Chapter 7: God and aScientific Universe: Towards aChristian Reading of Einstein
chapter 7: GOD AND A SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSE: TOWARDS A CHRISTIAN READING OF EINSTEIN
BY ANY STANDARDS, Einstein was a brilliant thinker. Yet he wasn’t right about everything. His views on quantum mechanics —a field he helped to pioneer —are now generally regarded as wrong. Perhaps more problematically, his social views do not sit easily with today’s moral values. In 1922, Einstein set out on a six-month journey to Japan, China, Singapore, Palestine, and Spain. His private reflections on the people he observed on this journey are disturbing in that they imply —and sometimes assert —that other races are biologically inferior to white European observers.[211] Some would say that Einstein here reflects views that were commonplace within his social circles; others would suggest that a “genius” ought to transcend such limits. Still others might suggest that since so many cultural icons turn out to have darker sides, we ought to be cautious about putting anyone on a pedestal in the first place.
A genius, as I see it, isn’t someone who is right about everything but someone who is able to open up a new way of seeing things that gives a better quality of vision and a deeper reach than those who went before. And that’s what Einstein did. I have tried to present his ideas accurately, fairly, and accessibly. In this final chapter, I want to open up what I consider to be an important conversation, which didn’t really get off the ground during Einstein’s lifetime.[212] As someone who now writes both as a specialist in the historical and intellectual aspects of science and religion and as a Christian theologian, I want to ask this question: What can those who think seriously about their Christian faith learn from Einstein?
Let me make it clear that I have no intention of forcing Einstein into a Christian (or any other) mold. Einstein clearly wasn’t a Christian. He clearly wasn’t an atheist, either. He was just Einstein. Yet it is perfectly fair and intellectually legitimate to respect his integrity while at the same time asking what Christians might learn from Einstein and how his ideas might feed into wider Christian reflection on a range of important themes. What critical questions does he raise that need to be addressed? What ideas and approaches did he develop that might be useful to Christians in developing their own approaches? Einstein always made it clear that he was not a theologian in any sense of the term. Yet that does not stop theologians from reflecting on his ideas from their own perspectives.
There is a long Christian history of engagement with leading thinkers (particularly philosophers) who are not Christian —not with any intention of falsely claiming that they are really Christians but rather with the intention of developing a dialogue with them. Examples of this include the early Christian engagement with Plato, the medieval exploration of Aristotle’s intellectual legacy, and the twentieth-century engagement with philosophers such as Martin Heidegger or Ludwig Wittgenstein. What I propose is to engage Einstein in the same way —respectfully but critically.
Yet there is another point that needs to be made here. Einstein was very reluctant to talk about the “religious” implications of his theories —including his theory of relativity. He took the view that he had clarified the best way of conceiving the ordering of our universe but did not see this as impacting the world of religion. In part, of course, this reflects his own distinct and rather idiosyncratic idea of religion. Yet Einstein “lived close to the frontier between physics and metaphysics.”[213] He was intensely alert to the fact that the scientific enterprise rested on certain implicit metaphysical assumptions that could not be proved to be true, such as the reality of a physical world that was open to scientific investigation. It is therefore fair and reasonable to ask, What set of metaphysical assumptions make the most sense of the scientific enterprise? How does a Christian way of seeing the world allow us to both explain the successes of science and identify its limits?
Einstein is an excellent dialogue partner, partly because he is so interesting, but mainly because he is an outstanding scientist with an obvious interest in what the philosopher of science Karl Popper called “ultimate questions.” In a lecture at Cambridge University in November 1977, Popper emphasized his own scientific and rational credentials yet distanced himself from those who made “exaggerated claims for science”:[214] “I am against intellectual arrogance, and especially against the misconceived claim that we have the truth in our pockets, or that we can approach certainty.” As Popper indicated in the lecture, such arrogance or overconfidence is often known as “scientism.”
While celebrating the successes of science, Popper warned of the need to recognize and respect its limits: “It is important to realize that science does not make assertions about ultimate questions —about the riddles of existence, or about man’s task in this world.” Popper insisted that these “ultimate questions” about meaning, purpose, and value could not be properly answered by science. That, however, did not mean they were unanswerable. “The fact that science cannot make any pronouncement about ethical principles has been misinterpreted as indicating that there are no such principles.” Such principles, Popper declared, did indeed exist but had to be discovered by means other than the natural sciences. “Some great scientists, and many lesser ones, have misunderstood the situation.” I very much doubt if Popper would include Einstein among those who have failed to grasp the point at issue.
Big Pictures —Not a “God of the Gaps”
Christians aim to defend the reasonableness of their faith in many ways, especially in the light of challenges and new questions raised by the development of the natural sciences. One instinct that some Christian apologists follow is to point to the scientifically inexplicable and interpret this as evidence of the need to invoke God to give a coherent account of the universe. The phrase “God of the gaps” is now widely used to describe this approach.
Although others identified and criticized this approach in the first half of the twentieth century, the Oxford theoretical chemist Charles A. Coulson mounted what is now generally seen as the definitive rebuttal of such an approach in his 1956 work Science and Christian Belief.[215] Coulson saw this inadequate way of thinking as contracting the area within which God might be known in the first place and impoverishing the intellectual vision of God in the second. This “is a God who leaves Nature still unexplained,” while sneaking in “‘through the loopholes’ of the laws of nature.” God was rather to be seen not in gaps that were unexplained but in the grander observation that human beings were able to make so much sense of reality. The capacity of science to explain itself requires explanation —and that means finding a “bigger picture” that makes sense of this observation.
In his lecture on Einstein, given at the Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule in Zürich in February 1979, Friedrich Dürrenmatt emphasized Einstein’s deep concern for discerning the complexity and coherence of our universe.[216] As we have seen, Einstein is a big-picture thinker, convinced that the role of the natural scientist is to uncover the deeper patterns and structures that account for our observations of our world. A grand theory would give an intellectual or imaginative framework that disclosed die Einheitlichkeit of our universe, even if this fundamental unity was displayed in multiple manners. Einstein thus had little interest in explanatory anomalies or gaps in our understanding, except insofar as these might open the way to the emergence of a richer theory (in much the same way as the anomalous behavior of the planet Mercury, which was inexplicable within a Newtonian framework, could be accommodated by the notion of the gravitational warping of space-time).
Christianity as a “Big Picture” of Life
This naturally leads us to ask what forms of Christianity might encourage such “big picture” thinking. It is clear that there are many ways of understanding Christianity that do not see this as an integral aspect of faith. Many forms of the movement known as Pietism, for example, hold that the Christian’s responsibility is to focus on a personal devotional life rather than to become preoccupied with intellectual issues. Others would suggest that Christianity is primarily a religion of salvation and that a concern with offering an explanation of our world does not feature prominently (if it features at all) in the New Testament.
Others, however, will suggest that while Christianity does indeed encourage a “discipleship of the heart,” there is also an obligation to develop a “discipleship of the mind.” One such writer is the noted Oxford literary critic and writer C. S. Lewis, whose personal journey from atheism to Christianity resulted from his judgment that Christianity offered a better envisioning of reality, coupled with an intellectual capaciousness capable of accommodating the successes of the natural sciences and appreciating their limits.
For Lewis, the Christian faith offers us a means of seeing things properly —as they really are, despite their outward appearances. This theme emerges in his first significant religious work, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), but is developed and expanded throughout his writings. Lewis’s commendation of the Christian faith rests partly on his realization that it offers a capacious and deeply satisfying vision of reality —a way of looking at things that simultaneously allows us to both discern its complexity and affirm its interconnectedness.[217]
Other Christian writers have developed similar approaches. For example, the Oxford philosopher of religion Basil Mitchell suggested that Christianity ought to be seen as a worldview or metaphysical system that attempts to make sense of human experience as a whole: “Traditional Christian theism may be regarded as a worldview or metaphysical system which is in competition with other such systems and must be judged by its capacity to make sense of all the available evidence.”[218]
A third Christian writer may also be noted here. Dorothy L. Sayers is best remembered for her crime fiction, now seen as one of the highlights of the “Golden Age” of British detective novels during the 1930s. Sayers saw human beings as searching for “patterns” in life and explored this theme in her Peter Wimsey detective novels as well as her religious writings. How can we find the best explanation of what we observe?[219] Sayers realized that the detective novel appeals to our implicit belief in the intrinsic rationality of the world around us and our ability to discover its deeper patterns. Her more explicitly theological works aim to develop this point. Christianity gave her a tool by which she might “make sense of the universe,” disclosing hidden patterns and allowing her to see meaning within its otherwise opaque mysteries.
Einstein himself opens up some very important possibilities here. For example, consider his remarkable statement that “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”[220] Why should this be so? What bigger picture of our world might be offered that makes sense of our ability to make sense of things? The American psychologist William James remarked that religious belief could be seen as a quest for an “unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found and explained.”[221] One such riddle is that posed by Einstein himself, yet there are others that also claim our attention.
John Polkinghorne, Cambridge quantum physicist turned theologian, is acutely alert to these issues, writing of what he terms “meta-questions,” which “arise from our scientific experience and understanding but which point us beyond what science by itself can presume to speak about.”[222] So what “meta-questions” does Polkinghorne have in mind? The first he notes is one we have already considered: Why is the physical universe so rationally transparent to us that we can discern its pattern and structures? Why is it that some of the most beautiful patterns proposed by pure mathematicians are actually found to occur in the structure of the physical world? How are we to account for the ability of mathematics to model so accurately the fundamental structures of the universe?[223]
Polkinghorne’s response is that Christianity provides an intellectual framework that makes sense of our ability to understand our universe: “Theology can render this discovery intelligible, through its understanding that the Mind of the Creator is the source of the wonderful order of the world.”[224] What religion can offer to science is to place scientific insights within a broader and deeper context of intelligibility, providing a framework that is able to hold together both objective and subjective accounts of reality. The parallels with Einstein’s own way of thinking here are remarkable.
Yet Polkinghorne builds on this way of thinking that is grounded in the deep structures of the universe, arguing that these structures are best explained by the central themes of the Christian faith. Science “needs to be considered in the wider and deeper context of intelligibility that a belief in God affords.”[225] An intellectual bridge can be constructed between Einstein’s idea of a “superior mind” disclosed in and through the order of the universe and the more specifically Christian vision of God. Einstein is here the starting point of a journey that leads from an impersonal transcendent order to the Christian idea of a personal God, disclosed both in the created order and especially in and through Christ.
The Two Books: Christianity and the Natural Sciences
Complex relationships are often best envisaged using images or metaphors, which can act as powerful cognitive tools to help us make sense of our world. Such metaphors are helpful in the imaginative representations of disciplinary boundaries, the mapping of complex structures, and the framing of potential relationships. As we noted earlier in this work, perhaps the most influential metaphor used in Western culture to frame the relation of Christianity and the natural sciences is that of “conflict” or “warfare.”[226] Though long discredited by scholarship, and seriously out of place in other cultural contexts (such as India), it retains an appeal that ensures its constant and uncritical repetition in the Western popular media.
Yet there are alternative metaphors, originating within contexts where the potential for productive and meaningful conversations between Christian theology and the natural sciences was acknowledged and actualized. The most important of these is the metaphor of the “two books,” which emerged during the Renaissance. One of the clearest statements of this approach is found in the writings of Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682), particularly his 1643 work Religio Medici (“The Religion of a Physician”):
There are two Books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of His servant Nature, that universal and publick Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the Eyes of all: those that never saw Him in the one, have discovered Him in the other.[227]
The metaphor of the “two books” was widely used to affirm and preserve the distinctiveness of the natural sciences and Christian theology on the one hand yet to affirm their capacity for interaction on the other. Both, seen from a Christian perspective, originated from God, who is their author or creator. God could thus be known, in different ways and to different extents, through each of these books individually and even more clearly through setting them side by side. Sixteenth-century Reformed confessions of faith —such as the Belgic Confession —affirmed that “the universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book,” designed to encourage us to “ponder the invisible things of God,” while simultaneously emphasizing that the Bible both clarified and extended this knowledge of God, setting it on a more reliable foundation.
The Metaphor of the Two Books
The metaphor of God’s two books is a specifically Christian idea, which reflects specifically Christian ways of thinking. It rests on a fundamental belief that the God who created the world is also the God who is disclosed in and through the Christian Bible. Without this underlying and informing assumption, the “two books” might be seen as two unrelated matters. The link between them is established and safeguarded by the Christian theological assumption of a creator God who is revealed in the Bible. For this reason, it remains both a valid and a valuable conceptual tool for the Christian community as it seeks to frame and engage the natural sciences.
The idea of the “two books” is found in a less developed form in the writings of John Calvin, who recognizes a “natural knowledge of God” accessible to all human beings that is independent of God’s revelation in Scripture. Such knowledge can arise from a “sense of divinity” within us or from reflection on the world of nature. For our purposes, we shall focus on this second source of a natural knowledge of God. Calvin then argues that what may be ascertained about God from nature is confirmed, explained, expanded, and enriched in Scripture. Einstein is an important witness to such a “natural knowledge of God.” As we have seen, he constantly speaks of a “superior mind” behind the universe and links the intelligibility of the world with this mind or force.
Calvin would invite us to see Einstein’s insights as an excellent starting point for our reflections rather than their final destination. For Calvin, human beings possess “weak vision,” which prevents us from fully seeing the God to whom nature points.[228] Nature often seems to be fragmentary. As Einstein himself emphasized, we need a theoria —a way of seeing our world correctly —that allows us to discern its fundamental unity. The unity of our universe is not something we observe; it is something we believe to be true. For Calvin, that unity can be discerned and affirmed through a close reading of Scripture, which functions as a set of “spectacles coordinating the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds.”
Calvin thus argues that the Christian faith is able to expand on this natural intuition or perception —evident in Einstein —that there is a mind behind the universe. At one level, it affirms this intuition; at another, it insists that there is more that can be said, including, for example, the human need for redemption and how this hope is able to transform human life. It opens the door to a grander vision of ourselves and our world.
So how does this metaphor of the “two books” help us bring Einstein into the conversation about science and faith? Perhaps the most important point to emphasize is that, from a Christian standpoint, each of these two “books” takes a different form while sharing a common author. To use a common Renaissance idea, the motto of the “book of nature” is Deus dixit et facta sunt (“God spoke and things were created”), whereas that of the “book of Scripture” is Deus dixit et scripta sunt (“God spoke and things were written down”).[229] The idea of complementarity or enrichment is thus integral to the metaphor. It is an image that invites us —perhaps even requires us —to ask how these two books can be read together in such a way that a deeper and richer understanding of their author may be achieved. Taken together, they offer us stereoscopic depth, rather than a shallow and superficial reading of our world.
Einstein points us to the book of nature, highlighting its mystery, its elegance and order, and his deep sense of religiosity in its presence. A Christian could then set Einstein’s reading of the “book of Nature” alongside her own reading of the “book of Scripture” and find that its features were brought into sharper focus as a result. This is not to suggest that Einstein is a Christian or that he offers a Christian reading of the natural world. The point is that he offers a reading of the natural world that resonates or chimes in with the Christian faith.
For example, think of Einstein’s many references to a “mind” behind the universe —as, for example, we see it in his expression of a “firm belief . . . in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience.”[230] For Einstein, this notion of a “superior mind” was the essence of his “conception of God.” The quantum physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne helps us see how this correlates with a Christian perspective:
The physical universe seems shot through with signs of mind. That is indeed so, says the theist, for it is God’s Mind that lies behind its rational beauty. I do not offer this as a knockdown argument for theism —there are no such arguments, either for or against —but as a satisfying insight which finds a consistent place in a theistic view of the world.[231]
Einstein would certainly affirm Polkinghorne’s starting point, whatever he might think of his final conclusion.
So what difference does a Christian reading of Einstein allow? Earlier we cited the American psychologist William James in reflecting on Einstein. At this point, we may turn to James again and reflect on one of his more remarkable insights: “At a single stroke, [theism] changes the dead blank it of the world into a living thou, with whom the whole man may have dealings.”[232] What does James mean by this? The basic point he is making is that recognizing God is creator —as we find this idea, for example, in Christianity —means we cannot think of the world as an impersonal object. It has personal associations. Let me explain.
Let’s reflect on two scenarios. First, imagine an artist painting a beautiful landscape. A painting is not the same as a photograph. The painter puts something of herself into the work of art. In viewing that painting, we do more than see the landscape; we learn something about the artist. In the same way, the creation discloses the Creator. “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). God’s wisdom and character is thus made known through what God has created. Second, imagine an item that was given to you by someone who is very special to you —perhaps your parents. It may be an impersonal object, but it has deeply personal associations for you. It reminds you of that special person.
That’s the point that James is making. Christianity allows us to see the creation as something special, shot through with signs of a person. Einstein himself didn’t believe in a personal God. Looking at the universe through a Christian lens, however, allows us to see it as a witness to the greater beauty and wisdom of a loving God. As John Polkinghorne remarks, science discloses a world which in its deep intelligibility could fittingly be described as shot through with signs of mind.[233] Christianity provides a framework that allows us to move from a universe displaying “signs of mind” to a universe that discloses the presence of a loving God.
Conclusion: Einstein and the Bigger Picture
This book has celebrated Einstein’s achievements as a scientist and human being while also opening up some deeper questions that hover over the face of the scientific enterprise. As we have seen, the natural sciences deal with the objective aspects of reality. That’s essential for the scientific method. Yet we know that there is more to figuring out what life is all about than discovering how things happen. We want to know whether there is meaning, purpose, and value in what is happening. And the scientific method simply does not deal with these “ultimate questions.”
Einstein, as we saw earlier, was puzzled and troubled by the failure of scientific objectivity to deal with the subjective aspects of life. At times he found it difficult to understand why the subjective side of life mattered so much to people. When his close friend Michele Besso died in March 1955, Einstein wrote a letter of condolence to his family. Michele, he remarked, had “departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.” As a scientist, Einstein was clear that this event was insignificant. “That means nothing. For believing physicists like us know that the distinction between past, present and future has only the meaning of a persistent illusion.”[234] Yet others might reasonably observe that most people think that moving from life to death is significant. It’s about more than a mere change of position on a set of coordinates!
Yet at other times, he realized these deep, existential questions mattered to people (including scientists!), even if they were “simply beyond the reach of science.” That’s why we seek for a richer vision of reality that engages both the cognitive and existential dimensions of life. Einstein may not have solved these questions for himself. He is, however, a great dialogue partner in trying to appreciate their importance, and a productive starting point for some serious apologetic conversations.
In closing, it is interesting to reflect on the experiences of Paul Kalanithi (1977–2015), a promising neurosurgeon who died of metastatic lung cancer at the age of thirty-seven before he could ever practice as a fully qualified surgeon. His bestseller When Breath Becomes Air was written during his final illness and published posthumously. It is a remarkable testimony to the importance of the ideas we have been considering in this book. Kalanithi loved science and valued its objectivity. However, he found it failed to engage —and could not engage —the deep and urgent questions that really mattered to him and which became increasingly important as his illness progressed. Scientific knowledge, he concluded, was “inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life.”[235]
Human beings are driven to find something deeper than what can be found through a superficial examination of the empirical world. The great Old Testament wisdom books —well known to Einstein —speak of wisdom as something that lies beneath the surface of our world. It is something that has to be searched out, not something that stares us in the face. That’s what the human quest for meaning is all about.
No reasonable person would ask us to give up the quest for scientific objectivity. Nor would they ask us to give up the quest for meaning and value in our lives. We need to be able to make some response to Kalanithi’s ultimate question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living? Einstein realized that both the objective and subjective realms are important and that they need to be affirmed and held together. Perhaps he himself never found a synthesis that entirely satisfied him, but he certainly provided a road map for those who wish to explore the matter further. A theory of everything that matters engages both our objective and subjective concerns, linking them together in a coherent whole. As the Cambridge physicist Alexander Wood pointed out, “our first demand of religion” is that it “should illumine life and make it a whole.”[236]
I do not suggest that Christianity alone provides a way of seeing things that allows us to hold together these objective and subjective worlds; that would be arrogant and inaccurate. Yet I cannot overlook the fact that it does hold them together and allows them to be seen as part of a greater whole, rather than as disconnected realms of thought. We need a theory of everything that matters to us if we are to live wisely and meaningfully in this complex world. And maybe Einstein can help us develop and consolidate our own “big pictures” of reality. He’s helped me think these things through —and I have not the slightest doubt he can help others as well.
[211] Einstein, The Travel Diaries.
[212] The theologian Thomas F. Torrance is a rare example of someone who took Einstein’s ideas seriously and explored their significance for Christian thought, particularly in relation to the doctrine of the Incarnation. See especially Torrance, Theological Science.
[213] Polkinghorne, “Space, Time, and Causality,” 975.
[214] This and the following quotes are from Popper, “Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind,” 341–42.
[215] On Coulson and his approach, see McGrath, Enriching Our Vision of Reality, 27–41.
[216] Dürrenmatt, “Albert Einstein,” 59.
[217] On these themes, see McGrath, The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis. There are interesting parallels between Einstein and Lewis on the role of intuition and imagination in discovering the structures of reality that merit closer examination.
[218] Mitchell, The Justification of Religious Belief, 99.
[219] Kenney, The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers.
[220] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 292.
[221] James, The Will to Believe, 51.
[222] Polkinghorne, “The New Natural Theology.” For Polkinghorne’s approach to these questions, see McGrath, Enriching Our Vision of Reality, 59–73.
[223] Polkinghorne, Science and Creation, 20–21.
[224] Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science, xx.
[225] Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science, 95.
[226] For the best recent studies, see Brooke, Science and Religion; Harrison, Territories of Science and Religion.
[227] Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, section 16.
[228] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.vi.1. More generally, see Adams, “Calvin’s View of Natural Knowledge of God.”
[229] Palmerino, “The Mathematical Characters of Galileo’s Book of Nature,” 27–28.
[230] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 262.
[231] Polkinghorne, “Cross-Traffic between Science and Theology,” 146.
[232] James, The Will to Believe, 127.
[233] See, for example, Polkinghorne, Science and Creation, 17–33.
[234] Letter dated March 21, 1955; Albert Einstein —Michele Besso Correspondence, 1903–55, 537–38.
[235] Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air, 170.
[236] Wood, In Pursuit of Truth, 102.