Spiritual Lessons from Biology

Bosons ~ The Triune Omnipresence of God C.S. Lewis once, said, “If [Christianity] were true, what it tells us would be bound to be difficult—at least as difficult as modern physics.”(1) Christianity makes many claims about God’s essence that are difficult.  For instance, there is the claim that God is everywhere.  His omnipresence pervades all of time.  We also read of the homousius , in which the Christ who stepped into time can be considered both fully man and fully God.  Then there is the notion of God’s ontology as three persons in one being.  How can we conceptualize a triune God whose being encapsulates the space-time continuum? These ideas are challenging.  Yet, as Lewis argues, their difficulty is no reason to reject them.  We observe many things in modern physics that boggle the mind, and in much the same way. One example is a particle called a boson.  Most elementary particles in the quantumsphere move around nicely on the playground....

       I was returning home after a long walk.  The river smelled fresh because of the rain, and a pungent sweet aroma of autumn wafted down from the forest canopy.  As I turned a corner, the path led me back to the roadside.  The gentle sounds of the river fell away, overcome by the swoosh swoosh of traffic.  A chill descended through the ether as the sun sank low upon the horizon.  I crested a hill.  Something colorful on the sidewalk caught my eye.  A beautiful butterfly!  It was a female Red-spotted Purple.  I picked it up.  She fluttered her wings a bit.  She was very weak, barely moving, and one of her wings was torn.  She’d clearly been trampled.  I carried her home, in the palm of my hand.  When I arrived back, I mixed up some sugar water and filled a cotton ball with it.  I set the butterfly’s feet on the ball so she could taste the sugar.  She moved her head a bit, but she was t...

I love watching a flock of birds in motion.  It’s as if the mass is one giant organism, blobbing around above the buildings.  Sometimes I try to pick out just two as they move through the sky in perfect time with each other.  As one turns left, the other is already turning.  It’s hard to tell which of the birds is following the other one.  They are so in-tune with the air currents, it looks like they are moving at the same time.  But if we were to record a video of them and slow the frames enough, we’d be able to see a time gap in the movements of each individual.  Fascinatingly, some bodies in nature move at the exact same time and in the exact same way due to a behavior called quantum entanglement.  Quantum entanglement sounds a bit like sci fi at first pass.  It’s a behavior that even Einstein was skeptical of, calling it “spooky action at a distance”(1).  Basically, two particles can be inextricably linked in such a way that the prop...