Big-Bang Theology
Did God cause the big bang?
That is what half a dozen new books about science and religion--whose authors
range from a Reagan-administration official to an Israeli physicist to an
elementary-particle-theorist-turned-Anglican-priest--are saying. The fact that
the universe abruptly exploded into existence out of apparent nothingness some
15 billion years ago, they submit, means it must have had a supernatural
creator. A couple of months ago the same claim was enthusiastically aired at a
Washington conference sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center under
the rubric "Beyond the Death of God," with eminent thinkers such as Fred
Barnes, Mona Charen, and Elliott Abrams in attendance. And the idea received a
sympathetic hearing on William F. Buckley's show Firing Line a few weeks
ago .
The idea
that only God could have caused the big bang is scarcely new. In fact, the big
bang is probably the only idea in the history of science that was ever resisted
because of its pro-God import.
For much of the modern era, scientists followed Nicolaus
Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton in believing the cosmos to be
eternal and unchanging. But in 1917, when Albert Einstein applied his theory of
relativity to space-time as a whole, his equations implied that the universe
could not be static; it must be either expanding or contracting. This struck
Einstein as grotesque, so he added to his theory a fiddle factor called the
"cosmological constant" that eliminated the implication and held the universe
still.
It was an
ordained priest who took relativity to its logical conclusion. In 1927, Georges
Lemaître of the University of Louvain in Belgium worked out an expanding model
of the universe. Reasoning backward, he proposed that at some definite point in
the past it must have originated from a primeval atom of infinitely
concentrated energy. Two years later, Lemaître's model was confirmed by the
American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who had observed that the galaxies everywhere
around us were receding. Both theory and empirical evidence pointed to the same
verdict: The universe had an abrupt beginning in time.
Churchmen rejoiced. Proof of the biblical
account of creation had dropped into their laps. Pope Pius XII, opening a
conference at the Vatican in 1951, declared that this scientific theory of
cosmic origins bore witness "to that primordial 'Fiat lux ' uttered at
the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of
light and radiation. ... Hence, creation took place in time, therefore there is
a creator, therefore God exists!"
Marxists, meanwhile, gnashed
their teeth. Quite aside from its religious aura, the new theory contradicted
their belief in the infinity and eternity of matter--one of the axioms of
Lenin's dialectical materialism--and was accordingly dismissed as "idealistic."
The Marxist physicist David Bohm rebuked the developers of the theory as
"scientists who effectively turn traitor to science, and discard scientific
facts to reach conclusions that are convenient to the Catholic Church."
Atheists of a non-Marxist stripe were also recalcitrant. "Some younger
scientists were so upset by these theological trends that they resolved simply
to block their cosmological source," commented the German astronomer Otto
Heckmann, a prominent investigator of cosmic expansion. The dean of the
profession, Sir Arthur Eddington, wrote, "The notion of a beginning is
repugnant to me ... I simply do not believe that the present order of things
started off with a bang. ... The expanding Universe is preposterous ...
incredible ... it leaves me cold ."
Even some
believing scientists were troubled. The cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle simply felt
that an explosion was an undignified way for the world to begin, rather like "a
party girl jumping out of a cake." In a BBC interview in the 1950s, Hoyle
sardonically referred to the hypothesized origin as "the big bang." The term
stuck.
Einstein overcame his metaphysical scruples about the big
bang not long before his death in 1955, referring to his earlier attempt to
dodge it by an ad hoc theoretical device as "the greatest blunder of my
career." As for Hoyle and the rest of the skeptics, they were finally won over
in 1965, when two scientists at Bell Labs in New Jersey accidentally detected a
pervasive microwave hiss that turned out to be the echo of the big bang (at
first they thought it was caused by pigeon droppings on their antenna). If you
turn on your television and tune it between stations, about 10 percent of that
black-and-white-speckled static you see is caused by photons left over from the
cosmogonic event. What greater proof of the reality of the big bang--you can
watch it on television!
Since the
'60s, scientists have been busy working out, and feuding over, the details of
the big-bang cosmology. But God is not in the details--his existence is
deducible from the mere fact that there is a world at all. So goes the
cosmological argument , one of the three traditional arguments toward a
Supreme Being. (Click to read the ontological argument and the
teleological argument .)
The reasoning starts off like this:
1)
Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
2) The universe began to
exist.
3) Therefore the universe
has a cause of its existence. (Click to learn more about the surprising
Islamic origins of this argument and what Ludwig Wittgenstein had to say about
it.)
There are
many options for attacking the logic of this cosmological argument, and
contemporary opponents of theism have tried them all.
If everything needs a cause for its existence, then so does
God. (More frequently heard in the form "But Mummy, who made God?") This
objection fails because it gets Premise 1 wrong. The premise does not say that
everything needs a cause but that everything that begins to exist
does. God never began to exist--he is eternal. So he does not need a cause for
his existence.
Maybe
the universe had a natural cause. But the big bang could not have been
caused by prior physical processes. That is because it began with pointlike
singularity , which, according to relativity theory, is not a "thing" but
a boundary or an edge in time. Since no causal lines can be extended through
it, the cause of the big bang must transcend the physical world.
Well, then, perhaps it had no cause at all. It
is hard to think of a principle more amply confirmed by our experience than
that things do not just pop into existence uncaused. No one can really pull a
rabbit out of a hat. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Yet something of the sort does
seem to happen in the quantum world, where, owing to Heisenberg's uncertainty
principle, tiny "virtual particles" spontaneously appear and disappear all the
time. An entire universe could do the same, claim some cosmologists. Calling
themselves "nothing theorists," they have produced models showing how the
cosmos could have burst into being all by itself out of a patch of "false
vacuum," or a 3-D geometry of zero volume, or--in the case of Alexander
Vilenkin of Tufts University--literally nothing at all (this took Vilenkin four
pages of math). So the universe is summoned out of the void by the laws of
physics. But this can't be right. The laws of physics are just a set of
equations, a mathematical pattern. They cannot cause the world to exist. As
Stephen Hawking has written, "A scientific theory ... exists only in our minds
and does not have any other reality (whatever that might mean)."
Just because the universe
is temporally finite does not mean it had a beginning. Speaking of Hawking,
this is his famous "no boundary" proposal. "So long as the universe had a
beginning, we could suppose it had a creator," Hawking wrote in A Brief
History of Time . "But if the universe is completely self-contained, having
no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning or end: it would simply
be. What place, then, for a creator?" In Hawking's quantum cosmology, the
pointlike singularity of the big bang is replaced by a smooth hemisphere in
which space and time are commingled. "Time zero" becomes an arbitrary point,
not a true beginning; it is no more a boundary than the North Pole is.
Hawking's
proposal is extremely popular with laymen who are hostile to the cosmological
argument, judging from the mail I get. Apparently they enjoy being baffled by
"imaginary time," a theoretical fiction Hawking uses to redescribe the big bang
so that there is no beginning. In real time there still is a beginning.
Sometimes Hawking says that imaginary time is "earlier" than real time, which
is a logical contradiction; sometimes he suggests it might be more real than
real time, which is an absurdity.
OK, so the universe had a beginning, and hence a First
Cause, which is, moreover, transcendent. How does it follow that this cause is
God, or even God-like? Now there is an acute question. Philosopher Thomas Nagel
has suggested that something humanly inconceivable lies behind the big bang.
What, if anything, can really be inferred about the First Cause? Well, suppose
that it were something mechanical. An ideal machine produces its effect either
always or never; it does not just suddenly start to operate at some moment,
unless someone gives it a kick. If a mechanical cause produced the universe at
time T, there is no reason it should not have done so at time T minus 1. The
argument can be repeated to T minus infinity: A mechanical cause would have
either produced the universe from eternity or not at all. But the universe was
created at one moment out of an infinity of other indistinguishable moments.
This implies that the moment was freely chosen, and hence that the creator had
a will, and to that extent a personal nature. And power.
Yet the big-bang cosmology
has one unwelcome consequence for theists. It seems to suggest that the Creator
was a bungler. A singularity is inherently lawless. Anything at all can come
out of one. It is exceedingly unlikely that a big-bang singularity should give
rise to a universe whose conditions are precisely suitable for life, let alone
the best of all possible worlds. As the American philosopher Quentin Smith has
pointed out, "If God created the universe with the aim of making it animate, it
is illogical that he would have created as its first state something whose
natural evolution would lead with high probability only to inanimate
states ." The only way God could have ensured the appearance of creatures in
his own image was by repeatedly intervening and making adjustments to steer the
evolution of the world away from lifeless disaster. But "a competent Creator
does not create things he immediately or subsequently needs to set aright,"
observes Smith. (Remember, we are talking about the universe's physical
infrastructure, not sinners with free will.)
So did God cause the big
bang? Overcome by metaphysical lassitude, I finally reach over to my bookshelf
for The Devil's Bible . Turning to Genesis I read: "In the beginning
there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was still
nothing, but now you could see it."
