Is this a scientific breakthrough that reveals who God is?

When we seek to understand something about God, we can come at it from several directions.

What does it mean that God is creator? Can we find evidence of God's mind in the physical world?

What does it mean that God is love? Can we learn about that through the lives of the prophets, through such people as Jesus of Nazareth, the Buddha, Moses, the Prophet Muhammad?

What does it mean that God is a god of mercy and justice? Is there some perfect social or political model of that somewhere that reveals the divine mind?

All of these -- and similar -- questions get regular attention from theologians, including some who emphasize our need to be comfortable with mystery. But some, including Sigve K. Tonstad, author of a book (God of Sense and Traditions of Non-Sense) that I wrote about here, emphasize human responsibility to recognize what God reveals about God's own self.

If Tonstad is right that God is not completely beyond human comprehension, then we will have more intellectual work to do in light of the recent news about "time crystals." As this BGR story says, "the time crystal concept is a new phase of matter."

You can read more about the time crystal news here and here.

The Quantum Magazine story to which I linked you in the first "here" in the previous sentence notes this: "A novel phase of matter that physicists have strived to realize for many years, a time crystal is an object whose parts move in a regular, repeating cycle, sustaining this constant change without burning any energy.

“'The consequence is amazing: You evade the second law of thermodynamics,' said Roderich Moessner, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany. . ."

As fascinating as I find the science in these stories (and I hope you'll read all three of them), what's even more intriguing to me is the theology. What kind of creative mind came up with a universe in which there could be -- or even needed to be -- such things as time crystals?

I think such scientific developments speak to our limited understanding of God and God's creation. The more we learn about subatomic physics and/or cosmology -- little end and big end science -- the more complex and mystifying and magical the world seems.

 

We are apt to reduce God to simple concepts: love, creator, savior. But those words, however helpful, hide so much more than they reveal.

 

These time crystal stories don't argue for a need for a God of the gaps -- meaning the idea that eventually we'll be able to explain everything about the cosmos but until we can do that we need God to be the explanation for what we don't understand. Rather, I think, they argue for a God so amazing -- not completely inscrutable but amazing -- that we should kneel in silence.

 

(The image here today came from this site.)

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IS CLOSING GITMO CLOSER?

The pressure on President Joe Biden to close the Gitmo prison grows. I wrote this USA Today column in January urging the president to do what he has said he wants to do -- quit housing uncharged prisoners there. Now members of Congress have written to Biden urging him to shut Gitmo down as soon as possible. You can read that letter by downloading this pdf file: Download GTMO Closure Letter_Schiff.Omar_.Price (08.04.2021) I'm especially glad to see that the member of Congress who represents my district in Kansas City, Emanuel Cleaver II, has signed it, too. Has your representative done that? As I wrote in the USA Today column, "The long story of how essential American values have been ignored or brutalized at Gitmo is a national embarrassment. Worse, it simply provides additional fodder for the religious and political radicals around the world who love to hate America."