I still believed in God (I am now an atheist) when I heard the following question during a seminar, first posed by Einstein, and was stunned by its elegance and depth: ‘If there is a God who created the whole universe and ALL its laws of physics, do God follow God’s own laws? Or can God replace his own laws, such as traveling faster than the speed of light and being in two different places at the same time? ‘Can the answer help us prove whether God exists or not, or is this where scientific empiricism and religious life intersect, with NO true answer? David Frost (67), Los Angeles.
I was in the lock when I received this question and was immediately intrigued. This is no wonder about timing – tragic events, such as pandemics, often leave us questioning the existence of God: if there is a merciful God, why does a catastrophe like this happen? The idea that God would possibly be “bound” by the laws of physics – which also governs chemistry and biology and thus the limits of medical science – was an interesting idea to explore.
If God could not violate the laws of physics, she would probably not be as powerful as you would expect a supreme being to be. But if she could, why have we never seen evidence that the laws of physics in the universe have been broken?
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Let us set it out a little to address the question. First, can God travel faster than light? Let’s take the question at face value. Light moves at an estimated velocity of 3 x 105 kilometers every second, or 186,000 km / h. We learn in school that nothing can move faster than the speed of light – not even the USS Enterprise in Star Trek when its dilithium crystals are set to maximum.
But is it true? A few years ago, a group of physicists believed that particles called tachyons move above the speed of light. Fortunately, their existence as real particles is considered highly unlikely. If they did exist, they would have an imaginary mass and the fabric of space and time would be distorted – leading to a violation of causality (and possibly a headache for God).
It seems so far that no object has been observed that can move faster than the speed of light. This in itself says nothing at all about God. It merely reinforces the knowledge that light is indeed moving very fast.
Things get a little more interesting when you consider how far light has traveled from the beginning. Suppose a traditional big bang cosmology and a light speed of 3 x 105 km / s, then we can calculate that the light traveled about 1024 km in the 13.8 billion years of the universe’s existence. Or rather, the existence of the observable universe.
The universe is expanding at a speed of about 70 km / s per Mpc (1 Mpc = 1 Megaparsec ~ 30 million km), so current estimates indicate that the distance to the edge of the universe is 46 billion light-years. As time goes on, the volume increases space, and the light has to move longer to reach us.
There is much more universe out there than we can see, but the farthest object we have seen is a galaxy, GN-z11, observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s about 1023 km or 13.4 billion light-years away, which means that it took 13.4 billion years before the light of the galaxy reached us. But when the light ‘went off’, the galaxy was only about 3 billion light-years away from our galaxy, the Milky Way.
We cannot observe or see the universe that has grown since the big bang, because insufficient time has passed for light from the first fractions of a second to reach us. So some argue that we can not be sure whether the laws of physics can be broken in other cosmic regions – perhaps they are just local, incidental laws. And that leads us to something even bigger than the universe.
The multiverse
Many cosmologists believe that the universe can be part of an extended cosmos, a multiverse, where many different universes coexist but do not interact. The idea of the multiverse is supported by the theory of inflation – the idea that the universe expanded a lot before it was 10-32 seconds old. Inflation is an important theory because it can explain why the universe has the shape and structure we see around us.
But if inflation can happen once, why not many times? From experiments we know that quantum fluctuations can give rise to pairs of particles that suddenly exist, and disappear only moments later. And if such fluctuations can produce particles, why not whole atoms or universe? It is suggested that during the period of chaotic inflation, not everything took place at the same rate – quantum fluctuations in expansion could cause bubbles that inflated to become whole in their own right.
Juergen Faelchle / Shutterstock
But how does God fit into the multiverse? One headache for cosmologists was the fact that our universe is finely tuned for life. The fundamental particles created in the big bang have the right properties to enable the formation of hydrogen and deuterium – substances that the first stars produced.
The physical laws that regulate nuclear reactions in these stars produced the things that life consists of – carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. How is it then that all the physical laws and parameters in the universe have the values that made the stars, planets and ultimately life possible to evolve?
Some think it’s just a lucky coincidence. Others say we should not be surprised to see bio-friendly physical laws – after all, they produced us, so what else would we see? However, some theists claim that this indicates the existence of a God who creates favorable conditions.
But God is not a valid scientific statement. The theory of the multiverse solves the mystery because it allows different universes to have different physical laws. It is therefore not surprising that we can see ourselves in one of the few universes that can support life. Of course, you cannot refute the idea that a God created the multiverse.
This is all very hypothetical, and one of the biggest criticisms of the theories of the multiverse is that because there seems to be no interaction between our universe and any other universe, the idea of the multiverse cannot be tested directly.
Quantum strangeness
Let us now see if God can be in more than one place at a time. Much of the science and technology we use in space science is based on the counter-intuitive theory of the small world of atoms and particles known as quantum mechanics.
The theory makes possible something called quantum entanglement: ghostly connected particles. If two particles are entangled, you automatically manipulate its partner when you manipulate it, even if they are very far apart and without the two interacting. There are better descriptions of entanglement than the ones I give here, but it’s simple enough to follow.
Imagine a particle that decays into two subparticles, A and B. The properties of the subparticles must contribute to the properties of the original particle – this is the principle of conservation. For example, all particles have a quantum property called ‘spin’ – roughly, they move as if they were small compass needles. If the original particle has a ‘spin’ of zero, one of the two sub-particles must have a positive turn and the other a negative turn, which means that each of A and B has a 50% chance of having a positive or a negative turn. (According to quantum mechanics, particles are by definition in a mixture of different states until you actually measure them.)
The properties of A and B are not independent of each other – they are intertwined – even if they are located in separate laboratories on separate planets. So if you measure the turn of A, you will find it positive. Imagine that a friend measured the turn of B at exactly the same time as you measured it. To make the principle of retention work, she must find the turn of B negative.
But – and this is where things get cloudy – like B-particle A, B had a 50:50 chance of being positive, and the spin state became ‘negative’ when the spin state of A as positive measured. In other words, spin state information was immediately transferred between the two subparticles. Such transmission of quantum information appears to occur faster than the speed of light. Since Einstein himself described the quantum entanglement as a “ghostly action at a distance”, I can all be forgiven if we find it a rather strange effect.
After all, there is something faster than the speed of light: quantum information. It does not prove or disprove God, but can it help us to think of God in physical terms – perhaps as a shower of tangled particles, which transmit quantum information back and forth, occupying so many places at the same time? Even many universes at the same time?
Jurik Peter / Shutterstock
I have this image of God spinning galaxy-sized plates while juggling planet-sized balls – throwing bits of information from one wobbling universe to another to keep everything going. Fortunately, God can do multitasking – to keep the space running from time to time. All it takes is a little faith.
Does this essay come close to answering the questions asked? I do not suspect: if you believe in God (like me), then the idea that God is bound by the laws of physics is nonsense, because God can do anything, even travel faster than light. If you do not believe in God, the question is equally absurd, because there is no God and nothing can travel faster than light. Perhaps the question is really for agnostics who do not know if there is a God.
This is indeed where science and religion differ. Science requires evidence, religious belief requires faith. Scientists do not try to prove or disprove God’s existence because they know that there is no experiment that God can ever detect. And if you believe in God, it does not matter what scientists discover about the universe; it can be considered that any cosmos corresponds to God.
Our view of God, physics or anything else ultimately depends on perspective. But let’s end with a quote from a truly authoritative source. No, this is not the bible. Nor is it a cosmology textbook. This is from Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett:
‘Light thinks it’s moving faster than anything, but it’s wrong. No matter how fast the light moves, it finds that the darkness has always been there, and waiting for it. ‘
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