Driven to Lead by Paul R. Lawrence

Author:Paul R. Lawrence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-07-01T16:00:00+00:00

This is extreme ideological warfare. Is it any wonder that religious leaders fight back? They feel, with the deepest conviction, that the view of the universe offered by Haeckel, Hull, Dawkins, Gould, and others is false at the most fundamental level. How can there be any convergence of these positions?

Miller then reverses his story and develops a step-by-step case for a possible convergence based on scientific findings that the biologists quoted above had not taken into account. He begins with Newton’s law of gravitation. The attraction between bodies is proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them. The ratio between the attraction and these other factors is a so-called “constant of nature,” which is a physicist’s way of saying, “It is what it is. The universe just comes that way.”

What it is, at least to fifteen decimal places, is 0.000000000066732 meters cubed per kilogram per second squared. But it is perfectly fair to ask: “Why is it that and not something else? What would happen if it were something else?” According to Miller, “It turns out that the consequences of even very small changes in the gravitational constant would be profound. If the constant were even slightly larger, it would have increased the force of gravity just enough to slow expansion after the Big Bang.”17 Miller then quotes the world-famous mathematical physicist, Stephen Hawking: “If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller [because of a larger gravitational constant] by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have collapsed back into itself before it reached its present size.”18 Conversely, Miller continues, “If it [the gravitational constant] had been smaller, the dust from the Big Bang would just have continued to expand, never coalescing into galaxies, stars, planets—or us. Moreover, gravity is only one of four fundamental forces in the universe. If any of the other three, the strong nuclear force, electromagnetism, and the resonance level of electrons, were of a different absolute value than they in fact are, life as we know it would be impossible.”19 In summary, he quotes Hawking again: “The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications.”20

Hawking went on to make his implications even clearer: “This means that the initial state of the universe must have been very carefully chosen indeed if the hot big bang model was correct right back to the beginning of time. It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”21 This amazing conclusion of Hawking’s is due to the incomprehensible enormousness of the odds against any natural explanation. Hawking came to this conclusion in his book A Brief History of Time. After discussing in detail all the available natural explanations of the Big Bang, he finds each of them seriously flawed.

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