Today, I started reading The Hidden Face of God by Gerald L. Schroeder. It’s a very meditational kind of science/theology book, one that needs to be not so much read as savored. I want to quote a few bits from Chapter 1: The Puzzle of Existence: An Overview.
“The universe is the physical expression of the metaphysical.”
“Some … being above or outside of the physical, must have preceded our universe or have our universe imbedded in it. This much is a certainty.”
“At the moment of the big bang everything, the entire universe, you included, was part of a homogeneous speck. … The speck was the entire universe. There was no other space. No outside to the inside of the creation. Creation was everywhere at once.”
“Solid matter … is actually empty space. If we could scale the center of an atom, the nucleus, up to four inches, the surrounding electron cloud would extend to four miles away and essentially all the breach between would be marvelously empty.”
“The world is more a thought than a thing, more intangible than real.”
“[This] is not fantasy and it is not some flaky idea. It’s mainstream science coming from such universities as Princeton and M.I.T.”
These thoughts reminded me of something I read once by Julian of Norwich, which is entirely compatible with Scripture.
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This is the opposite is something called the Clockmaker theory, which posits that God just set the universe in motion and left it to run. Maybe He’ll come back when it’s all wound down to zero Kelvin.
Maybe, if you like the idea that it’s all about us, He’s a Crock Pot kind of Creator, who will come back when we’re mature.
Or maybe He’s like Star Trek’s immature superbeing, Q, who built a kind of cosmic sand castle one afternoon, then went home for supper, unconcerned with what havoc wind and waves would wreak on our existence.
I suppose these forms of deism have a certain appeal to those who cannot deny the growing evidence of a Supernatural Intelligence behind the Big Bang and DNA, but who are offended by the paradox of an all-loving, all-powerful Creator who clearly allows bad things to happen to good people.
But the God of Scripture is no Clockmaker, Crock Pot or Q kind of Being. He is intimately, continuously involved in our existence. And, according to Gerald L. Schroeder, scientists are proving it. I can’t wait for my next coffee break, so I can dive in and read (savor) some more! 🙂
Sources:
Julian of Norwich: English mystic of the fourteenth century
polination.blog 
I like this guy’s perspective about the reality of the metaphysical. I always wonder about strict materialists who insist on there being an objective physical reality that all “right-thinking people” know about. Some of them, like Carl Sagan, had plenty of experience with altered mental states and alternative realities, and not just because he smoked a lot of pot. They all know that Einstein, himself a believer, claimed that one’s beliefs, theories and mental state determines what is observed, and not the other way ’round. In a universe that clearly has intent, you must know the mind of the one who intended it into being in order to know the reality of what is.
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