The Strange Reality of Science and Divinity

Reality is stranger than we can imagine. Our human minds, bound by the limits of perception and understanding, struggle to grasp the true nature of the universe we inhabit—and even more so, the nature of crucified -divinity that inhabits us.

The Bewildering Universe of Modern Science

Imagine explaining modern physics to Sir Isaac Newton, unarguably the greatest scientist of his era. What if you told him that gravity isn’t actually a force but a property of curved four-dimensional spacetime? That massive bodies like the sun affect the passage of time? Newton, brilliant as he was, would likely have found such concepts utterly incomprehensible, perhaps even madness.

“The moon simply rolls around the curved shape of space,” you might tell him. “The force of gravity is an illusion—there is no force. Objects are just free-falling through the geometry of spacetime, and what we observe is merely the curvature of this space.”

Even today, these concepts remain deeply counterintuitive to most people. Our minds don’t easily comprehend four-dimensional geometry or the bizarre implications of relativity. Yet the mathematics works, and experiments confirm these strange predictions.

The existence of black holes messes with our everyday understanding of time in fascinating ways. Imagine you’re watching a friend from a safe distance as they approach a black hole. As they get closer to the edge (what scientists call the “event horizon”), something weird happens. From your perspective, your friend appears to slow down more and more, eventually seeming to freeze in place at the edge, never quite falling in. Yet from your friend’s perspective, they cross the boundary normally and continue falling.

So if you asked, “What happens next to my friend?” – a perfectly reasonable question – you’d face a strange situation. There is an answer to what happens next, but you can never observe it from the outside. It’s as if the story continues, but you can’t turn the page to see how it ends. This is why Einstein famously suggested that “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

The Paradox of Divine Experience

The paradox deepens when we consider human consciousness. Something happens in the human brain between 18 and 24 months where development produces self-awareness, though the exact mechanism remains mysterious. This self-awareness brings the wonder of consciousness but also the burden of death awareness. We become conscious of our finite nature.

Even stranger than modern physics is the theological concept that God exists in a crucified state—and considers this a glorious throne. To our human understanding, crucifixion represents suffering, humiliation, and defeat. How could this possibly be understood as glory?

Our interaction with reality is fundamentally limited, and tricky. Consider the Necker cube—an unchanging image that our perception flips between two different interpretations. Similarly, the words of Scripture, remaining as constant as the image below, can flip back and forth between comfort, consolation, command, or judgment. The Bible has always contained “images” of law and gospel. What we perceive in any given verse changes as we grow and develop. The cross of Christ, the complete image of God’s narrative has, from eternity, been His Law/Gospel message. “Every verse of the Bible is like a waterfall. It’s the same waterfall, but every moment it spews out something fresh.” 

Watch any YouTube video on the McGurk effect. The McGurk effect demonstrates that accurate perception requires multiple senses working together, with vision typically dominating our integrated conscious experience. What you hear with your ears is determined by what you see with your eyes. What might this mean for divine perception? God isn’t limited to a certain number of bodily senses. Rather, He embodies the entire concept of experience with the universe—an experience characterized as “cruciform.” How we “see” the crucified life of Christ, for ourselves and in the cosmos around us, effects how we hear His word. On Good Friday everyone saw the horrible end to the life of God’s Son. For “three days and three nights” those men and women were in no position to hear anything. Seeing the resurrected yet still crucified Jesus enacted the McGurk effect. Their ears would be open by the cruciform Spirit of God on the day of Pentecost. In the light of the cross we see light, and when God opens our lips then, and only then, we speak His praise. Every heavenly “sense”, however many there are, is activated by seeing the glory of the crucified life of God. 

Emergent Phenomena and Divine Perspective

Wetness provides a perfect analogy for understanding divine perspective. A single water molecule isn’t wet—wetness is an emergent property that appears only when many molecules come together. Similarly, the true Christology of the universe can only be experienced when perceiving the universe as a whole. Only God, in the person of Jesus Christ, can feel the crucified “wetness” of all things simultaneously. To Him, this comprehensive view makes perfect sense, just as we understand an entire ocean as “wet.” Individual molecules—that is, we humans—remain uncertain, experiencing only our limited perspective.

We encounter a privileged access to reality when we recognize our participation in God’s crucifixion. When our brains receive nothing but information about the crucified Christ, it transforms our interaction with the environment—we begin to see reality through the lens of divine sacrifice and glory.

In this strange reality, the cross represents both brutal suffering and ultimate triumph. The apparent weakness of God becomes His strength, and the seeming defeat of crucifixion becomes the throne from which He rules. This paradox parallels the counterintuitive nature of quantum mechanics or relativity—a reality that defies our conventional understanding but nonetheless persists.

Perhaps the strangest reality of all is that through the cruciform experience, suffering becomes glory, weakness becomes strength, and death gives way to life. God knows the fullness of this reality, while we can only trust in the glimpses we receive—our partial perception of the whole.

As we contemplate both the strangeness of modern science and the paradox of divine glory through crucifixion, we’re reminded of the limits of human understanding and the boundless mystery that lies beyond.