If we can’t see God, does that mean he’s not here?

“No one has ever seen God, therefore he does not exist.” This is a fairly common premise deployed by individuals with a rational frame of mind. But if someone said, “No one has ever seen an electron, therefore it does not exist” they would laugh from the room, although two hundred years ago electrons also belonged to an invisible world. It’s fair? The same people who profess to be open-minded, with their faith in logic, are the first to label religious conviction as idle superstition. There is a good reason for this; the different attitudes displayed towards science and religion are due to the different natures of the two disciplines. In fact, science and religion live at opposite ends of the same spectrum, the search for truth.

In the 20th century, massive progress was made in the understanding of electromagnetism. Scientific geniuses such as Einstein, Bose, Planck and Bohr delved into invisible physics to discover the properties of the building blocks of our universe, a new revelation and a part of our world that, although it had always been there, until then had not. I had done it. it became manifest. It had not even occurred to humans that such a subatomic substructure could exist. These days we take it for granted; anyone educated in basic physics has heard of quantum theory, and while the vast majority of us are confident that the equations revealing the workings of unimaginably tiny particles are true and reliable, particles that control and guide our lives, we go ahead without even give them. a second thought. And new particles, quarks, fermions, bosuns and leptons, are being discovered all the time, in addition to dozens of hypothetical particles that should exist but have not yet been found.

Science is a long way from answering all the questions that this new science raises. The mystery of dark matter, an invisible mass in the universe that impacts all calculations, still baffles the brightest minds. While theories abound, they remain just that: theories. But the search continues, and scientists who persevere in the search for answers show boundless faith, if not in an invisible God, then certainly in the logical nature of the laws of the universe; but what quantum physics has shown is that to truly understand how it works, it may be necessary to break some of the laws we have taken for granted up to now. This is how science works. Two steps forward one step back. Despite being an uphill struggle, scientists are always confident that this slow and methodical process, sometimes maddening, sometimes inspiring, will eventually reveal things hitherto unknown.

This is one end of the spectrum. Religion tends to approach life from the other end.

Religious people use instinct and emotion based on wonder observation to understand what is going on. Faith accepts without question and without experience that there is an invisible world everywhere around us that controls and guides our lives. Religion is less concerned with the way things work and more with things being the shadows of a more intense reality that is yet to be known (look up Colossians 2.17). As we witness birth and death, we see the way lives prosper and decay, we watch the suffering caused by disease and war, we do not look for scientific solutions, but pray to the force that governs science that things come out as they should should. We base our understanding of life and all its irregularities on a perception of the King of our lives and what his attributes might be. Like science, religion is sometimes wrong. Just as the instincts of scientists can lead them into blind alleys, the instincts of the faithful can be misguided and blind them. But in the majesty of a miraculous creation, we see something that has been carefully crafted in advance by an unseen guiding force: God.

Thus, while science starts from the visible and seeks explanations, religion starts from the explanation even if it is invisible and starts from there. Science seeks salvation in the mechanics of existence, religion guarantees salvation through a connection to the source of existence.

As children we used to say the Our Father every morning at school. The second line goes “Hallowed be thy name.” I used to say these four words with absolute faith but without really understanding them. Now, I know that sanctified means holy, and holy refers to that which is perfect. Something that is perfect cannot be altered or divided. The Bible also tells us that the glory of God is found in light and that Jesus was the light of the world. Here, too, there is a parallel with science. The photon, a particle that was not discovered until the beginning of the 20th century, is a quantum of light, it cannot be divided or altered, it has no mass or electric charge. In a vacuum you can travel at the speed of light. And without her, life would not exist. In the discovery of the photon, science and religion may merge.

Future discoveries could have the same purpose, to illuminate the mechanisms that lie behind faith. Perhaps faith is a necessary part of that process. Perhaps, long before science has all the answers, God our Creator will make his glory known to all of us. Until then remain invisible. It’s not only okay, but it’s an integral part of faith, because faith is about accepting the truth without having to question it. To a scientific mind this is anathema, but to even the most cynical mind it should be obvious that not everything that exists can be seen immediately.

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