While much is being said about Creationism Vs Evolution, and the debate goes on concerning who is right and what should be taught in our schools, a quiet revolution has been taking place in an area of science that is seldom discussed in public. Yet the theories being advanced from leading scientists about this subject suggest that many of the “miracles” and supernatural events of the Bible may actually be scientifically acceptable at some point in the future. The field of science I’m talking about is Quantum Physics and specifically String Theory.

This new paradigm in science began with Max Planck in 1900, and was furthered by Albert Einstein, and has long been on the fringe of science, but was little discussed by the general scientific community at large because of the bazaar predictions and almost unbelievable experimental results it generated concerning the ultimate structure of the universe. The results of these experiments were never in doubt. It is real enough that several Nobel Prizes have been awarded in this field, and its advocates include Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and other “giants” of science.

Yet it seems somewhat hypocritical for scientists to characterize Christian beliefs in the miracles of Jesus, as “supernatural”, when very reliable experiments in this area suggest that reality is far more unreal and unpredictable.

What was in doubt, and highly controversial, was what it suggested. It suggested that our knowledge and understanding of the universe was not the quiet, static laws as given by Sir Isaac Newton, and even Einstein, but a chaotic realm controlled by probability and seemingly infinite complexity.

We hear the buzz words like String Theory, Quantum Gravity, Inflation, but few in the general public actually care to understand what they are about. Basically, the fundamental idea of Quantum Mechanics is that in the sub-micro world that lies underneath all of the “real world” that we see, smaller even that the subatomic particles that make up matter, lies another realm in which, literally, any event imaginable has a measurable possibility of happening, and to some degree, DOES happen. A postulate of this is the idea that it also says that there is no certainty in any event. Strange things do happen with “ghost-like particles that move in ways that defy logic, matter being created in a vacuum, and even particles that move backward in time. Its all very real, to the point that TV and nuclear weapons would not be possible if not for actions of some of those mysterious particles.

String Theory is the latest attempt in this field to try to describe the event that physicists call “The Big Bang”. The implications of this theory border on supporting and giving insight into perhaps some of the mysteries in the Bible.

What is String Theory? It says that at the basic structure of matter and space, all matter is ultimately composed of “string-like” structures that vibrate at different frequencies and energy levels. That much is not too complicated. It is the other outcomes predicted by the theory that physicists don’t discuss a great deal in public, for fear it would lend credence to the religious concepts of people of faith.

String Theory also predicts that there exists multiple external universes to our own that sometimes bounce into each other and collide. The November, 2008 issue of Scientific American magazine devotes an article to “Colliding Universes” which have different dimensions and structures to our own. There is the suggestion that perhaps just such a collision was the cause of the event we call “The Big Bang”.

Most religions today have some concept of alternate “worlds” we go to after we die. In most cases, they describe a place that is totally separate from the world as we know it, and suggest a place with different physical properties and laws.

That is an idea that has been around in all of recorded history, in all civilizations. Could there be a common thread between the “alternate universes” of physics and the places described in the Bible. If that is true then we can expect to see in the future more experiments and theories from the scientific community, which support that idea.

For those who don’t believe in Hell, there is a very real possibility that future discoveries in science will confirm such a place can exist, possibly as one of those external universes to our own.

The Bible makes reference to a “bottomless pit”. There could not be a better description of certain objects in space that have been proven to exist, that we call “Black Holes”. They have gravity so great that they trap matter and even light, inside, forever, in a concentrated geometric point in which the density is infinite and the temperature is infinitely high. These may be the doorways, or “Wormholes” to these external universes. There is also a luminous belt, called an “accretion disk”, that surrounds these dark objects. It is flat and gives off radiation, much like a “lake of fire”.

If all of this sounds too bazaar and too far out to be true , remember that at present, String Theory is just that, an unproven theory. However, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is spending billions this year to launch the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, for the specific purpose of finding out if String Theory is correct about extra dimensions and external universes.

In the popular movie “Contact” a priest is asked what he believed. In defense of his friend, a non-believing scientist, he commented,” As a person of faith I am bound by a different covenant, but we are both searching for the same thing, The Truth.”

In view of “alternate realities”, and theories about “uncertainty”, it seems that the only thing we can be sure of is “The Truth”. Isn’t that what Jesus said to reassure us? “I am the way, the TRUTH, and the life….”There is no doubt that science and religion are still far apart in some areas, but eventually the “truth” will bring us all together.