Date: 27 September 2002
Subject: Cosmology

The New Scientist this month carried two interesting articles by cosmologists. On 7th September, Cambridge scientist John Barrow began his article:

"Why are we here? In one sense at least, it's just a cosmic accident. Our existence is possible only because a number of peculiar coincidences between the values of different constants of nature allow it. The speed of light, the strength of gravity and the charge of an electron, for example, fall within the narrow windows of opportunity that allow atoms to forma nd hold together. If their values were slightly different there would be no stars, no galaxies and, of course, no life. But nobody has any idea why the fundamental constants of nature have the numerical values that they do…"

John Barrow is an eminent scientist and stimulating thinker, but some of the assumptions he continues with are very questionable. Science, he proclaims, has taught us that

"we are not the centre of the universe. It doesn't need us, and it certainly doesn't exist to serve us. Copernicus was the first to see this with his – at the time – heretical deduction that the universe does not revolve around us."

John Barrow is neither a historian nor a theologian, and verges here on some simply wrong assumptions. No one I can possibly think of, Catholic or Lutheran, at the time of Copernicus, pronounced his ideas "heretical" – though many thought them absurd! Nor, moreover, was there ever any "orthodoxy" in the assumption that we were the only intelligent beings in the universe. With few exceptions the more biblically orientated tradition has tended to presume that God may have other sentient beings elsewhere in the universe (in spire of the various questions this involved). Christians have not generally assumed that the whole universe existed only to serve us – but they clearly have assumed that God created the physical universe with the arrival of sentient beings in mind. Has science somehow shown that this is not so? Barrow does not explain to us how, if this is what he thinks. The main point of his article is to suggest that the most fundamental and ultimate descriptions of reality will be in dimensionless and de-anthrocentred constants. Extra dimensions, he suggests, will ultimately "prove crucial in our quest to understand the constants of nature. Only when we know why these constants take the values they do will we be able to say we understand the universe." Don't hold your breath.

On 21st September an article came from Sydney cosmologist Paul Davies. Davies has said in the past that science is a surer road to God than traditional religion, though is not a Christian. His article looks at various big remaining mysteries in physics and cosmology – emphasising the surprisingly basic questions to which we presently do not have answers. Like Barrow, he suggests, for example, that space may have may dimensions – and it appears 3-dimensional only to us (an idea which would have please the philosopher Immanuel Kant who suggested in the 18th century that space was a property of human experience!). Davies final question concerns consciousness, and his optimism that physics ultimately can explain the relationship between thought and matter.

What should we make of such figures as Barrow and Davies? It would be a mistake, surely, for us to smugly claim "God" as the explanation for every mystery? Physics and cosmology probably do have a lot further to go in "explaining" our universe. The relationship between the basic constants of reality may well eventually turn out to be linked at some higher level. In that sense maybe one day science will "explain" why the constants take the values they do. What makes me profoundly sceptical, is the idea that physic will one day explain why there is anything rather than nothing - and why the properties of consciousness have the experiential nature that they do. Is reality ultimately personal or impersonal? Christians believe the former, and it is hard to see how any purely physical theory could offer serious evidence against it. If "design" – as the modern "intelligent design" movement seem to hold – is a part of science itself, then perhaps one day (like any scientific idea) it could be supplanted by a better scientific concept. But if we just don't see science as answering this kind of question, we may remain sceptical that science will ever offer an alternative.