Skeptics question my honesty when I say I’m both a scientist and a Christian. They refuse to take seriously someone who believes in quantum physics and calls Jesus his Lord and Savior. The most hate-filled among them accuse me of being a fake scientist and/or fake Christian. Their minds simply cannot comprehend the possibility that science and Christianity are entirely, comfortably compatible. In science-speak, these skeptics have a “classical” worldview.
It’s a perception of reality that is purely logical, material, and mechanistic — very much like Newton’s classical physics. For these classicists, a body is just flesh and blood, a mind is just the product of the brain’s electrical activity, and the entire universe is just one big, awesome accident of nature.
It’s a blinkered perspective that led the late Stephen Hawking to say: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no Heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.” When I was a young atheist, I shared this machine-like view of reality. But I was quickly disabused of it when I started studying quantum physics.
Quantum physics turns logic on its head. Suddenly and enigmatically, the solid, material world becomes a ghostly cloud of probabilities, supernatural behavior becomes natural, and complete opposites become unified realities. It’s precisely that utterly illogical strangeness that seized my attention when I read the New Testament for the first time. I could scarcely believe it! This alleged, Iron-Age Jesus of Nazareth spoke like a modern-day quantum physicist.
Unlike the instructions on how to live from any other sacred figure I’d ever read (by then, I had immersed myself in all the major religions), Jesus’s teachings turned logic on its head. During His Sermon on the