Sermon preached at Great St Mary’s,
The University Church, Cambridge
Professor Russell Cowburn, FRS. Director of
Research, Cavendish Laboratory
Date Sunday 15 March 2015
Science Festival Choral Evensong
The story is told of Albert Einstein giving a lecture tour around America. He was provided with a car
and a chauffeur and each evening the chauffeur would drive him to another city and then sit at the
back of the lecture hall while Einstein delivered the same lecture. Towards the end of the tour
Einstein, seeking mischief, said to the chauffeur: you know, you’ve heard this lecture so often you
could probably give it yourself. And so, to relieve the boredom of giving the same lecture night after
night, Einstein and the chauffeur swapped clothes. Einstein sat at the back of the lecture hall dressed
as a chauffeur, and the chauffeur stood at the front and gave the lecture. Everything went well until
the questions from the floor at the end of the lecture. A distinguished professor took to his feet and
asked an intricate question about quantum physics. Quick as a flash, the chauffeur dressed as
Einstein looked the professor straight in the eye and said ‘Sir, that question is so elementary even my
chauffeur could answer it!’
Einstein is one of my scientific heroes. Most people know of him for his work on relativity. But he
only received the Nobel Prize once and that for his work on light. Einstein explained the
photoelectric effect which is essentially how photovoltaic solar cells work. But the prize wasn’t for
renewable energy but rather because it established firmly the quantum nature of light. We now
think of light as being made up of wave-like particles called photons. There are quite a few around –
about 1023 photons will hit me during this sermon (100,000 billion billion) just from the lighting in
this building and each of you will emit about 50x as many as this just through the body heat you lose
in the next 20 minutes.
I’d like to thank you and your vicar for kindly offering me this pulpit this evening. It’s the start of
Science Week and 2015 is the International Year of Light. And so I’m here both as an experimental
physicist and as a Christian. As a physicist, I work extensively with lasers. I’m a nanotechnologist
who is particularly interested in magnetism and so spend much of my professional life building tiny
magnets and then shining laser light onto them to learn how they behave. I became a Christian at
the age of 18, which is just the same time as I was embarking on advanced physics studies. And so
I’ve spent the last 25 years learning how science and faith can live together.
I’d like to speak tonight about the passage from Colossians which we previously read together. The
first thing I’d like to talk about is how Jesus shows us what God is like. Col 1: 15 says that Jesus is the
‘Image of the Invisible God’. This is a great verse for an experimental scientist.
A distinction is sometimes drawn between evidence-based science and allegedly evidence-free
religious faith. Richard Dawkins puts it as “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the
need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of
evidence.” Having held both science and faith together for a quarter of a century, I think that this
overstates both the science and the faith position. I’ve spent 22 years studying electrons in
nanostructures and in all that time I’ve never seen a single electron. Everything is done through
inference, through proxies. In my case, the best proxy for electron activity in nanostructures is the
effect they have on the polarisation of light. And even then it’s only a few thousandths of a degree of
rotation of the polarisation – if someone opens the door to the lab and a cool breeze blows in the
changes caused by that are much greater than the changes I’m studying. What I really care about is
invisible and so I need something to mediate the strong and definite effects of that invisible action to
my world. And so it is with God. Col 1:15 describes God as invisible. And it says that Jesus is his
image.
This word image is very potent to a physicist. It’s the language we use in optics. One of the greatest
inventions ever made is the simple lens. Gently shifting the trajectories of photons by just a few
degrees it brings order out of apparent randomness. A few years ago I had an eye problem. I had
lost all clarity of vision in my left eye. I could see light and shade but I couldn’t see any detail. My
optician diagnosed the problem as a dramatic shift in the focal length of my eye lens due to a
cataract. At the point she sent me to hospital she was measuring the required correction needed to
my eye lens as -18 dioptres. Those of you who wear glasses will know that is a very large number –
most people’s glasses correct 2 or 3 dioptres. My optician literally didn’t have enough space in the
lens holders to put all of the lens needed to correct the vision. Thankfully a surgeon at Moorefields
was able to cure the problem. What I find interesting about that is that both before and after the
surgery, exactly the same photons were entering my eye, bringing information about the outside
world. So the reason I couldn’t see my environment wasn’t because the information was blocked or
somehow lacking. It was because the eye lens was malfunctioning it didn’t rearrange the trajectories
of the photons correctly. In the language of optics, the lens didn’t focus the incoming light into an
image. The image is what you get when you correctly rearrange all of the photons such that the
information they carry makes sense.
Jesus is the image of the invisible God. In him all of the information about God which is all around us
meets and makes sense. To try to study God without looking at Jesus is to try to look at the world
without a functioning eye lens. It’s all there but it doesn’t make sense. So why do I believe in God
when I can’t see him? Because of Jesus. The real, historical man of 2000 years ago is the physical,
observable evidence of the invisible God.
This is a very scientific way of looking at things. The reason that science has been the most
successful intellectual endeavour ever known to humans is because of the invention of the scientific
method and its inherent empiricism. We believe things because we see them, be it directly or by
inference. Observation of reality takes precedence over theory and philosophy. Jesus is the
empirical observation of God.
The second thing we learn about Jesus from this part of Colossians is his key role in creation. Col
1:16 says “For by him [Jesus] all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and
invisible… all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things
hold together”
If ever there was a time to talk about light, it’s the moment of creation. Remember that we owe
most of our early physics about the Big Bang not to Edwin Hubble (whose name is usually associated
with this part of cosmology) but actually to a man called George Lemaitre – a Belgian physicist and
Catholic priest. Less of a Big Bang – in space nobody can hear you scream – but more of a Big Flash.
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A huge outpouring of mass and energy. Even though we are now 13.7 billion years on, the ripples
from the Big Bang still echo around the Universe and can be seen experimentally in the Cosmic
Microwave Background. When God says ‘Let there be light’ there really is light.
There are 2 theological points I want to draw from this. Firstly, a reminder about how Trinitarian
creation is. We usually associate God the Father as the part of the Trinity most associated with
creation. Somehow God the Son and God the Holy Spirit seem a little underemployed until we reach
about 4BC when they start to get involved. This passage is a reminder to us that Jesus, God the Son,
was the active agent in God the Father’s creative works. All things were made by Jesus and for Jesus.
Genesis 1 reminds us that the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters in the beginning and that
the decision to make man was a joint one: “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness”. One God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, at work in creation.
Secondly, there is a wonderful reminder here that God’s creative work isn’t limited to the moment of
the Big Bang. Col 1:17 tells us that “in [Jesus] all things hold together”. I remember as a student
joining a team from your neighbouring church Holy Trinity visiting churches in South London for a
week. In a pub in Clapham I talked with man from one of the London churches who was clearly a
deep thinker although hadn’t had much formal education. Hearing that I was a physics student he
asked me: I’ve been told that the nucleus of an atom is made up of positively charged protons and
chargeless neutrons. So how does the nucleus hold itself together? Why don’t the positively
charged protons repel each other? This was already quite a surprising question (and a very good
one) but even more surprising was when he offered a solution. He said the Bible says in Colossians
that in Jesus all things hold together. Is that how the nucleus holds together? By Jesus? I’ve often
thought back to this conversation because here was a man who was honestly trying to reconcile
different descriptions of reality: that presented by modern science and that presented by the Bible.
And that has been my own story for the last 25 years. But in trying to find reconciliation he was
making one of the classic mistakes – he wasn’t the first and won’t be the last to make the so-called
‘God of the Gaps’ error. The idea of God of the Gaps is that we attribute all of those things which we
do understand to the activity of science and we attribute the bits we don’t understand to God. A
more subtle form is found in the equally erroneous idea of Intelligent Design, where orthodox
scientific explanations are used for most steps in evolutionary biology but then there are special
moments of so-called irreducible complexity where we say that science can’t explain those and that
must be a special intervention of God. There are two problems with God of the Gaps. Firstly, the gap
gets smaller each year and therefore so does God. In the case of my pub conversation, my friend’s
reading hadn’t extended as far as the Strong Nuclear force and Quantum Chromodynamics – the
physics explanation of what glues protons and neutrons together into stable nuclei. If he had
ascribed to Jesus the thing that holds the nucleus together and had then later learned of the Strong
Nuclear force, somehow his faith would have been diminished – or equally problematic, he would
have denied the existence of the Strong Nuclear force as being counter to what his faith told him.
This is a cycle that we are sadly already deeply into between creationists and scientists. The second
problem with God of the Gaps is that it understates the role of God. Colossians 1 describes the
universal extent of Jesus creative activity – he created all things – in heaven and on earth, visible and
invisible. God isn’t limited to the bits we don’t understand or to the irreducibly complex bits. There
is no area of physical interaction which is out of scope for God. And that’s how we should hold
science and faith together. The laws and observations of science are a description of God’s minute by
minute activity with regard to the physical world. So yes, in Jesus protons and neutrons hold
together and praise God for the wonder of his creation of the Strong Nuclear force as his chosen
mechanism.
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As a Christian it’s an enormous privilege to work at the Cavendish where James Clerk Maxwell was
the first Cavendish Professor of Physics. A sign hangs above the entrance, due originally to Maxwell,
saying ‘The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein’ (Ps 111).
Not that everyone who works there is a Christian, but rather a reminder of the mind-set of Maxwell
that in pursuing physics we are studying the works of God and that is a pleasurable thing to do.
Finally, the third thing I want to pick out from this passage in Colossians is the role of Jesus in
reconciling all things to God. Col 1:19 says ‘For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him
[Jesus] and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in
heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross’.
This is the language of conflict resolution. If we’d read the following verse we’d see words like
‘alienated’ and ‘enemies’. Too often we assume that if God exists he must be well disposed towards
us. The Bible’s view is that the starting position for any discovery of God is recognition that we are in
fact alienated from him, that rather than peace there exists hostility and antagonism directed from
God towards us because of our failure to recognise him as the rightful king. We have usurped him as
rightful ruler and so a state of conflict exists.
In much of modern physics success starts by recognising our relationship to the phenomenon we’re
trying to observe. Einstein’s Eureka moment in relativity was watching a line of cows drinking from a
trough and realising how his frame of reference determined what he observed. The challenge in
quantum physics experiments is taking into account the fact that we are involved in the system and
that we are not isolated neutral observers. And there is theological truth here as well. God is not
another phenomenon to be put under the microscope to be dispassionately evaluated by us – he,
through the person of Jesus, is our Creator and ultimately will be our Judge. To know God needs
reconciliation. And it is Jesus who has provided the means for that reconciliation, by dying in our
place on the cross.
And so we find in this passage Jesus as the one who shows us God by being the image of the invisible
God. We find Jesus as the one who created the world and sustains its physical interactions minute by
minute. And we find Jesus as the one who reconciled the world to God. Revealer, Creator,
Redeemer. As the words of a modern hymn say, “Hands that flung stars into space, to cruel nails
surrendered. This is our God.”
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