The Physics of Faith: The Uncertainty Principle
03.11.05
Pastor Mark Batterson
This evotional begins a new series titled The Physics of Faith. Over the next four weeks we’re going to explore four dimensions of faith: expecting the unexpected, seeing the invisible, believing the impossible, and reversing the irreversible.
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SQ
I don’t sit around all day thinking about stuff like this, but God could have made us with one eye. The significance of that is this: two eyes give us an important optical capability called depth perception. If you cover one eye, everything seems flat. The reason is simple: you lose the ability to judge distances.
During this series of evotionals, I want you to think about physics as one eye. It is the eye of intellect. Let me call it the IQ eye. And I want you to think about faith as the other eye. It is our spiritual eye. Let me call it the SQ eye. If one of our eyes is closed we lose depth perception!
By the way, some of these ideas are borrowed from a book I highly recommend titled Can a Smart Person Believe in God by Michael Guillen.
I think there are four kinds of people in the world. Think of a matrix with four quadrants. Quadrant I is low IQ and low SQ. This is someone who isn’t very smart and isn’t very spiritual. I know that’s a little blunt, but all of us know a few Quadrant I people. Quadrant II is high IQ and low SQ. This is someone who is very intelligent, but they aren’t very spiritual. Quadrant III is low IQ and high SQ. This is someone who is very spiritual, but they aren’t very smart. And Quadrant IV is high IQ and high SQ. This person is very intelligent and very spiritual. And that is what we aspire to.
Albert Einstein may have said it best. “Science without religion is lame and, conversely, religion without science is blind.” I love that imagery. Physics without faith is lame. And faith without physics is blind. My hope is that this series would open both of our eyes!
Worship Smarter
Sometimes we compartmentalize IQ and SQ, but learning and worshipping are not mutually exclusive endeavors. In fact, they are directly proportional: the more you know the more you can worship. There is an old aphorism: you don’t need to work harder you need to work smarter. In the same sense, we need to worship smarter.
There is a fascinating exchange in John 4 where Jesus is talking to the Samaritan woman at the well. He says, “You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know.” The NLT says, “You Samaritans know so little about the one you worship.”
Hold that thought.
In his book, Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot, Richard Restak says, “The richer my knowledge of flora and fauna of the woods, the more I’ll be able to see. Our perceptions take on richness and depth as a result of all the things that we learn. What the eye sees is determined by what the brain has learned.” And he gives a great modus operandi: “learn more, see more.” Here is what knowledge does: it gives us depth perception.
When astronomers look into the night sky, they have a greater appreciation for the constellations and stars and planets because they see more than I do. When musicians listen to music they have a greater appreciation because they hear more than I do.
If you dissect the Great Commandment I think you discover that love is twenty-five percent intellectual. Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all of your heart and soul and mind and strength.” Loving God with your mind is one-quarter of the equation. I think that means loving God with your rational left-brain and your creative right-brain. I think it means loving God with your medial ventral prefrontal cortex.
Here is what I’m trying to say at the outset. I don’t think you can be intellectual, in the truest sense of the word, without being spiritual. And I don’t think you can be spiritual, in the truest sense of the word, without being intellectual.
Critical Realism
Let me give a disclaimer at the outset of this series. I have a fascination with physics. My bookshelves are filled with books on everything from string theory to quantum mechanics, but I’m neither a physicist nor the son of a physicist. When I read physics, it’s like being thrown into the deep end and barely being able to swim. Physics is deep. Sometimes it’s over my head and I can’t touch bottom! But so is theology. You never get to the bottom of God.
One of my theological touchstones is I Corinthians 8:2. It says, “He who thinks he knows does not yet know as he should know.” The NLT says, “Anyone who claims to know all the answers doesn’t really know very much.” Here’s what I think: the more you know the more you know how much you don’t know.
In the philosophy of science, there is a concept known as critical realism. It is the recognition that we don’t know everything there is to know. Russell Stannard says, “We can never expect at any stage to be absolutely certain that our scientific theories are correct and will never need further amendment.”
In his book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell says, “We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.” Gladwell says, “We need to accept our ignorance and say ‘I don’t know’ more often.”
I think science needs to say it more. I think the church needs to say it more. I think we need critical realism when it comes to physics. And we need critical realism when it comes to faith.
Can you imagine a pastor doing a series titled The Physics of Faith a hundred years ago? It would be all wrong because it would have been based on Newtonian physics. Everything we know about physics was turned inside out and upside down in the 20th century!
A hundred years ago, we thought we lived in a three-dimensional world. Then along came Einstein and his theories of relativity. And now, according to string theorists, there may be ten or eleven dimensions.
If you rewind four hundred years, before Galileo looked through his telescope, an astronomer named Johann Kepler catalogued all the stars in the sky—all 777 of them. Did you know that some astronomers now estimate the existence of eighty billion galaxies! That’s more than ten galaxies per person!
What I’m trying to say is this: give it a hundred years and there will be new discoveries that turn physics inside out and upside down all over again. So it’s with a degree of critical realism that I embark on this series, but let me share the driving motivation. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.”
Ology
I don’t want this to sound pejorative, but I believe that every “ology” is a branch of theology. In other words, every branch of science reveals a different dimension of who God is. Romans 1:20 is the axis this series revolves around. It says, “Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.”
Can you imagine studying about an artist like Pablo Picasso without looking at his paintings? Can you imagine studying about a composer like Ludwig Von Beethoven without listening to his music? It seems absurd doesn’t it? It’s about as absurd as studying about the Creator without studying creation. It’s about as absurd as studying theology without studying neurology or biology or ornithology.
I split my undergrad education between two schools—Central Bible College and the University of Chicago. I took lots of theology classes at CBC, as well as in my graduate programs. I’ve everything from pneumatology to soteriology, but if you asked me which class had the greatest theological impact on my thinking I’d say it was a class on immunology at the University of Chicago. Here is the irony. The professor never mentioned God. For all I know, she didn’t even believe in God. But every class was an exposition of Psalm 139:14: “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” I would walk out of those classes praises God for hemoglobin! I was in absolute awe of the Creator who custom designed our bodies.
I hope this series on the Physics of Faith does for you what that class in immunology did for me. Oliver Wendel Holmes said, “A mind stretched by a new idea never returns to its original shape.” I hope this series stretches your physics and your faith.
The Uncertainty Principle
There are amazing parallels in the physical and spiritual worlds. For every law of physics, there is a spiritual counterpart. Each evotional in this series will explore a law of physics and then juxtapose faith next to it.
In 1932, a German physicist named Werner Heisenberg won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum mechanics. His discovery ranks as one of the greatest scientific revolutions in the 20th century. For hundreds of years, determinism ruled the day. Physicists believed in a clockwork universe that was measurable and predictable. Heisenberg pulled the rug out from the under the scientific community.
Here’s Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in a nutshell: we cannot know the precise position and momentum of a quantum particle at the same time. Here’s why. Sometimes matter behaves like a particle—it appears to be in one place at one time. But sometimes matter behaves like a wave—it appears to be in several places at the same time almost like a wave on a pond. It is the duality of nature. So here’s the deal: the imprecise measurement of initial conditions precludes the precise prediction of future outcomes. Or to put it in layman’s terms: there will always be an element of uncertainty.
Let me come at it from one other angle.
Benoit Mandelbrot is the father of fractal geometry which is the study of complex shapes. Some shapes—like clouds and coastlines—are infinitely complex. Here’s what is meant by infinite complexity: any detail can be magnified to reveal even more detail ad infinitum. Fractals are really the theological equivalent of what is called the incomprehensibility of God. God is infinitely complex.
So here’s my point. Life is infinitely uncertain and God is infinitely complex. I just think this is the only place to start a series on the Physics of Faith. It is a recognition of our finitude. Life is full of infinite uncertainties and God is infinitely complex. We can hate that. Or we can learn to love it.
The Gift of Uncertainty
Most of us have a love/hate relationship with uncertainty. We hate negative uncertainties—bad things that happen that we didn’t expect to happen. And we love positive uncertainties—good things that happen that we didn’t expect to happen. But you can’t have it both ways.
One week ago I was in Disneyworld. The entire experience was magical—everything from eating cotton candy to meeting goofy to the magic carpet ride. And my kids loved it too!
We were sort of concerned about our three year-old, Josiah, because he’s pretty much scared of everything, including Mickey Mouse. In all fairness, most of us are scared of mice. We scream and jump on chairs! And we’re afraid of the little versions that are fifty times smaller than we are. So I think it makes sense that a two-and-a-half foot tall kid is afraid of a six-and-a-half foot mouse! But I digress! The basic idea is that Josiah has a very low fear threshold. So, like any good parents, we decided to take him on the Pirates of the Caribbean!
At one point, it was pitch black, which is scary enough for Josiah. And then, without any warning, the boat we were riding in took a dive. It was probably only a four foot drop. Pretty tame by rollercoaster comparisons, but it was the fact that we didn’t know it was coming that made it so much fun. There was this amazing mixture of screams and laughter! I think that was the most memorable part of our day at Disneyworld. It was so much fun because it was so unexpected.
If you stop and think about it, the greatest moments in life are the byproduct of uncertainty.
I’m no movie critic, but in my humble estimation, the greatest movies have the highest levels of uncertainty. There is romantic uncertainty or dramatic uncertainty. Scripts with the highest level of uncertainty make the best movies! In the same vein, I think high levels of uncertainty make the best lives!
Read Hebrews chapter eleven. It is filled with faith all-stars. Each of them had a high threshold for uncertainty! That is what faith is. It is not just embracing uncertainty. It is learning to love it.
There is part of us that wants a puppet God—a God we can control like a puppeteer. But even God doesn’t treat us like puppets. Part of us wants a predictable God. But if we had it we’d hate it! Can you imagine a world where everything that happened was predictable? How boring would that be! Life would be monochromatic. A world without uncertainty would be a world without mystery or romance or butterflies in your stomach or surprise birthday parties!
Unanswered Questions
I don’t want to make light of negative uncertainties. They are the source of tension headaches. Some of you are experiencing high levels of relational uncertainty. You’re in a dating relationship or going through a divorce and it seems like your life is up in the air. Some of you are experiencing occupational uncertainty. You’re not sure if you want to do what you’re doing forty hours a week for the next forty years. And some of you are experiencing high levels of spiritual uncertainty. You don’t have answers to life’s most important questions. What’s the meaning of life? What happens after I die? If there is a God, how do I relate to Him?
I hate to say this, but the Uncertainty Principle isn’t just a law of physics. It’s a law of life. The uncertainty never goes away. You can never retire uncertainty. And the vacations are few and far between. Live is forever full of infinite uncertainties! You will always have unanswered questions and unexplained experiences.
Last week, out of nowhere, Summer asked me a question. “Dad, why did God create mosquitoes?” That’s a tough question. I made up some lame answer like, “Lizards eat them.” But I’m not sure why God made mosquitoes. I don’t like them. I don’t lose sleep over it, but I think it’s one of those unanswered questions. By the way, Summer said, “I’ve been saving that question for God for two years.”
The burning questions of childhood!
I love Donald Miller’s chapter on worship in Blue Like Jazz. He says, “There are things you cannot understand, and you must learn to live with this. Not only must you learn to live with this, you must learn to enjoy this.”
I think all of us need to come to the point where we acknowledge and accept the fact that God is God and we’re not. There are questions I don’t have the answer to. There are experiences I can’t explain. But I’ve learned to embrace the uncertainty.
Hebrews 11:8 says, “By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as an inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going.”
That phrase—“even though he did not know where he was going”—may be one of the most encouraging phrases in Scripture. If Abraham was driving in thick fog, then maybe I’m normal. I’m a lot like Abraham. I have plans and goals and dreams, but sometimes I have no idea where God is taking me!
Fox Chase
One of my favorite exchanges in Scripture is in Matthew 9. A teacher of the law says, “I will follow you wherever you go.” And I love Jesus response: “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”
Here is my translation: when you follow Christ you never know where you’re going to end up. Anything can happen. All bets are off! That is scary, but it is also exciting. Jesus was promising the element of surprise and He delivers on His promises! Following Christ is the ultimate adventure!
I’m not convinced that following Christ reduces uncertainty. I think it reduces spiritual uncertainty. I think we can have what Philippians 4 calls “a peace that passes understanding.” I think we can know that we know that we are in right relationship with God and going to spend eternity with him. But following Christ may actually increase uncertainty in other areas of our lives. Oswald Chambers said it best. “To be certain of God is to be uncertain in all our ways, you never know what a day may bring.”
The Banana Peel
Let me borrow a metaphor from Robert Fulghum’s book From Beginning to End. When Fulghum does a wedding he gives the bride and groom a speech the last time they meet together. They’ve planned the wedding to the best of their ability, right down to the minute detail. They want everything to be perfect, but Fulghum reminds them of this simple truth. He says, “Weddings are a lot like any other occasion in life. Anything can happen. The great banana peel of existence is always on the floor somewhere.”
I love that image. Fulghum says, “Not only that, anything might go right! Sometimes the unexpected is an unforgettable moment that transforms a standard wedding into a memorable experience. The sweetest memories are seldom the result of planning.”
That totally bears witness with my experience. I’ve done a lot of weddings and my favorite moments are the unplanned moments. I love it when a bride or groom experiences what I’d call unrehearsed emotion. They are so overcome with the enormity of the moment that they can barely get through their vows! I love flower girls and ring bearers! The best age is right around three or four years-old. No amount of rehearsing can remove the element of uncertainty! And please forgive me for this, but I love it when someone faints in a wedding! I don’t want anybody to get injured, but that adds so much to a ceremony!
I was in my college roommate’s wedding years ago and the bridesmaid I was paired up with fainted. It was surreal. I remember standing there and experiencing it like it was happening in slow motion. It was like a matrix moment. All these thoughts flooded my mind as she was falling. “I’ve never seen anyone faint.” “I wonder if it hurts when you hit the ground.” “I wonder what the bride and groom will think.” Of course, the one thing I didn’t think was, “Maybe I should catch her.” I just watched her fall flat on her face!
We naturally want everything to go according to plan, but the element of surprise infuses life with so much joy. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve laughed about “the fainting spell.” Thank God for uncertainty and unpredictability!
Wind Factor
We had a saying in our family growing up. I honestly don’t remember where it came from or how it got started. It may be a famous aphorism for all I know. Here is the saying: you can’t never always sometimes tell. It was our family version of the uncertainty principle.
I think that is what Jesus was saying in John 3:8: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
I got a lesson in wind factor last week. Our family was flying home from Orlando, Florida and our plane got grounded. The pilot informed us that the wind was blowing above the legal limit of thirty knots. He said, “We’re waiting for the wind speed to dip to twenty-nine knots.” Of course, that gave all the passengers a tremendous sense of confidence! There are some things you don’t want to know! Too much information!
I couldn’t help but think of the incongruity of the situation. Here we were sitting in a Boeing 737 aircraft with twin CFM56-3-B2 engines that would take us to a cruising speed of 509 mph. We were about to defy the law of gravity. The technology that goes into flight is a marvel, but there wasn’t a thing we could do about the wind! Wind is unpredictable and uncontrollable. You can’t stop it from blowing! Wind will be wind.
Jesus likened the Holy Spirit to the wind. In other words, there is an element of unpredictability when it comes to following Christ. Faith is expecting the unexpected.
Here’s the irony: what is the most predictable place on the planet? I hate to admit it, but most churches are the most predictable place on the planet. I hope you don’t perceive that as an unwarranted criticism because I love the Church—even churches that don’t change. But when people are asked why they don’t attend church, do you know what answer always ranks in the top three? “It’s boring.” In other words, there is no element of surprise!
God is predictably unpredictable. You can’t read the Bible and come to any other conclusion. God loves to surprise us! I know that Hebrews 13:8 says that Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. That simply means his character doesn’t change. Jesus was predictably unpredictable then and He’s predictably unpredictable now!
I think Jesus ranks as the most counterintuitive person who has ever lived. He drove religious people crazy. That Pharisees couldn’t handle it because they wanted a god they could pigeonhole. They wanted a god they could control. They wanted a god that fit into nice, neat categories. But that isn’t what Jesus offered them.
I love studying the different ways that different people have worshipped and related to God over the centuries. I’m inspired by the Celtic Christians. I love their natural theology. I love their imagination. And I love their metaphors. They had a name for the Holy Spirit that I’ve fallen in love with. It may sound sacrilegious at first earshot, but I’ve learned to love it. They called him the Wild Goose. Can you think of a better metaphor for following Christ than a wild goose chase?
Throw Caution to the Wind
Have you ever read a passage of Scripture that you felt was exclusively written for you? That’s how I feel about Ecclesiastes 11. I’m a recovering perfectionist. I have a hard time tying off the umbilical cord on anything! Ecclesiastes 11 is the prescription for perfectionism.
Verse one says, “Cast your bread upon the waters for after many days you will find it again.” There is a time to be cautious and a time to throw caution to the Wind. There is a time to test the waters and a time to cast your bread upon the water!
Verse four says, “Whoever watches the wind will not plant; whoever looks at the clouds will not reap.” In other words, if you wait for perfect conditions you’ll be waiting till the day you die!
Then Solomon uses the analogy of the wind. “As you do not know the path of the wind so you cannot understand the work of God, the maker of all things.”
In his book, Jump In, Mark Burnett writes about his journey to TV producer stardom. Burnett is the creator of Survivor and The Apprentice.
For what it’s worth, Mark landed at LAX airport on October 18, 1982. He had $600 in his pocket and no return ticket. His dream was to work in television and movies, but his first job was working as a nanny for a Beverly Hill’s family.
In the first chapter, Mark outlines his philosophy of business. Here it is:
“Nothing will ever be perfect, and nothing can be totally planned. The best you can hope for is to be about half certain of your plan and know that you and the team you’ve assembled are willing to work hard enough to overcome the inevitable problems as they arrive. And arrive they will. The only thing you can be certain of in business is that the problems you have not thought of will eventually crop up—and always at the worst times.”
It’s the Uncertainty Principle! The best you can hope for is to be about half certain! I think that is a pretty good paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 11.
Don’t watch the wind. Don’t look at the clouds. You’ve got to cast your bread on the waters. You’ll never be more than half certain. That is so freeing to me. I genuinely believe that the key to success is the willingness to fail.
When we look back on our lives, I think we’ll regret playing it safe nine times out of ten. And I think we’ll be glad we took a risk nine times out of ten, even if those risks don’t pan out.
Crash
In his new book, The Barbarian Way, Erwin McManus writes about different animal groups. If you’ve studied ornithology or entomology or herpetology, you know that different groups of creatures have different names.
A group of fish is called a school. Ants are called colonies and bees are called a swarm. Cattle are herds, birds are flocks, and a tribe of lions is a pride. For what it’s worth, a group of buzzards is called a committee!
But here’s my personal favorite: a group of rhinos is called a crash.
That name seems so fitting! Believe it or not, a rhino can run about thirty miles per hour which is pretty amazing considering how much weight they are carrying! They are actually faster than squirrels which can run about twenty-six miles per hour. There’s a mental image!
Here’s the funny thing. Rhinos have terrible eyesight. They can only see about thirty feet in front of themselves. So they are running thirty miles an hour with no idea what’s at thirty-one feet! You would think they’d be timid creatures because they can’t see very far in front of themselves. But God, in his amazingly creative foresight, gave rhinos a big horn on the front of his head.
Erwin McManus piggy-backs off the crash analogy: “The future is uncertain, but we need to move toward it with confidence. There’s a future to be created, a humanity to be liberated. We need to stop wasting our time and stop being afraid of what we cannot see and do not know. We need to move forward full of force because of what we do know.”
In a sense, we are crash test dummies living in a world of infinite uncertainty. Maybe it’s time for a crash test!
