physics in scripture

 Thousands of years ago, centuries before the brilliant minds of Galileo, Newton, Schrodinger, and Einstein helped to reveal hidden aspects of the universe, the men God used to write the Scriptures tucked physics into the pages. Have you ever noticed it?

We'll start at the smallest level, with subatomic particles. There are people who study these and have named all sorts of particles out there, but we'll just focus on the main 3: protons, neutrons, and electrons. For all practical purposes, these 3 particles in different combinations make up everything in our universe, from the sun to the flowers to you. So these tiny, invisible particles? They are talked about in Hebrews 11:3 "By faith we understand that the universe was created at God's command, so that what was seen was made of what was unseen."

So these tiny particles can be thought of as tiny little one-sided magnets. Neutrons are neutral, so we'll ignore them right now, but protons and electrons are like the two sides of a magnet--opposites attract and likes push apart. Atoms are the basis for everything, and at the core of an atom is the nucleus. It's here that we find protons.

To make a hydrogen atom, we need one proton and one electron. No big deal--they are opposites, so it makes sense for them to stick together.t as we move through the periodic table, things get a bit more complicated. Next is helium, with two protons put together in the nucleus. Think about it for a second, what happens when you try to push together two like sides of magnets? They push back. You can hold them together pretty easily, though, so it's not a huge deal.

But what about adding a third magnet? A fourth? Or, as is the case with the carbon atoms that are the basis for pretty much everything you see around you, what about trying to hold together 6? Or how about that gold band on your finger? Each tiny atom has 79 protons held together in the nucleus. A wedding band that only weighs 3 grams has over 9x10^21 atoms of gold. If it's been a while since you dealt with numbers written in scientific notation, that's 9 with 21 zeros after it.

Gold is kind of a middle of the road element, but the periodic table gets as high as 118 protons. It still doesn't make sense to physicists, because in theory it would take an infinite amount of energy to make all those protons stick together. They've been super creative and come up with a theoretical particle they call a "gluon"...but God told us through Paul's letter to the Colossians, "It was by Him that everything was created: the heavens, the earth, all things within and upon them, all things seen and unseen, thrones and dominions, spiritual powers and authorities. Every detail was crafted through His design, by His own hands, and for His purposes. He has always been! It is His hand that holds everything together." I know Paul was a smart guy, a Jewish law scholar, but I don't think he knew he was writing physics into his letter.

Those verses are both from the New Testament, so "only" 2,000 years ago, but it's tucked into the Old Testament, too. We have to venture out of my wheelhouse for this one and into the world of astronomy. When astronomers study the stars, they talk about their frequencies, which in the simple terms I understand is basically how many times per second that a star spins. These frequencies are translated into radio waves, and the astronomers can "listen" to the stars. Or in the words of David, a shepherd boy: "Inaudible words are their manner of speech, and silence, their means to convey. Yet from here to the ends of the earth, their voices have gone out; the whole world can hear what they say." (Psalm 19:3-4)

I went to school to study physics. I had so many people tell me that once I learned about Newtonian mechanics, magnetism, quantum physics--all the crazy stuff they talk about on the Big Bang Theory--that I would put that old "religion" thing behind me. I was surrounded by people who thought they were to smart to believe in God. You know what? That's in there too: "Claiming to be wise, they have become fools" (Romans 1:22) But I think it was my quantum professor in grad school who said it best.

Our classroom had about 3 whiteboards across the front. My professor would start on the first board, fill it, move to the second, fill it, move to the third, fill it, then go back to the first board, erase it, and start over. One class period, we had taken probably a solid 4 pages of notes, all a single problem. We got to the end and the whole ugly mess simplified to a single, beautiful equation:

 My professor was a theoretical physicist from China, a brilliant man whose office was filled with stacks of pages of work I could never understand. His brain worked in an unimaginable way, so much different than my own. Yet when he got to the end of that problem--through all the variables used to account for conditions I can't even start to name anymore--I got to hear something I could definitely understand. He took a step away from the board to admire that equation for a second (because, believe it or not, some of us nerds see beauty in those things!), then he glanced at all of us, a roomful of physics grad students, and said the one thing I'll always remember from his class: "And that is why so many physicists come to believe in God."

We're told in 2 Timothy 2:15, "Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that need not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth." One of the things that most bothers me is the idea that we have to shut our brains off to believe in God. The God I serve didn't create brainless automatons. He created thinking, reasoning beings capable of amazing things. We shouldn't be afraid to study creation, because the more we understand it, the better picture we have of its Creator.

It was Galileo who wrote, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”