Evidence from the Size of the Universe

We’ve already discussed the vastness of the universe earlier in this chapter. We noted that the most distant galaxies are over 10 billion light years away, indicating that the light left these galaxies over 10 billion years ago in order to reach us today. The straightforward interpretation of these data is that the universe must be at least 10 billion years old.

While some people have argued that perhaps these galaxies aren’t really that far away, all of the methods used to measure distance agree that galaxies are billions, not thousands, of light years away. Others have argued that perhaps the light moved much faster when it first left these galaxies, so that it could reach us in much less time than 10 billion years. But this idea conflicts with other data that we have. As described in Chapter 3, ample evidence supports the idea that physical processes such as quantum mechanics and electromagnetism function the same way in distant galaxies as they do on earth. Those physical processes depend on the speed of light and would look very different if the speed of light had changed. Instead, they look the same in distant galaxies as they do on earth, indicating that the speed of light has been constant over the history of the universe.

Evidence from the Moon and Planets

Studies of the Moon and planets also give evidence for great age. Geologists can use some of the same methods to measure the age of rocks on the Moon, Venus, and Mars as they use on Earth. That’s because the asteroid collisions, volcanoes, and erosion they observe on Earth also occur on the Moon and planets. Photos taken by spacecraft while orbiting Mars show channels and gullies on the planet’s surface. Similar channels on Earth are usually made by flowing water. Yet there is no liquid water on the surface of Mars right now.

What does this have to do with age? It is evidence that Mars was much different in the past than it is today. The atmosphere used to be much thicker and warmer, similar to Earth’s, but now it is much colder and thinner. This dramatic change in planet-wide climate took millions or billions of years. Thus the rocks testify that the planet Mars must be at least this old.

Evidence from the Orbits of Asteroids

The orbits of asteroids also show evidence of a long history. When an asteroid is discovered, its path through the sky shows its orbit around the Sun. Once astronomers know the orbit of an asteroid they can calculate its orbit in the past and into the future to see whether it will hit the earth. By calculating the orbits backward, astronomers have found several asteroids that converged at the same location several million years ago. Apparently two larger asteroids collided at this spot and shattered into the smaller asteroids we see today. If God had created asteroids just a few thousand years ago, why would he have put them in orbits that suggest a collision several million years ago? The evidence clearly points to a long history for asteroids.

Evidence from Meteorites

Radiometric dating is used to study rocks on Earth as well as rocks from elsewhere in the solar system. Studies have been done on the rocks that astronauts brought back from the Moon and on asteroids that have fallen to Earth. As with Earth rocks, scientists use multiple radioactive isotopes to cross-check age measurements. At least three different isotopes have been used to measure the age of Moon rocks, and at least five different radioactive isotopes have been used to measure the age of meteorites. The results all agree: the oldest Moon rocks and asteroids are 4.6 billion years old. This is our best measure of the age of the solar system as a whole. The universe itself must be at least this old.

Evidence from Star Clusters

Another important measure of age in the universe comes from star clusters. Because all stars in a star cluster form in the same nebula at about the same time, they all have about the same “birthday.” But they don’t all have the same lifespan. High-mass stars burn bright and fast like a “flash in the pan,” while low-mass stars burn slowly and steadily. Consider how this will look in a star cluster. A cluster starts with many stars with the same birthday but of all different masses. Over time the high-mass stars die off first, leaving behind the low-mass stars. This means that if many high-mass stars are present, the cluster must be young because they haven’t burned out yet. If most of the stars are low-mass, the cluster must be old. Careful studies of star clusters show that some clusters are younger and some are older, with the oldest ones having an age of about 12 billion years.

Multiple Lines of Evidence

The most distant galaxies, the planets and asteroids of our own solar system, and the oldest star clusters all are several billion years old. Astronomers have many different methods for measuring the age of various objects, and they all support ages of billions of years, not thousands. Even if the assumptions of one or two methods were faulty, it is highly unlikely that all of the methods would be affected. Like the geologists in the 1700s, astronomers today have found multiple lines of evidence against a young earth and young universe.

It may seem as though we are once again describing a conflict between science and theology. Scientific results that indicate great age do conflict with the Young-Earth Interpretation of Genesis 1 discussed in chapter 5. But remember that in chapters 5 and 6 we presented many other interpretations of Genesis 1; several of these are not in conflict with the great age found in the book of nature. In chapter 6 we also explained why we believe that the best biblical scholarship, quite independent of modern science, indicates that Genesis 1 was never meant to convey scientific information to the original audience. Its intent for the first listeners, and for us, is to teach the who and why of creation, not the how and when. Taken in this context, there is no conflict between Genesis 1 and the astronomical evidence for great age.

For background on related topics (like the reliability of historical science and interpretations of Genesis), see previous excerpts from this series.

Excerpt from Chapter 7 of Origins: Christian Perspectives on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (Grand Rapids, MI: Faith Alive Christian Resources), 2011. Reprinted with permission. To purchase a copy of the book or e-book, call 1-800-333-8300 or visit www.faithaliveresources.org.

Want a free copy of Origins?  For a limited time, donations of $50 or more will receive a  copy of the book! Plus, from now through April, your gift will be doubled thanks to a matching grant from a generous donor. You can learn more here.

Belief in God in an Age of Science

Introducing John Polkinghorne

An Englishman of Cornish descent, John Polkinghorne was born in 1930 in the coastal town of Weston-super-Mare, southwest of Bristol in North Somerset. Although his parents had three children, an older sister died in infancy and his older brother, who served in the RAF Coastal Command during World War II, died when his plane was lost over the North Atlantic on a stormy night in 1942. Effectively an only child from that point on, his family nurtured him in their Christian faith, leading him to say a few years ago, “I cannot recall a time when I was not in some real way a member of the worshipping and believing community of the Church.”  (From Physicist to Priest, p. 7)

At the same time, his gift for mathematics did not go unnoticed, resulting in several years of study at Trinity College, Cambridge (where Isaac Newton had lived and worked in the seventeenth century). As an undergraduate, Polkinghorne studied applied math rather than pure math, a typical choice for someone interested in physics. There, he formed a close friendship with a classmate, Michael Atiyah, who would be best man at his marriage in 1955 to another mathematics student, the late Ruth (Martin) Polkinghorne. Later knighted, Sir Michael was President of the Royal Society in the early 1990s, the same period when Polkinghorne was president of Queen’s College, Cambridge.

​Sir Michael Atiyah (Source)

Polkinghorne was particularly inspired by the course in quantum physics taught by Paul Dirac, whom he has described as “undoubtedly the greatest British theoretical physicist of the twentieth century,” an opinion with which it is hard to disagree. For Polkinghorne, Dirac’s lectures were simply unforgettable: “so profound was the material, and so closely structured was the argument, that one was carried along enthralled by the experience.” (From Physicist to Priest, p. 26)

Paul Dirac (Source)

Remaining at Cambridge for graduate study, Polkinghorne worked under the Pakistani physicist, Abdus Salam, who later became the first Islamic scientist to win the Nobel Prize, which he shared with Americans Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for contributions to unifying the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force. Then he did postdoctoral work at Caltech with Murray Gell-Mann, another future Nobel laureate for his work on quark theory, and attended the famous lectures by yet another future Nobel laureate, the late Richard Feynman.

After Caltech, Polkinghorne taught briefly at Edinburgh before returning to Cambridge, where he was soon elected to a new professorship in mathematical physics. Quantum mechanics (QM) is his specialty; his writings on both QM and its interaction with theological ideas are numerous. His book, The Quantum World, has sold more than 100,000 copies, and when Oxford University Press wanted a book on this topic for their highly successful series, “A Very Short Introduction,” it was Polkinghorne who wrote it. His former students include Nobel laureate Brian Josephson, “the most precociously brilliant undergraduate that I ever taught,” and Martin Rees, who was until recently President of the Royal Society.

Although Polkinghorne has never won a Nobel Prize, in 1974 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, the highest honor in British science. Three years later, at the top of his scientific career at age 46, he astonished his colleagues by announcing a decision to pursue ordination as an Anglican priest; two years later, he resigned his chair at Cambridge to enter seminary. Partly, he felt played out. As a former physics student myself, I do not find his diagnosis hard to accept: “In mathematically based subjects you do not get better as you get older. Somehow one needs mental agility more than accumulated experience, and it becomes progressively harder for an old dog to learn new tricks. It is unlikely that most people do their best work before they are 25, but most do before they are 45.” Or, to put it more succinctly, “I simply felt that I had done my little bit for particle theory and the time had come to do something else.” (From Physicist to Priest, p. 71)

Nevertheless, he also felt a genuine call to the ministry, for “Christianity has always been central to my life” and ‘becoming a minister of word and sacrament would be a privileged vocation that held out the possibility of deep satisfaction.” (From Physicist to Priest, p. 73) After seminary, Polkinghorne served as a parish priest for many years and later as canon theologian of Liverpool Cathedral. He was knighted in 1997—although, as an ordained minister, he declines to use the title, “Sir John Polkinghorne”—and was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2002. It has been altogether a life well lived for the kingdom of God.

Looking Ahead

I’ll return in about two weeks with a summary of Polkinghorne’s basic attitudes toward science and religion, which (in his view) have a “cousinly” relationship. In the meantime, readers are invited to read Zeeya Merali’s essay, “The Priest-Physicist Who Would Marry Science to Religion,” from the March 2011 issue of Discover magazine, and “An interview with John Polkinghorne,” by philosopher Paul Fitzgerald.

References

John Polkinghorne, From Physicist to Priest: An Autobiography (2008).

It’s true that physics sounds scary to many people, and it can indeed be a difficult topic to learn. Yet I’ve always loved physics (my degrees are in physics rather than astronomy), because of the way that mathematical equations can describe and predict so much of what we see in the world around us. One reason I got into astrophysics is because the universe contains so many bizarre situations that we can’t reproduce on earth, like ultracold, or extremely high density, or extremely high magnetic fields. It’s a fun challenge to figure out which physical process will be the most important when the situation is so dissimilar to everyday experience. But if the word “physics” makes you shrink in distaste or fear, don’t worry. For the rest of this article, we’ll focus on a more friendly topic: astronomy.

In the last decade or two, our knowledge of the universe has grown dramatically as many new telescopes and spacecraft have come online. In this essay, I’ve selected some of my favorite recent astronomy photographs to share with you. As a professional astronomer and a Christian, I feel God has called me to share these wonders with the Church. Many times, these new discoveries are presented without any mention of God, and sometimes in a context of overt atheism. I want to share these things with you in a Christian context, with God as their creator.

The Milky Way

Have you ever seen the Milky Way? If you live in a rural area, you may have seen it many times. If not, it may have been a dramatic surprise when you first saw it while camping or traveling. On a clear night out in the country, the sky is strewn with brilliant stars—many more stars than you can see under city lights.The faintest stars form a creamy, smoky band from horizon to horizon. Our galaxy contains billions of stars, and thousands of those stars are visible to the naked eye. The stars appear in a band across the sky because we are viewing our galaxy edge-on, like looking at the edge of a dinner plate.

When David looked up at the night sky over Israel thousands of years ago, he may have seen the Milky Way, or a comet, or simply the brilliance of the full moon. Whatever the sky looked like that night, it inspired him to sing:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. (Ps. 19:1-4a)

The heavens are displaying the glory of God for all people to hear, proclaiming their message to people of every language, tribe, and nation. Just about anyone who looks up at the night sky feels a sense of wonder. Yet as Christians, we feel more than a vague sense of awe; we know the Creator of the heavens personally, as our own loving Father.

The heavens declare more than God’s glory. The universe is God’s revelation of himself to us, and teaches us about his character. As the Belgic Confession says about “The Means by Which We Know God,”

We know him by two means: First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20. Second, he makes himself known to us more openly by his holy and divine Word, as much as we need in this life, for his glory and for the salvation of his own. (Article 2)

The natural world teaches us about God’s glory, power, divinity, faithfulness, extravagance, immensity, love, and other attributes. God’s special revelation in scripture is our primary place to learn of God’s character (Ps. 19 goes on to talk about special revelation in vs. 7), but the natural world can bring the message to our senses in a powerful way beyond mere words on a page. The Holy Spirit can use the natural world to get the message past our hardened or weary hearts. Nature illustrates these attributes in ways that enlarge our imaginations to appreciate afresh the glory of God.

The Sun

The Solar Dynamics Observatory was launched into space in 2010, the latest of several spacecraft to photograph the sun in detail. In Figure 2, the upper photo shows the face of the sun with a sprinkling of sunspots. The sun is powered by nuclear fusion reactions deep in its core which heat the hydrogen and helium gas till it glows. A sunspot is a place on the sun’s surface where the gasses are a bit cooler than the surrounding area, so that it glows less brightly and appears dark.

The lower photo in Figure 2 was taken the same day, but in X-ray light. X-rays are invisible to our eyes, but you have experienced them at the dentist’s office. There, the X-rays are produced by a machine, travel through the mouth, and are detected by film to reveal an image of your teeth. In this image, X-rays are produced by the sun, travel to the Solar Dynamics Observatory, and are detected by a camera to show an image of the sun. In X-rays, the sunspots are the brightest part of the image, not the faintest. If you look at the sunspot on the left edge, you can see bands of particles rising out of the sunspot in a looping path above the sun’s surface and falling back down on it. As the particles follow lines of magnetic field, they emit X-rays. The loops you see are not small—they are about the size of planet Earth! Because of modern spacecraft, telescopes, and cameras, we can see so much more in the heavens than what is visible to the naked eye. Thus, we are seeing more of what the heavens have to declare about God. In Psalm 19, David goes on to describe the sun:

In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun. It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, like a champion rejoicing to run his course. It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other; nothing is deprived of its warmth. (vs. 4b-6)

If David had lived today, maybe he would have written about other properties of the sun, like the power of God as seen in nuclear reactions and looping magnetic fields. As it is, he makes two important points. One is the universal warmth of the sun, by which God provides for all life on earth. The other is the faithful path of the sun, day after day, unchanging year after year. In the book of Jeremiah, God promises his people that he will not break his covenant with them, any more than he would break his covenant with day and night and the fixed laws of heaven and earth (33:19-26). The sun is a persistent reminder, woven into our lives, of God’s faithfulness to his promises.

It has been widely reported that the moniker “God particle” was not its originator’s first choice. Still, Leon Lederman, director emeritus of Fermilab and Nobel laureate for neutrino research, did accept the nickname “God particle” because the particle is “so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive.” “God particle” was quickly accepted by the press and general public because it seemed an appropriate title for a particle theorized to give mass to all elementary matter particles and the force carrying W and Z bosons. Serving this mass-giving function since near the beginning of the universe, a Higgs field (more fundamental than the actual Higgs boson ) must necessarily exist everywhere in the universe and be unchanging. With an omnipresent and immutable field, analogies between the Higgs boson and God naturally developed within the press and the public—“God particle” became deeply rooted. Relatedly, the Higgs boson become an excellent source for theological analogies. (See for example this article.)

Nevertheless, as physicists seek to emphasize, neither the Higgs boson particle nor its field have religious properties. Thus, elementary particle physicists are not fond of the “God particle” appellation. In the opinion of Oliver Buchmueller, of CERN’s CMS group, calling the Higgs boson the “God particle is completely inappropriate. It’s not doing justice to the Higgs and what we think its role in the universe is. It has nothing to do with God“. As Pippa Wells, another CERN scientist expressed, “Calling [it] the God particle … confuses people about what we are trying to do at CERN”. (Source: Reuters)

One alternate name for the Higgs particle that is used within the physics community is the “BEH” particle. “BEH” stands for Brout–Englert–Higgs, three of the six authors of 1964 papers that first proposed a mechanism for giving mass to elementary particles. In addition to Peter Higgs, the five other authors are Robert Brout and Francois Englert, and Tom Kibble, C.R. Hagen, and Gerald Guralnik. The process for giving mass to particles is thus sometimes referred to not just as the Higgs mechanism, but as the Brout–Englert–Higgs–Hagen–Guralnik–Kibble (BEHHGK) mechanism. (Saying all six names a couple of times makes it obvious why we most often only call it the Higgs.)

But issues of naming aside, what is the Higgs and why is it so elusive? According to the Standard Model, the particles that compose matter (the quarks and leptons) are in a category called spin-1/2 particles. The force carrying particles (the photon, the W's, the Z, and the gluons) are spin-1 particles. What the physicists above proposed was the existence of a type of spinless, or spin-0 particle. Not only does the Higgs boson form its own class of particles, it also gives mass to itself and to all the other particles that have mass: to all of the leptons and quarks, and to the W's and Z bosons, but not photons or gluons. This set of relationships is shown in the image below, indicated by the lines connecting the Higgs to these other particles. There are no lines directly connecting the Higgs boson to photons and gluons because the Higgs boson does not interact with these force carrying particles and, thus, photons and gluons remain massless.

But the story of the Higgs particle actually begins with the associated Higgs field, an invisible field (something like a generalization of an electric field) that has a non-zero, constant value everywhere throughout the universe. This Higgs field continuously interacts with all matter particles and the W and Z force carrying particles. Matter and massive force particles are slowed down as they move through the Higgs field, just as are balls rolling through thick mud. The Higgs field is sometimes described as a “cosmic molasses”. Different particles interact with the Higgs field to varying degrees—those interacting more, are slowed down more, those interacting less are slowed down less. Slowing down more equates to acquiring more mass. If not for the Higgs field, all particles would be massless, zipping through the universe at the speed of light. The universe would be without structure—no galaxies, no plants, no life. Without the Higgs field, not even atoms could have formed.

It was theoretically possible for elementary particles to have mass without needing to acquire it through interaction with a Higgs-like field. However, as the standard model of elementary particles developed in the 1950’s and 1960’s, elementary particle theorists realized that if particles had their own innate mass, rather than acquiring it, many beautiful symmetries of particle interaction equations would be broken. To keep the beauty and symmetry in the theory was the essential reason the BEHHGK mechanism was developed, which immediately led to the prediction of Higgs bosons.

When there is enough external energy in a given volume, the Higgs field also produces Higgs bosons. But the Higgs bosons are very unstable and quickly decay. This is the process that enabled the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN. At CERN, protons are accelerated to high energies via electric fields and directed in circular paths via magnetic fields. The protons then collide and release large amounts of energy. When sufficient energy is released in a collision, the Higgs field can use this energy to produce Higgs bosons. The Higgs bosons quickly decay leaving evidence of their existence through particular combinations of leftover particles that they have decayed into. Among those predicted by the mathematics of the Standard model are the muons and electrons identified by the CERN experimenters. The image at the top shows the identities and paths of particles produced in one of the CERN proton-proton collisions whose results fit with what would be expected from the decay of a Higgs boson.

For a proton-proton collision at the CERN LHC, the above diagrams show both the dominant modes for creation of a Higgs with a mass around 125 GeV, and the two dominant decay channels (modes). The creation mechanism (shown schematically in the left half of each diagram above) involves virtual gluons, the carriers of the strong nuclear force (represented by squiggly purple lines) from the protons. The gluons fuse into a virtual top quark loop (medium blue triangle), which then emits a Higgs boson (squiggly yellow line). The top quark couples more strongly to the Higgs than any of the five other quarks, so the top quark contributes the dominant loop.

The Higgs boson then dominantly decays into either (i) 2 gamma ray photons (the squiggly green lines) via another intermediate virtual top quark loop or a virtual W gauge particle loop (dark blue triangle), or (ii) two Z0 gauge particles (squiggly dark blue lines), which each then decay into a lepton (specifically an electron or a muon)/anti-lepton pair (light blue lines).

The likely discovery of the Higgs boson, and its implied existence of the associated Higgs field, is an amazing success for CERN. Past research and experience at Fermilab and by elementary particle physicists throughout the world also contributed to the discovery. The Higgs boson was the remaining particle in the Standard Model of Particle Physics to be found. With it, the Standard Model is in some sense complete. (Nevertheless, many questions about the Standard Model still remain—many inspired once again by beauty and symmetry. In particular, several numeric values associated with particle masses and interactions could only be experimentally measured, as with the Higgs, and not predicted from the Standard Model.)

With the apparent success of these experiments and seeming confirmation that the physical universe is, indeed, reflected by the complex and beautiful mathematics of the Standard Model, the international physics community is eager to keep delving deeper into the structure of creation. In addition to trying to verify that the 125 GeV particle is, indeed, the Higgs spinless particle and not some more exotic, new particle, CERN physicists are simultaneously seeking to discover an entire new class of particles, resulting from a theorized symmetry called supersymmetry. Discovery of the associated particles, if they exist, will likely take a few more years. For these discoveries we can only wait in anticipation.

Updated July 12, 2012.

Judging from the flurry of headlines over the past week, one might be tempted to think that proof positive of God’s existence (or lack thereof) had just appeared out of a 27-km-tunnel buried beneath the Swiss-French border. This frenzy of news headlines and blog titles hailed the recent news that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has discovered a brand new particle of a mass of 125-126 GeV, which is assumed to be the Higgs boson, or the so-called “God particle.” The discovery of the Higgs boson would certainly be a breakthrough for particle physics and cosmology, but would such a finding also radically redefine theology’s understanding of God or challenge the existence of such a deity? Is there actually any theological or religious significance in Higgs physics at all?

The short answer is “no,” which becomes apparent when one considers the widely-reported story of how it got named. In 1993, Nobel Laureate physicist Leon Lederman, along with science writer Dick Teresi, wrote a book detailing the history of particle physics starting with Pre-Socratic Greek philosophy Democritus and culminating with the hunt for the Higgs boson. Until this latest discovery, the Higgs boson was the elusive final missing piece of the puzzle known as the Standard Model—a collection of the fundamental particles that constitute our universe and the complex and mathematically-sophisticated relationships between them. Considering how incredibly difficult finding the Higgs boson was proving to be, Lederman wanted to name the book after that “goddamn particle,” according to some of his collaborators. His editor, however, would not allow it and so the name was shortened to “The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What is the Question?” And thus ‘the God particle’ was born, carrying with it more than enough social baggage for such a miniscule particle.

Particle physicist Dr. Zosia Krusberg (at right) is visiting assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Vassar College and thinks “the term ‘god particle’ is unfortunate. The Higgs boson is no more (or less) divine or spiritually significant than any other elementary particle within the standard model of particle physics.” It may be fundamental to explaining one of the most basic characteristics of the universe—namely the existence of matter and mass in addition to energy—but “it is no more (or less) important than any other physics principle underlying the Standard Model.”

Last week’s discovery was monumental in that it may have finally provided experimental evidence for the Higgs Mechanism and defined the specific energy of the resulting Higgs boson, but even this “breakthrough” for particle physics leaves many scientific questions unresolved. Finding the Higgs boson completes the Standard Model, but it does not do away with many other questions and shortcomings of the current state of particle physics, such as the constituent particles of dark matter, a quantum theory of gravity, and other “mathematically subtle problems.” Not to mention that there is still significant work to be done to determine the exact nature of this newly-found particle. According to Dr. Krusberg, this particle might behave just as the Standard Model predicts or it could instead be “a Higgs-like particle that will serve as a gateway into explorations of physics beyond the Standard Model." Krusberg continued, “And I guarantee that it is this latter scenario that most of us are hoping for: physicists love nothing more than discovering the shortcomings of their theories, since this is the first step toward more fundamental theories with even more predictive power!”

No, finding the Higgs boson does not answer all the questions of particle physics, much less lend insight into the existence (or not) of God. For that reason, Dr. Krusberg (like most physicists) bemoans the term ‘God particle’ and insists, “There really is nothing either literally or metaphorically god-like about the Higgs boson.” Indeed, one writer for the British journal The Guardian reached such a point of frustration about the name that he ran a competition for alternatives. The winner was “the champagne flute boson,” ostensibly because the bottom of a champagne bottle is an excellent and oft-used demonstration of the energy potential of the Higgs Mechanism. Or then again, perhaps it is simply because physicists thought that finally finding this shy particle would call for some of the bubbly.

On the other hand, some science writers and scientists can appreciate the ‘educational benefits’ of such a mysterious and controversial name because it attracts the attention of the general public and puts a relatable face on an extremely esoteric physics concept. Krusberg herself admits that “People are naturally drawn to the mysterious and the controversial, providing educators with great teaching opportunities.” But she worries about the larger social implications involved in “mixing the vernacular of physics and spirituality,” not least because such uncritical mixing can lead the non-scientific community to draw conclusions about the authority and reach of science that are not justified.

Understanding that the Higgs boson is not the literal stuff of God and that it does not prove or disprove God’s existence (as the name seems to suggest) extinguishes the fire under any sort of religious outcry. But this does not mean that its discovery is irrelevant to the discussion of science and faith, nor to the Christian community as a whole. As Dr. Krusberg remarks, “The recent discovery of [this] new boson at the LHC perfectly embodies the scientific process at its best (and thereby illustrates to the public why and how science works).” Scientific exploration of nature is not a fool-proof endeavor; healthy skepticism and accountability to a wide community of other researchers are absolutely critical to its success. But such evidence of the power and finesse of well-executed science as we saw last week is a testament to our ability to explore and understand the ‘how’ of the universe. God has equipped humanity with the desire, the intellectual abilities, and the collective will to recognize and explore the cosmic order and beauty of his creation. God has made our home knowable, and has given us the tools and capacities by which to know it.

At left, Cern researchers present their findings to a few hundred of their colleagues in Melbourne, Australia. Image © 2012 CERN

It is valuable, then, for the Christian community to understand and appreciate how science works, in part to recognize that there are many instances in which science and the church work in tandem in order to better understand and better serve the world. But I think there is something else we can draw from the story of the Higgs boson, too. The nickname ‘the God particle’ has touched nerves in religious communities because it implies that science has the ability to prove or disprove divine existence by physical means. Even though the physics community is by no means claiming insight into the divine, it is sometimes assumed by the religious community that scientists view their work as chipping away at God’s existence when they begin to understand something that was previously unknown, or known only “by faith” in esoteric theories and models.

And yet, regardless of motives or metaphysical interpretations, perhaps physicists' search for the Higgs boson is in fact an apt picture of our own search for God. How many times have we stared up at the starry ceiling in times of crisis and prayed fervently for some kind of sign from God to assure us of his presence? And how many times has that much-desired evidence appeared only in retrospect, when we look back to see God’s hand faithfully and elegantly working in ways inscrutable at the time? It took a community of physicists to discern the presence of the Higgs boson. But even so, they could only do so after the fact from the cascade of particle decays it sparked; they could not observe the particle itself directly. In a similar way, though we often do not see the working of God directly, “in the moment,” we still trust in his presence and providence, often depending on friends, family and the community of the church to help us see his hand in hindsight.

So while the discovery of the Higgs boson does not itself explain God, we rejoice at the subtle yet striking new insight we have into God’s creative genius via the Higgs boson and at the way God gives evidence of his faithfulness in the ordered creation itself. Perhaps, however, the greatest insight we can glean from this breakthrough is an analogy for the way God calls us to seek him and find him together, in the community of those who follow his son.

Tomorrow, Baylor University physicist Gerald Cleaver answers the question, "What is the Higgs boson?"

The astronomy community is particularly interested in this event because exoplanets throughout the Milky Way galaxy regularly transit their parent stars in just the same way. This local example will allow astronomers to test and refine techniques used to determine the composition of these exoplanets' atmospheres, providing insight into whether these distant planets could possibly harbor life.

As Venus begins to cross in front of the disk of the Sun, Venus's atmosphere will refract the Sun's light, illuminating the backlit portion of the planet's atmosphere. Telescopes on the ground and in orbit will be trained on this thin arc of atmosphere lit up by the Sun. Astronomers will use spectrometers to break the light up into its constituent colors, from which they can determine the chemical composition of our over-heated sister planet's atmosphere. Once perfected, this same technique can be used to examine the atmospheres of planets far beyond our own solar system, offering us one of our best clues as to the habitability of these distant worlds.

Not only is this process of discovery exciting for natural science, but it has profound theological ramifications as well. Surely a God capable of orchestrating both the majestic swirls of a spiral galaxy and the intricate language of DNA could bring forth life where and when He chooses, but only now are we on the verge of being able to answer the age-old question: “Did God confine His creative life-giving actions to our own planet, or does His abundant fertility extent far beyond our limited experience?”

In 1882, William Harkness, the Director of the U.S. Naval Observatory, was one of two astronomers to determine from the transit of Venus the distance from Earth to the Sun. Just as previous viewers could never have imagined calibrating the scale of the solar system from such an event, Harkness could not predict its importance in 2004 and 2012 (the most recent Venus transits). As we look to the future, we can hardly imagine what new frontiers the next Venus transit of 2117 will find us exploring.

The image above shows Venus on the eastern limb of the Sun during the 2004 transit. As described in Tucker's essay, the faint ring around the planet comes from the scattering of light through its atmosphere, which allows some sunlight to show around the edge of the otherwise dark planetary disk. The faint glow on the disk is an effect of the TRACE telescope through which the image was captured. For more on the historical significance of the transits of Venus (including the voyage of Captain James Cook), see this article from NASA, which also includes links to several live webcasts of today's transit.

I ask the question, “Why is the universe so special?” Now scientists don’t like things to be special; we like things to be general, and our natural anticipation would have been that the universe is just a common or garden specimen of what a universe might be like.

But we’ve come to understand a lot about the history of the universe. We know that our universe started 13.7 billion years ago, and it started extremely simple, just an almost uniformly expanding ball of energy, about the simplest physical system you could possibly think about. But a world that started so simple has of course become rich and complex. With you and me, in fact, the most remarkable and complex consequences are its history, at least of which we are aware. The human brain is far and away the most complicated physical system we have ever encountered anywhere in our exploration of the universe.

That fact itself might suggest that something has been going on in cosmic history rather than just one thing after another. But we’ve also come to understand many of the processes by which this rich fruitfulness has come to birth. As we’ve come to understand these, we’ve come to see that though these processes are of course evolving processes, they took long periods of time – the universe was 10 billion years old before any form of life appeared in it, at least as far as we know anyway – and life of our complexity only appeared yesterday.

Nevertheless, the universe is pregnant with life, pregnant with the possibility of life, essentially from the beginning onwards. By which I mean the given laws of nature had to take a very specific, very finely tuned form, if the universe was to have so fruitful a history.

That’s a very remarkable discovery, and let me give you some examples of why we believe that. If you’re going to have a fruitful universe, one of the first things you have to get right is that you have to have the right stars in the universe. The stars are going to have a very important role to play. First of all, you must have some stars that are going to be very long lived, live for billions of years, steadily burning, steadily producing energy which will enable the development of life on one of the encircling planets. We understand what makes stars burn in that sort of way very well, and it depends on a delicate balance between the strength of gravity and the strength of electromagnetism. Electromagnetism is the force that holds matter together. The seats on which you are sitting are held together by electromagnetism and in fact you are held together by electromagnetism.

If you alter that balance a little bit in one direction the stars will begin to burn intensely, furiously, just pouring out energy and they will only live a few million years rather than a few billion years. If you move it a little bit in the other direction they will burn so slowly they will be brown stars and they will not produce enough energy to fuel the development of life. So you have to have a very delicate finely tuned balance between the strength of gravity and the strength of electromagnetic forces in a fruitful universe.

Remember, science takes the laws of nature, takes the given strengths of gravity, the given strength of electromagnetism, uses that to explain processes in the world, how things happen, but it doesn’t explain where those laws of nature come from. They are just brute facts as far as science is concerned.

And the stars have another absolutely indispensible role to play. The stars are the place where the heavier elements essential for life are made in the interior nuclear furnaces. There are many elements that are necessary for life, of which carbon is perhaps the most essential. Carbon is the basis of the long chain molecules, which are the biochemical basis of life. The early universe only makes the simplest elements; it makes hydrogen and helium and it makes no carbon at all. Carbon only begins to be made when the universe, which started uniform, begins to condense and become lumpy and grainy with stars and galaxies. As the stars condense they heat up, nuclear processes begin again in their interiors. And it’s those nuclear processes in the stars that make carbon and the heavier elements. Every atom of carbon in your body was once inside a star. We are people of stardust made in the ashes of dead stars.

And that’s a very beautiful process that takes place in that sort of way. And one of the great triumphs of astrophysics and the second half of the 20th century was to unravel that process. One of the people who did some of the most important work on that was a senior colleague of mine in Cambridge called Fred Hoyle. And they were trying to figure out how to make carbon. They got helium, and if you can make three helium nuclei stick together that will produce carbon, but when you have something as small as a nucleus it is impossible to get three to stick together at one time, they’re just too small.

Ok, so let’s do it step by step. Stick two together gives you berylium. Helium 4 gives you beryllium-8, hope it stays around for a bit, another helium comes along, attaches itself, and bingo, you’ve got carbon-12. That’s the obvious thing to think about but it doesn’t work in the obvious way, and the reason it doesn’t work in the obvious way is that beryllium-8 is terribly unstable. It doesn’t oblige you by staying around long enough to catch that third helium, at least in an ordinary, straightforward way.

But Fred realized that it would be just possible for this to happen if there was a very large enhancement effect, in the trade we call it resonance, occurring in carbon at just the right energy, it has to be the right energy, which would enable that attachment process to catch that third helium much much more quickly that you might have thought, in fact so quickly that some of them would get caught before the beryllium-8 disappeared. It was a very good idea, and he must have felt pretty pleased with himself and he went off to just check in the nuclear data tables of this particular resonance’s energy levels, and it wasn’t in the tables, but he knew it must be there, he’s carbon based life like you and me.

So he rang up some friends in the States, a father and son team who were good experimentalists and he said, “Look, you missed something. There’s a resonance and energy level in carbon that you haven’t spotted, and I’ll tell you exactly where to look for it. I know exactly where this energy has got to be. You go look for it.” And they said, “No, no, we don’t want to do that, we have more interesting things to do.” But Fred was very determined and he bullied them into looking for it and they found it.

Now that’s a wonderful achievement, to predict an energy level in carbon on the basis of how it might have been made in the stars is a fantastic scientific achievement. But it’s more than that. Fred had a lifetime conviction of atheism, realized of course that if the laws of physics had been just a little bit different that resonance wouldn’t have been there, and the possibility of carbon-based life is too significant for it just to be a happy accident in his view, so he says in a Yorkshire accent that is beyond my power to imitate, he said that the universe is a put-up job. Fred didn’t like the word God, and so he said some Intelligent, capital “I” Intelligence, must have monkied with the laws of nature to make carbon production possible. What that could possibly be I don’t know, but the more sensible thing to say is that creation is ordained, that the laws of nature would be such, as to enable the fruitfulness of carbon-based life.

We’ll come back to evaluating that possibility in a minute, but before we do, let me give you two other examples of how specific, how special, our universe has to be for us to be able to be here today to think about. We live in a universe that is immensely big, beyond our powers to imagine really. There are a hundred thousand million stars in our galaxy in the Milky Way, of which our sun is just a common or garden specimen, and there are about a hundred thousand million galaxies in the observable universe, of which our Milky Way is a pretty common or garden specimen. So we live in a world that is unimaginably vast, and sometimes we might feel upset by that and think, “What could be the significance of us who are simply inhabitants of a speck of cosmic dust, as you might say, in this vast, vast universe?”

Nevertheless, if all those stars were not there, we would not be here to be upset at the thought of them. Because there is a direct connection between how big a universe is and how long it lasts, and a universe that is significantly smaller than our universe would not have been able to last the 14 billion years, which is the necessary time to produce beings of our complexity. So that’s another condition of the world that has to be right for human beings, or something like human beings, to be a possibility.

One final example, which is the finest tuning of all: quantum theory suggests that there should be an energy attached to space itself. In quantum theory the vacuum, so called empty space, is not just a void. There are things called vacuum fluctuations which occur in a continual sort of seething mass of things coming into being and going out of being all the time. So while there is nothing there that doesn’t mean there is nothing happening. That may sound strange and paradoxical but believe me that’s what quantum theory implies. And of course these happenings, these fluctuations, generate a certain amount of energy, we call it “zero point energy”, and that energy is spread out over the whole of space. So we expect there to be energy associated with space.

And just recently the astronomers have discovered something called dark energy which is driving the expansion of the universe, which is just such an energy associated with space. Well that’s very good, you might say. However, when we estimate, just from thinking about quantum theory, how much energy there should be in space it turns out to be a fantastically large amount, and when we see the amount of energy there actually is per volume in space, it turns out to be very, very small in relation to that expected size. In fact, it turns out to be smaller by a factor of 10^-120. That means by a factor of 1 over 1 followed by 120 zeros. You don’t have to be a great mathematician to see that’s a fantastically small number. So some fantastic cancellation has taken place to turn that big number into the tiny number that we actually observe, and if it hadn’t taken place we wouldn’t be here to observe it because significantly higher energy would simply have blown the whole show apart too fast for anything interesting to happen. That’s the finest tuning that we know in the universe: one part in 10¹²⁰.

So we live in a world that is very remarkably finely tuned, and we have to consider that. And all scientists would agree about what I have been telling you; this is non-contentious. Where the contention comes in is what we might make of that, what is the further significance of it.

In the conclusion to Dr. Polkinghorne’s lecture, he looks at two explanations for the "fine-tuning" principle -- the multiverse theory and the existence of a divine intelligence -- and explains why natural theology alone is not sufficient to make the case for a God who interacts and cares for his creation. To make the case for theism, he argues, we need revelation, God's self-disclosure. This is manifest in various ways, including that which we experience personally, including ethics and aesthetics.

“The heavens,” wrote the psalmist “declare the glory of God.” (Ps 19:1 NIV)

The universe that inspired the psalmist three thousand years ago grows grander as each new generation of astronomers adds yet another layer of understanding. Each new discovery pushes back the boundary that separates the known universe from the vast terra incognita that beckons and teases us to keep going, to sail ever further from familiar shores.

A few centuries ago the great philosopher Immanuel Kant repeated the psalmist’s declaration: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steady reflection is occupied with them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me. Neither of them need I seek and merely suspect as if shrouded in obscurity or rapture beyond my own horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with my existence."

The night sky still beckons us, as it once did the psalmist. I spend time each summer at a rustic family cottage in the wilderness of my native New Brunswick, Canada. There, miles from electricity, the night sky does not compete with artificial light. Smog does not obscure it. Planes do not draw white trails on it. It does not compete with cable television or even cell phones, silenced by the absence of signals. The night sky is simply there, quietly declaring the glory of God. Its many lights reflect off the ripples of the lake, and are accompanied by the rustling of leaves and the voices of the many creatures that call this wilderness home. Only a jaded soul could sit by that lake and not wonder if there wasn’t some larger meaning to the experience.

I can see what the psalmist saw and rejoice as he did. But I watch the night sky through the eyes of a twenty-first century scientist. I have the benefit of centuries of scientific advancement and can see, in my mind’s eye, so much more. Those visible stars are just the advance guard of an almost infinite army of stars going back almost forever. The stars are not attached to a dome that one might reach with an ambitiously tall tower or puncture with a long-range missile. They are so far away that their light has been traveling at unimaginable speed for years, centuries, milennia and longer. The light from the stars in the Hyades Cluster began its journey to the earth at about the time that my ancestors—Loyalists from Pennsylvania—began their journey to this part of North America in the eighteenth century. The light from the closest stars, the trio that make up Alpha Centauri, takes over four years to reach earth. The most distant star ever detected from the earth is a “gamma ray burster” that launched its signal almost 13 billion years ago, when the universe was young. The powerful gamma ray signal from this star began its journey before our planet was even formed, reaching the earth in April 2009.

The psalmist did not know that the stars were made of hydrogen and helium. He did not know they generated their energy through nuclear fusion or that many of them explode at the end of their lives. He knew nothing of galaxies and the layers of structure in the cosmos. He did not understand how fast light travels or that the light from our sun powers photosynthesis and many other processes here on the earth.

The universe brought into view by science is like a collection of Russian matryoshka dolls nestled one inside the other. With the psalmist we can see the outer layer—and it is grand. But inside are additional layers, each one with a new type of grandeur. And at the very end of the unpacking lie the remarkable laws of physics that keep the earth orbiting about the sun, the sun shining reliably, and the sunlight providing energy to sustain life on our planet.

The universe as we understand it today inspires awe. And for those open to its message—from the psalmists of yesteryear to the believers and even the thoughtful skeptics of today—it speaks of a Creator. Our universe does not look like a cosmic accident, where lots of stuff just happened. It looks like the expression of a grand plan—a cosmic architecture capable of both supporting life such as ours and of inspiring observers like us to seek out the Creator.

This is why Antony Flew—“world’s most notorious atheist”—changed his mind and started believing in God.

Dr. Owen Gingerich is professor emeritus of astronomy and history of science at Harvard University. He grew up in a Christian home and attended a Christian college in northern Indiana that had a motto of “Culture for service”, something that was very important in thinking about what he might do with his life.

When it came time to go to graduate school, one of his science professors told him “If you feel a calling to go to astronomy, you should give it a try, because we shouldn’t let atheists take over any particular field.”

And so he went on to a career in astronomy. In the late 1980’s, Dr. Gingerich had a unique opportunity to give a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania on the topic of science and Christian faith. Since then, he’s been trying to help people better understand God’s creation. For example, God could have made the universe in many different ways, but given the particular way it appears, it suggests that we wouldn’t be here if the universe were not very, very old, because out of the big bang came hydrogen and helium, but not oxygen and the iron we need for our blood, for instance. Those things came from the interiors of giant stars and had to cook for long, long periods of time before we got those elements abundant enough for sustainable life. It’s a marvelous picture, and Dr. Gingerich is actively involved in telling people about it.

By the time I was ten years old, I was already determined to follow a career in physics and cosmology, both because of the wonder I felt for the natural world and as a means to better resolve serious questions that were developing within me regarding the relationship between biblical interpretation and scientific discovery. The prior year I had read and studied scripture in its entirety for the first time, rather than just the piece-meal sections covered in my Sunday school classes. Whenever I look back at that year in my life, I am always glad I chose to study the New Testament before the Old Testament, rather than vice versa. From the New Testament study, I found salvation and accepted Christ into my life. But my examination of the Old Testament that followed raised serious questions for me, particularly regarding Genesis. Even as a ten-year-old, I could see the apparent conflict between Genesis and what I had already learned about the history of the universe, of earth, and of life on earth as reported by science. From science I felt amazement and wonder toward God as Creator and strongly desired to learn more about the physical laws set up by God that sustained the universe. In contrast, both of the Genesis stories of creation seemed simplistic and hollow.

As I continued to study, I came to believe that divine inspiration of scripture does not exempt scripture from portraying human authors’ limited (in particular, finite) understandings of the physical world.

Since Genesis 1 and 2 were written in a pre-scientific age, we should expect a non-scientific description of the creation process. Divine inspiration allowed the language of the time to express eternal truths regarding some aspects of God’s nature as Creator. Using stock images from the culture, the opening chapters of Genesis describe God as the ultimate Creator of all things and in charge of all things. These chapters should not be misinterpreted as scientific treatises describing the actual physics processes by which God creates all things.

From further study I came to understand that for almost two thousand years, many others far more knowledgeable than I had wrestled with the same issues. I was thrilled to learn that the early church fathers had developed a procedure for dealing with disagreement between scripture and scientific understanding. In 1657, the famous scientist, mathematician, and devoted Christian, Blaise Pascal, summarized the procedure of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in his Provincial Letters:

When we meet with a passage even in the Scripture, the literal meaning of which, at first sight, appears contrary to what the senses or reason are certainly persuaded of, we must not attempt to reject their testimony in this case, and yield them up to the authority of that apparent sense of the Scripture, but we must interpret the Scripture, and seek out therein another sense agreeable to that sensible truth.... And as Scripture may be interpreted in different ways, whereas the testimony of the senses is uniform, we must in these matters adopt as the true interpretation of Scripture that view which corresponds with the faithful report of the senses.

An opposite mode of treatment, so far from procuring respect to the Scripture, would only expose it to the contempt of infidels; because, as St. Augustine says, “when they found that we believed, on the authority of Scripture, in things which they assuredly knew to be false, they would laugh at our credulity with regard to its more recondite truths, such as the resurrection of the dead and eternal life.” “And by this means,” adds St. Thomas, “we would render our religion contemptible in their eyes, and shut up its entrance into their minds.

During my teenage years, my conviction that science could be used to inform scripture and clarify our understanding and interpretation of it continued to solidify. I agreed with Galileo that, “the Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” Further, since God is the creator of all things, the physical and the spiritual, I came to understand that science as the study of the physical and theology as the study of the spiritual must be mutually consistent when both are properly understood. Inconsistency could only be the result of human misunderstanding of one or both arenas of knowledge.

(Some might correctly point out that science is not always as clear-cut as reason plus the report of the senses. That is, at times science also involves debates between competing interpretations, especially on the cutting edge of research. Nevertheless, ongoing scientific investigations gradually winnow away many or most proposed scientific descriptions of a given physical process, leaving only one or a few as the viable candidates. Scientific theories are formed by the general consensus of the scientific community based on overwhelming supporting physical evidence.)

In high school, I faced a serious medical problem, eventually identified as a brain tumor. Surgery was successful, in part due to a positive change in the tumor. In thankful response to God, I decided to pursue a career in church ministry. I determined a primary goal of my ministry would be to help the members of my future congregations develop mutually consistent and mutually supportive understandings of scripture and of science. I chose to attend Valparaiso University in Indiana, where I could, in addition to being a pre-seminary student, also double major in physics and mathematics to increase my scientific knowledge. Over the course of my four years at Valparaiso, I realized that my calling wasn’t for a church ministry, but one aspect of it would be to minister to Christians as a professional scientist, demonstrating by example that faith and science need not be at odds.

Thus, by way of a curved path, I did indeed follow the vocation I had initially chosen twelve years earlier. I decided once again to pursue the path that made my heart sing: studying the underlying laws and forces of the physical universe. As I was deciding which Ph.D. programs in elementary particle physics and cosmology to apply to, I became aware of a new, quickly developing subfield of particle physics called string theory that offered the possibility of unifying all of the known forces and matter in the universe into a single theory. I am now a successful scientist in this area, publishing discoveries that add to our understanding of particle physics and the universe.

In the next installment, Gerald Cleaver offers his advice to fellow Christians on how to seek after a consistent Christian worldview in which scientific and theological understandings of the universe are viewed as mutually supportive and complementary.

When astrophysicist Dr. Jennifer Wiseman first published the following posts as a paper in the BioLogos Scholarly Essay series, the essay’s subtitle asked the question, “Can Recent Scientific Discovery Inform and Inspire Our Worship and Service?” Over the next few weeks, we will look at Dr. Wiseman's answer to that query—an emphatic “Yes!”. But in this first installment we begin by describing some of the reasons such a posture of worship through science is not more common in the contemporary church than it already is.

Oh Lord My God, when I in awesome wonder, Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made; I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee; How great Thou art, how great Thou art

(Carl Boberg, 1885; Trans. Stuart Hine 1949)

The words of this great hymn convey the proper overwhelming sense in which the wondrous Creation of God should translate directly into a response of awe and praise from mind, body, and spirit. The writer sees and hears the wonders of nature with his body, considers with his mind what all this implies, and responds with songs from his soul.

But is this worshipful response happening in our Christian congregations today? I believe this kind of response to the Creation can and should happen within the hearts of God’s people and wherever congregations of believers are gathered. Such power can even unify believers who differ on lesser matters as we all look up outside of ourselves at the same wonders and respond with the same praise. As an astronomer, I have felt the sense of being “blown away” by seeing images of countless distant galaxies, or even by just looking up at the array of stars overhead on a dark moonless night and sensing something of the “big-ness” of God.

There are impediments to realizing the fullness of this kind of worship experience for many Christian congregations today. I believe four of the main culprits are ignorance, distraction, controversy, and uncertainty.

Let me start with the first, and clarify up front that by ignorance I am simply referring to being uninformed, rather than the sometimes more negative connotations of the word. How up-to-date is the scientific knowledge of average, educated, committed evangelical church members and pastors?Americans, both adults and schoolchildren, are not ranking favorably compared to the rest of the world’s developed nations in science knowledge these days. We enjoy our technological achievements and resulting gadgets, but true comprehension of scientific principles and recent discoveries is not a strong part of our culture and national conversation these days.

This is reflected directly in what kinds of things are (and are not) discussed in church. In my own generally very good church experience growing up in mainstream America, I can only remember science and nature being discussed in a general way (e.g., we should look at the beauty of flowers and mountains and animals and thank God), except for once in a specific way in a children’s sermon (where we were told we should not believe we came from monkeys!). That was a while ago, but how are science issues handled today? Do pastors speak about the evidence from cosmic background light for a spectacular beginning to the universe? Are the genetic codes being mapped out for animals and humans resulting in praise for God’s amazing “blueprint”? Are the advancements in nanotechnology and biotechnology and medicine subjects for discussion of good and poor uses of technology in church? The answer to these is, of course, “no”, for the most part, yet even issues seemingly more relevant to the daily lives of parishioners are often driven by current technology and scientific advancement, and an informed congregation can better understand how to praise, pray, discern, dialogue, and serve.

Related to being uninformed is the condition of distraction for many evangelical Christians today. The distractions of overloaded schedules, pressured jobs, divided families, and even church environments of entertainment-based worship and activities can impede a lifetime of quiet listening, learning, and contemplation. If there is no encouragement from church leaders to learn and incorporate nature and current scientific discovery into contemplation and praise and service, then there will be no space available in the lives and activities of congregants for what should be the resulting awe and praise.

But what does it mean to be informed about science in today’s evangelical congregations? Too often this has implied a direct relation to controversy, the third reason science is not often inspiring worship these days. There are many voices trying to “inform” Christians about science, and for the average evangelical congregant, discernment about which authority figure to believe can be difficult. Many times Christians are presented with a clear and strong implication that scientific conclusions, especially on issues related to origins of the universe and of life, are part of the secular “World” camp rather than the camp of “God’s Truth”. And Christians “know” that they must be on one side or the other of this stark line of worldliness. Often in more conservative churches a teaching will come from the pulpit that goes something like this: “Scientists tell us that *...+, but they cannot give a reason how *...+ happened; but WE know how: God is responsible!” Therefore any serious consideration of a scientific understanding of the development of the universe and life implies that one is “compromising” the teaching of the Word of God, rather than studying the details of how God works. In Scripture, however, never is the study and experience of nature seen as somehow antithetical to knowing and following the Lord; just the opposite in fact!

This often boils down to the correct interpretation of Scripture. Through sermons, radio spots, television shows, and literature, evangelical Christians are hearing adamant messages conflating the acceptance of modern scientific discovery with worldly compromise, or else providing alternative ideas that are not entirely satisfying. From Young-Earth Creationists, they hear that a literal reading of the Biblical creation account is the only correct one, so all scientific discovery must be reinterpreted to fit a recent Creation. But this robs them of the sense of awe we glean from the magnitude of space and time revealed by astronomy, geology, and fossils. From the Intelligent Design community, they hear the message that life (and perhaps the entire universe) is too complicated to develop through natural processes alone, and therefore that God’s work requires miraculous inputs of information into the natural world. This implies that somehow natural processes must not be fully God’s processes, or that God’s work through them is somehow inadequate. They also hear the message to “teach the controversy,” so that somehow by proclaiming that there is a controversy about natural processes as an adequate explanatory tool for natural history, the controversy will in fact become real. They are then surprised to find out from either advanced scientific study or from the Evolutionary Creation voices that in fact there is no great controversy in the scientific community about the basic structure and timeline of the natural history of the universe and life; that in fact there need be no theological debate about how God brought (and is bringing) the universe and life into being, rather, the issue is whether God is in fact real and responsible for all we know and are. And yet even this unifying message can sometimes seem to gloss over the central theological issues of suffering and death and fallen-ness in Creation. So every approach to origins and evolution evokes some difficulties and challenges with which the Christian congregant must grapple.

Next week, Part 2 concludes Dr. Wiseman's discussion of the stumbling blocks that can stand between the church and its appreciation of science as a means of worship, and turns to the ways that the pursuit of God through study of the created world can help overcome those difficulties by pointing us directly to the Lord.

Humanity is marked by the biological capacity for musicality. Every known culture has something like music. Understanding how we experience and create music in the present gives us clues to why and how music emerged as one of the defining features of human culture (and, therefore, of humanness itself) in the past. But thinking carefully about music and evolution can also help us reassess how we use music now: in the wider culture, collectively as the church, and even within our own homes. In a nutshell, then, this essay will examine how views on evolution impact how one assesses music’s effects and meaning. In many cases, problematic views about evolution and artistic creativity result in problematic views about music, but my argument is that an appropriate evolutionary view of music—one that looks at how music becomes meaningful within social relationships—is a view that actually enriches our appreciation of this most human endeavor, rather than trivializing it. In this first part I explore common discourses about the meaning of music and their relationship to ideas of creation. In part two next week, I suggest that understanding the role that music played in our biocultural evolution helps correct some of the myths that have made their way into popular discourse, especially with the growing popularity of trying to understand music via neuroscience.

Let’s begin by looking at a couple of popular ways of answering the question, “Where does musical meaning come from?” beginning with the idea that “music is in the ear of the beholder.” One thing that is clear from years of teaching classes of first-year university students is that they are musical relativists. They have ‘their’ music that they enjoy and even use to demark their identities, but are perfectly willing to allow others to like other music. After all, music is all about enjoyment, right? Historically, this cultural trope developed out of the post-Kantian argument of musical autonomy, the often-fashionable argument that music’s meaning is strictly musical and does not relate to other parts of the world. It is also reflected in Steven Pinker’s argument that music is ‘auditory cheesecake’. For Pinker, music used to be useful for things like attracting mates, but now we have evolved out of needing music: it’s not necessary, but is a nice extra. I might like cheesecake, but you might prefer ice cream. Either way, it won’t change the survival of the species, so we can enjoy what we like. This argument may have a harder time standing up when music is used as a means of torture at Guantanamo Bay, but it remains popular none-the-less. Like many ideas of creation and the arts, the idea of music as primarily pleasure (determined by individual taste) is a post-Enlightenment development.

This musical relativism takes a slightly more exacting form in another popular idea, that meaning is embedded within the ‘music itself’ not in the taste of the listener. This view of meaning is the starting point of Plato and Aristotle’s disagreement about the effect of certain modes, the disagreements in the early church about the usage of certain musical instruments, and the arguments of the detrimental moral impact of certain forms of popular music (which, by the way, is an argument not just limited to the 20th or now 21st centuries). It is also the foundation of the statement from one of my former conductors that if we played well enough, we would summon up the ‘spirit of Haydn’. In other words, ‘proper’ participation can reveal the meaning of the work—be that the composer’s meaning or another idealized meaning.

Musical autonomy in this case refers to the view that music stands apart and has no relations or meaning outside of itself. Many philosophers and musicologists rely on this view in an unreflective way, represented by Peter Kivy’s statement that music “is a quasi-syntactical structure of sound understandable solely in musical terms and having no semantic or representational content, no meaning, and making no reference to anything beyond itself”¹. For Kivy, the heart of the autonomy argument is that music is completely self-contained. Such a view is possible because of the historical development of ‘absolute music’, referring to music without a text or narrative, typified by the development of the symphonic form in the late 18th century. It is no accident that between 1750-1850, the form of the symphony developed, Kant theorized the idea of genius, and Schopenhauer claimed music to be “pure will.” In the 19th century, music came to be considered the highest of the arts, and even at the turn of the 20th century Kandinsky claimed that all art should try to achieve the autonomy and abstraction of music.

The idea of musical meaning somehow residing within the musical work is based on an assumption that the more one can isolate and analyze something, the more can be known about it. We can certainly learn much about a rock or plant by isolating it and putting it under a microscope, and those who take music to be autonomous believe that music can also be known most thoroughly by placing it ‘under the microscope’ through close analysis of a score or recording, or through close listening. It is through such pseudo-scientific analytical acts that knowledge about music is thought to be accessed. This is also the guiding ideology of ‘music appreciation.’ But while much can be gained by close examination of rocks or music, much more can be gained by studying how a rock or (especially) music is used by people—a central point to which we will return.

It is more than a little ironic, then, that a further example of the belief in an intrinsic musical meaning is the argument that music is ‘universal’; that is, that at least some music can cross cultural barriers and mean the same thing to all people. Often this view assumes a primacy of the Western canon, as it is believed that Mozart has a universal meaning but Chinese qin (zither) music does not. In a globalized world where many cultures listen to and value Mozart, people who do not share a common language or view of the world may find Mozart a common point of contact. But finding Mozart a point of contact is not caused by the music having a universal meaning. Rather, it is an example of the way music can become a shared space where people enter into a relationship via art. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (a project of Daniel Barenboim and the late Edward Said) is an example of music being a common ground where people from different views of the world can connect, not an example of universalized meanings of music.

Indeed, there are many situations when music’s meanings are not shared, showing that meaning is most definitely not universal. Martin Lodge recounts the encounter of Dutch explorers and the Maori people of New Zealand in 1642. When the parties got close enough to see (and hear) each other, each group signalled with trumpets. The Dutch, thinking they were successful in making contact, sent a boat of unarmed sailors to shore. The boat was met by Maori warriors who killed more than half of the sailors. This misunderstanding was caused by not sharing a musical meaning: “The Maori trumpeting in this case was the music of war, an invitation to fight. On the other hand the Dutch trumpets played a variety of tunes intended to be welcoming.”² Musical meanings are often shared, but are not universal or ‘in the music’.

As we have begun to see, considering music as culturally embedded lets us recognize something quite different from the arguments that musical meaning is either subjective or encoded within the music itself. Music does allow for subjective response, but not truly autonomous response—our experience of music occurs within the bounds of cultural norms. Since music’s significance cannot be abstracted from it’s embeddedness within social relationships, an attention to culture and human intentionality (not just a reductionist sense of biology) must inform the ways that music is studied, whether in contemporary culture, in neuroscience, and with reference to human evolution. Unfortunately even many Christian views of music have relied upon some of these problematic views of musical meaning, aligning ideas like individual artistic genius and the “meaning in the music” concept with theologies of creation ex nihilo. As Bruce Ellis Benson discusses in an essay in the journal Verge (and in a shortened version here at BioLogos), this combination or paralleling of genius and ex nihilo creation complicates the church’s understanding not only of music, but also about the Creator God, downplaying the essential element of community and interpersonal relationship inherent to both.

Next week, we’ll look at a similar tendency to abstract and quantify the way music makes meaning in the burgeoning field of neuroscience (from the “Mozart Effect” to fMRI scans), and return to the way that thinking about music within the evolution of human culture might give us a deeper appreciation of music—even of worship—within the church. In the meantime, here are some questions to consider:

How do my own assumptions of the way music is meaningful affect the ways I conceive of and use music?

Are there negative consequences stemming from these assumptions?

How have problematic views of musical meaning affected the use of music as personal identity? Or in the church? Or in the media? Or in popularized science?

Notes

1. Kivy, Peter (1990) Music Alone (Cornell University Press: Ithica, NY): p. 202.

2. Lodge, Martin (2009) 'Music Historiography in New Zealand' in ed. Zdravko Blazekovic, Music's Intellectual History (RILM: New York): p. 627.

But since time exists, change and development are possible. The sciences have acquired the tools to “look back” in time and explore our universe’s rich history, so we know that the universe and the life in it do indeed evolve. Through these observations in the natural realm, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that God typically prefers to do His work gradually rather than instantaneously. In what follows, I’d like to briefly explore some of the ways that our universe has been and is evolving over long periods of time and attempt to show that the concept of a God who makes use of long timescales ought to be familiar to us from the story of redemption in scripture. And like observing a living statue, by staring long enough (in this case millions and billions of years) we are able to see a world that is moving and changing, which hopefully deepens our appreciation for the wonder of God’s dynamic creative acts.

God’s use of time in the physical realm

The sense of enjoyment that comes from studying the dynamically evolving universe that God has created is similar to that of a gardener when he or she watches a seed grow into a mature plant. And when considering the history of the cosmos, the analogy of a seed in a garden is an apt one, with each branch of science reinforcing and corroborating the story that is told.

From physics we learn that all the matter and energy that now exists in our universe originated in a hot, dense state (something akin to a primordial seed) which burst forth and has been expanding and cooling ever since. Myriads of stars have gone through the process of forming, burning, and dying, with many exploding in what's called a supernova. These long stellar life cycles have been going on for billions of years and are responsible for "cooking up" and dispersing all the atomic elements necessary for forming planets like Earth and creatures like us.

Once our planet formed, we know from geology and its theory of plate tectonics that the earth's crust has been in a constant (but very slow) process of moving and changing, shifting even the continents around over many millions of years and forming majestic mountains, islands, and other geological features. The picture becomes even more fascinating when biology enters the landscape, describing how life has slowly developed, also over many millions of years, beginning from the simplest of organisms and progressing all the way to beings like us, of such complexity that we are able to reflect on and enjoy the entire display.

But how do we know all this, since our short lives don’t allow us to see these long drawn out processes in action? I see these same sciences as a great gift from God that allow us to explore beyond the bounds of our own time. For instance, when astrophysicists look up into the night sky, they see light that has taken millions or even billions of years to reach us, meaning that they are literally looking at what our universe looked like in the distant past. Geologists look back in time by studying layers of rock, sediment, or ice. They have even found evidence that the earth's magnetic field has flipped many times over the course of the Earth's history so that even the direction our trusty compasses point isn’t constant! Biologists have the fossil record and genetics as a means of exploring the rich and fascinating history of life, teaching us about the ancestors of modern humans as well as exotic creatures such as dinosaurs. All around us the physical world is shifting, changing, and unfolding in an extraordinary way, teaching us that God, the ultimate Gardener, is pleased to watch his creation grow and mature gradually.

God's use of time in redemption up to Jesus

A good number of Christians find the idea of God using long maturation times in creation threatening to their understanding of scripture. But what we learn about God from scripture is not inconsistent with a God who works over long timescales. We see this if we look at the grand meta-narrative of the entire Bible, of which I’ll cover a few highlights to demonstrate my point.

After humans made a mess of their intended role in the created order, God desired to restore it and put it right. And like what we learn from the sciences about the evolution of the universe, He decided to take his time about it. God began his redeeming work with a promise to use Abraham's family to be a blessing to the entire world (Gen. 12:1). This was a promise that was ultimately fulfilled in Jesus nearly two millennia later. Now if God had been in a hurry, he might simply have allowed Sarah to conceive by the Holy Spirit and bring forth Jesus directly. But instead, he decided to take the scenic route, working through Abraham’s seed, including Jacob, Moses, David, and others until the time was right for Jesus.

As time went on and God’s people developed into a nation, David rose to the throne and God made another promise -- that of perpetual kingship to David’s line (2 Sam 7:13). This was another opportune time for Jesus to be born, take the throne, and fulfill the promise. But again we find God taking his time, allowing the kingdom to be divided and eventually conquered, and God’s people sent into a long exile, until the time was right for Jesus, nearly a millennium after David.

God's use of time in redemption after Jesus

The Christian faith holds that in the “fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4) God sent Jesus as the individual in whom all the promises of God ultimately converged. Just as God's physical creation developed slowly and eventually brought forth our earth and life and humanity, so God's purposes slowly unfold and culminate in Jesus, the descendant of Abraham and David who becomes the blessing to the world.

But here again is another case that demonstrates the point I’m attempting to make. Even the blessing that Jesus comes to announce and inaugurate develops slowly and dynamically – God, the Gardener, continues to slowly cultivate. Jesus himself teaches us to expect this to be the case in parables about the kingdom such as that of the mustard seed (Mark 4:30-32). Thus, the world isn’t automatically cured of its ills after Jesus’ resurrection. Both then and now, evil, sin, and injustice still exist and there is much that remains to be redeemed. The church is called to continue living in this meta-narrative until we reach the second climax: when Jesus reappears and ushers in the fullness of the new heavens and new earth.

A similar point can be made about God’s redemptive work in the lives of individual Christians as well. God forms each of his children over time through our relationships, our experiences, the trials we encounter, and the service we render. “I am the vine, you are the branches”, says Jesus in John 15:5. God is “growing us” as individuals and as every Christian knows from experience, the maturing process often seems very long indeed.

In conclusion, this brief survey has shown a consistent picture of how God works in his creation. In the cosmos, in the evolution of life, in the redemption of the world, and in the redemption of individuals, God sees fit to use long timescales for accomplishing his purposes. Moreover, with the similarities between what we learn of God from nature and from scripture, Christians needn’t react defensively to what science tells us about the history of the cosmos. Instead, we can indulge in the opportunity to marvel at the ever continuing work of God the Gardener, both in His dynamic creation and His dynamic acts of redemption.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user ToniVC.

In 1975, Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson created a firestorm when, in his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, he argued that human nature might be explainable in evolutionary terms. Centuries earlier, however, a leading Christian scholar was already applying many key evolutionary principles to the understanding of man.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was the foremost Christian scholar of the High Middle Ages and is today regarded as a "doctor" of the Catholic Church. Working six centuries before Darwin, he obviously was not an evolutionist. His major project was the Christianizing of Aristotelian philosophy. As an ardent Aristotelian (enough so that some of his teachings were condemned by the Bishop of Paris in 1277), Aquinas assumed that species were fixed and unchangeable, an idea incompatible with evolution. But Aquinas was the star student of Albert the Great, an enthusiastic Medieval naturalist. Albert assiduously observed the Dominican Order's policy of walking, not riding, when traveling. Ostensibly this was to emphasize the Order's commitment to poverty, but for Albert it was an opportunity to more closely observe nature's minutiae. Under Albert and Aristotle's mentorship, Aquinas acquired a deep appreciation for nature's continuity, which he understood as reflecting purposeful design rather than common descent.

Aquinas had no doubt that humans were specially created by God. However, he was also convinced that they were created out of the same basic materials used for all creatures and were therefore connected to all of nature. In his Summa Theologica he writes:

"But it was fitting that the human body should be made of the four elements, that man might have something in common with the inferior bodies, as being something between spiritual and corporeal substances." (ST P1 Q91 A1)

Aquinas had no qualms about calling humans animals:

"Socrates and Plato ... have the same human species; others differ specifically but are generically the same, as man and ass have the same genus animal." (De Principiis Naturae 45)

Following Aristotle, Aquinas rejected the strict dualism of the Augustinian/neo-Platonic philosophy dominant at the time. No, Aquinas was not a materialist neuroscientist, but he understood the intimate interdependence of mind and body. For Aquinas, different bodies meant different levels of intelligence: "...because some men have bodies of better disposition, their souls have greater power of understanding." (ST P1 Q85 A7)

Aquinas is most famous for his Summa Theologica, much of which is considered authoritative in Catholic theology. Less known is another great summa, Summa Contra Gentiles, where he sought to persuade non-believers using purely rational arguments for Christian doctrine. It is here that we find a naturalistic discussion of marriage.

"We observe that in those animals, dogs for instance, in which the female by herself suffices for the rearing of the offspring, the male and female stay no time together after the performance of the sexual act. But in all animals in which the female by herself does not suffice for the rearing of the offspring, male and female dwell together after the sexual act so long as is necessary for the rearing and training of the offspring. This appears in birds, whose young are incapable of finding their own food immediately after they are hatched. ... Hence, whereas it is necessary in all animals for the male to stand by the female for such a time as the father's concurrence is requisite for bringing up the progeny, it is natural for man to be tied to the society of one fixed woman for a long period, not a short one." (SCG B3 Q122)

The ideas expressed above are familiar to evolutionists as part of parental investment theory -- male/female pair-bonding is more likely to emerge where offspring are highly dependent.

Aquinas also anticipated another core evolutionary concept: paternity certainty. Males find an evolutionary advantage in long-term pair bonding because it helps to insure that offspring possess their genes. Without this assurance, males are unlikely to provision or protect the offspring. Thus, monogamy serves the genetic interests of both males and females. Females and their offspring receive resources and protection from the male (paternal investment), while males gain assurance of a genetic legacy (paternity certainty).

"...every animal desires free enjoyment of pleasure of sexual union as of eating: which freedom is impeded by there being either several males to one female, or the other way about ... But in men there is a special reason, inasmuch as man naturally desires to be sure of his own offspring ... The reason why a wife is not allowed more than one husband at a time is because otherwise paternity would be uncertain." (SCG B3 Q124)

Note how Aquinas' discussion also alludes to another important evolutionary precept: male mate competition. Aquinas goes on to describe how monogamy benefits women by reducing the female competition inherent in polygynous households, thereby insuring the concentration of emotional and material resources on a single female mate.

"For among men that keep many wives the wives are counted as menial. For one man having several wives there arises discord at the domestic hearth..." (SCG B3 Q124)

Along with anticipating many key concepts in evolutionary psychology, Aquinas also understood that humans possessed a natural moral sense. Some believers today foolishly try to argue that without religion there is no morality. Aquinas would have scoffed at such simple-mindedness. Synderesis, as Aquinas called it, was the natural human inclination toward right behavior.

"Wherefore the first practical principles, bestowed on us by nature, do not belong to special power, but to a special natural habit which we call synderesis. Whence 'synderesis' is said to incite the good, and to murmur at evil, inasmuch as through first principles we proceed to discover, and judge of what we have discovered. It is therefore clear that 'synderesis' is not a power, but a natural habit." (ST P1 Q79 A12)

In contrast to Augustine, Aquinas did not see human nature as inherently depraved. Instead, his view was generally more positive. We are, as Aristotle had argued, naturally social animals who seek to get along in society. Divine grace did not radically alter human nature, it perfected it.

If he were alive today would Aquinas be an evolutionist? His writings suggest a mind already resonating with many evolutionary concepts. My sense is that Aquinas, like Aristotle and Albert before him, was just too curious and too smart not be at the intellectual vanguard wrestling with exciting new knowledge.

As part of the H. Orton Wiley Lecture series in Theology on the campus of Point Loma Nazarene University, Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne inspired students and faculty alike in thinking about the interaction between science and the Christian faith. The first lecture, entitled, Natural Theology, was delivered on November 15th, 2010. The entire MP3 is available for download here.

In Part 2 of this series, Dr. Polkinghorne looked at the first of two meta-questions. In today’s post, he looks at the second of these meta-questions: “Why is the universe so special?”

We provide a written transcript of the talk to make it easier to mull over Dr. Polkinghorne’s ideas while you listen.

Fine-tuning and the “Fruitful Universe”

Now my second meta-question is a little bit more specific. I ask the question, “Why is the universe so special?” Now scientists don’t like things to be special; we like things to be general, and our natural anticipation would have been that the universe is just a common or garden specimen of what a universe might be like.

But we’ve come to understand a lot about the history of the universe. We know that our universe started 13.7 billion years ago, and it started extremely simple, just an almost uniformly expanding ball of energy, about the simplest physical system you could possibly think about. But a world that started so simple has of course become rich and complex. With you and me, in fact, the most remarkable and complex consequences are its history, at least of which we are aware. The human brain is far and away the most complicated physical system we have ever encountered anywhere in our exploration of the universe.

That fact itself might suggest that something has been going on in cosmic history rather than just one thing after another. But we’ve also come to understand many of the processes by which this rich fruitfulness has come to birth. As we’ve come to understand these, we’ve come to see that though these processes are of course evolving processes, they took long periods of time – the universe was 10 billion years old before any form of life appeared in it, at least as far as we know anyway – and life of our complexity only appeared yesterday.

Nevertheless, the universe is pregnant with life, pregnant with the possibility of life, essentially from the beginning onwards. By which I mean the given laws of nature had to take a very specific, very finely tuned form, if the universe was to have so fruitful a history.

That’s a very remarkable discovery, and let me give you some examples of why we believe that. If you’re going to have a fruitful universe, one of the first things you have to get right is that you have to have the right stars in the universe. The stars are going to have a very important role to play. First of all, you must have some stars that are going to be very long lived, live for billions of years, steadily burning, steadily producing energy which will enable the development of life on one of the encircling planets. We understand what makes stars burn in that sort of way very well, and it depends on a delicate balance between the strength of gravity and the strength of electromagnetism. Electromagnetism is the force that holds matter together. The seats on which you are sitting are held together by electromagnetism and in fact you are held together by electromagnetism.

If you alter that balance a little bit in one direction the stars will begin to burn intensely, furiously, just pouring out energy and they will only live a few million years rather than a few billion years. If you move it a little bit in the other direction they will burn so slowly they will be brown stars and they will not produce enough energy to fuel the development of life. So you have to have a very delicate finely tuned balance between the strength of gravity and the strength of electromagnetic forces in a fruitful universe.

Remember, science takes the laws of nature, takes the given strengths of gravity, the given strength of electromagnetism, uses that to explain processes in the world, how things happen, but it doesn’t explain where those laws of nature come from. They are just brute facts as far as science is concerned.

And the stars have another absolutely indispensible role to play. The stars are the place where the heavier elements essential for life are made in the interior nuclear furnaces. There are many elements that are necessary for life, of which carbon is perhaps the most essential. Carbon is the basis of the long chain molecules, which are the biochemical basis of life. The early universe only makes the simplest elements; it makes hydrogen and helium and it makes no carbon at all. Carbon only begins to be made when the universe, which started uniform, begins to condense and become lumpy and grainy with stars and galaxies. As the stars condense they heat up, nuclear processes begin again in their interiors. And it’s those nuclear processes in the stars that make carbon and the heavier elements. Every atom of carbon in your body was once inside a star. We are people of stardust made in the ashes of dead stars.

And that’s a very beautiful process that takes place in that sort of way. And one of the great triumphs of astrophysics and the second half of the 20th century was to unravel that process. One of the people who did some of the most important work on that was a senior colleague of mine in Cambridge called Fred Hoyle. And they were trying to figure out how to make carbon. They got helium, and if you can make three helium nuclei stick together that will produce carbon, but when you have something as small as a nucleus it is impossible to get three to stick together at one time, they’re just too small.

Ok, so let’s do it step by step. Stick two together gives you berylium. Helium 4 gives you beryllium-8, hope it stays around for a bit, another helium comes along, attaches itself, and bingo, you’ve got carbon-12. That’s the obvious thing to think about but it doesn’t work in the obvious way, and the reason it doesn’t work in the obvious way is that beryllium-8 is terribly unstable. It doesn’t oblige you by staying around long enough to catch that third helium, at least in an ordinary, straightforward way.

But Fred realized that it would be just possible for this to happen if there was a very large enhancement effect, in the trade we call it resonance, occurring in carbon at just the right energy, it has to be the right energy, which would enable that attachment process to catch that third helium much much more quickly that you might have thought, in fact so quickly that some of them would get caught before the beryllium-8 disappeared. It was a very good idea, and he must have felt pretty pleased with himself and he went off to just check in the nuclear data tables of this particular resonance’s energy levels, and it wasn’t in the tables, but he knew it must be there, he’s carbon based life like you and me.

So he rang up some friends in the States, a father and son team who were good experimentalists and he said, “Look, you missed something. There’s a resonance and energy level in carbon that you haven’t spotted, and I’ll tell you exactly where to look for it. I know exactly where this energy has got to be. You go look for it.” And they said, “No, no, we don’t want to do that, we have more interesting things to do.” But Fred was very determined and he bullied them into looking for it and they found it.

Now that’s a wonderful achievement, to predict an energy level in carbon on the basis of how it might have been made in the stars is a fantastic scientific achievement. But it’s more than that. Fred had a lifetime conviction of atheism, realized of course that if the laws of physics had been just a little bit different that resonance wouldn’t have been there, and the possibility of carbon-based life is too significant for it just to be a happy accident in his view, so he says in a Yorkshire accent that is beyond my power to imitate, he said that the universe is a put-up job. Fred didn’t like the word God, and so he said some Intelligent, capital “I” Intelligence, must have monkied with the laws of nature to make carbon production possible. What that could possibly be I don’t know, but the more sensible thing to say is that creation is ordained, that the laws of nature would be such, as to enable the fruitfulness of carbon-based life.

We’ll come back to evaluating that possibility in a minute, but before we do, let me give you two other examples of how specific, how special, our universe has to be for us to be able to be here today to think about. We live in a universe that is immensely big, beyond our powers to imagine really. There are a hundred thousand million stars in our galaxy in the Milky Way, of which our sun is just a common or garden specimen, and there are about a hundred thousand million galaxies in the observable universe, of which our Milky Way is a pretty common or garden specimen. So we live in a world that is unimaginably vast, and sometimes we might feel upset by that and think, “What could be the significance of us who are simply inhabitants of a speck of cosmic dust, as you might say, in this vast, vast universe?”

Nevertheless, if all those stars were not there, we would not be here to be upset at the thought of them. Because there is a direct connection between how big a universe is and how long it lasts, and a universe that is significantly smaller than our universe would not have been able to last the 14 billion years, which is the necessary time to produce beings of our complexity. So that’s another condition of the world that has to be right for human beings, or something like human beings, to be a possibility.

One final example, which is the finest tuning of all: quantum theory suggests that there should be an energy attached to space itself. In quantum theory the vacuum, so called empty space, is not just a void. There are things called vacuum fluctuations which occur in a continual sort of seething mass of things coming into being and going out of being all the time. So while there is nothing there that doesn’t mean there is nothing happening. That may sound strange and paradoxical but believe me that’s what quantum theory implies. And of course these happenings, these fluctuations, generate a certain amount of energy, we call it “zero point energy”, and that energy is spread out over the whole of space. So we expect there to be energy associated with space.

And just recently the astronomers have discovered something called dark energy which is driving the expansion of the universe, which is just such an energy associated with space. Well that’s very good, you might say. However, when we estimate, just from thinking about quantum theory, how much energy there should be in space it turns out to be a fantastically large amount, and when we see the amount of energy there actually is per volume in space, it turns out to be very, very small in relation to that expected size. In fact, it turns out to be smaller by a factor of 10^-120. That means by a factor of 1 over 1 followed by 120 zeros. You don’t have to be a great mathematician to see that’s a fantastically small number. So some fantastic cancellation has taken place to turn that big number into the tiny number that we actually observe, and if it hadn’t taken place we wouldn’t be here to observe it because significantly higher energy would simply have blown the whole show apart too fast for anything interesting to happen. That’s the finest tuning that we know in the universe: one part in 10¹²⁰.

So we live in a world that is very remarkably finely tuned, and we have to consider that. And all scientists would agree about what I have been telling you; this is non-contentious. Where the contention comes in is what we might make of that, what is the further significance of it.

As an evolutionary biologist I am fascinated by the emergence of that suite of cognitive abilities that make us so distinctive from other living species.

There are, however, risks in making up evolutionary "just-so" stories to explain the origins of complex human beliefs, such as religious ones.

For we have virtually no firm knowledge of the details of religious beliefs prior to the invention of writing about 5,000 years ago. Some general (and plausible) inferences can be made based on burial customs, cave paintings, and the like, going back a few tens of thousands of years, but before that the discussion becomes increasingly speculative.

Writing here this week, the psychologist Jesse Bering makes up a wonderful just-so story about "selfish behaviours" being "punished by supernatural agents" thereby promoting "prosocial reputations". Well, who knows, there just isn't any evidence either way. One significant problem with such stories is that they tend towards group selectionism, a biologically problematic notion. Another problem is the ethnocentric slant of Bering's thesis. Evolutionary arguments for the origin of religion always struggle because, as many historians have pointed out, the ideation of "religion" is an invention of the European Enlightenment.

Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism only began to be "religions" when Europeans started to force these categories upon them. As Wilfred Smith comments in The Meaning and End of Religion, the question of whether Confucianism is religion is a question that the west has never been able to answer and the Chinese never able to ask.

If evolutionary arguments fail to convince through lack of data and fuzzy notions of "religion", then fortunately the field of cognitive psychology does much better – relatively speaking. The theorising in this new field is, by common consent, well ahead of the data, but nevertheless has a solid core of significant empirical results. Early developmental human drives and behaviours may be broadly categorised into those essential for survival ("instincts"), such as face recognition, hunger, thirst and suckling – and those for which there appears to be a strong cognitive preference. In this latter category one might include evidence that very young babies can count, acquire a basic knowledge of physics, develop a theory of mind and, following language acquisition, readily accumulate non-reflective beliefs.

Some beliefs are acquired using a presumed "agency detecting device", a mental tool that infers whether an object is an agent or the consequence of agency. Young children, at least in the western context, appear to be natural theists, readily providing explanations dependent on omnipotent god-agency, beginning to distinguish between parental minds/knowledge and god-minds/knowledge by the age of five.

For the sake of argument, let's cut to the chase and say that we accept the whole current cognitive psychology "package". Are we then justified in saying that the innate cognitive tendencies to believe certain things ipso facto rules out their actual existence or validity? It is difficult to know why this should be the case and Bering's stance seems to me unnecessarily Machiavellian on this point ("why the human mind is so easily seduced" … "Theory of mind became the warped lens through which we perceived the natural world" etc). In fact sometimes he sounds like a downright crypto-solipsist.

Take maths, for example. I know of no academic mathematicians who are not either explicit or implicit neo-platonists. They all believe there are mathematical truths that exist "out there" that are waiting to be found. E = mc² would still remain the case even if humans went extinct. As Eugene Wigner, the physics Nobel Laureate, once remarked: "The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift that we neither understand nor deserve."

Yes, babies display basic numeracy, but this is a long way from quantum mechanics, which is hard work to grasp and counter-intuitive, but both appear to be grounded in an external reality "outside the head".

The innate cognitive ability to count compared with quantum mechanics is as the innate childhood bias to theism is to adult theology. There is a big difference between non-reflective and reflective beliefs. The reflective ability to grapple with quantum mechanics does not thereby nullify the baby's non-reflective ability to count, any more than does an adult's reflective belief in God nullify childhood theism. And evolutionary biology will be of little help in "explaining" human beliefs in either quantum mechanics or the finer points of theology.

Evolution may have delivered tendencies to believe certain things and to disbelieve others. But that in itself does not tell us whether those beliefs are true or not. What evolution has delivered is some big frontal lobes that are essential for rational cogitation; all adult beliefs have to be justified by rational argument. Bering finds the ontological question "rather dull".

Personally I find people who fail to ask ontological questions extremely dull. Thankfully there is life beyond the inside of our heads.

In my own Reformed Presbyterian tradition, I have found that our theological presuppositions typically serve as the lens through which the natural world is observed and understood. When faced with apparent conflict between science and faith, the conservative knee-jerk reaction is to insist without equivocation that special revelation is a more reliable guide to ultimate truth than natural revelation. Without this ultimate reference point, it is feared that our sin natures would prevent us from seeing the world clearly. But if Christian theology is merely our fallible attempt to systematize the biblical data, then certainly we are prone to goofing that up as well. And given the estimated 38,000 Christian denominations spread across the world today, I’d say we’ve goofed it up quite a bit!

Interestingly, we do have the ability to faithfully interpret scientific data when no theology is at stake. For instance, Christians who tend to perpetually argue over the most trivial points of doctrine would probably all agree that chlorophyll is green, ice melts at 0 degrees C, and the universal gravitational constant is 6.67300 × 10^-11 m³ kg^-1 s^-2. This leads me to believe that theology can also be a dirty lens that blurs our observations of the natural world. Is it possible that scientific data can help Christians sort out good theology from bad theology?

Consider the great supernovae explosions that occurred in the years 1006, 1054, 1181, 1572 and 1604. Details of these incredible events were dutifully recorded by the world’s great astronomers. But the 1054 and 1181 explosions were not mentioned by any European astronomers. Some have cited bad weather as the probable cause, but the 1054 supernova, which is known today as the Crab Nebula, was visible in broad daylight for 23 days and at night for 653 days. Its sudden and violent appearance was recorded by Chinese, Arab, Japanese and even North American Indian astronomers, but for some reason nobody in Europe seemed to care. The 1181 supernova was visible at night for 185 days and was recorded by both Chinese and Japanese astronomers. But once again, Europeans paid scarce attention to it. Perhaps there was more going on than perpetual cloudiness?

In the years following SN1006, European astronomical science gave way to primitive superstitions and occult astrology. The conflation of Aristotle’s ancient cosmology with Christian tradition seemed to give theological support to the Greek notion that everything beyond the sub-lunar firmament was perfect, eternal, and unchanging. We now recognize this as a clear-cut case of bad exegesis based on incorrect assumptions about creation, but at the time this doctrine was considered non-negotiable. While Chinese astronomers referred to these supernovae explosions as “guest stars” European astronomers would have considered the existence of heavenly guests contrary to theologically acceptable science. As a result, the supernovae were not seen as new scientific data to be analyzed and understood, but as omens and curses to be feared—as was the comet of 1066 which nearly threw medieval Europe into widespread panic.

But why is there no mention of SN1054? Some say the object could have been viewed as an atmospheric phenomenon rather than a heavenly event—similar to how comets were understood; but even passing comets were dutifully recorded. Others have blamed the Ecclesiastical disputes between Rome and Constantinople, which came to a head in July of that same year. Pope Leo IX excommunicated the Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church only two weeks after SN1054 exploded. Given the political turmoil of the Christian world, it’s quite possible that SN1054 was not seen as a natural phenomenon to be studied, but a supernatural omen marking the schism between East and West. Perhaps it was bad luck to even mention it? Since no written records of the event exist in Christendom, we may never know for sure.

The lesson here is that we Christians must be careful not to ignore obvious facts and data just because they don’t seem compatible with our theology. Often times these inconvenient truths can provide exciting new biblical and theological perspectives, and they can open up areas of scientific investigation that were once considered off limits to believers. For example, after Nicholas Copernicus pointed out the flaws in Aristotle’s earth-centered cosmology, more people were willing to test other aspects of the traditional system. Eventually it became theologically acceptable to study the material changes in the heavens—and just in time for the 1572 and 1604 supernovae! By demonstrating that these transient celestial objects were distant enough to occupy the “immutable” heavenly realm, the Renaissance astronomers began a difficult journey that would eventually liberate Christian theology from the scientific shackles of Greco-Roman astronomy.

It might not have seemed so at the time, but clearly this was a win-win situation for both science and theology—a victory achieved not by new exegetical insights, but through scientific discovery. It is definitely possible for scientific data to be misunderstood, but if Christians can admit that the Scriptures can also be misunderstood, then there is hope for a constructive dialogue between science and faith.

The "hand" shown above is created by energy emanating from the nebula around the dying star PSR B1509-58. While it is certainly not the literal "Hand of God," His hand is certainly quite evident in it.

Underlying our universe, captured so beautifully in this image, are countless physical constants that appear to be precisely tuned in order to support its present state. Was ours simply the only universe to get things right amongst an infinite number of other universes? Or does such balance point to a designer?

To learn more about the "fine-tuning of the universe," be sure to explore Question 14 on our website.

Astronomers and geologists have determined that the universe and Earth are billions of years old. This conclusion is not based on just one measurement or one calculation, but on many types of evidence. Here we will describe just two types of evidence for an old Earth and two types of evidence for an old universe; more types can be found under Further Reading. These methods are largely independent of each other, based on separate observations and arguments, yet all point to a history much longer than 10,000 years. As Christians, we believe that God created the world and that the world declares his glory, so we can’t ignore what nature is telling us about its history.

Age of the Earth from seasonal rings and layers

If you’ve ever seen a horizontal slice of a tree trunk, you’ve seen how a tree forms a new growth ring each year. In years of drought, the tree grows less quickly so the ring is narrower; in good growing seasons the ring is thicker. A tree’s age can be found by simply counting its rings. By comparing the pattern of thick and thin rings to weather records, scientists can verify that the method is accurate. This method can even be used on dead trees that fell in a forest long ago. For example, the last 200 rings in the dead tree might match up with 200 rings early in the life of the living tree, so the two trees together can count back many years. In this way, multiple trees can be used to build a master chronology for a forested region. European oak trees have been used to build a 12,000-year chronology.¹

The annual ice layers in glaciers provide a similar method that goes back much further in history. Each year, snowfall varies throughout the seasons and an annual layer is formed. Like the tree rings, this method can be verified by comparison to historical records for weather, as well as to records of volcanic eruptions around the globe that left thin dust layers on the glaciers. Scientists have drilled ice cores deep into glaciers and found ice that is 123,000 years old in Greenland² and 740,000 years old in Antarctica.³ These annual layers go back much farther than the 10,000 years advocated by the young earth creationists. The Earth must be at least 740,000 years old.

How can an old Earth be reconciled with Genesis? See Scripture Interpretation

Age of the Earth and solar system from radiometric dating

In your high school science classroom, you may have seen a large poster of the periodic table hanging on the wall. The periodic table shows the types of atoms that make up the world around us. An element in the periodic table can come in different flavors called isotopes. Some isotopes are unstable, and over time these isotopes “decay” into isotopes of other elements. For example, Potassium-40 is unstable and decays into Argon-40. As time passes, a rock will have more and more Argon-40 and less and less Potassium-40. Radiometric dating is possible because this decay occurs at a known rate, called the “half-life” of the radioactive element. The half-life is the time that it takes for half the radioactive sample to change from one element into the other.

Some isotopes have short half-lives of minutes or years, but Potassium-40 has a half-life of 1.3 billion years. Radiometric dating requires that one understand the initial ratio of the two elements in a given sample by some means. In this case, Argon-40 is a gas that easily bubbles out and escapes when it is produced in molten rock. Once the rock hardens, however, all the Argon-40 is trapped in the sample, giving us an accurate record of how much Potassium-40 has decayed since that time. So, if we find a rock with equal parts Potassium-40 and Argon-40, we know that half the Potassium-40 has decayed into Argon-40, and that the rock hardened 1.3 billion years ago.⁴

It’s hard to find rocks on the surface of the Earth that have not been altered over time. Most old rocks have been eroded by wind and water or submerged by continental plates. The oldest reliably dated rock formation is in Greenland, where several different isotopes were used to find an age of 3.6 billion years.⁵ Scientists also recently dated zircon grains (which resist erosion) in Western Australia to 4.4 billion years old.⁶ To find older rocks that haven’t been eroded, we need to look beyond Earth. Meteorites are rocks from the solar system that have fallen to Earth recently and haven’t suffered much erosion. Their pristine interiors give an age that dates back to their formation at the beginning of the solar system. Nearly all meteorites have the same radiometric age, 4.56 billion years old.⁷ Thus, the solar system, including the Earth, is about 4,560,000,000 years old.

Age of galaxies from the travel time of light

What about the ages of stars and galaxies, and the age of the whole universe? One way to measure these ages is with the travel time of light. Light travels incredibly fast – 300,000 kilometers per second, or 186,000 miles per second. On Earth, the delay due to light travel time is a tiny fraction of a second. But in space, the distances are so vast that the light takes a substantial amount of time to travel to us: 8.3 minutes from the Sun, 4.3 years from the nearest star, and about 8500 years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. That delay means that we don’t see these objects as they are right now, but as they were when the light left. The universe actually works as a sort of “time machine,” in which we can see into the past simply by looking far away.

The calculation of the light travel time is simple once you know the speed of light and have a measurement of the distance. The speed of light is well known from experiments on Earth, and various astronomical observations confirm that the speed of light has not changed over the history of the universe. But measuring distances in astronomy is not trivial – you can’t just string a measuring tape from here to the center of the galaxy! Instead, astronomers use several interlocking methods to determine the distances, such as geometric calculations and brightness measurements. For example, some galaxies look much smaller and fainter than other galaxies of the same kind, showing they are much further away.⁸

The Andromeda galaxy, a near neighbor to our own Milky Way galaxy, is 2.3 million light years away. That is, we are seeing it as it was 2.3 million years ago. But that is just our local neighborhood. In recent decades, astronomers have detected galaxies located several billion light years away. If the light has been traveling billions of years to reach us, then the universe must be at least that old. This is completely independent of radiometric dating of the solar system, but both methods point to an age of billions of years, not thousands.

See Did God create everything recently but make it appear old?

Age of the universe from expansion

Not only can astronomers measure the distance of galaxies, they can measure how galaxies are moving. Galaxies are not holding still in space, nor are they moving randomly. Some galaxies are moving towards their neighbors, attracted by their mutual gravity. But the biggest pattern we see is that galaxies are moving apart from one another. This motion apart is not all at the same speed; instead it follows a pattern where galaxies that are further apart are moving more quickly.

This particular pattern indicates the whole universe is expanding. To see why, consider a loaf of raisin bread. The raisins are like galaxies and the dough is like the fabric of space in the universe. As the dough rises, it carries the raisins along, pulling them apart from each other. Raisins that started out on opposite sides of the loaf will be a few inches farther apart after the dough rises, while raisins that started out near each other may only move half an inch. So, the speed of their motion is proportional to the separation between them. In the same way, the space of the universe pulls galaxies further apart as the universe expands.

Astronomers detect a galaxy’s motion by looking at its light spectrum. When a galaxy is carried away by the expansion of space, its light waves are stretched out, making it appear redder. The change in the galaxy’s color is called the red shift, and can be used to calculate its velocity. From the measurements of many galaxies, astronomers can accurately measure the expansion rate of the universe as a whole.

The age of universe can be determined by imaging what the universe looked like in the past, “rewinding” the expansion. In the past the galaxies must have been closer together, and in the distant past they would have been packed together in a tiny point. If we assume that the expansion rate is constant over time, the age for the universe as a whole is about 10 billion years. However, astronomers have been working over the last 20 years to determine how the expansion rate changes with time. We now know that early in the universe the expansion was slowing down, but now it is speeding up. Using careful measurements of this change in expansion rate, the age of the universe is now known quite precisely to be 13.7±0.13 billion years. ⁹

Conclusion

Many different and complementary scientific measurements have established with near certainty that the universe and the Earth are billions of years old. Layers in glaciers show a history much longer than 10,000 years, and radiometric dating places the formation of the Earth at 4.5 billion years. Light from galaxies is reaching us billions of years after it left, and the expansion rate of the universe dates its age to 13.7 billion years. These are just a sampling of the types of evidence for the great age of the Earth and the universe; see the resources below for more.