God After VIII: God After Heisenberg

Kenilworth Union Church

Media

God After VIII: God After Heisenberg

God After...

July 14, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Psalm 102:25–28

Then in 1927 German physicist Werner Heisenberg comes along and really messes things up. He comes up with what is famously known as The Uncertainty Principle. He says that you cannot measure the position and the velocity of a subatomic particle at the same time. As someone put it when it comes to a subatomic particle, if you know where it is, you cannot know where it is going, and if you know where it is going, you cannot know where it is.[1]

You cannot really know what is precisely going on at the most fundamental level of reality. If you shine your flashlight at one of these subatomic particles to see where it is and what it’s doing, a photon from your beam of light will collide with the particle and knock it off course. An electron is elusive and inscrutable; it might show up here and it might show up there; it’s more a probability than a certainty.

[1]John Polkinghorn, One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology (Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 5.

God After Doudna

God After... VII: God After Hubble

July 7, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Genesis 1:1–5, Genesis 1:14–19

And even if the universe is 13.78 billion years old, that’s a lot younger than we used to think. We used to think the universe was always there. It’s called the Steady State Theory. The universe had no beginning. Edwin Hubble has given God something to do. I don’t know if God did it, as Genesis claims. The laws of physics don’t apply at the heat and density of that aboriginal infinitesimal singularity, but something caused the universe to inflate and stretch like a balloon. Even when I was a child, the creation story in Genesis troubled me. I said to myself, if light is created on the first day of creation, and the stars are created on the fourth day of creation, where did the first light come from? You can’t have light without stars, right? Wrong! Astronomers say that light first appeared in the universe 380,000 years after The Big Bang; the stars didn’t congeal, condense, and ignite until 200 million years after The Big Bang; for over 100 million years, there was light in the universe without stars.

God After... VI: God After Einstein

June 30, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • John 1:1–4

When Einstein toured the United States, he was always surrounded by adoring hordes. He was always signing autographs and posing for the paparazzi before the paparazzi was a thing; it was the greatest mob of groupies until Elvis and the Beatles came along later. All because he changed the world just by thinking about it. When he was 16 years old, he asked himself, “What would a beam of light look like if I were running alongside it? Would it stand still? Could you see little bits and pieces and particles of light?” Ten years later, he wrote down his answer as the theory of special relativity, which is simple to state but almost impossible to understand. Simple to state: The speed of light is the same for all observers, regardless of their motion relative to the light source.