Why Physicists are Christians

Did you know that there are more Christian physicists than there are Christian ministers?

Neither did I... That's nonsense.

But there are a lot of Christian physicists. More than any other discipline, scientific or otherwise I think. I've always encouraged my extraordinarily intelligent and gifted wife to do a PhD in arts (English Literature or Cultural Studies) because a. She's a great writer, and b. There are very few - almost no, in fact - Christians in the arts.

The discrepancy is astounding. I have a bit of a theory about it. It's one of many possible reasons, so don't take it too seriously, but here it is:

Physics is the study of the natural world. If other physicists are anything like me, they look at the natural world, scratch their head, and say 'bloody hell, I'm never gonna understand this thing'. They are in constant awe. Anyone who knows anything about quantum theory knows that it's extremely weird, and incredibly impressive. The world doesn't behave the way you'd think, and the more physics you do, the more you find that out. But it is so difficult to understand, and such a marvel, that one can't help but marvel at the creator of it all, if one is so inclined as to believe there is a creator.

The Arts on the other hand, are humanistic (humanities). They're about what humans have done. When you study English literature you study Charles Dickens, and Virginia Wolf, and Margaret Atwood (my three favourites at the moment), and you marvel at people, and what they've done, and their enormous genius. How  could anyone read Oscar Wilde and think "Geez, if there's a god out there, I'm pretty impressed that he made Oscar Wilde". Sure they should think that, but instead they ditch the middle man, and just say "Geez, Oscar Wilde is pretty darn smart."

In this context I can imagine that there would be many more Christian physicists than Christian Arts people, and that is certainly the case.

But there's a bit of a worrying thing going on in physics, and at the moment I'm right in the thick of it. I'm studying two-dimensional physics, and some of the amazing things that come out of two-dimensional worlds (and they are amazing, believe me). But in case you haven't noticed, the world is 3D!

So is my research esoteric and useless? No. We can create 2D universes, and do physics with them. We can create 1D universes too. No worries!

And so now, while I still marvel at the maths, and while these properties are technically still part of nature, they're not natural, they're man-made. So when I do some physics on a 2D system, that system must be human-made. This worries me a little that physicists will become increasingly humanistic as well, and start worshipping the created like everyone else does...