When I was much younger, I used to do weird things in my attempts to understand the infinite. What does “infinite” even mean? I remember lying on the ground on warm summer evenings looking up into the starry heavens and considering the universe and trying to understand something without boundaries. Much later, unable to sleep in the oxygen depleted Peruvian Andes, I stared into the much more brilliant starry heavens and marveled that one could almost reach out and touch those stars. My parents had a trifold mirror in the bathroom, and I would fold the wings of the mirror around my head to investigate the infinite reflections of said head and wonder if they could be counted. Weird. What captured my imagination more than the concept of infinity was the idea that I could even think about that concept. My dog certainly didn’t show any inclination to waste time on such considerations so why did I?
I have a friend who regularly upbraided me for being an idiot and totally irrational about my belief in God. “You seem like a smart enough person, Murray. How can you believe in God?” He certainly was smart enough, having a PhD, and he was one of the most eclectic readers I know. In fact, many of our conversations centered on books that we were reading and offering recommendations to each other. Whenever he assailed my belief in God, I would send him zingers about information theory and ask, “You seem like an intelligent enough person. How can you believe in evolution?” He would laugh and we would fight over the bar bill.
I argued that we were both dealing in hypotheses that were impossible to prove and it was not act of intellectual suicide to believe one way or the other. We had to take the evidence as we understood it and make our own philosophical decisions about God, evolution, and the state of the world. I say all this to assure the reader that I am not on a mission to proselytize. What you believe is up to you and I am not disturbed one way or the other. But I am a bit tired of being told that I am a Medieval reactionary for my faith statements which are no more incongruous or outrageous than those of my evolution believing friend.
One last story. A couple of years ago I participated in a pipeline hearing for an important project that had several indigenous intervenors. On a couple of occasions, the three panel members were asked to sign confidentiality agreements to hear evidence about certain indigenous practices and beliefs. I can’t, for that reason, discuss what we heard but it was weird stuff. As I listened and considered how weird it was, I thought, “but you believe in a God who became human through a woman who didn’t have sex. Isn’t that weird?” And, indeed it is, so I listened with a changed attitude and increased curiosity.
All this is to say that in dealing with the metaphysical it is good to bring a healthy dose of humility. There are things we can’t know and some of the evidence for a particular belief system is often weird. That is true for all the possible hypotheses because that is the nature of the metaphysical world. There is no “science” of evolution any more than there is a “science” of God. All that we can say or argue about the position we take is anchored in the realm of philosophy.
But in the spirit of the great doubter Rene Descartes, when all is stripped away, we are left with one basic question, “Why is there something?” The evolutionary biologists and physicists will mumble about string theory and multiverses and panspermia and red shifts and a whole host of other intellectual constructs that a professor of mine termed, in another context, “mental masturbation”.
People like me, on the other hand, will mumble about information theory, irreducible complexity, the mysteries of the Cambrian explosion and the statistical impossibility of the boundary conditions that make ours the Goldilocks planet/galaxy/universe. I hesitate to use my professor’s pejorative to describe what I believe but the truth is that no one can answer the question “Why is there something?” However, given that we are here and are something, it seems an important question to consider.
Many years ago I worked for a small company, one of whose shareholders was a delightful man who did his PhD at the University of Chicago and who shared a laboratory with Miller and Urey of “We made amino acids from primeval soup!” fame. He and I got into some pretty intense debates about origins and he would write off my arguments by telling me of this famous experiment implying that his proximity gave him special knowledge. In the years since, the significance of the experiment has diminished to not much at all but the death of my friend John has robbed me of my opportunity to gloat. At his funeral, however, his son told me that his dad had become a Christ believer - the happiest (to me) of all possible outcomes.
Herewith, then, the things that I think about in considering the something that we are.
The most fundamental evidence for my belief in Christ Pantocrator is the historicity of the event. The basic elements of his life, death and resurrection are not questioned by serious scholars. Did God enter history and the human family through a young virgin in a country town of Galilee? I think the historical evidence is overwhelming. The real issue is not the fact pattern but the interpretation of the divinity of the person. If Jesus wasn’t God as he said he was, then he was a crackpot and there is no room for any other conclusion. But almost no one calls him a crackpot.
When I was an undergraduate at university, we were taught about five or six universal constants that made earth habitable for human existence. The number of such constants and boundary conditions is now in the dozens. This is important because the more we explore and understand the operation of the universe and our little corner of it, the more we are faced with the vanishingly low probability of these elements being simultaneously tuned without the influence of an external (to the system) tuner. And by tuned, I mean to within very fine tolerances that, if not met, will result in the system blowing up. This anthropic principle was well described by atheist Stephen Hawking,
“If the overall density of the universe were changed by even 0.0000000000001 percent, no stars or galaxies could be formed. If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed before it reached its present state.”1
Dr. Hugh Ross suggests that if the mass of the singularity a moment before the Big Bang had been as much as the weight of a dime more, the creation of the universe would have been over before it started. That is fine tuning.
“You are pushing the God hypothesis!” my friend would yell at me.
“No, I am looking at the data and evidence and drawing logical conclusions. Data should never be discarded because it doesn’t support a given hypothesis. Show me where I am wrong but don’t throw out the data.”
I generally had him on that point. He would argue that the statistical probability issues can be overcome by asserting the existence of an infinitude of universes. And he is right. But assertions need evidence or he just proves my professor’s nasty aphorism. Another favourite of his rejoinders was to assert the evidence for extra terrestrial life from another region of the universe who left behind some carbon-based nucleic acids and proteins on their tour of Earth. Problem solved! To which I would respond “ET go home.” Neither of us really took that one seriously, Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins notwithstanding.
The final evidence from science that I think about is the nature of information. It is a fascinating area of study and, had I to do it again, perhaps engineering might have been my second choice. It is irrefutable that the natural world is full of unexpected information. I am not talking about the repeating patterns of the snowflake or crystalline rock structures which are tantamount to the “bar.. bar…” sounds of the Germanic tribes from which the word barbarian was coined. Maybe the barbarian nature of snowflakes will, like the Germanic tribes, reveal deep knowledge of the natural world but I am not counting on it at this point.
Rather I am thinking about the unbelievable information stored in our DNA molecules: from the information-generating placement of the protein molecules to the physical structure of the DNA itself. What about the molecular machines that operate without ceasing within each of our billions of cells? What about the unusual qualities of water including its relative incompressibility and surface tension that allows the upper needles of one hundred foot trees to be watered through capillary systems? What about the still not understood nature of the information storage and retrieval systems located between our ears? What about the unimagined complexity and beauty of the far reaches of the universe that celestial telescopes are now finding? What about the self-organizing and incredibly complex body functions that keep us alive? Think about that the next time you cut yourself and form a scab. Why don’t you just bleed out? You will be stunned by your relevant self-organizing and incredibly complex body functions. Seven finely tuned body responses from different physiological systems that occur instantaneously to keep us alive. If you miss any of the seven responses, you will bleed out. Nevertheless, isn’t blind evolution over billions of years great? Good grief.
At both the macro and micro level of investigation we are finding increasing levels of information and complexity. Where does that information come from? I am so sorry, but the rocks, plants and chemicals I studied as a student don’t generate information. They might store it, but they can’t generate it. With this in mind, is the God hypothesis so outrageous? If you assert that it is, then you have a responsibility to come up with a competing theory that is based on something more substantial than infinite time and endless arm waving. And, by the way, the Big Bang removes your access to infinite time.
When my father had entered the dotage in which I now find myself, he would gaze unmoving into the distance for long periods of time. I once held a mirror under his nose and said, “Just checking.” Fortunately, he laughed. A bit worryingly I find myself doing the same but, in my case as, I suppose, in his, my mind is quite active. I consider the kinds of things that are written about in this blog, for example. This level of consciousness is quite remarkable it seems to me, and I have yet to read a reasonable explanation for it. And I suppose that my level of consciousness is not less than yours even as I am prone to napping a lot more than you.
Why is there something? The best philosophical and moral explanation that I can come up with is that there is an omniscient and external source of information that willed it to be so and then spruced up the product of his will with creatures made in his own image. From my study of history, I also think that we are slowly learning that abusing one another abuses the image creator and we can get a lot more done when we stop the abuse and learn to deal with one another as created image bearers loved equally by the one whose image we bear. I could be wrong and only offer this as a hypothesis.
It is also important to point out that I do not believe that a well developed faith is based only on rational arguments that point in one direction. Arguably, no one was more rational with a highly developed Greek mind than Saul of Tarsus yet he needed an event, a meeting with the historic, risen Christ before he could start to develop that faith. And so it was with me and every other Christian believer that I know. It is metaphysics after all and the process of faith is steeped in mystery.
Now you may disagree with all this because even the rational argument part of the process can point people in different directions. If that is the case then I welcome your alternative explanation supported by a stronger case for a different moral foundation.
So far, the alternative explanations I have received from this challenge have mostly centered on “survival of the fittest”. If that is what you believe, then watch your back. At least those of the steadily reducing number of you who are less fit than me.
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time as quoted from Is Atheism Dead by Eric Metaxas. The reader is encouraged to read the Metaxas book as it offers a more detailed description of the anthropic principle.