What if the Bible was never meant to be read as supernatural fantasy, but as early physics written in metaphor.
Ancient people did not have equations, particle accelerators, or language for quantum fields. They had stories. They had symbols. They had parables. If you were trying to describe the structure of reality, consciousness, morality, and energy to a civilisation without mathematics, you would not write a textbook. You would write something that could survive thousands of years in human memory. You would write scripture.
This is not an argument for religious literalism. It is almost the opposite. It is an attempt to read the Bible more literally in a physical sense, stripping away magical thinking and translating its claims into the language of energy, systems, and coherence.
Consider the opening line of Genesis. In the beginning, God creates light. Not animals. Not people. Light. From a modern perspective, that is a strangely scientific starting point. Light is energy. It is the fastest thing in the universe. It is the carrier of information. Everything we know about the cosmos comes to us through it. If you were going to describe the birth of a universe, beginning with light is not naïve. It is precise.
The Bible repeatedly describes God as something omnipresent and sustaining rather than a humanoid figure sitting somewhere beyond the sky. God is said to be everywhere. God is described as the source of life itself. God is said to live within us. Read literally through physics, that sounds less like a bearded authority figure and more like a universal field.
In modern terms, we already accept that everything is made of energy. Matter is energy in a stable configuration. Life is organised energy. Consciousness appears to be an emergent property of complex systems interacting over time. Nothing exists in isolation. Everything is embedded in something larger.
If God is understood as the total field of positive, generative energy that allows complexity to arise, then the biblical claim that God is within us becomes almost mundane. Of course the universe is in us. Every atom in your body was forged in stars. Every thought you have is energy moving through neural networks. Separation is an illusion created by perspective.
This framing also casts morality in a new light.
The Bible is unusually insistent that good and evil cannot coexist. Light and darkness are not presented as rivals so much as incompatible states. In physics, positive and negative charges interact, but they do not merge into the same state. Coherence matters. Systems that fall into destructive feedback loops lose stability and eventually collapse.
If good is defined as alignment with generative energy, behaviours that promote growth, cooperation, and increasing complexity, then evil is not a supernatural force. It is entropy. It is destructive interference. It is energy that consumes without contributing, that fragments rather than integrates.
In this view, hell does not need to be a place of fire. It can be understood as disconnection. A system that has become so incoherent that it can no longer reintegrate into the larger field. Isolation is not punishment imposed from outside. It is the natural outcome of sustained misalignment.
This idea appears repeatedly in scripture, though rarely read this way. The warnings are not about divine anger so much as consequence. You reap what you sow. A house divided against itself cannot stand. The wages of sin is death. These are not threats. They are descriptions of how systems behave when they undermine their own stability.
Jesus, in this framework, becomes less of a magical exception and more of an outlier in human evolution. Someone profoundly attuned to the underlying structure of reality. Someone operating at a level of coherence most people do not reach. His teachings consistently emphasise compassion, nonviolence, humility, and radical empathy. These are not arbitrary moral rules. They are behaviours that maximise long term system stability.
Even the more difficult claims take on a different texture when viewed this way. Resurrection can be understood as transformation rather than reanimation. Eternal life becomes participation in an ongoing process rather than personal immortality. Salvation becomes alignment.
The Bible often insists that belief alone is insufficient. Faith without the work is described as dead. That aligns uncomfortably well with a physics based reading. Intention without action changes nothing. Coherence requires behaviour, not just internal states.
From this perspective, the idea that not all consciousness reconnects after death is not moral judgement. It is physics. A pattern that loses coherence does not persist. A system that cannot synchronise with the larger field cannot re enter it. That is not cruelty. It is conservation.
This interpretation does not require abandoning science. It requires taking both science and scripture seriously, but not literally in the childish sense. Literally in the structural sense.
Science asks how the universe behaves. Scripture asks how humans should behave within it. When read through the same lens, the overlap is unsettling.
The Bible may not be a book about miracles. It may be a book about alignment, written by people who understood far more about human nature and systems than we give them credit for.
Seen this way, God is not watching you. God is the system you are participating in. Heaven is coherence. Hell is fragmentation. Life is a temporary configuration of energy learning how to remain connected.
That does not make the universe kinder. It makes it more honest.
And perhaps that was the point all along.