Physics and faith: The luminous web
Among the many compelling reasons for religious people to engage science is the human tendency to base our worldviews on the prevailing physics of the day. Our governments, our schools, our economies and our churches all reflect our understanding of how the world works, and when that understanding changes—as it is changing right now—all those institutions are up for revision. New discoveries in quantum physics are already changing the way some businesses are being managed. New discoveries in human brain research are changing education. Changes may be in store for the church as well.
The Bible gives us a worldview based on the physics of Aristotle and Ptolemy. In it the round earth sits at the center of the universe (and presumably at the center of God's attention as well). During the Dark Ages, the earth was hammered flat. Conservative clerics insisted that the planets were pushed around by angels, and that no other explanations were necessary. Having little else to do, science went to sleep.
When science woke up again, almost a thousand years later, there was a renaissance of learning in Europe. With the invention of the printing press, intellectual classics that had lain dormant for centuries suddenly became both available and affordable. A Pole named Mikolaj Kopernik could not get enough of them. He read his way from Krakow to Bologna and back again, returning home with volumes of Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes and Ptolemy in his luggage. He also came home with the name most of us know him by—Nicolaus Copernicus, the man who changed our vision of the universe.
