MM
Copyright © 2003 by Kevin Sharpe. All rights reserved.
Submitted for publication.
by
Kevin Sharpe
Graduate College, Union Institute and University, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Harris Manchester College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK
Oxford Institute for Science and Spirit, Oxford, UK
Founder of Science & Spirit
Magazine
kevin.sharpe@tui.edu
www.ksharpe.com
and
Jonathan Walgate
Physics Department,
jon.walgate@qubit.org
ABSTRACT.
Cosmology studies the universe as a whole, all at once. Of what does the cosmos consist? How does it operate, evolve, and sustain itself? What is our place within it? Herein science and theology overlap. A modern consensus says that religion and science have nothing to do with one another. Many in the religious community promote this in their retreat to ever more defensible positions from which they protect their faith and impose their conceptions of God on the universe. They have, however, pulled back from the frontier of knowledge. The worthwhile response studies the ‘design’ rather than shouts ‘Designer.’
KEYWORDS.
Big Bang, cosmology, design, God-world relationship, Isaac Newton, physics, science and religion.
CONTENTS.
Isaac
Newton and Classical Physics
Our hunger for knowledge and enlightenment always exceeds our personal
limitations, but rarely can it outstrip human potential. Nowhere is this
clearer than with cosmology: the study of the universe as a whole, all at
once. Such an all-encompassing endeavor is surely the last word in
intellectual arrogance. Throughout most of history our knowledge of the most
familiar of things – trees, rocks, and birds – has been woefully inadequate,
and, in many ways, it still is. Least of all we know ourselves and, in spite of
centuries of reflection and meditation, the human condition is a source of
mystery. Yet a grander, universal wisdom has seduced philosophers in spite of
our shortcomings: an understanding of the world in its entirety. Of what does
the cosmos consist? How does it operate, evolve, and sustain itself? What is
our place within it? These sweepingly broad questions are remarkably
presumptuous for a species starting out on the road to discovery but,
undaunted, we’ve been asking them for millennia. Some of the issues, even some
of the answers, are proving remarkably accessible.
Cosmology is symptomatic of a fundamental current in human thought that flows toward unification and synthesis. We prefer to understand every phenomenon we encounter as part of a broader underlying scheme. Rather than understand the planets as separate entities tracking their own personal paths through the cosmos, we have tried (in the case of Kepler, with great success) to understand them as one whole group of similar objects following one single pattern. This strategy is a foundation of science, yet it simplifies our descriptions and predictions only to the extent that the one unified pattern is more accurate and less convoluted than a raw aggregate of many individual patterns. No logical reason why this must be the case springs to mind. The universe might, for instance, be populated with independently minded planets and stars, each moving according to its whims with not a care for its neighbors. The word ‘planet’ itself derives from the Greek for ‘wanderer,’ the irregular motions of these lights in the sky clearly exasperating the ancients. If there hadn’t been a pattern to it all, cosmology would never have ‘gotten off the ground.’ But it works. The universe is a more orderly place than we could ever have hoped, and those of us with presumptuous questions have a lot to be thankful for.
Our concerns with integrating and unifying our ideas stretch far back beyond scientific concerns for planetary orbits, for they predate science itself. They are based on deep respect for the concept of order in nature, which may seem so fundamental to basic comprehension and common sense that its origins are shrouded in the mists of evolution. True enough, but there is a crucial distinction to draw. Homo sapiens undoubtedly has always shared with other species an intuitive understanding of the regularities of the world; we always knew that whatever goes up will come down, and that animals, vegetables, and minerals should never be confused. That kind of knowledge is one thing. Explicitly demanding an abstract unity and simplicity of form from one’s ideas is quite another.
Why did we spurn the polytheistic superstitions of our forebears for the monotheistic religious institutions of today? We could appeal to directly to revelation – and some Gnostic sects would explain how the holy books literally fell from the skies. A more subtle form of revelation may have been at hand, though, in the cultures of growing civilizations. Civilization was the cradle not only of theologies, but a broad sweep of philosophies that ushered in an unprecedented era of enlightenment. The prime concern of these philosophies, above all others, was to harmonize all our knowledge.
Ancient Egyptian religion, ripe with pageantry and full of animal-headed
gods, also had its monotheistic leanings. The multitude of gods focused their
concerns on just three spheres: the creative sun, procreative life, and the
fertilizing
The Egyptian conflation of god, state, and ruler provides excellent evidence
for the true climate in which the monotheistic attitude blossomed. Novel social
systems were becoming established. Simplistic tribal hierarchies had been
rooted at a personal level, but many-tiered systems of rank rooted in economics
and bureaucracy emerged. People became ever more dependent upon cooperation and
unity of purpose. Irrigating the
The real need for faith in the integrity of the state soon suggested other questions, and other fears. It’s a short step from worrying that your society will disintegrate to wondering why the world doesn’t disintegrate. After all, who’s taking charge of the world’s harmonies and security? Their prehistoric ancestors had left these duties to whatever gods felt so inclined, but now civilized people understood that there was much more at stake. Ultimately, there must be an authority. Today, the occidental religious traditions continue to use monarchical language for God: ‘God is the Lord, the King of Kings, who rules over all creation as His dominion.’[1]
It serves us well to paint this historical scene, for ideas are always best understood as they really are: dynamic, evolving, and interacting. We must be cautious, though, for this correlative story demonstrates no causal link and the issues are much too subtle to be reduced to one. An evangelist who reads too much into this analysis might speak of the monotheistic revelation attending the birth of civilization itself. An atheist would reply that it seems a state-sponsored superstition. Both responses miss the point, which is to portray the climate of the time. People discovered an urgent need for sources of authority and security in their world. They developed a thirst for unity, harmony, and order that eventually fueled the genesis of theology, philosophy, and ultimately, science. These famously rational disciplines did not originate in the dispassionate logical reflections of the leisured classes, springing ‘full-armored’ from the minds of philosophers as Athena burst from the forehead of Zeus. They built upon and evolved from pre-existing foundations, more cultural than clinical, and more mytho-poetic than analytical.
Cosmologies are founded in reason and logic, be they theological justifications of God’s creation or scientific accounts of the fundamental forces. This is the secret of their success. But they touch upon each other, influence each other, and incite their followers to disputation, even confrontation. While the answers they express may be rational, the great questions that sparked them were forged from our emotional responses to humanity’s social revolution. That is the secret of their importance.
Cosmology is much more than a synonym for astronomy. The recent successes of Big Bang theory have been extremely important, and have stimulated the great majority of modern cosmological debate. That debate, though, springs from interaction between the new astronomy and older cosmological theories. Any far-reaching analysis of the nature of the universe’s past or present can lay claim to being a cosmology, provided its focus is upon the universe as a whole. The notion of a beginning, for instance, is an important cosmological issue, but beginnings per se are not crucial. Once popular steady-state theories were no less cosmological for claiming our universe was infinitely old.
One criterion is nevertheless essential: cosmologies must be rational. Cosmology is valuable only to the extent that it is rational. A rational approach is open with regard to analysis, which leads on to debate, refinement, and progress. The rational approach is explicitly constructive. This does not to impose a scientific framework upon metaphysical thinking; the scholastic philosophers and theologians of the mediaeval Catholic Church were more obsessed with rationality than any modern scientist. Their theories, whatever their premises, were accessible to explanation. Nor is this to deny the value of myth and ritual, which communicate truths primarily through metaphor rather than logic. But such metaphorical stories focus upon metaphysical matters only tangentially, being primarily concerned with the personal. Myth can also have an agenda. The creation myth of the Egyptians, for example, is concerned with establishing a divine origination for Pharonic rule, and in so doing, tells a tale of the fundamental spheres – Sun, Life, and Nile – that ground them within the royal dynasty.
It is difficult, if not impossible, entirely to disentangle the rational and
mytho-poetic traditions throughout most of history. The centuries preceding the
collapse of the
General metaphysical ideas supply the intellectual basis of cosmologies,
asserting and describing the existence of the real world. Because of
their abstract character, they are most difficult to trace confidently. Certain
broad trends can be observed, nonetheless. Neither
After Thales, the Greeks began to search for the physis and the logos,
the stuff of reality and the order of reality. In this earliest of
distinctions, we see the seed of a host of ideas to come. Dualism forged itself
on the anvil of Greek philosophy, evolving in many directions. Christianity,
Judaism, and Islam adopted an absolute distinction between creation (physis,
the world of experience) and God (logos, order, perfection). So compelling was
this doctrine that Christians embraced it in spite of their belief in a God
made flesh. ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ John’s Gospel was the last to be
written and reflects the impact of Hellenic thinking.
A deep reverence for mathematics grew up after Thales, instilled mainly by the Pythagoreans, which led up to Plato’s theory of eternal forms. In this idealistic cosmology, reality as it really is consists of eternal and immutable perfect forms. The notion of perfect forms was geometrically inspired. Plato was thinking of perfect triangles and perfect spheres, similar to but surpassing the crude physical representations we encounter in everyday life (which is a flawed reflection of true reality). Plato’s cosmology is a realm of unchanging absolutes, to be approached by reason and deduction alone.
Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, had different ideas. Aristotle differed from Plato because he believed the world he felt and touched was fundamentally real, rather than the world of mathematical abstractions. Aristotle believed in matter as well as form, he believed in learning from observation as well as deduction, and he believed in change. In Aristotle we find the clearest account of the elemental theory for which the Greeks have become famous. Fire, Earth, Air, and Water are the world’s building blocks, while a celestial ‘fifth element’ forms the heavens – Quintessence. Aristotle and Plato dominated Christian and Islamic thought for nearly two millennia.
Thanks largely to
Theology and philosophy were intertwined in a creative exchange. The ‘novel’
ideas of Aristotle stirred up debate in the universities that were being
founded across
Plato and Aristotle had no understanding of inertia and so could hardly have expected the Earth to move through the empty heavens in any meaningful sense. Their astronomies were appropriately geocentric.[6] Plato, moreover, had propounded the perfection of circular motion, and Aristotle had followed his lead as far as heavenly bodies were concerned. This caused problems for Aristotle because it was obvious to him that only the moon and sun adopted simple circular orbits, while the wandering planets behaved most irregularly. Unwilling to abandon the geometrically perfect shape, he relied upon a system of epicycles (circles within circles), which provided some improvement. Astronomical data accumulated over time, though, and these exposed inaccuracies latent in his system. Apollonius refined and formalized the theory of epicycles, Hipparchus added yet more improvements, and by the second century C.E., Ptolomey set his seal on an exceptionally convoluted system of epicycles, equants, and deferents. The resultant confusion of ad hoc additions was as obscure as it was accurate, yet it served well to predict the heavens.
No extravagant claims were made for the Ptolomaic system. Everyone accepted it was a flawed practical tool that just happened to prove useful. The real nature of the heavens, they deduced, must lie somehow hidden within Aristotle’s original insight: planets and stars fixed upon perfect spheres of quintessence. Scholars easily dismissed the minor discrepancies in planetary motion so long as Platonic ideals overrode practical considerations.
The fourteenth century and fifteenth centuries brought with them, though, a
greater willingness to question the wisdom of the ancients. Practical
considerations came to be of paramount importance, and considerable effort was
expended trying to improve on Ptolomey. So it was that Nicolas Copernicus (
Copernicus, despite the growing interest in observation, was a mathematician
at heart. He was concerned to purify Ptolomey’s convoluted system by returning
to the simplicities of Plato and Pythagoras. That his new system clashed with
the accepted physics would have been at best a secondary concern. A greater
worry was the disagreement with Catholic doctrine. Biblical
Aristotelian cosmology had been adapted to an explicitly Christian hierarchy. The successively distant crystal spheres receded from the Earth, each more holy and perfect than the last, until they reached the stars at the boundary of our mortal world. Beyond lay heaven, physically located in our universe, its attention focused on the center: Earth. This picture was simple, easily understood, and projected a kind of hierarchical reality that the Catholic hierarchy liked. Now, Copernicus wanted to throw all this into doubt. He even proposed we shouldn’t consider ourselves privileged within the cosmos. His book was swiftly condemned.
Observational
The stakes were too high, of course, for this to be admitted at the time, and Galileo was threatened with torture, forced to recant, and placed under house arrest. He continued, nevertheless, to develop a new physics that began to explain the new astronomy. He famously discovered that falling bodies all fell the same way, regardless of their mass. He also dabbled with laws of inertia.[7] Perhaps most worrying for the Church, had they known it at the time, was the great profusion of new stars that became visible with Galileo’s telescope. The universe was expanding and the physical location of God was becoming ever more distant.
Johannes Kepler (
Nature and nature’s laws
Lay hid in night,
And God said
‘Let Newton be’
And all was light.Alexander Pope
Principia Mathematica was published in
Newtonian mechanics contains many implicit metaphysical assumptions. He offers a direct and simple account of causation, for example, that can be reduced to two types. Acts of gravitation (to which were later appended magnetic and electric events) influence objects at a distance to obey a mathematical pattern – the inverse square law. All other acts of causation are instantaneous impacts – particles hitting each other just like billiard balls.
This brings us to the atomistic element of classical mechanics. The ultimate basis of reality is those particular billiard balls – the atoms – that impact and interact with one another according to mathematical laws dependent upon their mass. Physis and Logos are with us again – atoms possessing inertial mass on the one hand, geometry on the other. These ideas have quite naturally been extended by many into an explicitly reductionist attitude holding the random collisions of tiny particles responsible for everything that happens from starlight to Shakespeare.
This multitude of tiny particles poses another problem, for
The past and the future, meanwhile, were infinitely extended. The mechanics was time symmetric. A collision of billiard balls looks just as realistic when it is filmed backwards, and so does a Newtonian universe.[8] Both past and future look just like the present, and so there is nothing to choose between them. The universe must have gone on forever and will persist forever as it is now. (Classical thermodynamics in the nineteenth century showed this was physically wrong, discovering in entropy a way to tell the difference between future and past. The logic of the backwards-forwards argument cannot be faulted, though, which should have unsettled the classical physicists of the time.) An infinite past conflicted with religious belief in a creation event, but this was not thought to be important because theologians since Thomas Aquinas had believed that divine creation was known by revelation (Aquinas meant ‘by faith’) rather than deduction.
The ideas of
Theologians have sought convoluted escape routes from these problems, but
the general public has not shared their patience. A ‘war’ between atheistic
science and irrational religion has pervaded the public consciousness. The
nineteenth century saw trenches drawn up.
The modern consensus is somewhat more liberal, but every bit as damning – it is that religion and science have nothing to do with one another. Many in the religious community are responsible for this state of affairs, for they have retreated to ever more defensible positions from which they can protect their faith. They have pulled back, not from the front-line of some phony war with science, but from the frontier of knowledge itself.
They shouldn’t defend their faith, however; they should explore it.
The twentieth century has moved on from Newtonian mechanics, but it is proving difficult to break free of the shackles of Newtonian metaphysics. Philosophers, theologians, and scientists alike must be careful not to import nineteenth century assumptions into the twenty-first century’s ideas. We must walk our brave new intellectual landscape free from classical preconceptions; else, we will discover nothing but their reflections.
Cosmology has become synonymous with the science of the Big Bang. We have seen that cosmology’s history is much broader history than this narrow branch of physics. The adoption of the term by theoretical astronomers is fair, though, because their discoveries breathe fresh life into the great debate and inject new ideas capable of revolutionizing the old metaphysical thinking. In Big Bang theory, human researchers dig presumptuously into the boundaries of the universe and uncover remarkable finds.
‘The Big Bang’ represents the earliest moments of our universe. It is the
name given to a whole set of theories that employ both general relativity and
quantum physics to describe these moments. Such theories must be hypothetical
to some extent. To describe the very earliest times properly, we would require
a synthesis of relativity and quantum theory, rather than the two theories
working side by side. This ‘quantum gravity,’ popularized as a TOE or a GUT
(‘Theory of Everything’ or ‘Grand Unified Theory’) has so far eluded us.
Nevertheless, a great deal of evidence points toward a Big Bang event about
General relativity describes a space-time that differs from
Big Bang theory is a good place to start looking for the metaphysics of
tomorrow: it is the cosmology of today. It amalgamates the two great advances
on classical physics – relativity and quantum mechanics – and represents
physicists’ best attempt at describing the whole universe. Its metaphors are
accessible and comprehensible (especially in the era of
The most significant novelty of Big Bang theory is the most obvious. The
past is explicitly finite, and this is contained within the mathematics. There
just was no ‘
Those who identify the divine at work in Big Bang metaphysics have taken three different approaches. The most basic draw conclusions from analogies with Genesis, while Kalam cosmological arguments put a modern gloss of Aquinas’ old proofs. Anthropic arguments are most widespread, and also the most rooted in actual physics; they read purpose into the values of cosmological constants.
Appeals to Genesis are without question the weakest of the religious
responses to modern cosmology. They claim there exist
parallels between the biblical and modern accounts of the beginning of the
universe that lend the former scientific
An onus exists upon this argument to demonstrate much more than the ‘amazing
coincidence’ that Jewish mythology involves a creation myth, which by itself
proves nothing. An intelligent chicken, asked whether the universe had a
beginning, would stand a
Genesis cannot be understood as a historical cosmology, and those who
attempt this do the book a great disservice. It tells a mythic tale of the
Hebrew people, their descent from the first humans on Earth, and their special
relationship with the one true God. Of
Kalam cosmological arguments are much more sophisticated. They are philosophically refined and compelling deductions of God the creator from elementary metaphysical premises. Their chief modern advocate is William Lane Craig, who has condensed them to one concise form:
Once we have established that some entity exists apart from the universe, which is the cause of the universe, it is a small step to identifying that cause as God.[12] The argument is logically sound. If you accept premises 1 and 2, you are committed to the conclusion.
This proof is a direct descendent of the cosmological proofs of Thomas
Aquinas and Aristotle, and in many respects has not changed since their day.
What has changed is our situation with regard to the metaphysical assertions
about beginnings, existence, and causes. Aquinas and Aristotle relied on
intuition and rhetorical reasoning to
The Kalam argument is logically appealing, but before we deliver a scientific verdict, philosopher Adolf Grunbaum points out some problems. ‘Beginnings’ and ‘causes’ are not very precise terms, and we must be careful to pin them down. This is especially important when considering so unusual an event as the beginning of the universe, where our everyday knowledge may prove irrelevant.
Grunbaum considers two possibilities as regards
the beginning. We might assume that the moment ‘time =
If ‘time =
Craig maintains that objects, which exist for the first time at a certain
time, begin to exist there and then, regardless of times before this. But this
leaves him dangerously close to claiming that God began to exist at ‘time =
Grunbaum can then counter with his other
possibility. What if ‘time =
We have reached the end of a metaphysical argument and seem to have agreed that, whether or not there was a first instant at which the universe existed, it cannot have begun to exist. We would not be alone in finding such metaphysical rhetoric unsatisfying. Though they center their thoughts on Big Bang cosmology, neither Craig nor Grunbaum draw a single conclusion from the actual physics. The consequence is an exchange that symbolizes the problems besetting metaphysics throughout history. It has no authority from which to derive the meaning of its terms. What, exactly, is a ‘beginning’? What is a ‘cause’?
We should try to get somewhere with some physics – an actual quantum cosmology.
We look up at the stars with wonder. Our attempts at understanding and encompassing the vast whole of reality have evolved from primitive superstitions to complex theologies and sciences. Our sheer intuitive wonderment at the cosmos has driven every step. As each new discovery arrives, we pose new questions and new inspiration dawns. The twentieth century marks a watershed in our intellectual progress. We have harnessed fantastically microscopic particles and discovered the stuff of life itself – DNA. Last but not least, that grandest of pursuits – cosmology – the science of the universe, has become a reality.
The heavens always offer the quintessence of the other, untouchable, beyond; they form a metaphor for the Divine. We have patiently watched and recorded their motions, unable to do more than observe – until now. The relativistic and quantum revolutions of our time transform space into a laboratory for our enlightenment. Stars explode in supernovae of information and the Hubble telescope looks across time as well as space, back billions of years into the past.
Translators are now opening to us the message of these discoveries, but
already some thinkers draw spiritual inspiration. The word ‘design’ slips back
into the science of these circles. Though a cold and desolate place, the cosmos
is arranged specifically to provide a chance for biology – so some
astrophysicists increasingly say. The fundamental constants of the universe,
the masses of the fundamental particles and the relative strengths of the
forces between them, seem arranged to foster life on Earth. Lee Smolin calculates the likelihood that the universe would
develop the long-lived stars that life requires, given a random set of basic
constants. The answer: one chance in
What does this mean? Some commentators consider it meaningless because we don’t know how the fundamental constants were chosen. Rather, a mystery awaits investigation. In Smolin’s words: ‘a probability this tiny is not something we can let go unexplained. Luck will certainly not do here; we need a rational explanation of how something this unlikely turned out to be the case.’
We enter the territory of the anthropic principle:
life must exist in the universe. Numerous scholars cling to this idea to
promote their own intuitions about reality. Some hold that many ‘possible’
universes exist (a popular concept in science fiction). The existence of our
own world doesn’t surprise as long as more than
We should wonder why these life-
The unexplained harmonies and mysteries of the world provide tempting targets for those religious thinkers who seek to impose their conceptions of God upon the universe. They only prove that the universe is a mysterious and wonderful place. The worthwhile response studies the ‘design’ rather than shouts ‘Designer.’
Spiritual concerns are human concerns – such intuitions and sensations form a fact of daily life for billions. We seek to understand all our experiences and should draw upon all the insights of human endeavor. As the spiritual beliefs of scientists down the ages have shaped their work, so their discoveries should mold and inform our spiritual appreciation of the cosmos. We all play the same game of understanding.
[1]. There is a wealth of evidence correlating the rise of monarchical society with the rise of monotheism. Guy Swanson (1960), for example, examined fifty separate societies and found monotheism nearly always occurring in hierarchically inclined civilizations, and not otherwise.
[2]. By Aristotle.
[3]. Russell (1961: 45). Russell rightly observes that Thales, like so many of the philosophers to follow him, was ‘rash in (his) hypotheses,’ but this is not necessarily a bad thing so long as the hypotheses are critically examined.
[4]. Interestingly, Russell (1961) notes that Aquinas has adopted exactly the form of a proof used by Aristotle himself, but that in Aristotle the argument leads somewhat unexpectedly to 47 or 55 gods!
[5]. But not for long, perhaps. Modern physical discoveries refute the premises of these metaphysical arguments.
[6]. Copernicus cannot claim to have invented the heliocentric theory, however, because Aristarchus beat him by at least 1500 years. He proposed not only that the Earth rotates around the sun, but that it also rotates upon its own axis with a period of 24 hours. His ideas were not popular, and Plutarch suggests he may have been punished for them.
[7]. Galileo’s inertia was a circular force, probably in an attempt to account for the circular motions of the planets.
[8]. This assumes, of course, the absence of perceptible friction, which afflicts billiard balls but not atoms.
[9]. Burtt (1932: 256).
[10]. In
particular, there was a switch from barren, desert like primordial matter
described by writers after the exodus to the watery chaos of Babylonian
creation myth. The former makes more sense in dry Palestinian surroundings. The
latter developed in the flood plains of
[11]. Three step argument taken from Craig (1992).
[12]. Craig does not consider the possibility that the universe may cause itself. While this idea runs counter to intuition, it should be entertained. Quantum effects, for example, have been observed that can be explained by allowing backwards causation in time.
Barrow, John D., and Frank J. Tipler.
Blanchette, Oliva.
Bos, A. P.
Burtt, Edwin.
Cairns, David.
Craig, William L.
_________.
_________.
_________.
Drees, Willem B.
Farley, Edward.
Hallberg, Fred W.
Kress, Robert L.
Ling, Trevor.
Lowewenstein, John.
Oppy,
Graham.
Peach, John Vincent.
Polkinghorne, John.
Raschke, Carl.
Russell, Bertrand.
Smolin, Lee.
Swanson, Guy E.