One of my Bible Study group members mentioned that she’d seen The Story of Everything film at a friend’s house recently. I asked her what she (as a non-scientist) thought of it, as I’m planning a possible showing under the auspices of our church.
As you may have seen the film, based on Steve Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis, deals with three of the current scientific issues pointing, arguably of course, to a divine Creator. The issues chosen are the Big Bang, Cosmic Fine Tuning, and the Origin of Life.
In a couple of online discussions of the film, Meyer has pointed out how the low entropy of our current universe raises the thermodynamic certainty that, at the origin of the Big Bang, be it a singularity or not, that entropy must have been much lower. That is to say the “primordial atom” must have been super-intensely ordered, if after 13 billion years the cosmos is as highly structured as it is. That’s fundamental 2nd Law stuff.
Meyer has also commented on the finding of the James Webb telescope, that organised galaxies existed far earlier than previous theory suggested. This may, he says, indicate that the universe is significantly older than current estimates – or else that its initial order was even higher than we have conjectured.
My friend, commenting on the film, was less impressed with the cosmology than with the astonishingly complex microscopic world of the cell. The most striking image, for her, was the graphic of the rapid replication of the chromosomes at cell division, which she described (much in keeping with the scene as I remember it) as “an explosion.”
That set me thinking, because “explosion” is scarcely an accurate description of the wonderfully choreographed process of eukaryotic nuclear division. It may capture the rapidity, but not the nature of the event. Consequently I wonder if the term “Big Bang” may similarly divert us into a mental picture of the creation of the universe that is entirely inaccurate.
It was, of course, Fred Hoyle who described the claim of a universe expanding from an origin as a “Big Bang” for pejorative reasons, much preferring his own Steady State Theory of cosmology. The term stuck, but it inevitably puts us in mind of explosions (and how many visual representations of the process have you seen with added dynamite sound effects?). But every explosion we’ve ever witnessed takes the form of something of low entropy (a building, a tank, or even a stratum of rock) being suddenly reduced to high entropy, in the form of heat and disorganised light leaving piles of rubble, machinery or body parts. Explosions level cities, destroy dinosaurs, of spread star fragments across the universe. They never create organisation.
But although, according to theory, the expansion of the universe happened inordinately fast, the ordered cosmos it produced makes it look a lot less like Tsar Bomba than like that rapid process of mitosis, or the bursting open of a flower bud. Perhaps we should think of the creation of the universe as (unlike Darwinism) a genuinely “evolutionary,” that is “unfolding” process. It might have happened at the speed of light, but the results were precisely built-in from the start.
If the macroscopic universe did, indeed, unfold from secondary causes governed by lawlike regularities, as cosmology describes pretty well after the condensation of matter and energy, it raises the separate question of whether God always works that way. Such “non-interference” by God in the world is, quite literally, a religious article of faith for many theistic evolutionists and Aristotelians alike. They talk of the absurdity of God “breaking the laws he made himself.”
The first error here is in forgetting natural laws are descriptive, not prescriptive. As I have argued here before, God might be acting directly on every quantum event, yet in regular ways, in order to make the world comprehensible both to scientists and to lowly animals requiring a reliable way to meet their needs. Nevertheless, the world does give the appearance of true secondary causes – so that rubbing two boy scouts together predictably produces fire as well as scandal. But that does not require that God has to do things that way.
If the standard theory of cosmology is true, and the formation of the various generations of stars, galaxies, elements and so on could be predicted from the laws and initial conditions, as far as we can trace them, that does not entail that this initial creative act would also result in life on earth. In fact, empirically speaking, there seems no way that it could. Neither do we have to assume that biological evolution guided only by the fundamental principles of physics and a thing called “randomness” accounts for the “endless forms most beautiful” of the biosphere, and still less for the divine image in mankind.
Even human beings can work both algorithmically, such as in doing mathematics, or contingently, such as in writing blog posts about the Big Bang. I doubt that God is any less free – “He is Yahweh: he will do what seems right to him.”
