Our Sacred Source

A Theology Grounded in Modern Physics, about a Creator God and Why We Are Here

Andrew Kneier

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781725288256
  9781725288263
• eBook ISBN:
  9781725288270
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Life is not a cakewalk for any of us. We each have our individual sufferings and challenges in life, and we each must endure vital questions that have no certain answers. Why are we here? Where is God when we need him? How do our lives matter in the long run? Our science cannot help us with such questions, but theology can. And that's what this book has to offer. This book's theology is based on an arresting theory about God. Turning to modern physics, it finds God in the origin of the universe and in the innermost foundations of the natural world. The universe flowed from his nature, but his nature was not perfect, which is why we have an imperfect world where bad things happen to good people. And yet we also find this God deep within us, enabling us to confront our suffering with resilience and grace. The evil in the world has power, but we have power too, the power from our inner God to hold steady against the slings and arrows of our misfortunes. The theology presented here builds on the discoveries of particle physics and quantum mechanics about the foundational building blocks and forces in all of creation. These reveal the abounding spirit and purposes of the Creator--a spirit that empowers us and instills in us purposes we can embrace and foster. It may seem we are essentially on our own as we navigate through life, but in this book's theology, God is always and everywhere with us and in us.

1

The Book of Nature

It is difficult to overestimate the significance of the intellectual shift that occurred in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.6 The central issue concerned the method for knowing the truth, whether in the physical sciences, philosophy, or theology. In prior centuries, the truth was regarded as something revealed by the authority of tradition (all the way back to Aristotle’s teachings about the workings of nature) or the teachings of the church. The truth was found in what was taught to be true by those in positions of authority to know the truth. If a farmer’s crops failed, for example, he or she might go to the local priest to learn how the hand of God was behind the farmer’s misfortune.

All that changed with the advent of the scientific method. Now the success or failure of crops was explained by discovered knowledge about the workings of nature. This was a radical, monumental shift in thinking. Nearly everything thought to be true, because of the received wisdom of past centuries, was now challenged. It was not so much the content of taken-for-granted knowledge that was at issue; the issue concerned the method by which this knowledge was derived.7 The new paradigm could be summarized as follows: We find ourselves in a world that is governed by laws, and these laws can be discovered through rational investigation and trial-and-error experiment.

This new approach was applied to knowledge about God. The existence of the Judeo-Christian God, or of a Creator Deity, was widely accepted throughout Europe. The issue concerned the nature and will of this God. How could that be known? The church had its own answer to that question, according to which scripture and tradition were regarded as the sources of knowledge about God. These were now rejected as being unscientific—not necessarily wrong, but based on an untenable method of discovery. The correct method, it was now believed, was to look at the created world, the world of nature, for insight into the nature and will of the creator. This was because God’s nature was manifested in the world He created. This was the key point.

Isaac Newton is a good example. In 1687 he announced to the world that he had happened upon a law of God, a law put in nature by God to make the universe an orderly, lawful place. This was the universal law of gravitation, a law that Newton believed revealed the lawful orderliness of God’s nature. Think about this for a moment. Newton discovered that any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. This fascinating law is in nature, but how did it get there? It would be farfetched to think it occurred by accident. He believed it came from God. In a sense, he was doing theology when he was doing his science. Nowadays, we would say he was doing “natural theology”; but even in his day, this concept was sometimes used to describe his work.

It was not only Newton who believed the creator God was revealed in His creation. Other giants of the scientific revolution shared the same belief, including Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler. It gradually became a widespread belief among other scientists (or “natural philosophers,” as they were called) and among the intellectual class at the time. Throughout European culture, the dominance of the church, whose teachings about God were based on Scripture, gave way to the new approach to learning about God—namely, through a scientific exploration of the book of nature.

If we jump forward to the beginning of the twentieth century we find Albert Einstein with similar beliefs. When asked whether he believed in God, he wrote: “My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little we can comprehend about the knowable world. That deep emotional conviction in the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.”8 In response to a student who asked about his religious faith, he said:

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naïve.9

Thanks to Einstein and the burgeoning fields of particle physics and astrophysics, we now know much more about the book of nature than in the era when Newton made his discoveries. Since the time of Aristotle, it was believed that atoms were the fundamental building blocks of matter. But the last fifty years brought in the burgeoning field of particle physics and the discovery that atoms were composed of much smaller particles (protons, neutrons, and electrons) and that protons and neutrons were composed of still smaller bits of matter (quarks and leptons). In addition, particle physics identified the fundamental forces at work in the microscopic world.10

In physics, the laws and principles of this world are called quantum mechanics. “Quanta” refer to the indivisible units of matter or energy that make up the quantum world. Because these units behave and interact in a fluid, dynamic manner, the term “quantum dynamics” would be more appropriate. There is nothing “mechanical” going on in this realm. Nonetheless, I will stick with the term “quantum mechanics” in the following discussion.

As I mentioned in the Introduction, the theology of the book you are now reading belongs to the field of natural theology. Its basic premise is that the book of nature, which we now see as vastly more intricate and rich than we ever knew, is a source of revelation about the Creator Deity. To elaborate on this point, I should say a word about the two principles that inform my method.

The principle of emanation. I believe the fundamental building blocks and forces in the natural worl...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• The Book of Nature
• God’s Purposes
• God’s Purposes in Relation to Goodness, Beauty, and Love
• On Having a Purposeful Life
• The Theology of Paul Tillich
• A Personal God?
• The Experience of God’s Presence
• God and the Problem of Evil
• A Theology of Death
• A Theology of the Human Spirit
• Bibliography