Albert Einstein once mused that “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility… [t]he fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.” The physicist Eugene Wigner also echoed this sentiment: “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.”

But what was a mystery to Einstein and confessed by Wigner to be beyond comprehension was quite clear to earlier generations of scientists. To paraphrase Galileo from his essay Il Saggiatore (The Assayer, 1623), “nature is written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics.” The intelligibility of nature is not an inexplicable miracle, but a revelation of the Mind of the One who brought it into being. I will have the privilege of exploring the reasons and evidence for this with the college seniors next spring as we study the history and philosophy of science and contemplate the foundations of physics and cosmology and biology.

The psalmist proclaims, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1) and the Apostle Paul reminds us that “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (Romans 1:20). That creation is ordered in such a way that it can be understood—and that our minds are capable of understanding it—bears witness to the activity and intention of God.

Modern science did not arise in a cultural vacuum. It grew in the soil of a distinctly Judeo-Christian worldview. In medieval Europe, at the universities that grew out of the cathedral schools, the order and unity of the universe as the product of the divine Mind, amenable to the human mind, was the basis for all knowledge. As Alfred North Whitehead put it in his 1925 Lowell lectures at Harvard:

When we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of other civilizations when left to themselves, there seems but one source of its origin. It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality. Remember that I am not talking about the explicit beliefs of a few individuals. What I mean is the impress on the European mind arising from the unquestioned faith of centuries. By this I mean the instinctive tone of thought and not a mere creed of words.

The universe is the rational creation of a wise and faithful God. Because God is free in His creative will, nature’s order could not simply be deduced from abstract reasoning—it had to be discovered through observation and experiment. And because God is faithful, this order was reliable, coherent, and worthy of investigation.

As the writer of Hebrews puts it: “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible” (Hebrews 11:3). The very possibility of science, its rational ground, rests on this foundation: a creation that exists and is intelligible because it was spoken into being by the Word of God.

This theological foundation was eroded, however, mostly from the late nineteenth century onward. While the Mechanical Philosophy, which had its beginnings in the seventeenth century, reduced natural function to material mechanisms and efficient causes, formal and final causes remained evident in God’s design and purpose for these efficient mechanisms in the natural order. It really was only with the rise of Darwinian philosophy in the late nineteenth century that the attempt was made to recast the universe as blind, purposeless, merciless, and arbitrary. Yet even here, though the efficacy of natural selection operating on random variations in populations has proven far more limited than required, order and structure and regularity unexplained and unjustified by naturalistic assumptions were required if any “undirected” ratchet system for biological complexity was to function.

Once the intellectual dismissal of God’s relevance had overtaken the scientific culture, epistemic puzzlement and metaphysical disorientation were short to follow. The very comprehensibility of the universe that made science possible became, in Einstein’s words, an inexplicable “eternal mystery.” Philosophical naturalism offers no reason for anything to exist at all, let alone a natural world structured by lawful regularities that are mathematically describable, rational, and discoverable by the human mind. That which need not have existed can only be explained by that which cannot have failed to exist and be what it is.

It is the Logos, the Word of God, the Word who became flesh for us and for our salvation, whose eternal reason gives us life and being, infuses nature with order, and sustains reality: “For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible…all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16–17). The world in which we live and move and have our being is neither self-generating nor self-sustaining but grounded in God’s faithful speech—“Let there be light…”—the Word of God, the Light that banishes all darkness, the Alpha and Omega, has made all things, and he is making them new. In him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28).

God’s existence and action are not obstacles to science; they are the reason science is possible. Every equation written on a chalkboard, every pattern discerned in the heavens, every regularity of nature discovered in the laboratory—all of it is testimony to the wisdom and faithfulness of the Creator and to the fact that “in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). The proper response is not wonder at our inexplicable luck, but worship of the One who spoke the cosmos into existence and upholds it by His power. Perhaps we will end next semester’s class with a doxology!

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
… When I consider your heavens, the work of your hands,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man, that you are mindful of him,
human beings, that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honor.
You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
and put everything under their feet…
O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Psalm 8: 1, 3-6, 9

 

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil…
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur