BENJAMIN YOUNG
Staff Writer
The wild world of quantum physics is not an inviting place to tread. It is complicated and random, grandiose and intimate. Indeed, this world is not one that easily lends itself to be understood. The ideas of simultaneous locations, conscience rendering and infinity are not ideas that we, the vast plane of uninitiated humanity, are quick to grasp.
Then there are the religious and faith implications of quantum physics. What our reality is just a dream or an existence in the conscience of another being? What if I can choose my reality with deliberate thought? Where does the traditional notion of a Christian God fit in with all this seemingly situational, relative stuff? These are questions that will be asked over and over again both in and out of Christian circles as some of these quantum ideas become more and more mainstream.
One of the more interesting theories fronted today by people like Dr. Fred Alan Wolf and his colleagues, is that when people, believe, they can actually realign their immediate reality to accomplish what they want to accomplish. In other words, when people truly believe in something with every molecule of themselves, they can “move mountains.”
This theory at least forwards an explanation for those miraculous events when, say, 7-year-old child is able to lift an 800-pound lawn mower off his mother or maybe when one of Jesus’ disciples, Peter, is able to get out of the boat and walk on water. What if these events are examples of what can happen when human beings live up to their full potential — totally in tune with their environment and totally confident they can manipulate it in the way they want.
Look at the life of Jesus. We typically ascribe the miracles that he performed to the “God-half” of His being. After all in his time on Earth, He was half-God and half-man. From the book of John, we understand that Jesus did these miraculous things to show he was God. What if the miracles he performed also revealed his perfect humanity? What if he was showing us all that we could become — through total faith and belief — and imploring us to reach up to that level of existence? Peter, if only for a brief moment, broke into that higher plane of existence.
The trick it seems is to have total faith: faith to move a mountain into the sea, faith to walk on water and faith to order the world in which we live.
According to Dr. Wolf and his colleagues, the quantum theory says that every molecule must be aligned according to the belief that one holds to accomplish the “miraculous.” If even one molecule moves out of sync with the others, the higher plane of existence becomes impossible to reach. But what if, for even one brief moment, everything slides into place and the world around us becomes ours to command? I suppose that in itself is a good reason to keep living and longing to make the move into total faith.
09-15-2005