« Randy revisits Revolver | main | Understatement of the year award »
God’s Universe?
19 Sep 06
The Harvard University Press Publicity Blog recently referenced a new review of Owen Gingerich’s God’s Universe that appeared in the October 2006 issue of Scientific American. The Harvard post pulled the following quote from the review:
In God’s Universe, Owen Gingerich, a Harvard University astronomer and science historian, tells how in the 1980s he was part of an effort to produce a kind of anti-Cosmos, a television series called Space, Time, and God that was to counter Sagan’s “conspicuously materialist approach to the universe.” The program never got off the ground, but its premise survives: that there are two ways to think about science. You can be a theist, believing that behind the veil of randomness lurks an active, loving, manipulative God, or you can be a materialist, for whom everything is matter and energy interacting within space and time. Whichever metaphysical club you belong to, the science comes out the same.
Harvard also bolded the phrase “the science comes out the same” to add emphasis. Of course, you wouldn’t expect the Harvard UP publicity folks to include the fact that the SA reviewer dismissed Gingerich’s claim outright. But it occurred to me that, if in fact the science does come out the same in a universe created by a god, it is perhaps something of a contradiction to state that that god is active, loving, and manipulative. Let’s imagine that god created the universe as a giant simulation game in which the program was written and continues to run, but god has effectively gone away and plans to come back to see the results eventually. In that case, the science could in fact come out the same. But if that god sticks around, lovingly tweaking results every now and then, it seems to me that would make the science come out different. Suppose that god actually had to intervene, however slightly, in the process of evolution in order to ensure that humans came out human. Would that not effectively change not only the course but also the science of evolution? Would biologists, in order to explain human development, not eventually have to come up with a theory as to how and when god intervened?
The Scientific American article is actually a review article that covers three other books: The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis S. Collins, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan. The article’s conclusion falls decidedly on the side of Dawkins and Sagan:
But the universe is not all that hospitable–try leaving Earth without a space-suit. Life took billions of years to take root on this planet, and it is an open question whether it made it anywhere else. To us carboniferous creatures, the dials may seem miraculously tweaked, but different physical laws might have led to universes harboring equally awe-filled forms of energy, cooking up anthropic arguments of their own.
Posted by pzed on September 19, 2006 at 7.05pm
Categories: scripture
