Ciência e Deus | Aliança de Santa Maria

SCIENCE AND GOD

João Branco
Data Analyst

If there was one scientific master who never ceased to amaze me with his quest to establish a link between science and the transcendent, it was undoubtedly Albert Einstein.

"God doesn't play dice," said the German physicist, referring to the assumptions of quantum physics, which is based on non-deterministic concepts such as "probability" and "randomness". For Einstein, even phenomena apparently without a visible cause had an underlying logic, a reason (albeit unobservable) that supported them. This view reflects his belief in a universal order, a harmony that transcends the limitations of human perception.

In fact, modern science shows that our place in the cosmos is the result of a series of unlikely, but not impossible, conditions. Among the infinite possibilities of the universe, we "just happened" to exist at a specific point, at exactly the right distance from the Sun for the Earth's atmosphere to be maintained, for water to be abundant and for life to flourish. Although science allows us to explain many of these phenomena, the real beauty lies in questioning why they are the way they are and not otherwise.

Science, with all its precision, recognizes the rarity of certain events, such as the famous miracle of the sun at Fatima. Many people ask: "If it's such a rare phenomenon, even if it can be explained, how can it be justified that it happened precisely on that day, at that time and in front of a crowd gathered to witness it, and not at any other time, with no one there to witness it?". For some, coincidences don't exist.

It is said that, as a young man, Einstein told his teacher, who was trying to demonstrate that hatred exists in the world: "There is no such thing as cold, only the absence of heat. Likewise, hate does not exist, only the absence of love." This quote from the Laws of Thermodynamics is a powerful and profoundly true example of how our perceptions of good and evil can be seen in a different light. In fact, the "evil" evident in the world is often just a lack of love.

Like Einstein, who lost himself in the numbers and formulas that describe the vastness of the cosmos, I too see in this mathematical "harmony" a way for God to express himself. The Fibonacci sequence, explained in mathematics textbooks, is the same as that seen in a sunflower, a pineapple or a pine cone. It is numbers that allow us to dismantle the laws of nature and understand their fundamental principles. In the end, perhaps this is what gives us purpose: in trying to understand the inexplicable, we try to decipher God's intentions and thus give meaning to our existence. That's why I say that Science and God are not opposed to each other - on the contrary, they are concepts that explain everything in the Universe in different ways and which, to an infinitesimal extent, end up intersecting.

If everything were perfectly justified and determined in our minds, life would lose its charm. It is precisely uncertainty and the effort to interpret the laws of nature that give life its flavor. Believing that everything is interconnected is, in a way, believing in God, because God is order and cause, and this presence, however subtle, can be found between the lines of reality.

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