CHAPTER 1
A Creation Story for Our Times
TED BURGE
The Big Bang and subsequent physical and biological evolution arefirmly established beliefs in the minds of nearly all scientists. When setside by side with the story of creation in Genesis, they appear to givea more convincing account of the material creation. But the two accountshave different purposes. The scientific one, of course, makes no mentionof God. Genesis, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with the divinetruths of God and creation and God's relation to humankind.
Those parts of Genesis that reveal primitive ideas about the materialaspects of creation can be revised without disturbing most of those divinetruths. We have much evidence in the Bible of the evolution of theconcept of God, particularly in the Old Testament, but belief in him asCreator and our dependence on him remain firm and unchanged.
In the light of our present scientific knowledge and of subsequentevents in history, perhaps the writers of Genesis, inspired by God's continuingrevelation of himself, would have written something like this:In the beginning, God said "Let there be ...," and he created the unifiedforces of physics, with perfect symmetry and prescient precision. Andout of nothing, and into nothing, God, by a free decision, set up thespontaneous production of particles, in newborn space and time, producinga silent, seething sphere, infinitesimally small and unimaginablyhot. There was onset and evolution, the first stage of creation.
During a tiny fraction of a second, an expansion took place, and theperfect symmetry of the forces was broken, step by step, as the temperaturedropped, to produce the forces of nature we know today.
God's well-tuned laws made innumerable particles, of every requisitekind, in a steadily expanding chaotic cooling sphere. And the universecooled for nearly a million years, until electrons could stay joinednuclei to form familiar atoms. There was onset and evolution, thesecond stage of creation.
With atoms and molecules as building blocks, the attracting force ofgravity took over, and after about a thousand million years, God saw thefirst stars and galaxies forming in an expanding cosmic universe. Therewas onset and evolution, the third stage of creation.
Individual stars contracted under gravity and became hot enough fornuclear fusion to produce chemical elements not seen before, until, afterabout ten thousand million years, stars were exhausted by theirradiance, and God saw them begin to die, some dramatically, by explodingas supernovas, releasing all the known chemical elements. Therewas onset and evolution, the fourth stage of creation.
And God saw that it was very good, for now all the ingredients wereavailable, and gravity formed a second generation of stars, some accompaniedby planets and satellites, including the Sun, Earth, and, later, theMoon, in our galaxy of the Milky Way. There was onset and evolution, thefifth stage of creation.
Bathed in alternate daylight and darkness, during the next thousandmillion years or so, conditions on Earth became favorable for the eventualgeneration of life. There was onset and evolution, the sixth stage ofcreation.
During these last three thousand million years, life has evolved asGod intended, and through numerous cycles of birth, survival, procreation,and death, species have multiplied and progressed, plants andanimals of every kind, and some have become extinct, until, a mere threehundred thousand years ago, there arrived, in the likeness of God, Homosapiens, intelligent humans, with freedom to choose, living together incommunity, knowing good and evil, pleasure and pain, aware of honordue to their dominion, and acquainted with death. There was onset andevolution, the seventh stage of creation.
And the universe entered the Age of Humanity. Human beings havehardly changed in physical form during the past forty thousand years,but their beliefs have evolved, their knowledge has grown, and their understandinghas deepened.
And God saw that it was good, but it was not good enough, for freewill led to sin and suffering, and guilt and disbelief could lead to despairand the death of the human spirit.
So God sent his only Son, the Word made flesh, who dwelt among usas Jesus of Nazareth, suffered, died, and rose from the dead, and showedhis glory, full of grace and truth.
And that was the beginning of the new creation.
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Ted Burge is Emeritus Professor of Physics of the University of London and formerDean of the Faculty of Science. He also holds a degree in theology. Burge is theauthor of Atomic Nuclei and Their Particles, Lord of All, Hear Our Prayer,and Lord for All Seasons.
The Alpha and the Omega of Space and Time
ROD DAVIES
The study of the origins of the universe is, I believe, both a scientific anda religious voyage of discovery: scientific because we use the techniquesof the scientific method—exploration and deduction; religious becauseit contains the element of awe and wonder, and it stimulates questionsabout purpose and ends.
The current scientific view is that the cosmos began with a Big Bang.The universe is expanding from a compact phase of condensed matter atthe beginning of time.
As we examine the more distant galaxies, we are probing further backin time as a consequence of the finite speed of light. When I first cameinto astronomy in early 1950, the light from the most distant galaxiesthen detected had been traveling for a billion years—one-fifteenth of theage of the universe. Radio astronomy today can take us closer to the BigBang: to within three hundred thousand years.
This arises out of observations of the cosmic microwave background—the"afterglow" of the Big Bang itself. This form of radiationis extremely uniformly distributed across the whole sky. But in the pasttwenty years slight inhomogeneities have been detected. Encoded inthese variations are the earliest clues we have so far detected as to howthe universe came to acquire the structure it has today. It was these slightvariations of density and temperature that were subsequenly to be reinforcedby the influence of gravity, giving rise to the galaxies we seetoday. From within these spinning galaxies, the stars, the planets, andeventually we ourselves emerged. Much of my recent scientific effort hasbeen devoted to the search for these weak and elusive signals—clues tothe secrets of the origin of the universe.
It is possible to get even closer to the instant of the Big Bang using adifferent kind of observation. Although the element helium is producedin stars through the fusion of hydrogen, it was also present before theearliest stars formed. The only environment with sufficiently high energiescapable of such cosmic alchemy was the first few hundred seconds ofthe history of the universe. The study of the primordial abundances ofthe elements becomes another way of exploring the conditions of theearly universe.
One of the most important outstanding problems is the determinationof the average mass density of the universe. If we could find its precisevalue, we could determine the ultimate fate of the cosmos.
If the density of the universe is high enough, the gravitational pull ofeach part on every other part will eventually bring the expansion to a haltand, billions of years into the future, cause everything to collapse in onitself in a Big Crunch.
On the other hand, if the density is too low, the universe will expandforever, becoming more and more tenuous, with the galaxies recedingfarther and farther from each other.
A third intriguing possibility is suggested by a theory called the "inflationaryscenario." This holds that a tiny fraction of a second after theinstant of the Big Bang, there was a change of state of the radiation/matter mix, resulting in a density that will eventually lead to the expansionapproaching a gradual halt—in the infinite future.
So much for a sketchy summary of the present scientific thinkingabout the origins and ultimate destiny of the universe. What then aboutmy opening statement that the quest for the origin of the universe is ajourney of discovery for both scientific and religious thinkers?
The Judeo-Christian reaching out for an understanding of our originsis encapsulated in Genesis:
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth. And theEarth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of thedeep. And the spirit of God moved on the face of the waters. And Godsaid, 'Let there be light'; and there was light."
In the New Testament we have the Greek philosophical addition. Johnsums it up beautifully in his Gospel:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and theWord was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things weremade by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made.In Him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shinethin the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.... He was in theworld, and the world was made by Him."
In this concept of the "Word," or logos, we have the kernel of what theChristian believes about God the Creator. Having created the world, Godis in the world and part of it. In him we have our being. If we get ourminds "around" this philosophical concept, the scientific approach tocreation and the religious approach merge.
Today we too attempt to make sense of the world and the communitiesin which we live in response to wonder and reverence for the createdorder. The scientists ask how it is that all the processes which have operatedover the billions of years since the Big Bang led to the emergence ofa Homo sapiens who can contemplate the whole creative process. This issummed up in the anthropic principle, which affirms that the universemust have within it those properties which allow life to develop at somestage of its history. "The most unintelligible thing about the universe isthat it is intelligible," said Albert Einstein. In such recent thinking, I beginto see a synthesis of the scientific and religious approaches to thewonder and potential of creation.
Rod Davies is Emeritus Professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Manchesterand former director of the Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories, JodrellBank. He is also a Methodist preacher.
What Happened before the Big Bang?
PAUL DAVIES
It is often said that science cannot prove the existence of God. Yet sciencedoes have value in theological debate because it gives us new conceptsthat sometimes make popular notions of God untenable. One of theseconcerns the nature of time.
Many people envisage God as a sort of cosmic magician who existedfor all eternity, and then at some moment in the past created the universein a gigantic supernatural act. Unfortunately, this scenario raises someawkward questions. What was God doing before he created the universe?If God is a perfect, unchanging being, what prompted him to actthen rather than sooner? The fifth-century theologian St. Augustineneatly solved the problem by proclaiming that the world was made withtime and not in time. In other words, time itself is part of God's creation.
To make sense of Augustine's concept it is necessary to place Godoutside of time altogether, and the notion of a timeless Deity becameofficial church doctrine. However, it is not without its own difficulties.How can a timeless God be involved with temporal events in the universe,such as entering into human history through the Incarnation?
Today, religious people like to identify the creation with the Big Bangof scientific cosmology. So what can we say about the nature of time inthe scientific picture?
Albert Einstein showed us that time and space are part of the physicalworld, just as much as matter and energy. Indeed, time can be manipulatedin the laboratory. Dramatic time warps occur, for example, whensubatomic particles are accelerated to near the speed of light. Blackholes stretch time by an infinite amount. It is therefore wrong to think oftime as simply "there," as a universal, eternal backdrop to existence. Soa complete theory of the universe needs to explain not only how matterand energy came to exist; it must explain the origin of time, too.
Happily, Einstein's theory of relativity is up to the job. It predicts a so-calledsingularity at which time abruptly starts. In the standard Big Bangscenario, time and space come into being spontaneously at such a singularity,along with matter.
People often ask, What happened before the Big Bang? The answer is,Nothing. By this, I do not mean that there was a state of nothingness,pregnant with creative power. There was nothing before the Big Bang becausethere was no such epoch as "before." As Stephen Hawking has remarked,asking what happened before the Big Bang is rather like askingwhat lies north of the North Pole. The answer, once again, is nothing,not because there exists a mysterious Land of Nothing there, but becausethere is no such place as north of the North Pole. Similarly, there is nosuch time as "before the Big Bang." Of course, one can still ask why auniverse popped into existence this way. Cosmologists believe the answerlies with the weird properties of quantum mechanics, a topic beyondthe scope of this essay.
We can now see that Augustine was right and popular religion wrongto envisage God as a superbeing dwelling within the stream of time priorto the creation. Professional theologians acknowledge this. The doctrineof creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) does not mean God pushing ametaphysical button and making a Big Bang, then sitting back to watchthe action. It means God sustaining the existence of the universe, and itslaws, at all times, from a location outside of space and time.
Can science give any credibility to such a notion? Mostly, scientistseither are atheists or keep God in a separate mental compartment. However,there is a strong parallel in the scientific concept of the laws ofnature. Like the theologians' God, these laws enjoy an abstract, timelessexistence, and are capable of bringing the universe into being fromnothing. But where do they come from? And why do these laws existrather than some different set?
Science is based on the assumption that the universe is thoroughly rationaland logical at all levels. Miracles are not allowed. This implies thatthere should be reasons for the particular laws of nature that regulate thephysical universe. Atheists claim that the laws exist reasonlessly and thatthe universe is ultimately absurd. As a scientist, I find this hard to accept.There must be an unchanging rational ground in which the logical, orderlynature of the universe is rooted. Is this rational ground like thetimeless God of Augustine? Perhaps it is. But in any case, the lawlike basisof the universe seems a more fruitful place for a dialogue between scienceand theology than focusing on the origin of the universe and thediscredited notion of what happened before the Big Bang.
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Paul Davies is Visiting Professor of Physics at Imperial College in London. Formerlyhe was Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Newcastle and Professorof Mathematical Physics and of Natural Philosophy at the University of Adelaide,Australia. Davies was awarded the 1995 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religionand is the author of more than twenty best-selling books, most notably The Mindof God.
CHAPTER 2
The Universe as a Home for Life
At first sight the universe appears to be a vast and hostile place—hardlya suitable "home" for life. But looks are deceptive. For intelligent life toevolve from what was originally a fireball, the world had to satisfy a rangeof conditions—collectively known as the anthropic principle.
Michael Poole and Owen Gingerich point out that the universe had tohave the characteristics it possesses in order for us to put in an appearance.This fine-tuning does not in itself constitute a knockdown proof ofa Designer God, but it is, nevertheless, fully consistent with there beinga purpose behind creation.
Bruno Guiderdoni, in contemplating the cooled-down remnant ofthe primordial fireball, notes that although it is almost uniform in itsdistribution, close examination reveals a pattern of gentle irregularities.It was these inhomogeneities that were later to develop into life-bearinggalaxies. He regards this radiation map as an icon for our times—themight of God and the subtlety of humankind combined into a singleimage.
Howard Van Till emphasizes that there is deep mystery in the way theultimate constituents of the world, and the laws that govern their behavior,have the ability to transform the simple raw materials and energyemerging from the Big Bang into the intricate forms that constitute usand our surroundings. This gift of self-organization, so easily taken forgranted, is perhaps best seen as evidence of a creative Mind.
Of course, not everyone agrees that the study of the world leads inevitablyto contemplation of God. Carl Feit points out from a Jewish perspectivethat in a complex way God reveals himself in nature but also remainshidden.
