Directions and Content

A few items to get off the table right away; this blog will not be like anything else that I have encountered, which is why I finally started it. And to start this blog off clearly, and delineate it from all other blogs that cover similar subject matter, the following points need to be placed front and center.

• Intelligent Design begins with a valid observation but ends by drawing conclusions which are not supportable; a thesis which this blog intends to come back to frequently and develop in depth.

• Any argument that reduces down to “finding God in the gaps” is not an argument for anything; it is rather an admission of defeat.

• If there is any conflict between physics and my Christian faith, it does not begin with the creation story in Genesis 1; rather, the core conflict begins with Genesis 2 and the story of the Garden of Eden. For this reason, approaches like evolutionary creationism that address only Genesis 1 questions, can never accomplish any reconciliation between science and religion.

If there will ever be a coming together of physics and faith, it will not come about by pasting these two realms of thinking together from the outside. Attempting to find interpretations of Scripture that line up with current scientific understandings is a fool’s errand; Genesis 1:3 “Let there be light” is not a reference to the Big Bang, and Jeremiah 51:15 “…stretched out the heavens by his understanding” is not a reference to cosmological inflation.

As I mentioned in my first post, if there is ever to be found common ground between physics and faith it will have to be found by going deeper into both these realms of thought, not by looking for clever interpretations of Scripture that only result in a superficial appearance of similarity.

In this regard, the worst offenders of all are the public lectures, TED-Talks, YouTube videos and books that offer popular versions of current physics questions. By the time a topic in physics is simplified enough to present in a public forum, it’s invariably lost its mathematical underpinnings. As a result, what the public hears is more often than not, not what the underlying mathematics says.

Then, running with this incomplete understanding, many people will start making associations which have no basis in the original underlying theories. It’s not just the Christian community that does this; there is no end of New Age spirituality gurus that incorporate one aspect or another of modern physics into their speculations as well. As an aside, one of the ironies of this situation is that militant-atheists are often just as bad as a Bible-literalist Christians when it comes to the misuse of science in the pursuit of their agenda.

In summation, my intent in starting this blog is to point out a possible path to reconciliation between physics and faith by pointing out that the fundamental foundational questions that arise separately in these two realms, often show a striking similarity to each other; what I have taken to calling “mirror questions,” and hence the name for this blog.