It is very interesting that sometimes it seems quite by chance that I read things that were meant to be in order. It’s like everything ties in some way together. I say it seems like it’s by chance but I really don’t believe there is such a thing. When things like this happen you may wonder, “Did that just happen? Or was there some kind of reason behind it?” I trust the LORD, that He wanted a thought threaded through my mind and also that I may share it with others if it may indeed be impactful. So I started reading in the Summit Journal (a free newsletter they send to my house),
Isaac Newton was the greatest scientist who has ever lived or, in Albert Einstein’s words, the most “privileged” of all scientists because of the discoveries that Newton was permitted to make. Einstein describes Newton as “this brilliant genius, who determined the course of western thought, research, and practice to an extent that nobodybefore or since his time can touch.” (See Essays in Science by Albert Einstein (1934), Philosophical Library,New York.)
Yet, near the end of his life, Newton said of himself: “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but TO MYSELF I SEEM TO HAVE BEEN ONLY LIKE A BOY PLAYING on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all UNDISCOVERED before me.”
In the second edition of the Principia, in which he published most of his discoveries in physics, Newton writes: “The true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful being. His duration reaches from eternity to eternity; His presence from infinity to infinity. He governs all things.”
Newton wrote only three books—the Optics, the Principia, and Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John—Isaac Newton (1733), Darby and
Browne, London. Reprinted by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (1991).
Averaged over his life, he divided his time equally between his physics and his Bible, believing that his physics was a Biblical ministry. To Dr. Bently he wrote, “When I wrote my Treatise about our System [the Principia], I had an Eye upon such Principles as might work with considering Men, for the belief of a Deity, and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that Purpose.”
-Arthur B. Robinson, Access to Energy. Dec. 2009 (emphasis mine)
Then I read the next article:
I would like to follow up on Dr. Robinson’s comments regarding science. About a year ago, I decided to check out some readable works on physics to see what was going on in that field. What I discovered from one of the twentieth century’s greatest physicists is worth sharing with our Summit family. So stay with me as I develop this story.
First, I have been told that three of the top physicists of the twentieth century are Paul Dirac, Richard P. Feynman, and Steven Weinberg. In the forward to Feynman’s Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics, John C. Taylor of Cambridge University writes, “Paul Dirac was one of the finest physicists of [the twentieth] century. The development of quantum mechanics began at the turn of the century, but it was Dirac who, in 1925 and 1926, brought the subject to its definitive form, creating a theory as compelling as Newton’s mechanics had been.”
Then I noticed another interesting statement by Taylor: “Dirac stated his philosophy of physics in the sentence ‘physical laws should have mathematical beauty.’” Wow! Science, math (the language of science), and beauty—WHAT A TRINITY! If this is true, then why are Christians ridiculed for believing that the “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth His handywork.” (Psalm 19:1)?
Steven Weinberg, an atheist, says, “Many of us are betting the most valuable thing we have, our time, that [string] theory is so beautiful that it will survive in the final underlying laws of physics.” This adds to scientific endeavor beyond imagination and experimentation. Now a theory must also be beautiful! I wonder if Dr. Weinberg ever considered that perhaps God is behind such beauty!
After reading Elementary Particles, I discovered that Richard P. Feynman is indeed considered one of the twentieth century’s pre-eminent physicists. Paul Davies insists that first there was Isaac Newton, then Albert Einstein, and now “Richard
Feynman has become an icon for the late twentieth-century physics—the first American to achieve this status.”
So what was I to do but read Feynman (Princeton PhD, 1942) in greater depth?
I started slowly with Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics and moved on to The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist, The Theory of Fundamental Processes, Lectures on Physics, and finished with Elementary Particles and the Laws
of Physics.
In spite of the innumerable equations sprinkled throughout Feynman’s work, e.g., (h2/2s)+(nh2/2s’)=(b-1) h2/2R, I actually began to gain some understanding of the world of particles. (Incidentally, I think the above equation translates earth!)
I also read Stephen Meyer’s great work Signature in the Cell and knew I was entering the deeper regions of the cell’s atoms. Since the parts of the atom intrigue me to no end, I could hardly wait to learn more.
However, since my academic background is philosophy (unfortunately, Feynman does not like philosophers, psychologists, or for that matter, the National Academy of Sciences), I knew there were some challenges ahead, but in allhonesty, not exactly what I expected.
Paul Davies (not exactly a slouch in physics) insists that Feynman is on top of such subjects as subatomic particles, atoms and nuclei, molecules and chemical bonding, the structure of solids, superconductors and superfluids, “and much else,” and “it is unlikely that the world will see another Richard Feynman.”
Feynman also possesses another quality lacking in much of science today. WHEN HE DOESN’T KNOW SOMETHING, HE ADMITS IT! For example, in Six Easy Pieces, Feynman makes the startling statement, “It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is” (p. 71).
If we don’t know what energy is, what else don’t we know?
As it turns out, we don’t know a whole lot of things as the following list from Six Easy Pieces illustrates.
Six of Feynman’s lectures on physics have been put into a book entitled Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brillant Teacher. The intro to the book is by Paul Davies. . . . I begin with Paul Davies. . . . “There is a popular misconception that science is an impersonal, dispassionate, and thoroughly objective enterprise. Whereas most other human activities are dominated by fashions, fads, and personalities, science is supposed to be constrained by agreed rules of procedure and rigorous tests. It is the results that count, not the people who produce them. This is, of course, manifest nonsense. Science is a people-driven activity like all human endeavor, and just as subject to fashion and whim. In this case fashion is set not so much by choice of subject matter, but by the way scientists think about the world.” Now to the world’s most recently celebrated physicist. . . (Richard Feynman).
Page 2—“First, we do not yet know all the basic laws[of physics]: there is an expanding frontier of ignorance.” Same page—“The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific ‘truth.’ But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations—to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess.”
Page 24—“The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. . . . Actually, we do not have all the rules now. (Every once in a while something like castling is going on that we still do not understand.”
Page 39—“It turns out that the calculations that areinvolved in this theory [quantum nucleodynamics] are so difficult that no one has ever been able to figure out what the consequences of the theory are. . .we do not yet know where it fits.”
Page 43—“Everything works exactly the same for the muon as for the electron, except that one is heavier than the other. Why is there another one heavier; what is the use for it? We do not know.”
Page 44—“This then, is the horrible condition of our physics today. . . . We do not know how the universe got started, and we have never made experiments which check our ideas of space and time accurately, below some tiny distance, so we only know that our ideas work above that distance. . . . We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of sub-atomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.”
Page 66—“We do not know the patterns of motions that there should be inside the earth.”
Page 71—“It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is.”
Page 83—“Next we come to nuclear energy, the energy which is involved with the arrangement of particles inside the nucleus, and we have formulas for that, but we do not have the fundamental laws. We know that it is not electrical, not gravitational, and not purely chemical, but we do not know what it is.”
Page 84—“In the last analysis, we do not understand the conservation laws deeply. We do not understand the conservation of energy [on page 69 Feynman says it’s “one of the most basic laws of physics, the conservation of energy.”]. We do not understand energy as a certain number of little blobs. You may have heard that photons come out in blobs and that the energy of a photon is Planck’s constant times the frequency. That is true, but since the frequency of light can be anything, there is no law that says that there can be a certain definite amount.”
Page 93—“Galileo discovered a very remarkable fact about the principle of inertia—if something is moving, with nothing touching it and completely undisturbed, it will go on forever, coasting at a uniform speed in a straight line. Why does it keep on coasting? We do not know but that is the way it is.”
Page 110— “The gravitational attraction relative to the electrical repulsion between two electrons is 1 divided by 4.17 x 10 to the 42 power! The question is, where does such a large number come from?. . .This fantastic number is
a natural constant, so it involved something deep in nature.”
Page 113—“None of these nuclear or electrical forces has yet been found to explain gravitation. The quantum-mechanical aspects of nature have not yet been carried over to gravitation.”
Page 134—“One might like to ask: ‘How does it work? What is the machinery behind the law [regarding quantum behavior]. No one has found any machinery behind the law [How about Mind! How about a Lawgiver! How about John 1:1–3!]. No one can ‘explain’ any more than we have just ‘explained.’ No one will give you any deeper representation of the situation. We have no idea about a more basic mechanism from which these results can be deduced.” Thus spake Richard P. Feynman in Six Easy Pieces.
Question 1: If “we don’t know” all these aspects of oneof the most prestigious of the sciences, how is it that somepeople know with absolute certainty that God does not exist?
Question 2: Why is it that atheism is cleverly woven throughout America’s educational system in the sciences, in the humanities, and in the social sciences (which, by the way, Feynman does not consider science at all)?
Elsewhere in this Journal, I quote Feynman regarding the role of government and science. It’s obvious that science has become politicized in this country (think grants) and Feynman doesn’t bow down to it. Feynman would not allow science to defend global warming or declare such science definitive. In fact, quite the opposite is true. In The Meaning of It All, he says, “All scientific knowledge is uncertain” (p. 26). He also says, “I agree that science cannot disprove the existence of God. I absolutely agree” (p. 36).
Why then is science constantly put forward as the “proof” that God does not exist? Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, are you listening?
—Your Editor, David A. Nobel
(Emphasis-capital letters-mine)
After I read the whole journal I picked up a book my mom got for me called Darwinian Fairytales Selfish Genes, errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution by David Stove. Now it’s important to note that David Stove is not a creationist. This is what he says about himself,
“I had better add at once that I am not a ‘creationist’, or even a Christian. In fact I am of no religion. It seems just as obvious to me as it does to any Darwinian, that the species to which I belong is a certain species of land-mammal. And it seems just as overwhelmingly probable to me as it does to any Darwinian that our species has evolved from some other animals.” (Preface, xiv)
But I was reading the introduction and this is what Roger Kimball (definitely not a creationist either) said,
“Stove shows in unanswerable detail that, despite its enormous explanatory power regarding ‘cods, pines, flies,’ etc., Darwin’s theory of evolution is ‘a ridiculous slander on human beings.’ He is particularly good at exposing the ‘amazing arrogant habit of Darwinians’ of ‘blaming the fact, instead of blaming their theory’ when they encounter contrary biological facts. Doctrinaire Darwinists HAVE AN ANSWER FOR EVERYTHING, ALWAYS A BAD SIGN in science, since it means that mere facts can never prove them wrong. Does it regularly happen that increasing prosperity leads to lower birth rates? And does that directly contradict Darwinian theory? No problem, just announce that the birth rates in such cases are somehow ‘inverted,’ evidence of a ‘biological mistake.’” (Emphasis added)
Is it good to admit that we may not have an answer, that we may not (or dare I say never) come to know everything about everything there is to know? I’m not advocating that because of this we should take evolution (not natural selection) literally and to stop doing science altogether (for if evolution were true we could not do any reputable and somewhat trustworthy science). I still believe we should use our God given minds and study our God given world, that we may have dominion over it and give glory to Him as we should.
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” (Gen. 1:26)
“What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him?
For Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet:” (Psa. 8:4-6)
“O LORD, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.” (Psa. 104:24) “The works of the LORD are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein.” (Psa. 111:2)
And I read this the next day!
“The reason for his mocking, irritated tone is that the unbeliever’s mind is darkened and he applies the wrong arithmetic. Everyone knows that one plus one plus one equals three, not one. But what does one multiplied by one and multiplied by one equal? One. The Trinity is a mystery, but not ‘a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma,’ in the famous words attributed to Winston Churchill. God is three persons in one being. God in His almightiness is a mystery. We DO NOT KNOW HOW the doctrine of the tri-unity of God works. We just know that the Trinity is true and without the Trinity, as the one true God, we cannot make sense out of anything. Reject the Trinity and one cannot account for personhood, love, equality, mathematics, justice, morality, and logic.” (Michael A. Robinson, The Necessary Existence of God, p. 126, emphasis added)
So maybe the lesson here is that you are not going to ever know everything; you can give up on that. Learn as much as you can, “buy the truth and sell it not” (Prov. 23:23), but just come to grips that you are (we are), at the end of the day, very limited. If you don’t already, I encourage you to come to the place where you “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.” (Prov. 3:5) It is an awe-inspiring realization that you will never know everything, but that you can come to know the One Who does.
Always in Christ JESUS’ Awesome, Amazing, Awe-inspiring Love! ~Luke
Psa. 145:11 “They shall speak of the glory of Thy kingdom, and talk of Thy power;”
