(Author: Honey Gluckman, Vol. 71, No. 3, Chanukah 2016)
On 16 April 1966, Time Magazine’s famous cover page appeared asking, with red letters on a black background, “IS GOD DEAD?” At that time this was the view of many scientists who stressed that reliable knowledge can only be gained through using the Scientific Method. This method involves observation, measurement, experimentation and forming and testing hypotheses until an acceptable theory is put forth, leading to an acceptable physical law. What would not be acceptable for scientists was knowledge that came from the authority of, and faith in, holy books and religious leaders.
However, a variety of factors have since enabled scientists to acquire knowledge of primordial times, going back hundreds of millions of years. These were the discoveries of ancient fossils of animals, plants and primitive life forms embedded in rocks and earth that were then dated using carbon 14. Other factors were the rise of new scientific theories by Einstein and others and the invention of more powerful telescopes which could unlock the mysteries of the Universe.
As a result of all these factors, many scientists have queried their unexamined belief that the Universe has always existed and have started to wonder whether it was indeed created. If this was so, there had to have been a Creator. This article will be looking at some of these scientist’s arguments for accepting God. (See Bibliography for their names and credentials, as at the time of writing).
I will be discussing six of their reasons, but in putting forward these arguments, I will not be explaining how various physical laws were discovered, nor elaborating on the details of these laws. (All such explanations can be found in the books listed in the Bibliography). Rather, I will concentrate only on the significance of the arguments for those scientists who now accept that there was a Creator.
(1) The Big Bang
There were two discoveries that led scientists to believe that the universe had not always existed, but had been created in what became known as the Big Bang. In the early decades of the 20th Cent u r y, Edwin Hubble and his assistant measured distances to galaxies and, noting that the light from these stars were red shifted, an indication of increasing distance, hypothesized that the galaxies were constantly moving further and further apart from each other. If this was the case, then at one stage in the much more distant past, they must have been incredibly closer together. As Gerald Schroeder put it (Genesis and the Big Bang, p65), “The present Universe … is the result of the Big Bang, a massive expansion from a single point … The universe was then the size of a speck of dust … and at that early time, all matter was concentrated into one minuscule core location … A Big Bang followed by an unending expansion of the Universe, tells us that there was a beginning in the form of energy which over eons of time was converted into tangible matter and that, at the minimum, there is a place for a Beginner.”
The belief in a Big Bang was later proved in 1964 when the American radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered a microwave radiation background that was constant and equal in all directions of the Universe. This fading radiation is what remains of the original heat from the explosive birth of the universe. Their discovery confirmed the prediction of the Big Bang theory. (You can hear this radiation background as static when you misplace a station on your radio or TV).
Schroeder then quotes the account of the Ramban (Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, aka Nachmanides), in his commentary on Genesis (written in the 13th Century!). Of the first seconds of the universe, the Ramban wrote, “At the briefest instant following creation, all the matter of the universe was concentrated in a very small space, no larger than a grain of mustard. The matter at this time was so thin, so intangible, that it did not have real substance. It did, however, have a potential to gain substance and form and to become tangible matter. From the initial concentration of this intangible substance in its minute location, the substance expanded, expanding the universe as it did so … from this initial act of creation … everything that has existed, or will ever exist, was, is, and will be formed” (ibid, p65).
How, Schroeder asked, was it possible for someone writing before the invention of powerful optical and radio telescopes and other sophisticated scientific instruments, to know all this? He concluded, “Nachmanides … was not in the business of discovering … All could be derived from the revelation associated with the Bible” (ibid, p68).
The first page of the Bible is an example of such a Revelation.
(2) Six Days of Creation
Both Schroeder and Andrew Parker discuss the eerie similarity between the Genesis account and the findings of science as regards the creation and development of the Universe, Earth and Life. This involved two issues, viz., how valid is six days of Creation and how accurate is the order of events as set out in Genesis?
Regarding the first question, scientists and others have always scoffed at the idea that the Universe was created in six days and put forward various alternative theories. Then Einstein happened. His Laws of Relativity showed that the closer some event approaches the speed of light, and the more it is affected by gravitational forces, the slower time moves for that event. Schroeder writes, “Not just the sensation of time, but the actuality of time’s passage changes in accord with the relative motion of the observers” (ibid, p47) and “…For when a single event is viewed from two frames of reference, a thousand or even a billion years in one can indeed pass for days in the other” (ibid, p34). In other words, when God created the Universe, for local time this took billions of years, but in God’s time, it took six days.
(3) The order of events as set out in Genesis
In order to prove how accurate this order was Andrew Parker, in his book The Genesis Enigma, analyzes the first page of the Bible. (Quotations in italics from all relevant parts of the Genesis account’ are found on page three of the book). In Chapter Two, he took Day One of the account and showed its scientific proof by listing the various stages from the Big Bang: the creation of energy, leading to the creation of fundamental particles, then atoms, then matter, then primordial gas, when darkness ruled upon the Earth, then groups of stars, then the formation of the Sun (around 5000 million years ago). “In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth and the Earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep… and God said, ‘Let there be light.’ ”
In Chapter Three, Parker then explains in detail how the oceans were formed as the Earth cooled sufficiently for water vapor in the atmosphere to liquefy into rain eventually forming seas, and how land areas eventually appeared (around 4200 million years ago). “And God said, ’let the waters under the heaven be gathered together under one place, and let the dry land appear.’”
Chapter Four describes how life began. The Genesis account states, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind.” Parker compares this to the scientific account of the beginnings of plant life, describing how single celled, photosynthetic organisms with the aid of the Sun, formed around 3900 million years ago. He comments, “It is also interesting that water was absolutely necessary for life to have appeared at all, and water was singled out in Genesis account’s previous stage” (ibid, p101).
The next stage in the Genesis account is strange since ‘light’ is once more mentioned. “Let there be lights…to divide the day from the night.” At the beginning of Chapter Five, Parker writes, “The author of Genesis recorded that God made two great lights; ‘the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night’. … But God had already covered the appearance of the sun … This fourth phase in the creation account cannot be referring to that, although it appears to invoke the sun again” (ibid, p102).
This is Parker’s own explanation for the repetition of this phenomenon: “The first image –forming eye evolved and the visual information used. The lights were turned on for animal behaviour and evolution (around 521 million years ago) …” (ibid, p3). This was a monumental step that changed life forever and lead to the Cambrian explosion, a period in geological time which lasted from 543 million to 490 million years ago, and which Parker, when this diversity of life increased immeasurably, called ‘evolution’s Big Bang: “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life … And God created the great whales , and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind and every winged fowl after his kind.” As scientific discovery has showed, at that time life existed in the oceans.
The sixth stage in the Creation account envisages great creatures making their way out of the sea: “the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing … and beast of the earth.” This too accords with the scientific account of the evolution of life. And then, finally, the creation of Man, the so called final species: “so God created man in his own image…”
Parker has shown that the evolution of our world and all life indeed reflects the order of events as set out in Genesis, viz.: the creation of the Sun; of the oceans; of the first plant life; the creation once more of light; the beginnings of life in the sea; living creatures coming out of the ocean; birds and finally, the creation of Man. He asks, “Could it be that the Creation Account on page one of Genesis was written as it is because that is how the sequence of events really happened? … But the astonishing point is that the Genesis account has no right to be correct. … Consider the identity of its writer – when and where he lived … no one (then) had access to the information or the techniques needed to deduce the scientific account” (p. xiii).
Parker ends his book with these words ( pp288-9):
The Aaronid priest who wrote the Bible’s first page, or Moses who may have given the ancient Israelites their creation account, originally lacked any interest in natural history …. The scientific method necessary to decipher the true account of how the universe formed and life evolved … was yet to manifest itself … The writer of the Bible’s first page … was without so much as a magnifying glass …. But the Genesis Enigma has told us that those enigmatic phrases … are scientifically accurate … The conclusion is that this page of the Bible could, perhaps more than any other, represent God’s hand in the Bible (Parker’s italics). The true account of how we came to exist may have been handed to humans by God”.10
(4) Fitness for Life
The phenomenon of the eerie fit between our world and its habitability for life is what has astonished and puzzled many scientists. As Fred Hoyle, a British cosmologist, stated (quoted in Davies), “Our bio-friendly universe looks like a fix or ‘put-up job’ …. as if a super intellect had been ‘monkeying’ with the laws of physics” (Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma, p3).
I will be discussing how this “super intellect” incredibly shortened the time needed to produce life; how the Earth was ‘fine-tuned’ to allow life to appear, both in the macro and micro fields; and how all life is regulated by the miracle of our genes.
a) Time Needed For Life to Evolve
Schroeder (p111) analyzes the fossil record, which shows that life appeared on Earth about 4.5 billion years ago and argues that this was not possible. He refers to Morowitz, a physicist, “who presented calculations of the time required for random chemical reactions to form just a single-celled bacterium (which) … exceeds not only the 4.5 billion year age of the Earth, but also the entire 15 billion age of the universe … The likelihood … of random processes producing life from a primordial bath of chemicals in the time available, is therefore improbable and cannot be explained by conventional physical laws ( p101).
b) Fine Tuning
As Flew states (There is a God, p115 ), “Virtually no major scientist today claims that fine tuning was purely a result of chance factors at work”. Here follow just a few examples, given by the writers in my Bibliography, of the fine tuning of basic physical laws.
The Big Bang produced slightly more matter than antimatter. When these both come together, they quickly annihilate. As Collins (The Language of God, p72) explains, “If there had been complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, the universe would have devolved into pure radiation and people, planets, stars and galaxies would never have come into existence.” He adds that without sufficient dark matter, which provides most of the gravitational pull needed to grow galaxies, our stars and planets could not have been formed. Moreover, if gravity was stronger or weaker, the orbits of these planets, stars and galaxies as they fly through space, would become unstable and Earth would spiral away from, or towards the Sun. End of life here.
Moreover, the Big Bang was just the right size. As Davies comments, “Our Universe has picked a happy compromise; it expands slowly enough to permit galaxies, stars and planets to form, but not so slowly as to risk rapid collapse” (pp61-2).
In addition, the Sun is just the right distance from the Earth to give us light, warmth and with it, food. Without our star, life would not be possible. But together with its life-giving properties, the Sun can also harm us with its destructive UV rays. So the ‘Super Intellect’ provided the Earth with an atmosphere which originated at the nuclear level and which eventually provided volcanoes with fuel rich in carbon dioxide. This gas generated plant life and through photosynthesis, oxygen was produced which together with other gases, formed the atmosphere under which we live and breathe. The miracle is that upon striking oxygen, the ultra–violet radiation from the Sun forms ozone, and it is ozone that absorbs this toxic radiation. Walker (An Ocean of Air, p153) elaborates that “Five billion tons of ozone float above our heads trapping the highest–energy ultraviolet rays before they make it down to the surface. The lowest energy ultra violet rays, the ones that our ozone frontier guards let through, are quite good for humans… But if the ones trapped were allowed to fall freely to the ground, they would be highly dangerous” in that they can… cause skin cancer and cataracts. Moreover, when the molten iron deep inside the core of the Earth moves about, it produces a magnetic field that diverts away from the Poles much more of the lethal UV rays, (which we see as the Northern Lights, Aurora Borealis) that would otherwise reach the Earth. Furthermore, Walker points out that without air in our atmosphere, there would be no way for sound to travel and we would be ‘living’ (if such was possible) on a silent planet.
Finally, water in its liquid state is essential and on Earth it is between 0 degrees and 100 degrees C. Compared with the incredibly huge range of temperatures in our solar system, anything far below or above would have prevented human life.
The most famous scientist of today, Stephen Hawking, stated, “The laws of science contain many fundamental numbers … The remarkable fact, is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted, to make possible the development of life”… He concludes, “The initial state of the Universe must have been very carefully chosen indeed … It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way except as an act of a God who intended to create beings like us” (A Brief History of Time, p125, 127).
c) Mathematical Order in the Universe
As Davies stated, “Modern scientists are mostly not religious, yet they still accept that an intelligent script underlies the workings of nature,” otherwise there would be no point in doing research. He added, “You would never guess by looking at the physical world that beneath the surface hubbub of natural phenomena lies an abstract order … Diverse physical systems making up the cosmos are linked deep down by a network of coded mathematical relationships. And science has uncovered the existence of this concealed mathematical domain” (The Goldilocks Enigma, p5). In other words, all the discovered laws of nature and of the different phenomena on our Earth and in the Universe can be summarized in a rationally precise manner through the language of Mathematics.
Flew, a one-time ardent atheist, wrote, “The important point is not merely that there are regularities in nature, but that these regularities are mathematically precise, universal and tied together … The question we should ask is how nature came packaged in this fashion. This is certainly the question that scientists from Newton to Einstein to Heisenberg have asked and answered. Their answer was the Mind of God” (There Is a God, p96). This, too, was the answer which Varghese (quoted in Flew) gave, “There can be rationality in the universe only if it is grounded in the ultimate rationality – an infinite mind” (ibid, p166). Collins asked. “Are these mathematical descriptions of reality signposts to some greater intelligence? Is mathematics, along with DNA, another language of God?” (The Language of God, p62).
d) The Improbability of DNA
Not only are the natural laws of the world and the universe based on mathematics, so too are the laws affecting our genetic makeup mathematically based. Schroeder (Genesis and the Big Bang, p113) explains DNA as follows: “The long helix-like molecules … DNA and RNA … are the basis of the genetic material of all living cells yet analyzed …. All forms of life have the same type of genetic code…a blade of grass, a bacterium or a human, all base their existence on the same 20 amino acids … This equivalence among all life forms is strong evidence for a single source of all life. It is not plausible that the similarity arose by chance….”
Collins asks, “How could a self-replicating information carrying molecule assemble spontaneously … DNA … seems an utterly improbable molecule to have ‘just happened’’(The Language of God, p91). For him, the answer was God, who spoke life into being through DNA language.
I conclude with a quote from Collins: “…the fact that the Universe had a beginning, that it obeys orderly laws expressed precisely with mathematics, and the existence of a remarkable series of ‘co-incidences’ that allows the laws of nature to support life … do point to an intelligent mind that could lie behind such precise and elegant principles” (ibid, 219). Hawking (A Brief History of Time, p175) refers to this mind as “The mind of God”.
It is such proven facts which led the astrophysicist Robert Jastrow, quoted in Smoot
(Wrinkles in Time: The Imprint of Creation, p291)to speak of the scientist’s nightmare: “He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries”.
Honey Gluckman is a former lecturer in the Department of Educational Studies at JCE, now the Education Faculty of Wits. Her subjects included Philosophy of Education, with an emphasis on Critical Analysis. She is a regular contributor to Jewish Affairs.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Collins, Francis, The Language of God (Simon and Schuster, UK Limited 2007). Collins is a leading American geneticist and leader of the Human Genome Project.
Davies, Paul, The Goldilocks Enigma(Allen Lane, 2006). Davies, who established the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarrie University, is an internationally acclaimed physicist, cosmologist and writer.
Flew, Antony, with Varghese, Roy Abraham, There is a God, (Harper Collins, 2007). Flew is the leading Analytic Philosopher of the 20th Century and one time notorious atheist. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Keele and also held positions at Oxford, Aberdeen and Reading universities.
Hawking, Stephen W, A Brief History of Time (Bantam Press, 1988). Hawking, one of the world’s leading cosmologists, holds the Newton Chair as Leucasian professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University.
Parker, Andrew, The Genesis Enigma, (Doubleday, 2009). Parker is an honorary research fellow at Oxford University and a research leader at the Natural History Museum.
Schroeder, Gerald, Genesis and the Big Bang, (Bantam, 1990). Schroeder was an applied physicist and theologian with doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He lectured and advised around the world and was published in numerous scholarly journals.
Schroeder, Gerald, Genesis and the Big Bang, (Bantam, 1990). Schroeder was an applied physicist and theologian with doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He lectured and advised around the world and was published in numerous scholarly journals.
Walker Gabrielle, An Ocean of Air, (Bloomsbury, 2007/8). Walker has a PhD in chemistry from Cambridge University. She has taught at both Cambridge and Princeton Universities, is a consultant to New Scientistand contributes to BBC radio and other media.
