Some thoughts on Science and Religion
I am interested in Christian apologetics, but I am unapologetically Christian. I believe the reductionist scientific view to be hypodimensional. There are more dimensions to reality than can be investigated with the scientific method. There are other ways of knowing. I believe that the Christian faith reveals the deepest truths about who we are and our relationship to God.
If there is a spiritual world, it must be governed by laws, and I find this prospect fascinating in the highest degree. We do not know much about the laws that govern the spiritual world, but we can reasonably expect them to be as complex as physics as we know it (paraphrasing C.S. Lewis).
Like any scientist, my worldview is subject to revision, but the evidence in my own personal journey points to the truth of Christianity. I believe that what a person knows intellectually must be consistent with their religious beliefs, or something akin to schizophrenia results. Thus it is a tragedy when people are told that they must reject the revelations of modern science in order to maintain their faith in God. I believe that no such choice is necessary. The problem is that as human beings, we are limited in our ability to see the “big picture”. Two-dimensional people looking at the projection of a cube into the plane of their world (see below), see the same object as having four sides or as having three, depending on the particular orientation of the cube. How can a triangle and a square be different manifestations of the same object? To beings who are able to perceive three dimensions, it is obvious, but this is not so for two-dimensional people. Thus, people are told in some churches that they must reject the theory of evolution in order to embrace Christianity. The Bible states that God made man from the “dust of the earth” , but this is exactly where evolutionary biologists believe we came from as well. The truth is always more complex than our simplistic preconceptions and limited cognitive capacities allow us to comprehend. As Sir Arthur Eddington said, “The universe is not only stranger than we believe, but stranger than we can believe.” I believe that to say “God made the universe without agents” is nonsense — it is like saying that “He made the universe without making the universe”. A carpenter can make nothing without tools (agents). In the case of the universe, the agents are the laws of physics.
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”2_5″ _builder_version=”4.6.6″ _module_preset=”default”][et_pb_blurb title=”our hypodimensional comprehension of reality” image=”https://drphyzz.drury.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/two2dpeople.png” _builder_version=”4.6.6″ _module_preset=”default” transform_scale=”110%|110%” transform_translate=”156px|43px”]
The two-dimensional beings shown in the graphics above are looking at a cube which enters their universe two different ways: face-on (left) and vertex-on (right). To them, it seems impossible for the same object to appear as a square (left) and as a triangle (right). This is because of their hypodimensional view of reality.
video on left: I created a tesseract (4D cube) on my computer using Matlab. Just as a 3D cube has six sides, each of which is a 2D cube (a square), a tesseract has eight sides, each of which is a 3D cube. Each of those cubes, in turn, has six sides. That’s forty-eight 2D squares, and I put images of scenes from our universe on all of them. Then I tipped it on a vertex, and set it rotating. The sound is from the magnetometer boom on the Voyager II spacecraft as it traveled through our solar system. The result is the video shown on the left. If you listen carefully while you watch, you might hear angels singing.
Several years ago, I became fascinated by something C.S. Lewis said. The result is a paper that I presented at the Genesis and Genetics conference some years ago. It is a mathematical model of the Fall of Man and the Atonement of Christ, and it may be downloaded here. The first page is shown on the right. It is not meant to be taken as truth. I think of it as mathematical art. Like all models of reality, it is only one way of trying to explain something, and is only as good as the glimpse it may give into truth. The truth in this case is a profound mystery of the Christian faith: How can Someone make atonement for the sins of another?
