Most of us think of God in a mixture of Greek philosophical and Hebrew biblical terms. The Greek God of philosophy is absolute, all-powerful, all-knowing, and changeless, eternal—distant and impersonal. The Hebrew God of the Bible is close, personal, changeable, and doesn't always know everything. These two views of God are, strictly speaking, at odds with each other, but most of us believe in both of them and combine them in ways that may not be logical but that are meaningful to us. The way I've been putting it here is that God is at once Beyond and Present.In previous postings (here and here), we have played with the possibilities quantum physics offers for our thinking about God. The discovery of the tiny tiny world of quantum mechanics with its wacky ways does, in particular, offers an analogy that helps us understand how God might actually be both Beyond and Present, impersonal and personal, changeless and changing, all-knowing and not always in the loop all at the same time. Put another way, God can both stand outside of time and space as "pure being" and participate in the evolution of the universe as "pure becoming."
Dr. George F. Spagna, Jr., a physicist, plays with some of these same ideas in a 2007 paper entitled, "Toward a quantum theology" (2007). According to Spagna, in that wacky quantum world physical reality only begins to exist when there is an observer. This fact of quantum mechanics suggests that the universe at large also requires an observer in order to exist. If that is true, then who is this observer if not God? He writes, "...it is God’s presence and participation in every event that makes God both the Ultimate Observer and the omnipresent, continuous Creator." He continues, "Unlike Augustine’s transcendent God who stands outside of time, this God is immanent and intimate. As the universe of events unfolds, this God 'calls' it into becoming at each point of spacetime."
This is the God of the Bible, creatively involved in the universe and our lives. It is not the timeless God of the Greeks and much of post-biblical Christian theology. Yet, logically God must also stand outside of time in order to create it, so the timeless Greek God is necessary, too. God is both. That's the point. Stay tuned one last time.
