Does Everything Happen for a Reason? — Part 2 of 4

The Physicist Takes the Stand

This evening we call a physicist to the stand and see what he has to say.

Last Saturday I introduced this series, and I asked a question that I deliberately left lying on the table. The question was this: how can one event be every single event? How can one day on Mount Calvary, outside Jerusalem, contain the whole of history when it plainly looks like it is only a part of it?

Tonight the physicist answers that question in one word. His answer is symmetry.

Here we go.

The Change That Produces No Change

Symmetry is a phenomenon in which changing something doesn’t seem to change anything. That is the actual working definition, and it sounds strange because it is a little strange. It is a claim that two contradictory conditions are true at the same time.

Rotate a circle 30 degrees. Rotate it 90. Every single point on that circle has moved, and yet nothing has happened. The circle is symmetric under rotation. Something changed and nothing changed. Both are true, and that is the shape we are going to keep meeting tonight.

Your life is going to rotate through good times and bad times. It will not ask your permission about which kind of day you would prefer; it will simply happen to you. And the infinite diversity contained in your rotating life, and in the rotating lives of billions of other people, is already contained in the infinite diversity of the cross of Christ. That cross holds every rotation of your life, every rotation of the earth on its axis, every circuit of the earth around the sun — and it is always the same. The points on the circle are what spin. The circle does not. That all-encompassing, eternal circle is the crucifixion of Jesus.

A crucified God and a crucified humanity in one person is the sum and substance of every human event. There is no experience available to you that is not already inside what Jesus is experiencing on Good Friday. If you are lonely, betrayed, unjustly treated. If you are called upon to turn the other cheek, or to not take into account a wrong suffered, or to endure excruciating pain while crying out to a God who does not appear to be there — none of this is anything the circle does not know firsthand. And when by the grace of God you are permitted to show some small mercy to a stranger, or to extend just the right word or just enough money to the right person at the right hour, you are being Christ-like in the strict sense. You are participating in his unchanging rotation.

You Are Not the Individual You Think You Are

We are not nearly as individual as we like to think. Our personal life is anything but our own. The existence of every human being is woven into the life of Jesus and simultaneously entangled with every other existence in the universe. We are all entangled in the crucified Christ. Every property of the cosmos, animate and inanimate, is an expression of Jesus on the cross. He is the constancy and reliability of the cosmological constants and the famous equations, and he is also the incomprehensible probabilistic behavior of the smallest quantum particles.

Mount Calvary is the stage on which all events take place. Every event. The ones recorded in the Bible and the ones that happen in your backyard, around your kitchen table, or on the news as you scroll your phone. Just as fish swim about in the ocean, human beings move about within the crucifixion.

Fish do not think about water. That is not because water is unimportant to them. It is because water is not one of the things in a fish’s world. Water is the condition inside of which a fish has a world at all. Ask a fish what the most important thing in its life is and it will not say water. It will tell you what it had for breakfast.

Nobody is going to say the cross is the most important thing that happened to them today. The cross rides along quietly underneath everything we actually notice, and the noticeable things are the ones we care about. Understand what this means. The cross does not show up on your list of the day’s events because it is not an item on the list. It is the paper the list is written on.

Let’s keep going.

Albert Einstein, and Why One Absolute Is the Source of All Relativity

The fixed, constant, stable, invariant, eternal cross of Jesus is the sum of all things that belong to God. What does that have to do with Einstein?

Someone will object: how does something so invariant produce all this diversity? If the cross never changes, where does the riotous variety of your strange life come from?

Because we have a physicist testifying this evening, he would tell you the question is backwards. Invariance is not the enemy of variety. Invariance is the source of variety. Here is where Einstein comes in.

Consider what Einstein actually did in 1905. He took one quantity — the speed of light in a vacuum — and nailed it down as the universe’s one absolute. It is a number. It has a fixed value, and it is the same number for you, for me, and for every observer in the universe. Moving or standing still, fast or slow, toward the beam or away from it, it makes no difference. Ask those photons how fast they are traveling and they always give you the same answer.

And the consequence of always giving the same answer — the consequence of holding that one thing rigid — is that everything else has to become flexible to accommodate it. Everything else in the universe goes out of its way to make sure light is always traveling at exactly that speed. That includes two rather important items: the rate at which time flows and the size of space itself. These two supposedly foundational pillars of all thinking and all science suddenly agree to go soft. Clocks speed up and slow down. Rulers contract. You can throw in simultaneity while you’re at it, because simultaneity shows up, looks at the situation, and admits there is no such thing — not absolutely, not for everyone at once. Space, time, and simultaneity all went soft on us so that one thing could stand up and reign supreme.

The constancy of light produces the relativity of nearly everything else. Or said the other way around, which is the way that matters tonight: the relative nature of everything else emerges from a constant.

So I am not really talking about Einstein and photons. I am telling you that all the diversity in your life and everything you see around you is the result of one thing that never changes, and that one thing is this: God has always been the man Jesus Christ, and that man Jesus Christ has always had holes in his wrists.

This is worth pausing over, because most people assume the opposite. They assume an unchanging God must mean a frozen world, a scripted world, a world where nothing is really at stake. The physicist says no. Rigidity at the center is precisely what buys motion everywhere else. The invariance built into the speed of light is exactly what makes space and time bendable — not in spite of that constant, but because of it. Jesus is the invariant light of the world, rendering everything else unbelievably relative.

Relative to what? To the cross, of course. Everything in existence is a close relative of that man on Calvary.

The rock-solid, invariant certainty of Christ is the truth standing behind the twisting, bending, sliding variability of everything you experience. Your life is not unstable because nothing is fixed. Your life is as out of control as it is because something is firmly planted, and that something isn’t you. It is the man who is the sum total of all of us, and he has connected every one of us in the perfect circle of his cruciform shape.

Back to Science Class: Entropy, Time, and Genesis 1

Now for the second gift the physicist has for us, and this one lands directly on the first page of the Bible.

A scientist would describe equilibrium as a state in which time effectively does not exist. Past, present, and future all look exactly the same. Time cannot be defined, because there is no before and no after — there is nothing to distinguish one moment from another. This is the condition of very high entropy: no uniqueness, no direction, no gradients. Everything is smeared out and nothing points anywhere. Order is nowhere to be found.

So how do you start time? How do you get history up and running? The judge announces order in the court.

To kick-start the machinery of time and progress and direction requires a sudden introduction of low entropy. The lower the better. Low entropy is a technical way of talking about order, togetherness, direction, purpose. That is how a scientist would describe a beginning, and every serious account of the arrow of time depends on the universe having started in exactly that condition.

Now go read Genesis chapter one.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

Formless. Void. Undifferentiated dark water — the ancient world’s picture of precisely the state the physicist just described. And then, without warning and without process, that chaos is suddenly and violently ordered. Light. Separation. Naming. Direction. The arrow of time has been fired.

And here is the sentence I want you carrying around for the rest of your Saturday evening.

The Cross Is Highly Ordered Chaos

Look at Golgotha and you are looking at maximum disorder. The mockery of God. Blood everywhere, and it is God’s blood. Disciples scattered. Darkness in the middle of the day. The temple veil torn in two from top to bottom.

And you are simultaneously looking at maximum order. Every prophet and every tribe, every type and every thread running through Moses and the Psalms and the Prophets, all pulled tight into one place, in one hour, inside one man, who then announces that the whole project is finished.

Chaos and order at the same coordinates, both at maximum. Change that produces no change. You have met this shape before. It was a circle in rotation, and we called it invariance.

Now follow that one step further, because the physicist has handed us more than he intended. If history’s arrow is fired by a sudden concentration of order into one place, and if the cross is the tightest concentration of order there has ever been, then Golgotha is not merely an event that occurs partway along the timeline. Golgotha is where the arrow was launched. Genesis 1 and Good Friday are not two events that resemble each other. They are one event, seen from two ends.

The Bridge

The arrow of time emerges from a low-entropy beginning, where all the universe’s information is concentrated together, and it runs toward a high-entropy future where that information is completely scattered. That is the shape of physical history from a scientific standpoint. From concentrated to dispersed. From knowing and being known, to lost and being lost.

The cross is the bridge that spans that entire gap. It is anchored in the concentration of God, and it reaches all the way out to the apparent scattering of even the Triune family on Good Friday. All the information of God is contained in him — and it remains a mystery even to the God who is hanging there. Which brings us back to that very famous verse.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

That is not a rhetorical question from the lips of Jesus. And he is not merely quoting a psalm to signal its fulfillment, as though what he is doing were somehow subservient to a text. The Word of God is located primarily in him, not in Psalm 22. All the information of God is found in him — and he is asking why.

This bridge reaches the far bank, spans the whole expanse, and arrives having seemingly lost knowledge of the very gap it just closed. The bridge is found right smack dab in the middle of the not-knowing.

That is how we answer tonight’s question. And the better way to ask it, and the better way to answer it, is to put it like this: everything that happens is happening because of the cross of Christ.

One More Thing, from the Quantum Side

Without observation, the modern physicist would say, nothing is definite. That is the scandal at the bottom of quantum mechanics, and I want to be honest with you about its status: the measurement problem is not solved. A century of very bright people have argued about what observation actually is and what it actually does, and they are still arguing. But on the reading that has troubled physics longest, measurement is not a neutral glance at a world that has already made up its mind. The observation participates in what the thing turns out to be.

Now back to Genesis chapter one.

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

The original is warmer and deeper than our English word moved. It is a word that makes you think of a bird — hovering, brooding, fluttering. Moses uses that same verb in his song in Deuteronomy 32 for an eagle stirring up her nest and hovering over her young, and centuries later Jesus reaches for the same picture with a hen and her chicks over the city of Jerusalem. The Spirit of God was hovering over indefinite waters before there was anything definite to see.

And notice what the physicist has quietly done to us here. All evening he has been describing a condition — an invariance, a constant, a background. Now he hands us an observer. The hovering Spirit is not a spectator watching from a safe distance. He is the eternal Watcher whose attention is bound up in there being anything determinate at all. The background turns out to have a face. So let me tell you plainly what I have and have not said tonight.

I have not told you that your suffering has a purpose. I have not handed you a reason for the phone call you got this week, good or bad. What I have told you is where it is happening. It is happening inside of him. Your worst hour is not an exception to the circle; it is one more point on a circumference that has already turned through everything you are afraid of. He is not watching from the far bank. He is the bridge, and he built it out of the not-knowing.

Next Saturday the mathematician takes the stand. He will show us two faces and a vase, hand us permission to break Euclid’s axioms, and answer the question that has surfaced yet again: how can a part be the same as the whole — and what on earth does that have to do with everything happening for a reason?

God bless you. Good night.