God and the Big Bang

Originally published 8 October 1984

Next win­ter [1985] Hal­ley’s Comet will make its long await­ed dash around the sun. It will be the fourth appear­ance of the comet since New­ton’s col­league Edmund Hal­ley pre­dict­ed its peri­od­ic return.

Bright comets appeared in the sky in 1680 and 1682. Upon the appear­ance of the first of these, Increase Math­er preached in Boston on “Heav­en’s Alarm to the World.” His ser­mon reflect­ed the com­mon view that comets were warn­ings flung from the hand of God. In 1683, Math­er pub­lished a “Dis­course on Comets.” He was aware of grow­ing skep­ti­cism about the Divine ori­gin of comets. “But cer­tain it is,” he wrote, “that many things which may hap­pen accord­ing to the course of Nature are por­ten­tous signs.”

Not long there­after, across the sea, Hal­ley not­ed orbital sim­i­lar­i­ties between the comet of 1682 and comets that had been observed in 1531 and 1607. He real­ized that the three comets were in fact one, mov­ing on a cal­cu­la­ble tra­jec­to­ry in accor­dance with New­ton’s law of grav­i­ty. His pre­dic­tion of the comet’s return in 1758 was wide­ly hailed a tri­umph of sci­ence over superstition.

Science vs. religion

Increase Math­er and Edmund Hal­ley were foot-sol­diers in what was once called “the war­fare of sci­ence with the­ol­o­gy.” Among the more famous “bat­tles” in that con­flict were Galileo’s skir­mish­es with the church regard­ing the motion of the Earth, and Hux­ley’s debate with Bish­op Wilber­force on evolution.

In recent years, the ques­tion of the rela­tion­ship of sci­ence and reli­gion has again become a live­ly top­ic of inter­est. The fresh debate has been sparked by two devel­op­ments: The increas­ing influ­ence of fun­da­men­tal­ist the­ol­o­gy in mat­ters of pub­lic pol­i­cy (such as text­book selec­tion), and extra­or­di­nary dis­cov­er­ies in physics and astron­o­my that direct­ly relate to the mat­ter of creation.

Six years ago astronomer Robert Jas­trow pub­lished a book called God and the Astronomers, in which he recount­ed the con­tem­po­rary sci­en­tif­ic view of the begin­ning of the uni­verse. The essence of the new cos­mol­o­gy was that the uni­verse had a begin­ning, at a par­tic­u­lar and know­able moment in the past, in a blaze of light and expand­ing force that has come to be called the Big Bang. There were prob­lems with the Big Bang, at least so far as physi­cists were con­cerned. The Big Bang cre­ation seemed to vio­late the cher­ished prin­ci­ple of the con­ser­va­tion of mat­ter and ener­gy, for at the first instant these enti­ties emerged from noth­ing­ness. Fur­ther, the math­e­mat­i­cal infini­ties asso­ci­at­ed with the descrip­tion of the Big Bang sug­gest­ed that what­ev­er went before the cre­ation was for­ev­er beyond the reach of sci­en­tif­ic speculation.

Jas­trow, him­self an agnos­tic, not­ed the sim­i­lar­i­ties of the sci­en­tif­ic account of cre­ation and the sto­ry of Gen­e­sis: both described an uncaused uni­verse emerg­ing from noth­ing­ness in a flood of light. It was as if, he wrote, the sci­en­tist has scaled the moun­tain of igno­rance and found on the peak a band of the­olo­gians who had been there all along.

But like a true sci­en­tist, Jas­trow hedged his bets with “at this moment,” “per­haps,” and “maybe.” And it is well that he did, for in the half-dozen years since he pub­lished his book, physi­cists have had a glimpse “beyond the begin­ning,” and they have shown how the cre­ation of a uni­verse from “noth­ing” might not after all be incon­sis­tent with known phys­i­cal laws.

These new devel­op­ments are described in the cur­rent­ly pop­u­lar book, God and the New Physics, by physi­cist Paul Davies.

Davies is less san­guine that Jas­trow that the sci­en­tist will meet the the­olo­gian on the moun­tain­top. He con­trasts the sci­en­tist’s unre­lent­ing skep­ti­cism with the reli­gious per­son­’s com­mit­ment to belief. Reli­gion, asserts Davies, looks back­wards to revealed truth, while sci­ence looks for­ward to new discoveries.

But sci­ence and reli­gion both offer answers to the big ques­tions: How did the uni­verse begin? How will it end? What is life? What is mind? What is the self? It is on the ground of these ques­tion that Davies erects his inquiry into the con­tem­po­rary rel­e­vance of the con­cept of God.

Inflationary creation

At the heart of the Davies’ inquiry is the ques­tion of cre­ation, and at the heart of the ques­tion of cre­ation are recent the­o­ries of quan­tum grav­i­ty that allow an entire cos­mos, includ­ing space and time, to swell into being from noth­ing­ness as a ran­dom uncaused event, cre­at­ing along the way all the mat­ter and ener­gy need­ed to build the uni­verse as we know it. This new mod­el of cre­ation has been dubbed “the infla­tion­ary uni­verse,” and in com­ing years it will undoubt­ed­ly become as famil­iar to the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion as the Big Bang and black holes.

Davies exam­ines some tra­di­tion­al argu­ments for the exis­tence of God in the light of the new physics. He con­sid­ers, for exam­ple, the need of a “first cause” or “prime mover,” or “design­er” in a uni­verse that begins as a quan­tum fluc­tu­a­tion and unfolds in accor­dance with laws of grav­i­ty and entropy. He finds the tra­di­tion­al “proofs” want­i­ng. But Davies cau­tions his read­ers against tak­ing the new and high­ly spec­u­la­tive phys­i­cal ideas too seri­ous­ly. Like all physi­cists, he knows it is risky to draw ulti­mate answers from the physics of the day. Still, the new the­o­ries, in prin­ci­ple at least, are sub­ject to obser­va­tion­al test.

Davies believes that sci­ence offers a sur­er path than reli­gion in the search for God. It is an auda­cious claim, sure to ran­kle believ­ers and unbe­liev­ers alike. Many sci­en­tists and the­olo­gians will find Davies’ book to be super­fi­cial or irrel­e­vant. But Davies excludes no one’s search for mean­ing. He is con­vinced that it is only by under­stand­ing the world in all if its aspects — reduc­tion­ist and holis­tic, math­e­mat­i­cal and poet­i­cal, phys­i­cal and moral — that we will come to under­stand our­selves and the uni­verse we live in. In this respect he is express­ing sen­ti­ments high­ly com­pat­i­ble with the cur­rent sci­en­tif­ic world view.

Per­haps it is inevitable that two such diverse paths to truth as sci­ence and rev­e­la­tion will remain in a state of ten­sion. Many sci­en­tists have dif­fi­cul­ty with the very con­cept of revealed truth. But sci­en­tists also find much in nature that inspires awe and humil­i­ty. There is more to the world, insists Davies, than meets the eye.