Science encounters spirituality
By Gregg Easterbrook, Wired

"The ancient covenant is in pieces: Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance." So pronounced the Nobel Prize-winning French biologist Jacques Monod in his 1970 treatise Chance and Necessity, which maintained that God had been utterly refuted by science. In 1981, the National Academy of Sciences declared, "Religion and science are separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought." Case closed.

And now reopened. In recent years, Allan Sandage, one of the world's leading astronomers, has declared that the big bang can be understood only as a "miracle." Charles Townes, a Nobel-winning physicist and co-inventor of the laser, has said that discoveries of physics "seem to reflect intelligence at work in natural law." Biologist Christian de Duve, also a Nobel winner, points out that, "There is no sense in which atheism is enforced or established by science." And biologist Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, insists that "a lot of scientists really don't know what they are missing by not exploring their spiritual feelings."

Why the renewed scientific interest in spiritual thinking? In science, the pure materialistic view that reigned through the 20th century, holding that everything has a natural explanation, couldn't prevail forever. Decades of inconclusive inquiry have left the science-has-all-the-answers script in tatters. As recently as the '70s, intellectuals assumed that hard science was on track to resolve the two Really Big Questions: why life exists and how the universe began. What's more, both Really Big Answers were assumed to involve strictly deterministic forces. But things haven't worked out that way. Instead, the more scientists have learned, the more mysterious the Really Big Questions have become.

Look up into the night sky and scan for the edge of the cosmos. You won't find it-nobody has. Instruments such as the Hubble Space Telescope's deep-field scanner have detected at least 50 billion galaxies, and every time the equipment is improved, more galaxies farther away come into focus.

All this stuff-enough to form 50 billion galaxies, maybe fantastically more-is thought to have emerged in less than a second, from a point with no physical dimensions. Something made an entire cosmos out of nothing. It is this realization-that something transcendent started it all-which has scientists using terms like "miracle."

[Scientific] explanations of how the mass of an entire universe could pop out of a void are especially unsatisfying. Experiments announced in July this year by the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York measured properties of subatomic particles known as muons, finding that they behave as though influenced by other particles that seem to have materialized from nothingness. But no object larger than the tiniest subatomic particle has been observed to do this-and these "virtual" particles are volatile entities that exist for less than a second, while the big bang made a universe that is superbly stable.

About 10 years ago, just as scientists were becoming confident in big bang theory, I asked Alan Dressler-one of the world's leading astronomers, and currently a consultant on the design of the space telescope scheduled to replace the Hubble-what caused the bang. He scrunched his face and said, "I can't stand that question!" At the time, cosmologists tended to assert that the cause and prior condition were unknowable. We would never know.

The more scientists testily insisted that the big bang was unfathomable, the more they sounded like medieval priests saying, "Don't ask me what made God." No matter how you slice it, calling on unknown physical laws sounds awfully like appealing to the supernatural.

The existence of 50 billion galaxies isn't the only mystery that's prompting scientists to rethink their attitudes toward the divine. Beyond this is the puzzle of why the universe is hospitable to living creatures.

In recent years, researchers have calculated that if a value called omega-the ratio between the average density of the universe and the density that would halt cosmic expansion-had not been within about one-quadrillionth of 1 percent of its actual value immediately after the big bang, the incipient universe would have collapsed back on itself or experienced effects that would render the fabric of time-space weirdly distorted. Instead, the firmament is geometrically smooth-rather than distorted.

If gravity were only slightly stronger, research shows, stars would flame so fiercely they would burn out in a single year; the universe would be a kingdom of cinders, devoid of life. If gravity were only slightly weaker, stars couldn't form and the cosmos would be a thin, undifferentiated blur. Had the strong force that binds atomic nuclei been slightly weaker, all atoms would disperse into vapor.

Life itself required an equally unlikely fine-tuning at the atomic level, yielding vast quantities of carbon. Unlike most elements, carbon needs little energy to form exceedingly complicated molecules, a requirement of biology. As it happens, a quirk of carbon chemistry-an equivalence of nuclear energy levels that allows helium nuclei to meld within stars-makes this vital element possible.

To the late astronomer Fred Hoyle, who calculated the conditions necessary to create carbon in 1953, the odds of this match occurring by chance seemed so phenomenally low that he converted from atheism to a belief that the universe reflects a "purposeful intelligence." Hoyle declared, "The probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make the random concept absurd." That is to say, Hoyle's faith in chance was shaken by evidence of purpose, an experience shared by many of his successors today.

Numerous other areas of contemporary science sound like supernaturalism dressed up. Researchers studying the motions of spiral galaxies have found that the stars and gas clouds within them behave as though they're subject to 20 times more force than can be explained by the gravity from observed matter. This has led to the assumption-now close to a scientific consensus-that much of the cosmos is bound up in an undetectable substance provisionally called dark matter. Other experiments suggest that as much as two-thirds of the content of the universe may crackle with an equally mysterious dark energy.

Then there's the Higgs field. In an attempt to explain the ultimate source of mass, some theorists propose that the universe is permeated by an undiscovered field that confers mass on what would otherwise be zero-mass particles.

These and other mystery forces seem to function based on nothing. That notion, now a fact of life among physicists and cosmologists, would have been considered ridiculous just a few generations ago. Yet Christian theology has been teaching for millennia that God made the universe out of nothing.

Maybe these forces work in a wholly natural manner that simply hasn't yet been determined. But for the moment, many believers find physics trending in their direction, while physicists themselves are left to ponder transcendent effects they can't explain.

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Commentary:

Modern scientists are simply discovering what many of the greatest scientists of old proclaimed a long time ago-that the world and the universe itself is such a marvelous and miraculous place that it had to have been created! The invisible workings of God are clearly seen in His wonderful creation, and those who deny it are simply without excuse! (See Romans 1:20.) That's how obvious it is!

Look at dear Fred Hoyle, whose faith in science alone was shattered, and who had to confess there was a Creator. Look at the great astronomers, physicists, biologists and scientists of the past who believed in the Lord. Look at the great scientist Isaac Newton, who believed in the Flood, Noah's ark, and that everything was just created in six days! Ancient and modern scientists alike, their science simply led them to the conclusion that God was the conclusion-the Alpha and the Omega!

So don't be intimidated in your faith and your witnessing by those who are skeptical and who say they don't believe in something unless they can see it-that they're the scientific type and don't believe in religion. Scientists themselves are having to confess that they believe in things they can't see, things that they don't have any scientific answers for! God's invisible workings continue to testify of Him all these thousands of years later. [D.B.B.]
 

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