God is Watching!

 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth; the earth was waste and void; darkness covered the abyss, and the spirit of God was stirring above the waters.

According to modern science, what was true, is true today.  Scripture says, In Him we live and move and have our very being (Acts 17:28) and

He is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Col.1:17).  Bruce Gordon, a philsopher of science states, "....reality, in toto, is continually realized through divine action (mental causation) as an expression of ongoing creation."  In other words, creation is not an event in the past, but an ongoing action of God in the present.   "God saw....God said."  God continues to see and He continues to speak --- and His Word holds all things in existence, just as at the beginning.  He speaks to what He sees.

The physicist who invented the term black hole  (John Wheeler) studied the relationship between the observed experiment and the observer (the scientist performing the experiment).  In quantum physics, it is only when the quanta packets of energy are being interfered with by the observing of the scientist that they "collapse" into a particular material state.  Only then do they become identifiable and measurable.  Wheeler concluded that an "Observer" was essential for the existence of the universe itself, because only such an observer could give it reality:  ....the entire universe only exists because someone is watching it----everything, right back to the Big Bang some 15 billion years ago, remained undefined until noticed.

When the physicist sets up his experiment to detect particles, he finds that light energy exists in particles.  When he sets up the experiment to detect waves, light energy expresses itself in waves.  Leading physicists have concluded that there is not only the experimentally verifiable horizontal cause and effect, but a "vertical causality" (the scientist himself).  For them, the solution to the quantum enigma implies the existence of another dimension of time. 

Interestingly, Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas had all seen the real world as "images" of the model in the mind of God.  The pagan philosophers, of course, referred to the "ideal" forms to which the material forms conformed.  Aquinas spoke of "aeviternal" time where eternity overlaps with chronological everyday time and configures the "real" world.  In other words, God has set up His World as His "experiment" to produce and reveal the Image in His Mind of the real world.  

When we were children, we were told that God is "watching" us.  Indeed He is!  

Spooky Science

 About 40 years ago, when I was still working at the college, a colleague came into my office one day with a lengthy newspaper article.  "Read this," she said, and walked out.  As I began reading, my hair stood on end.  The article was about a famous experiment in quantam physics, wherein scientists were trying to determine whether light could be defined as particles or as waves, a question that had plagued them for some time.  In fact, one scientist had received the Nobel Prize in physics at one time for determining that light could be defined as particles.  Years later, that same scientist's son won the Nobel Prize for proving that light could be defined as waves.  

According the latest research, the determination was now that light, when unobserved, acted as particles; when the experiment was observed by a scientist, however, light behaved as waves.  And they could prove this theory by experimentation!  My colleague and I agreed to call this "Spooky Science."  That article has stayed with me all these years, for some reason.  Even though I am not scientifically inclined, I never forgot my reaction to that article.

Now, all these years later, I am reading an entire book about the issue of Quantum Physics and its effect on Newtonian Physics.  For years and years, scientists believed and taught that atoms were the stable building block of the universe--- that everything we see is made up of atoms.  Turns out that is not exactly true.  Atoms themselves are made up of sub-atomic particles called "quanta."  And, unlike atoms, quanta are not stable at all  -- the chance of finding any quanta today where you found it yesterday is absolute zero.  And quanta "control" or affect one another from great distances --- even 20 miles or more apart.

As I read this book, spooky science gets more and more weird.  The question is how anything in the world remains stable when it is constructed at bottom by quanta.  When you build a house in one locale, you do not expect to find it on the other side of the city the next morning!  Yet, that is exactly how quanta behave --- until they are observed by a scientist!  Then they manage to rearrange themselves into nameable and measurable elements like waves.

The implications of this science are almost unbelieveable to the modern mind.  Einstein's reaction is famous:  "All I know is that God does not play dice with the universe!"  Max Planck (the father of Quantam Physics and friend of Einstein's) spoke to an international group of scientists in 1944:

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such.  All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom and holds this most minute solar system of an atom together. Since there is neither an intelligent nor an eternally abstract force in the whole universe...which moves of itself... we must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent spirit.  This spirit is the matrix of all matter.  Not the visible, transient matter is real, true, manifest...but the invisible, immortal spirit is the real thing!  However, since spirit cannot exist as such, but every spirit belongs to a being, we are compelled to presume the existence of spirit-beings. Now since even spirit-beings cannot exist out of themselves, but have to be created, I do not shy away from calling this mysterious creator the same as all cultures of the earth have called him in previous millenia: God!

What this means is that the opening page of Genesis is on-going and eternally true:  God "hovers" over the "chaos"/particles and moment-by-moment conforms them to the image in His mind.  Tomorrow, I'll try to explain why this is the present conclusion of modern-day science!

Connecting With Zoe

 "I have come that they might have zoe, and have it more abundantly."  (Jesus)

"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life (zoe)."  (Jesus)

In English, unfortunately, we do not have a way to distinguish between the 2 Greek words for "Life:"  bios and zoe.    Bios, obviously, refers to our biological life or energy.  Zoe refers to vitality, energy, enthusiasm, connectivity, alertness, overflowing......I will give you a spring welling up to eternal life (Jesus to the woman at the well.)

Most of us probably connect the words "eternal life" to the idea of biological life without end  --- with the result that many people consider that heaven and eternity might become boring after a few thousand years! But what if we could read the Gospel with the distinctions that are made in the Greek original between bios and zoe?  I once made a study of these words in the Gospel of John and regret now that I did not make the distinctions in my bible.

At the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus said, "The one who believes in me will never die!"  Quite a statement!

In his book Enchanted by Eternity, William Slattery proposes a future for each human person in a resurrected body in a new heavens and a new earth, connected to God Himself, to one another, and to the earth/nature itself.  According to him, that future can begin now.

When we refer to "God," we tend to think of Him as another object in the universe.  There's plants, there's animals, there's people, and then there's God.  But actually, God is not an object, however exalted; He IS LIFE itself --- and our life is actually participation in HIM!  In Him we live and move and have our very being (Acts 17:28).  In fact, the word enthusiasm literally means "God within"  (en theos).  Whenever we are living our lives with enthusiasm, or participating fully in life/energy, we are connecting to the Source of Life Itself.  

Slattery does not use the term "God" in his book, but rather Creator, Lover, Rescuer ----because that is how we experience God.  "God" is the answer to "what;" Creator, Lover, Rescuer is the answer to "Who."   In Him, all things hold together (Col.1:17) ---- Jesus Christ is the sustaining force of the entire universe --- all creatures, all peoples, all visible and invisible life.

C. S. Lewis once wrote: If you want to get warm, you must stand by the fire; if you want to be wet, you must get into the water. If you want joy, peace, power, eternal life (zoe), you must get close to, or even into the thing that has them.....they are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you; if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?