To get funding, the ever-costlier physical sciences need to present the taxpaying public with a regular series of gee-wow-golly-gosh Eureka moments. We've found a new planet! We've found a hole in the ozone layer!! We've found the Higgs boson!!!
Now the latest. We've found gravity waves!!!! The Big Bang was bigger than we thought!!!!! During the first trillionth of a second, the universe expanded faster than light-speed!!!!!!
For the past 10 years, scientists at the South Pole – perched in the dry air atop the 8,852 feet of ice that still covers the landscape there – have been pointing delicate telescopes at the sky to try to detect minute fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation.
These particular fluctuations, known as gravity waves, are supposed to provide confirmation of the theory that in the first instant after the moment of creation the universe expanded from nothing to not far short of its present – and ever more rapidly expanding – size.
This is a romantic, swashbuckling tale. In 1956, when two scientists messing about with a redundant telecoms antenna found a persistent and irritating hiss, they put it down to bird-droppings on the dish. So they scrambled out there with scrubbing brushes and got rid of all the pigeon poop.
The hiss continued. Baffled, they contacted their local university, which told them they'd found by accident what the university had been deliberately hunting for years – the cosmic background radiation that physics had long predicted.
The two boffins – Penzias and Wilson – got the Nobel Prize for physics. This was perhaps the most unusual award ever. They hadn't been looking for what they found. When they found it, they didn't know what they'd found. They thought it must be a mistake. When they reported it, those who knew what they'd found got no share of the prize.
Penzias and Wilson are the only physicists in history to have been awarded a Nobel Prize for their skill in cleaning up bird droppings. By doing that, they had eliminated the impossible. The hiss that remained, however improbable, must be the truth.
The radiation they had stumbled upon is thought to represent the last wispy remnants of the colossal explosion that brought our universe into being. Its temperature is just one-hundredth of the freezing point of water. But it is there. And it is fascinating.
For one thing, its distribution in the observable universe is not quite uniform. By measuring its minuscule fluctuations, NASA's anisotropy probe has been able to determine the age of the universe as 13.82 billion years.
Now, that value makes the universe quite a lot older than the 6,000 years posited by the late Bishop Ussher, a worthy and amiable divine who conceived the dotty notion that the age of the universe could best be determined by assuming that every word of the Bible – even the allegorical bits – was in all respects literally true. He counted the generations from Adam and concluded that the universe had been created in 4004 B.C.
So fashionable was this delightful absurdity that I have in my library an Ussher Bible in which every page is annotated with its imagined (and imaginary) date. Opposite the words "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" appears the date "4004 B.C."
Scientists, of course, are prone to scoff at religion. They cannot tell us Who or what caused the Big Bang, but too many of them confidently tell us there is no such being as God. Richard Dawkins, notoriously, is one of them – but he believes in aliens instead. To each his own.
The Big Bang is actually a great deal more problematic for your average atheistic scientist than it is for us Christians. For the Big Bang – whose reality the latest research from the South Pole tends to confirm – is evidence that there was indeed a definite and mightily spectacular moment of creation. And God said, Let there be light. And there was light.
So alarmed were the atheists at this implication that at Cambridge in the 1950s Fred Hoyle and his team spent decades trying to disprove the Big Bang theory. However, the Abbé Georges Lemaître, the Belgian Catholic priest whose paper of 1927 had first provided a mathematical and physical basis for the Big Bang theory, gently pointed out that his discovery that there was a moment of creation, when the entire universe exploded from a single "primordial particle," did not also prove beyond doubt that God exists.
He wrote: "As far as I can see, such a theory remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being. … For the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God. … It is consonant with Isaiah speaking of the hidden God, hidden even in the beginning of the universe."
It is this balance in Lemaître's writing that I commend to you today. As the book of Proverbs puts it, "A false balance is abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight."
Both scientists and men of religion are prone to take positions that are absolutist and insufficiently nuanced to reflect the evidence in a balanced fashion. Matters are more complex than we may think. In the climate debate, for instance, the true-believers of the Thermageddon cult have greatly underestimated the uncertainties that lie at the heart of all the physical sciences.
As one great professor used to put it, "Every measurement has a measurement uncertainty. Every result depends ultimately on measurement. Therefore, every result is uncertain."
Some men of religion say science must be wrong to claim that the universe is almost 14 billion years old. Some men of science say religion must be wrong to claim God exists.
The truth is that the universe must be a great deal older than 6,000 years (my personal suspicion is that it is a great deal older than 14 billion years, but that's another story). However, since the laws of physics by which scientists measure the universe did not exist until an instant after the Big Bang, science cannot have – and will never have – any method of demonstrating that God does not exist.
It is intellectually respectable, then, not only to believe in the teachings of the doctors and fathers of the Church but also – albeit with appropriate caution – to pay heed to the doctors and fathers of science. As Lemaître rightly saw, the two are by no means incompatible.
But, thanks to the pigeon-pooper-scoopers and the frostbitten astronomers, one should no longer believe that a bishop was correct in calculating that the world began 6,000 years ago.
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