The Blog, Light and Jesus

The aim of my blog on this website is to talk about Science and Christianity.


Christianity- the religion based on the person and teachings of Jesus Christ, or its beliefs and practices.

That’s what the online oxford dictionary says at least, part of this blog is me challenging myself to see if I can talk about science and belief in Jesus without talking about creation, eventually I expect ill run out of ideas and move onto the minefield of supposed controversy that is the origin of existence/life/animals/species/humans/consciousness/other, because as important as that is if that is all that gets talked about when we discuss areas where science and religion meet that is a real shame.

Anyway this is a blog about sciency stuff and Goddy stuff and if I spend the whole of my first blog talking about future blogs no one will read them I imagine.

For two thousand years Theologians have been stroking their beards about how Jesus could be two things that are apparently so ridiculously different that it can’t apparently work, can Jesus be both a man who could die and be God when under his own authority he did miracles including some that truly did defy death?

Towards the end of those two thousand years scientists (who were called natural philosophers) were constantly trying to make things simple, explainable and predictable.

Then in 1921 a madman famous for sticking his tongue out in a picture got a Nobel Prize for saying that perhaps there was something that could be two things at once.

He decided this because in 1887 Heinrich Hertz found an interesting effect, that when a metal has a light shone upon it, it is more likely to spark, and negatively charged metal plate will lose its charge when it is has light shone upon, but only above a certain frequency of light. (This may seem dull but it’s interesting, honest).

This effect didn’t make sense so scientists did their thing and got more information, found out what happened if you increased the frequency and intensity of the light and that didn’t make it any more sensible.

If you’re kind of getting lost hang in there with us.

Cue Einstein. Einstein looked at this information and then looked at some ideas of Max Planck, that you could model light as a particle with energy proportional to its frequency, and decided that using this he could explain the effect. So Einstein decided that the only way to explain this was that light is both a wave and a particle.

All of that was in way of saying that science and theology share at least one question: Can one thing be two very different things?

Although scientists and many theologians are convinced the answer is yes. Light is a wave and a particle.

This brings a new possible level of meaning to John 8 where Jesus says he is the ‘light of the world’,

Is this a very clever pun that took 1900 years for anyone else to get it? I doubt it but it’s an entertaining idea.