Throughout my life, I have felt like I have one foot in the world of science and one foot in the Church. I hold degrees in both theology and engineering. I have worked for a national lab and major scientific corporations, all the while remaining an active volunteer with my local parish and Christian organizations. Never have these two worlds intersected more for me than this past semester while I was teaching modern physics at Aquinas College. Exploring Einstein’s theories at an institution named after St. Thomas Aquinas brought me a deeper appreciation for these parallels. I could not help but see the overlap between these two great thinkers’ philosophies that up until now I had not fully considered.
Let me clarify from the beginning – I do not intend to baptize Albert Einstein or award Thomas Aquinas a Nobel prize in physics. Both men were a product of their times and cultures. Thomas Aquinas was a scholar who lived in the mid-1200s. He is considered a Doctor of the Catholic Church, and arguably the greatest Catholic philosopher of all time. However, much of his scientific worldview was based on Aristotle’s “Physics” which was written in the fourth century B.C. Aquinas predates Galileo by a few centuries, and Newton by 400 years. Thus, we can forgive him for what to our modern eye may appear to be a rudimentary understanding of the scientific world. In a similar sense, Einstein was Jewish, at least culturally and ethnically. He may not have had religious leanings in a formal sense, but he spoke of God often. Einstein frequently expressed his scientific motivations by saying he “wanted to know what God was thinking when he created the universe.” Accepting these two very different perspectives makes it even more notable how much thought they both devoted to their fields.
One of the first consequences of Einstein’s theory of special relativity covered in textbooks is that simultaneity is not an absolute. That is, in reference to frames moving with respect to one another at speeds approaching the speed of light, there is no definitive “now.” Events that appear to be simultaneous to one observer may be non-simultaneous to another observer in a different reference frame. As counterintuitive as that may be to our own lived experience (because we live our lives at speeds much slower than the speed of light, so relativistic effects are negligible), it is maybe even more surprising that St. Thomas Aquinas was wrestling with some of these concepts 700 years earlier. Although St. Thomas did not speak of different reference frames, he did speak of the perspective from eternity as compared to that from within time. He wrote “eternity is not the same as the ‘now’ of time.” There is a subtlety here that God’s eternity is distinct from our human experience of “now,” much like the experience of “now” differs between observers in Einstein’s reference frames.
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To take this one step further, another consequence of Einstein’s theory of special relativity is time dilation. Simply put, time dilation means that observers moving at relativistic speeds (speeds approaching the speed of light) will experience less passage of time than a slower or stationary observer. (For a dramatic illustration of time dilation, go watch the movie “Interstellar.”) Taken to the extreme, a photon, a single particle of light, does travel at the speed of light, so it experiences no passage of time. From the moment a photon is emitted to the moment it is absorbed, it is instantaneous from the photon’s perspective. This too is very analogous to Aquinas’ philosophy of the eternity that God exists within versus time as we experience life. God does not experience time like we do. There are plenty of Scripture passages we could invoke here that say God is light to tie these philosophies even closer together, but that feels like a bridge too far.
One debate I would love to spectate would be Einstein and St. Thomas Aquinas discussing the role of random chance in the universe. Einstein famously said “God does not play dice with the universe” in response to the seemingly random nature of some phenomena in quantum physics. On the other hand, Aquinas wrote that through divine providence, certain things may happen by chance. Far be it from me to pick sides, but I’m afraid the last 100 years of quantum physics experimentation have largely proven Einstein to be wrong on that point, regardless of how uncomfortable it made him feel.
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If your eyes have not glazed over yet like my students’ would when I pontificate in lectures about these same topics, I would encourage you to go right to the source material. Check out the signature works of each of these legends which are readily available in full text online. Much of the above is drawn from Aquinas’ “Summa Theologica,” and Einstein’s “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” Coming away from this study with fresh insights, I take a renewed comfort in knowing that ours is a faith built on reason, and at the same time, the reasoning put forth by the world of science remains consistent with our faith.
