Terry Dashner……………….Faith Fellowship Church PO Box 1586 Broken Arrow, OK 74013

Since basic science is ever-changing, shouldn’t our theology change with it? No. Our theology should remain constant, even when science seems to contradict it. Usually science changes to support, to some degree, what theologians and simple people of faith have been saying all along—“In beginning, God…” Allow me to illustrate this, please.

Catherine H. Crouch in her essay entitled, “The Strangely Relational World of Quantum Mechanics” makes a very interesting observation about science in 20th century. Says Crouch, “…Einstein is rightly celebrated for his association with relativity, one of two major innovations in twentieth-century physics, it’s less well known that he vehemently opposed other theory that rocked twentieth-century scientific world—quantum mechanics.” Crouch continues, “And, surprisingly, in recent years theory that reportedly caused Einstein to protest, ‘God does not play dice [with universe],’ not only has turned out to be right, but may be remarkably congruent with Christian convictions. Call it quantum leap of faith.”

QM speaks of probabilities. For example, take particles which make up your body. QM “…is stubbornly unwilling to tell you where each electron in your body’s roughly billion billion billion atoms is right now. Chances are, they’re all pretty much where you think they are, but there is a real (though extraordinarily small) chance that right now, at least one of your electrons ‘is’ outside of your personal space. In fact, QM refuses to commit to where electron is, preferring instead to say merely that at any given time, that electron has a certain probability of being in a certain place. This idea—that chance, rather than definite predictability, describes behavior of universe—prompted Einstein’s uneasy comment about God playing dice.”

1. Yang - Mills Theory The laws of quantum physics stand to world of elementary particles in way that Newton's laws of classical mechanics stand to macroscopic world. Almost half a century ago, Yang and Mills introduced a remarkable new framework to describe elementary particles using structures that also occur in geometry. Quantum Yang-Mills theory is now foundation of most of elementary particle theory, and its predictions have been tested at many experimental laboratories, but its mathematical foundation is still unclear. The successful use of Yang-Mills theory to describe strong interactions of elementary particles depends on a subtle quantum mechanical property called "mass gap:" quantum particles have positive masses, even though classical waves travel at speed of light. This property has been discovered by physicists from experiment and confirmed by computer simulations, but it still has not been understood from a theoretical point of view. Progress in establishing existence of Yang-Mills theory and a mass gap and will require introduction of fundamental new ideas both in physics and in mathematics.