BOOK REVIEW:
By Dr. John Mavroides, Emeritus Professor of Physics,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN--ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN PHYSICS by Archbishop Lazar Puhalo (Synaxis Press)
In
this very clear and well-referenced book, Archbishop Lazar Puhalo, a
hesychastic theologian, uses the historical approach to contrast the
theology of the Orthodox Christian Church to that of the Western
Christian Churches. In addition to presenting a lucid and accurate
exposition, without any phyletic distortions of traditional Orthodox
theology, the theology of the Apostles, the Patristic Fathers and the
later Church Fathers, as one would expect of a hesychastic monk, this
gifted theologian is also comfortable with the rather difficult field
of quantum physics.
He moves with ease from
specific topics in Orthodox Theology to corresponding topics in
physics. He shows that in contrast to scholastic and fundamentalist
Christian religions, the Orthodox faith and modern physics are
compatible. He indicates that because of the differences in theological
understandings of Eastern and Western Christians there has rarely been,
if ever, a conflict between the traditional Orthodox Church and
science, and that modern science in general is not a devious plot
which must be feared by Orthodox Christians. As Archbishop Lazar
points out, one would expect this to be the case since all phenomena
and laws of nature are governed by the Creator of the Universe, our
Lord God. Western theologians, Catholic and Protestant, fear science
and they have a history of conflict with the disciplines of science and
physics
.
Puhalo distinguishes between facts and meaning. In a
physical experiment one can take very accurate measurements of facts,
but without interpretation these facts have no meaning. Puhalo points
out that an early astronomer, Brahe, took very accurate astronomical
measurements but still ended up with an incorrect theory of cosmology;
his facts were useless until they were correctly interpreted after his
death by Kepler, his assistant.
Similarly the creation narrative,
from the beginning up to the time of Abraham and Sarah, condenses
enormous time and vast prehistoric oral tradition into a simple
narrative. This narrative is about meaning--not historical or
scientific detail. Puhalo reminds us that we derive our theology from
meaning--not from supposed facts.
In comparing modern microphysics
to Orthodox Theology, Puhalo points out that there is no separation
between the observer and the observed, the observer in both instances
is not extraneous to the observed, but is a participant at different
levels of experience, being part of the process by seeking to
understand and quantify it. In theology the observer has intentionally
involved himself, hoping to become part of it the living theology of
Orthodoxy, whereas in quantum physics the observer unavoidably impacts
directly on the observation, becoming a part of the process being
observed. (The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle).
One of Archbishop
Lazars main points of this book is that almost all apparent conflicts
between science and faith are the result of models of reality rather
than of reality itself. When we become rigid and frozen in our models
by using a literal understanding of scripture and non-dogmatic
statements of the holy fathers about science and history, we deprive
ourselves of reality itself. As an historical example, Puhalo goes to
the year 1500 when the general model of reality for our universe was
that a stationary earth was the center of the universe, around which
the sun and other heavenly bodies were rotating. The great philosophers
as well as the Holy Scriptures agreed that this was reality rather than
a model of reality so concrete as to be a dogma of faith.
But
the observations of the heavens by Galileo with his primitive telescope
proved that the old model of the universe was wrong and Galileo came up
with the more accurate Copernican-Galileo model of reality in which
the earth and the planets rotate around the stationary sun. This caused
a conflict between Galileo (science) and the Catholic Church. Galileos
doctrine was condemned by Rome and Galileo was forced by an inquisition
to recant in public. Actually even Galileos model of reality is not
the last word. A later model of reality has not a stationary sun, but
one which races through space on one of the spiral arms of our Milky
Way galaxy. This again is a better model, which may need to be modified
as more discoveries are made.
The Archbishops final statement in
[chapter 4] if of great importance: Orthodox Christianity is not an
arbiter of facts, but the healer of humanity, the source of meaning,
the path to the authenticity of life and the doorway to eternity to
immortality
.
N.B. The elipses (
.) indicate places where brief surveys of each chapter were omitted for the sake of space.
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