Christianity: ether or magnetism?

Among the stirring passages in The Varieties of Religious Experience¹ is this one regarding the human sensitivity to things spiritual:

It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies. Such a bar of iron could never give you an outward description of the agencies that had the power of stirring it so strongly; yet of their presence, and of their significance for its life, it would be intensely aware through every fibre of its being. [60]

James finished his lectures in 1902, when one could still make passing reference to "time, space, and the ether" (60). In 1905 Einstein united time and space and made the ether obsolete; this he makes explicit in his 1916 popular work:²

According to [the theory of relativity] there is no such thing as a "specially favoured" (unique) co-ordinate system to occasion the introduction of the æther-idea, and hence there can be no æther-drift, nor any experiment with which to demonstrate it. [53]

Einstein also challenges James' magnetism metaphor by holding that we ought indeed to look for an "outward description" for such a phenomenon:

[W]e have come to regard action at a distance as a process impossible without the intervention of some intermediary medium. If, for instance, a magnet attracts a piece of iron, we cannot be content to regard this as meaning that the magnet acts directly on the iron through the intermediate empty space, but we are constrained to imagine—after the manner of Faraday—that the magnet always calls into being something physically real in the space around it, that something being what we call a "magnetic field." In its turn this magnetic field operates on the piece of iron, so that the latter strives to move towards the magnet. [63]

Thus after 100 years the ether-idea is quaint, while magnetism lives on as a niche field of study. (In fairness, James is brilliant within his own field; for example, he correctly identifies the discovery of the subconscious as a major development [188].) In fact, Einstein would class magnetism with those theories that have been subsumed under a grander theory, and this is no small matter:

No fairer destiny could be allotted to any physical theory, than that it should of itself point out the way to the introduction of a more comprehensive theory, in which it lives on as a limiting case. [77]

Now, the Universe is an experiment, and religion is a hypothesis on its outcome. This experiment is necessarily beyond the scale of our science—a second test means re-running the Universe—so we end up building an entire theory on a single experiment.

Christianity is a theory that claims to subsume Judaism and the rest, and claims that it will itself be subsumed by a grander "theory" at "the Second Coming." This fits with Dawkins' idea that "[i]f there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed." Relativity is bigger and more incomprehensible than both the ether-idea and magnetism, but one survived and one did not. So which is Christianity? If it is to be James' magnetism, then there must be an "intermediate medium;" it has to connect somehow.

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¹ James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: New American Library, 1958.
² Einstein, Albert. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. Fifteenth ed. New York: Crown, 1952. Feed back to Chad Whitacre.