In his excellent book, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), physics professor Stephen M. Barr recounts the typical story of the the universe as told by scientific materialists. It's one of the best summaries of the naturalist worldview I've read, from any perspective:

"The world revealed by science bears little resemblance to the world as it was portrayed by religion. Judaism and Christianity taught that the world was created by God, and that things therefore have a purpose and meaning, aside from the purposes and meanings we choose to give them. Moreover, human beings were supposed to be central to that cosmic purpose. These comforting beliefs can no longer be maintained in the face of scientific discoveries.
 
The universe more and more appears to be a vast, cold, blind, and purposeless machine. For a while it appeared that some things might escape the iron grip of science and its laws—perhaps Life or Mind. But the processes of life are now known to be just chemical reactions, involving the same elements and the same basic physical laws that govern the behavior of all matter. The mind itself is, according to the overwhelming consensus of cognitive scientists, completely explicable in the performance of the biochemical computer called the brain. There is nothing in principle that a mind does which an artificial machine could not do just as well or even better. Already, one of the greatest creative chess geniuses of all time has been thrashed by a mass of silicon circuitry.
 
There is no evidence of a spiritual realm, or that God or souls are real. In fact, even if there did exist anything of a spiritual nature, it could have no influence on the visible world, because the material world is a closed-system of physical cause and effect. Nothing external to it could affect its operations without violating the precise mathematical relationships imposed by the laws of physics. The physical world is 'causally closed,' that is, closed off to any non-physical influence.
 
All, therefore, is matter: atoms in ceaseless, aimless motion. In the words of Democritus, everything consists in 'atoms and the void.' Because the ultimate reality is matter, there cannot be any cosmic purpose or meaning, for atoms have no purposes or goals.
 
Once upon a time, scientists believed that even inanimate objects did have purposes or goals: 'ends' which they sought or toward which they tended. For example, heavy objects were said to fall because they sought their proper place at the center of the earth. That was the idea of Aristotelian physics. It was precisely when these ideas were overthrown four hundred years ago that the Scientific Revolution took off. With Galileo and Newton, science definitively rejected 'teleology' in favor of 'mechanism.' That is, science no longer explains phenomena in terms of natural purposes, but in terms of impersonal and undirected mechanisms. And, of course, is there are no purposes anywhere in nature, then there can be no purpose for the existence of the human race. The human race can no longer be thought of as 'central' to a purpose that does not exist.
 
Science has dethroned man. Far from being the center of things, he is now seen to be a very peripheral figure indeed. Every great scientific revolution has further trivialized him and pushed him to the margins. Copernicus removed the Earth from the center of the solar system. Modern astronomy has shown that the solar system itself is on the edge to a quite ordinary galaxy, which contains a hundred billion other stars. That galaxy is, in turn, one of billions and perhaps even an infinite number of galaxies. Earth is an insignificant speck in the vastness of space: its mass compared to all the matter in the observable universe is less than that of a raindrop compared to all the water in all the oceans of the world. All of recorded human history is a fleeting moment in the eons of cosmic time. Even on this cozy planet, which we think of as ours, we are latecomers. Home sapiens has been around at most a few hundred thousand years, compared to the 4 billion years of life's history. The human species is just one branch on an an ancient evolutionary tree, and not so very different from some of the other branches--genetically we overlap more than 98 percent with chimpanzees. We are the product not of purpose, but of chance mutations. Bertrand Russell perfectly summed up man's place in the cosmos when he called him 'a curious accident in a backwater.'" (19-21)

I think atheists and theists can nod their heads in agreement: that's a clear, coherent, accurate depiction of the naturalist worldview. Its main plotline may be called the "marginalization of man." In the religious view man is the center of all things, but the scientific story has since corrected that delusion.

However, there's a problem with this story. Actually, two big problems, according to Barr: its beginning and its end. It's not really true that religious man saw himself at the center of the world. The idea that the Earth sat at the center of the universe stemmed from Greek astronomy and philosophy, not religion;mdash;and certainly not Judaeo-Christian religion. The ancient Jewish picture of the world was vertical, not concentric, with the human race located between the heavens above and the "abyss" below. Humans were lower than angels and higher than plants and animals, but in no sense we were at the center. In fact, the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures depict God casting out man, sending him into exile. (Also, even in the Greek picture the central place was not the most exalted. The further things were from the "center", the more beautiful and sublime they were.)

Yet even if the beginning is a bit off, the bigger problem with the story above is its ending. As Barr notes, "If science had ended in the nineteenth century, the story would have some claim to accuracy...Instead, in the twentieth century [scientists] made discoveries even more profound and revolutionary than those of Copernicus and Newton. And, as a result, the story has become much more interesting" (22).

As with many of the best stories, this one has a plot twist at the end. And not just one plot twist, but at least five. Barr spends most of his book examining each of these plot twists in detail, so for the details I suggest picking up a copy. But here's a short summary of them:

Twist #1 - The Big Bang and the Beginning of the Universe

Jews and Christians have always believed that the world, and time itself, had a beginning, whereas materialists and atheists have tended to imagine the world has always existed. Modern skeptics have generally followed suit. In their minds, the idea of a beginning of time is associated with religious conceptions, not with scientific theory, and those scientists who believe in a beginning do so for religious reasons, not scientific reasons. Indeed, by the nineteenth century almost all the scientific evidence seemed to point to an eternal universe.

But that all changed with the discovery of the Big Bang, which came as a profound shock to the scientific community. According to Barr, "the Big Bang was as clear and as dramatic a beginning as one could have hoped to find" (22). When you combine that discovery with research built on top of the model, you have an overwhelming amount of support for a universe that began in the finite past.

In fact, the esteemed, non-religious cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin concluded at a conference in Cambridge celebrating the 70th birthday of Stephen Hawking:

"All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning...It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning."

Now to be clear, the discover of the Big Bang itself prove the Jewish and Christian doctrine of Creation. Nevertheless, as Barr explains, "it was unquestionably a vindication of the religious view of the universe and a blow to the materialist view" (22).

Twist #2 - The Questions Behind the Questions

In the materialist story above, the world is governed not by a personal God but by impersonal laws. Science looks to physical "mechanisms", processes, and laws to explain events in the world. But as we've deepened our understanding of these empirical laws, we've found that they flow from deeper laws and principles, such as the fundamental laws of atomic physics. And those laws flow from the laws of quantum electrodynamics. And so on, and so forth. Physicists began to look not only at physical effects themselves, but for the mathematical laws that underlie them and for a single, harmonious system that could unite them all.

Barr notes the consequence of these trends:

"It is no longer just particular substances, or objects, or phenomena that physicists asks questions about, it is the universe itself considered as a whole, and the laws of physics considered as a whole. The questions are no longer only, 'Why does this metal act this way?' or 'Why does this gas act this way?' but 'Why is the universe like this?', 'Why are the laws of physics like this?'....
 
"When it is the laws of nature themselves that become the object of curiosity, laws that are seen to form an edifice of great harmony and beauty, the question of a cosmic designer seems no longer irrelevant but inescapable." (24)

In past centuries, atheists and materialists took certain facts for granted such as the existence of a single universe or the three dimensions of space. Indeed, few people, if any, in the nineteenth century would have wondered why there are three spatial dimensions.

But today, those beliefs are not taken for granted. Physicists speak of many universes and many dimensions of space. Yet if we can't even take for granted the very number of universes, it becomes harder to avoid asking, "Why is there any universe at all?" A new openness to these deeper-level questions about reality has also opened many people to the possibility of God.

Twist #3 - The Startling Coincidences That Permit Us to Live

In the materialist story of the world, science has definitively shown that we were not meant to be here. We were a fluke, our existence the result of "a fortuitous concourse of atoms." Science dethroned man in the cosmos.

Except now, science is telling a different story. Beginning in the 1970s, people started talking about "anthropic coincidences", certain features of the laws of physics which seem—just coincidentally—to be exactly what is needed for the existence of life to be possible in our universe. As Barr writes, "The universe and its laws seem in some respects to be balanced on a knife-edge. A little deviation in one direction or the other in the way the world and its laws are put together, and we would not be here. As people have looked harder, the number of such 'coincidences' has grown" (25).

This is exactly what we might expect if human beings were meant to be here, and if the universe was created with us in mind. It doesn't mean the materialist view of the world is certainly false. In fact, skeptics have proposed other ways to explain this apparent fine-tuning for life (though Barr refutes the most popular attempts in his book.)

In any event, what is clear is that the materialists may have prematurely ended their story with the dethroning of man. It looks very much now like the story may turn out the other way.

Twist #4 - The Mind as More Than Machine

If only matter exists, as the materialist thinks, then the human mind must be a machine. The invention and popularization of the computer made this idea even more plausible. Many people, scientists and laymen alike, believe it is only a matter of time before computers become intelligent in ways that rival, or even supplant our own intelligence.

However, the past couple centuries have seen a bevy of arguments against the regnant view that the mind is no more than a physical machine—a "wet computer" or "machine made of meat" as some have called it. Barr covers some philosophical examples in his book, but the most impressive counterargument comes not from philosophy but from the science of computation itself. It's based on a brilliant and revolutionary theorem proved in 1931 by the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel, and then built on by the philosopher John Lucas and the mathematician Roger Penrose. Barr explains:

"The gist of the argument is that if one knew the program a computer uses, then one could in a certain precise sense outwit that program. If, therefore, human beings were computers, then we could in principle learn our own programs and thus be able to outwit ourselves; and this is not possible, at least not as we mean it here."

Perhaps the only way to refute the Lucas-Penrose argument against the "machine mind", which leans on Gödel's Theorem, is to say that the human intellect reasons in a way that is inherently inconsistent. This would imply not just that human beings sometimes make logical mistakes (which is obvious), but that the human mind is radically and inherently unsound in its reasoning faculties. Yet that's a huge problem. Why? Because then to maintain the belief that your mind is only a machine, you would have to argue against your own mental soundness. You would literally identify as insane. Not many physicists are willing to go that far.

In any case, the discovery of Gödel's Theorem offers another blow to the materialist story of the world. It seems that the mind cannot be reduced to mere biochemical reactions.

Twist #5 - Quantum Mechanics and the Defeat of Determinism

Most materialists deny that free will exists, and for centuries this seemed well-grounded in the findings of physics. The laws of physics appeared to be "deterministic," in the sense that what happens at a later time is solely determined through the laws of physics by what happened at earlier times. This was of course a troubling point for Judaism and Christianity, both of which held free will as a central tenant.

However, a truly astonishing reversal came in the 1920s with the discover of quantum theory. Barr describes it as "the greatest and most profound revolution in the history of physics" (27). It transformed the whole structure of theoretical physics, and in the process swept away physical determinism.

In prior centuries, the core of physical science was prediction. That's how theories were tested and proved. But with quantum theory, the present state of a physical system would not, even in principle, be enough to predict everything about its future behavior. No longer could you simply argue from the deterministic character of physics that free will was impossible.

Of course, this doesn't prove that we have free will. Instead, as Barr notes, "quantum theory simply showed that the most powerful argument against free will was obsolete. In the words of the great mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl, 'the old classical determinism...need not oppress us any longer'" (27).

Opening the door to free will was just one of the effects of quantum theory. In its traditional or "standard" interpretation, it also posits the existence of observers who lie, at least in part, outside of the description provided by physics. That's a controversial claim, and has been challenged by radical reinterpretations of quantum theory (such as the "many-worlds interpretation") or by changing quantum theory in some way.

But as Barr writes, "The argument against materialism based on quantum theory is a strong one, and has certainly not been refuted. The line of argument is rather subtle. It is also not well-known, even among practicing physicists. But, if it is correct, it would be the most important philosophical implication to come from any scientific discovery" (28).

The above represents just a sampling of the major discoveries in the great history of science and faith. Barr spends nearly 300 pages examining them in more depth. If you'd like to learn more, I highly recommend you pick up Modern Physics and Ancient Faith for the rest of the story.
 
 
(Image credit: Rutgers)

Should I believe in miracles? This question doesn’t pertain to whether I should believe in this miracle or that miracle. It has to do with whether I’m rationally justified in believing in miracles as such.

David Hume's Wisdom for the Wise

The eightenth-century Scottish skeptic philosopher David Hume argued the wise man should not believe in miracles. The basis for his assertion was what might be called the “repeatability principle”—evidence for what occurs over and over (the regular) always outweighs evidence for that which does not (the rare). Since miracles are rare and contradict our uniform experience, Hume argues the wise man ought never to believe in miracles.

While it’s true that a wise man should base his belief on the weight of evidence, it’s not true that evidence for uniform experience always outweighs evidence for what is singular and rare.

We know this for several reasons, but I’ll give you four.

Why Uniform Experience Doesn't Make Belief in Miracles Irrational

First, if Hume’s principle concerning uniform experience were correct, then we would have to deny many things we hold as true. For example, the Big Bang was a singular event that is unrepeatable. Have you experienced any Big Bangs lately? I would also venture to say you haven’t experienced anybody landing on the moon in recent times.

Now, if we hold to Hume’s principle, it would be irrational to believe the scientific account of the Big Bang and the historical fact that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, since these occurrences contradict our uniform experience. But this is absurd. The Big Bang is one of the most rigorously established theories in all of science, and all who are not obsessed with conspiracy theories hold Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon is a historical fact.

Moreover, Hume’s principle nullifies science itself. As an inductive discipline, science necessarily presupposes the possibility of discovering new things that may contradict uniform experience. Scientific laws are revised all the time based on new contrary evidence. But if Hume’s principle were correct, scientists would never have reasonable grounds to revise laws, and thus replacing the Newtonian view of the universe with Einstein’s view would have been irrational. No skeptic can hold this and still be seen as intellectually credible.

A third reason why Hume’s argument from uniform experience fails is that it sets the standard for authenticating a miracle too high. It views rarity as that which disqualifies rational belief, yet rarity is of the essence of a miracle. A miracle, by definition, is an unusual event, something contrary to the ordinary course of things. So, according to Hume’s view, every miracle is disqualified from the start, because every miracle is a rare event.

This is analogous to making a fifty-foot bar the qualifying height for a good high jumper, when no jumpers can even clear an eight-foot bar. It is simply unreasonable to set a standard so high that no one can ever reach it. If skeptics desire Christian beliefs to be subject to falsification, then they ought not set standards where Christian beliefs cannot be proven true.

A fourth critique of Hume’s argument is it commits the fallacy of special pleading, a fallacy in which one deliberately ignores aspects unfavorable to his point of view. Hume is basing his argument on his experience, or perhaps the experiences of those he knows. Perhaps there were people in Hume’s time, or even people of the past, whose common experience involved miracles. This is precisely the claim of the early Christians. While Hume is within his rights to speak authoritatively about his own experience, he cannot do so with regard to others. His own uniform experience cannot be used to exclude the testimony of another person’s experience.

The Improbable is Too High a Hurdle to Jump

A skeptic may not articulate his or her skepticism about miracles as does Hume but simply might express the inability to overcome the hurdle of accepting something so improbable. A skeptic might say, “The miracles in the Bible are just too far-fetched for me to believe—a man rising from the dead? Blind people seeing? You expect me to believe that?”

While I can sympathize with someone who has a healthy skepticism when it comes to improbable events, we can’t reject something outright simply because it’s improbable.

First, an event might be improbable when considered relative to our general background knowledge, but, relative to other specific knowledge or evidence, improbability can decrease.

For example, it’s highly improbable that the winning number for the California Lottery would be 6345789. If the newspaper, however, says this is the winning number, then the probability changes, making the odds for it being the winning number higher. Furthermore, if the news anchor broadcasts it as the winning number on the nightly news, then the odds for it being the winning number become even higher.

Similarly, miracles, like Jesus rising from the dead, are improbable relative to our background knowledge—men don’t usually rise from the dead. But the improbability decreases when it’s considered relative to specific evidence, namely, eyewitness testimonies. If the testimonies are sound, then belief is rational despite the event’s improbability.

A second response to help a skeptic overcome the high hurdle of a miracle’s improbability is Hume’s principle:

"[N]o testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the miracle be of such a kind, that its falsehood be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish." (David Hume, Of Miracles).

Many skeptics consider only how improbable a miracle is but hardly ever consider the improbability of a miracle not occurring despite the testimony.

Take for example the Resurrection of Jesus, to which the early Christians testified. Skeptics rightfully consider this event as improbable and are rational when they exercise caution concerning the testimonies of it. But very seldom do skeptics consider how improbable the alternative explanations are.

For example, it’s much more improbable that the early Christians stole the body and lied about the Resurrection only to gain death. People don’t die for what they know to be a lie. Furthermore, it’s highly unlikely the apostles would give simple, nondramatic accounts—not to mention giving women the role as first witnesses—if they were lying about the Resurrection.

Another improbable alternative to the literal Resurrection of Jesus is that the Christians hallucinated. It’s improbable because St. Paul records Jesus appearing to many different people on several different occasions as well as appearing to more than 500 disciples at the same time (see 1 Cor. 15:6)—occurrences not typical of hallucinations.

So, when facing the obstacle of improbability, the question should not be “Should I believe in miracles as such?” but “Is there sufficient evidence to believe this or that miracle?” If the evidence for a particular miracle is trustworthy—say, the resurrection of Jesus—then belief in that miracle would be reasonable, even though it’s an improbable event.

The wise man surely needs to exercise caution when confronted with accounts of the miraculous. But the wise man should also be open to following the evidence where it leads, no matter how extraordinary and improbable it is.

Have you heard about Pope Francis’ recent comments about God, evolution, and Creation? If so, chances are you’ve heard wrong.

Here are four things you should know:
 

1. Pope Francis is Not an Atheist

Amazingly, the popular news site Independent Journal Review (IJ Review) ran — and as of this writing, is still running — the following headline:

“God is not a Divine Being”? We’re supposed to believe that the pope got up, denied that God was actually God, and that everything just went on as business as usual?

Obviously, this story is false. It’s the result of two things: bad translating, and atrocious journalism. What Pope Francis actually said that God wasn’t a “demiurge,” the pagan idea of a “god” who forms the world out of chaos. [The IJReview article relied upon an earlier Raw Story piece that originally ran the same bad translation; unlike IJReview, they've since corrected the record.]

In other words, God isn’t like a demiurge, forming the world out of chaotic raw materials. He’s infinitely bigger than that, creating the entire universe ex nihilio, from nothing. This is a ringing endorsement of God’s Deity, not a denial.

Here’s the original comment, in context, which makes it clear he neither said nor meant that God was less than Divine:

"God is not a demiurge or a conjurer, but the Creator who gives being to all things. The beginning of the world is not the work of chaos that owes its origin to another, but derives directly from a supreme Origin that creates out of love. The Big Bang, which nowadays is posited as the origin of the world, does not contradict the divine act of creating, but rather requires it. The evolution of nature does not contrast with the notion of Creation, as evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve."

Does that sound like a denial of God’s deity? Even if you don’t know what the word “demiurge” — or the Italian word “demiurgo” — means, context and common sense should clue you in that Pope Francis isn’t announcing his newfound atheism in the middle of a speech he’s given in honor of the unveiling of a statue.

Given how absurd the IJReview headline is, you might think, “there’s no way anyone would fall for that.” But you’d be wrong: the IJReview piece currently has over 300,000 views and has been shared on Facebook 45,000 times.
 

2. Pope Benedict XVI Was Not a Fundamentalist Protestant

The IJReview headline was bizarre in how extreme (and obviously wrong) it was. What’s becoming all too routine, in contrast, are the articles breathlessly claiming that Pope Francis is making a radical break with Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. There are countless examples of this, including this lede from The Independent (UK):

"Speaking at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Pope made comments which experts said put an end to the “pseudo theories” of creationism and intelligent design that some argue were encouraged by his predecessor, Benedict XVI."

Again, this is culpably ignorant journalism. Benedict has an entire book on the subject of how we should understand Genesis, creation, and evolution, taken from his essays and homilies. Nowhere does he take an opposite view of what Francis is saying here. In fact, he presents the argument for the compatibility of evolution and Creation in an arguably more provocative manner:

"Currently, I see in Germany, but also in the United States, a somewhat fierce debate raging between so-called “creationism” and evolutionism, presented as though they were mutually exclusive alternatives: those who believe in the Creator would not be able to conceive of evolution, and those who instead support evolution would have to exclude God.
 
This antithesis is absurd because, on the one hand, there are so many scientific proofs in favor of evolution which appears to be a reality we can see and which enriches our knowledge of life and being as such. But on the other, the doctrine of evolution does not answer every query, especially the great philosophical question: where does everything come from? And how did everything start which ultimately led to man?"

So Benedict is directly calling out the position the Independent accuses him of holding, calling it absurd. (Of course, the Independent doesn’t actually back up its claims about Benedict’s views; rather than referring to his countless public statements on Creation and evolution, they rely on nebulous and unnamed “experts,” “some” of whom claim this about him).

So Francis’ comments are anything but a radical break from Benedict XVI’s views on this matter. Again, an ounce of common sense should have clued reporters to this: Francis is giving these comments at the unveiling of a Benedict XVI bust at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. And they think that he’s going to choose this time and place to attack Benedict’s views on faith and science?

But the issue is broader than the opinions of Benedict and Francis. John Paul II said much the same thing on evolution, as have basically every pope since Pope Pius XII. It was Pius who issued the 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, explaining what Catholics could and couldn’t believe about our human origins (as the encyclical’s Latin title suggests). In that encyclical, he said,

"the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter – for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God."

This is also the position of the Catechism (CCC 283-84). There are certain things that Catholics must hold to, including that (a) God created the universe from nothing; (b) evolution isn’t just random and unguided [as if God created the universe and then abandoned it]; (c) the human soul didn’t “evolve,” even if the human body did; and (d) Adam and Eve existed. That leaves a lot of room for Catholics to hold to varying interpretations of Genesis 1-3 and of the scientific data.

So Catholics aren’t required to believe in evolution (contrary to the Independent’s claim that Francis “declared” evolution true), but they’re free to, as long as they also hold to the truths of the faith.
 

3. The Secular Media Isn’t a Reliable Source for Catholic News

To recap, Pope Francis is just reiterating the basic Catholic position on both God and evolution. This is a total non-story, other than media distortions that amount to out-and-out falsehoods. So why do stories like this exist? Here’s one possible clue:

Sometimes, fallacious and misleading news stories are based on innocent mistakes. Other times, they’re motivated by an ideological agenda (and certainly, the media has not been shy about trying to claim Francis as a liberal, and pitting him against Benedict and the entire pre-2013 Catholic Church). But it’s broader than that. The Independent is liberal, IJReview is conservative. But both are (a) more concerned about getting clicks than the truth, and (b) clueless on religion. Seriously, if you rely on secular news sources to get religious news (especially Catholic news) correct, you’re bound to get misled.
 

4. A Bonus...

The guy most scientists credit with formulating the Big Bang Theory? A Catholic priest.
 
 
Originally posted at ChurchPOP!. Used with permission.
(Image credit: CBS News)

Over the past few days the world of cosmology and astrophysics has gone “supernova.” Researchers affiliated with the BICEP2 telescope in Antarctica announced that they had discovered empirical evidence for a key part of the Big Bang theory, cosmic inflation. One aspect of this discovery that I found really interesting is that it forms an almost perfect parallel to a discovery that was made sixty years ago.

The First Telescope Discovery

 
In the early twentieth century, the Belgian priest and physicist Georges LemaÎtre concluded that Einstein’s new theory of gravity, called general relativity, would cause a static eternal universe to collapse into nothingness. Since Einstein’s theory was sound, this only meant one thing: The universe was growing, and had a beginning in the finite past. Fr. LemaÎtre and Einstein would discuss the cosmic consequences of the theory while walking around the campus of Cal Tech, and although Einstein was skeptical at first, in 1933 he proclaimed that LemaÎtre’s theory of an expanding universe was one of the most “beautiful theories he had ever heard.”

Fr. LemaÎtre called his theory “the primeval atom,” but another physicist, Fred Hoyle, mocked the theory with the term “Big Bang.” Hoyle believed that theories of the universe beginning to exist from nothing were “primitive myths” designed to put religion into science. Fr. LemaÎtre’s status as a Catholic priest did not help the situation. In response to Fr. LemaÎtre, Hoyle argued for what he called the “steady state theory” of the universe and claimed that there was no empirical evidence for Fr. LemaÎtre’s model. Einstein was also skeptical that no “cosmic rays” or after effects from the Big Bang had ever been discovered.

However, in 1965 Bell Laboratory technicians Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson used radio telescopes to detect a faint, uniform “glow” of static coming from all directions of the sky. At first, they thought this uniform glow was merely bird droppings contaminating the telescope! But after a thorough cleaning, the static turned out to be radiation in the form of microwaves coming from deep space.

According to the Big Bang model, right after the “bang” the universe was a white-hot ball of plasma before it cooled and formed stars and galaxies. Particles that had been flying around since the very beginning of time cooled and turned into microwaves, traveling to fill the whole cosmos. Today, this radiation is called Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (or CMBR, which is pictured below).

This discovery was so monumental that Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize for it, and Fred Hoyle admitted it refuted his steady-state model of an eternal universe: “[It] is widely believed that the existence of the microwave background killed the “steady state” cosmology. . . . Here, in the microwave background, was an important phenomenon which it had not predicted.”

Enter Inflation

 
But this wasn’t the end of the story. As scientists studied the Big Bang they came across several problems that they weren’t sure how to resolve. One was the “flatness problem,” which couldn’t explain why the density of matter and energy in the universe almost perfectly aligned to a very precise value that gives the universe a “flat shape” (or one where parallel lines expand and never intersect). The other was the horizon problem, which could not explain why different parts of the universe possessed “equal temperatures” even though the universe was not old enough for particles from those different parts to interact with one another. Even if the particles were travelling at the speed of light, there would not have been enough time for them to cross our huge universe and mix together until their “temperatures” became even.

In the 1970’s an American cosmologist named Alan Guth proposed the idea that the universe did not expand at a slow, constant rate from the Big Bang. Instead, the universe expanded at an exponential rate from just a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Stephen Hawking says the expansion of the universe would be like a penny expanding to the size of the entire Milky Way galaxy (or 100,000 light years across) in a few seconds. This inflationary expansion would have “locked in” both the universe’s flatness and even temperatures while it was very small and then blown those features up to fill the entire universe we see today.  But for decades this theory had the virtue of being elegant and explaining a lot, but it also had the vice of not being supported by empirical evidence . . . until now.

BICEP2 shows that there are distinct “gravity waves” in the microwave background radiation. These waves are the final “blown up” effects of very small “quantum disturbances” that made up the universe 13.7 billion years ago before the inflation event. What the Bell Labs radio telescope’s discovery was to Fr. LemaÎtre, the BICEP2 telescope’s discovery is to Andrei Linde, another pioneer in inflationary cosmology. A video team even captured the emotional moment when Linde learned that the theory he had been toiling over for decades had finally been confirmed with an empirical observation:
 

 

Any Religious Significance?

 
I’m glad that most news articles covering this story didn’t drudge up the tired “science vs. religion” trope. But, I could count on my local U-T San Diego newspaper to include this gem in their coverage of the discovery:

"The finding strengthens scientists’ support of the Big Bang theory, although it’s likely to be challenged by some theologians who see the hand of a divine creator in the rise of the universe."

Which theologians? Sure there are some Christians who think the universe was created at the same time the Babylonians were brewing beer, but the Catholic Church has affirmed that,

“The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers” (CCC 283).

This discovery does not disprove the idea that the universe requires a necessary being in order to sustain it nor does it disprove the idea that the universe began to exist in the finite past. Even if inflationary theory explains why some of the constants in the universe (such as the strength of gravity) have the life-permitting values they do, inflation alone does not overturn the conclusion that our universe’s life-permitting laws of nature were designed. Instead, it merely pushes the problem back one level. Resorting to inflation to explain the fine-tuning of the universe’s constants and conditions would be like saying that the case of a dart hitting a bull’s eye can be explained by “projectile theory” apart from the actions of any intelligent agent.

The fact is that this discovery has no bearing whatsoever on either the existence of God or any other Catholic teaching. It is perfectly compatible with the view that God created the universe from nothing for the good of intelligent creatures to come to know him.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Answers. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Raw Story)

 
I would like to thank Chana Messinger for her thoughtful and gracious reply to my piece on the need for caution in using the Big Bang to argue for God’s existence.

Here I will offer a few thoughts in response, though I should say up front that I’m not familiar enough with Messinger’s thought to be entirely sure how she’s using certain terms, so if I misunderstand her position, I apologize.
 

A Possible Misunderstanding

 
I think that Messinger misunderstands my position when I say:
 

“Losing scientific support from the Big Bang would not disprove the existence of God. It wouldn't even disprove the Kalaam cosmological argument. It would just mean that the premise in question would have to be supported some other way.
 
If it were to turn out that the Big Bang was not the beginning of the physical universe then this argument in apologetics would have to be revised.
 
That's nothing to be ashamed of, though. Apologetics, like the physical sciences, is subject to revision based on the evidence available at the time.”

 
She takes this to imply:
 

"Akin is not merely more sure of God and Catholicism than of science. He is infinitely more sure. . . . There is simply no evidence that will change his mind about God."

 
It was not my intention to claim anything that strong. I merely meant:

1. If it turned out that the Big Bang was not the beginning of the universe then this would not disprove God’s existence. There are other arguments to be considered.
2. Similarly, it would not mean that the universe had no beginning. From a Christian perspective, it would have one—simply farther back.
3. And finally, it might be possible to fashion another version of the Kalaam argument using different arguments (ones not involving the Big Bang) to support its premise that the universe did have a beginning.

I was not trying to imply that belief in God automatically trumps science or that there is no possible evidence that could rationally cause one to change one’s mind about God existing.

Those are interesting but separate questions, and I wasn’t trying to address them.

For space reasons, I’m afraid I won’t be able to address them here, either, but perhaps I can in the future.

In the meantime, I’d like to address a very interesting subject that Messinger brings up...
 

Non-Overlapping Magisteria

 
She is correct when she says that I subscribe to the same school of thought as Stephen J. Gould (and Augustine, Aquinas, John Paul II, and others) when it comes to the question of non-overlapping magisteria.

For those not aware of this idea, it is the claim that different disciplines may be suited to different types of questions, and they may not have a great deal of overlap with other disciplines.

Thus science may be better suited to addressing some questions, philosophy others, and theology still others.

Even Gould, though, did not claim that the magisteria of science and religion do not have any overlap. In his book Rocks of Ages, he acknowledges that the two spheres “press upon” each other when it comes to certain questions. They do have some overlap.

Although I wouldn’t put it the way that Messinger does, I think she is correct in stating that the Bible does make some claims that belong not just to the sphere of faith but to the sphere of history as well.

Jesus did exist, he did die, and he did rise again. The Christian faith claims these, and if any of them is false then Christianity is false.

I wouldn’t say that these fall into the realm of science, though. They fall into the realm of history, and—absent the invention of a time machine—we can’t verify them empirically (i.e., through personal observation and testing).

We also can’t verify most historical occurrences empirically. There is no way to empirically verify the existence, death, and non-resurrection of Julius Caesar.

Instead, we have to use other means (e.g., the evaluation of ancient testimony) to establish these ideas.
 

The Burden of Proof

 
Toward the end of her piece, Messinger writes:
 

"Atheist argumentation may have its flaws, but it is generally consistent on its epistemology: reason and empiricism. Perhaps the Catholic response is well documented in the literature, and I am simply insufficiently familiar with it. But as I currently see it, the onus is on Catholics to give a more thorough account of exactly how the epistemologies of faith, reason and empiricism interlock, what predictions they make, and which beliefs they feel are fundamental, versus which they would be willing, in the final analysis, to relinquish to the cleansing fire of truth."

 
Messinger is correct that there has been a great deal of discussion of these issues in Catholic literature, which perhaps we can discuss in the future.

I want to note that I agree with her that, in this case, “the onus is on Catholics to give a more thorough account.”

The reason is that, in this case, the Catholic is asking the atheist to consider the Catholic viewpoint.

Any time you are asking someone to reconsider their view and think about adopting yours, the burden of proof is on the one making the invitation.

In the same way, the atheist would shoulder the burden of proof if asking a Catholic to consider the atheist viewpoint.

I hope we can discuss this more in the future, and I thank Messinger for a refreshing exchange.
 
 
(Image credit: Nothing Out of Nothing)

A few weeks ago, Stephen Hawking delivered a lecture at the California Institute of Technology titled "The Origin of the Universe," and you’re likely to have heard about it because, according to mainstream media outlets, Hawking has put God out of a job. In an article headlined “Stephen Hawking lays out case for Big Bang without God,” NBC News describes the presentation:
 

Stephen Hawking began the event by reciting an African creation myth, and rapidly moved on to big questions such as, Why are we here? He noted that many people still seek a divine solution to counter the theories of curious physicists, and at one point, he quipped, “What was God doing before the divine creation? Was he preparing hell for people who asked such questions?”

 
It’s somewhat annoying that Hawking implicitly uses the argument “Some religious explanations are silly (such as myths about gods laying eggs that become the universe), therefore all religious explanations are silly.” Surely he would know that Cal Tech is the site where Fr. George Lemaitre discussed the first incarnation of the Big Bang theory seventy years ago with a skeptical Albert Einstein (who felt that the idea of the “beginning of the universe” smacked too much of religion).

Fr. Lemaitre firmly believed in following the scientific evidence where it led, and this did not exclude God from his view of the universe. The NBC News article also describes Hawking as claiming that Pope John Paul II told scientists visiting the Vatican to study the universe but not the beginning of the universe since that is "holy" (this claim is also found in Hawking's A Brief History of Time, 120). There's no way to verify that this exchange took place because Hawking claims that it was said in a private audience. My money is on the Pope telling the scientists that there is a difference between studying the scientific question of the beginning of the universe and the philosophical/religious question of the origin of the universe, something Hawking apparently fails to grasp.

If Hawking wants to exclude God’s creative activity from the beginning of the universe, he’s going to need a pretty good argument. Does he have one? Unfortunately, this particular NBC news article is short on specifics. The articles says only that Hawking believes that a variant of string theory proves that multiple universes can come into existence from nothing and one of those universes will, by chance alone, have the physical properties necessary for life to emerge.

The problem with appeals to string theory is that the theory is as malleable as pizza dough and is almost impossible to empirically verify. Famed Cal Tech physicist Richard Feynman, whom Hawking mentions in his talk, said, “For anything that disagrees with an experiment, [string theorists] cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, ‘Well, it still might be true’”(quoted in Lee Smolin. The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, 2007, 125.)

Lee Smolin, whose cosmology influenced Richard Dawkins’s proposal to explain away God in his 2005 book The God Delusion, writes, “The scenario of many unobserved universes [in string theory] plays the same logical role as the scenario of an intelligent designer. Each provides an untestable hypothesis that, if true, makes something improbable seem quite probable.”

The other problem with Hawking’s proposal is the answer to the question “How did the universe begin to exist from nothing?” The metaphysical principle “out of nothing, nothing comes” would preclude an entire universe emerging from nothing through a singularity. The NBC article is confusing because Hawking’s preferred model for the beginning of the universe (the Hartle-Hawking “no-boundary” model, pictured below) does not include a singularity.

The model has a beginning but it has no beginning point or boundary to the universe’s past. Asking what occurred before the beginning of this model is like asking what is north of the North Pole (time just goes in the other direction just as once you reach the North pole you start to go south).

The model simply exists without a beginning event that needs an explanation. The problem with this model is that Hawking relies on imaginary numbers, or the square root of negative numbers, for the time variables in order to preserve a purely spatial representation of the beginning of the universe. While imaginary numbers are helpful in abstract mathematics, it becomes absurd to measure a real entity such as the flow of time using something like “3i” minutes. Even Hawking admits that this is something of a mathematical trick and that “when one goes back to the real time in which we live . . . there will still appear to be singularities” (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 144).

Hawking may have one alternative proposal for the beginning of the universe, but does he have any argument against the idea that God created the universe? The article alludes to one when Hawking makes the joke which Augustine first made about “what was God doing before he created the universe?” Augustine answered the question by noting that before creation there was no time so God was not “doing” anything within a temporal realm.

In other venues, such as the television show Curiosity, Hawking uses this observation as a springboard to argue that time did not exist at the Big Bang, so no cause is needed because causation only applies in time. According to Hawking, since all causes operate in time, not even God could make the universe while he exists timelessly.

However, the cause of an event does not have to be temporally prior to an event in order to be the event’s cause. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant writes, “The greater part of operating causes in nature are simultaneous with their effects...If the cause had but a moment before ceased to be, the effect could not have arisen.”

To understand this, consider a hammer smashing a window. In this case, it is clear that the hammer is swung before the window smashes; the window doesn’t smash before the hammer hits it. However, if the cause (or the hammer moving through the air) disappeared even a microsecond before it touched the window, then the effect would never happen. Instead, there has to be a moment where the cause and effect “overlap” and both happen at the same time. Likewise, the cause of God creating the universe and the effect of the universe coming into existence are simultaneous events that happen at the first moment of time.

Stephen Hawking is a brilliant expert in the area of physics, but just because someone is an expert in how one part of reality works does not mean he is an expert in how all of reality works (or what is called metaphysics). Hawking's claims in this area should be reviewed carefully and not taken solely on his scientific authority.
 
 
Originally posted on the Catholic Answers blog. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Reuters)

In science today, we are under the tyranny of an image, the image of an explosion—the Big Bang. Ironically, this term was not derived from evidence but from contempt. Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), the celebrated astronomer, was so incensed at the notion that the universe might have a beginning that he began to refer to proponents of this view as believing that the universe started in some kind of a “big bang.”

He was quite surprised when the fires of his sarcasm, rather than withering his opponents, inadvertently coined the now commonly accepted term.

Interestingly enough, the astronomy magazine Sky and Telescope had a contest in 1994 to rename the Big Bang. There were over 10,000 entries, but the judges were unable to find a more golden term to coin. Thus, they declared the “Big Bang” it shall remain.

But what if the Big Bang was really a Big Bloom—not an enormous explosion, but a rapid and wondrous unfolding like a flower emerging from a densely-packed bud? Then the term “Big Bang” would be disastrously inaccurate. Happily, scientists are gathering more and more evidence that Bloom should replace Bang as the most accurate image of our cosmic origin.

To give ourselves a metaphor, imagine being invited to two events. The first is called “The Big Bang: See a House Blown Up!” You arrive at the address, a house sitting in a field, and settle into a lawn chair a comfortable distance away. The host announces: “Behold! The Big Bang!” and immediately the 3-bedroom brick farmhouse explodes into a cloud of smoke. As the wind slowly dissipates the smoke, you see a large pile of debris—glass shards, jagged pieces of wood, broken bricks, and dust.

The second event is called “The Big Bang: See a House Blown Up!” You arrive at the address, fully expecting a repeat, but in the field, instead of a house, you find a large pile of debris—glass shards, jagged pieces of wood, broken bricks, and dust. You settle into your lawn chair a little bemused. Just then, the host announces: “Behold! The Big Bang!” and immediately the pile of debris explodes into a cloud of smoke. As the wind clears away the smoke, you see a 3-bedroom brick farmhouse.

Obviously the first event conforms to what we mean by “bang,” because an explosion increases disorder (what scientists call “entropy”). But what of the second event? There was an explosion, but we would justly accuse the second host of great irony in the use of the term and great cleverness in his use of explosives. Obviously, he somehow rigged the whole thing in the finest detail, and we would rightly conclude his mastery of physics, chemistry, and architecture bordered on the divine.

Now what if you received an invitation: “The Big Bang: See the Universe Blown Up!” What would you witness? As it turns out, the more scientists dig into the complexities of the cosmos, the more it appears to be like the second event.

The evidence? To begin with the beginning, if the universe originated in an explosion, it was very precisely and very suspiciously calibrated down to the finest details. And further, this cosmic fine-tuning seems to be defined by a goal, the eventual existence of complex, biological life. Indeed, scientists are going even further, and arguing that the fundamental laws and forces of nature, the chemical elements and basic compounds, the 3-dimensionality of space, and more, all lead to the strange and welcome conclusion that we may well be the goal of the universe. Thus, the science of cosmology has become not just biocentric, but anthropic (from the Greek anthropos, human being).

If we could replay the cosmic tape, then, we would not see a chaotic explosion that merely scatters debris, but a well-orchestrated unfolding, a Big Bloom governed by humanly unimaginable precision. If the Bloom were compressed into a fourteen-minute tape, the first third of a minute would be dark and brooding anticipation, like the buds of flowers waiting to burst. Suddenly, there would be blinding light, and the first stable elements that had been kneaded in darkness, would emerge as the initial unfolding of the infinitely dense original bud. Over the next ten minutes, we would see the universe bloom at the speed of light, expanding in every direction even as the elements swirled and condensed into the first stars, the fiery furnaces that would forge the heavier elements needed for the ultimate intricacies of complex life.

Near the end of this phase, we would see our own solar system form. In the last three minutes of the tape, we would witness a dizzyingly rapid crescendo of creation upon Earth, with the most intricate, spiraling integration of biologic complexity in the last half minute, as species after species of living being arose, bursting forth with staccato regularity in every imaginable form occupying every imaginable nook. In the last fraction of a fraction of a second, human beings would arrive, somehow the crown and glory of the bloom, the only known creature capable of science.

Scientists now admit, almost universally, the existence of the fine-tuning that allows the bang to end in a bloom. The commonsense conclusion: our universe was “rigged” from the beginning by a very clever Master of physics, chemistry, and architecture. As physicist John Polkinghorne has said, such cosmological fine-tuning means that “the universe is indeed not ‘any old world’ but the carefully calculated construct of its Creator.”

Others resist the commonsense conclusion that the theologians were right all along. Some, like Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal at Cambridge, avoid this conclusion only by exchanging commonsense for nonsense, and conjecturing that there are a multitude of universes, and we just happen to be the lucky one.

Let us hope that, as more and more evidence of the extraordinary, providential ordering of the universe and earth itself is uncovered, that common sense will prevail.
 
 
Originally printed in To the Source. Used with author's permission.)
(Image credit: Fan Pop)