Every culture has had myths about how the world began. In modern times, we are very technological and we have our scientific version. And it turns out that science's version is more incredible than any myth anyone ever made.
Then, last week, American scientists announced the discovery of radiation patterns in space that may mark the beginning of time itself. Said astrophysicist George Smoot, leader of the research team: "If you're religious, it's like looking at God. The order is so beautiful and the symmetry so beautiful that you think there is some design behind it."
Whatever caused the rapid expansion of the universe following the Big Bang--the same forces caused tiny ripples. Because if you try to do something too fast, you shake a little. God might be the designer.
--Maclean's, May 4, 1992 (the three above quotes are by George Smoot).
"It is a mystical experience, like a religious experience," Smoot said, reflecting the unscientific thoughts he had allowed himself in recent days, after the rigorous analysis of data was well behind him. "It really is like finding the driving mechanism for the universe, and isn't that what God is?" --(San Jose Mercury News, May 12, 1992. Story by John Noble Wilford of the New York Times.)
"By studying the way objects attract each other," Lange goes on, "we can come to the conclusion that there must be something [in the universe] that isn't normal matter, something that's some new form of matter. And any particle that exists--that God put in from the beginning--if it's stable, would still be around in great abundance.” --Andrew Lange (April 26, 1991 issue of the East Bay Express: "The Revenge of the WIMPS" an article by Steve Heimoff on current cosmology. This article centers on the U.C. Berkeley Lange Group, "a group of instructors, graduate students, and department assistants, organized under assistant professor of physics Andrew Lange.”)
The evolution of the universe from nothing is described by the big bang theory.
--astrophysicists Fang Li Zhi and Li Shu Xian, (Creation of the Universe, World Scientific, 1989)
What is the ultimate solution to the origin of the Universe? The answers provided by the astronomers are disconcerting and remarkable. Most remarkable of all is the fact that in science, as in the Bible, the world begins with an act of creation.
--astronomer Robert Jastrow, (Until the Sun Dies, 1977) p
To the contrary, "creation out of nothing" is a concept unique to Western religions. In traditional Western religious thought, the conception of a creator of the world is a conception of God. Indeed, creation of the world "out of nothing" is the ultimate religious statement because God is the only actor....
--Rev. Bill McLean, et al., Plaintiffs, v. The Arkansas Board of Education, et al., Defendants. No. LR C 81 322., United States District Court, E.D. Arkansas, W.D., January 5, 1982.
Concepts concerning...a supreme being of some sort are manifestly religious....These concepts do not shed that religiosity merely because they are presented as philosophy or as a science... Malnak v. Yogi, 440 F.Supp. 1284, 1322 (D.N.J. 1977); aff’d per curiam, 592 F.2d 197 (3d Cir. 1979).
Mr. Wouk also raises an interesting issue regarding creationism. My complaint that fundamentalist creationism is inspired by big bang creationism (Physics Today, April 1983) was echoed recently by John Maddox, who writes in his August 10, 1989, Nature editorial, "Creationists and those of similar persuasions seeking support for their opinions have ample justification in the doctrine of the Big Bang”. --Anthony Peratt (The Sciences, July/August 1990)
The Astronomy Book Club interviews the author of The Mind of God, the book by Professor Paul Davies:
Q: At one point in THE MIND OF GOD you ask, "If we can never get a handle on the laws [of nature] except through their manifestation in physical phenomena, what right have we got to attribute to them an independent [transcendent] existence?" What's the answer?
A: It's clear that at a certain point one has to take a metaphysical position. We're never going to tell from our investigations of the world whether these laws have an independent existence or not. But if the laws don't have an independent existence, then we can never appeal to them to explain how the Universe came into existence, because it's only if there are transcendent, independent laws capable of bringing the Universe into being and sustaining its existence through time that we can even conceive of an explanation for the origin of the Universe.
It is pretty transparent that Davies’ "transcendent, independent laws" are his words for God. p
