‘All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.’
Laozi
Taking this scientific-theological point of view for a moment, let us consider the possibility that the beginning of the cosmos was a conscious act conducted by a designer – let’s call it God – with complete control over events. Having the ultimate ‘blank sheet of paper’ upon which to write, God has the freedom to create the infinite number of rules that will pervade and govern His new universe. Our stunningly clever scientists of the 20th and 21st centuries have been able to stare deep into the night sky and reverse-engineer events in the early moments of creation to establish with some certainty that this event occurred a period of time ago equal to 13.7 billion current Earth orbits of the Sun.
According to the Big Bang theory, within an unimaginably tiny sliver of time (10-37 seconds) from the beginning of time- space, nothingness became a singularity that immediately grew exponentially. This initial inflation of the universe consisted of elementary particles and temperatures so high that the random motions of particle–antiparticle pairs of all kinds were continuously being created and destroyed in collisions. Within the blink of an eye a very small excess of quarks and leptons over antiquarks and antileptons resulted in a dominance of matter over antimatter and the fundamental forces of physics and the parameters of elementary particles were in place.
Next, after about 379,000 years the electrons and nuclei began to combine into atoms – mostly hydrogen. Then, slowly over a longer period of time, gravity meant that the ever-so-slightly denser regions attracted nearby matter and grew even denser – forming gas clouds – and then became stars and formed galaxies.
Many people assume that the Big Bang theory is proven fact but it’s actually just the most popular theory around today. Astrophysicist George F R Ellis has pointed out that the Big Bang is little more than a good suggestion. He has said: ‘People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations… For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its centre, and you cannot disprove it based on observations… You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that. What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.’*
The theory of the Big Bang is another arena within the world of science that has generated a great deal of bad feeling towards anyone who does not comply with the convention.
Halton Arp, an award-winning American astronomer and protégé of Edwin Hubble, was surprised when he was attacked by fellow scientists after he dared to question the Big Bang theory of the universe. Arp was eventually forced to pursue his studies in exile.
Arp had been a staff astronomer at the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories in California for almost 30 years, where he appeared to accept the consensus view of the beginning of the universe. One of the key pieces of evidence that gave rise to the theory is the apparent ongoing expansion of the universe. The light from distant objects indicates their movement by shifts in its spectrum, analogous to the increase in pitch of a locomotive as it approaches and then a drop in pitch when it has passed you.
This Doppler shift, as it is known, means that a star approaching the observer would emit light waves compressed or ‘shifted’ towards the blue end of the spectrum, since blue is at the high-frequency end of the visible spectrum; likewise, if a star is moving away from the observer, any light waves it emits get stretched and are ‘redshifted’, red being at the low-frequency end of the spectrum. It was noted by astronomers that light from other galaxies is redshifted, and therefore all the galaxies in the universe must be moving away from us, and furthermore the most distant ones are moving away from us at the greatest rate. This led astronomers to presume that this was the Big Bang happening as they watched.
During the 1960s, however, astronomers began to discover intense radio sources whose spectra are shifted dramatically towards longer, redder wavelengths of light, implying they are moving away from us at enormous velocities and must be extremely distant. Arp began looking at these quasars, as they became known, and noticed that many appeared to be lying quite close in the sky to galaxies, often in alignment with them. Then in 1971 he claimed to have found a ‘bridge’ of gas joining a galaxy named NGC 4319 and a quasar that sits next to it in the sky. As this quasar had a far higher redshift than the galaxy, according to conventional Big Bang theory it should have been billions of light years further away. The apparent proximity simply did not fit with the ideas of the day.
Most cosmologists dismissed the issue by assuming that Arp had made a mistake simply because the two objects were in the same line of sight. Arp responded to this criticism by producing many more images of other linked deep space objects, yet with very different redshifts. One showed a quasar-like object that had a redshift which placed it about a billion light years from Earth, yet appeared to be in front of a galaxy only 70 million light years away.
Arp went on to suggest that quasars are created in and ejected by galaxies, and have an ‘intrinsic’ high redshift that has nothing to do with distance or velocity.
Arp found himself among a small band of astronomers who proposed a rival theory to the Big Bang, known as Steady State, which had first been proposed by Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, and was further developed by Fred Hoyle. Steady State holds that the universe has always looked much the same and, if it is expanding, new matter must be created to maintain its general appearance.
Whilst the Big Bang theory is still the most popular explanation for the origin of the universe, it is still only a theory and the whole debate remains open. Despite this, Arp found himself being treated as a pariah. In the early 1980s he was told that his research was going nowhere and the committee that allocated time on the major astronomical telescopes he used informed him that he could ‘no longer make those kinds of investigations’.
Is God really necessary to explain the existence of the universe? The short answer is probably no – but even leading scientists have always found it is remarkably difficult to argue the cosmic-accident stance.
If we go back to the early days of modern science, Isaac Newton, one of the most respected scientific minds of the 17th century, saw God as the masterful creator whose existence could not be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation. Newton explained that his own investigations into the laws of nature were simply a means to get closer to the mind of God. As the man who first described the force of gravity, he believed that it existed due to continual divine action. He wrote: ‘Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.’
The rules of physics, as we understand them to be today, begin to manifest in the very early period after the first creation of matter. These rules did not have to be as they are, yet had they been even very slightly different, the outcome would have been a swimming, chaotic soup of strange matter. The tiniest difference in the strength of gravity, the masses of all electrons, the number of spatial dimensions and many other factors would change everything. Had things not unfolded in exactly the way they did there would be no structured cosmos at all.
Physicists are agreed. The starting point for the rule-book of the universe was a miracle beyond all imaginable miracles. Quite simply, it should not have unfolded in the way it did.
Of particular importance to us mortals is the precision of the fine-tuning of the laws of physics relating to carbon, the element on which all known life is based. According to the Big Bang theory, the original creative event produced hydrogen and helium, but no carbon at all. So the big question is, where did the all-important carbon in our bodies come from? Physicists have concluded that most of the chemical elements heavier than helium were manufactured due to the nuclear fusion in the centre of stars – but that still does not explain the existence of carbon.
The answer came from Sir Fred Hoyle, the famous University of Cambridge astronomer who, as previously mentioned, had been a supporter of the Steady State theory. He observed that carbon could only have been formed from the simultaneous collision of three helium nuclei. However, Hoyle pointed out that the chances of any three helium nuclei coming together at the same point in time and space is ridiculously unlikely given their tiny size and the vastness of empty space around them. It is rather like three riflemen spread out in a circle half a mile apart from each other and firing into the air so that all three bullets collide together at the same moment. They have to get the timing perfect, as well as the direction and height. And that is assuming that all three bullets had exactly the same amount of explosive energy released as the trigger was pulled!
Given the vanishingly small probability of any carbon existing in the universe, Hoyle reasoned that a special factor must be at work to explain the abundance of this life-forming element.
Hoyle, working with Willy Fowler, a nuclear physicist at the California Institute of Technology, was able to demonstrate that carbon has a resonant state at exactly the right energy level to enable stars to manufacture it. However, this carbon resonance was itself dependent on the strength of the force that binds protons and neutrons together in the nucleus. If the strength of the force that determined the carbon resonance had been even the tiniest bit stronger or weaker, then we humans would not be here.
Fred Hoyle became troubled at the precise nature of the laws of physics and the consequential multiple layers of improbability of life occurring. He famously dismissed the accidental origin to life, saying: ‘A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing-747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there?’
Hoyle’s aircraft analogy made the point that it is very hard to believe that the laws of physics occurred randomly.
Hoyle was also the man who coined the term ‘Big Bang’ – but he used it as a term of derision, believing that a spontaneous explosion of nothingness could not explain everything. As a scientist, he concluded that the only reasonable explanation for the existence of intelligent life was that the organization of the cosmos must be controlled by some ‘superintelligence’ that guides its evolution through quantum processes. He observed: ‘A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.’
Hoyle was well aware that his observations would not go down well among his peers, but he was not a man to be easily intimidated. In 1982 he presented ‘Evolution from Space’ for the Royal Institution’s Omni Lecture in London, in which he said: ‘If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of in pondering this issue over quite a long time seems to me to have anything like as high a possibility of being true.’
Sir Fred Hoyle was not in any way religious. Hoyle was reportedly an atheist during most of his early life but became agnostic as he realized that life was not a cosmological accident. It seems likely that Hoyle would have made little or no connection between his scientific observations, regarding an intellect behind creation, and any form of theology. However, that may be due to the difference in starting point rather than the end point.
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* Gibbs, W, ‘Profile: George F. R. Ellis, thinking globally, acting universally’, Scientific American, October 1995, vol 273, no 4, p 55