SCIENCE SPEAKS ABOUT GOD
Seek the Creator
NATURE is the subject of science. Science studies nature and discovers those laws through which nature is being governed. In other words, science studies the creation without referring to the Creator.
It is not the concern of scientists to discover the Creator. Moreover, this kind of bifurcation is practically impossible. One cannot detach the engineer from the machine, then how can one detach the Creator from the creation? Science discovers the marvels of nature, but the question arises as to who created these marvels? When we try to find out the answer to this question, we cannot help acknowledge the existence of God.
One cannot detach the engineer from the machine, then how can one detach the Creator from the creation?
There are a number of books on this subject. A recent one is Why Science Does Not Disprove God written by mathematician Amir D. Aczel, who is currently researcher in the history of science at Boston University. The following are excerpts taken from a review on this book by the physicist Alan Lightman:
There is plenty of good scientific evidence that our universe began about 14 billion years ago, in a Big Bang of enormously high density and temperature, long before planets, stars and even atoms existed. But what came before? The physicist, Lawrence Krauss in his book discusses the current thinking of physicists that our entire universe could have emerged from a jitter in the amorphous haze of the subatomic world called the quantum foam, in which energy and matter can materialize out of nothing. Krauss’s punch line is that we do not need God to create the universe. The quantum foam can do it quite nicely all on its own. Aczel asks the obvious question: But where did the quantum foam come from? Where did the quantum laws come from? Hasn’t Krauss simply passed the buck? Legitimate questions, but ones we will probably never be able to answer.
…Aczel discusses the mysteries of “emergent” phenomena — when a complex system exhibits a qualitative behaviour that cannot be explained in terms of the workings of its individual parts: for example, the emergence of self-replicating life from inanimate molecules or the emergence of consciousness from a collection of connected neurons. He writes, “The inexplicability of such emergent phenomena is the reason why we cannot disprove the idea of some creative power behind everything." …The fine-tuning problem: For the past 50 years or so, physicists have become more and more aware that various fundamental parameters of our universe appear to be fine-tuned to allow the emergence of life — not only life as we know it but life of any kind. For example, if the nuclear force were slightly stronger than it is, then all of the hydrogen atoms in the infant universe would have fused with other hydrogen atoms to make helium, and there would be no hydrogen left. No hydrogen means no water. On the other hand, if the nuclear force were substantially weaker than it is, then the complex atoms needed for biology could not hold together.
In another, even more striking example, if the cosmic “dark energy” discovered 15 years ago were a little denser than it actually is, our universe would have expanded so rapidly that matter could never have pulled itself together to form stars. And if the dark energy were a little smaller, the universe would have collapsed long before stars had time to form. Atoms are made in stars. Without stars there would be no atoms and no life.
So, the question is: Why? Why do these parameters lie in the narrow range that allows life?
If our particular universe did not have the right parameters to allow
the emergence of life, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. In a
similar way, Earth happens to be at the right distance from the Sun
to have liquid water, a nice oxygen atmosphere and so on. We can
ask why our planet has all these lovely properties, amenable to life.
…But if we lived on Mercury, where the temperature is 800 degrees,
or on Neptune, where it is 328 degrees below zero, we could not exist.
(The Washington Post, April 11, 2014.)