I have found that one of the best ways to live life is to have friends who are smarter than you. Two of mine come to mind – Rob (a very committed atheist) and Matthew (a better Christian than I am). We have been batting around the latest scientific discoveries in physics and how they may point to a Creator, but definitely point to Ultimate Reality being much weirder than we can ever comprehend. Consider Matthew’s quote below:
“Theoretical physicists are Platonists. Until the past few years, they agreed that the entire universe, the one universe, is generated from a few mathematical truths and principles of symmetry, perhaps throwing in a handful of parameters like the mass of the electron. It seemed that we were closing in on a vision of our universe in which everything could be calculated, predicted, and understood.
However, two theories in physics, eternal inflation and string theory, now suggest that the same fundamental principles from which the laws of nature derive may lead to many different self-consistent universes, with many different properties. It is as if you walked into a shoe store, had your feet measured, and found that a size 5 would fit you, a size 8 would also fit, and a size 12 would fit equally well. Such wishy-washy results make theoretical physicists extremely unhappy. Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science….
That same uncertainty disturbs many physicists who are adjusting to the idea of the multiverse. Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.
Sound familiar? Theologians are accustomed to taking some beliefs on faith. Scientists are not. All we can do is hope that the same theories that predict the multiverse also produce many other predictions that we can test here in our own universe. But the other universes themselves will almost certainly remain a conjecture.
We had a lot more confidence in our intuition before the discovery of dark energy and the multiverse idea,’ says Guth. ‘There will still be a lot for us to understand, but we will miss out on the fun of figuring everything out from first principles.”
-The accidental universe: Science’s crisis of faith: http://harpers.org/archive/2011/12/0083720
If you want to know more about multiverses and string theory (we might live in about 11 dimensions), hit up Brian Greene on YouTube. I say all this to say, when people mock at the concept of God becoming a Man, and a helpless babe laying in a trough at that, I say when you have electrons popping into and out of existence, when the faster you go the slower time goes, and when the latest math suggests an infinite number of parallel universes, you can’t discount the incredible. Because it’s happening all the time. Merry Christmas!
Bryan Randall Davis 