I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest are details.
–Albert Einstein1
The turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century was a heady time for advances in atomic theory. J. J. Thomson had recently discovered the electron in 1897 through a series of experiments using a cathode ray tube. Thomson showed that the unit of electric charge — previously named the “electron” by George Johnson Stoney in 1891 — was, in fact, a negatively charged particle.
More information about the electron emerged from experiments carried out between 1911 and 1912 by Robert Millikan and Harvey Fletcher. They determined the charge of a single electron by suspending tiny, charged drops of oil in an electric field, balancing the electrical force against gravity. When their results were combined with Thomson’s earlier work, both the charge and the mass of the electron could finally be calculated.
Yet the exact nature of the atom remained a mystery. In the so‑called “plum pudding model,” atoms were imagined as smears of positive charge — the pudding — with negatively charged electrons — the raisins — embedded randomly throughout, balancing the overall charge.2
Scientists, being a curious sort, pressed on. Beginning around 1917, Ernest Rutherford and his graduate students, Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, conducted a series of experiments at the University of Manchester. Using radium as a source of alpha particles, they fired these high‑energy helium nuclei at a thin sheet of gold foil. Most of the alpha particles passed straight through with little or no deflection. But some were scattered at various angles, and a few — quite astonishingly — bounced straight back, ricocheting 180 degrees.3
This was a stunning discovery. It took several years for Rutherford to interpret the results, which he eventually explained in a lecture at Cambridge University. He said:
It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a fifteen‑inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you. On consideration, I realized that this scattering backward must be the result of a single collision, and when I made calculations, I saw that it was impossible to get anything of that order of magnitude unless you took a system in which the greater part of the mass of the atom was concentrated in a minute nucleus. It was then that I had the idea of an atom with a minute massive centre carrying a positive charge.4
Now that the atom had been shown to contain a dense, positively charged nucleus holding nearly all of its mass, the question remained: how were the electrons arranged?
Around the same time Rutherford was conducting his gold‑foil experiment, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr proposed his quantum model of the atom. Bohr’s theory successfully explained the four visible spectral lines of hydrogen — lines that had long followed a mathematical pattern but lacked a physical explanation.
Taken together, the work of these scientists produced the planetary model of the atom: negatively charged electrons orbiting a positively charged nucleus, much like planets orbit the sun. Thomson, Millikan, Rutherford, and Bohr all received Nobel Prizes for their contributions — though Rutherford’s prize was awarded for earlier work on radioactivity, not for the discovery of the nucleus.
While Bohr’s model successfully explained the observed spectral lines in the visible emission spectrum of hydrogen, it nonetheless had theoretical problems, most glaring of which was a failure to explain how the electron, which was undergoing an acceleration, didn’t lose energy and spiral into the nucleus.5 Bohr simply said that in a stationary state, the electron doesn’t lose energy—a violation of a principle known as acceleration radiation, a process that is explained by Maxwell’s equations.
Despite the elegant simplicity of Bohr’s model—it is still taught today in virtually every introductory general chemistry course—it ignores several inconvenient truths and fails to adequately explain the nature of the atom beyond hydrogen.
But the story is far from over. Scientists, in addition to being a curious lot, are also stubborn in their pursuit of explaining the unexplainable. In 1924, the French physicist, Louis de Broglie, theorized that electrons had a dual nature; that they were not only particles but standing waves. Writing in his doctoral thesis, de Broglie explained:
I have developed new ideas able perhaps to hasten the synthesis necessary to unify, from the start, the two opposing, physical domains of radiation, based on two opposing conceptions: corpuscles [particles] and waves. I have forecast that the principles of the dynamics of material points, when one recognises the correct analysis, are doubtlessly expressible as phase concordance, and I did my best to find resolution of several mysteries in the theory of the quanta. In the course of this work I came upon several interesting conclusions giving hope that these ideas might in further development give conclusive results.6
And further development into atomic theory was indeed spawned by de Broglie’s ideas. In 1926, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed his quantum mechanical theory of the atom, providing a mathematical framework for the behavior of an atom’s electrons as electromagnetic waves, not as particles. In 1933, Schrödinger, along with Paul Dirac, won the Nobel Prize for their work in this new field.
Unlike Bohr’s theory, Schrodinger’s Equation is only briefly mentioned in general chemistry courses; its complexity reserves it for advanced courses such as physical and inorganic chemistry, and quantum physics.
Despite Schrödinger’s work, there lingers a gnawing dissatisfaction with our understanding of atomic theory. For one, the solutions of the Schrödinger Equation are for hydrogen and its one electron. They are used as a template for all atoms in the periodic table. Second, the resulting wave equations contain the imaginary number i. It is only after further manipulation, utilizing a mathematical process termed normalizing, that we obtain real, three-dimensional representations of the orbitals the electrons are most likely to occupy at various energy levels of an atom. I say most likely because the positions of the electrons are based on probabilities. Uncertainty is an inherent guiding principle of quantum mechanics, something that disturbed Albert Einstein and several of his colleagues. This uncertainty continues to leave difficult questions of quantum theory unresolved, or “largely ignored” by most working physicists.7
The late Timothy Keller often remarked that faith was not opposed to reason but sometimes opposed to feelings and appearances. Writing in The Reason for God, he explained, “It is one thing to say that science is only equipped to test for natural causes and cannot speak to any others. It is quite another to insist that science proves no other causes could possibly exist.”8 Indeed, as the story above illustrates, certain scientific findings can reveal the limits of our understanding regarding physical causation and the unresolved mysteries regarding such causation.
The Christian story provides a different, theological account. The Apostle Paul explained in Colossians, “For in Him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Col 1:16-17). The phrase, “in Him all things hold together,” provides a theistic framework for the ongoing “coherence and stability of the universe, down to its smallest components.”9 The writer of the Book of Hebrews echoes these words, stating, “He [Jesus] is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power (Heb 1:3). Or, as Kevin DeYoung explains, “The Son is the Sustainer of all things. Every proton, every electron, every compound, every particle and planet, every star and galaxy, is upheld by his powerful word.”10
These verses of scripture provide a powerful theological explanation for Bohr’s conundrum of an accelerating charged particle (the electron) not radiating energy and crashing into the nucleus. Bohr’s answer was simply unsatisfying: it didn’t happen, the rules of classical mechanics don’t apply at the quantum level. God’s book provides further theological insight: “The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen” (Rom. 1:20 KJV), being understood not by classical mechanics, nor even quantum mechanics, but through Christ-animating faith—a faith that is substantive and evidentiary (Heb 11:1).
This brings us full circle back to the early twentieth century, when the great theoretical physicist, Max Planck, who won the 1918 Nobel Prize in physics, wrote, “All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds the most minute solar system of the atom together … We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind.”11
Notes:
- Michel-Yves Bollore and Oliver Bonnassies, God, the Science, the Evidence—the Dawn of a Revolution, (USA E.1, Palomar editions, 2025), 311. ↩︎
- Although dubbed “the plum pudding model,” the plums were actually raisins. ↩︎
- An alpha particle is a high-energy helium nucleus consisting of two protons, two neutrons, and no electrons. It carries a positive two charge and hence, was the perfect particle to fire at gold, being a very dense metal with a large nucleus containing 79 protons. ↩︎
- Ernest Rutherford, John A. Ratcliffe, “Forty Years of Physics.” In Needham, Joseph; Pagel, Walter (eds.). Background to Modern Science (Cambridge University Press, 1938). ↩︎
- An acceleration can be a change in velocity or direction. Since the electron is moving in a circular orbit around the nucleus in the Bohr model of the atom, it is constantly changing direction and would thus constantly radiate energy, ultimately crashing into the nucleus. ↩︎
- Louis‑Victor de Broglie, On the Theory of Quanta, trans. A. F. Kracklauer (Paris: Fondation Louis de Broglie, 2004), v. ↩︎
- “What’s Wrong with Quantum Mechanics?” Phys. Rev. Focus 16, 10. September 23, 2005. https://physics.aps.org/story/v16/st10 ↩︎
- Timothy Keller, The Reason for God, Belief in an Age of Skepticism, (Penguin Books, 2018), 88. ↩︎
- “Atoms of Matter: General Scriptures Concerning…” Bible Hub, https://biblehub.com/topical/naves/a/atoms_of_matter–general_scriptures_concerning.htm “The concept of atoms as the fundamental building blocks of matter is a modern scientific understanding that is not explicitly detailed in the Bible. However, the Scriptures do provide insights into the nature of creation and the intricate design of the universe, which can be seen as aligning with the idea of a divinely ordered and structured cosmos.” ↩︎
- Kevin DeYoung, Taking God at His Word, (Crossway, 2014), 48. ↩︎
- Bollore and Bonnassies, eds. God, the Science, the Evidence, 276. ↩︎
