Charles Krauthammer turns in a bravura performance in his column today about the recent discovery that some neutrinos appear to travel faster than the speed of light. Krauthammer’s view is that this is such a revolutionary finding that the media — perhaps out of skepticism, perhaps out of ignorance of its significance — downplayed it. But it mustn’t be downplayed, he writes. Excerpt:

The implications of such a discovery are so mind-boggling, however, that these same scientists immediately requested that other labs around the world try to replicate the experiment. Something must have been wrong — some faulty measurement, some overlooked contaminant — to account for a result that, if we know anything about the universe, is impossible.

And that’s the problem. It has to be impossible because, if not, if that did happen on this Orient Express hurtling between Switzerland and Italy, then everything we know about the universe is wrong.

He means, of course, that this result, if accurate (and as Krauthammer points out, the scientists who announced it are among the world’s very best), would overturn Einstein’s law stating that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. More:

But there must be some error. Because otherwise everything changes. We shall need a new physics. A new cosmology. New understandings of past and future, of cause and effect. Then shortly and surely, new theologies.

Why? Because we can’t have neutrinos getting kicked out of taverns they have not yet entered.

I understand why, if this is true, we will need a new understanding of past and future, a new physics, and so forth. But why would we need new theologies? If one believes in a God who exists outside of time — as Jews and Christians do, at least — why would this require a new theology? I’m not an expert in these things, obviously, but it seems to me that this would force a shift in our understanding of how the physical universe in constructed vis-a-vis eternity — that is, a change in the way we understand God’s relationship to the material world — but that seems more minor than what Krauthammer imagines. Or am I getting this wrong?

Many Christians believe that we have the natural world here, and God there; the supernatural is what happens on that rare occasion when God puts His thumb on the scale. The Orthodox Christian view is rather different, seeing God far more intimately involved with matter (the term is panentheism, which is not the same thing as pantheism). If the eternal God exists in some sense within matter, even as He also transcends it, is it all that difficult to imagine that cause-and-effect, as we understand it, doesn’t exist? I certainly grasp why this is revolutionary to a materialist, but should it be so to a Christian, or anyone who believes in the world of the spirit?

Belief in the efficacy of prophecy depends on faith in an understanding of cause and effect that doesn’t jibe with materialism. How can the future already exist? Yet it must, in some sense, if we can have intimations of it in the present. I have had more than a few dreams that came true. Nothing earth-shattering (alas!), but they were real enough in their details to have been beyond coincidental. Many people have had this experience. Perhaps science is making progress toward explaining how this might be so. Krauthammer is right: it’s revolutionary stuff, but less so for religious believers than he may think. It’s a hugely complex and difficult issue, one that raises brain-breaking questions (e.g., What does it mean for free will if the future is in some sense set? To what extent can our decisions alter the future? What does God permit?), but theologians have been grappling with these for centuries. Science really can learn something from religious thought, despite what you may have heard from Dr. Dawkins.