The Grand Coherence, Chapter 7: Physics and Christianity
This post is part of the book The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity. For all the links in the book, see this introductory post.
We want to find out what science knows and what the ramifications of science are for the truth of Christianity, and the best place to start studying science is with physics, because physics is the most fundamental, the most underlying and general and universal, of the natural sciences. Scientists regard chemistry as reducible to physics, and biology as reducible to chemistry. Chemistry does not apply inside stars, where it's too hot for any molecules to form, and most of the matter in the universe is in stars, so in one sense, chemistry is limited in scope, a special case. And biology is a much more limited special case, for there are no living things that we know of outside planet Earth and a few man-made projectiles into outer space. But physics applies to the whole material universe, or from the scientific materialist perspective, to everything.
It was in the 17th century, in the age of Galileo and Newton, that physics emerged as a sweeping explanation of the cosmos that threatened to become so complete as to leave no room for anything else. Ever since, physics has been, in one sense, the chief rival to Christianity. Physics and Christianity are the principal explanations on offer of the ultimate natures of things. Christians accept physics but don’t regard it as sovereign or ultimate. To scientific materialists, of whom one of the first was the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), physics is all there is. When Newton (1642-1726) published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687, with his laws of motion and his theory of gravity, from which he derived his explanation of the motions of the planets as well as everyday experiences of starting and stopping and dropping and weight, deterministic laws of limitless scope suddenly explained so much that they seemed likely to explain everything else too, leaving no room for many things religion believed in, such as miracles and free will and supernatural, immortal souls. The reign of Newtonian physics lasted for over 200 years, and when G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) defended the faith in the early 20th century, he had to face off against a grimly deterministic universe that had long seemed to have the full authority of science behind it.
But times have changed. Physics now deals a Christian apologist like me a much more favorable hand to play.
I had better add quickly that the scientific materialist worldview that make physics the basis of all things is as influential today as it ever has been. That's because biology has become, since Darwin, a stronghold of atheistic reductionism. But as biology has turned hostile, physics per se has changed in four major ways that make it much more congenial to Christianity.
First, we learned gradually over the early and mid-20th century, to the point where it is now settled science, that the universe began, at least as far as we can extrapolate, with a dramatic event called the Big Bang. Once, long ago, the universe was a small, incredibly hot and dense mass of formless matter, expanding rapidly. We can tell that because it's still expanding slowly, and we can trace backward by extrapolating momentum and gravity, and by using our knowledge of subatomic particles and light, all the way to a point in time a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang… and then, we know nothing. What caused the Big Bang? Science has no idea. How could it? It relies on deriving patterns from observation and experiment, but the Big Bang was too unique an event to be studied that way. The question practically begs to be answered: God.
Second, the universe seems to be “fine-tuned” for life in many different ways. This metaphor of “fine tuning” needs some unpacking. If you’re playing a stringed instrument like a guitar or a violin, you want the pitches produced by different strings of the instrument, when played “open” or without fingering, to be related to each other in very specific ways. For example, on a violin, the ratio of the frequencies of the sounds produced by adjacent strings should be exactly 3:2, which musicians call a “fifth.” Even a very slight deviation from this makes the music sound “out of tune,” and music played on a violin with a ratio of, say, 3.1:2 between the frequencies of adjacent strings would be unrecognizable. To make beautiful music, the violin needs to be finely tuned.
In the same way, the laws of physics need to be finely tuned, far more so than the strings of any violin, for the universe to play that music that we call life. Fortunately, the laws of nature are fine tuned in just the way they need to be. We’re lucky to be alive! But fine tuning implies a wise and purposeful and powerful Fine Tuner, that is, a Creator, or in short, God.
As an example of fine tuning in nature, when the Big Bang first banged, there was an incredible amount of outward momentum in the matter and energy of the primordial universe, but at the same time, there were gravitational forces pulling it back together. If the outward momentum had dominated the gravitational attraction, the universe would have expanded too fast for stars to form. If the gravitational attraction had dominated the outward momentum, everything would have been sucked back into a universal black hole.
What happened instead, namely an intricate pattern of stars and galaxies and planets, neither exploding nor imploding, required the outward momentum and gravitational attraction to be in incredibly fine balance. How did the initial conditions at the Big Bang happen to be set so that the universe steered ever so narrowly between being a diffuse fog and getting swiftly flushed into black holes? It’s as if a bullet were shot through the eye of a needle at a hundred paces. But only believe in God and the mystery vanishes. God wanted it that way, of course, because it's beautiful and interesting.
There are many other examples. It takes an incredibly fine balance between the strong nuclear force and electromagnetic repulsion to yield the manageable number of stable atoms that provides a basis for chemistry. Gravity seems to be fine tuned to hold stars together without making them all collapse into black holes. Life could not exist if electromagnetism were slightly stronger or weaker. I have to take all this on trust, not being able to perform such physics calculations myself. But it seems to be uncontroversial among physicists now that there is at least apparent fine tuning in nature, a quality of vast beneficent coincidence about the universe, which has led even some irreligious physicists to transgress strong methodological scruples and entertain the possibility of intelligent design as an explanation of it all. It would be more conventionally “scientific” to seek non-theistic explanations of apparent design, as Darwinian evolution purports to offer for the vast amount of apparent design in living organisms. But when the apparent design is found in the most fundamental natural laws or in the initial conditions of the Big Bang, any such effort would seem to be checkmated before it can begin. The one recourse of conventional scientific nontheistic explanation in the face of overwhelming evidence of fine tuning is to postulate many universes, giving rise to the “multiverse” hypothesis, which is actually proposed and believed by some, but it seems like a reductio ad absurdum. To this we will return.
Third, the old determinism of physics gave way in the 20th century to a strange new doctrine of subatomic randomness called quantum mechanics, and this deprives arguments against free will of the warrant from physics that they used to enjoy.
A few Christians have occasionally stumbled into odd cul-de-sacs of predestinationism, but essentially Christianity has always agreed with common sense that people have free will. You do what you do because you choose to do it, not because you had to do it. Choice is one of the origins of what happens. Your choices are shaped and influenced but not determined by your preexisting traits and circumstances, and your actions cannot in principle be predicted with perfect exactitude, at least by actors working from within space-time, setting aside the special problem of divine foreknowledge. You could have done otherwise.
This general prediction of human unpredictability holds up very well empirically, by the way. So it doesn’t surprise us at all that we’ve gotten much better at predicting thunderstorms but no better at predicting specific crimes. No one expects science to predict human behavior, partly because we know by our own personal experience of free will that our own behavior is unpredictable, and partly because science has never had any success in predicting human behavior in the past. Nonetheless, long ago, when Newtonian physics reigned supreme, free will seemed incompatible with the basic nature of the universe as assumed by science. As science progressively elucidated the laws of nature, and more and more things became explicable and predictable, human conduct, too, which science could all too easily assume must be governed by the same kind of inexorable laws that governed the motions of the planets and the interactions of substances in the chemist’s test tube, should become predictable. Free will seemed an impossibility, and apparent freedom of the will was only the measure of our ignorance.
No longer. In the early 20th century a variety of phenomena forced physicists to begin interpreting the universe as probabilistic rather than deterministic at very small levels. A crucial step was the introduction of the “Heisenberg uncertainty principle” into physics in 1927, which articulates certain permanent limits on the accuracy with which the position and momentum (jointly) of tiny particles such as electrons can be observed. I don’t fully understand why this caused a revolution in physics away from causal determinism, in favor of a belief in subatomic randomness. It seems like physicists might have concluded instead that determinism was still valid, but at some level the operations of cause and effect were permanently unobservable by us. But subatomic randomness seems to be settled science now. And if the universe is not deterministic, one reason to disbelieve in free will is taken away.
That’s not to say that science now believes in free will. The scientific project is still committed to a reductionism that makes the notion of a free human will shaping events in the world deeply alien. And I don’t want to pursue a detailed investigation into how subatomic randomness might give free will an opening, as if we needed a permission slip from science to believe in free will. On the contrary, we know infallibly by introspection that we have free will, and science, ultimately, must learn simply to accommodate that, at whatever cost to the coherence of its worldview. It has always been an intolerable presumption when people claiming a warrant from science have doubted it. But it’s nice that the determinist form of the attack on free will has been largely abandoned, no longer enjoying any epistemic warrant from physics.
The fourth big way that physics has dealt a favorable hand to Christian apologetics is something called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As the doctrine of the Fall was once thought to be inscribed in nature in the form of the celestial versus sublunary spatial division of the cosmos, we can now see it inscribed in nature in the form of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. To understand what that is, let’s start with the concept of useful energy. Technologists love to convert energy from one form to another, in order to make it useful for various human ends, and they’ve found many ingenious and surprising ways to do so. But there are limits. Useful as it might be, you can’t convert diffused, ambient heat into motion. You can’t run a ship on the heat in sea water, dropping blocks of ice behind the ship. You can create heat gradients and use them to power motion. Car engines exploit the heat from gasoline combustion to turn wheels. But that’s because concentrated heat is a form of order, or what scientists sometimes call “disentropy.” Disentropy can be changed from one form to another, but a little of it is always lost along the way. And in general, the Second Law of Thermodynamics asserts that disentropy in the universe is always retreating, diminishing, giving way to entropy or chaos. On the order-chaos spectrum, change goes only one way, in a sense the wrong way, from order to chaos. You can stir things together, you can’t stir them apart.
Life is a kind of not-quite-exception that proves the rule. Order does increase locally in living creatures as they grow. But they only achieve this by, so to speak, hoarding temporarily, for their own use, some of the supply of disentropy in the universe. We eat food and void excrement; something has been lost. Plants rely on the usable energy of sunlight, which is plentiful enough for now. But deep inside the sun, the disentropy of free hydrogen atoms is being depleted as they sink into the nuclei of larger helium atoms. To put it another way, the sun is slowly burning through its limited supply of fuel. Someday, science foresees, it will run out of hydrogen, and start to burn up helium as fuel, resulting in a temporary, dramatic expansion into a huge “red giant” star. Later, it will collapse into a small, dim “white dwarf,” luminous because hot but burning no fuel, and then slowly darken into a “black dwarf,” thus to remain forever. In general, the future of the universe, as physics foresees it, is intolerably sad. The stars will burn out. Much later, the dark solar systems will break up. Much later still, the dark galaxies of long-since burnt-out stars will very slowly break up. Life will probably, from the scientific materialist perspective, meet its end with the death of the sun. If it is ingenious enough to migrate from solar system to solar system, it might last a while longer. But of course it has no chance amidst the doom of universal darkness. There will then be nothing sentient or beautiful or meaningful, forever and ever.
In the heart of Christianity is a long tradition of agonizing over the mortality of all things. The Bible contains the meditations of sad old Solomon the Wise on how “all is vanity.” Things fall apart. But the Fall doesn’t have the last word. As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. The Resurrection is the answer to all the agonizing questions. Death’s victory, though it is all around us, will be nullified at the end. The trumpet of its defeat has already sounded, and we are called to rally round the banner. Yet we must still live in this dying world, until the moment when all things are changed. Physics sheds a powerful light on the mortality of all things, on the universal decay. It knows nothing of the Resurrection, the rescue, the repair and redemption of this dying world. But how should it? It can only extrapolate from observation, and tell us how things are. If God is plotting a new creation, and has circulated promises of what He will do, it is not the job of the physicists to have heard about that.
Yet physics can still suggest why the current situation of ever-increasing entropy can’t be the permanent law of the universe. For it won’t quite do to settle for a trend towards chaos. If Humpty Dumpty is falling (to borrow an example from C.S. Lewis), it makes sense to ask how he got onto the wall in the first place, even if no analysis of the process of falling is ever likely to shed light on the question. Physics can observe only the slow triumph of chaos. But whence comes this endowment of order that is being inexorably depleted? Doesn’t there need to be something outside the reach of the Second Law of Thermodynamics that could have supplied the fund of disentropy which the universe we observe is so emphatically powerless to generate, and can only run down? And whatever that something, that source of original order, may be, might it come back to rescue us from our plight? This kind of tentative deductive guesswork about possibilities starts to lead from physics into a new perspective on Christian doctrine.
We have seen three arguments that I have said seem to suggest a Creator: the argument from the Big Bang, the argument from fine tuning, and an argument from the universe’s endowment of disentropy. But do they really? How do we know? How can we settle the question?
Let’s put to one side for the moment the divine personality that we meet in the Bible. Any Creator we deduce from physics will surely be more abstract than that, at least at first.
If we’re going to interpret the universe causally at all, it seems necessary to ask why the Big Bang occurred. The something that caused it would need to be very old, very strong, and have some independence from the physical, material universe, since it seems impossible that the origination of the physical universe could be the work of something contained in the physical universe. But I don’t think the Big Bang alone would compel us to imagine a personal creator. It might be something more like a force.
When we add fine tuning to the story, more of the traits of the Creator come into view. There seems to have been a plan. A remarkably far-sighted, complex and intricate plan. The Creator seems to have wanted a night sky full of stars, and to set the stage for that great crescendo of complexity and diversity, autonomy and adventure that we call life. There is some kinship to a human artist, though a vast difference too, obviously in the scale, and maybe also in the style.
And yet I can’t shake a feeling that I’m reading into. I don’t feel at all sure that I’m separating adequately the creative personal force that I’m deducing from physics from the God I believe in for other reasons. So perhaps I’d better come clean first about what those reasons are.
I’ve done little so far to define God. That’s intentional, because I think you already know more about God than I could ever tell you, even if you call yourself an atheist. I don’t want to offer a definition that would crowd out your intuitive knowledge and substitute something less true in its place.
Children soon form ideas of God, often with a strange ease. Atheists typically have some notion of who God is supposed to be. I think it’s more natural to believe in God than not to, and if the causes of disbelief can be removed, belief will happen naturally, without more evidence, because there was already plenty of evidence. It lay in the beauty and meaning and order of things. Perhaps one's inmost heart bears witness in a way even more fundamental than that.
Indeed, if I have to offer a proof of God’s existence, here’s the one I’ll choose. Look around you. Find some object of interest like a chair, a clock, or a tree. Take it in. Now look again. It’s still there! Why? Who sustained it in existence? It wasn’t me! I don’t know how to manage the basic existence of things. I don’t have that power. It wasn’t you either, was it? It must have been… God!
This probably sounds like a joke. Fine, I knew it would. But the point stands. There is no reason in mere logic that the world should keep existing. That it does, shows something deep about the nature of reality. It needs an explanation. God is an explanation. There aren’t really any other candidates.
But then, what do atheists think is the reason why the world goes on existing from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day? The laws of nature. Modern atheists tend to give the laws of nature some of the characteristics of God, seeing them as perfect and immutable, always existing, necessary, everywhere present and filling all things, givers of life, all-powerful. In a way, gravity and electromagnetism and e=mc^2 are their gods, or their substitutes for God.
Of course, the same question can be asked of the laws of nature that was asked of the chair: why do they go on? What sustains them in existence? You can ask the same thing of God, too, but theology has an answer: God is the necessary being, who must in His nature exist and cannot not exist, the foundation and source of all being, so He alone of all things needs no cause but Himself. That is a difficult but serious answer.
By contrast, the laws of nature, if you stop to think about it, are clearly not necessary or self-existing, and they might have been different. So they are not candidates for the foundation of all being in the way that God is. And so perhaps we can try to refine these thoughts into some proposition like the following:
Proposition A: There is a being that is the foundation of all being, necessarily existing in itself, which is the source of existence and sustains all other beings, including matter and energy and the laws of nature, in their existence. For the sake of argument, this being may be called “God.”
Now, you might not feel very confident about A. The reasoning that led us to it is a bit ineffable. The question to which it is the answer seems at once overwhelming and non-urgent. It’s hard to see how you would really settle it. Your first impulse might be to assign a moderate level of confidence to A being true, and then feel a bit helpless to move forward.
And what’s the alternative to A? I’ll articulate it like this:
Proposition ~A: There is no foundation of being.
It’s my intention that A and ~A, together, cover all the possibilities. Of course, it’s not obvious that that’s true. The words of A and ~A could be interpreted to leave logical room for alternatives to both. But assume that the extra words in A just clarify what “foundation of being” means, while ~A covers everything else.
Now let’s take the first argument from physics, and see if it strengthens your reasons for believing in A. The argument is that the Big Bang supports the creationist doctrine, the idea that the material universe was created by God.
Now if you believe in God anyway, that’s easy. The only question then is whether the universe was created in a temporal sense, with a moment of origin, or if it existed forever. And the Big Bang settles that: the universe has an origin, so if it depends on God as its foundation of being, then that’s when God began its being, i.e. created it. But here we don’t want to assume there’s a God, but rather to establish it.
So let’s start by formulating the Big Bang evidence thus:
Proposition B: The entire material universe originated at a specific point in space and time.
Is B evidence for A? Is the Big Bang evidence for God as the Big Bang causer? To answer that, we must first do our best to judge the values of:
P(B|A): the ex ante probability that B would be true, given A, that is, that if there is a God/foundation of being, He/it would have originated the entire material universe, Big Bang style, at a particular point in time.
P(B|~A): the ex ante probability that the material universe would have sprung into existence at a particular point in time if there is no foundation of being.
Now, these are very challenging questions for intuition to wrestle with. For what it’s worth, though, it seems to me that P(B|A) must be rather high, and P(B|~A) rather low. Of most things, we can ask, “When did it begin?” and get an answer, so it’s more plausible that this should be true of the material universe as well. And infinity seems to create logical problems. For example, if it takes sequoia trees 500 years to grow from seed, and there have always been sequoia trees, then when did the first sequoia seeds appear? Five hundred years before always? That doesn’t seem to make sense. But it also makes no sense to say that, in an eternal universe, the first sequoia trees must have appeared full grown because there was no time for them to grow from seed. You avoid these logical problems if the foundation of being originated the material universe a very long but still finite time ago. On the other hand, if there is no foundation of being, it seems to force the conclusion that matter and energy are necessary and self-existent, and therefore eternal. After all, how could they have originated at all if there is nothing to originate them? Is it conceivable that they could have sprung into existence by mere accident? What would that mean?
So let’s assign P(B|A)=90%, P(B|~A)=10%, and an initial P(A) of 50%. What does that imply about whether the Big Bang is evidence for God? Well:
P(A|B) = (90%*50%)/(90%*50%+10%*50%) = 90%
So using my intuitions at any rate, the Big Bang is evidence for God, in the attenuated sense of a foundation of being. So far, though, I don’t see it as necessarily evidence for a personal God. Merely to bring things into existence might be the work of some impersonal force or principle. But that brings us to the fine tuning argument.
The fine tuning argument does more than provide evidence that there is some kind of foundation of being. It provides evidence for a God who can imagine and execute plans and designs, and who in that sense resembles a person more than anything else that we know. The fine tuning of the universe is evidence for a personal God. To see why, let’s start with:
Proposition A’: There is a foundation of being, which has the traits of a person in the sense that it can imagine and execute plans and designs. This can be called a personal God.
The alternative to A’ is:
Proposition ~A’: There is no personal God.
The fact that is claimed to serve as evidence for A' is:
Proposition C: Many seemingly arbitrary features of nature, such as the initial mass and centrifugal momentum of the material in the universe immediately after the Big Bang, and the relative strengths of fundamental forces, happen to fall with extreme exactitude in such a way as to allow for the existence of stable complexity and of life in particular, such that if they were slightly different life could not have occurred. That is, there are “fine tuned.”
Next we need to assign some sort of intuitive probability to:
P(C|A'): the ex ante probability that C is true if A' is true, that is, that the universe would be fine tuned if there is a personal God.
P(C|~A'): the ex ante probability that C is true if A: is not true, that is, that the universe would be fine tuned if there is no personal God.
Now, P(C|A') seems likely to be rather high. To design a universe suitable for life seems like the sort of thing a personal God would be likely to do. By contrast, P(C|~A’) seems like it would have to be infinitesimally small. It’s extremely unlikely that the universe would be fine tuned by any such chance process as must be imagined in the absence of a personal God. Maybe P(C|A’)=80% and P(C|~A')=0.00001%.
Perhaps it seems unlikely at first that there is a personal God. Let the initial P(A’) be 10%. Then P(A’|C)=(80%*10%)/(80%*10%+0.00001%*90%)=99.9999%.
In other words, using reasonable intuitions about various prior probabilities, and applying Bayes’ Law, the existence of a personal God is established with virtual certainty from the observed fine tuning of the universe. And this has in fact been widely recognized as a straightforward prima facie conclusion from observed fine tuning. The case from fine tuning for a personal God is sufficiently compelling that a rather desperate hypothesis has been advanced in order avoid the, for some, unwelcome conclusion. Meet the “multiverse.”
It seems to be seriously held by some physicists, as far as I can tell, that there is a vast variety of universes other than the one we see. The one we see is fine tuned for life because of the “anthropic principle,” which is that an environment we inhabit is suited to our needs because otherwise we wouldn’t be here. The other universes exist, but the vast majority have no sentient life to observe them. Certainly we can’t observe them. They’re whole other systems of space-time, with different physical laws, and no communication with our universe. How, then, do we know that they exist? Because it would be too improbable that our universe could support life, if it were the only one. That the super-universe, or universe generator, or whatever, had such a lucky roll of the dice in getting a framework of natural laws suitable for life in our case shows that it must have had a great many tries.
Does that make sense?
The anthropic principle does sometimes validly apply, of course. Why is the Earth so well suited to the needs of life? Because of the anthropic principle. Many other planets are uninhabitable by life. Consequently, we’re not there to observe them. For planets, it’s true that many planets exist, and the one we live on is fine tuned for life because otherwise we wouldn’t be here. But the difference is that we can see those other planets, some with the naked eye, others with telescopes. So we believe in other planets based on clear observational evidence, not just rarefied theoretical guesswork.
If there are other universes, how many, and what kind? Do all conceivable universes exist? That claim at least would have a kind of completeness about it. But it leads straight back into the strange reductio ad absurdum of the “grue” problem. Is grass green, or grue? If all conceivable universes exist, then universes where grass is grue, which is certainly a conceivable state of affairs though very odd, must exist. And if they exist, we might be living in one. So this extreme version of the multiverse hypothesis, which has at least a certain simplicity about it, kills the possibility of inductive reasoning and therefore of science.
How about a multiverse hypothesis that claims all orderly universes exist? But what does “orderly” mean? And couldn’t universes with grue grass be orderly in many ways? Perhaps what would best suit advocates of the multiverse as a shield against the fine tuning argument for God would be a universe generator whose outputs vary only with respect to the parameters of our universe that happen to be fine tuned. Such a multiverse would be populated with universes that had different quantities of matter and initial momentum, and different relative strengths of the fundamental forces, but still had time, space, matter and energy. But it’s a bit suspicious that universes would vary only in ways that happen to be convenient for physicists.
Meanwhile, it’s a good moment to step back and notice something odd. Scientists sometimes emphasize the primacy of observation. Science is supposed to be grounded in evidence, in contrast with religion, which sometimes asks people to take things on faith. In one sense, science has been moving away from that ideal for some time, as it studies things inherently invisible, such as forces, or things too small to be seen. But some observation is still generally needed to establish a scientific concept. It might be quite indirect, and require a lot of interpretation, but evidence is necessary and decisive. Now, with the multiverse, vast claims are being advanced about things we can’t observe, and never could observe, even indirectly,. Such fanciful exercises hardly seem compatible with the spirit of science. There was a time when fans of science often mocked theologians for engaging in fine speculations about things not observable. Now the shoe is in the other foot!
Ultimately, the best answer to the multiverse may be to invoke the authority of intuition to dismiss it. A single universe is like green grass. The multiverse is like grue grass. Green grass is a single universe ruled by a Creator. It's a legitimate candidate for Bayesian confirmation. A multiverse of universes in which natural laws and quantities vary in just the ways needed to make fine tuning in one universe not prohibitively improbable is like grue grass. We can rule it out by intuition as excessively odd.
It’s a remarkable turnaround to be able to enlist the lance of physics to lead the charge for the Christian doctrine of creation. For much of the time since Isaac Newton, physics has been the bastion of a worldview which leaves God out. A law-governed world didn’t seem to need a God to rule it. For a little while, it seemed like whereas physics might undermine faith, biology would restore it, since life is clearly not rooted in chance, but exhibits rich evidence of design. Then in 1859, biology became hostile terrain too with Darwin’s Origin of Species. Biology continues to be the fortress from which attacks are made, but physics has turned rather friendly.
But of course, physics is still the basis for the ideology of Christianity’s chief modern rival, scientific materialism. Physics, for scientific materialists, supplies the complete inventory of what there is, and lays down laws that can never be violated. Christianity has no quarrel with physics per se, and Christian physicists investigate the laws of nature in order to understand how God has ordered the world to work most of the time. But for Christians, physics does not describe all that there is, and its laws can be overridden.