Dear Theophilus, 

Theophilus, it has been some time since I last wrote to you. I have been busy with a variety of things and now I am once again free to write. The question of science, you say, still troubles you and you have asked me to delve a little deeper into this matter. I agree with you that this is a vexing question for many but I want you to keep things in perspective. Science cannot prove the existence of God, but if God created the universe then He must have left some traces which will speak of how He operates.

The popular view of science is outdated and refers to the pre-twentieth century science. This science dealt with objects which were accessible to our sense for direct perception. What this century has revealed is that this view is only a faulty approximation to what creation is really like. Two fundamental discoveries shattered the comfortable picture generated over many years and these two discoveries go under the name of relativity and quantum mechanics. Relativity deals with very large bodies and very high speeds, approaching that of light. Quantum mechanics deals with very, very small particles which form the basis of the material universe. We will start out looking at relativity and then, we'll consider quantum mechanics, which is probably the stranger of the two.

Consider the following example. You are on a train and the train is moving at a velocity of 150 kilometers per hour. Therefore, everything, including you that is on the train, is moving at 150 kilometers per hour. Suppose that you get up and you move in the same direction that the train is riding and you walk at a speed of 3 kilometers per hour. Then someone watching you outside the train would see you moving at a speed of 153 kilometers per hour. This speed is derived by adding your speed to the speed of the moving train. You can easily determine that these speeds are additive if you go on an escalator. If you walk as the escalator is moving, then you move at an even faster pace. The same thing happens here. Thus far, thus good.

But, let us suppose that you want to try another experiment. You have a flashlight with you, on board the moving train and you shine the flashlight in the direction of the movement of the train. You would expect the light from the flashlight to move at a speed of light plus the speed of the train. Experiments analogous to this have been carried out many times and what has been found is that the beam of light does not move any faster whether it is on a train or not. In other words, the speed of light is a constant in the universe. Light does not behave as other objects in the universe and what this shows is that some of our ways of talking about the universe in the past, were faulty and this becomes noticeable only when we deal with extremely high velocities. Actually this opens up the door to further considerations because when we talk about speed or velocity, we're not really talking about something simple but about something that is made up of two other things. Speed is the number obtained when we divide the distance travelled by the time it takes for this to occur. What our observation about the behavior of light shows is that both, our conception of space (or distance) and time, need correcting and this is what is done in the famous Theory of Relativity proposed by Einstein.

Let's consider time. For most of our common sense experience of time is that time is an absolute. One second is simply that - an unchanging duration of one second. But, with Einstein's discover, we finds that time is relative and therefore, something that is not absolute. Experiments, for example, have been carried out on clocks which are stationary and those which are moving, and those which are moving (at very high speeds) record a slowing down of time. This concept has found use in cancer therapy. Certain radioactive isotopes have very short lives and when their existence is terminated, they release an intense burst of energy which can be used to destroy malignant cells. This time span is too short to permit us to make any practical use. But, by accelerating these isotopes, we can prolong their life span and thereby, we can use them medically. Now, all of the examples that we look at involve motion and since time is affected, then distance or space is also affected because when we speak about speed, we are talking simultaneously about distance and time.

The upshot of all this is that our normal, accepted way of talking about our world, our three dimensional picture is a poor approximation which only works when we have certain conditions which apply in our everyday lives. This is the reason why we are not aware of the complexity of the actual universe. If we want to have a more complete picture of space and time and distances, we have to expand our vision to encompass an additional dimension. Let me illustrate with an example. If we have a two dimensional surface such as the surface of a sheet of paper, then we can draw a recognizable circle, which has width and height, but no depth, and therefore is two-dimensional. If we were to pick up the sheet of paper and view the circle from the edge, we would no longer have a circle, but what we would see is a line. By losing one dimension, the dimension of width, we have gotten a totally different picture of the object that we are observing. This is analogous to our common sense experience of the world that we live in. We are used to seeing things in three dimensions, width, length, and depth. But, what relativity tells us is that we need to include another dimension if we want an accurate picture of something and that fourth dimension is what we experience as time. Space and time are inextricably linked in ways that we had not even dreamt of and this, as we shall see, has tremendous repercussions on how we see our world.

Another major discovery that Einstein made had to do with gravity. He found that gravity distorts space so that the shortest distance between two points is no longer a straight line but a curve. This led to the concept that the whole universe was in the shape of a globe with no limits and no boundaries. The universe, under this understanding has a finite size. Now, what does all this have to do with faith, God and our destiny?

There is an account of Einstein who was dying making a statement that death was merely a translation into an other dimension. What relativity did was open up the realization about the richness and complexity of creation. In a sense, it extended our vision and freed our imaginations so that concepts such as heaven and eternal life and death, take on a totally different hue. Viewed through the limiting vision of nineteenth century, these concepts seem hard to believe or to make sense of. Viewed through the lens of twentieth century physics, they become possibilities that cannot be ruled out. Permit me to stretch your imagination through a few examples.

If we can travel through space and space and time are relative and related, why do we assume that we cannot travel through time? It is very simple to answer this. We do not consider this because we have not done this. But, what relativity shows us is that we close the door on this possibility too soon. It may take another Einstein to work out the practical details of carrying out this enterprise but, in essence, it should be possible. All this raises the fascinating question: if all of space exists, and we have no doubt about this, why can't all of time exist? And is this not one of the definitions of eternity?

Now, if time has these interesting characteristics which defy our common sense view of it, doesn't this open possibilities for God to interact with each individual person at any given point of that person's time. There is a famous and very old prayer to the Holy Spirit which says "you who are everywhere and fill all things with your presence", we see now that what this prayer says is in keeping with what we know of creation and not some absurd fantasy.

Theophilus, please don't misunderstand the point of my discussion. I am not out to prove dogmas or teachings about faith through physics. All I'm pointing out is that if the universe is created by God, then what we read in creation should not be contrary to what our faith says. Modern scientific discoveries open up new possibilities for understanding our faith but they do not prove it. This is not what their main goal is.

The relevance of relativity for a better understanding of our faith lies in a new vision of space and time and the finiteness of our universe and this is an interesting point. If our universe is finite, where does the concept of infinity come from? After all, this concept is used in mathematics and has applications to describing processes that occur in nature. But, where did this concept come from? Doesn't it hint at something outside the finiteness of creation?

With this tantalizing thought, I leave you and promise you an even more exciting time when we explore the very small in creation through the recently discovered tool of quantum mechanics.

Yours,

Bar-Abbas

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