The Science of God - how a lover of physics found the truth in Christianity

Chapter 5

So that was the origin, pardon the expression, of my questions pertaining to the relationship between God and science. To me, it all comes back to energy. We know that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred from one form to another.

But where did energy, or matter, come from in the first place? Or am I asking the wrong questions? Was there ever a "first place"? We're getting into questions of time here. Always sticky. Very Dr. Who. But we have to ponder them. Why? Because there is no possibility of a strict linear interpretation of time. If there is, there must be a beginning. And how can there be a beginning of infinity?

Sorry. I know the readers of this book are as young as 10. So I'll try to lay off the excessive quantum physics. We don't need quantum physics, though. We only need our minds, which are more powerful than any known entity in the universe. Well...for the atheist, anyway.

Okay, circling back around to this matter of energy. We have two choices: it was created, which Thermodynamics denies, or it just is. Because time isn't linear, then we cannot say energy began or even that energy always existed. Because "always" is a statement of linear time.

Head hurt? This is the type of stuff that wakes me up at 3am.

We don't need to dive too deeply into this topic, though, because I think we can all agree that time is probably not an issue. Energy just is. No beginning. No ending. Infinite.

Science fiction writers have come up with numerous tales of alien beings formed of nothing physical. Just pure energy. Energy that has existed an infinite number of years, so that eventually, it changed forms often enough that it finally puddled into something with conscious thought. No body. No physical appearance. Just intelligence. Intelligence capable of communicating. Of reasoning. Maybe even...creating.

Of course, science fiction still has that big "fiction" tag stapled on the end. But somewhere, some writer and his 6 lb. brain (or 6.2 lbs. if he is a she, so I've been told), formulated this concept of energy as an intelligent being. Remember, energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred from one form to another.

So how many forms of energy are there? Heat. Light. Sound. Conscious thought?

Let me break it down for my 10 year-old reader, although she has probably already worked this out on a spreadsheet:

When you hold a baseball, that's static energy. The ball isn't moving, so the energy is contained.

When you throw the baseball, that's kinetic energy. It's moving. Now you can see the energy at work.

When it hits a glove, some of the energy is transferred into both sound and heat (pound a ball into cold leather and test this for yourself).

I may have to go back and check some of my terms, but you get the point. Energy is transferred. Never lost. Never created.

So take our baseball and make it infinite. The size of every galaxy and beyond. Now how many forms of energy can we transfer our baseball into? And how big is the energy created?

Do we know all the forms of energy? Or, like time, do we only know what we can see and measure with our human eyes, 6 lb. brain, and our experience? If time can exist in another form than linear, then energy can certainly exist in other forms than what we can see and measure.

If all this energy, over countless millenniums and endless space, can eventually change into conscious, intelligent thought, just as our scifi writer supposed, then why can't that vast "bubble" of energy grow so large and so intelligent that it can create other forms of energy, like matter. Like planets and stars. Like us.

If you can believe in an infinite universe and the non-linear aspects of time, then our all-knowing, all-seeing, all-creating form of energy shouldn't be a huge leap. If you try to fit Him into the shape of a grandfatherly figure with flowing robes and long white beard, then you're just falling into some child's easy-to-understand concept of a fatherly figure.

But if you are a man or woman of science...

Well then, your infinite, self-aware, and powerful entity of energy just matched perfectly with the God that is actually written about in the Bible.