The highest summit: God meets the big bang

"There were two ways of arriving at the truth. I decided to follow them both," declared Georges Lemaitre, one of the fathers of modern cosmology and also a Catholic abbot [1]. "Nothing in my working life, nothing I ever learned in my studies of either science or religion has ever caused me to change that opinion. I have no conflict to reconcile. Science has not shaken my faith in religion and religion has never caused me to question the conclusions I reached by scientific methods."

What relations are there between modern science and theology, understood as a rational explanation of a religious tradition? Are the two entirely separate, do they overlap or are they just complementary?

Lemaitre, a defender of "dissonance" between the disciplines, argued that the approaches of science and religion were completely separate and insulated from each other. Because they belong to totally different areas of knowledge, he added, science and theology not only do not overlap, but are so far apart they cannot even influence one another.

This conclusion is not upheld by other supporters of dissonance. According to the NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria) principle proposed by U.S. palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould [2] and others, science and religion supply magisteria--fields of knowledge--that do not encroach on each other, but are not entirely separate; an intimate dialogue is possible between them. Gould uses the metaphor of oil and water, two elements that do not mix but can remain in very close contact. The contours of their separation are complex and fluid, since both can move back and forth into places occupied moments before by the other. Science and religion, in short, are inseparable but radically different, friends but never partners.

Transcendental gaps

Not true say the supporters of "correspondence," who base their viewpoint on the notion that scientific data can be directly useful to religion. According to this approach, concepts in these two fields can link up or even agree, so that theories of the big bang and Creation may interact to their mutual advantage. But this position raises a host of questions, particularly over the nature of knowledge: is science not impoverished or cheapened by confusing all or part of it with religion? Does a concept such as Creation not mean very different things in different religious traditions and in the mouths of scientists, for whom it has a precise technical significance?

The essential weakness with this approach is evident in the concept of a "God particle." Since scientists have no quantum theory of gravitation to describe what happened in the first few moments after the big bang--there is a scientific gap to be filled--the initial creative impulse is attributed to divine power. But God provides no explanation at all. Reduced to a simple physical cause within other physical causes, God also loses his divinity to become just another element in the material world.

Dissonance avoids this trap by allowing a calm dialogue between scientists and theologians that respects each other's independence of thought: they agree not to exploit bits of each other's field of knowledge to advance their own. But is this division perhaps too radical, depriving each side of elements that could be useful for their own thinking?

Thus the need for a third position that rejects all blending of science and theology advocated by sup porters of correspondence, but establishes an indirect dialogue between them via a go-between--philosophy in the broadest sense. The dialogue is also asymmetrical, since it encourages theological debate on the basis of scientific knowledge rather than the other way round.

This perspective begins by recognizing that science inevitably raises philosophical questions which it cannot answer, such as ones about meaning and ethics. Philosophers can then draw on religious traditions among other resources to search for answers. These answers are of little use to scientists in their everyday research, but may help them deal with the kind of questions every human being runs up against. And theology in turn can benefit from philosophical work inspired and fertilized by science. This pathway from science towards religion is thus the fruit of work that has to be carried out continually as scientific knowledge advances: questions are raised, and philosophical responses generated that must at some stage take account of religion.

Unravelling the beginnings

Let's go back to the example of the big bang. A scientist from the school of correspondence could say it was equivalent to Creation in the theological sense. But this assertion would not be scientifically legitimate: physics is based on natural causes alone, while Creation comes from divine and therefore metaphysical intervention. As a result, the issue of the purely physical origin of the universe "remains entirely separate from any metaphysical or religious question," according to Lemaitre. The theory of the big bang hence does not presuppose any special religious belief, contrary to what some scientists thought in the 1950s.

Dissonance, which rules out all dialogue between cosmology and theology, is no more satisfactory. But an intermediate philosophical discussion about the meaning of the big bang as the physical origin of the cosmos can help theologians unravel the links and differences between notions of physical beginning, metaphysical beginning and divine Creation, and see more clearly the purely theological meaning of the latter.

Creation in the theological sense can mean the sudden physical appearance of the world for divine reasons, but it can also mean a relation that God uses to keep the universe in existence by giving it physical shape. This "sudden appearance" cannot be regarded as the start of a process in physical time because it is itself the origin of space, time and matter.

Furthermore, this "Creation link" cannot be seen as a physical cause because it is in fact the cause of all physical causes. New theological ways of describing the relations between time and eternity, between God and the world, can flow from this philosophical clarification. It also makes for better understanding of the range and limits of science.

For some, science and religion are inseparable but very different friends. For others, they are friends only linked by a third party. For get others, they are friends that are in fact true twins. And finally, they are viewed as two people who are not friends at all because they never meet. In short, a set of bonds running all the way from fusion to fission.

(1.) Interview in New York Times Magazine, February 19, 1933

(2.) Rock of Ages: Science, Religion and the Full ness of Life (Ballantine Books, 1999)

IVAN BRISCOE

Steven Weinberg [*]: Towards a final theory

"I'm reasonably sure that we will have a final theory from which all the regularities in nature can be deduced, but I am also reasonably sure that the final theory will leave us with a mystery: why isn't the theory something else, such as a theory with nothing at all, or a theory with just two particles endlessly in orbit around each other. The best we can hope to do is discover a theory that is logically fragile, in the sense that any small change in the theory would lead to logical contradictions.

On a more mundane level, there are limits to science that are not so fundamental but as a practical matter we will probably not be able to transcend. For example, the final theory may very well be something like string theory, but I cannot conceive of how we will ever directly produce structures that are 17 powers of ten smaller than those probed in the laboratory today. Likewise there's a wide class of cosmological theories in which our big bang is one of many that go off all over the universe, though in principle we will never observe the others. In both cases the theory will be successful or not depending on whether its predictions for things we can observe are correct.

As for religion, whatever reasons it provides still raise the question of why: why should there be deities with certain characteristics? In fact the more you learn of physics, the less you see of what may be regarded as purpose."

(*.) Professor of Physics, University of Texas at Austin, Nobel Prize for Physics (1979)

John Leslie [*]: Inside the divine mind

"Cosmology can give us speculative stories that are very much worth taking seriously. But at the moment science cannot give us any confidence that these stories are correct. The stories are all about how this universe came into existence against the background of the laws of physics, and there's a question of why there are any laws of physics, and why they should apply to anything. Let's suppose you had a completely empty situation. What would there be in that situation which could create a universe? Well, first note that the situation couldn't be entirely empty because it would be full of all sorts of facts--for example, the fact that 2+2=4. I don't think you can get rid of facts like that just by banishing the universe from existence, because these are facts about possibilities and hold no matter what. There would also be ethical facts: for example, it would be a fact that the emptiness was in one respect bad because you could have a really good situation instead, a wonderful cosmos.

If Plato was right in thinking that Value itself acts creatively, then the cosmos must be the very best possible cosmos. It then consists of an infinite number of minds, each knowing everything worth knowing: minds we might want to call divine. The structure of the universe is just one of the things worth knowing, and all of us exist inside one of those divine minds. This is a pantheistic view--that the structure of the cosmos is simply the structure of divine thinking."

(*.) University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Guelph, Canada, and author of Universes (Routledge, 1996)

Michael Heller [*]: The limits of scientific understanding

"There is a great temptation for the scientist to identify the limits of rationality with the limits of scientific method--or, to put it in a more picturesque way, to identify the limits of the method with the limits of the universe. This temptation is so powerful because the scientific method is the easiest kind of rationality and can efficiently distinguish what is scientifically valuable information from what is not.

The nature of the big bang is a purely scientific problem. To "explain" it as a result of God's action is like ascribing thunder to the bad temper of Zeus. I think the really important question lies elsewhere: namely, where do the laws of physics come from? There are currently two ways of answering this. One is to show that on a fundamental level there reigns complete anarchy and the laws of physics are just effects of purely random averaging processes. The other is to imagine a set of all possible universes, each of them with different physical laws. We then happen to be living in a highly ordered universe because in all other universes the life of beings like ourselves is excluded. But can such probabilities be an ultimate explanation? Why does the universe--or the set of all universes--have this property of probability? Here, I think, we are touching the real limits of our understanding of the universe.

The only way to get rid of such questions is not to ask them. But that would go against a criterion of critical rationality: one should not cease to look for further arguments as long as something remains to be argued for."

(*.) Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Pontifical Academy of Theology, Cracow, Poland

Tsevi Mazeh[*]: The beauty of the world

"Science cannot tell us why and what for, and in a sense science is limited to the technical details of how the world works. I think there is no problem with saying God was in the beginning, that God set the world rolling and decided upon its rules. But as for the question of God interfering during the history of the universe--that is something I believe, but which I do not fully understand. My religion [Orthodox Judaism] does not influence my work as an astronomer, but it does make me appreciate God and the beauty of the world. I have been teaching a course on binary stars, in which there is a mathematical formula describing perfectly the stars' motion. In my eyes it is a miracle that the human mind can find such beautiful mathematical tools to explain the motion of the world--I see that as one of the miracles of the world that God created.

As for Chapter 1 of Genesis, you have to realize that it has a core and it has details. The core is the theological message: there is one unified God. When the Bible was written, this was a complete revolution and actually doesn't make sense when you look upon the world and see its forces fighting each other. The writer of Genesis had to convey this message in some cosmological terms, so he chose the cosmology of his day. He could not mention the big bang, the speed of light or atoms. Instead, he spoke in terms understandable to the people of that time."

(*.) Professor of Astronomy at Tel Aviv University

Lee Smolin[*]: Cosmological evolution

"A key issue is understanding the fine-tuning of the universe: how did it come to be that the parameters that govern elementary particles and their interactions are tuned and balanced in such a way that a universe of such variety and complexity arises? The probability that a universe created by randomly choosing the parameters will contain stars is one chance in [10.sup.229].

The universe is improbable, and it is improbable in the sense that it has a structure which is much more complex than it would be if its laws and initial conditions were chosen more randomly. Thus we seek a kind of explanation which is checkable, which is falsifiable, and which is based on some hypothesis of natural phenomena. Broadly speaking, biology and natural selection are the most successful examples of a theory that addresses such questions. In the case of the universe, this leads to the hypothesis of cosmological natural selection: in other words, that our elementary particles are the way we find them because they make the production of black holes, and thus the production of new "universes," much more likely.

If it is true that the big bang was not the beginning of the universe but an event that came from another part of the universe, whether a black hole or something else with a prior structure, then it's very possible that observations over the next few decades will help us-just as by studying the ripples in water, you can measure the shape of the rock that caused them."

(*.) Professor of Physics at Pennsylvania State University, author of The Life of the Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 1997)

Seyyed Hossein Nasr [*]: Be, and there is

"Science by its very nature can deal only with one level of existence, physical existence. Science also relies on the study of events in time and space. The scientist therefore pushes towards the beginning, but find its impossible to get to the beginning itself since it is beyond material existence and beyond the spatial or temporal. In contrast, most religions--with exceptions, such as Confucianism--have spoken about the origin of the universe.

Those who accept the religious point of view, such as myself, can say a great deal about the origins of the universe. We believe that the reality which brought the universe into being has also sent us a revelation in knowledge of the origin of that universe. In the case of Islam, this revelation comes first of all from the Koran, which describes the creation of the universe as coming from the word of God, recounted in the very famous verse of Chapter 36 in which God says "Be, and there is." Until the 17th century, science from East to West was aimed at studying the traces of God's wisdom in his creation. But the Cartesian philosophy that undergirds the scientific revolution created a division between the knowing subject and the known object: modern science considered its goal to be the study of pure quantity, and tore away all qualitative aspects of nature--all its spiritual elements.

Every ten years there are new cosmological theories and views. But I do not really take these to be steps towards understanding the ultimate structure of the universe since we are dealing with so many unknowns. It's as if you knew one inch of a line and extrapolated it straight to the moon."

(*.) Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University

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