What We Talk About When We Talk About God

One more note about notes: all of the places where I cite Scripture verses, as well as credits for other sources for information and suggestions for further reading, are included in the endnotes, organized there by theme or key phrases.

It’s a fair bit of ground to cover, and my hope is that by the end you will say,

“Now that’s what I’m talking about.”

CHAPTER 2

OPEN

One time I was asked to speak to a group of atheists and I went and I had a blast. Afterward they invited me out for drinks, and we were laughing and telling stories and having all sorts of interesting conversation when a woman pulled me aside to ask me a question. She had a concerned look on her face and her brow was slightly furrowed as she looked me in the eyes and said, “You don’t believe in miracles, do you?”

As I listened, I couldn’t help but smile, because not long before that evening I’d been approached by a churchgoing, highly devout Christian woman who’d asked me, with the exact same concerned look on her face, complete with furrowed brow, “You believe in miracles, don’t you?”

It’s as if the one woman was concerned that I had lost my mind, while the other woman was concerned that I had lost my faith.

There’s a giant either/or embedded in their questions, an either/or that reflects some of the great questions of our era:

Faith or intellect?

Belief or reason?

Miracles or logic?

God or science?

Can a person believe in things that violate all the laws of reason and logic and then claim to be reasonable and logical?

I point this either/or out because how we think about God is directly connected with how we think about the world we’re living in.

When someone dismisses the supernatural and miraculous by saying, “Those things don’t happen,” and when someone else believes in something he can’t prove and has no evidence for, those beliefs are both rooted in particular ways of understanding what kind of world we’re living in and how we know what we know.

Often in these either/or discussions, people on both sides assume they’re just being reasonable or logical or rational or something else intelligent-sounding, without realizing that the modern world has shaped and molded and formed how we think about the world, which leads to how we think about God, in a number of ways that are relatively new in human history and have a number of significant limits.

So before we talk about the God who is with us and for us and ahead of us, we’ll talk about the kind of world we’re living in and how that shapes how we know what we know.

First, we’ll talk about the bigness of the universe,

then

the smallness of the universe,

then

we’ll talk about you and what it is that makes you you,

and then

we’ll talk about how all this affects how we understand and talk about God.

This will take a while—so stay with me—because the universe is way weirder than any of us ever imagined . . .

I. Welcome to the Red Shift

The universe,

it turns out,

is expanding.

Restaurant chains expand, waistbands expand, so do balloons and those little foam animal toys that come in pill-shaped capsules—but universes?

Or more precisely, the universe?

It’s expanding?

Now the edge of the universe is roughly ninety billion trillion miles away (roughly being the word you use when your estimate could be off by A MILLION MILES), the visible universe is a million million million million miles across, and all of the galaxies in the universe are moving away from all of the other galaxies in the universe at the same time.

This is called galactic dispersal, and it may explain why some children have a hard time sitting still.

The solar system that we live in, which fills less than a trillionth of available space, is moving at 558 thousand miles per hour. It’s part of the Milky Way galaxy, and it takes our solar system between 200 and 250 million years to orbit the Milky Way once. The Milky Way contains a number of smaller galaxies, including

the Fornax Dwarf,

the Canis Major,

the Ursa Minor,

the Draco,

the Leo I and the not-to-be-forgotten Leo II,

the Sculptor, and

the Sextans.

It’s part of a group of fifty-four galaxies creatively called the Local Group, which is a member of an even larger group called the Virgo Supercluster (which had a number of hit singles in the early eighties).

And happens to be traveling at 666 thousand miles an hour.

(So be careful out there, and look both ways before you cross the supernova.)

Back to our original question:

Expanding?

Around a hundred years ago, several astronomers, among them Edwin Hubble, he of telescope fame, and Vesto Slipher, he of awesome name fame, observed distant galaxies giving off red light. Red is the color galaxies emit when they’re moving away from you, blue when they’re moving toward you—hence the term “red shift.”

Fast-forward to 1964, to two physicists working for the Bell Telephone Company, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. These men were unable to locate the source of strange radio waves they were continually picking up with their highly sensitive equipment. As they searched for the source of these waves, cleaned the bird droppings (which Penzias called “white dielectric material”) off their instruments, and shared their findings with other scientists, they realized that they were picking up background radiation from a massive explosion.

An explosion, it’s commonly believed, that happened a number of years ago—13.7 billion, to be more exact.

Apparently, before everything was anything, there was a point, called a singularity, and then there was a bang involving inconceivably high temperatures, loaded with enough energy and potential and possibility to eventually create what you and I know to be life, the universe, and everything in it.

The background radiation from this explosion, by the way, is still around in small amounts as the static on your television. (And you thought it was your cable company.)

Now when we get into sizes and distances and speeds this big and far and galactic and massive, things don’t function in ways we’re familiar with. For example, gravity. Jump off the roof of your house, drop a plate on the floor in the kitchen, launch a paper airplane and you see gravity at work, pulling things toward our planet in fairly consistent and predictable ways. But in other places in the universe, gravity isn’t so reliable. There are celestial bodies called neutron stars that have such strong gravity at work within them that they collapse in on themselves. These stars can weigh more than two hundred billion tons—more than all of the continents on Earth put together . . .

and fit in a teaspoon.

And then there’s all that we don’t know. A staggering 96 percent of the universe is made up of black holes, dark matter, and dark energy. These mysterious, hard to see, and even harder to understand phenomena are a major engine of life in the universe, leaving us with 4 percent of the universe that is actually knowable.

Which leads us to a corner of this 96 percent unknowable universe, to the outer edge of an average galaxy, to a planet called Earth. Our home.

Earth weighs about six billion trillion tons, is moving around the sun at roughly sixty-six thousand miles an hour, and is doing this while rotating at the equator at a little over a thousand miles an hour. So when you feel like your head is spinning, it is. Paris is, after all, going six hundred miles an hour.

Earth’s surface is made up of about ten big plates and twenty smaller ones that never stop slipping and sliding, like Greenland, which moves half an inch a year. The general estimate is that this current configuration of continents that we know to be Africa, Asia, Europe, etc. has been like this about a tenth of 1 percent of history. The world, as we know it, is a relatively new arrangement.

Every day there are on average two earthquakes somewhere in the world that measure 2 or greater on the Richter scale, every second about one hundred lightning bolts hit the ground, and every nineteen seconds someone sitting in a restaurant somewhere hears Lionel Richie’s song “Dancing on the Ceiling” one. more. Time.

Speaking of time, here on Earth we travel around the sun every 365 days, which we call a year, and we spin once around every twenty-four hours, which we call a day. Our concepts of time, then, are shaped by large, physical, planetary objects moving around each other while turning themselves. Time is determined by physical space.

No planets, which are things,

no time.

We have calendars that divide time up into predictable, segmented, uniform units—hours and days and months and years. This organization into regular, sequential intervals that unfold with precise predictability has deeply shaped our thinking about time. These constructs are good and helpful in many ways—they help us get to our dentist appointments and remember each other’s birthdays, but they also protect us from how elastic and stretchy time actually is.

If you place a clock on the ground and then you place a second clock on a tower, the hands of the clock on the tower will move faster than on the clock on the ground, because closer to the ground gravity is stronger, slowing down the hands of the clock.

If you stand outside on a starry night, the light you see from the stars is the stars as they were when the light left them. You are not seeing how those stars are now; you in the present are seeing how those stars were years and years and years in the past.

If you stand outside on a sunny day, you are enjoying the sun as it was eight minutes ago.

If you found yourself riding on a train that was traveling at the speed of light and you looked out the window, you would not see things ahead, things beside you, and things you had just passed. You would see everything all at once. You would lose your sense of past, present, and future because linear, sequential time would collapse into one giant NOW.

Time is not consistent:

it bends and warps and curves;

it speeds up and slows down;

it shifts and changes.

Time is relative, its consistency a persistent illusion.

It’s an expanding,

shifting,

spinning,

turning,

rotating,

slipping and sliding universe we’re living in.

There is no universal up;

there is no ultimate down;

there is no objective, stationary, unmoving place of rest where you can observe all that ceaseless movement.

Sitting still, after all, is no different than maintaining a uniform approximate constant state of motion.

There is no absolute viewpoint; there are only views from a point.

Bendy, curvy, relative—the past, present, and future are illusions as space-time warps and distorts in a stunning variety of ways, leading us to another matter: matter.

The sun is both a star that we orbit,

and our primary source of energy.

It is a physical object,

and it is the engine of life for our planet.

The sun is made of matter,

and the sun is energy.

At the same time.

Albert Einstein was the first to name this, showing that matter is actually locked-up energy. And energy is liberated matter.

Perhaps you’ve seen posters of the Swiss patent clerk sticking his tongue out, with the wild hair and the rumors of how he was supposedly such a genius that he would forget to put his pants on in the morning. And then there’s his famous E = mc2 formula, which many of us could confidently write out on a chalkboard even if we couldn’t begin to explain it.

Beyond all that, though, what exactly was it that he did?

What Einstein did, through his theories of general and special relativity, was show that the universe is way, way weirder than anyone had thought. I realize that weirder isn’t the most scientific of terms, but Einstein’s work took him from the bigness of the universe to the smallness of the universe, and that’s when a string of truly stunning discoveries were made, discoveries that challenge our most basic ideas about the world we’re living in.

II. Who Ordered That?

For thousands of years people have wondered what the universe is made of, assuming that there must be some kind of building block, a particle, a basic element, a cosmic Lego of sorts—something really small and stable that makes up everything we know to be everything. The possibilities are fascinating, because if you could discover this primal building material, you could answer countless questions about how we got here and what we’re made of and where it’s all headed . . .

You could, ideally, make sense of things.

Greek philosophers—among them Democritus, who lived twenty-five hundred years ago—speculated about this elemental building block, using a particular word for it. The Greeks had a word tomos, which referred to cutting or dividing something. Out of this they developed the concept of something that was a-tomos, something “indivisible, uncuttable,” something that everything else was made of. Something really small, of which there is nothing smaller. Something atomos, from which we get the word atom.

Imagine what we’d learn if we could actually discover one of these atoms! That was the quest that compelled scientists and philosophers and thinkers for thousands of years until the late 1800s, when atoms were eventually discovered.

Atoms, it turns out, are small.

About one million atoms lined up side by side are as thick as a human hair.

A single grain of sand contains 22 quintillion atoms (that’s 22 with 18 zeroes).

An atom is in size to a golf ball as a golf ball is in size to Earth.

That small.

But atoms, it was discovered, are made up of even smaller parts called protons, neutrons, and electrons. The protons and neutrons are in the center of the atom, called the nucleus, which is one-millionth of a billionth of the volume of the atom.

If an atom were blown up to the size of a stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a grain of rice, but it would weigh more than the stadium.

The discoveries continued as technology was developed to split those particles, which led to the discovery that those particles are actually made up of even smaller particles. And then technology was developed to split those particles and it was discovered that those particles are actually made up of even smaller particles. And then technology was developed to split those particles . . .

Down and down it went,

smaller and smaller,

further and further into the subatomic world.

The British physicist J. J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897, which led to the discovery of an astonishing number of new particles over the next few

years, from

bosons and

hadrons and

baryons and

neutrinos

to

mesons and

leptons and

pions and

hyperons and

taus.

Gluons were discovered, which hold particles together, along with quarks, which come in a variety of types—

there are up quarks

and down quarks

and top quarks

and bottom quarks

and charmed quarks

and, of course,

strange quarks.

When an inconceivably small particle called a muon was identified, the legendary physicist Isaac Rabi is known for saying, “Who ordered that?”

By now somewhere around 150 subatomic particles have been identified, with new technology and research constantly emerging, the most impressive example of this happening at a facility known by the acronym CERN, which is near the Swiss–French border. Workers at CERN, an international collaboration of almost eight thousand scientists and several thousand employees, have built a sixteen-mile circular tunnel one hundred meters below earth’s surface called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). At the LHC they fire two beams at each other, each with 3.5 trillion volts, hoping that in the ensuing collision particles will emerge that haven’t been studied yet.

Physicists have talked with straight faces for years about how with this unprecedented level of energy and equipment and billions of dollars and the brightest scientific minds in the world working together they might be able to finally discover that incredibly important, terribly elusive particle called the . . .

Higgs Boson.

(Which they did. Go ahead, Google it. It’s incredible. Even if it sounds like the name of a southern politician.)

Now, the staggeringly tiny size of atoms and subatomic particles is hard to get one’s mind around, but it’s what these particles do that forces us to confront our most basic assumptions about the universe.

Many popular images of an atom lead us to think that it’s like a solar system, with the protons and neutrons in the center like the sun and the electrons orbiting in a path around the center as our planet orbits the sun.

But those early pioneering scientists learned that this is not how things actually are. What they learned is that electrons don’t orbit the nucleus in a continuous and consistent manner; what they do is

disappear in one place and then appear in another place without traveling the distance in between.

Particles vanish and then show up somewhere else, leaping from one location to another, with no way to predict when or where they will come or go.

Niels Bohr was one of the first to come to terms with this strange new world that was being uncovered, calling these movements quantum leaps. Pioneering quantum physicists realized that particles are constantly in motion, exploring all of the possible paths from point A to point B at the same time. They’re simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.

A given electron not only travels all of the possible routes from A to B, but it reveals which path it took only when it’s observed. Electrons exist in what are called ghost states, exploring all of the possible routes they could take, until they are observed, at which point all of those possibilities collapse into the one they actually take.

Ever stood on a sidewalk in front of a store window and seen your reflection in the glass? You could see the items in the display window, but you could also see yourself, as if in a fuzzy mirror. Some of the light particles from the sun (called photons) went through the glass, illuminating whatever it was that caught your eye. Some of the particles from the sun didn’t pass through the glass but essentially bounced off it, allowing you to see your reflection. Why did a certain particle go through the glass, and a certain other particle not?

It can’t be predicted.

Some particles pass through the glass;

Some don’t.

You can determine possibilities,

you can list all kinds of potential outcomes,

but in the end, that’s the best that can be done.

The physicist Werner Heisenberg was the first to name this disturbing truth about the quantum world: you can measure a particle’s location, or you can measure its speed, but you can’t measure both. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, along with breakthroughs from Max Planck and many others, raised countless questions about the unpredictability of the universe on a small scale.

As more and more physicists spent more and more time observing the universe on this incredibly small scale, more truths began to emerge that we simply don’t have categories for, an excellent example of this being the nature of light.

Light is the only constant, unchanging reality—all that curving and bending and shifting happens in contrast to light, which keeps its unflappable, steady course regardless of the conditions. But that doesn’t mean it’s free from some truly mind-bending behavior. Because things in nature are either waves or particles. There are dust particles and sound waves, waves in the ocean and particles of food caught in your friend’s beard. That’s been conventional wisdom for a number of years.

Particles and waves.

One or the other.

Particles are like bullets;

waves are spread out.

Particles can be only in specific locations;

waves can be everywhere.

Particles can’t be divided; waves can.

But then there’s light.

Light is made up of particles.

Light is a wave.

If you Ask light a wave question, it responds as a wave. ask light a particle question, and it reveals itself to be particles.

Two mutually exclusive things, things that have always been understood to be either/or,

turned

out

to

be

both.

At the same time.

Niels Bohr was the first to name this, in 1926, calling it complementarity.

Complementarity, the truth that something can be two different things at the same time, leads us to another phenomenon, one far more bizarre, called entanglement.

Communication as we understand it always involves a signal of some sort—your voice, a telephone, a wire, a radio wave, a frequency, a pulse—something to transmit whatever it is from one place to another. Not so in the subatomic realm, where particles consistently show that they’re communicating with one another with no signal involved. Wolfgang Pauli identified this truly surreal property of subatomic particles in 1925 with his exclusion principle. Pairs of quantum particles, it was discovered, demonstrate an awareness of what the other is doing after they’ve been separated. Without any kind of signal.

The universe in its smallness presents us with a reality we simply don’t have any frame of reference for:

A single electron can do forty-seven thousand laps around a four-mile tunnel—in one second.

Protons live ten thousand billion billion billion years, while muons generally live about two microseconds—and then they’re gone.

If you’re sitting in a chair that spins and I turn you around, I have to turn you 360 degrees to get you facing the same direction again. Electrons have been discovered that don’t return to the front after being spun 360 degrees once; for that to happen you have to spin them twice.

Imagine playing tennis and discovering that sometimes you were able to hit the ball with your racquet, and other times the ball went through your racquet as if there were no webbing. You would immediately assume that there was some reason for this unexpected behavior of the ball and the racquet, and so you would work to figure out why this was happening. You’d take into account speed and force and the characteristics of the various materials: plastic and rubber and metal. All under the assumption that there was an explanation for the ball’s action. You’d apply basic laws of physics and motion, and you’d think about similar circumstances involving similar speeds and sizes and shapes.

You’d be doing what scientists have been doing for a long time: operating under the assumption that the universe functions according to particular laws of motion that can be known.

But in the subatomic world,

things come and go,

disappear and appear,

spin and leap and communicate and demonstrate awareness of each other,

all without appearing to pay any attention to how the world is supposed to work.

Niels Bohr said that anyone who wasn’t outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn’t understand what was being said.

It’s important to pause here and make it clear that quantum theory is responsible for everything from X-rays and MRI machines and superconducting magnets, to lasers and fiber optics and the transistors that are the backbone of electronics, to computers. It’s staggering just how many features of the modern world as we know it come from the contributions of quantum theory. The Nobel Laureate physicist Leon Lederman and the theoretical physicist Christopher hill of Fermilab believe that quantum theory is arguably the most successful theory in the history of science.