Physics and Religion

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PHYSICS AND RELIGION

PHYSICS AND RELIGION . Physics describes the material world on the basis of repeatable observation and in terms of concepts such as mass, energy, space, and time. As the earliest of the modern scientific disciplines, physics has played a central role in establishing the approach that characterizes modern science in general. At the heart of this approach lies the quest for precise mathematical "laws," which can be used to explain, predict, and control the natural world. The historical roots of this quest lie in the musings of the ancient Greeks, most notably those of Pythagoras (sixth century bce) and his followers. The writings of the Pythagorean tradition, as well as those of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, were re-introduced to late medieval Europe by Islamic scholars such as Ibn Sīnā (known also as Avicenna; 980–1037). This collection of writings had a profound impact on European history, precipitating many of the intellectual shifts that led to the birth of modern physics during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Because of these historical connections, the impact of modern physics upon religious ideas has been most enduringly felt and evaluated from the perspective of Western Christian thought. This article thus focuses primarily on Christian responses, though works relating to other religions are included in the bibliography.

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) stands at the center of one of the first encounters between physics and Christianity. The Roman Catholic Church is commonly perceived to have put forward theological objections to the sun-centered, or heliocentric, account of planetary motion first developed by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) and later promoted by Galileo. However, historians now generally agree that the church's hostility toward heliocentrism resulted more from Reformation controversies over authority and biblical interpretation, as well as the various personalities involved in the encounter, than from any real theological difficulties stemming from the earth's motion. In retrospect, the lasting theological significance of physics' emerging worldview proved to be its comprehensive account of physical motion in terms of deterministic laws. If every moment in history had been completely determined by physical laws acting upon what came before it, could one still conceive of God's ongoing activity in the world? And equally important, in such a world could one still conceive of human thought and action as genuinely free?

Newtonian Mechanism

The deterministic worldview of early modern physics solidified around the grand synthesis of Isaac Newton (1642–1727), which united celestial and terrestrial motion into a single conceptual scheme. The heavens were no longer the abode of spiritual beings but merely another part of the physical world that could be understood mathematically in terms of its parts. In this key respect, Newton's account of physical motion, his "mechanics," shaped the character of modern science in general. All of the early scientists in Europe, including Newton, were at least nominally Christian, though many held unorthodox beliefs. Some, like Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), took it as their task and reward to "think God's thoughts after him" and thought of their investigations as a hymn of praise to the Creator. Others, like Galileo, attempted to distance scientific ideas from theological ones by describing science and the church as two distinct authorities, each controlling separate spheres of knowledge. Quoting the respected cardinal and Counter-Reformation historian Césare Baronio (1538–1607), Galileo wrote in his own defense that "the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go." But distinguishing religion from science in this way obscured, at least initially, the far-reaching consequences of replacing the medieval view of the world as an organism open to divine interaction with physics' developing view of the world as a lifeless and autonomous clocklike mechanism closed to any "external" influence.

At the heart of this new worldview lay the idea of determinism, which has become a synonym for classical (i.e., Newtonian) physics signifies the impossibility of any genuine novelty in the world. As the French mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749–1827) famously stated, "Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it…, for [this intelligence] nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes" (Laplace, 1917, p. 4). Newtonian mechanism also reinforced the strategy of reductionism, by which an object's behavior is explained solely in terms of the behavior of its parts. Embracing both determinism and reductionism, Newtonian physicists and other scientists came to eschew explanations that appealed to purpose, or telos. Instead, they sought to provide explanations solely in terms of efficient causes. This mechanistic outlook continues to oppose religious perspectives that speak of the meaningfulness and purposefulness of the world.

In response to the rise of mechanistic physics, Western philosophers and theologians of the Enlightenment focused much of their effort on protecting human freedom. One of the first to deal with this issue was René Descartes (1596–1650), who divided reality into two realms: the material world of mechanical necessity (res extensa) and the mental world of human free willing (res cogitans). Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) subsequently advanced a more nuanced dualism, distinguishing between the determinism of the perceived world (the realm of phenomena ) and the freedom of the world in and for itself (the realm of noumena ). Following Descartes and Kant, many Protestant theologians abandoned the physical world and retreated into the "inner" world of the human spirit. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was one of the first to push this agenda, removing religion from the realm of knowledge and relocating it in the realm of feeling. By the end of the nineteenth century, Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889) could write, "theology has to do, not with natural objects, but with states and movements of man's spiritual life." In its first interactions with modern physics, Christian thought had managed to protect human freedom from physical determinism only by severing human existence from its physical foundation.

Classical physics also posed a serious challenge to notions of God's ongoing activity in the world. In response to determinism, Christian thinkers developed three markedly different theories of divine action. According to the first, the universe does not have the causal powers within itself necessary to bring about its present configuration. Newton espoused an early version of this approach, claiming that the planets' orbits were inherently unstable and thus in need of occasional divine adjustment. Locating God's activity as Newton did in events allegedly lying beyond the ken of scientific explanation has been called the God of the gaps approach. Such explanations rely problematically on scientific ignorance and must retreat whenever science fills an explanatory gap. Others pursued a more compelling version of this approach, often called interventionism, in which God breaks the laws of nature when acting in a specific event. God, on this view, creates gaps in an otherwise deterministic world to make "room" for particular divine acts. Deists rejected this theory because they felt that the most honest and reasonable response to determinism was to relinquish the God who continues to act, in favor of a God who brings the world into existence and then desists. (Newton's account of inertial, or self-sustaining, motion helped to discredit the idea that the world depends upon God's ongoing activity for its continued existence.) Finally, nineteenth-century Protestant liberals eliminated from their theory of divine action all objectively special acts and miracles, speaking only of God's one great uniform act: the entire history of creation. On the liberal account, one might perceive God acting specially in some particular physical event, but this would be merely a matter of one's own subjective perception.

The three responses—interventionism, deism, and liberalism—differ sharply from one another, yet they brook a common theological constraint. Each accepts that a God who brings about change in the world must be treated on a par with any other object entering into human experience. Thus, all concede to classical physics that if the world is deterministic then there is no "room" within its structures for God to act. Deism and liberalism infer from this that God does not act specially at particular moments in history. Interventionism retains the idea of an active God, but it sees God acting by breaking the world's natural structures. The far-reaching consequences of this constraint cannot be overemphasized. Prior to the rise of physics, theologians had no difficulty harmonizing a God who acts with a world that manifests its own causal integrity. While few would accept a return to prescientific notions of divine action, the virtues and liabilities of the notion that objectively special divine acts are incompatible with physical determinism, or theological incompatibilism, have not been discussed extensively by contemporary theologians.

Recent developments in physics have led to a new (but still theologically incompatibilist) approach to divine action. On the one hand, this approach agrees with the liberal theological tradition that God must be understood to act with the grain of natural processes—after all, it is noted, God is the one who established these processes—though it rejects the liberals' purely subjective view of special divine action. On the other hand, it agrees with interventionism that God acts objectively at particular moments in the world, though it rejects the interventionist view that God thereby violates the laws of nature. This new noninterventionist strategy attempts to straddle the traditional divide by turning to developments in twentieth-century physics, many of which can be seen to undercut the determinism and reductionism of the classical paradigm.

The Twentieth-Century Revolution

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, physicists' work seemed nearly complete. Classical mechanics described the motion of physical masses under the influence of mechanical forces, electromagnetic theory described the interaction of electrical charges and currents, and thermodynamics described the phenomena of temperature and heat. The eminent Victorian physicist Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), who was instrumental in the development of thermodynamics, saw nothing new on the horizon for future generations of physicists to discover. He professed to see only a few inconsequential clouds obscuring the "beauty and clearness" of Newtonian physics. But in truth, behind these clouds lay deep puzzles regarding the nature of light and the behavior of atoms. Contrary to Kelvin's expectations, attempts to solve them ushered in the greatest revolution in physical science since the time of Newton. This revolution came in the form of two new theoretical paradigms, both of which seemed at odds with the worldview of classical physics: the theory of relativity developed by Albert Einstein (1879–1955) and the theory of atomic behavior called quantum theory developed by a host of scientists in the 1920s. New views of space, time, and causation prompted by these theories encouraged renewed theological reflection on the nature of God, the world, and humanity.

Newton had conceived of space as God's means of experiencing the world and of time as an absolute structure with an endless past and future, as well as a uniformly moving present. Einstein, in his special theory of relativity, reconceptualized space and time as a single reality, spacetime, and postulated that the speed of light, not space or time, was the true invariant of the universe. Accordingly, measurements of distance and time vary from different perspectives depending upon the different observers' relative motion. This understanding denies the existence of a universal "now" and raises questions about traditional notions of the relation between divine eternity and creaturely temporality. Additionally, the portrayal of time as a fourth dimension has led some to interpret Einstein's theory as hostile to the very idea of temporal flow. According to proponents of the block universe interpretation, our spacetime universe exists timelessly as a four-dimensional whole, challenging the reality of human freedom and our general sense of temporal becoming.

After publishing his special theory of relativity, Einstein turned to the problem of developing a new theory of gravity (the general theory of relativity) based on his account of spacetime. His new theory treated gravity geometrically as the curvature of spacetime rather than in Newtonian terms as a force acting on a mass. According to Einstein, matter curves spacetime, and spacetime tells matter how to move. It is within this conceptual framework that physicists developed the cosmological theory of the origin, structure, and development of the universe known as the Big Bang theory. Extrapolating backwards from the present expansion of the universe, physicists arrived at the notion of a primordial explosion, or big bang. This notion led Pope Pius XII to suggest in 1951 that physics had finally confirmed the Christian doctrine of creation. Much discussion has ensued as to whether such connections can be made and whether the concept of creation entails an absolute beginning or only the more general notion of ontological dependence. Recent scientific proposals such as eternal inflation and quantum cosmology suggest that the beginning of our universe may have been only one event in a much longer series. Consequently, the Big Bang now looks less and less like an absolute beginning.

Contemporary cosmology has also reinvigorated the design argument for the existence of God. Although earlier forms of this argument focused on the intricacy and beauty of living organisms, Darwin's case against design—it was only "apparent"—shifted the debate to the level of physics. According to the so-called anthropic principle argument, the structure and processes of the universe are finely tuned for the requirements of our own existence. In its strongest form, this argument leads to the existence of a divine tuner. In its weaker form, however, our existence is seen merely as the result of a process of cosmic Darwinism: we can only live in a particular domain of the universe where its structures and processes are hospitable to life. This weaker version avoids the theistic conclusion, but much disagreement remains as to whether or not it amounts to a scientific explanation. The design argument runs into further difficulties with the far future of the universe, which appears doomed either to endless expansion and cooling, the freeze scenario, or to eventual recollapse and implosion, the fry scenario. Neither offers much comfort for an eschatological perspective that clings to the notion of future fulfillment. It is at least conceivable that life, suitably transformed, could extend itself far into the future, though this kind of pseudo-immortalization does not satisfy the Christian vision of a creation ultimately assumed into the divine life.

While Einstein was rewriting Newton's account of space and time, as well as reshaping our understanding of the universe at the largest scales, another even more radical revolution was taking place at the very smallest scales. In 1900 the physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) turned his attention to one of the most puzzling of the remaining "clouds," a problem having to do with the emission and absorption of electromagnetic radiation by atoms. He solved this problem theoretically by introducing the curious notion that energy comes only in discrete units, called quanta, not in continuously varying amounts as classical physicists had supposed. This and other breakthroughs led physicists such as Niels Bohr (1885–1962), Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961), and Paul Dirac (1902–1984) to develop quantum theory, which achieved great successes in describing the behavior of atoms and their components. These successes, however, came at the expense of classical intuitions regarding basic physical concepts such as causality, determinism, separability, and the wave-particle distinction. At the quantum level, objects can change their state over time without any sufficient mechanical cause, evolve in a purely random or indeterministic manner, remain intimately connected to one other over large distances, and behave like waves in one setting but like particles in another. Theologians have responded to the quantum perspective on the physical world in a variety of ways. Some have connected Bohr's notion of complementarity, the idea that mutually incompatible descriptions like wave and particle are necessary for a complete description of the same reality, to issues such the relation between religion and science. Others have appealed to quantum indeterminism to resolve the question of divine action. According to their arguments, an indeterministic ontology makes it possible to conceive of God (and perhaps human beings as well, though by different means) as acting directly in the physical world without breaking physical laws by determining otherwise underdetermined quantum events. Still others are exploring quantum nonseparability or entanglement, which suggests that creation is a place not only of immense times and distances but also of deep and subtle connections.

The remarkable subtlety of physical processes is additionally highlighted by chaos theory, a third significant theoretical development within twentieth-century physics. Strictly speaking, chaos theory fits within the Newtonian deterministic paradigm. However, it reveals how even processes described by deterministic mathematical laws, such as weather patterns, can develop in seemingly random and unpredictable ways. Because the theory is deterministic, it does not appear to offer any straightforward opportunities for those pursuing a noninterventionist account of divine or human action. Still, some have argued that, despite being presently deterministic, the theory points to a genuine form of openness in nature; this openness, they aver, will eventually be reflected in a future version of the theory. If this were to happen, chaos theory would provide yet another example of physics moving beyond its Newtonian origins.

Physicists are currently struggling to unite the various theoretical developments surveyed here under one conceptual framework, but at present the theory of relativity, quantum theory, and chaos theory each provide quite distinct lenses onto the world's physical structures and processes. Although both relativity theory and chaos theory transform various aspects of Newton's account of space, time, and causation, they also essentially sustain the determinism of the classical tradition. Quantum theory, on the other hand, at least according to the most widely held interpretation, dramatically overturns this tradition. Physics is a scientific discipline presently at odds with itself, presenting us with remarkable but fractured insights into the nature of the physical world. The resolution of this tension will no doubt lead to further opportunities for conversation with religious perspectives. The human quest for meaning and transcendence cannot be reduced to physical explanation, but it can be enriched by the deeper understanding of the world's natural processes that physics provides.

Bibliography

General

Introductory theological texts include a collection edited by Robert J. Russell, William R. Stoeger, S.J., and George V. Coyne, S.J., Physics, Philosophy, and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding (Vatican City, 1988), and Mark W. Worthing's God, Creation, and Contemporary Physics (Minneapolis, 1996). Twentieth-century developments in physics are surveyed in Paul C. Davies's God and the New Physics (New York, 1983), and in his The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World (New York, 1992). For a more detailed analysis of epistemological issues, see Philip Clayton's Explanation from Physics to Theology: An Essay in Rationality and Religion (New Haven, Conn., 1989) and Roy D. Morrison's Science, Theology, and the Transcendental Horizon: Einstein, Kant, and Tillich (Atlanta, 1994), as well as a collection of essays edited by Jan Hilgevoord, Physics and Our View of the World (Cambridge, U.K., 1994). Apologetic concerns dominate in Stephen M. Barr's Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (Notre Dame, Ind., 2003) and Victor J. Stenger's Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe (Amherst, N.Y., 2003). In one of the first popular works to explore the religious implications of modern physics, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, 3d ed. (Berkeley, Calif., 1975), Fritjof Capra focuses on connections to the Eastern traditions. Essays written from a wide variety of perspectives are contained in a collection edited by Henry Margenau and Roy A. Varghese, Cosmos, Bios, Theos: Scientists Reflect on Science, God, and the Origins of the Universe, Life, and Homo Sapiens (La Salle, Ill., 1992), and in another edited by Clifford N. Matthews and Roy A. Varghese, Cosmic Beginnings and Human Ends: Where Science and Religion Meet (Chicago and La Salle, Ill., 1995). Other general works include Arthur Peacocke's Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming: Natural, Divine, and Human (Minneapolis, 1993), John C. Polkinghorne's The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-up Thinker (Minneapolis, 1996), Michael Heller's The New Physics and a New Theology (Vatican City, 1996), Guy Consolmagno's The Way to the Dwelling of Light: How Physics Illuminates Creation (Vatican City, 1998), Peter Hodgson's Theology and the New Physics (Oxford, 1998), and Andreas Benk's Moderne Physik und Theologie: Voraussetzungen und Perspektiven eines Dialogs (Mainz, Germany, 2000). See also Pierre-Simon de Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, 2d ed., translated from the 6th French edition by Frederick Wilson Truscott and Frederick Lincoln Emory (New York, 1917).

Historical

Studies of religious and philosophical developments accompanying the rise of modern physics include Edwin A. Burtt's The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science: A Historical and Critical Essay, rev. ed. (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1952); Amos Funkenstein's Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 1986); Michael J. Buckley's At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, Conn., 1987); and John Hedley Brooke's Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, UK, 1991). Carolyn Merchant examines the social and ecological impact of mechanistic thinking in The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, 1980), and Margaret Wertheim compares the historical marginalization of women in religious institutions to their exclusion from the physics academy in Pythagoras' Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars (New York, 1995). N. Max Wildiers examines the impact of modern science on religious cosmology in The Theologian and His Universe: Theology and Cosmology from the Middle Ages to the Present (New York, 1982). The preservation and expansion of early science in Islamic society is discussed in Muzaffar Iqbal's Islam and Science (Burlington, Vt., 2002). Other works deal with particular concepts or historical figures: Jerome Langford discusses recent scholarship on Galileo in Galileo, Science, and the Church, 3d ed. (Notre Dame, Ind., 1998); Wolfhart Pannenberg treats the religious significance of the concept of inertia in Toward a Theology of Nature: Essays on Science and Faith, edited by Ted Peters (Louisville, Ky., 1993); J. L. Heilbron recounts the use of churches for astronomical observation in The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Max Jammer examines Einstein's views in Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology (Princeton, N.J., 1999); and Richard Cross reconstructs one medieval perspective in The Physics of Duns Scotus: The Scientific Context of a Theological Vision (Oxford, UK, 1998).

Special Relativity and Temporality

Paul Davies introduces the scientific and philosophical issues in About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution (New York, 1996). Treatments of the religious implications include Lawrence W. Fagg's The Becoming of Time: Integrating Physical and Religious Time (Atlanta, 1995), Jürgen Heinze's "Gott im Herzen der Materie ": Die Struktur der Zeit als Grundlage christlicher Rede von Gott im Kontext der modernen Physik (Bonn, Germany, 1996), and William Lane Craig's Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time (Wheaton, Ill., 2001). The relation between eternity and temporality is the topic of several of the essays in a collection edited by Robert J. Russell, Nancey C. Murphy, and Chris J. Isham, Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, 2d ed. (Vatican City and Berkeley, Calif., 1996).

General Relativity and Cosmology

Popular scientific introductions include Stephen W. Hawking's A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York, 1988) and Robert Jastrow's God and the Astronomers, 2d ed. (New York, 2000). Discussions of the religious implications can be found in Stanley L. Jaki's God and the Cosmologists (Edinburgh, 1989); in a collection edited by Ted Peters, Cosmos as Creation: Theology and Science in Consonance (Nashville, 1989); in another edited by Robert J. Russell, Nancey C. Murphy, and Chris J. Isham, Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, 2d ed. (Vatican City and Berkeley, Calif., 1996); and in Willem B. Drees's Beyond the Big Bang: Quantum Cosmologies and God (La Salle, Ill., 1990), Owen Gingerich's Space, Time, and Beyond: The Place of God in the Cosmos (Valparaiso, Ind., 1993), and Jeffrey G. Sobosan's Romancing the Universe: Theology, Science, and Cosmology (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1999). The anthropic principle is discussed in John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler's The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford, 1985) and John Leslie's Universes (London, 1989); its theological implications are further explored in Nancey C. Murphy and George F. R. Ellis's On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics, (Minneapolis, 1996). Cosmological arguments for and against the existence of God are presented in William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith's Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (New York, 1993). Attempts to harmonize scientific and biblical accounts of creation can be found in Hugh Ross's Beyond the Cosmos: The Extra-Dimensionality of God, 2d ed. (Colorado Springs, Colo., 1999), Gerald L. Schroeder's Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery of Harmony between Modern Science and the Bible (New York, 1990), and Howard Van Till's The Fourth Day: What the Bible and the Heavens Are Telling Us about Creation (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1986). Scientific and theological considerations are enlisted to support a philosophical cosmology in Arthur Gibson's God and the Universe (New York, 2000) and Nancy Howell's A Feminist Cosmology: Ecology, Solidarity, and Metaphysics (Amherst, N.Y., 2000). The far future of the universe is the topic of a collection edited by John C. Polkinghorne and Michael Welker, The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology (Harrisburg, Pa., 2000); Arnold Benz's The Future of the Universe: Change, Chaos, God? (New York, 2000); and a volume edited by George F. R. Ellis, The Far-Future Universe: Eschatology from a Cosmic Perspective (Philadelphia, 2002). The possibilities for life continuing into the distant future are explored in Freeman J. Dyson's Infinite in All Directions (New York, 1988) and Frank J. Tipler's The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead (New York, 1994).

Quantum Theory

Popular scientific introductions include Nick Herbert's Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics (Garden City, N.Y., 1985) and John Polkinghorne's Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002). Early theological reflections on quantum theory include Karl Heim's The Transformation of the World (London, 1953) and William G. Pollard's Chaos and Providence (London, 1958). The noninterventionist approach to divine action is assessed in a book edited by Robert J. Russell, Philip Clayton, Kirk Wegter-McNelly, and John Polkinghorne, Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action (Vatican City and Berkeley, Calif., 2001); see also earlier volumes in the VO/CTNS series. Metaphysical perspectives are constructed in David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London, 1980) and John A. Jungerman's World in Process: Creativity and Interconnection in the New Physics (Albany, N.Y., 2000). An Islamic perspective is developed in Bint al-Shati's The Subatomic World in the Qurʾan (Norwich, UK, 1980). A Buddhist perspective is presented in Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Xuan Thuan's The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet (New York, 2001). John Losee discusses methodological parallels in Religious Language and Complementarity (Lanham, Md., 1992).

Chaos Theory

A popular scientific introduction is James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science (New York, 1988). John Polkinghorne argues for the relevance of chaos theory to divine action in, for example, Reason and Reality: The Relationship between Science and Theology (London, 1991). Its relevance is examined critically in a book edited by Robert J. Russell, Nancey C. Murphy, and Arthur Peacocke, Chaos and Complexity: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action (Vatican City and Berkeley, Calif., 1995).

Spirituality

Numerous works have been written from a variety of religious perspectives. Some of the more prominent include Daniel Liderbach's The Numinous Universe (New York, 1989); B. Alan Wallace's Choosing Reality: A Contemplative View of Physics and the Mind (Boston, 1989); John L. Hitchcock's The Web of the Universe: Jung, the "New Physics," and Human Spirituality (New York, 1991); Kevin O'Shea's Person in Cosmos: Metaphors of Meaning from Physics, Philosophy, and Theology (Bristol, Ind., 1995); Brian Hines's God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder: Echoes of Ultimate Reality in the New Physics (Brattleboro, Vt., 1996); Daniel C. Matt's God and the Big Bang: Discovering Harmony between Science and Spirituality (Woodstock, Vt., 1996); Diarmuid O'Murchu's Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics (New York, 1997); Lothar Schäfer's In Search of Divine Reality: Science as a Source of Inspiration (Fayetteville, Ark., 1997); David Toolan's At Home in the Cosmos (Maryknoll, N.Y., 2001); and Ken Wilber's Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists, rev. ed. (Boston, 2001).