On the Origin of Time

by Thomas Hertog

Echoing Gould on biology, Harari asserts that “if we could rewind history and replay the fourth century a hundred times, we’d find that Christianity will have taken over the Roman empire a few times only.” But the frozen accident of Christianity had far-reaching consequences. For one, monotheism encouraged a belief in God the creator, with a rational plan for the created world. It is hardly surprising, then, that when twelve centuries later modern science finally emerged in Christian Europe, the early scientists regarded their investigations as a sort of religious pursuit, setting the scene for the riddle of design we are still grappling with.

One string theorist likened the local character of the physical laws in the multiverse to the U.S. East Coast weather: “tremendously variable, almost always awful, but lovely on rare occasions.”12