This book by Barbara Brown Taylor really surprised me. Most people are either left brain types or right brain types. Early in our process of education we split off those people that are geared for logical thinking and those that are more geared to write the great American novel.

Taylor is such a great master of words that I was surprised to see her tackle the likes of evolutionary biology, Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity, quantum physics, and chaos theory. I’ve always been fascinated by science, but most books on the subjects suffer from a horrible case of underdeveloped right brain functionality. I was very impressed with this short book that finds a wonderful balance of logic and poetry. She hits the high points of these major scientific areas without boring the reader to tears.

Religion has often been forced into the role of competition with science but that shouldn’t be the case. The two are really built on the same concept of searching for truth. If we attempt to turn the Bible or any set of religious teachings into our science textbook then we will have ruined our ability to think rationally. If we attempt to use science as our religious inspiration then we will end up completely uninspired.

“Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” – Albert Einstein

From the beginning of time man has always used God as the explanation for the unexplainable. Floods, earthquakes, fires, famine, and even a victory or defeat in battle became the acts of God that punished or rewarded our behavior. As those things became more explainable we relinquished God to be the smaller and smaller “gaps” in our understanding. A major emphasis of the book is revealing how the scientific discoveries in the last several centuries have influenced our religious endeavors. What we learned about the universe during this time period is that there seemed to be a number of very dependable laws of nature that made up a structured machine-like universe. The idea of mystery seemed to be vanishing and our image of God evolved (pardon the pun) into the master machinist pushing the right buttons to keep everything from falling apart. Religion feared these laws because each one seemed to threaten the image of God that man had created. To combat those threats religion attempted to create it’s own set of laws/doctrines to protect its identity. Science keeps stumbling onto a new paradigm shift that sends religion back to the drawing board.

The truth is that religion is always shaped by the physics of the day and the theology of the faith we all grew up with was built on the absolute mindedness of 19th and 20th century science. Modern physics is all about absolute laws of nature. Einstein’s theories of relativity had little to do with being relative and everything to do with an absolute formula for the energy in mass. Even the more recent Chaos theory has more to do with the limits of randomness rather than the mystery of the unknown.

Einstein spent the last part of his life trying to disprove quantum physics, which is an attempt to explain why sub-atomic particles seem to completely ignore all the laws of nature that we have grown attached too. He said, “God doesn’t roll dice” in an attempt to again create another formula that explains what still seems to be unexplainable. He died unsuccessful at finding the formula for the strange relationship of particles that seemed to be affected or somehow externally connected. He called this phenomenon “spooky action at a distance”.

Quantum physics may end up explaining exactly how God operates the machine from a distance, or it may explain how God is not in control at all. Instead, I like the idea that maybe every particle in the universe is actually a part of God interacting together the way a heart interacts with blood or the way plants interact with sunlight. Maybe everything that we can see with the strongest telescope is just a simple cell or at most an organ in the mystery we call God.

“Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes and heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.” - Rabbi Abraham Heschel (Jewish Theologian 1907 –1972)