God and Galileo by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL106000/SCI004000/REL108020
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2019-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

The public perception may be that science has solved it all, but it has not. We commend an essay written by astronomer Michael Disney:

Don’t be impressed by our complex machines or our arcane mathematics. They have been used to build plausible cosmic stories before—which we had to discard afterwards in the face of improving evidence. The likelihood must be that such revisions will have to occur again and again and again.3

We fully agree with Disney that science progresses step-by-step, and in that spirit, we hope that many scientific answers will in the fullness of time be forthcoming.

Disney makes an important (but perhaps too rarely appreciated) point: for most of its existence, our universe has been opaque, masked by itself. In physical cosmology, the Planck epoch is the earliest period of time in the history of the universe, from zero to approximately 10−43 seconds (10−2 = 0.01, 10−3 = 0.001, etc.). In this very short, hot, and dense period of the universe, the current laws of physics break down. Given our estimate of the age of the universe to be roughly 1017 seconds, some sixty decades or sixty factors of ten in time [10(43+17) = 1060] have elapsed since the Planck era. Initially, then, our universe was flooded with radiation. As the universe expanded, the radiation cooled, and about 300,000 years or 1013 seconds after the Planck era, the universe became transparent, and galaxies began to form. In logarithmic terms, galaxies have existed for only four decades in time (from 1013 to 1017 seconds). Disney poses an insightful thought: How secure is our scientific knowledge of the unobservable opaque universe in those first fifty-six out of sixty decades of time? We may get some clues from the Large Hadron Collider, but as Disney says, those early epochs may be “lost too far back in the logarithmic mists of time.”4 The point Disney emphasizes is that in terms of the history of our universe, current astronomical observations of galaxies span only four out of sixty decades in time! What a daunting task, Disney therefore argues, to mathematically model the entire history (past and future) of our universe, given that the only astronomical data we have come from a very late fragment in time spanning from 1013 to 1017 seconds. Disney’s essay is one of caution. To put this in perspective, during those mere four decades of time, everything that astronomers have ever observed was produced: all the galaxies, stars, and our solar system were formed, and modern man emerged.

Our response to Peter Atkins would be caution. Atkins may be right, that science has the power to solve all these physical questions, although it still has a long way to go in surmounting the intellectual barriers that we face. Our major issue here, however, is with Atkins’s final point: we are concerned not so much with the power of science (even if it is sometimes exaggerated) but with the limits of science. We interpret Atkins as claiming that science can deal with any aspect of our existence, including our existence as spiritual human beings.

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