Article September 22, 1980 Issue

Physics and reality

JAMES RICHARD BARTELS-KEITH

How real is the material universe? Most people do not question its reality. Yet from time to time, the latest theories and findings of particle physicists or astronomers reach the press, and the notion of matter as something enduring and substantial receives an uncomfortable jolt.

Why should the study of phenomena so far removed from everyday experience inspire this unease? The physical universe has not changed as a result of these studies. But human perception of it has, and the resulting adjustment to a new perspective is what seems disturbing.

Christian Science shows us how to raise our perception of the universe to a still higher level—how to gain the sense of the universe as spiritual, not material, and as evolved by God, not through physical law. This higher perception, however, does not come through the refinement of material theories, but through divine revelation, and through the dropping of outworn modes of thought. "Divine modes or manifestations are natural, beyond the so-called natural sciences and human philosophy, because they are spiritual, and coexist with the God of nature in absolute Science,"^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 349;} writes Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science.