Stranger Than We Can Imagine

I have a friend — a serious scientist, the kind who still reads the journals and listens to STEM podcasts. The last time we chatted he had something on his mind he wanted to talk to his “pastor friend” about. By his own confession he sits on the opposite side of the aisle from me when it comes to the cross of Christ. He was troubled because the people on his side of the aisle have started to sound like the people on mine.

“Frank,” he said (I’m paraphrasing, but only a little), “it isn’t the preachers who sound like mystics anymore. It’s the physicists. The mathematicians. The people talking about cosmology are using language more sanctified than anything I’ve heard from a pulpit. And they like it. They relish it.”

Now, I should tell you up front how I listen to a thing like that, because it colors everything that follows. I don’t put much stock in what any of us thinks about our own thinking, and I put even less stock in what we think about our thoughts concerning God. That’s an arrow pointing in the wrong direction — the one that starts down here in my mind and tries to climb its way up to heaven. I’ve watched a lot of good people exhaust themselves with that direction, you know, a hyper-concern with “whose religious argument is better than whose.” The direction that matters to me runs the other way: the wisdom that begins in the mind of God and comes down to us, all the way down, as the person of Jesus. That’s whose mind I am thankful for, and by the grace of God, I receive as pure gift.

So when my friend tells me the scientists are starting to sound like clerics, my first thought isn’t who’s winning. Who is making a more convincing case? No. My first thought is well, of course they are. Here’s why.

He gave me examples, and they were good ones. He told me his colleagues describe the beginning of all things as “creation” shrouded by its very nature — a beginning that refuses to answer to the tidy yes-or-no boxes our minds need in order to file the world away. And it bothered him, this language. Shrouded. Creation. He said those words came straight out of Genesis and Exodus and snuck into the conference. He’s more comfortable with words that sound like they originated in a laboratory, words describing equations, and instead his circle keeps drifting into territory he left behind in college.

I told him I didn’t think the words had snuck in. I think they came home.

Because here’s something forty years of “Maxwell’s equations” taught me: the deepest layer of the physical world has never once been embarrassed to be mysterious. When physicists reach the bottom of a subject — as far as they can go — and find it shrouded, refusing their categories, they are not abandoning science. They are arriving, a little breathless, at the very doorstep where the book of Exodus has been standing the whole time, where a man named Moses was told to take off his shoes because the ground was holy before he got there.

Then he mentioned the light. He’s a scientist; he understands the cosmic microwave background as well as anyone alive. But he said when his friends start talking about light holding all things together, something turns over in his stomach — because it sounds exactly like what the pastor of his childhood used to say about Jesus. I had to smile at that one. 

I spent the better part of my career with light — light in its secular setting. And I can tell you, plainly, without a single Bible verse attached, that light does in fact hold things together. The force that binds an atom to an atom, that keeps your hand from passing clean through the kitchen table, that stitches matter into matter — it is electromagnetic. It is, at the bottom of it, light doing its quiet work. A physicist can write that on a whiteboard and never once blush.

And then there’s the other sentence — the one his childhood pastor would read off a letter to a little church in Colossae: in him all things hold together. I don’t think those two sentences are competitors. I think one of them is the shadow the other one casts.

He brought up entanglement, too — the way the information about a particle of light gets bound up with the knowable information about whatever it touches, so that you can no longer tell the full story of the one without telling the story of the other. They become, in a way the mathematics insists on even while our intuition fights it, a single thing told two ways. And he doesn’t much like where his colleagues run with it.

But I’m sitting there thinking: I know that grammar. I’ve preached that sermon.

The whole scandal of Christmas is that the life of God got bound up with the life of a baby — knowable, permanently, in a way you cannot now untangle. You cannot tell the story of God without telling the story of Jesus of Nazareth, and you cannot tell the story of that human being without telling the story of God. Two natures, the old theologians said, in one Person, never to be pulled apart. If a physicist goes looking for a word for that, entanglement is not the worst one I’ve ever heard.

But here is where my friend’s frustration reached its peak — and here is where I want to end.

His colleagues, he says, have quit describing the beginning as matter wandering into a universe to be noticed, later, by a mind. They’ve started saying it the other way around — as if, from out of Mind, came matter. As if the cosmos isn’t entirely finished until some intelligence comprehends it. One keynote speaker brought the whole weeks’ conference to a conclusion with: the endgame of everything — galaxies and supernovas, the coldest dark and the hottest fire, the first element on the periodic table down to the last — the whole point of the enterprise is comprehension. To be known. To be discovered, at last, inside a mind.

And my friend looked at me like I ought to be alarmed or angry or something.

But I wasn’t, and I’ll tell you why, and you can take it for whatever it’s worth coming from a pastor. There is a sentence I have read a thousand times that opens not with matter but with Mind: In the beginning was the Word. The Logos. Reason. Meaning. Mind. And the staggering claim isn’t merely that the Word was there first. It’s that the Word became flesh. The Mind the cosmos had been straining toward all along did not stay safely up in the rafters of eternity waiting to be reached. It came down. It took on matter. It got comprehended — and I mean that in the cruelest sense the word will carry, the way a crowd comprehends a man with nails.

So here is where my friend and I ended it, more or less, even though we’d each walked in through opposite doors.

There’s an old line from a scientist — Haldane — that the universe is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose. I love that line. I’d only add one thing to it. I don’t think the universe is strange because it’s complicated and chaotic. I think it’s strange because it carries fingerprints — and the fingerprints belong to a stranger God than any of us would ever have dared to invent.

Because the strangest thing in all of reality is not entanglement. It is not the shrouded first instant. It is not a cosmos that waits around to be known. The strangest thing sits further down than any of those, in the eternal inner counsel of God Himself: that God is God, and God is a man, and that God-man is in a wounded, crucified condition — and that this, this bleeding paradox, is the thing holding everything else together.

That’s why the scientists are starting to sound like priests, friend. Not because they’ve gone soft. Not because they’ve lost their rigor. It’s because they keep digging, honestly and bravely, toward the bottom of the world — and the bottom of the world has a cross in it. You can reach that floor with an equation or you can reach it with a hymn. It’s the same floor. And the One lying at the bottom of it — bound up with every particle He ever made, holding it all together with hands that have holes in them — has been waiting down there the whole time for both of us to finally arrive. I told my friend I’d see him at the next conference. I might even bring my Bible. 

No. That would just be wrong.