Physicist-turned-priest Nick Knisely recalls that Einstein’s attitude toward the the Michelson-Morley experiment’s outlandish results was, in brief, to face the facts and deal with them. He suggests that Einstein’s example should inform the church’s current struggles to deal with gay and lesbian Christians today.
Excerpt:
Einstein started his thinking toward Special and General Relativity by postulating that each observer’s experience must be treated as valid. By so doing, he constructed a physics that would require that the speed of light was exactly the same for all observers, whether they were moving or not. Einstein then was able to suggest experiments that demonstrate that his ideas were correct.
But the key point in all this was that he accepted the experimental evidence of the Michelson-Morley experiment as valid, even though it seemed to make absolutely no sense within a Newtonian (and deterministic) framework. Einstein decided to trust in the report of the observer and by making that decision he was able to gain a radical new insight into the nature of reality.
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Gay and lesbian people report that they find themselves transformed by their encounters with the Risen Christ. But they do not uniformly find that their sexuality or sexual orientation is transformed. If we believe this report, then what does this tell us about God’s desires for them?
Entangled States: The Michelson-Morley Experiment and the Experience of Gay and Lesbian Christians.
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