Reading Science Leads to Belief in a Creator
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By Sharon Begley
The achievements of modern science seem to contradict religion and undermine faith. Just for a growing number of scientists, the same discoveries offer support for spirituality and hints of the very nature of God.
T he more deeply scientists see into the secrets of the universe, yous'd await, the more God would fade away from their hearts and minds.
But that'due south not how information technology went for Allan Sandage. Now slightly stooped and white-haired at 72, Sandage has spent a professional lifetime coaxing secrets out of the stars, peering through telescopes from Chile to California in the promise of spying nothing less than the origins and destiny of the universe. As much as whatever other 20th-century astronomer, Sandage really figured it out: his observations of afar stars showed how fast the universe is expanding and how old it is (fifteen billion years or so).
But through it all Sandage, who says he was "virtually a practicing atheist every bit a boy," was nagged by mysteries whose answers were not to be establish in the glittering panoply of supernovas. Amongst them: why is there something rather than nothing?
Sandage began to despair of answering such questions through reason alone, and so, at 50, he willed himself to take God. "It was my scientific discipline that drove me to the conclusion that the globe is much more complicated than can be explained by science," he says. "It is only through the supernatural that I can sympathise the mystery of existence."
Something surprising is happening between those 2 onetime warhorses science and religion.
Historically, they have alternated between mutual support and bitter enmity. Although religious doctrine midwifed the birth of the experimental method centuries ago (post-obit story), faith and reason soon parted ways.
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Simply as science grew in say-so and power get-go with the Enlightenment, this detente bankrupt down. Some of its greatest minds dismissed God as an unnecessary hypothesis, ane they didn't need to explicate how galaxies came to shine or how life grew and so complex.
Since the nascence of the universe could now exist explained past the laws of physics alone, the late astronomer and atheist Carl Sagan concluded, there was "nothing for a Creator to exercise," and every thinking person was therefore forced to admit "the absence of God." Today the scientific community and so scorns faith, says Sandage, that "at that place is a reluctance to reveal yourself equally a believer, the opprobrium is so severe."
Some clergy are no more tolerant of scientists. A fellow researcher and friend of Sandage'southward was told past a pastor, "Unless you take and believe that the Earth and universe are merely 6,000 years old [as a literal reading of the Bible implies], you cannot be a Christian." Information technology is piffling wonder that people of religion resent science: past reducing the phenomenon of life to a serial of biochemical reactions, past explaining Creation every bit a hiccup in infinite-time, science seems to undermine belief, return existence meaningless and rob the globe of spiritual wonder.
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Rather than undercutting organized religion and a sense of the spiritual, scientific discoveries are offering support for them, at least in the minds of people of religion. Large-bang cosmology, for instance, once read as leaving no room for a Creator, now implies to some scientists that there is a design and purpose backside the universe. Evolution, say some scientist-theologians, provides clues to the very nature of God. And chaos theory, which describes such mundane processes every bit the patterns of weather and the dripping of faucets, is being interpreted every bit opening a door for God to act in the world.
From Georgetown to Berkeley, theologians who cover science, and scientists who cannot bide the spiritual emptiness of empiricism, are establishing institutes integrating the two. Books like "Science and Theology: The New Consonance" and "Belief in God in an Age of Science" are streaming off the presses. A June symposium on "Scientific discipline and the Spiritual Quest," organized by Russell's CTNS, drew more than 320 paying attendees and 33 speakers, and a PBS documentary on science and faith volition air this fall.
In 1977 Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas sounded a famous note of despair: the more the universe has become comprehensible through cosmology, he wrote, the more it seems pointless. But now the very science that "killed'' God is, in the eyes of believers, restoring organized religion.
Physicists have stumbled on signs that the cosmos is custom-made for life and consciousness. Information technology turns out that if the constants of nature – unchanging numbers like the forcefulness of gravity, the charge of an electron and the mass of a proton – were the tiniest fleck different, then atoms would not hold together, stars would non burn and life would never have made an appearance.
"When you realize that the laws of nature must be incredibly finely tuned to produce the universe we meet," says John Polkinghorne, who had a distinguished career as a physicist at Cambridge University before becoming an Anglican priest in 1982, "that conspires to found the thought that the universe did not just happen, but that there must be a purpose backside it."
Charles Townes, who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the principles of the laser, goes further: "Many accept a feeling that somehow intelligence must have been involved in the laws of the universe."
Although the very rationality of science ofttimes feels similar an enemy of the spiritual, here, as well, a new reading can sustain rather than snuff out conventionalities. Ever since Isaac Newton, scientific discipline has blared a clear message: the world follows rules, rules that are fundamentally mathematical, rules that humans can figure out. Humans invent abstract mathematics, basically making it up out of their imaginations, yet math magically turns out to describe the world. Greek mathematicians divided the circumference of a circumvolve by its diameter, for instance, and got the number pi, 3.14159... . Pi turns upwards in equations that describe subatomic particles, lite and other quantities that have no obvious connections to circles.
This points, says Polkinghorne, "to a very deep fact almost the nature of the universe," namely, that our minds, which invent mathematics, suit to the reality of the cosmos. We are somehow tuned in to its truths.
Since pure idea tin can penetrate the universe'south mysteries, "this seems to be telling us that something nigh human consciousness is harmonious with the listen of God," says Carl Feit, a cancer biologist at Yeshiva Academy in New York and Talmudic scholar.
To virtually worshipers, a sense of the divine equally an unseen presence behind the visible globe is all well and good, but what they really yearn for is a God who acts in the globe. Some scientists see an opening for this sort of God at the level of quantum or subatomic events.
In this chilling realm, the behavior of particles is unpredictable. In perhaps the most famous example, a radioactive element might have a half-life of, say, one hour. Half-life means that half of the atoms in a sample volition decay in that time; half will not. But what if you have simply a single cantlet? Then, in an hour, information technology has a 50-50 run a risk of decaying. And what if the experiment is arranged and then that if the atom does decay, it releases poison gas? If you have a cat in the lab, volition the cat be live or dead subsequently the 60 minutes is up?
Physicists have discovered that there is no style to determine, fifty-fifty in principle, what the atom would practice. Some theologian-scientists see that determination betoken – volition the atom decay or non? volition the cat live or dice? – as one where God tin can human activity. "Quantum mechanics allows us to think of special divine action," says Russell. Even better, since few scientists abide miracles, God tin can act without violating the laws of physics.
An fifty-fifty newer scientific discipline, chaos theory, describes phenomena like the weather and some chemical reactions whose exact outcomes cannot be predicted. It could exist, says Polkinghorne, that God selects which possibility becomes reality. This divine action would not violate physical laws either.
Almost scientists withal park their faith, if they take it, at the laboratory door. Merely just equally belief can find inspiration in science, and then scientists can observe inspiration in belief. Physicist Mehdi Golshani of Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, drawing from the Koran, believes that natural phenomena are "God'due south signs in the universe," and that studying them is about a religious obligation. The Koran asks humans to "travel in the earth, then encounter how He initiated the creation." Research, Golshani says, "is a worship act, in that it reveals more than of the wonders of God'south creation."
The same strain runs through Judaism. Carl Feit cites Maimonides, "who said that the just pathway to achieve a love of God is by agreement the works of his hand, which is the natural universe. Knowing how the universe functions is crucial to a religious person considering this is the globe He created." Feit is hardly alone.
� 1998 by Newsweek, Inc.
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