E=MC² and Other Spiritual Matters

Energy is matter times a constant!  That was a revelation from the great Albert Einstein, the culmination of a century of incredible progress in scientific knowledge that set the Newtonian world on its head and ushered in a new age of uncertainty in science where there had previously been unbridled confidence.  For even as this discovery and others that created the fields of quantum mechanics, particle physics and relativity allowed us to harness the energy of the atom and create nuclear weapons and power, we also found ourselves opening new doors faster than we could understand the rooms we were entering.

Now the once unchallenged belief that science would ultimately clearly define everything in our universe and provide clear guidance for our lives and experiences has been more or less abandoned, and scientists have declared themselves satisfied to explore the mystery and the beauty of the universe without a clear path to total comprehension!  (This is of course my interpretation and may not represent the views of actual scientists J)

But what indeed are matter and energy?  As our concepts of matter have evolved we have found ourselves chasing an ever more elusive final tally of matter’s constituent parts – compounds, molecules, ions, atoms, protons, electrons, neutrons, fermions, bosons, leptons, quarks, neutrinos and so on. 

And even as the names of these particles have become familiar to us, their nature has been stubbornly resistant to any “sensible” description.  Are these pieces of matter ‘particles’ or ‘waves’?  They are both!  Do electrons really orbit around nuclei like small solar systems?  No, they appear to be a probability cloud of charge and energy!  They are everywhere and nowhere, phantoms that can only really be conceptualized through quantum physics equations and mathematics.

Energy is even less comprehensible than matter, if indeed we can even regard energy as a different phenomenon.  We have deluded ourselves about energy for a couple hundred years, pretending to understand electricity and magnetism, different types of heat transfer, kinetic and potential energy, and even nuclear energy.  We have become comfortable with its use and speak glibly of its properties, but energy remains just as mysterious and unseen to us in the 21^st century as it did to the ancients.

In the end, the conceptual models we were comfortable with had to be abandoned and new ones attempted that are much more abstract and difficult to grasp.  But the models are not the essence of what we are experiencing.  The ‘essence’ is the way that these physical phenomena impact our lives – their enduring truths!

Perhaps the abstract natures of matter and energy, and their complex but intimate relationship, have something to teach us about flesh and spirit.  Just as our material selves have been exposed as something quite different from what we historically conceived, so perhaps are our spiritual selves in need of a ‘quantum’ leap in understanding.  Our concepts of spirituality and its relationship to the material world have not evolved significantly over the past two millennia.

Of course many will argue that our understanding of the spiritual world has indeed evolved – that a great number of people have totally rejected religion and any idea of a divine or spiritual realm.  This is certainly true, and a great many of those that reject these ideas are scientists.  The ancient models of religion that incorporate a distinct and separate God on high with a heaven and hell seem nonsensical at a time when we have extensive scientific knowledge that appears to refute many of the underpinnings of this type of theology.  Our literal interpretations of scripture have painted us into a corner, but we are reluctant to abandon the models we have relied on for centuries for fear of finding ourselves with an amorphous spirituality that has no real doctrine or ritual.

But an amorphous, untethered spirituality would be loosely analogous to the mysterious nature of the physical world that we explore through science.  A world where certain truths shine through the haze, but where our imaginations struggle to grasp or categorize the phenomena in any comfortable way.

In the end, spirituality and theology are tasked with identifying basic truths about our existence - its meaning and purpose.  Does it really matter what types of models and frameworks we use to discern these truths?  Is God a human-like deity or rather some form of energy?  Is heaven a place of eternal bliss or rather a probability cloud of energy and charge that our own inscrutable ‘matter’ inhabits for eternity in various forms? 

These are fascinating questions and worthy of deep contemplation by those whose passion lies in this domain, but it is more crucial that we confront the spiritual truths that every human attempt at spiritual identification seems to impart – that compassion and love are paramount and profoundly motivating despite the human inclinations toward greed, power, lust and violence; that humility and generosity are more deeply satisfying than selfishness and vanity; that our needs for community and social interaction and harmony trump the disparate forces that alienate and estrange us.

Our pursuit of spirituality in the form of world religions has long been a self-contradictory force in the world, providing solace to many, inspiring incredible acts of love and compassion, but also inspiring hideous forms of prejudice, self-righteousness, exclusion and even violence.  If we could take joy and comfort in the spiritual models that are our cultural heritage yet not regard them as absolute and rigidly literal perhaps we could come closer to living out their spiritual truths.  Like the modern physicist, let us embrace mystery and revel in its beauty and complexity, trusting that the beautiful universe that we inhabit will not let us down.