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Science Confirms Judeo-Christian Worldview, Or, Dalai Lama, Call Your Office
One of the most basic observations of comparative religion is that the difference between Judeo-Christian religion and Asian religious systems, such as Buddhism, resembles the difference between a line and a circle.
In Judaism and Christianity, reality has a beginning and an end. It’s linear. It’s going somewhere. Both beginning and end are mysterious, the former rendered, mythically, in the creation story, the latter represented, at least in Christianity, in the thrilling if baffling formulation that “time shall be no more.” The beginning is believed really to have happened and the end is believed to really be coming.
Buddhism, by contrast, conceives of reality as a matter of rhythm, of repitition and pattern. As Chesteron puts it in the Everlasting Man:
For most of Asia the rhythm has hardened into a recurrence. It is no longer merely a rather topsy-turvy sort of world; it is a wheel. What has happened to all those highly intelligent and highly civilized peoples is that they have been caught up in a sort of cosmic rotation….
Of course neither religious system possesses any purchase at all upon the contemporary mind—or didn’t, until yesterday morning’s newspaper.
“Discovery Bolsters Big-Bang Theory,” read a headline in the Wall Street Journal. “Signals Reach Back to the Birth of the Universe.”
Scientists said Monday they have detected the earliest signals reaching back to the birth of the universe almost 14 billion years ago, buttressing the big-bang theory of how the cosmos was formed.
Using a radio telescope at the South Pole, a team of astronomers and astrophysicists said they found telltale patterns of gravity waves in the primordial microwave radiation that lingers in space today. Scientists consider this the faint afterglow of the big bang.
The discovery offers what scientists say is the first direct data on the creation of the universe. Until now, cosmologists had theories but few facts.
The experiment didn’t merely lend credence to the big-bang theory. It damaged—and perhaps destroyed—the alternative theory.
A rival theory to the big bang suggests that the universe was instead created as part of an endless self-sustaining cycle. If the latest observations are true, “those cyclical models are dead,” said Neil Turok, director of Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a theorist who favors the cyclical models.
Now, I wouldn’t want to take my religious views from physics so complicated that I couldn’t begin to understand them any more than I would want my religion to constrain scientific inquiry (and, if I had my way, anyone raising the dispute between Galileo and the Church in the comments thread would be found guilty of violating the Ricochet Code of Conduct). But jeepers. We have here the most sophisticated and utterly contemporary science available to us. And what is it saying? That Genesis is right. Creation really did have a beginning.
To quote that most penetrating of western philosophers, Bertie Wooster, deuced interesting, what?
Yes, it’s possible there is some matter that came out of the big bang with slow enough speed that it didn’t escape the gravity well. I have no idea how much, though.
We’ll see what cosmology suggests as we continue discovering, but given our time horizon and the closely observable around us, the cyclical deduction is logical (as were past deductions given what’s observable).
Some Judaic perspective:
The Zohar, the main book of Kabblah, states:
The year referenced is 1839 in the Gregorian calendar, around the time when massive changes were rocking the Jewish world (e.g. the advent of Chassidism) and the secular, scientific world (e.g. Doppler, Joule, Faraday, Kelvin, Darwin, Maxwell, etc.).
Both areas of change are called a preparation for the elevation of the world, the coming of the Jewish Messiah which Jews believe will either begin or reach a new ascendancy in the year 6000 (the Jewish calendar is currently at 5774).
Thus it is logical and expected that as time goes on, science and Torah will converge, as they are both means of appreciating the divine dominion over and unity with the physical. (One way this might play out is through the discovery of a Theory of Everything, reflecting G-d’s Unity.) This according to Torah has always been the point of earthly wisdom: to understand G-dliness through physicality.
What I find amazing Peter is that for the last three days since this discovery has been alerted to is three really annoying trends have started on social media: – First Using this discovery by certain atheists to mock all the religious – not realising that the Big Bang Theory came from a Catholic priest hypothesis. – Two that that priest name has been deliberately covered up (Fr Georges Lemaitre) who insist that hubble was responsible. – Three that somehow this proves the multiverse theory is true. The first I find obnoxious, the second disgraceful, the third shaking my head (does it). Though it backs up what your friend David Berlinski stated : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juuM26pcMtg Perhaps you should have him make another guest apperance.
So, I know this is off topic and probably emerges from a pocket of snark matter in my universe, but I’m just hoping that at some point it doesn’t take 14 billion years to get to the next page of comments in a discussion thread.
I’m typing this at 8:30PM PDT, and–lo!–suddenly everything on Ricochet is running much faster. We knew there would be bugs–although not, I confess, quite this many. But Yeti and others have been working 20 hours a day now since Sunday evening, and there are, here and there, signs of progress.
Since Biblical themes lie at the heart of this thread, might it be appropriate to suggest that, God Himself not having rested until the seventh day, all of us exercise, during this act of re-creation, another three days of patience?
Anyway, there’s progress, Brian, no?
Gee, I read that NASA just gave scientific underpinning to Big Government, Environmentalism and Central Planning.
Whatever floats your boat.
Sorry for dropping out of the conversation, especially for doing a sloppy hit-n-run as I did. I also (unfairly) imported some frustration from other posts, which is never called for.
I don’t maintain that science contradicts religion. I do, however, maintain that some religious propositions are contradicted by some things we know from science.
What frustrated me about Peter’s post was his propensity to comment on science only to the degree to which it comports with (as with cosmology) or departs from (as with biology) his theological understanding. In the aggregate, I don’t think anything’s dispositive here, though I wish we’d spend more time pondering what things are before we all jump to what it all means.
And Peter said unto his Ricochet disciples, it will runneth faster, you just wait and see…and lo, it did run faster and all rejoiced and were glad and some proclaimed it a miracle…and a much welcome one at that, by gum.
As a general rule, I agree.
But there are a lot of specifics that both lay claim to. To take an obvious example, whether or not the Flood happened is subject to empirical investigation. It may be one that science/archeology cannot definitively answer, but it’s definitely within both realms. Same goes for Moses (for whom there’s almost no archeological evidence), David (for whom there’s very little), or Pontius Pilate (for whom there’s a little, though it’s pretty solid).
So, by the way, is the question of whether the universe had a beginning.
I think there might be a bit of confusion on what the Big Bang is. It’s wrong to think of it as an explosion. Instead, space-time itself inflated. That means there is no ‘center’ of the Big Bang. There is no preferred direction of observation in space. Instead, everything is moving away from everything else.
The best analogy is the surface of a balloon. If you draw a bunch of dots on the surface and inflate the balloon, all the dots move away from each other. In the surface plane of the balloon, there is no center of expansion. Every dot just sees all other dots moving away from it, and none of them are special.
If you could extrapolate that balloon surface into four dimensions, that’s what happened during the big bang.
Whether the universe continues to expand, or eventually contracts, depends on how much mass there is in the universe. If the amount of mass crosses a certain threshhold, then in the distant future the force of gravity would cause all matter to collapse in on itself. If not, then the universe would continue to slowly expand and while it does entropy would eventually cause all motion to stop – the ‘heat death’ of the universe.
But then a wrinkle got thrown into cosmology with the discovery of dark energy, and now it looks like the universe will not only continue to expand, but the expansion will accelerate until everything flies apart at an increasing rate – the ‘Big Rip’.
But if cosmologists are honest, they’ll tell you there’s still a lot we don’t know. Dark Matter and Dark Energy have thrown some pretty good curveballs at conventional theory, and it’s still being sorted out.
Is religion applied social science or is it historical fact, and are you taking this as reinforcement of science supporting your views of religion? One of the major errors made in the 19th century that gave us progressivism was to make the mistake of asserting that the same gains made in the natural sciences would of course be followed by mastery of moral sciences, even though social orders are many orders of magnitude beyond the complexity of the physical world. Blame the Mathematicians!
Also curious to readily take as support of western religious views scientific findings, which by themselves used to be considered working against religion. Its about time.
The problem with using science to validate religion is that for every factoid you can pick out that seems to support a possible biblical interpretation, there are countless others that are absolutely contradictory.
In fact, the overarching theme of scientific discovery is to show that we are less and less special in the universe. We once thought the Earth was the center of the universe. Then we accepted that it was part of a solar system. Then we learned that the solar system is but one of many billions in our galaxy. Then we learned that our galaxy is just a pinprick in a giant cosmos.
Recent discoveries in cosmology go even further. The WMAP survey and other observations suggest that the universe is probably infinite in size, or at least immense compared to the 13.8 billion light-year bubble that makes up ‘our’ universe. So that makes us even less special.
The whole story of the bible is that we are unique – made in God’s image and the universe made for us. That’s very hard to reconcile with what we are observing.
Isn’t this itself an unwarranted interpretation? If you realize how much father we see and yet still haven’t found anything like us, doesn’t that reinforce our uniqueness?
During a recent discussion on the nature of the Trinity, I posed this question: before the Incarnation, was the Trinity a duality? Although no clear answer was forthcoming at that moment, I’ve come to the conclusion that it depends on one’s perception of time. From a linear point of view, there was a sequence: singularity (creator), duality (creator/spirit), trinity (creator/spirit/human form). The Eastern concept of circular time illuminates the question more clearly. The parts of the Trinity can coexist in this context. It seems that Western religion can find insight in Eastern philosophy. Truth, it seems, is for the Deity to know.
This was certainly true when I was a graduate in physics in the early 1980s. However, I believe it has been superseded by the observations in 1998 that the universe was not only expanding but the expansion is accelerating. The Nobel Prize for physics in 2011 went to Perlmutter, Schmidt and Riess for their discovery of the accelerating expansion.
(Complete aside: Where’s the preview button?)
The scientific explanations about the Big Bang are useful. They help clarify some ideas in the debate about creation.
For instance, much of the argument about the existence of God is that it’s incoherent to simultaneously hold that (a) all things change, and that (b) matter is eternal. We observe (a) as an empirical fact. But if we also conclude that the universe was once a singularity, and that all differentation happened after the Big Bang, and that this singularity was true at a roughly identifiable moment in time, it doesn’t explain why the pre-exploded Big Bang wasn’t also a subject of change. After all, if change is a property (or operation) of matter itself, then why wasn’t the matter within the Big Bang already changing before the Bang?
The idea that change is part of matter itself doesn’t seem to square with a Big Bang singularity. Change must be external.
The religious explanation denies that matter is eternal. No dilemma arises if matter is created and contingent.
This is so wrong in every point that I cannot begin to condemn it sharply enough. The heavens declaring the glory of God and the wonder of God’s love for humanity is only enhanced by the vastness of it all. And nowhere does the Bible argue that the whole universe was ‘made for us’ exhaustively. We are part of the picture, but not all of it.
I thought the expansion of the universe isn’t about matter moving through space but rather about space it’s expanding between objects thus putting them further apart relative to each other.
Re: Complete aside question: There is a preview visible with formatting incorporated that is live at the bottom of the page, so there’s no need anymore for a preview button. Many people haven’t noticed this yet.
I’m not entirely clear on this myself, but I understand the red shift to indicate objects are moving apart from each other. I am not sure if “expanding space” can produce a Doppler effect the same way relative velocity can. Maybe Dan Hanson can set me straight.
Dan, I understood this to be analogous to escape velocity, since it depends if the gravitational potential energy of the entire universe is positive or negative, which in turn depends on the total mass. Am I wrong?
Well, escape velocity is more about having enough energy to leave a gravity well in spacetime, whereas we’re talking about the expansion of spacetime itself. Also, an explosion tends to indicate a center, and there’s no center to the universe.
This gets into hairy territory for me as well, but a better way to think of it might be as a race – the force of gravity is trying to slow down expansion, but as the universe expands and the mass spreads apart the pull of gravity on expansion weakens. If the universe contains a certain amount of mass, the force will manage to stop the expansion of space-time, or reverse it. But if you don’t have enough, it just eventually loses its power to slow down the universe’s expansion.
But Dark Matter and Dark Energy really mess this up. Dark energy seems to be a force pulling the universe apart, while dark matter appears to be something that has the effect of a large mass – except we can’t observe it directly. My suspicion is that the two are related, and reflect something we don’t understand about gravity at larger scales.
The objects are moving apart, and the more distant we look, the faster things seem to be moving. But that’s not because things were launched out of the big bang at different velocities. Rather, the speed we see is purely a function of the expansion of space-time.
Going back to the dot analogy – let’s put a line of dots on a rubber band. Now stretch the band while measuring the change in distance between the dots.
If you measure the velocity of the dots relative to each other, you’ll see that dots adjacent to each other move the smallest relative distance in the same amount of time, and the dots at the ends of the band move the farthest away from each other.
So it is with the universe – it doesn’t matter which direction we look in – the farther we look, the faster everything seems to be moving away relative to us. That’s a big piece of the evidence that the universe is expanding. But again, it’s the same in every direction – a being living on a planet 11 billion light years from us would see us moving away from them, and our galaxy would look old because they’d see the light that left when it was forming.
Red Shift: There are several machanisms that can cause a red shift in a wave. The first is the Doppler effect, which has to do with the difference in relative velocities.
Imagine a moving cannon spitting tennis balls at you once every second, at a velocity of 100 feet per second. You’ll have a stream of tennis balls 100 feet apart. Now have it move towards you at 50 feet per second, spitting tennis balls at the same rate. Now, even though the frequency of ball firing and the speed of the ball relative to the cannon hasn’t changed, they ‘bunch up’ and now there’s a tennis ball every 50 feet.
When the cannon passes you and keeps firing at you, it’s going to move 50 feet away from you between tennis ball firings, so the tennis balls will be stretched to 150 foot intervals. That’s the doppler effect. Waves bunch up or stretch apart (rise and fall in frequency) depending on relative velocity. That’s one technique that’s used to find planets around other stars – the planet makes the star wobble, and we detect the spectrum changes due to redshift.
Another kind of redshift is caused by gravity – waves traveling through a gravity well will be distorted and stretched.
The third kind is ‘cosmological red shift’, and that’s the shift in frequency of a wave due to the expansion of space itself. Again, imagine our rubber band. Now draw a sine wave on it. When you stretch the band, the wave stretches out – lowers in frequency. A wave leaving galaxy billions of light years away started traveling when the universe was much smaller. The universe has expanded as it’s traveled those billions of years towards us, stretching it and causing its frequency to shift red.
To know how far something is from us, we can look at the emission spectrum for spectral lines. These lines have a fixed relationship depending on the chemicals in them. By measuring the distance between the lines we can calculate the red shift, and from there determine how fast it’s going. That speed is directly proportional to distance because of cosmological red shift, so we know how far away the thing is.
This sounds exactly like the concept of gravitational potential energy. But I don’t know how gravity affects the expansion of space itself. It’s hard to comprehend the difference between a situation where two objects have nonzero relative velocity, and a situation where two objects have zero relative velocity but the space between them is expanding.