.  Our concept of God is always too small, because God is much greater than we can ever imagine.

There's another, well, not exactly reason to believe, but theological point, at least, to be made from science, and about faith.

As I said, I'm a physicist.  And one of the things that we learn from physics, is that, in terms of light and dark, light is the reality.  Darkness actually has no existence.  Darkness is only the absence of light.  In the same way, in terms of heat and cold, heat is the reality.  Cold is not a thing.  Cold is simply the absence of heat.

There is a point to be made from that.  In terms of good and evil, these illustrations would indicate that good is the reality.  Evil is not an actual thing.  Evil is simply the absence of good.  Now, in one sense this is bad, because it points out, once again, that we are sinners, because we are not perfect, and are not perfectly good at following God's commands.  But it also means that whatever evil is arrayed against us, battling against us in daily life, is not actually real.  I'm not saying that there aren't bad things that happen, or even bad agents that are working against us.  But, ultimately, evil is just the absence of good.  Evil is turning away from God.  God is good.  God is the reality.  And, as Romans 8 tells us, none of the evil powers and agents arrayed against us can do anything about that.  Neither life nor death nor angels nor principalities can separate us from the love and goodness of God.  Evil cannot stand against us, because it is inherently flawed: it is based upon the absence of reality.

There's a little sidebar to this point.  And that has to do with heat, and cold, and the laws of thermodynamics.  Some people, in reaction to the bad things that happen in our lives, point out that it takes the sun, and the rain, to make a rainbow.  That is, actually, true, and I could point out the physics behind it, but that would probably take too long right now.  But it is also true, in physics, that if you do not have both heat and cold, nothing is going to happen.  I said that cold is not a real concept, and I'm still holding to that: I'm not contradicting myself here.  Cold is not the reality; heat is: but in order to get any useful work done you need a range of relative heat.  You need some areas that have more energy, and some areas that have less energy.  It is the flow of energy, or heat, from one area, that has lots of energy, to another area that has less energy, that can be used to do work.  By itself, you cannot force energy from the less energetic area, to the more energetic area.  This is known as the second law of thermodynamics, and it means that we cannot get any work done unless we have some kind of differential in heat.

Again, there is a theological point to be made of this.  The same point that people make with the comment about needing both the sun, and the rain to make a rainbow.  You need areas of greater heat, and lesser heat, to get any work done.  That is just a fact of the physical universe.  And, I suspect, that it is a fact of the spiritual universe, as well: in this universe that God has created; in this universe that God has provided for us as a playpen for us to grow up in; we need to have areas of more goodness, and less goodness.  It is important that bad things happen.  It is important that bad things happen to us.  I don't know why.  I don't know if *anybody* knows why.  But God has done it, and God must have done it for our good.  We have to take that on faith.  But, our faith is, in many ways, supported by what science tells us about the world that God has created.

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