Truth
God and the Cosmologists
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, November 03, 1999
Inflation Theory and the Sephirot
Margaret Wertheim, in an article in New Scientist (God of the Quantum Vacuum, 4 October 1997) reports from the conference of “leading” cosmologists at Berkeley, California, that “many” cosmologists see the hand of God at work in the Big Bang. Surely, they could have come up with better arguments, if they did?
Joel Primack, a Jewish cosmologist from the University of California at Santa Cruz likens cosmological inflation theory to the first three Sephirot of the Jewish Qabala. Primack says they “correspond fairly closely”. So what? Is he trying to say that the Qabalists somehow found out about modern ideas of cosmology—presumably from God or, at least, an angel—or is he saying that modern cosmologists are basing their speculations on the Qabala? Perhaps he is saying neither. What is he saying?
Is he saying that the fact that two sets of conjectures about the origins of the universe, formulated hundreds of years apart, “correspond fairly closely” is a synchronicity which must have some divine significance? Is he saying that we can have more scientific confidence in cosmologists’ speculations because they agree with the arcane musings of some Jewish magicians? Perhaps he is trying to re-assure Jewish and perhaps Christian believers (after all they both have the same God) that science is simply confirming what God has already revealed to the fringe element of Judaism centuries ago?
What is the purpose of this nonsense? Ancient people from long ago came up with various ideas about the origins of the cosmos. Some turned out to be quite good guesses and others turned out to be silly. But they were guesses just as Guth and Linde’s ideas, flattered with the appellative “theories”, are essentially guesses.
Wertheim tells us that Andrej Pacholczyk calls cosmology “noncorrespondence science” because it is based on pure speculation. Well, Pacholczyk can call it science if he likes but if it is based on pure speculation then all it is is pure speculation. If cosmologists can measure something coming in from space that will distinguish one speculation from another then it is science but otherwise it is nonscience (or is that nonsense) not noncorrespondence science.
Augustine and Time
Robert Russell is apparently a minister in the United Church of Christ but also a theologian and a physicist. Now there is a man who can do miracles, if ever you wanted one. It is a sure sign of a theologian and not a scientist that they turn not to experiment or observation but to ancient authorities. Primack turned to the Qabalists but Russell has a better authority, none other than St Augustine.
Augustine figured that time as well as the world of space must have been made at the moment of creation. Augustine inferred that God exists outside of time, as he must if he created it. We can congratulate Augustine for some clever thinking, but for Russell, as for anyone besotted with God, the saint must be correct and this proves that God is transcendental. Modern cosmologists agree that time began at the moment of the Big Bang but have no reason to admit the hypothesis of God. Quantum fluctuations would suffice, or the realization that time is an illusion caused by the shape of the universe. The theologian Russell prefers to stick with his unnecessary belief, serving to prove that he is a very poor scientist.
Bruno Guideroni of the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris prefers to turn to Sufism, an Islamic mystic tradition. He seems to go seven points of the Sephirot beyond Primack because the five Presences of Sufism correspond to the ten Sephirot of the Qabala. They are God’s way of revealing himself and they operate continually. Guideroni tells us that this idea of continuous creation fits in with the cosmologist’s view of an increasingly complex universe—he means that fact that, since the Big Bang, it has evolved, the original energy of the creation condensing and transmuting into various types of matter as time passed. Well isn’t that wonderful, and the Islamic mystics knew it already. We really must give up science and practice mysticism.
Religion Permeates Science
John Barrow of the University of Sussex continues this conference of supreme banality by telling us that religious ideas permeate science. Remarkable! It is obvious that earlier traditions influence later ones, and our culture is that of the Christian religion that for centuries people were obliged to accept, not merely on the pain of hellfire, but on the pain of incineration in this life. Not surprisingly, people believed, and those beliefs still permeate society.
However, to claim that Hawking would not be working on the emergence of the universe from the quantum vacuum without the biblical tradition that God created the universe out of nothing is absurd. Is Barrow really saying that Hawking has no observational basis for the Big Bang? As soon as cosmological study suggests that the universe is expanding, the notion of a moment of creation out of nothing must arise as a hypothesis to explain the expansion. An idea a few decades ago held equal sway with the Big Bang, that of continuous creation which required matter to be created out of nothing all the time, and could equally have stimulated work like Hawking’s. Indeed, now some scientists are claiming that it will be possible to get the energy to travel to the stars from the same source. Barrow is talking through his hat. Is he a Christian?
Edward Harrison, an astrophysicist recently retired from the University of Massachusetts, appeals to the idea of the omniscience (does he or Wertheim mean omnipresence?) of God expressed by the fifteenth century theologian, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, in the form—“God is everywhere and occupies no point”. This he claims is the origin of the cosmological idea that the universe has no centre. Well waddya know? Andrei Linde, the Russian Physicist who has opted for richer pickings at Stanford University, claims that the whole of modern cosmology has been influenced by the idea of monotheism. He thinks the scientists’ desire for a Theory of Everything (TOE) is a desire to find an absolute God in such a theory. As we saw, these banal observations could hardly be worth his transfer fee. In fact, catch all dreams, from the Philosopher’s Stone to intergalactic travel, have often been the inspiration which led to surprising discoveries, but the fancied idea is never confirmed.
Humanity’s Place in the Cosmos
Wertheim comment that some religious believers view science with suspicion because human beings have no special place in it, unlike the Christian theological view that humanity was at the heart of the cosmos. That indeed was the Christian view, and it tells us more about the Christian’s self-centredness than it does about the universe.
There is an answer though. Primack turns to his wealth of physical and mathematical knowledge to assure us that we are in the centre of things, indeed. “We are almost exactly halfway between the largest cosmological scale of 1026 metres and the smallest quantum scale of 10-35 metres”. Well, Primack is being a bit loose for a scientist, but doubtless he too is a believer and therefore his standards need not be precise—in fact he can lie his head off. Half way between these two numbers is their average, 3 x 10-5 (0.00003) metres—actually smaller than an amoeba, not the size of a human being which is 2 x 100 (2) metres, “almost exactly!” Primack’s “almost exactly” is not at all exact. It is a factor of 100,000 out, but that is God’s Truth.
Primack also says that the fact of our being made up of baryonic matter which only constitutes a tenth of the universe also shows that we are special. That argument defeats me totally. Are we special because we are sustained by oxygen rather than nitrogen? Are we special because we live on the earth rather than in it? Are we special because we live on the earth rather than Jupiter? We have evolved where it was possible for us to evolve. We might not, even then, have evolved in those places, but then we would not have been able to debate the point. Since it seems unlikely that life could evolve in the dark matter of the universe, it would be more correct to say that we were special if we had been a dark matter lifeform!
Guideroni tries a similar tactic. We are here only because the universe is old enough to make us and sustain us. Wow! Guideroni seems to think that this proves we are at the top of creation just as we were for Christian medieval thinkers. Guideroni adds that we are, in fact, at the centre of our universe because our universe is defined as that which is bounded by the light which is reaching us from the surface corresponding to the time of the Big Bang, t=0. This echos medieval ideas says Guideroni. But since everywhere else in an infinite, or even in merely a boundless, universe has exactly the same property, it is hard for us non-theists to see how that corresponds with the medieval view which considered us unique, and how therefore it makes us special.
Wertheim in the article is fond of suggesting that “many” scientists think in these ways. Thus “many scientists still see the face of God reflected from the edge of the cosmos”. If it is true, it is a sad indication of the state of modern science, and a shocking decline from the enlightenment. It is probably not true but evidence of Wertheim’s own agenda. It looks to me like God’s agenda.
