May 19, 1999
Hubble discoveries force
science, religion to talk again
___By Karen Long
___Religion News Service
___WASHINGTON (RNS)-- Those two old war-horses, science and religion, are playing high-profile footsie again.
___Prominent theologians and physicists converged on the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History for three days last month to argue whether the newest cosmology--fresh off the Hubble Telescope--adds heft to the arguments that God does exist.
___"We have a world shot through with signs of a divine mind and purpose," said John Polkinghorne, a renowned particle physicist. "Science itself is possible because the physicalworld is so beautifully designed."
___Even as Polkinghorne squared off to debate Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, who looks at the same physics and sees a cold and impersonal universe, astronomers in California were announcing a trio of planets orbiting the star Upsilon Andromedae, 44 light years from Earth and visible with the naked eye.
___The discovery "implies that planets can form more easily than we ever imagined, and that our Milky Way is teeming with planetary systems," said astronomer Debra Fischer of San Francisco State University. This and other findings, like last year's revelation that the moons of Jupiter probably hold liquid water, are ushering in a golden era of cosmology with profound implications for the place of both God and humanity in the universe.
___"Today, data is flowing in so fast from new telescopes and other scientific instruments that the question is whether a single one of the current (cosmology) theories can survive," said Joel Primack, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of the conveners on the conference at the Smithsonian. "Does this have broader implications? Does this matter to people as people? Most of us cosmologists talk about this amongst ourselves, but not publicly. This conference is an attempt to start."
___Asked if they believe in God, many astronomers become shy. Primack joked that he is Jewish, so if God exists, he knows there is just one. Polkinghorne, however, was so moved by the religious implications of his life's work that he resigned his professorship in mathematical physics in late middle age and became an Anglican priest.
___One reason is the importance of abstract mathematics in describing physical reality, a coincidence that even Weinberg concedes is spooky. For example pi, the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter first calculated by the ancient Greeks, turns out to be important in equations describing light and subatomic particles that have no obvious connections to circles.
___"This is a very deep metaphysical question," Polkinghorne said. The fact that mathematics, which springs from the minds of human beings, is so exquisitely fitted to the physical facts of the universe tells him human consciousness seems fined-tuned for the mysteries of creation.
___Of course, many scientists find these discussions appalling. Harvard paleobiologist Stephen Jay Gould has just written a book arguing that science and religion should keep to their separate corners: science seeking truth through doubt and its experimental method, religion from a core of faith.
___But those mixing up the two are gaining ground. Gould is president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which spent $175,000 to host the Smithsonian conference and where Robert John Russell, a Ph.D in physics at the Graduate Theological Union-Berkeley, dismissed Gould's position as silly.
___"Science is one of the most important ways to rid religion of superstition," Russell said, paraphrasing Pope John Paul II. "And science needs religion to rid itself of idolatry. And humanity needs both."
___From Boston to Berkeley, theologians intrigued with science and scientists unwilling to leave their metaphysical questions at the laboratory door have put their heads together. Johns Hopkins University-trained chemist Barbara Smith-Moran co-founded the Center for Faith and Science Exchange in Boston, where she gives religious leaders a two-week immersion experience in the laboratory to get over their "exaggerated esteem" for white lab coats.
___Likewise, she said, too many scientists treat religion as if theology has stood still since the Middle Ages, mocking God from an unnuanced Sunday school perspective.
___Cosmologist Stephen Hawking isn't one of them. He argues that even the beautiful equations in physics can't explain, after all, why there is something instead of nothing.
___He and others have noted that a remarkable feature of the early universe is that it seems to be exquisitely fine-tuned to the conditions needed for the emergence of life.
___ "If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size," he writes.
___This fine-tuning argument has attracted adherents like physics Nobel laureate Charles Townes.
___The argument states that if many of the constants of nature --like the mass of a proton or the strength of gravity--had been almost infinitesimally different, then the stars would not have formed, atoms would not hold together and life would not have been possible.
___ "The more we learn of the laws of physics, the more it looks like the universe is fine-tuned, that is to say that the universe is designed and the Creator created it," said Astronomer Sandra Faber, who uses the Hubble scope to study the centers of galaxies. "I do think these ideas, ideas in cosmology, are capable of transforming human behavior. I just hope we do it in time to save ourselves" from extinction.
___Weinberg, however, used his deep baritone to besmirch such arguments as wishful dithering after a God akin to the one painted on the Sistine chapel.
___"The universe is described by impersonal laws," he said. "We don't see any departures from the natural order. We don't see miracles, no burning bush, no empty tomb, no angel dictating the Koran to Mohammed. In fact, the theologians I talk to seem embarrassed by the idea of miracles."
___Weinberg believes some physicists indulge a bad habit of renaming the laws of nature as God when most of humanity conceive of a deity who intervenes in human affairs. And he argues science is better equipped to explain the world than theologians, who only offer the need for free will to grapple with the busy efficiency of evil.
___"It seems unfair that all my relatives were murdered to provide free will for the Germans," said Weinberg, whose cousins were killed in the Holocaust. "And what of cancer? What of that? Is that free will for tumors?"
___Theologians listening agreed the idea that a benevolent God would allow evil in the world was a critical problem. But they said this problem is perhaps too big even for a conference that both quoted Genesis and began with three minutes of astonishing film from the Hubble deep field survey showing innumerable galaxies thinning out at the farthest distances from Earth.
___"Planets now being discovered are being discovered around metal-rich stars, noted Astronomer Sandra Faber, who uses the Hubble scope to study the centers of galaxies. "And it turns out our sun was a very metal-rich star for reasons we don't understand, maybe a supernovae in the vicinity. Now, we are seeing younger, metal-rich stars forming. Because it took billions of years for life to evolve here, it may be that we are forerunners on Earth, that we are pioneers. If so, that would change our sense of our place in the cosmos."
___ "The more we learn of the laws of physics, the more it looks like the universe is fine-tuned, that is to say that the universe is designed and the Creator created it," said Astronomer Sandra Faber, who uses the Hubble scope to study the centers of galaxies. "I do think these ideas, ideas in cosmology, are capable of transforming human behavior. I just hope we do it in time to save ourselves" from extinction.
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