The Evidence of Things Not Seen - Book Review

BOOK REVIEW:
By Dr. John Mavroides, Emeritus Professor of Physics,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN--ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN PHYSICS by Archbishop Lazar Puhalo (Synaxis Press)

In this very clear and well-referenced book, Archbishop Lazar Puhalo, a hesychastic theologian, uses the historical approach to contrast the theology of the Orthodox Christian Church to that of the Western Christian Churches. In addition to presenting a lucid and accurate exposition, without any phyletic distortions of traditional Orthodox theology, the theology of the Apostles, the Patristic Fathers and the later Church Fathers, as one would expect of a hesychastic monk, this gifted theologian is also comfortable with the rather difficult field of quantum physics.

He moves with ease from specific topics in Orthodox Theology to corresponding topics in physics. He shows that in contrast to scholastic and fundamentalist Christian religions, the Orthodox faith and modern physics are compatible. He indicates that because of the differences in theological understandings of Eastern and Western Christians there has rarely been, if ever, a conflict between the traditional Orthodox Church and science, and that “modern science in general is not a devious plot which must be feared by Orthodox Christians.” As Archbishop Lazar points out, one would expect this to be the case since all phenomena and laws of nature are governed by the Creator of the Universe, our Lord God. Western theologians, Catholic and Protestant, fear science and they have a history of conflict with the disciplines of science and physics….

Puhalo distinguishes between facts and meaning. In a physical experiment one can take very accurate measurements of facts, but without interpretation these facts have no meaning. Puhalo points out that an early astronomer, Brahe, took very accurate astronomical measurements but still ended up with an incorrect theory of cosmology; his facts were useless until they were correctly interpreted after his death by Kepler, his assistant.

Similarly the creation narrative, from the beginning up to the time of Abraham and Sarah, condenses enormous time and vast prehistoric oral tradition into a simple narrative. This narrative is about meaning--not historical or scientific detail.  Puhalo reminds us that we derive our theology from meaning--not from supposed facts.

In comparing modern microphysics to Orthodox Theology, Puhalo  points out that there is no separation between the observer and the observed, the observer in both instances is not extraneous to the observed, but is a participant at different levels of experience, being part of the process by seeking to understand and quantify it. In theology the observer has intentionally involved himself, hoping to become part of it – the living theology of Orthodoxy, whereas in quantum physics the observer unavoidably impacts directly on the observation, becoming a part of the process being observed. (The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle).

One of Archbishop Lazar’s main points of this book is that almost all apparent conflicts between science and faith are the result of  “models of reality” rather than of reality itself. When we become rigid and frozen in our models by using a literal understanding of scripture and non-dogmatic statements of the holy fathers about science and history, we deprive ourselves of reality itself. As an historical example, Puhalo goes to the year 1500 when the general “model of reality for our universe was that a stationary earth was the center of the universe, around which the sun and other heavenly bodies were rotating. The great philosophers as well as the Holy Scriptures agreed that this was reality rather than a “model of reality” – so concrete as to be a dogma of faith.

But the observations of the heavens by Galileo with his primitive telescope proved that the old model of the universe was wrong and Galileo came up with the more accurate Copernican-Galileo “model of reality” in which the earth and the planets rotate around the stationary sun. This caused a conflict between Galileo (science) and the Catholic Church. Galileo’s doctrine was condemned by Rome and Galileo was forced by an inquisition to recant in public. Actually even Galileo’s “model of reality” is not the last word. A later “model of reality” has not a stationary sun, but one which races through space on one of the spiral arms of our Milky Way galaxy. This again is a better model, which may need to be modified as more discoveries are made.

The Archbishop’s final statement in [chapter 4] if of great importance: “Orthodox Christianity is not an arbiter of facts, but the healer of humanity, the source of meaning, the path to the authenticity of life and the doorway to eternity – to immortality”….

N.B. The elipses (….) indicate places where brief surveys of each chapter were omitted for the sake of space.