Beautiful

“…He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NIV)

“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 sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
Sir Isaac Newton

The speed of information acquisition is staggering. The Internet has led us to unimaginable heights in the assimilation of knowledge. Huge “clouds” of processing power, available to a select group at the end of the last century, have been unleashed on the public as we near the end of the first decade of the 21st Century. Can one really imagine what the intellectual giants like Copernicus, Galileo, Da Vinci, Newton, and Einstein would have been able to accomplish had they leashed the processing power that the modern man now has on his “smart phone”? The potential would have been enormous. How quickly would Edison have been able to develop a working light bulb, or the Wright Brothers have been able to make a quantum leap in the development of the airplane? Man now seems to be situated upon an information precipice looking across the gorge trying to develop the next span in an effort to further expand his knowledge base. We seem to be upon a never ending journey to uncover knowledge. Each step opens new horizons and new universes in which to explore.

Many of humanity’s greatest thinkers developed their greatest theories because of their devotion to their religious beliefs. Many did so in an effort to uncover the structure underlying Creation. Galileo was a well known and pious Roman Catholic. His castigation by the church grieved him, but did not dissuade him from continuing his quest to reveal the divine behind the scenes working out the creative process. Nor did the prevailing Aristotelian theorists of the church have the least impact upon Galileo’s quest. Galileo knew, as did Augustine before him, that “all Truth is of Him who is the Truth”. Galileo’s observations concerning the movement of the various planets around the star of our solar system provided a basis for a structure of the universe. And where there is structure there is a basis for belief of one who structures, a planner, a creator, a God. This brought life to the Psalmists statement that “the heavens declare the glory of God”.

Copernicus, who gave the foundational ideas to Galileo’s heliocentric theory of the earth’s movement around the sun, was also a devout Catholic whose ideas, formulated well before those of Galileo, proved a valuable foundation for the Gregorian calendar released some seventy years after Copernicus’ death. Yet the two were hailed by historians as devout in their beliefs. Copernicus even earned a doctorate in Canon Law, that law by which the Catholic Church measured all things. To treat these two heralds of the Enlightenment as secular scientists would be an egregious error as calling Magellan the first mate of a New York harbor garbage barge. These two men understood their science in light of their Christian faith. And they were not the only ones.

Isaac Newton, the wrongly proclaimed grand master of the Priory of Sion in Dan Brown’s novel the Da Vinci Code, actually wrote more on theology than he did on physics. His contributions to both science and theology cannot be understated. But underlying all of Newton’s work was his admiration of God. Some of the most oft quoted lines from Newton were, “[the] most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being”. In Newton’s mind there was no line of separation between natural philosophy (the study of science) and theology (the study of God). Natural philosophy, he would say, was just on a recovery mission after the Fall of Man as described in Genesis. It was this act, Newton believed, that separated man from the issue of all Truth – both scientific and theological. As a matter of fact, Newton was of a group of scholars who believed that all natural philosophical knowledge was known to man prior to the Fall. Man, according to Newton, had perfect knowledge of all things earthly prior to his separation from the Creator. Natural philosophy was a method of recovering of that which was lost to man. It is no wonder then that Newton uttered the words above as he described his life quest as an unending shell hunt on the shore of an ocean replete with undiscovered Truth.

South Carolinian, Charles Townes, credited with discovery of the laser beam, believes that both science and religion are on two parallel paths that will ultimately converge into one reality. His understanding of faith led this Nobel Prize Laureate to be awarded the Templeton Prize in 2005 for his work describing the convergence of science and faith. Townes believes that the nature of scientific discovery and religious discovery have similar characteristics – much akin to the process of mediation. One of his notable discoveries, MASER theory, was uncovered in what he describes as a moment of revelation on a park bench in Washington, DC. That moment, he has compared to both Moses and the Buddha experiencing a moment of enlightenment. Townes has been quoted as stating, “Science is an effort to understand what the universe is made of and how it works; religion is an attempt to understand the meaning and purpose of the universe. Understanding how the universe works should give us a good deal of information about what its purpose and meaning is. Science sheds more and more light.” Townes, like many before him, is trying to find resolution between this religious belief and his scientific inquisitiveness. Newton, Copernicus, and Galileo were on the same path.

In many ways, the modern Christian has been silenced in the marketplace of ideas because we are seen as squelchers of knowledge. It is our duty, as Newton expressed, to uncover that which was covered by the Fall of Man – uninhibited Truth as God reveals it to us. We should not be seen by the world as mufflers of scientific discovery, but as those who actively engage the rational minds of today in an effort to understand its meaning and purpose. We should engage new scientific ideas and infuse meaning and purpose, as Townes would hold. In this way we can fulfill the words of the Hebrew philosopher Ecclesiastes: God “has made everything beautiful in its time”.