I believe in God, the Father almighty

My six-year-old son came back from school—he is in Grade R—telling me that the teacher wanted to know if they knew who created the world.

“And how did you answer?” I asked  getting interested. “I told her it was God. And she asked who created God, and what was there before God,” he replied. “What did you tell her?” “I told her God kind of created himself by himself.”

I explained to him that there was never a time when God was not, since time itself is created by God who exists in the eternal moment we can call now. And I passed my kudos to the wonderful catechists of our parish who teach our children simple wisdom. But the talk left me thinking about the things Christ said are revealed to the babes and the meek but hidden to the clever and the shrewd.

The categorical mistake of atheists such as Richard Dawkins and recently deceased Christopher Hitchens is to assume that God belongs to the laws of nature, and therefore within the realm of, say, science, to investigate and test. They want to make God an ordinary part of the natural world. Failing to find God there, they conclude that he does not exist.

But God is not and cannot be part of nature. God is the reason for nature, the explanation why things are, an answer to existence, not part of existence itself.  We can say God is a non-physical being of consciousness and intelligence or wisdom, who creates the universe for the sake of distinctive values that the universe generates.

These atheists are the spawn of Auguste Comte who in the 19th century propagated the idea of a progress of humanity through three states of thought—religious, metaphysical, and positive or scientific. The final stage supersedes the others, he said, and declared that therefore science has rendered belief in God obsolete.

Stephen Jay Gould, leaning more on Kant, in our era, argued that there could be no conflict between science and religion, because science deals only with facts and religion only with values.

The conversation with my son made me think also about time as a dimension. We know now that quantum physics has decisively rejected Comte’s philosophical proposal that human sense-observations provide the ultimate truth about objective reality. They more or less vindicate Kant’s alternative proposal, that our senses only reveal reality as it appears to us.

Reality in itself is quite different, and is accessible only through mathematical descriptions that are increasingly removed from observation or pictorial imagination. For instance, how do you picture a probability-wave in Hilbert space?

It is now almost commonplace in quantum physics to speak of many space-times, or of this space-time as a 10 or 11 dimensional reality that dissolves into topological foam below the Planck length. This is a long way from the sensationalism of Hume and Comte, and from the older materialism that insists on locating every possible being within this space-time.

Some modern physicists routinely speak of realities beyond space-time (for example, quantum fluctuations in a vacuum from which this space-time originates). And some physicists, such as Henry Stapp, Eugene Wigner, and John von Neumann, speak of consciousness as an ultimate and irreducible element of reality, the basis of the physical as we know it, not its unanticipated by-product.

So it is simply untrue that modern physics rules out the possibility of non-physical entities. And it is untrue that science has established a set of inflexible laws so tightly constraining and universally dominating that they exclude the possibility of other forms, including perhaps non-physical forms, of causal influence that we may not be able to measure or predict.

It is more accurate to say that fundamental laws of nature are seen by many physicists as approximations to an open, holistic, and flexible reality, as we encounter it in relatively isolated and controlled conditions.

This is the first in Mphuthumi Ntabeni’s monthly 12-part series reflecting on the Apostles’ Creed, intended to prepare us for the Year of Faith.