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There is no consensus in physics about the supposed entailments of the findings of this discipline for religious belief. While atheistic physicists such as Steven Weinberg and Victor J Stenger have argued that the findings of their discipline point unmistakably to atheism, other equally distinguished physicists such as John D. Barrow, Russell Stannard, John Polkinghorne, Arthur Peacocke, R.J. Russell, and Ian Barbour have argued that the findings of physics do not point to atheism (and in some respects may even point to theism, or at least offer hints in that direction). Physicists of the latter sort have variously argued that classical determinism did indeed appear to point to a completely deterministic physical system within which God could not intervene and in which humans could not obviously exercise any free choice. Yet developments in physics seemed to suggest ways in which God could nevertheless interact with the world without interrupting its laws and humans could exercise genuine free will. They have also argued that despite first appearances, humans do indeed occupy a central and important place in the cosmos, appealing to weak and strong forms of the Anthropic Principle, and the inherent beauty and well-constructed nature of the basic physical laws as suggesting some sort of Designer. It has also been denied by some (for example, the theologian Keith Ward) that cosmological predictions about the probable end of the physical universe necessarily have gloomy implications for religious belief in a future life.[1]

The Earth from space. Photo: NASA

One of the central contemporary debates is that concerning the possibility of 'special divine action', namely, whether and how God acts at particular times and places in the world.[2] As Wegter-McNelly points out, it was traditionally claimed that the universe is not equipped with the causal powers which are required for bringing about everything that occurs in it, so that God's activity was located in the unexplained (which was presumed to be unexplainable). This 'God of the gaps' approach - so named because it relies on ignorance ('gaps' in our knowledge), meant that religion had to yield to science whenever science managed to explain anything previously unexplainable and has consequently fallen into disrepute as a form of apologetics. [3] An alternative traditional approach to divine action is interventionism, i.e., the position that God, as transcendent creator of the physical laws, has the power and the right simply to break them if he so wishes.[4]

However, many religious believers prefer to abandon the idea of special providence and attribute a more general providence to God. In other words, they grant that God does not intervene miraculously in the events of the world, but regard creation itself as 'God's one great act',[5] in which he does not intervene after the initial act of creation. As Wegter-McNelly points out, this assumes that 'in a Newtonian world of strict determinism there is no 'room' in the physical world for God to act in individual events'.[6] In contemporary discussions, however, many make the attempt to give an account of divine action which appeals neither to special nor to general providence, but rather seeks to show, for example, that God can act through the 'under-determined character of natural processes' (quantum indeterminism), or through 'higher levels of novelty and freedom' (complexity and emergence theory).[7] God can thus be understood to act in a very real sense in the world without having to suspend its physical laws.[8]

A further important discussion relevant to the question of whether modern physics entails atheism is that concerning the significance of human life in the midst of what we now know to be a vast, and apparently non-anthropocentric universe. As Bernard Carr notes: 'The steady progress from the geocentric to heliocentric to galactocentric to cosmocentric view appears to have shown that humans - as judged by scale - are completely insignificant. We also appear to be insignificant as judged by duration: the lifetime of an individual - and even an entire civilisation - is utterly negligible compared to the timescale on which the cosmos functions...nor is it clear how long humans will persist in the cosmos, since we are prone to dangers such as asteroids, marauding black holes, and exploding stars.'[9]

Other, more religiously minded physicists and philosophers of science, however, have drawn different conclusions from the same evidence, and have rather felt that they saw evidence of 'a great intelligence at work in the universe', and have argued that 'the coherence of the laws which regulate it seem to point to the existence of some underlying organising principle'.[10]

Furthermore, religiously sympathetic physicists and philosophers of science have argued in reaction to the previously prevailing view that humans do after all have a central place in the cosmos, since the 'anthropic coincidences' suggest that life is a fundamental rather than an accidental aspect of the universe. The weak anthropic principle claims that 'in some respects, the Universe has to be the way it is because otherwise it could not produce life, and we would not be here speculating about it'.[11] As Carr notes: 'In order for life to exist, there must be carbon, and this is produced by cooking inside stars. The process takes about 1010 years, so only after this time can stars explode as supernovae, scattering the newly baked elements throughout space, where they may eventually become part of life-evolving planets...the very hugeness of the universe, which seems at first to point to humanity's insignificance, is actually a prerequisite for our existence'.[12] This is the principle expressed in its weaker form. In its stronger form (the 'strong anthropic principle') the fine-tuning of the physical constants is held to reflect the 'existence of a 'beneficent being' who tailor-made the universe for our convenience';[13] in other words, far from providing evidence against a divine Creator, modern physics actually suggests evidence for one.

More atheistically inclined physicists have tended to address the challenge of the anthropic principle by appeal to the multiverse theory, namely, that our universe is one of a multitude of universes existing in parallel with one another. If this (itself very metaphysical) theory can be accepted, the anthropic coincidences would no longer have to be regarded as improbable. Up until the present the multiverse theory has been regarded as highly speculative. Wegter-McNelly, however, notes that 'whereas the anthropic argument was initially taken to be quite compelling to a good number of religiously minded physicists...this number has fallen as the idea of a multiverse has moved slowly away from the realm of science fiction and closer to the mainstream of cosmological theory'.[14] Nevertheless, the anthropic principle continues to pose a challenge to contemporary atheists, who cannot assume that the evidence provided by the study of the physical world unequivocally points to atheism. A measure of the seriousness with which the New Atheists take the challenge of the anthropic principle is the significant amount of space, for example, which Richard Dawkins devotes to attempting to refute it in The God Delusion (pp. 134-151).[15]

Finally, atheistic physicists have tended to suppose that the cosmological predictions about the end of the universe are completely inconsistent with religious belief, especially the views of the Abrahamic religions about the 'last things'. As the Christian physicist John Polkinghorne notes, 'science predicts that, after immense periods of time, the universe will end in futility, either through collapse or (the currently favoured expectation) through long drawn-out decay. Christian theology is challenged to say how it responds to this prognostication of a dismal fate for creation.'.[16] If we assume with theologian Keith Ward that the ultimate goal of the cosmos from a religious point of view is understood as 'the generation of a society of minds, or many societies of minds, sharing experiences and actions, endlessly moving into a future of infinite possibility',[17] current cosmological predictions certainly do appear to be straightforwardly in contradiction with such a hope.

However, as Ward has noted, current cosmological explanations about the far future universe open up the possibility of 'a continuation of life in different forms and in different space-times'. Modern physics opens up 'speculative possibilities of conceiving immortality in different realms of being and forms of embodiment'.[18] 'Some speculative mathematical physicists have supposed that intelligent life may one day take over the whole physical universe, and even 'spread into all spatial regions in all universes which could logically exist, and will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge which it is logically possible to know''.[19]

However, as Wegter-McNelly has pointed out, while it is possible that life in some form could continue to exist into the future, 'this kind of pseudo- immortalization...offers little hope for a more traditional eschatological vision',[20] and the speculations of religious physicists such as Tipler are dubiously orthodox. These are mere speculative hypotheses (although nevertheless founded on 'well-understood and well-established theories in modern physics'); but as Ward notes the point is not that 'these hypotheses suggest...that these things will happen, but that they are possibilities allowed by modern physics'.[21]

As Ward has further noted, 'when we have got used to such bold speculations, it is not a much greater step to move on to the hypothesis that a consciousness that originates in one universe might be transferred to another universe instantaneously.'[22] Religious believers hold that there exists 'an unembodied primordial mind that could be the origin of many universes and might well have the power to initiate such an instantaneous transfer of finite persons between them. Whether or not God could or would do such a thing cannot be established by the natural sciences...but at least contemporary physics seems to have opened up...the bare possibility of a continuing life beyond this universe'.[23] Thus 'The idea of a life 'after death', in some other sort of universe, when these physical bodies have decayed, comes to seem much more plausible in the light of the [contemporary] far future speculations of physics'.[24] As Ward rightly points out, contemporary cosmological speculations about the far future of the universe are therefore only ominous for religious believers if the latter assume that the promised future life is a future state of this universe; but there is no particularly good reason (theologically or physically) why they should suppose this.

References

Carr, Bernard. "Cosmology and Religion." In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, edited by Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. London: Bantam Press, 2006.
Polkinghorne, John. "Christianity and Science." In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, edited by Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Ward, Keith. Pascal's Fire: Scientific Faith and Religious Understanding. Oxford: One World, 2006.
Wegter-McNelly, Kirk. "Fundamental Physics and Religion." In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, edited by Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Bibliography

Footnotes

[1]↑ See, for example, Keith Ward, Pascal's Fire: Scientific Faith and Religious Understanding (Oxford: One World, 2006). Ch 16.
[2]↑ Kirk Wegter-McNelly, "Fundamental Physics and Religion," in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 161.
[3]↑ Ibid.
[4]↑ Ibid.
[5]↑ Ibid., 162.
[6]↑ Ibid.
[7]↑ Ibid., 163.
[8]↑ Ibid.
[9]↑ Bernard Carr, "Cosmology and Religion," in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 145.
[10]↑ Ibid., 147.
[11]↑ Ibid., 148.
[12]↑ Ibid.
[13]↑ Ibid., 149.
[14]↑ Wegter-McNelly, "Fundamental Physics," 166.
[15]↑ Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006), 134- 51.
[16]↑ John Polkinghorne, "Christianity and Science," in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 68-69.
[17]↑ Ward, Pascal's Fire, 256.
[18]↑ Ibid., 233.
[19]↑ Barrow and Tippler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, p.677, cited in Ibid., 235.
[20]↑ Wegter-McNelly, "Fundamental Physics," 166.
[21]↑ Ward, Pascal's Fire, 239.
[22]↑ Ibid., 241.
[23]↑ Ibid.
[24]↑ Ibid., 244.

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