Not having any expertise in physics my reading informs me that there are a series of fundamental forces in the universe. Among these are things like strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, gravity, etc and that these are extremely finely tuned such that a minor deviation in any would have resulted in a universe that could not have supported life, or even lasted very long. The marvelous coincidence of all this fine tuning is suggesting an intelligent plan to many because the odds against it happening by chance are infintesimally small.
More fundamental than all this however is the explanation of the origin of these forces and for that matter the origin of the universe. We now understand that the universe had a beginning and the date roughly has been calculated. In addition physicists speculating about the radically different state of the universe in those first couple of billion years state that there appears to have been exquisite fine tuning of the colossal initial forces to produce the universe that we know today rather than one that imploded on itself, etc. I'd have to look up my sources to be any more specific than that.
The big question then appears to be that if the universe had a beginning in a singular point of unimaginable power, what is the explanation of that event. In addition we know from einsteinian physics that space and time are not independent of the universe and do not exist apart from our universe. All of this suggests the common sense intuition that there is a reality outside of that which we presently understand that exists outside of space and time that is responsible for our universe. I can think of no other explanation.
Modern secularists and atheists divide truth and knowledge into scientific and supernatural. This seems to be a common presumption of those who hold up "science" as the only valid knowledge. They contend that the only possible knowledge or truth is that which we can perceive with our senses or with instruments that are extensions of our senses. That seems to me to be an extremely limited viewpoint and one which is doomed to result in major defects in knowledge. It is like the men in Plato's cave who see only shadows on the back wall and believe they have a real view of the world.
Science, philosophy and theology all seek universal truth and cannot contradict each other. All are valid. Einstein was just as much a philosopher as a scientist. He never conducted experiments except in his head and his philosophical experiments turned out to be true (at least as far as our present day understanding is concerned). Cosmology is half science, half philosophy. Einstein found that our presumptions of reality which seemed so obvious were incorrect. The same process in our acquistion of knowlege of the world around us has happened time and again in the past and will continue to happen in the future. What we know as "scientific fact" today will seem ridiculous to those a thousand years from now.
Let us suppose that it is true that the universe as we know it was created by an intelligent being who exists outside of time and space and who is unimaginably powerful. From all we know that is at least a reasonable possibility. If a "scientist" who is seeking an understanding of the origin of the universe excludes that possiblility from his consideration, then he is not seeking truth but is doing something else, perhaps forming his own religion. If he is really seeking truth he must accept this at least as one possibility and look for what evidence he can of this as an explanation. In my view he will find it. For those of us who are convinced by our "thought experiments" we can move on to the more important question of the meaning of creation and our relationship to the creator.
No comments:
Post a Comment