David Berlinski - The Devil's Delusion

Einstein had hoped that the equations of his great theory would specify only one cosmic blueprint. In this he was destined to be disappointed. Months after he discovered one solution of the field equations, Willem de Sitter discovered another. In de Sitter’s universe, there is no matter whatsoever, the place looking rather like a dance hall in which the music can be heard but no dancers seen. Dismissed at the time, the de Sitter universe has recently enjoyed a revival in quantum cosmology. It is easy to describe, easy to find, and like the diligent Dutch themselves, endlessly useful.

In the 1920s, both Aleksandr Friedmann and Georges Lemaître discovered the solutions to the field equations that have dominated cosmology ever since, their work coming to amalgamate itself into a single denomination as Friedmann-Lemaître (FL) cosmology. To Einstein’s pained surprise, FL cosmology indicated that the universe was either expanding or contracting, a conclusion nicely in accord with Hubble’s observation but profoundly in conflict with models of the universe in which the universe remained resolutely unchanging.

Having been joined at the fulcrum of observation and theory, Big Bang cosmology has been confirmed by additional evidence, some of it astonishing. In 1963, the physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson observed what seemed to be the living remnants of the Big Bang—and after 14 billion years!—when in 1962 they detected, by means of a hum in their equipment, a signal in the night sky they could only explain as the remnants of the microwave radiation background left over from the Big Bang itself.

More than anything else, this observation, and the inference it provoked, persuaded physicists that the structure of Big Bang cosmology was anchored into fact.

The wheel had come full circle.

If both theory and evidence suggested that the universe had a beginning, it was natural for physicists to imagine that by tweaking the evidence and adjusting the theory, they could get rid of what they did not want. Perhaps the true and the good universe—the one without a beginning—might be reached by skirting the Big Bang singularity, or bouncing off it in some way? But in the mid-1960s, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking demonstrated that insofar as the backward contraction of the universe was controlled by the equations of general relativity, almost all lines of conveyance came to an end.

The singularity was inescapable.

This conclusion, while it encouraged the theologians, did little to ease physicists in their own minds, for while it strengthened the unwholesome conclusions that Big Bang cosmology had already established, it left a good deal else in a fog. In many ways, this was the worst of all possible worlds. Religious believers had emerged from their seminars well satisfied with what they could understand; the physicists themselves could understand nothing very well.

The fog that attended the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems (there is more than one) arose spontaneously whenever physicists tried to determine just what the singularity signified. At the singularity itself, a great many physical parameters zoom to infinity. Just what is one to make of infinite temperature? Or particles that are no distance from one another. The idea of a singularity, as the astronomer Joseph Silk observed, is “completely unacceptable as a physical description of the universe…. An infinitely dense universe [is] where the laws of physics, and even space and time, break down.”

Does the singularity describe a physical state of affairs or not?

Tell us.

If it does, the description is uninformative by virtue of being “completely unacceptable.” If it does not, the description is uninformative by virtue of being completely irrelevant. But if the description is either unacceptable or irrelevant, what reason is there to believe that the universe began in an initial singularity? Absent an initial singularity, what reason is there to believe that the universe began ?

If the universe did not begin, but had nonetheless only a finite temporal extent, what on earth are we to think at all?

It may seem that a conclusion has been reached that will appeal to physicists and religious believers alike: Nothing can be said. Those who believe in God and those who do not may resolve their differences by agreeing to say nothing. There is nonetheless a striking point at which Big Bang cosmology and traditional theological claims intersect. The universe has not proceeded from the everlasting to the everlasting. The cosmological beginning may be obscure, but the universe is finite in time. This is something that until the twentieth century was not known. When it became known, it astonished the community of physicists—and everyone else. If nothing else, the facts of Big Bang cosmology indicate that one objection to the argument that Thomas Aquinas offered is empirically unfounded: Causes in nature do come to an end. If science has shown that God does not exist, it has not been by appealing to Big Bang cosmology. The hypothesis of God’s existence and the facts of contemporary cosmology are consistent.

The uncertainties surrounding the origin of the universe have led certain writers to find comfort in a companionship with Aquinas they would not otherwise dream of enjoying. In writing about the first cause to which Aquinas appealed, and which he identified with God, Richard Dawkins argues that “it is more parsimonious to conjure up, say, a ‘Big Bang singularity,’ or some other physical concept as yet unknown” to account for the existence of the universe. The word parsimonious is meaningless in context: Whatever it might denote, how could it be measured? But conjure is the right verb, suggesting as it does both misdirection and inattention. Misdirection: The Big Bang singularity does not represent a physical concept, because it cannot be accommodated by a physical theory. It is a point at which physical theories give way. Inattention: The physical concept in which Dawkins has placed his confidence is something that is either infinite and inscrutable, or otherwise unknown. Men have come to faith on the basis of far less. This is, I suppose, not surprising. His atheism notwithstanding, Dawkins believes that he is a “deeply religious man.” He simply prefers an alien cult.

“Perhaps the best argument in favor of the thesis that the Big Bang supports theism,” the astrophysicist Christopher Isham has observed, “is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists. At times this has led to scientific ideas, such as continuous creation or an oscillating universe, being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his or her theory.”

THE COSMOLOGICAL argument just given covers familiar ground: God is a cause. But God enters the troubled human imagination in a second way, and that is as the answer to the question why the universe exists at all. Something deeper is at issue, and so something deeper is wanted. Even if we understood how the universe came into existence, the question why it exists and why it continues to exist would remain.

At some moment in the unrecoverable past, the battle-ready Hebrews understood that the scattered deities of the Near Eastern world were manifestations of a single God. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one!”