How We Believe, 2nd Ed. Read online

  The lengths some will go to in the endeavor to prove their faith strains credulity. Physicist Gerald Schroeder, in his 1997 book The Science of God, offers perhaps the most painfully contorted attempt to squeeze modern science into the Bible. According to Schroeder, modern scientists have discovered what ancient Jewish scholars always knew: Genesis describes the large-scale sequence of evolutionary change (sea creatures to land animals to mammals to man); the six days of creation perfectly match the description of the creation of a fifteen-billion-year-old universe (in relativistic time one day is equal to a couple of billion years); and medieval Kabalists like the Jewish scholar Nahmanides somehow got it all right. “With the insights of Albert Einstein,” says Schroeder, “we have discovered in the six days of Genesis the billions of years during which the universe developed.” How can a day be as a billion years? “The million-million-factor difference between our local perception of time and Genesis cosmic time is an average for the six days of creation. As discussed, it derives from the approximate million-millionfold stretching of light waves as the universe expanded.” Faith and reason are reconciled, Schroeder concludes: “Genesis and science are both correct. When one asks if six days or fifteen billion years passed before the appearance of humankind, the correct answer is ‘yes.’”

  The fatal flaw in this argument is that the universe’s age is only known within a factor of 2 (one often sees figure ranges reported such as ten to twenty billion years). This means that the days of Genesis, if defended scientifically, could have been anywhere from three to nine days. Since Schroeder argues that it must be six days (because, de facto, like everyone in this genre he begins with the assumption that the Bible must be true), the jig is up if the (still inconclusive) scientific evidence comes in at a figure at odds with Genesis.

  A deeper and more troubling problem in this and other like-minded books is that Genesis is neither correct nor incorrect, because it is not a book of cosmology. Genesis is a cosmogony—a mythic tale of origins—and like all cosmogonies (for example, Egyptian, Hindu, Greek, Roman, Inuit, Polynesian, Mayan, Native American) it is neither true nor false because these evaluative terms are reserved for statements of fact, not myths and stories. Sure, if you stretch your imagination and play fast and loose with both the story and the science, you can find gross similarities between myth and nature. Comparing Genesis time to cosmic time is like comparing Taoism to quantum mechanics—the fact that they both speak of wholeness and integration means nothing more than that the author has found linguistic and conceptual similarities. But these comparisons do not prove anything, other than that the human mind is adept at finding and matching patterns.

  Even those who do not consider themselves religious in any traditional way are attracted to some of these arguments for what they might imply about the possible existence of some sort of higher intelligence or human spirituality. In Skeptics and True Believers, physicist and astronomer Chet Raymo offers a very measured and reasonable discussion of the relationship between science and religion. Raymo considers himself “a thoroughgoing Skeptic who believes that words like God, soul, sacred, spirituality, sacrament, and grace can retain currency in an age of science, once we strip them of outworn overlays of anthropomorphic and animistic meaning. Like many others in today’s society, I hunger for a faith that is open to the new cosmology—skeptical, empirical, ecumenical, and ecological—without sacrificing historical vernaculars of spirituality and liturgical expression.” Along similar lines, Bruce Mazet, who has no belief whatsoever in the anthropomorphic Judaeo-Christian God, presented in the pages of Skeptic, “A Case for God.” Mazet reviewed the fine-tuned universe argument in which the likelihood of the conditions for life to arise are astronomically small. He noted that there are counterarguments, such as that trillions of universes might have popped into and out of existence, one of which happened to have the right conditions for life (ours). The problem, Mazet notes, is that “there is no evidence whatsoever that this infinite number of hypothetical universes exist, and according to the cosmologists who postulate these hypothetical universes, there is no means by which to obtain any such evidence.” Therefore, Mazet concludes, “I suggest that if it is acceptable to postulate the existence of hypothetical universes, then it is acceptable to postulate the existence of God.”

  That certainly sounds reasonable. After all, what is good for the cosmologist is good for the theologian. Let’s examine what leading scientists are actually saying about God and cosmology, and consider how we might address these new cosmological arguments for God’s existence.

  1.

  Stephen Hawking’s God. When cosmologists deal with the beginning of the universe they are only a small step removed from Aquinas’s prime mover and first cause arguments. After all, to ask such questions as: “What was there before the Big Bang?” or “Why should there be something rather than nothing?” is not so distant from “What was God doing before He created the universe?” or “What is God’s purpose for the universe?” Stephen Hawking, in his quest to understand the origin and fate of the universe, admits his work often falls in that shadowland between science and religion, physics and metaphysics, as he told an ABC 20/20 reporter:

  It is difficult to discuss the beginning of the Universe without mentioning the concept of God. My work on the origin of the Universe is on the borderline between science and religion, but I try to stay on the scientific side of the border. It is quite possible that God acts in ways that cannot be described by scientific laws. But in that case one would just have to go by personal belief.

  In his book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking closes with this now oft-quoted line: “If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.” This was an unfortunate choice of words because in his position as one of the world’s leading cosmologists Hawking is eminently quotable, and people have read this to mean the Judaeo-Christian God. According to his biographers Michael White and John Gribbin, although Hawking is not an atheist, he clearly does not believe in a personal God. Shortly after A Brief History of Time was released, in December 1988, the actress Shirley MacLaine asked Hawking at a luncheon if he believes that a God created the universe. In his characteristic economy of words, Hawking’s machine voice answered “No.” Similarly, in a BBC television production called Master of the Universe, Hawking waxed theological about his cosmology: “We are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer suburbs of one of a hundred thousand million galaxies. So it is difficult to believe in a God that would care about us or even notice our existence.” Indeed, in his chapter, “The Origin and Fate of the Universe,” in A Briet History of Time, where he presents his no-boundary model of the cosmos, Hawking concluded that the universe may have no beginning or end, and thus no need for God:

  The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws, However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started—it would still be up to God to wind up the clackwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place. then, for a creator?

  It is a difficult concept for the human mind to grasp, but Michael White and John Gribbin, in their biography of Hawking, make this analogy: Imagine walking all the way to the North Pole of the Earth. For the entire trip there you are heading north, but the moment you pass the pole you are now heading south. Similarly, imagine the universe as an expanding sphere beginning with the Big Bang, and that you are in a time machine traveling backward toward that initi
al point. For the entire trip you are heading back in time, but the moment you pass the starting point you are now heading forward in time. There is no beginning and no end—no boundaries. The universe always was, always is, and always shall be.

  Whatever Hawking may mean when he speaks of God, he certainly does not mean the personal Judaeo-Christian God who created the universe and cares about us.

  2.

  Paul Davies’s God. Mathematical physicist Paul Davies is a believer in God and winner of the million-dollar Templeton Prize for “progress in religion.” In his book, The Mind of God, Davies reviews all the philosophical and scientific arguments for God’s existence, concluding that “belief in God is largely a matter of taste, to be judged by its explanatory value rather than logical compulsion. Personally I feel more comfortable with a deeper level of explanation than the laws of physics. Whether the use of the term ‘God’ for that deeper level is appropriate is, of course, a matter of debate.” If one of the great believing scientists of our age says that God’s existence cannot be proved, it would seem that some weight should be given to the position that belief in God is a matter of personality and emotional preference, also known as faith.

  3.

  Frank Tipler’s God. Cosmologist Frank Tipler’s answer to the God Question, while a theistic one, begins with a premise unlike that of most theists. In his books The Anthropic Cosmological Principle and especially The Physics of Immortality, subtitled Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, Tipler presents and defends his Omega Point Theory: The laws of nature and the configuration of the cosmos from atoms to galaxies is such that if you tweaked any of the parameters even slightly (and this often means a change many places after the decimal point in a number describing some aspect of nature), our universe, and we, could not exist in anything remotely similar to what we experience. Since “the Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history,” it does, and here we are. In other words, the universe had to be just so in order for us to be here, and the chances of it being just so are so small that it would have to have been made by some supreme being. More than this, says Tipler, “intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out,” so we must and we will take control of our universe and all other possible universes. In the process of doing this we “will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge which it is logically possible to know.” This, says Tipler, “is the end.” It is the Omega Point—the all-knowing and all-powerful being (God as computer?)—that not only has the power but also the desire to resurrect everyone who ever lived or could have lived.

  I have spoken to a number of cosmologists and physicists about Tipler’s theory, and the conclusions are generally the same. Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, for example, found nothing wrong with Tipler’s physics but concluded that his if-then leaps of logic between the steps of what must occur in order to reach the Omega Point were far too speculative to be meaningful; too much “hand-waving” between steps. John Casti, from the Santa Fe Institute, agreed with Tipler’s speculations on how intelligent life could colonize the galaxy and, like Thorne, had no beef with Tipler’s physics, but he concluded that each step in Tipler’s chronology leading up to the universal resurrection could be broken down into further steps to the point where the probability of all these contingencies coming together was so unlikely that he does not know what value such a theory could have.

  One of Tipler’s most enthusiastic supporters, on the other hand, is the highly regarded German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, from the Institute for Fundamental Theology at the University of Munich. In a lecture given at the Innsbruck Conference in June 1997, Pannenberg concluded: “Tipler is justified in claiming that his statements on the properties of the Omega Point correspond to Biblical assertions on God. The God of the Bible is not only related to the future by his promises, but he is himself the saving future that constitutes the core of the promises: ‘I shall be who I shall be.’” Yet even Pannenberg must go beyond Tipler’s physics to admit that God is not just in the future: “In hidden ways he is already now the Lord of the universe which is his creation, but it is only in the future of the completion of this universe, in the arrival of his kingdom that he will be fully revealed in his kingship over the universe and thus in his divinity.”

  I even had the opportunity to ask Stephen Hawking’s opinion of Tipler’s theory during his 1998 visit to Caltech. Hawking’s lecture dealt with something he calls the “pea instanton,” a particle of space/time resembling a wrinkly pea, out of which the universe sprang into existence. As this universal “pea” expanded, the wrinkles were pushed out, leaving the relatively smooth universe we observe today. In Hawking’s opinion, the question of the closed or open nature of the universe (Tipler’s theory demands a closed universe) depends on the model applied to the question, which means that the universe can be both closed and open, not unlike how light can be both particle and wave. Without ever mentioning God, Hawking skirted that metaphysical line in discussing the Omega Point and the Anthropic Principle, so I inquired:

  You’ve been talking about the Omega Point and the Anthropic Principle. What is your opinion of your cosmologist colleague Frank Tipler’s book, The Physics of Immortality, and his theory that the Omega Point will reach back from the far future of the universe into the past to reconstruct every human who ever lived or who ever could have lived in the ultimate Holodeck?

  Hawking composed his answer for about a minute, then his now-familiar computer voice responded: “My opinion would be libelous.” Tipler responded to this charge as follows:

  All I do in my work is accept the logical consequences of the known laws of physics: quantum mechanics, relativity, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I’m not proposing any new laws of physics, just asking people to accept the logical consequences of the laws they claim to accept. Libeling the Omega Point Theory is equivalent to libeling the known laws of physics. Almost all contemporary theology still presupposes the truth of Aristotelean physics. This being the case, scientists naturally suppose theology is nonsense, or in a separate realm from science. With the almost unique exception of Pannenberg, theologians encourage them in this latter opinion. Only if theology is kept separate can it retain its Aristotelean physical basis.

  The reality that the ancients were trying to capture in the word “soul” is expressed by defining the soul to be a computer program being run on the human brain. With this redefinition, we can keep the religious concept, and make it consistent with the facts. But most importantly, the redefinition makes the scientist realize that immortality is perfectly possible: there’s no physical reason why a program cannot exist forever. Some of the programs now coded in our DNA have been around billions of years. Keeping the old definition makes Hawking want to libel a person whose book’s central postulate is that the biosphere can go on forever. Is postulating the immortality of the biosphere an evil postulate? Shouldn’t we at least try to make it so? Should a person who tries to figure out how to use the known physical laws to make the biosphere immortal be ostracized from scientific society?

  Similarly for the word “God.” If He is identified with the Omega Point, then the key religious meanings of “God” are retained, with science and religion integrated. As he wrote at length, the German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg agrees that the Omega Point is in all essentials the God of the Bible. It’s easier for a German theologian to come to this conclusion than an English speaker. God’s Name, given in Exodus 3:14, was translated by Martin Luther as “ICH WERDE SEIN, DER ICH SEIN WERDE”—“I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” Failing to make this change of definition, which is to say, failing to give up Aristotelean physics, makes it difficult to accept the consequences of modern physics. These require the universe to terminate in its ultimate future in an Omega Point, a state of infinite knowledge, and infinite power.