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January 25 - February 1, 2023
“the return of the God hypothesis”: (1) evidence from cosmology suggesting that the material universe had a beginning; (2) evidence from physics showing that from the beginning the universe has been “finely tuned” to allow for the possibility of life; and (3) evidence from biology establishing that since the beginning large amounts of new functional genetic information have arisen in our biosphere to make new forms of life possible—implying, as I had argued before, the activity of a designing intelligence.
Gingerich and Sandage also discussed discoveries in physics showing how the universe had been finely tuned from the beginning of time—in its physical parameters and initial arrangements of matter—to allow for the existence of complex life. This suggested to them some prior intelligence responsible for the “fine tuning.”
Professor Russell explained that the perception of a deep or inherent conflict between science and faith is a product of late nineteenth-century historical revisionism. Two such works helped give rise to this understanding. They are John William Draper’s (Fig. 1.4a) History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s (Fig. 1.4b) A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896).
Although some scientific theories during the nineteenth century, particularly those concerning biological origins and geological history, did seem to challenge some traditional theistic ideas, these historians note that belief in a God—and Christianity specifically—played a decisive role in the rise of modern science during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
They point to Judeo-Christian ideas prevalent in Europe before the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Barbour argues that “science in its modern form” arose “in Western civilization alone, among all the cultures of the world,” because only the Christian West had the necessary “intellectual presuppositions underlying the rise of science.”
The founders of modern science assumed that if they studied nature carefully, it would reveal its secrets. Their confidence in this assumption was grounded in both the Greek and the Judeo-Christian idea that the universe is an orderly system—a cosmos, not a chaos. As the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead argued, “There can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an Order of Things. And, in particular, of an Order of Nature.”55 Whitehead particularly attributed this conviction among the founders of modern science to the “medieval
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The great pioneers in physics—Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus—devoutly believed themselves called to find evidences of God in the physical world.”58 The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) (Fig. 1.6), for example, exclaimed that “God wanted us to recognize” natural laws and that God made this possible “by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”59
Research in the history and philosophy of science suggests two biblical ideas as having been crucial to the rise of science, both of which can be attributed to the reading of Genesis provided by Augustine, an early church father, whose work became increasingly studied in the late Middle Ages and especially the Reformation. Augustine captured the two ideas in two Latin coinages, which prima facie cut against each other: imago dei and peccatum originis. The former says that humans are unique as a species in our having been created in the image and likeness of God, while the latter says that all
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Nevertheless, since nature and scripture issued from the same source, namely, God, the early modern scientists assumed that both sources of revelation would ultimately align in either convergent or complementary testimony. Thus, Boyle, for example, never considered the possibility that the study of nature would undermine belief in God, but instead regarded devotion to the study of nature, like devotion to the study of scripture, as “an act of Piety,”12 especially since he thought God desired “to have his Works regarded & taken Notice of.”
As the Oxford University historian of science John Hedley Brooke has explained: “For Newton, as for Boyle and Descartes, there were laws of nature only because there had been a [Divine] Legislator.”31
the first people to conceive nature as an externally governed system were—in fact—the ancient Hebrews.
Since the founders of modern science thought the laws of nature expressed the free will of the divine creator and sustainer of nature, they recognized that whatever order nature exhibits might well have been different had the creator chosen to create or order the natural world differently.52 This conception of natural law had several beneficial effects on the development of science as we know it today.
Newton and his followers clearly regarded what we call the “laws of nature” as a mode of divine action and governance of the natural world.77 The laws of nature not only reflected the past action of a divine creator who established the conditions necessary for orderly and regular natural processes, but the fundamental laws of nature also depend upon the ongoing and sustaining activity of a divine legislator.78 As University of Cambridge historian of science Simon Schaffer has explained, Newton thought what we call the laws of nature manifested “the essentially divine will evident in the common
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Newton suggested that the stability of the planetary system depended not only upon the regular action of universal gravitation, but also upon the precise initial positioning of the planets and comets in relation to the sun. As he explained: “though these bodies may indeed persevere in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first deriv’d the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws.” Thus, “this most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”
“If you miss Newton’s theism, you’ve missed everything.” Newton not only had a profoundly theistic philosophy of nature, but he also developed several compelling (at least, at the time) arguments for natural theology—that is, arguments for the existence of God based upon observations of complex systems in the natural world.
After the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), many Europeans felt exhausted by religious conflict, leaving them open to new perspectives, even radically new ones.
Natural philosophers, or “scientists,” as the English philosopher William Whewell dubbed them in 1833,2 still sought to discover the “laws of nature” and the “mechanisms” of the great “clockwork” of nature. But these metaphors gradually lost their original theological connotations. At least, they did so for many Enlightenment philosophers who characterized science as a purely secular enterprise and depicted reason and revelation as opposites.
Newton also found the infinite universe appealing for theological reasons. He thought of space as a “Divine Sensorium,” a medium in which God perceived creation.16 Since God was infinite, space had to be as well.
The success of new scientific theories—about astronomical, geological, and biological origins—contributed to the rejection of theism as an explanatory framework for science. These new theories collectively seemed to support the alternative worldview of scientific materialism.
Even popular proponents of scientific atheism, including Dawkins and Nye, admit that science cannot categorically exclude that possibility.57 They do not deny the possibility of a designer whose creative activity is so masked in apparently natural processes that it escapes scientific detection. Yet for most evolutionary biologists such an undetectable entity hardly seems worthy of consideration.
Other scientists have argued, however, that since science has not definitively disproved the existence of God, it does not necessarily contradict religious belief, even though explicitly theistic explanations for the origin and development of life may be unnecessary. Those who advance this view typically portray science and religion as such distinct enterprises that their teachings do not intersect in significant ways. They also usually deny that theistic religion properly understood makes any factual claims about human or natural history; its claims are only about morality and meaning.
If the universe began with the first moment in time, it must have come from the ending of an earlier moment.
Though many thinkers during the Middle Ages and the scientific revolution affirmed that the universe did have a beginning a finite time ago, many of those same thinkers believed that the universe extended infinitely far in every direction of space.
Olbers’s Paradox. The light from stars in the night sky at all distances appears to fill different parts of our visual field. If the universe were infinitely large, and stars or galaxies were distributed throughout it, every line of sight would terminate with a star or galaxy. In that case, the night sky would appear entirely illuminated and no dark regions would remain. That the night sky does not appear entirely white suggests that the universe is not infinitely large.
Unlike the earlier thinkers, who thought that the light from distant objects might grow tired or that the ether might block it, Poe proposed that the universe was not old enough to give light sufficient time to get to the earth from the most remote regions of the vast night sky.17 And if it was not old enough, that meant it was not of infinite age. In Poe’s view, if our present universe had existed for an infinitely long time, then the light would have had plenty of time to reach observers on earth, even if it traveled at a finite velocity across a great distance. But if our universe had only
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To see why this distinction between absolute and apparent brightness matters to an astronomer trying to determine the distance to luminous objects, imagine looking at a light coming from a lamppost through the fog while walking through a park at night. If you see a light in the park that looks extremely bright to you, you might attribute that apparent brightness to the light being extremely close at hand. Or you might attribute the brightness of the light to an extremely high-output lightbulb located on the other side of the park. In other words, the brightness you observe might be the result
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When an atom gains energy from a collision with another atom, an electron, or a photon of light, the atom is said to become “excited.” Upon excitation the electrons in the atom jump to higher energy levels. The “excited” electrons quickly drop down to lower energy levels, resulting in the emission of photons with energies equal to the differences between the energy levels (Fig. 4.9). Higher energy levels correspond to greater average distances between the electrons and the nucleus. Most important, the energy of an emitted photon is directly proportional to its frequency and inversely
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Astronomers have discovered that distant galaxies are moving away from each other and from the earth. Consequently, light emitted at a given wavelength from distant stars will appear to be stretched out or “red shifted.” Moreover, the farther galaxies are from the earth the faster they will recede from us and the more the wavelengths of light coming from them will be stretched out.
The light coming from a galaxy moving away from the earth appears “red shifted” as the wavelengths of the light coming from that galaxy are stretched out or lengthened. The light coming from a galaxy moving toward the earth appears “blueshifted” as the wavelengths of the light coming from that galaxy are compressed or shortened.
if one galaxy is twice as far away from earth as another, it will be moving away twice as fast relative to the earth as that other, closer galaxy.
The galaxies in the universe do the same as the result of the expansion of space itself. Moreover, the galaxies that are initially farther apart expand away from each other faster than the galaxies that are initially closer together, suggesting that the model of spherical or uniform expansion explains Hubble’s observations well. By deflating the balloon, I can also illustrate how the material in the universe would have been closer and closer together at points farther and farther back in the past, suggesting that the matter making up the galaxies would have all come from the same initial point
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According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, time appears to slow down to an observer in a moving reference frame such as a spaceship as that moving object approaches the speed of light.
Einstein’s thought experiments showed that our measurements of space and time are fundamentally linked. Our perception of time depends on how fast we are moving through space; our perception of space depends upon how fast we are moving over time. That linkage suggested to him a new entity—spacetime. Spacetime combines the time variable (t) with the three spatial variables (x, y, z) in a four-dimensional continuum (x, y, z, ct) where c represents the speed of light.
Whereas Newton viewed gravity as a force between objects having mass, Einstein reconceived gravity as a geometric property of spacetime, something he saw as a multidimensional “fabric” that objects having mass could warp.4
Just as a bowling ball set down on a large trampoline makes a depression in its surface, a large mass such as the sun will curve or depress the fabric of spacetime. The more mass an object has, the larger the warp or depression. Objects having less mass “fall into” the depression in spacetime caused by objects with larger mass, just as tennis balls at the edge of a trampoline will roll into the depression created by a bowling ball placed in its center. Thus, general relativity, and Einstein’s field equations expressing the theory mathematically, describe how curved space affects the movements
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A finite universe, by contrast, would force scientists to confront uncomfortable questions about the ultimate beginning of the material universe itself. It also raised the possibility that the universe had begun in something like a creation event produced by a cause that existed independently of matter, space, time, and energy.
Similarly, if in every cycle mass and energy grow progressively more randomized, eventually—given infinite time—the universe would reach heat death in which no energy will be available to do work, like a rubber ball that bounces to a smaller and smaller height until finally it can bounce no more. Yet, if the universe was oscillating and infinitely old, it should have reached such a state an infinitely long time ago. But since we do not find ourselves in such a cold universe with maximally homogeneous distributions of matter and energy, it follows—even assuming an oscillating universe—that the
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As the universe expands, space (or “spacetime”) flattens and the curvature of space decreases and approaches zero. Curvature increases, however, in the reverse direction of time, eventually reaching a limit of infinite curvature. Infinite curvature corresponds to zero spatial volume, thus marking the beginning of the universe.
if one follows any spacetime trajectory back in time, any expanding universe, including one expanding as a consequence of an “inflaton field,” must have had a starting point to its expansion, indicating a beginning.
Indeed, carbon-based life is the only known form of life, and carbon has features that make it uniquely suitable as the basis for complex chemistry and life. For instance, carbon is essential for forming sufficiently stable, long, chain-like molecules capable of storing and processing genetic information.
There are four distinct fundamental forces in nature: gravitational force, electromagnetic force (EMF), the strong nuclear force (SNF), and the weak nuclear force (WNF). The weak nuclear force causes nuclear radiation (i.e., the radioactive decay of atoms). The strong nuclear force, an attractive force, holds protons and neutrons together; the electromagnetic force attracts particles with opposite charges and repels those with the same charge. The SNF operates at a short range, and the EMF operates at all distances.
As Paul Davies (Fig. 7.6) has marveled, “The really amazing thing is not that life on earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural ‘constants’ were off even slightly.”34 Or as Stephen Hawking noted, “The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”35
In the universe, a black hole represents a highly disordered (high-entropy) state, like an extremely messy room. That’s because the intense gravitational forces at work in a black hole ensure that matter and energy may adopt many different chaotic configurations.
The universe as a whole also represents a lower-entropy system because the galaxies are uniformly distributed throughout space.
Few people realize that Darwin’s theory of biological evolution did not explain, or attempt to explain, how the first life—presumably a simple one-celled organism—might have first arisen. Instead, Darwin’s theory sought to explain the origin of new forms of life from simpler preexisting forms.
In 1859, Darwin did not attempt to offer an explanation for the origin of the first life. Today the question of how life first originated is still widely regarded as a profound and unsolved scientific problem, largely because of the mystery surrounding the origin of functionally specified biological information.
In 2008 in the film Expelled, Richard Dawkins publicly acknowledged that “we don’t know” how life originated in the first place and even speculated that the information in DNA might represent a “signature of some kind of designer.”34 Not a divine designer, though. He proposed as an “intriguing possibility” that an alien civilization evolved elsewhere in the cosmos and then “designed” and “seeded” the first life on earth.35
It occurred to me that by Lyell’s and Darwin’s own criterion of a sound scientific explanation, intelligent design qualifies as the best explanation for the origin of biological information. Why? Because we have independent evidence—“uniform experience”—that intelligent agents can and do produce specified or functional information and we know of no other cause that does (at least starting from a purely physical or chemical state).
The four worldviews of theism, deism, pantheism, and materialism represent four possible ways of answering three basic questions about ultimate reality: Does God exist? If so, is God personal or impersonal? If personal, does God act only at the beginning of the universe or also after the beginning within the created order?
even if one may not affirm the consequent with certainty, one may affirm it as a possibility. And this is precisely what abductive reasoning does. It provides a reason for considering that a hypothesis might be true. Indeed, it gives a reason for believing a hypothesis, even if one cannot affirm the hypothesis (or conclusion) with certainty.
