Religion and Science

Theologians are much concerned with the relationship between God, time, and human freedom. The development in the twentieth century of first quantum theory and then chaos theory has emphasized the inadequacy of a clockwork model of the universe. In the usual interpretation of quantum mechanics, chance is a genuine and inalienable element in the unfolding of physical systems. Chaos theory, moreover, stresses our inability ever to predict precisely how complex systems will unfold. Theological models have emerged of the universe unfolding according to the interplay of chance with God-given laws, in a way that cannot be predicted by humans and may even not be known precisely by God. There have been various efforts, none of them very successful, to identify these "unclosable gaps" in determinacy and knowledge as loci at which God might act providentially but undetectably on physical systems, so keeping alive both the model of a God who intervenes in the world to effect purposes of divine love and healing and also the model of a God who is faithful to the laws with which God endowed creation.

One of the scientific developments of the twentieth century that seemed most consonant with the Christian tradition was big bang cosmology, with its description of the universe as arising out of an explosion that was extremely violent and yet seems precisely "tuned"—if any one of a number of key parameters had been even minutely different, no life could ever have arisen. There has been a great temptation to insert God into this causal gap at the beginning of time, to suggest that God must have been both fine-tuner and initiator of the big bang. Again this sort of theology has been shown to be inadequate, as cosmological physics has moved into a realm of speculation about the big bang as a random, uncaused frothing-up (perhaps one of many) of a preexisting quantum vacuum. The type of explanation Christian theology offers of the universe is an ontological one—God as the answer to the question Why–is–there–something–and–not nothing?—rather than an account of God as the first cause in a series of temporal causes.

Astrophysics currently predicts the end of this universe as being its eventual expansion out to a low-temperature, low-density continuum from which all life and structure have disappeared. Here there is evident dissonance from those theological formulations that picture God as gathering up the whole creation into a pattern of new order and goodness. Again, the effect of exploring the dialogue with science is to cause theologians to be more precise about the type of explanation they are giving. Just as the resurrection of Jesus is postulated by Christians to involve a new state of matter, having some continuity with our present bodily state but also being different, incompletely recognizable, so the final state of matter is presumed to involve divine transformation, not a mere unfolding of the present creation.