“Motion is the act of a being in potency insofar as it is in potency.” - Aristotle, Physics Book III, 201a10-11

In his famous First Way of proving God’s existence, St. Thomas Aquinas says, “It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion.”¹ But, are things really in motion? Most people would think that motion in the world is too obvious to doubt. Yet, some, based on theories of modern physics, claim that physical change in the universe is actually impossible. Change or motion—meaning that “this” becomes “that” with some persisting reality exhibiting those before and after qualities—simply does not exist. Like Parmenides, those denying motion claim that our dynamically changing, evolving world is merely one grand illusion.

Despite such claims that change is unreal, philosopher of physics Tim Maudlin, well known for studying entangled quantum particles, insists, “Physics has discovered some really strange things about the world, but it has not discovered that change is an illusion.”

In his book, The Trouble with Physics (reprint edition, 2007), theoretical physicist Lee Smolin puts his finger on why physics is prone to make the mistake of saying motion and time are unreal: “…Descartes and Galileo both made a most wonderful discovery: You could draw a graph, with one axis being space and the other being time. A motion through space then becomes a curve on the graph. In this way, time is represented as if it were another dimension of space. Motion is frozen, and a whole history of constant motion and change is presented to us as something static and unchanging.”² In other words, the static mathematical abstractions of modern physics automatically tend to omit the very starting point they presume, namely, the reality of objective motion or change.

In a new book, Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science (2017), philosopher Edward Feser points to the incoherence of physicists denying the reality of motion when their scientific method presupposes it. For example, even the simplest experiment requires watching for movement of a needle on a dial:

“When the needle moves from its rest position it loses one attribute and gains another (namely a particular spatial location), and it is one and the same needle that loses and gains these attributes and one and the same dial of which the needle is a component. If there were no gain or loss of attributes, or if the needle or dial were not the same, the observation would be completely useless.”³

Similarly, physicists presume real physical causation takes place through time with ontologically-continuous physical agents causing the continuous coming-to-be of ontologically-continuous effects. For example, the same rocket engine causes the progressive ascent of the same spacecraft into orbit. This is simply how natural science has always understood the nature of physical causation operating in the real world. That a physical theory should be interpreted as contradicting this universal scientific presupposition defies understanding.

Even if change or motion were simply a subjective illusion or a memory function product, it is still immediately recognized and judged by the intellect for precisely what it is, that is, a change. The intellect knows the nature of being and forms a concept of being that begets the universal certitude of the principle of non-contradiction – a truth about reality that scientists absolutely accept, but have no scientific way of explaining. In like fashion, the intellect judges the nature of change or motion as real when immediately experienced – no matter its size or type. Whether it is extramental or intramental change makes no difference. Static experiences alone would never beget the concept of motion, since non-motion contradicts motion.

One of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20^th century, Karl Popper, says of the experience of change within consciousness, “It could not be explained away by a theory of the successive rising into our consciousness of time slices which in some sense coexist; for this kind of ‘rising into consciousness’ would have precisely the same character as that succession of changes which the theory tries to explain away.” Worse yet for materialists who deny change, if all that exists is material, then change’s reality within consciousness means that change is real in the physical universe.

We have a concept of change solely because we have encountered a reality – subjective or not – that actually contained motion. That alone explains how we even have such a concept. Yes, we form concepts of imaginary things. But, they are always composed of elements taken from real objects, as a unicorn is composed of concepts taken from real horses and real horns. Since the concept of change itself is primary, it must be based on an actually existing nature.

Nor could motion or change be experienced as such unless both the “before” and “after” of the change is present to the same knower. This fulfills change’s meaning, since “this” becomes “that” with something (the knower) persisting to both the before and after.

Therefore, change or motion is objectively real.

If some physicists cannot reconcile the immediately given reality of motion or change, as defined here, with their speculative inferences drawn from the special theory of relativity, their speculations must be wrong on that point.

Einstein’s special relativity thought experiment assumes a train moving past a standing observer. Observer, of what? Observer that the train is in motion! The observer knows it is motion because the train he observes is in diverse positions relative to his own position. So, for him there is a before and after with himself, the observer, being present to both – which fulfills the Aristotelian meaning of motion. Clearly, no speculative interpretation of special relativity can contradict the reality of the very motion Einstein’s thought experiment presupposes in its proof.

Either Einstein made a mistake in one of his assumptions, or else, one of several philosophical interpretations of special relativity compatible with motion must be correct.⁴ In any case, the immediately given reality of motion or change trumps any subsequently developed theory that denies its objective reality.

“Quidquid movetur ab alio movetur.” Whatever is moved is moved by another. What this famous principle really means is this: Whatever is in motion is being moved here and now by another. While motion is mostly thought of in terms of local motion – motion from place to place, any type of change can be called motion.

As seen above, motion does not mean simply one thing replacing another, like frames in a motion picture film. Rather, it means one thing becoming somehow different with some persisting reality connecting the before and after. For example, consider the same knower experiencing successive images, or, the same body moving from one position to a different position relative to some point of reference.

Aristotle defines motion as the act of a being in potency insofar as it is in potency. Easier to grasp is this description: the progressive actualization of a potency. For purposes of describing motion, potency is what is able to be, but is not; act is that which is fully real or completed. Strictly speaking, motion means local motion, a change of place. More broadly, it can mean any kind of change, any passage of something from potency to act—sometimes even instantaneously.

For a non-technical macroscopic example, consider water being heated from room temperature to boiling. Motion is not maintaining the water at 72 degrees, but progressively adding heat so as to constantly raise the temperature until 212 degrees is reached. If the “raising” stops at, say, 200 degrees, the motion stops, even though the heat must be maintained to stay at that point. Thus, the motion is not the act already achieved, namely, the 200 degrees, but the act that is achieving the potency yet to be fulfilled, that is, 212 degrees.

The reason everything in motion needs a mover is simple. A thing cannot reduce itself from potency to act and that is exactly what is happening to the thing in motion: it is being reduced from potency to act. Yet, “reduction” here does not mean less being, but more being!

A thing in motion is gaining new perfections of existence every moment it continues to move or change. Since a being cannot give to itself that which it lacks, something else must be giving to it that which it lacks, but is gaining incrementally.

Yet, how do we know this reasoning is correct? While it is easy to defend the principle in terms of the standard Thomistic analysis of potency and act, many today do not fully appreciate the full force of such reasoning.

Here is a different way to see the objective certitude of the principle that whatever is in motion must be being moved by another, one simply based on “the natural metaphysics of human intelligence.”

Everyone knows and uses the metaphysical principle of non-contradiction, that is, that nothing can both be and not be at the same time and in the same way. Even though materialist scientists cannot prove this principle or show how its certitude arises, they have no honest doubts about its universal truth and application. This is because the human intellect, once it forms the concept of being, sees clearly the necessary truth of its application to all possible things.

So too, the fact that you cannot get something from absolutely nothing is universally accepted—after you eliminate claims of getting particles from quantum vacuums that turn out to be something after all. Once it is understood that the philosopher means really nothing, every honest mind assents to the truth that from nothing, nothing comes to be.

What has this to do with things in motion? Simply this: a thing in motion is gaining new properties of being it did not previously possess. As such, with respect to those properties it did not have, it is non-being; nothing at all. Since nothing cannot beget something without extrinsic causal assistance, a being in motion must be getting this new being from something other than itself, that is, from a mover.

For a thing to reduce itself from potency to act would be for it to be giving itself the very perfections of existence that it lacks. This is equivalent to having something that is non-being in a certain respect accounting for the coming-to-be of the selfsame being that it does not have. Being coming from non-being is impossible and absurd.

The full force of this principle is not understood until it is realized that it applies even to bodies already in a “state” of motion—a motion “explained” by most moderns simply by appeal to Newton’s principle of inertia. Even those who defend the principle that motion requires a mover sometimes retreat to applying it solely to cases in which a change in inertial motion occurs. Thus, to accelerate or decelerate an object in motion is seen to require a mover, but that the object merely stays in its present “state” of motion is considered fully explained by inertia.

Part of the problem is that it may not be clear as to exactly which body is in motion, since all motion appears relative—so that if A moves relative to B, we cannot tell which body is actually undergoing the motion. In fact, it could be both. But it really does not matter at all, since all we need to know is that a change of distance or relative position between two or more bodies occurs.

Just as I have shown in a prior Strange Notions article how many confuse physical antecedents with real causes of present effects, so too, acceptance of Newton’s first law of motion as full explanation for the phenomenon of inertial motion causes many to fail to see the further need of metaphysical explanation. Modern science correctly describes the phenomenon under consideration: a body in motion tends to remain in motion. But mere description is not identical to giving an adequate explanation as to why this phenomenon occurs at all.

Calling motion a “state” does not render it static. All motion still requires the continuous reduction of potency to act. And since nothing can give to itself the new perfections or qualities of existence that it lacks, some extrinsic reason or cause must account for the coming-to-be of those changes.

This applies just as much to bodies in a “state” of inertial motion as it does to objects that are accelerating or decelerating. Nor does it matter which object is considered to be in motion, since any change in spatial relation or any other kind of relation between things entails a real change in something—and that requires some extrinsic agent or mover to complete the explanation of what is going on—to account for the “new being” that is manifested, even if that new being is merely a change of relative position. Some outside agent must exist to account for the coming-to-be of the new existential qualities manifested by these new spatial relationships.

Newton’s first law of motion is not an exception to the principle that whatever is in motion requires a mover here and now continuously providing the new modes of existence manifested by continuing change or motion.

Of course, local motion is only one type of motion, but it is one of central occupation to physical science. The principle in question applies to every conceivable type of change, not only of local motion, but also to changes of quality, relation, size, disposition, time, and so forth. It can even be applied to spiritual changes that entail no gradual change. That is, even an instantaneous change by which a potency is actualized requires an extrinsic agent to effect the change, as when a fresh insight suddenly “pops” into one’s mind.

Much more can be said, but this should be enough to demonstrate that the philosophical principle that whatever is in motion is moved by another is absolutely certain and universally true.

This principle is not merely a principle of natural philosophy, but of metaphysics as well—since motion, which is the progressive actualization of a potency, entails that something is gaining new qualities of being. A being in motion must be getting this new being from something other than itself.

All of this shows that this principle is a principle of being, just like the principle of non-contradiction. As such, just like the concept of being and the principle of non-contradiction, it applies to all beings and can be used in an analogical manner, even possibly to reason from finite being to infinite being in a transcendent fashion. This, of course, foreshadows a role for this principle well beyond the topic at hand.

The classical proofs for God’s existence, particularly St. Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways, employ the notion of causality – both efficient and final. In that context, many misunderstandings arise concerning the true metaphysical meaning of the principle of causality.

This article will assume the validity of the metaphysical first principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason, which were established as true in my previous Strange Notions article on the first principles – and will not be reargued herein. These principles will be employed as instruments with which to explore the genuine meaning of causality.

No modern philosopher has had more impact on the understanding of causality than David Hume. Hume conceived causality as an habitual association of mental impressions, arising largely through constant conjunction of previous experiences – connected through contiguity or temporal succession.¹ Since induction alone could never assure the necessity of such associations, he maintained that the “law of causality” cannot be rationally proven. Influenced by Hume, modern science translates causality to a formula, such as “given event A, event B will necessarily and subsequently follow.” Effectively, this becomes a matter of predictability. Since event B can always be interfered with, strict causality can never be assured.

While Thomist metaphysicians would not accept the idealistic implications of Hume’s epistemology, they would agree that finite causes cannot be guaranteed to produce any given effect for much the same reason.

Still, the metaphysical principle of causality starts from the other end: from the effect – and reasons back to the cause. The universally true metaphysical principle of sufficient reason states that every being must have a sufficient reason for its being or coming-to-be. Logical division tells us that this reason must be found either within the being in question (intrinsically) or not within that being (extrinsically). If a being is not its own sufficient reason, it necessarily follows that something else, called a “cause,” must be its reason.

Thus, an effect is a being whose sufficient reason is not intrinsic. A cause is an extrinsic sufficient reason. The principle of causality states that every effect necessarily requires a cause. The principle of causality is simply a subset of sufficient reason – that part of it that deals with beings that are not their own sufficient reason, and thus, need a cause. From this, it follows that an Uncaused First Cause, namely God, would have no need for a prior cause, since he would be his own sufficient reason for being.

But what if we have something that partially explains itself? In that case, the formula is elucidated by saying that to the extent that a being does not explain itself, it needs to have an extrinsic reason, or cause, to account for whatever it does not explain of itself. For example, while water’s nature may explain why it is wet, it does not explain why it is hot. Thus, its heat, which is extrinsic to its nature, must be explained by some extrinsic agent, such as a hot stove. In sum, adding both intrinsic reasons to extrinsic reasons, the totality of the being in question must be fully explained (whether all such reasons are fully known or not).

Moreover, just as a reason must be sufficient, a cause must be proportionate to its effect. You cannot have something that is totally dependent, and yet, is adequately explained by a cause that accounts for only part of its effect’s existence.

Thanks to David Hume, we are used to thinking of a cause as something that invariably precedes its effect in temporal sequence, just as we expect that parents come before their children. This leads people to think of the causal regresses in St. Thomas’ Five Ways in terms of a series of causes going back in time. But this is entirely wrong.

The meaning of an effect is measured in terms of its being existentially dependent upon its cause. Simply put, you cannot remove an extrinsic sufficient reason (cause) on which something depends, and still expect the effect to continue to be. St. Thomas affirms this principle many times, as when he says “… with the cessation of the cause, the effect also ceases….”² Or again, “…removing a cause is to remove that of which it is a cause.”³

Since the logic of this principle flows so immediately from that of sufficient reason, one might think that no confusion could arise as to its use, especially in the proofs for God’s existence. Still, in practice, the principle appears often badly understood, despite its critical role in such demonstrations. Thus, we see endless arguments as to whether causal chains can go back in time to infinity, or whether the world must have had a temporal beginning – all of which are entirely irrelevant to the actual proofs, at least those of Thomas Aquinas.

Thomist metaphysicians usually mark this immediate dependence of effect upon cause by saying that the cause must be simultaneous with its effect. Still, many people remain confused about the proper application of this principle to practical examples.

Consider the following scenario: Someone uses dynamite to remove a tree stump, taking care to leave the scene before the explosion. How does “simultaneity” work here? How does taking away the cause always take away the effect?

First, the dynamiter must light the match to light the fuse. He rubs the match over sandpaper to cause the heat needed to start the reaction between the oxidizing and reducing agents in the head of the match. Sometimes the match does not light because the friction fails to generate enough heat to start the reaction. When the match stops running over the sandpaper (cause), the heat stops (effect). So he tries again. This time the heat causes the chemicals in the head of the match to initiate their mutual causation on each other, resulting in an exothermic reaction of fire. But sometimes the oxidizing and reducing agents are consumed before the carbon in the wood of the match catches fire. The match fizzles out. When the mutual agents were exhausted (cause), the incipient fire ceased (effect).

But, let us assume that the match head fire reaches the kindling point of the wood in the match and the match ignites. What then keeps it burning, since the match head is now exhausted? It is the mutual agency of the carbon in the wood with the oxygen in the air, causing the burning of the match – a process that continues only as long as there is sufficient wood and oxygen to causally interact. Then, the match is put to the end of the fuse. If it ignites, the black powder in the fuse burns with the oxygen in the air as long as there is powder to burn and no longer. If the fuse is exhausted before the dynamite is ignited, it simply goes out and nothing happens. When the cause ceases causing, the effect ceases.

Finally, the dynamite goes off, creating a massive explosion that removes the tree stump. But why does not the explosive force go to infinity? How does the dynamiter know how much dynamite to use? He can in fact calculate the amount of explosive to use in order to cause the desired effect – knowing that for every gram molecular weight of the explosive agents he will almost instantly produce 22.4 liters of gasses, thus creating the powerful, but predictably limited, desired effect. When the cause ceases causing, the effect ceases.

Yet, was not the person who lit the dynamite the true cause of the later explosion? Yes, but in a different order of causation than the physical one that I have described in detail. He is the cause as a moral agent, using intelligence to oversee the entire causal process. His physical causation ended when he put the lighted match to the fuse. But his moral responsibility for the final explosion remains after the explosion itself. He is not physically able to remove the stump with his own muscles, but he can intelligently use the physical forces of nature to do so.

In every moment of this detailed description, the universal causal principle was upheld. Every time the physical cause ceased causing its direct effect ceased being effected.

Proper understanding of exactly what a cause is actually causing proves no exceptions to the causal rule. But I use this complex physical “case study” to show how easily one could make the mistake of thinking that “the cause is gone, but the effect remains.” At every moment, careful understanding will show that present effects are explained solely by present, not past, causes. And yes, the physical remains of the blast are sustained, not by the earlier causes of coming-to-be, but by the physical structure of the resulting wood chips, the ground holding them up, while gravity holds them down, and the rest of operative physical and metaphysical causes presently effecting their continued existence in the manner in which they are.

The universal validity of the principle of simultaneity in causation is derived from the principle of sufficient reason, and so it applies to all being, both material and spiritual. Still, I have offered careful explanation of a physical scenario, since most misunderstandings about causation arise from physical examples in which it appears, superficially, that the cause precedes its effect in time – a mistake apparently made even by Hume.

Still, does not Einstein’s special theory of relativity prove that objective simultaneity is illusory? As philosopher Dr. Edward Feser points out, causation that concerns the same event in the same place – such as removing that tree stump, renders irrelevant an objection based on judgments made by different observers in diverse spatial locations.⁴

While Thomists usually insist upon “simultaneity” between cause and effect, a more exact expression of the causality principle is that the effect is immediately dependent upon its proper cause, which is a cause directly ordered to a specific effect. “Simultaneity” is a concept properly predicated of things in the physical world, since they exist in time.

This principle applies, not only to the physical world, but to the spiritual world as well, since its universal and transcendental character arises from its nature as a law of existence itself – just like the other metaphysical first principles. Clearly, things that no longer exist or have no immediate impact on the effect, cannot remedy its existential dependency. Only a true and immediately acting proper cause can.

For the above reasons, every effect requires an immediate, proportionate, and proper cause. Such causation is the focus of St. Thomas’ Five Ways.

Now that LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravity-wave Observatory) scientists have published their research in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters, the media is abuzz with the news of gravitational waves. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this announcement. To begin with, gravitational waves were (until now) the only major prediction of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity that still lacked observational evidence. Because LIGO’s measurements align precisely with Einstein’s calculations, they provide further validation for his theory, which has served as the foundation of large-scale physics for a century now. Moreover, gravitational wave astronomy has vast potential to provide new and important data on black holes, galactic structure, and even the formation of the universe.

There are a number of popular articles that provide an overview of how the LIGO team detected the gravitational waves, and MIT has posted a very good video:

The key monitoring devices are two interferometers; one located in Hanford, Washington and one 1,865 miles away in Livingston, Louisiana. (Gravitational wave observatories need a distant twin to validate that local vibrations are not mistaken for actual wave signals.) Each interferometer is an extremely fine-tuned measuring devices with the ability to detect minute variations in received timing between two laser beams that travel up and back perpendicular vacuum chambers.

Because of the constancy of the speed of light, the only thing that could alter the round-trip travel time of the laser beams is an expansion or contraction of space-time itself (as Einstein predicted). In normal operations both beams complete the round-trip simultaneously, but if a gravitational wave ripples through, then the arrival times of the two laser beams will be slightly offset. To learn more about how the interferometers work, I recommend this page on the CalTech LIGO website.

In the General Theory of Relativity, the measurement and geometry of space and time vary according to the mass-energy density in a particular region. This has been verified many times but, as I mentioned above, one prediction remained to be verified—the rippling of the measure of space and time (caused by a disturbance in the space-time continuum) such as might be produced by a collision of two super dense, super massive bodies or a supernova.

In this case the disturbance was the result of a cataclysmic collision and merging of two black holes located about 1.3 billion light years from earth. The gravitational wave from this spectacular event reached the Livingston interferometer on September 14, 2015. Seven milliseconds later (traveling at the speed of light) it hit the Hanford site. Like ripples on a pond, ripples in space-time subside as they propagate, and by the time the wave reached the interferometers its frequency was extremely weak. Fortunately, the two locations had been recently upgraded to increase their level of sensitivity, and because of this were able to detect this “whisper of a wave”. The measurements at Hanford and Livingston were identical and precisely as would be predicted, giving us a remarkable confirmation of Einstein’s General Theory, as well as a penetrating look into the dynamics and structure of black holes—particularly in black hole collisions and merges.

Now that we are reasonably sure that gravitational waves exist (i.e., the rippling of the space-time continuum does occur), we may be able to get further insights into the very early conditions of the universe. One of the most significant predictions of the contemporary Big Bang model is universal inflation—a super acceleration of the space-time continuum that occurred almost immediately after the Big Bang. If such a period of inflation occurred, we would expect to detect indications of gravitational waves in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation (this is the ubiquitous thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang that was discovered by two Bell Labs researchers in 1964.)

One of the exciting things about LIGO’s discovery is that it gives new momentum to the search for gravitational waves in the CMB. In 2014, scientists working with the South Pole based BICEP2 telescope announced that they had made such a discovery, but later data from the Keck Array Telescope (also located at the South Pole) and the Plank satellite indicated that those readings were either partially or completely caused by the effects of intergalactic stardust. A more refined BICEP3 telescope is now operational and probing the CMB for ripples. LIGO’s confirmation of the existence of gravity waves increases confidence that scientists will be able to detect similar Big Bang induced gravity waves in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation—which in turn will help verify initial universal inflation.

The significance of this discovery is vast indeed. Gravitational waves offer the potential to learn much more about the properties of our universe. Moreover, they may allow us to look even further back in time—to those first moments immediately after the Big Bang. We await the results of further discoveries to peek not only into the formation of super black holes and galaxies but also into the formation of our universe—and perhaps even into the advent of physical reality itself.

This article was co-written by Fr. Robert Spitzer, President of the Magis Center of Reason and Faith, and Joseph G. Miller, the Executive Director of the Magis Center.

 
 
(Image credit: LIGO)

The Question

 
In the year 587 BCE, the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and brought many of the Jews back home as captives. Among them was the prophet Ezekiel. During this dark period of Israel’s history, God promised Ezekiel that Israel would rise again. We can read about it in the Book of Ezekiel, where God leads His prophet out to a battlefield in a valley, strewn with the dry, dusty skeletons of Jerusalem’s fallen army. There, God makes Ezekiel a strange request: He tells him to command the bones to live again. Ezekiel does as God says (telling his silent audience to “Hear the word of the Lord!”), and as his voice echoes through the valley, the earth begins to shake. The scattered bones reassemble themselves, and are covered with knotted lines of sinew. Over them grow new layers of flesh, skin, and hair. The breath of God, carried by the wind, blows over the bodies, and just as breath animated Adam, so too do the rebuilt bodies lying on the dust of the battlefield rise up, awake. By the power of God, “a great and immense army” now stands on its feet. Israel will rise again (Ez. 37:1-14).

The Bible offers many other examples of death and resurrection, written in the centuries following Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones. There is the resurrection of Lazarus (John 11:38-44), the dead saints who emerged from their tombs at the hour of Jesus’ death (Matt. 27:52), and of course Jesus himself (Mark 16:9, John 20:14). These are all easy enough for us to picture in our minds; Lazarus and Jesus were both dead for only a very short time, their bodies bound up securely in folds of linen. Though Lazarus’ family had feared a stench when Jesus asked that his tomb be opened up, we can still imagine some process reversing his dead state or somehow rejuvenating him. The same goes for the dead arising in the tombs in St. Matthew’s gospel; though perhaps dead for many years, their bodies had remained undisturbed in their tombs until the day of Jesus’ death. And the same is true for the bones in Ezekiel's vision: Though the dead men Ezekiel saw being raised up were nothing but dust and dried bone, the remains of those soldiers slain on that battlefield remained (more or less) together.

The Challenge

 
Christianity is predicated on the possibility of resurrection, and the belief that on Easter, Jesus defeated death once and for all. More than that, He had the power to extend His new life to others, allowing them to share in His immortality. This is why, once the early persecutions of the Christians were underway, the Romans went to great lengths to discourage the belief in bodily resurrection. According to Eusebius of Caesarea, one group of Christians executed by the Romans had had their corpses left to rot for a week, unburied (so that they would be denied proper funerals). The remains were then cremated, and finally dumped into the Rhone River. As the ashes washed downstream, one of the overseers remarked aloud, “Now let us see if they will rise again!”

While the Romans might have worked hard to destroy the bodies of Christians, they really need not have bothered. In reality, just as human remains decay, so too do they disperse. In the valley Ezekiel saw in his vision, birds of prey would have already picked the bones of Jerusalem clean, carrying parts of the dead soldiers away with them in their beaks and bellies. And if the bones had remained lying there longer, they would have eventually crumbled into dust and been blown away in the wind, or washed out by the rain.

Now, think of all the people who have ever lived, and what has become of most of them over the past 200,000 years. Their tombs are lost, their bones long gone, consumed by predators, floods, landslides, at the mercy of the elements, or (perhaps) lying beneath the foundations of modern cities. With a very few exceptions (such as the Pharaoh Tutankhamen, whose untouched tomb was discovered in 1922, some 3,200 years after he was laid to rest) the inevitable, natural process of decay has utterly destroyed what remains of anyone who lived more than a few centuries ago. The Romans of Lyon need not have tried so hard!

Atheists are right to point out that this poses a serious problem for most Catholics alive now, who hope for resurrection and eternal life in the future. There are of course exceptions, examples of people who lived long ago, whose bodies remain intact until today: Pharaoh Tutankhamen, of course, the bog-people preserved in the medieval swamps of northern Europe, and the incorrupt bodies of a few special saints. But what about the rest of us? Our remains might one day be scattered across the planet, be consumed by worms, fertilize the grass, be consumed by cows, and be consumed by eaters of hamburgers.

If Catholics really believe in the possibility of resurrection, and wish to convince atheists that death is not the end of life, they must find a satisfying answer to this question. Explaining the "mechanics" of resurrection indeed poses a formidable challenge.

A Possible Solution

 
In 1935, Albert Einstein and two of his younger colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathen Rosen, proposed one of the most famous thought experiments in modern physics. The paper they wrote (with the lengthy title, "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?") describes a quality of physical reality known as "locality". Because of locality (location in the physical world), a domino at the front of a line cannot directly knock down a domino at the end of the end; it can only do so indirectly (via the movement of all the dominoes standing in between).

In the EPR paper (so named because of the initials of its authors), though, a perceived "fatal flaw" of quantum physics is revealed, in which locality plays a crucial role. But it is, in fact, not a flaw at all—it is a mystery! The paper describes a bizarre paradox that seemingly flies in the face of common sense (a paradox upon a paradox, as those familiar with Schrodinger's cat already know), yet which has been since verified many times in the laboratory.

To explain the paradox, let's keep talking about dominoes. Suppose I randomly take two dominoes from a pile and look at the number of dots on each. Let us say one has no dots at all, and the other has twelve. I shake the two dominoes in my hands, mix them up, and then look at the one on top. I see that it is the one that has twelve dots, and automatically know (even though I am not looking at it) that the one I cannot see has no dots.

This makes sense, until we start thinking about a similar situation on a quantum level. A quantum particle called a pi meson decays into a positron and an electron, which spin off in opposite directions. But their spins are not independent; they correlate with the original state of the pi meson before its decay. As a result, a physicist observing the electron will automatically know the state of the positron, just as I (in the above example) can tell you the number of dots on the domino I cannot see, so long as I am looking at the other one.

How is this a paradox? Well, in quantum physics (and the example of Schrodinger's cat), the state of a particle depends upon the presence of an observer. The properties of a particle (its position and momentum, for example) are undefined until an observer observes them (like Doctor Who's Weeping Angels, who have no definite, solid existence unless they are being watched ... don't blink!). Particles have no definite position or momentum until they are observed, yet by observing the electron a physicist can also know the state of a positron. Einstein, Podolksy, and Rosen, then, had apparently found a contradiction within quantum theory: the properties of particles really do exist, even if no one is looking at them.

The only other possibility would be what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance": the idea that an observation here can affect reality there. But that would be impossible, Einstein, thought, because of locality (just as knocking over a domino at this end of the line does not directly cause a domino to fall at that end of the line).

Or is it?

As I said already, this "spooky action" has been empirically verified many times in the 80 years since the EPR paper was written, perhaps most effectively by the Swiss physicist Niculus Gisin and his colleagues at the University of Geneva. In 1997, they sent pairs of entangled photons through a network of fiber-optic tubes to locations eleven kilometers apart, one north and the other south of Geneva. And yet even at that distance (keep in mind that these are subatomic particles!), the behaviour of one particle correlated with the behaviour of the other; when the paths of each member of the pair were compared, they were symmetrical. Though there had been many possible pathways through the tubes, what one particle had done, the other had done as well. Even though the two particles were separated by a large distance and had no way of influencing with or "communicating" with one another, the movement of one affected the movement of the other, from a distance.

This is the phenomenon of entanglement. Entanglement occurs constantly, everywhere. While we do not consciously perceive it with our senses, it nevertheless ties together all the most fundamental particles composing reality. Whenever two things, whether photons (light particles), electrons, or atoms interact, they are tied together, sharing a single "experience" and losing their separate existence. On the everyday, human level, these entanglements do not endure for very long; in our bodily experience, new interactions inevitably occur, resulting in new entanglements of new, shared experience. But these interactions have been observed and tested on both microscopic particles and macroscopic objects.

This shared relationship was demonstrated recently with diamonds large enough to be seen by an unaided eye. Physicist Ian Walmsley and his colleagues at the University of Oxford were able to cause two diamond strips to vibrate simultaneously across a fifteen-centimeter gap. This may not sound terribly impressive at first, until we realize that the experiment was conducted at room temperature; the heat of the laboratory and the air particles filling the room would have interfered with the entangling connection between the two diamonds (most entanglement experiments deal with atoms or subatomic particles at temperatures approaching absolute zero, in order to prevent atoms from jostling one another. Walmsley’s experiment involved macroscopic objects at, again, room temperature). Ultimately, Walmsley’s experiment showed that the ties of entanglement may continue to bind particles together, on a larger scale and in spite of outside interference.

A Speculative Conclusion

 
What does this have to do with resurrection? It suggests that particles may somehow remain united, regardless of the amount of space separating them (for entanglement is a non-local phenomenon, unaffected by distance).

This opens the door to two exciting possibilities. First, it is conceivable that a particular living body could continue on in some form, even after it has died and its component particles have decayed and/or physically separated (whether by an earthquake, a stick of dynamite, or a hungry bear). Second, entanglement suggests that particular events leave a lasting “mark” upon their subjects, right down to the subatomic level. Events unite particles together, whether the spin of a progenitor particle (like a pi meson), or (perhaps!) the shared participation in a particular living body.

So the efforts of the Romans to prevent their Christian victims from being raised up might have been fruitless, after all. While much more investigation is required before we can speak more definitely about this sort of thing (investigations which I will leave in the hands of physicists, though I will watch and listen with great interest), quantum entanglement offers a fascinating response to an important challenge posed to the possibility of resurrection.

In the meantime, incorruptible saints, bog bodies, Egyptian mummies, and dry bones will continue to lie in wait.
 
 
(Image credit: Planet Science)

When most people think of Albert Einstein’s contribution to physics, the theory of relativity is what comes to mind, and rightly so. What most don’t realize is that his Nobel Prize was actually awarded for explaining the photoelectric effect, a result which contradicted the classical understanding of light and helped lead to the development of Quantum Mechanics. Despite his major contributions to its development, Einstein was famously uncomfortable with the way randomness and uncertainty became so integral to the understanding of that new theory, often summed up in his quote, “God does not throw dice.”

This objection, however offhand it may seem, resonated with many physicists of the time. The glory of classical physics was how neat and tidy everything was. It offered the promise of determinism: if we could know perfectly the state of the universe at one moment and the laws that govern it, we could extrapolate forwards and backwards perfectly as far as we like. Despite the recognition that this ideal was well nigh impossible, there was comfort in the promise, and each step we took at least brought us closer to that perfection. The claim was that perfect knowledge of the natural world, the sort that is attributed to God, would ultimately be expressed in a deterministic mathematical formula.

The difficulty that Quantum Mechanics presented for Einstein and many others, physicists and non-physicists alike, is that the best picture of the physical world that it allows seems partial and incomplete. It implied that it is not just practically difficult but theoretically impossible to completely describe the current state of the world, let alone extrapolate forwards or backwards as we please. As bad as the loss of “perfect” knowledge of the world was for physicists, it further called into question the nature of God’s knowledge of the world. If some aspect of the natural order was inherently uncertain and unknowable what does this imply for God? Is God’s knowledge subject to this randomness, is he simply reacting to the whims of nature?

The image of God awaiting the results of a chance outcome is rightly viewed as absurd, but the solution was not a recovery of classical determinism. Even independent of the results of Quantum Mechanics, that view was philosophically flawed, and the attempt to understand God’s knowledge using it was even more so.

If physics could actually give us a complete description of the now and from that extrapolate forwards and backwards, then the past, present and future are logically the same and all equally “present.” In a sense, nothing “new” ever happens because everything is subject to absolute necessity. Every effect is completely defined by its cause, a picture of the world that is arguably static rather than dynamic, detracting from the very notion of time. There are a host of subtle problems this raises about necessity and contingency and what it even means to be a cause, but the most obvious difficulty with this view is that it leaves no room at all for free human activity.

Additionally, thinking of God’s knowledge in this way cripples the idea of His providence. If everything in nature simply happened necessarily based on what came before, it would seem reasonable to say that God’s knowledge is just the perfect working out of the complicated physics problem of the universe. As creator He knows how all things will work together and His providence simply becomes this human kind of foresight and His governance simply becomes setting things up to run perfectly. The danger inherent in this is to see God as the external Architect who only works on and understands the world on a natural level, more powerfully and perfectly than we ever could perhaps, but still on a natural level.

It took many years and much experimentation and calculation before the reality of the quantum world sunk in. Physicists eventually became comfortable with the success of Quantum Mechanics and settled into a new status quo that accepted a randomness and indeterminism underlying physics. Even those who sought alternative interpretations of Quantum Mechanics that might save determinism recognized that they had to bring in other phenomena that destroyed the crisp, clean classical worldview. Unfortunately, the damage done to the understanding of causality and of God’s providence by classical determinism remains.

Even if the natural world “throws dice” in its most fundamental interaction, this may simply be a physical manifestation of the inherent contingency of all material things. This idea would not have been so foreign to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, who saw both necessary and contingent causes in the world around them. More importantly, this loss of absolute necessity does not threaten God’s absolute knowledge of the created order, for his knowledge is not limited to the particular mathematical and formal descriptions that we are able to develop in the sciences. God’s providence, His wise ordering of everything to its proper end, is above every natural cause. The certainty of God’s knowledge does not limit his power to create natural objects that can act in a truly contingent way. Einstein was right that “God does not throw dice,” but He knows perfectly the natural order that He created to do just that.
 
 
This article first appeared on DominicanaBlog.com, an online publication of the Dominican Students of the Province of St. Joseph who live and study at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC. It was written by Br. Thomas Davenport, O.P., who entered the Order of Preachers in 2010. He graduated from Stanford University with a PhD in Physics.
 
(Image Credit: Hudgins Mediation)

Over the past few days the world of cosmology and astrophysics has gone “supernova.” Researchers affiliated with the BICEP2 telescope in Antarctica announced that they had discovered empirical evidence for a key part of the Big Bang theory, cosmic inflation. One aspect of this discovery that I found really interesting is that it forms an almost perfect parallel to a discovery that was made sixty years ago.

The First Telescope Discovery

 
In the early twentieth century, the Belgian priest and physicist Georges LemaÎtre concluded that Einstein’s new theory of gravity, called general relativity, would cause a static eternal universe to collapse into nothingness. Since Einstein’s theory was sound, this only meant one thing: The universe was growing, and had a beginning in the finite past. Fr. LemaÎtre and Einstein would discuss the cosmic consequences of the theory while walking around the campus of Cal Tech, and although Einstein was skeptical at first, in 1933 he proclaimed that LemaÎtre’s theory of an expanding universe was one of the most “beautiful theories he had ever heard.”

Fr. LemaÎtre called his theory “the primeval atom,” but another physicist, Fred Hoyle, mocked the theory with the term “Big Bang.” Hoyle believed that theories of the universe beginning to exist from nothing were “primitive myths” designed to put religion into science. Fr. LemaÎtre’s status as a Catholic priest did not help the situation. In response to Fr. LemaÎtre, Hoyle argued for what he called the “steady state theory” of the universe and claimed that there was no empirical evidence for Fr. LemaÎtre’s model. Einstein was also skeptical that no “cosmic rays” or after effects from the Big Bang had ever been discovered.

However, in 1965 Bell Laboratory technicians Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson used radio telescopes to detect a faint, uniform “glow” of static coming from all directions of the sky. At first, they thought this uniform glow was merely bird droppings contaminating the telescope! But after a thorough cleaning, the static turned out to be radiation in the form of microwaves coming from deep space.

According to the Big Bang model, right after the “bang” the universe was a white-hot ball of plasma before it cooled and formed stars and galaxies. Particles that had been flying around since the very beginning of time cooled and turned into microwaves, traveling to fill the whole cosmos. Today, this radiation is called Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (or CMBR, which is pictured below).

This discovery was so monumental that Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize for it, and Fred Hoyle admitted it refuted his steady-state model of an eternal universe: “[It] is widely believed that the existence of the microwave background killed the “steady state” cosmology. . . . Here, in the microwave background, was an important phenomenon which it had not predicted.”

Enter Inflation

 
But this wasn’t the end of the story. As scientists studied the Big Bang they came across several problems that they weren’t sure how to resolve. One was the “flatness problem,” which couldn’t explain why the density of matter and energy in the universe almost perfectly aligned to a very precise value that gives the universe a “flat shape” (or one where parallel lines expand and never intersect). The other was the horizon problem, which could not explain why different parts of the universe possessed “equal temperatures” even though the universe was not old enough for particles from those different parts to interact with one another. Even if the particles were travelling at the speed of light, there would not have been enough time for them to cross our huge universe and mix together until their “temperatures” became even.

In the 1970’s an American cosmologist named Alan Guth proposed the idea that the universe did not expand at a slow, constant rate from the Big Bang. Instead, the universe expanded at an exponential rate from just a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Stephen Hawking says the expansion of the universe would be like a penny expanding to the size of the entire Milky Way galaxy (or 100,000 light years across) in a few seconds. This inflationary expansion would have “locked in” both the universe’s flatness and even temperatures while it was very small and then blown those features up to fill the entire universe we see today.  But for decades this theory had the virtue of being elegant and explaining a lot, but it also had the vice of not being supported by empirical evidence . . . until now.

BICEP2 shows that there are distinct “gravity waves” in the microwave background radiation. These waves are the final “blown up” effects of very small “quantum disturbances” that made up the universe 13.7 billion years ago before the inflation event. What the Bell Labs radio telescope’s discovery was to Fr. LemaÎtre, the BICEP2 telescope’s discovery is to Andrei Linde, another pioneer in inflationary cosmology. A video team even captured the emotional moment when Linde learned that the theory he had been toiling over for decades had finally been confirmed with an empirical observation:
 

 

Any Religious Significance?

 
I’m glad that most news articles covering this story didn’t drudge up the tired “science vs. religion” trope. But, I could count on my local U-T San Diego newspaper to include this gem in their coverage of the discovery:

"The finding strengthens scientists’ support of the Big Bang theory, although it’s likely to be challenged by some theologians who see the hand of a divine creator in the rise of the universe."

Which theologians? Sure there are some Christians who think the universe was created at the same time the Babylonians were brewing beer, but the Catholic Church has affirmed that,

“The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers” (CCC 283).

This discovery does not disprove the idea that the universe requires a necessary being in order to sustain it nor does it disprove the idea that the universe began to exist in the finite past. Even if inflationary theory explains why some of the constants in the universe (such as the strength of gravity) have the life-permitting values they do, inflation alone does not overturn the conclusion that our universe’s life-permitting laws of nature were designed. Instead, it merely pushes the problem back one level. Resorting to inflation to explain the fine-tuning of the universe’s constants and conditions would be like saying that the case of a dart hitting a bull’s eye can be explained by “projectile theory” apart from the actions of any intelligent agent.

The fact is that this discovery has no bearing whatsoever on either the existence of God or any other Catholic teaching. It is perfectly compatible with the view that God created the universe from nothing for the good of intelligent creatures to come to know him.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Answers. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Raw Story)

It was recently revealed that, toward the end of his life, Albert Einstein wrote a letter in which he dismissed belief in God as superstitious and characterized the stories in the Bible as childish. During a time when atheists have emerged rather aggressively in the popular culture, it was, to say the least, discouraging to hear that the most brilliant scientist of the twentieth century seemed to be antipathetic to religion. It appeared as though Einstein would have agreed with the Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harrises and Richard Dawkins of the world in holding that religious belief belongs to the childhood of the human race.

It just so happens that the revelation of this letter coincided with my reading of Walter Isaacson’s wonderful biography of Einstein, a book that presents a far more complex picture of the great scientist’s attitude toward religion than his late career musing would suggest. In 1930, Einstein composed a kind of creed entitled “What I Believe,” at the conclusion of which he wrote: “To sense that behind everything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense...I am a devoutly religious man.” In response to a young girl who had asked him whether he believed in God, he wrote: “everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe—a Spirit vastly superior to that of man.” And during a talk at Union Theological Seminary on the relationship between religion and science, Einstein declared: “the situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

These reflections of Einstein—and he made many more like them throughout his career—bring the German physicist close to the position of a rather influential German theologian. In his 1968 book Introduction to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, offered this simple but penetrating argument for God’s existence: the universal intelligibility of nature, which is the presupposition of all science, can only be explained through recourse to an infinite and creative mind which has thought the world into being. No scientist, Ratzinger said, could even begin to work unless and until he assumed that the aspect of nature he was investigating was knowable, intelligible, marked by form. But this fundamentally mystical assumption rests upon the conviction that whatever he comes to know through his scientific work is simply an act of re-thinking or re-cognizing what a far greater mind has already conceived.

Ratzinger’s elegant proof demonstrates that, at bottom, religion and science ought never to be enemies, since both involve an intuition of God’s existence and intelligence. In fact, many have argued that it is no accident that the modern physical sciences emerged precisely out of the universities of the Christian west, where the idea of creation through the divine word was clearly taught. Unhappily, in far too many tellings of the history of ideas, modernity is seen as emerging out of, and in stark opposition to, repressive, obscurantist, and superstitious Christianity. (How many authors, up to the present day, rehearse the struggles of Galileo to make just this point). As a result, Christianity—especially in its Catholic expression—is often presented as a kind of foil to science, when in fact there is a deep congruity between the disciplines that search for objective truth and the religion that says, “in the beginning was the Word.”

What sense, then, can we make of Einstein’s recently discovered letter? Given the many other things he said about belief, perhaps it’s best to say that he was reacting against primitive and superstitious forms of religion, just as St. Paul was when he said that we must put away childish things when we’ve come of age spiritually. And what of his dismissal of the Bible? Here I think we have to make a distinction. A person can be a genius in one field of endeavor and remain naïve, even inept, in another. Few would dispute that Einstein was the greatest theoretical physicist of the last century, but this is no guarantee that he had even an adequate appreciation for Sacred Scripture. The “infantile” stories of the Bible have been the object of sophisticated interpretation for two and half millenia. Masters such as Origen, Philo, Chrysostom, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Henry Newman have uncovered the complexity and multivalence of the Bible’s symbolism and have delighted in showing the literary artistry that lies below its sometimes deceptively simple surface.

So I think we can say in conclusion that religious people can, to a large extent, claim Einstein as an ally, though in regard to Scripture interpretation, we can find far better guides than he.
 
 
Originally posted at Word on Fire. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Majzooban)