Talk about Francis Collins and his frozen waterfalls—we have an equally good example of misguided Trinitarian faith from the world of physics. I’m reading the new 644-page The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity (2012, eds. A. G. Padgett and J. B. Stump), which my library bought for me because it costs $200 retail (!!). It’s an edited collection of 54 pieces, and is a pretty good review of the science-vs.-Christianity debates, though most of the articles seem slanted toward faith.

The book features the usual suspects: Polkinghorne, Swinburne, Plantinga, Denis Alexander, Michael Ruse, John Haught, and even Stephen Meyer, defending their Jesus, but there’s also some good pieces by anti-accommodationists, including a terrific short essay by physicst Sean Carroll, “Does the universe need god?” which you can read free online here. And there are a few pieces by faitheist accommodationists, including one particularly infuriating essay by Julian Baggini, “How science lost its soul, and religion handed it back.” (The title tells it all).

The pro-Christian bent, despite the editors’ asseveration that “this is not a work defending or promoting Christian faith,” may stem from the facts that Padgett is a professor of systematic theology at Luther Seminary in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Stump is a professor of philosophy at Bethel College, Indiana, and editor of the Christian Scholars Review.

To give you an idea of the quality of thought and scholarship involved when Christian academics try their hand at accommodationism, I’m presenting a passage from Rodney D. Holder’s essay, “Quantum theory and theology” (pp. 220-230) which is a masterpiece of post facto rationalization. It is the kind of stuff that these people are really good at: comporting the latest discoveries of science with Christian thought.

Holder is course director of the infamous Templeton-funded Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge. He was trained in astrophysics and was also a priest in the Diocese of Oxford. In this passage he explains why Christianity comports with quantum physics. It’s a long passage but I couldn’t leave anything out. It’s surprising to see an academic like Holder behaving like Deepak Chopra.

Consonance with Christian Doctrine

Although we could not predict the kind of world shown to us by quantum theory without doing the experiments, it does seem to be a world consistent with the kind of world the Christian God would create. And we can say more about this with regard to specifically Christian doctrine as opposed to mere theism: these strange features are consonant with the kind of world one would expect the God described by the Nicene and Chalcedonian formulations to create. According to Christian doctrine, God is fundamentally relational. God is one, yet God is also Trinity; God is three persons enfolded in a relationship of perfect love. Moreover, each of the persons is fully God. The persons are distinct yet inseparable and interrelated. According to the doctrine of perichoresis formulated in the early Church, the three persons are bound together in a kind of mutual indwelling. Quantum holism, as demonstrated by the EPR [Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen] thought experiment, is analogous to this. The electron and positron, though distinct and widely separated, yet form a unified quantum system (Polkinghorne 2004, 73ff.; 2010). According to the Chalcedonian definition, our Lord Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man. He is one person, the Son of God, but with two natures, divine and human. This reminds us of the wave-particle duality of subatomic particles discussed above. An electron is one thing but possesses both particle and wave properties. A further analogy might be drawn with the distinction made by the Fathers between the ‘immanent” Trinity and the “economic” Trinity. The idea of the immanent Trinity concerns what God is in himself, the inner relations between the persons. The economic Trinity concerns how he reveals himself for the sake of the “economy,” that is, how in the divine plan the persons of the Trinity relate to the world and its salvation. Thus, while the Son and Spirit are eternally one with the Father in being of the Godhead, they are manifested in the economy, and thus made known to us as distinct from the Father, in the Incarnation and in our sanctification. In a somewhat analogous way, the electron’s reality is veiled until a measurement is made. Of course, none of this is to claim that quantum theory proves Christian doctrine correct. However, I believe it does two things. First, it shows that theology and science are alike in using analogical language, even paradoxical language. For example, the mystery of God is expressed in the phrase “one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” Wave-particle duality would be doing a similar job in quantum theory to express the veiled mystery of the electron. Second, it links theology to science by saying that the world revealed by quantum theory is consonant with what would be expected on the basis of Christian dotrine, so that a relational God is likely to create a relational world. As Polkinghorne rightly says, this is indeed not to prove God is relation, or that theology can make predictions from its doctrines about the physical world, but it is to say that theology and science fit together very comfortably and are far from contradictory (p. 229).

I really don’t have to add much to this: it debunks itself. It is embarrassing, but predictable, that an accommodationist with brains would spend his time trying to comport two completely different things in a futile attempt to show that “theology and science” fit together very comfortably.” But that’s Sophisticated Theology™. It’s good at fitting square pegs into round holes.

And I defy anyone to mention a scientific phenomenon that, by appropriate word-twisting and logic-chopping, I couldn’t also comport with Christianity.