Yes I am 37 - Modern Science Helps

Yes I Am by Norman Grubb

Chapter 37

MODERN SCIENCE HELPS

Though not directly affecting us, yet it is both encouraging and helpful to take a glance for a moment at the radical changes in the attitude of modern science to the material universe. I do it as an ignorant amateur, but one greatly interested.

We see how great has been the break-up of the old materialistic concepts of a generation ago, with a move over from the material to the immaterial. These concepts don’t affect our living faith, which has wholly other foundations, but the startling changes are interesting and greatly intriguing, and we would say helpful to faith.

Science has really taken a great leap to a certainty that, as the Bible said long ago, the visible is made out of the invisible. Mass is energy, and matter is really trapped light. The physicists have reached so far these days that they have passed beyond the atom to the sub-atoms, all those mysterious so-called particles; and their remarkable findings are that these can no longer be tied down to being what we would call "material particles," however minute. They can only be described as "events" where there is a conjunction of space and time; and they are moving so rapidly that they can only be spoken of as "patterns of probabilities." They can only be known by their interconnectedness with the whole, and these interconnections are inseparable, so that everything is contingent on the existence of the rest. Thus, for instance, a spin dryer, which by its motion throws out the water from the clothes, only does so "by its relation to the fixed stars"; and if the stars disappeared, the force of the rotating body would disappear also. Thus everything in the universe is interconnected. There is no such thing as empty space. All is filled with dynamic energy, just as much as visible matter is. Indeed, as Einstein said, all are "fields of vibrating energy," and what we regard as matter is "constituted by the regions of space where the field is extremely intense." All is really an unbroken wholeness, and absurd as it sounds to us in our ignorance, "a single particle contains all other particles." With that has come the new recognition, which was the basis of Einstein’s relativity theory, that all depends on us, the observers. All is relative to where we stand and how we see a moving thing. There are even suggestions (still more absurd to such as us) that all things are products of the observers, even to the effect that we could influence or change past history as well as future. Fantastic! But is not all this pointing to matter as a product of mind, and don’t we believers know Him who is the one Mind of the universe? Does it not also take us nearer to Paul’s statement that the whole groaning creation waits to find its deliverance by the manifestation of the sons of God? "For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God,... because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God" (Rom. 8:19-21). And it was God Himself who "made the creation subject to vanity," with that glorious purpose in view.

Our present interest is that this is showing us that what we used to call "material substance" is altogether broken up today. Researches are going on into what they call a "fourth dimension," where space and time are interrelated in a way beyond our natural understanding. It is in that realm that the true origin of our material universe is found, where all is really energy. For mass is but energy divided by the inconceivable speed of the speed of light multiplied by itself (M = e/c2, or E = mc2). And we are now seeing how all this is being connected with the involvement of the observer with what is observed. It is an approach to the dimension to which we have already come, to the dimension of spirit, where Paul said long ago of Christ as Creator: "By Him all things consist [cohere, are held together]" (Col. 1:17), and that God’s revealed purpose is "to gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth" (Eph. 1:10). The physicist, however brilliant, cannot, with only his natural mind, find ultimate truth through science; truth is a living Person, the living Christ, and He can only be found person to person at the foot of His cross, whether by a Nobel prize-winner or an uninformed layman. But scientists are more allies than opponents in accepting the spiritual as the real when they say that all is really light, "trapped light." For "God is Light."

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