Is God at the end of the scientific rainbow?

By Greg Easterbrook

This article appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail SCIENCE, October 24, 1998

Research is pointing toward a buoyant view of our being, one in which life is favoured, not improbable, and the universe is a welcoming place.

Suppose you accept the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Here’s what you believe, roughly, according to the model proposed by Alan Guth, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

You believe that, once upon a time, all the potential of the cosmos all the potential for a firmament of 40 billion galaxies at last count  was packed into a point smaller than a proton. You believe that within this incipient cosmos was neither hyper-compressed matter nor any tangible substance. It was a "false vacuum" through which coursed a weightless, empty quantum-mechanical probability framework called a "scalar field." You’re probably not clear about what a scalar field is, but then neither are most PhDs.

Next, you believe that, when the Big Bang sounded, the universe expanded from a pinpoint to cosmological size in far less than one second space itself hurtling outward in a torrent of pure physics, the bow wave of the new cosmos moving at trillions of times the speed of light.

Further, you believe that, as subatomic particles began to unbuckle from the inexplicable proto-reality, both matter and antimatter formed. Immediately, these commodities began to collide and annihilate themselves, vanishing as mysteriously as they came. The only reason our universe is here today is that the Bang was slightly asymmetrical, its yield favouring matter over antimatter by about one part per 100 million. Because of this, when the stupendous cosmic commencement day ended, a residue of standard matter survived, and from it the galaxies formed. That is to say: You believe that a microscopic, transparent, empty point in primordial space-time contained not just one universe but enough potential for a 100 million universes.

It’s wise to take the Big Bang hypothesis seriously, since considerable evidence weighs in its favour. The galaxies are expanding away from one another as if they had once been in the same place, then hurled outward; the interstellar void is slightly warmer than absolute zero, suggesting the universe was once superheated by something much stronger than the output of stars; the earliest nebulae appear to be composed of precisely the mix of elements that Big Bang calculations suggest.

Yet, for sheer extravagant implausibility, nothing in theology or metaphysics can hold a candle to the Bang. Surely, if this description of the cosmic genesis came from the Bible or the Koran rather than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it would be treated as a preposterous myth.

Just as surely, the sort of majestic events hypothesized by current thinking about the Big Bang seem hauntingly similar in character to other, more traditional arguments about splendid powers at the core of existence. Something extremely grand must have called forth our firmament, and whether that something was natural or supernatural may be mere semantics.

Reflecting on this, Allan Sandage, one of the world’s astronomers, recently proposed that the Big Bang is best understood as "a miracle" triggered by some kind of transcendent power. The Nobel Prize winning physicist Charles Townes, chief inventor of the laser, suggests that "to think that science already knows enough to be certain there are no mystical forces is illogical." Other prominent researchers are beginning to say much the same thing.

In the century since Darwin, the arc of science has pointed toward displacing belief in anything beyond genes, machines and the vibration of atoms. Many have waited, expectantly or even impatiently, for the moment when science fully refutes obsolete conceptions of meaning and purpose. Now, however, researchers are encountering profound riddles on many of the very points most concerned with the larger questions of life: What caused the universe? Why are natural laws and physical constants amenable to biology and consciousness?

In part because it has been assumed that science would inexorably prove existence to be no more than a chance manifestation of pitiless mechanical forces, the main current of postmodern thought in philosophy, literature, art and their mass-cult equivalents has been silted with grey. But as bleak worldviews deconstruct themselves to the point of depletion if nothing really matters, why even bother to say it?  Such thinking is starting to change. New findings in science point toward a buoyant view of our being, one in which life is favoured, not improbable, and the universe a welcoming place, not an obdurate domain.

Some of the conflict between science and meaning has been administrative, traceable to researcher’s needs to win academic freedom in university systems once flavoured by church politics. It is useful to recall that, as recently as Victoria’s reign, the Anglican Church controlled hiring decisions at Cambridge and Oxford. One reason Charles Darwin was so touted by the British scientific establishment, while Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of evolutionary theory, was practically black-balled, was that Darwin was an agnostic who threw the rector class into a tizzy while Wallace was a believer who spoke about "the unseen universe of the spirit."

Bureaucratic politics aside, aspects of the conflict between science and meaning reflect deep philosophical division. In his powerful 1972 book Chance and Necessity, Nobel-winning French biologist Jacques Monod says everything about the living world can be explained without recourse to purpose, significance or larger powers. "Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity out of which he emerged only by chance."

A quarter of a century later, the picture seems much less clear. Take the origin of life. Evolution glides over this most engaging of biological questions: Natural selection describes the way organisms that already exist adapt to change in habitats that already exist, but it is silent on how the process begins. Even cellular forms of life are so fantastically complex, so different from the azoic world and so fragile compared to it, that it is difficult to imagine how an incomplete, initial organism could have functioned before its components were sufficiently established as to be capable of replication and development.

Carrying the patina of what seems like objective science, the notion of life as a vacuous accident is central to contemporary intellectual orthodoxy. But, while life may be pointless, that’s an opinion, not an impartial induction. And it is surely an opinion leveraged by the desire of many thinkers to gain retribution against belief by treating it as dismissively as faith once treated science. As Alan Dressler, a prominent astronomer, notes: "Many scientists seem to be on a crusade to run down human worth, because they think this will destroy the old religious arrogance of believing that man is the centre of the universe. But nobody believes that any more."

More to the point, the life-as-fluke view may be about to collapse. Christian de Duve, a Nobel-winning Belgian biologist, says: "Eventually we will understand that the origin of life was not a highly improbable cosmic jest but rather an almost obligatory outcome of chemical structures, given the right conditions."

Conventional views about the significance of evolution may collapse as well. Darwinian theory ranks among the foremost achievements of rationality, yet many proponents insist on presenting adaptation not as a glorious manifestation of the life force but rather as just another vacant, going-nowhere mechanism.

Imputing a positive arrow to evolution is decried as "anthropocentrism" because women and men would then be seen as superior to earlier organisms. (Some factions in evolutionary debate become very offended at the suggestion that Homo sapiens is a higher accomplishment than Australopithecus.) Development of intellect is depicted not as nature’s highest known achievement but as a random event, signifying nothing. Yet, as Dr. de Duve notes, if you "chart out the last 500 million years, you will find that nearly every animal has steadily increased its neurological capacity, if only because brain power is a marvelous adaptation mechanism.

As research has begun to veer toward the metaphysical, the interplay of science and religion, seemingly a dead issue a decade ago, has made a comeback, now growing into one of the liveliest arenas of intellectual discourse. Theology finds itself warming to science, especially to the Big Bang with its discrete, Genesis-like moment of rapid creation, and to the ethereal notions of quantum mechanics, such as that particles can travel from A to C without passing through B.

Outside the creationist extremes, religious leaders are taking tentative steps toward natural selection -- the Pope in 1996, called Darwinism "more than just a hypothesis" -- as they come to understand both how strong the evidence is and that evolutionary biology behaves with a profound elegance that may suggest larger influence. New schools of thought with names such as "design inference" are staking claims to the notion that circumstances such as favourable physical law will eventually be understood as divine latency.

But the Maker cannot be proved from natural beneficence any more than God could be disproved by indications of impersonal forces. All that can be said with assurance is that science is moving away from dispirited views of a merciless cosmos toward a new vision of creation as poignantly favourable to life.