Spiritual Cues from the Humility of Physics
The shaping of our thoughts on God has personal and social impact. Physics has some suggestions.
As a practicing physicist, I appreciate a certain humility underlying scientific understanding. Over the last few centuries, we have built a highly successful theory physics, able to predict a vast range of phenomena. But we have no doubt that major revisions will be required in the future — and we eagerly look forward to these disruptions. To say it another way, healthy and successful science is characterized by movement, rather than an insistence that it has arrived at the final destination. The road to better understanding is not one of brilliant thinking alone. There is a constant dance between new ideas and new observations, generated not by a few people but by a scientific community. As a practicing Christian, I notice that these humble aspects of the scientific journey can teach us some things about the spiritual journey.
Growing up in an Evangelical church, I experienced as a teen a deeply meaningful connection with God. It was good! But it was also challenged through my next decades. Maintaining a thriving spiritual life has required both the evolution of my understanding of God and holding God close during the process. For people like me, with a religious background and also a familiarity with the scientific method, that juxtaposition might be uncomfortable. If your religion originates from divine revelation, then what room can there be for evolution of theology? And if some major change of your picture of God becomes necessary, wouldn’t the truth be better found by objectively maintaining some distance during the transition? The humility of physics sheds light on both these questions.
An example of progression in physics is the development of quantum theories, beginning in the early 20th century. The physics of several decades previous enjoyed great success in understanding matter as particles and light as waves. But through a series of surprising experiments, it was found that the associations sometimes reversed, with light behaving as particles and matter behaving as waves. The next theory, Quantum Mechanics, successfully explained the early observations. But it contained a seemingly ad-hoc wave/particle duality; which nature you observed depended on which experiment you did. Its successor Quantum Field Theory was later confirmed by more precise experiments, one of the modern examples being my Ph.D. measurement of the electron’s magnetism. Quantum Field Theory resolves the wave-or-particle confusion by revealing a category mistake in the question; matter and light are better described as bursty disturbances in wavelike fields, rather than by particles or waves.
As with the scientific journey, the spiritual journey involves personal and collective shifts in our understanding. A first example might be familiar. Many children grow up with a picture of God as a king who rules from somewhere else, not unlike Zeus presiding from Mount Olympus. This model can provide society a basis for shared morality, and the Deist influence in the founding of the United States attests to its effectiveness. However, it is in tension with the nearness of God many of us experience, for example in Catholic Eucharist or charismatic Evangelic worship, which suggests a model more like the one Paul pitched to the Athenians: “God is not far from any one of us. For in God we live and move and have our being.” One social implication of these alternate pictures is where to prioritize our efforts toward creating a good and whole world — is it to be in this one, or someplace distant and yet to come?
A second example also illustrates the interplay between developing spiritual experience and thinking. I noticed several years ago a personal pattern of responding to small stresses by saying nasty things to people. Jesus’ words applied: “The mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” The problem wasn’t the stress, but rather what was truly inside. Seeking transformation, I discovered the practice of contemplative prayer, where one prays simply by being present before God without spoken or thought words. Contemplative prayer practiced over months helped as I had hoped; practiced over years it had further reaching effects. Able to more deeply trust myself to the Holy Spirit’s current, I was no longer afraid to examine a perceived theological lifeline, namely how to understand my felt experience of being saved through Jesus. Christian thinking has evolved over the centuries, emphasizing in turn one of the several pictures suggested in the Bible, with the substitutianary atonement model currently dominant. God is just, so sin must be addressed. But God is loving and surprises us by paying the cost on our behalf, through the death of Jesus. This model has some wonderful elements, but it always struck me as more a picture of appeasement than of justice. In the freedom created by my newfound spiritual practice, I discovered the alternate orthodoxy of the Franciscans. Rather than atoning for sin, Jesus saves by prophetically demonstrating God’s joining with us in suffering and the power of resurrection on the other side. Similar to the category problem imbedded in the wave-or-particle question, perhaps the atonement question — who needs to pay for sin — also has an intrinsic problem. Might it be based on a flawed model of retributive justice, with a better model being one of restorative justice? The social implications are substantial. For instance, the predominant picture of God’s justice, retributive or restorative, has dramatic domestic and foreign implications for a country.
The pastor of my childhood Southern Baptist church suggested to me this picture of spiritual development: “Over the course of my life, I have come to believe fewer and fewer things more and more.” I see there a profound and humble framework for engaging our rational minds in a process whose end goal is fundamentally relational. Healthy spiritual progress involves a whole-brained interaction with God, both experiencing God’s presence and coming to new understanding of what that means. Like in the physics dance between new experiments and new ideas, this process involves moving from one imperfect model to the next, and being OK with that because we can trust the reality undergirding the journey.
Brian Odom is a Professor of Physics and member of the Center for Fundamental Physics Northwestern University, and a member of Saint Chrysostom’s Episcopal Church in Chicago.
