A number of recent books and articles would have you believe
that—somehow—science has now disproved the existence of God. We know so much
about how the universe works, their authors claim, that God is simply
unnecessary: we can explain all the workings of the universe without the need
for a Creator.
And indeed, science has brought us an immense amount of
understanding. The sum total of human knowledge doubles roughly every couple of
years or less. In physics and cosmology, we can now claim to know what happened
to our universe as early as a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang,
something that may seem astounding. In chemistry, we understand the most
complicated reactions among atoms and molecules, and in biology we know how the
living cell works and have mapped out our entire genome. But does this vast
knowledge base disprove the existence of some kind of pre-existent outside force
that may have launched our universe on its way?
Science won major victories against entrenched religious
dogma throughout the 19th century. In the 1800s, discoveries of Neanderthal
remains in Belgium, Gibraltar and Germany showed that humans were not the only
hominids to occupy earth, and fossils and remains of now extinct animals and
plants further demonstrated that flora and fauna evolve, live for millennia and
then sometimes die off, ceding their place on the planet to better-adapted
species. These discoveries lent strong support to the then emerging theory of
evolution, published by Charles Darwin in 1859. And in 1851, Leon Foucault, a
self-trained French physicist, proved definitively that earth rotates—rather
than staying in place as the sun revolved around it—using a special pendulum
whose circular motion revealed the planet’s rotation. Geological discoveries
made over the same century devastated the “young earth” hypothesis. We now know
that earth is billions, not thousands, of years old, as some theologians had
calculated based on counting generations back to the biblical Adam. All of these
discoveries defeated literal interpretations of Scripture.
But has modern science, from the beginning of the 20th
century, proved that there is no God, as some commentators now claim? Science is
an amazing, wonderful undertaking: it teaches us about life, the world and the
universe. But it has not revealed to us why the universe came into existence nor
what preceded its birth in the Big Bang. Biological evolution has not brought us
the slightest understanding of how the first living organisms emerged from
inanimate matter on this planet and how the advanced eukaryotic cells—the highly
structured building blocks of advanced life forms—ever emerged from simpler
organisms. Neither does it explain one of the greatest mysteries of science: how
did consciousness arise in living things? Where do symbolic thinking and
self-awareness come from? What is it that allows humans to understand the
mysteries of biology, physics, mathematics, engineering and medicine? And what
enables us to create great works of art, music, architecture and literature?
Science is nowhere near to explaining these deep mysteries.
But much more important than these conundrums is the
persistent question of the fine-tuning of the parameters of the universe: Why is
our universe so precisely tailor-made for the emergence of life? This question
has never been answered satisfactorily, and I believe that it will never find a
scientific solution. For the deeper we delve into the mysteries of physics and
cosmology, the more the universe appears to be intricate and incredibly complex.
To explain the quantum-mechanical behavior of even one tiny particle requires
pages and pages of extremely advanced mathematics. Why are even the tiniest
particles of matter so unbelievably complicated? It appears that there is a
vast, hidden “wisdom,” or structure, or knotty blueprint for even the most
simple-looking element of nature. And the situation becomes much more daunting
as we expand our view to the entire cosmos.
We know that 13.7 billion years ago, a gargantuan burst of
energy, whose nature and source are completely unknown to us and not in the
least understood by science, initiated the creation of our universe. Then
suddenly, as if by magic, the “God particle”—the Higgs boson discovered two
years ago inside CERN’s powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron
Collider—came into being and miraculously gave the universe its mass. Why did
this happen? The mass constituted elementary particles—the quarks and the
electron—whose weights and electrical charges had to fall within immeasurably
tight bounds for what would happen next. For from within the primeval soup of
elementary particles that constituted the young universe, again as if by a magic
hand, all the quarks suddenly bunched in threes to form protons and neutrons,
their electrical charges set precisely to the exact level needed to attract and
capture the electrons, which then began to circle nuclei made of the protons and
neutrons. All of the masses, charges and forces of interaction in the universe
had to be in just the precisely needed amounts so that early light atoms could
form. Larger ones would then be cooked in nuclear fires inside stars, giving us
carbon, iron, nitrogen, oxygen and all the other elements that are so essential
for life to emerge. And eventually, the highly complicated double-helix
molecule, the life-propagating DNA, would be formed.
Why did everything we need in order to exist come into being?
How was all of this possible without some latent outside power to orchestrate
the precise dance of elementary particles required for the creation of all the
essentials of life? The great British mathematician Roger Penrose has
calculated—based on only one of the hundreds of parameters of the physical
universe—that the probability of the emergence of a life-giving cosmos was 1
divided by 10, raised to the power 10, and again raised to the power of 123.
This is a number as close to zero as anyone has ever imagined. (The probability
is much, much smaller than that of winning the Mega Millions jackpot for more
days than the universe has been in existence.)
The scientific atheists have scrambled to explain this
troubling mystery by suggesting the existence of a multiverse—an infinite set of
universes, each with its own parameters. In some universes, the conditions are
wrong for life; however, by the sheer size of this putative multiverse, there
must be a universe where everything is right. But if it takes an immense power
of nature to create one universe, then how much more powerful would that force
have to be in order to create infinitely many universes? So the purely
hypothetical multiverse does not solve the problem of God. The incredible
fine-tuning of the universe presents the most powerful argument for the
existence of an immanent creative entity we may well call God. Lacking
convincing scientific evidence to the contrary, such a power may be necessary to
force all the parameters we need for our existence—cosmological, physical,
chemical, biological and cognitive—to be what they are.
Science and religion are two sides of the same deep human
impulse to understand the world, to know our place in it, and to marvel at the
wonder of life and the infinite cosmos we are surrounded by. Let’s keep them
that way, and not let one attempt to usurp the role of the
other.
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