Acts of God in a Physical World, Part 1
It’s Personal
If God exists, does she act in the world? If so, discerning God’s activity seems to require cultivation of a certain openness. As a scientist trained in the art of healthy skepticism, I naturally ask whether the veiled nature of God’s manifestations suggests psychological and social origins of belief rather any external reality. I also wonder about the physics of it all. Would the laws of physics occasionally be suspended when God reaches across from some other realm? I find myself returning to these questions from time to time, and I usually find resolution through recounting personal experiences. Here, I will share two stories of the sort which encourage me to believe in an active God. In a follow-up essay, I will consider the physics questions.
The first story is from a unique time in my life, during my Ph.D. work at Harvard. My advisor had said I could graduate whenever I liked, but I was striving to complete a measurement to which years of my life had already been devoted. The downside of my persistence was that I had become a 30-year-old graduate student, who for two years had needed to get on an airplane to see my wife. Sometimes there were late nights in the lab, and one particular night I left at 2:30 AM. The trains had stopped running long before, so I caught a taxi from Harvard Square to my apartment. The next day I was scheduled to fly to Chicago for a much-anticipated weekend with my wife. I had mastered the timing of the fastest mid-afternoon transit to the airport. The train-train-train-bus trip typically took 60 minutes, security took 10 minutes, and the plane doors closed 10 minutes before takeoff. Never leaving a large safety margin, I usually left lab two hours before takeoff. Perhaps with judgment impaired this day by lack of sleep, I agreed to do a personal favor for a co-worker, and found myself leaving lab only 55 minutes before my plane was scheduled to depart. I immediately asked God what to think, and I had a profound sense — of the type I have experienced a handful of other times but not very often — that God would take care of things.
I hastily descended the ramp to the Harvard Square Red Line, and a train arrived just as I got to the platform. This was before the days of the Silver Line, so I exited at Downtown Crossing to transfer, made my way through the labyrinthine passageways, and an Orange Line train pulled up just as I arrived at the platform. I had not previously experienced such lucky timing for both Red and Orange Line trains. I exited at State to transfer again, and when I reached the platform a Blue Line train was just approaching. The train timing to this point was so exceedingly unusual that I became convinced something special was going on. Nonetheless, the schedule was still very tight, and when I exited to catch the final shuttle bus to the airport terminal, none was in sight. Taxis sometimes also made this loop, so I waited for whichever came first. Within one or two minutes a taxi drove up, and I hailed him. When I got in, I recognized the cross hanging from the rearview mirror. This was the same taxi and driver who had given me a ride home the previous night — from a very different part of town. The driver confirmed this coincidence, to which I replied, “God must be taking care of me.” With a booming voice, he shot back, “Yes, he is, because he is our SHEPHERD!” It turned out that he was also a church pastor. I arrived at the security line still tight on time, but I decided not to spoil God’s provision by asking anyone to skip ahead. However, the two good-natured businessmen in front of me must have noticed my tension, and they took it upon themselves to tell people to let me through (kind behavior I have never seen before or since), and people gladly did so. I boarded my flight a few minutes before the doors closed at the scheduled time, and had a great weekend in Chicago.
I relate a second story, also from my time in graduate school, primarily because it speaks to some of the psychology of these experiences. I often worked in the lab on Saturdays, but this particular weekend I worked Sunday instead. As I was leaving for the day, I crossed paths with my advisor, who also was not normally in on Sundays. Probably noting the coincidence himself, he invited me to a talk he was giving the next morning on a different part of campus, about his experience of being a practicing Christian and also a scientist. He joked that the 9 AM talk was so early in the morning for a graduate student that I would need to be convinced that it was the Lord’s will in order to show up. But even before he made that comment, I had been developing a sense of weight about this encounter. I was confident that God was up to something.
The talk ended without any surprises, and I wondered if my sense had been wrong. I gave God one last chance, by stopping by to speak with my advisor’s family before leaving. After exchanging pleasantries, I concluded that I most likely had been mistaken. But as I turned toward the exit, someone poked his head in the door and then left; he was a Chinese undergraduate who was doing research in our group for the summer. I caught up with him before he rode his bike away. He said that on his way in to lab he had noticed a sign advertising a talk on science and religion, but he had not known that our advisor was the speaker. He had stopped and glanced in the room just out of curiosity, because in China science and religion are broadly viewed as being incompatible. I talked with him a bit more and gave him a book, and I don’t know what else came of it.
Even before considering their significance, there are good reasons to think twice before taking these stories at face value. Social and possibly evolutionary pressures can bias people toward religious belief. And human psychology provides at least a few mechanisms by which we might be tricked, including in the formation and selective retention of memories. So, all such stories come from only partially credible narrators. Be that as it may, we each have a privileged vantage point when evaluating our own experience — we know things that nobody else can. For me, I know that my willingness to steer experiences to match expectations has its limits, and that I am willing to declare my expectations to be mistaken. I know that I have only occasionally sensed that God was doing something definite in the moment, and that these experiences have usually had noteworthy outcomes. And I also know that one experience stands out as having had a somewhat disappointing outcome — which I have not conveniently forgotten. All that to say, I don’t see why these stories should be terribly convincing to anyone else, but I personally need to take them seriously.
But might these just be stories of coincidence? As I said, I have not often had a sense of God’s immediate activity. So these stories describe unlikely events stacked on top of rare experiences, in other words the right ingredients for highly improbable scenarios were there not something else going on behind the scenes. However, it is not practical to evaluate quantitative probabilities because that would involve enumerating all possible outcomes. For instance, if my commute to the airport had been unremarkable but my flight had been delayed, I would also have understood God to be delivering on his promise, albeit in a less striking way. A purely probabilistic analysis also would not account for indications of divine personality and even sense of humor that I perceived. I am left with only gut-level and very personal conclusions. Beyond implying some sort of goodness permeating the universe, to me experiences like these suggest an intelligent and resourceful god-like actor.
If God indeed acts in the world, why is it not part of her modus operandi to provide more convincing and frequent proofs of her existence? I could speculate, but I do not know. Skeptics conclude that signs of God are hard to find for a simple reason, that God is not actually there. I think that is a reasonable position. It just does not fit with my full experience of life.
Rare head-turning experiences do play a role in my faith, in that they help persuade me that God is more than a figment of imagination. But in terms transforming my life, my daily non-flashy interactions with God play a much larger role. Indeed, if I had not cultivated a two-way communication with God for many years, I would not have been in a position to listen and respond — a central aspect of these stories. It seems the heart of interaction with God, not unlike in healthy human relationships, is more about intimacy than grand gestures. As discussed in the follow-up essay, even hearing God’s still small voice implies that physics is playing out differently than it otherwise would. And it is these subtle interactions, with an easy on-ramp for those willing to try, which are probably the most important.
