The new creationists

Originally published 5 December 1988

The C‑word is back. “Cre­ation,” long taboo, taint­ed with the odor of mys­ti­cism, a pari­ah con­cept that dared not speak its name, is back in the vocab­u­lary of science.

I am not talk­ing about so-called “Cre­ation sci­ence,” the activ­i­ty on the part of Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ists to prove the lit­er­al truth of Bib­li­cal cre­ation, which is not sci­ence at all. Rather, I am talk­ing about a new will­ing­ness on the part of physi­cists, astronomers, biol­o­gists, and neu­rol­o­gists to address the issue of how the world came to be.

Sci­en­tists are wrest­ing from philoso­phers and the­olo­gians the biggest ques­tions of all: Why is there some­thing rather than noth­ing? Are the laws of nature unique or nec­es­sary? Is life and mind inevitable? What will be the uni­verse’s ulti­mate fate?

Look at a few titles of recent­ly pop­u­lar books by sci­en­tists: The Cre­ation, by phys­i­cal chemist P.W. Atkins; The Great Design: Par­ti­cles, Fields, and Cre­ation, by physi­cist Robert K. Adair; The Cos­mic Blue­print: New Dis­cov­er­ies in Nature’s Cre­ative Abil­i­ty To Order the Uni­verse, by physi­cist Paul Davies; The Cre­ation of Mat­ter: The Uni­verse from Begin­ning to End, by physi­cist Har­ald Fritzsch.

The cos­mic blue­print! The uni­verse from begin­ning to end! What kind of chutz­pah is this? For cen­turies physi­cists prid­ed them­selves on the restraint of their ques­tions, and on their dis­taste for spec­u­la­tion that was not firm­ly ground­ed in obser­va­tion. Now it seems no ques­tion is too big or too spec­u­la­tive for their vault­ing confidence.

Justified chutzpah

No, it’s not as bad as all that. First, the humil­i­ty of physi­cists has not become entire­ly enfee­bled. And sec­ond, the new cre­ation­ists have jus­ti­fi­able grounds for a cer­tain degree of chutzpah.

Physi­cists and astronomers have pieced togeth­er a remark­ably con­sis­tent pic­ture of how the world began — a “Big Bang” cre­ation, 15 or 20 bil­lion years ago, that brought mat­ter, space, and time into exis­tence. Robert Adair, says this: “The his­to­ry of the uni­verse from the first one-thou­sandth of a sec­ond after cre­ation until the present is now a well-doc­u­ment­ed part of knowl­edge.” It’s an auda­cious claim, but true, or at least as true as any sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge can be said to be true.

Adair is an Asso­ciate Direc­tor of the Brookhaven Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry on Long Island. At Brookhaven, and oth­er high-ener­gy accel­er­a­tor labs, physi­cists accel­er­ate sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles to veloc­i­ties close to the speed of light, then smash them into each oth­er to see how they behave. The­o­ret­i­cal cos­mol­o­gists can use this knowl­edge to recon­struct the first moments of cre­ation — the Big Bang — when the tem­per­a­ture and ener­gy of par­ti­cles were extreme­ly high.

Cal­cu­la­tions based on the observed prop­er­ties of mat­ter at high ener­gy pre­dict the kind of uni­verse that should have emerged from the Big Bang, and the pre­dic­tions can be com­pared with the uni­verse we observe today. How are the galax­ies dis­trib­uted in space? What is the rel­a­tive abun­dance of ele­ments in the uni­verse; how much hydro­gen, how much heli­um? What are the mass den­si­ty of the uni­verse, and what is the uni­verse’s rate of expan­sion? Is space filled with neu­tri­nos? Can we observe the flash of the Big Bang? So far, obser­va­tions of astronomers are con­sis­tent with the dis­cov­er­ies of the high-ener­gy physi­cists, so much so that most sci­en­tists believe we under­stand in broad out­line how the uni­verse came to be — at least since the first “one-thou­sandth of a sec­ond” and per­haps even earlier.

Embold­ened by suc­cess, the high-ener­gy physi­cists now want to build a more pow­er­ful accel­er­a­tor, the multi­bil­lion-dol­lar super­con­duct­ing super­col­lid­er, that will let them explore the behav­ior of mat­ter at even high­er ener­gies, and there­fore at an ear­li­er epoch in the uni­verse’s his­to­ry, clos­er to time zero. The­o­ret­i­cal physi­cists are look­ing for a Grand Uni­fi­ca­tion The­o­ry (GUT), a “the­o­ry of every­thing” that will unite the known forces of nature in one ele­gant math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­la­tion, as they were pre­sum­ably unit­ed in the first instant of creation.

New instruments

And a new gen­er­a­tion of giant tele­scopes, now under con­struc­tion, will let astronomers peer deep­er into space and fur­ther back in time to test the pre­dic­tions of the physicists.

And what of humil­i­ty? Have the exper­i­men­tal and the­o­ret­i­cal suc­cess­es of physi­cists been a pre­lude to hubris? Quite the con­trary, as the read­er of the above books will quick­ly dis­cern. The books are marked by con­sid­er­able mod­esty. They reflect a grow­ing respect on the part of physi­cists for nature’s uni­ty, and an almost mys­ti­cal rev­er­ence for the glo­ry of creation.

Some of the new cre­ation­ists empha­size the role of chance in the uni­verse; oth­ers see the work­ings of a grand design. Some dis­miss tra­di­tion­al reli­gion as irrel­e­vant; oth­ers stress the com­ple­men­tar­i­ty of sci­ence and reli­gion. Some are athe­ists or agnos­tics; oth­ers are the­ists. All of them insist that only the obser­va­tion of nature can teach us how the uni­verse began. All of them admit that our present knowl­edge of cre­ation is tentative. 

And where there are still gaps in our knowl­edge, all of them are will­ing to humbly say, “We don’t yet know.”