The Universe: Accident or Design?
Sermon preached in St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews on Sunday the 29th April 2007 by Rev Dr Rodney Holder
Readings: Isaiah 40: 21 - 31 and Colossians 1:15 - 20
Sermon:
I wonder how this academic year has been going for you and how you feel with just a few weeks remaining. I hope you are enjoying university life here in St Andrews with all it has to offer. But maybe instead you are finding the pressure too much, whether on the academic or social front. Perhaps the thought of impending exams or a dissertation to be finished is causing anxiety, or you are experiencing relationship problems; perhaps you feel you ought to be enjoying life but instead you are finding it hard to cope. Perhaps you are depressed and need help - that is certainly a common experience in university life.
Our passage from Isaiah chapter 40, one of the most sublime passages in all the Old Testament, is addressed to the people of Israel at the blackest point in their history. Everything they most held dear has been destroyed - their capital Jerusalem and its Temple, the focal point of their religion, are destroyed, their land has been overrun, their King deposed and they have been carted off into exile in Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar, on whom incidentally Saddam Hussein modelled himself. The people were disorientated and depressed.
Into this situation the prophet speaks a message of hope, centred on the identity of their God as supreme Lord and Creator of the Universe. Their God is majestic beyond compare, and beside him the earth's inhabitants are as grasshoppers. He brought out the starry host by number, he is the unique Creator of the whole cosmos, powerful, all-knowing, eternal. This God not only created the universe but acts within history to bring about his purposes, binging princes to nought and giving strength to the faint. Because theirs is the one true God, the almighty Creator who acts in history, the one who has no rival, they can be comforted and can know that they will be redeemed, as indeed he redeemed them of old from slavery in Egypt.
The question for us is, Can we believe today in that same God, the all-powerful Creator of the universe, who is working his purpose out in history, who cares for us as he cared for his people Israel in 540 BC? Hasn't modern science exploded the idea of a Creator, by providing an alternative explanation for the universe, its origin and evolution, in which, to quote Laplace, there is no need for that hypothesis?
Now it seems to me that the answer to that question is a resounding No! Yes, there is a lot of misunderstanding in the popular mind where the notion of a conflict between science and Christian faith seems firmly entrenched. But the reality is that science, and particularly as it happens my former discipline of astrophysics, provides strong support for the notion that the universe is designed and created by God.
Of course some scientists will tell you otherwise. The most notorious are Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins, who express supreme confidence in the ability of science to answer all questions that we might want to ask as human beings. Coming from Cambridge, I wryly wonder whether it is perhaps no accident that these scientists who are supremely self-confident but wrong are based in Oxford!
Atkins in particular tries to make us believe that the universe spontaneously created itself out of nothing. Oxford theologian Keith Ward has systematically demolished this claim in his book God, Chance and Necessity, enumerating the multiple logical fallacies on which it is based. The universe might be a brute fact with no explanation at all, or it could be created by God as Christians believe; what is not an option is to say it created itself, and science simply doesn't answer the age-old question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?'. Stephen Hawking asks the very pertinent question, 'What breathes fire into the equations?', but stays not for an answer.
But not only does science not answer the question why there is a universe; it does not explain why the universe that exists is the way it is either, and it is this question that I should like to explore for a few minutes now.
For it seems to me that the universe shouts out that it is designed, from the beauty and simplicity of its laws, the constants that go into those laws, and the initial conditions in which the universe started in the gigantic explosion we call the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago. The Big Bang theory, incidentally, was the brainchild of a Belgian priest called George-Henri Lemaître, who I was to delighted to discover recently had been a member of St Edmund's College. He solved Einstein's equations of gravity, his general theory of relativity, for the universe as a whole and found an expanding solution, implying that the universe had a beginning. Einstein hated the idea because he thought the universe ought to be static and eternal and he introduced an extra term in the equations to give the solution he liked. After the expansion was observed and the Big Bang vindicated he called this extra term his 'biggest blunder'.
There is a multiplicity of seeming coincidences in the way the laws of nature are set up which are necessary for our coming to be in the cosmos. Let me rehearse just three, by way of example.
First, the initial expansion rate at the earliest time we can sensibly speak of, some 10-43 seconds from the origin, needs to be right to 1 part in 1060. If the expansion is faster than it is by more than this tiny amount, then no galaxies and stars can form by gravitational collapse as condensations in the expanding gas; the universe lasts for ever but is completely lifeless. If the expansion rate is slower by more than this tiny amount, the universe will rapidly recollapse before anything interesting has had time to develop. The accuracy required here of 1 in 1060 is something like that required in aiming a gun to hit a coin situated 10 billion light years away at the opposite end of the visible universe.
Professor Sir Roger Penrose has shown that our universe was one of 1010123 possible universes only one of which would have had the amount of order in it to produce the complexity we observe. 'Order' has a precise meaning in physics and something like this amount of order was needed in order for us to arise in the cosmos. Supposing you were to write down 1010123 writing a nought on each proton in the universe, there would not be enough protons in the entire visible universe to enable you to do this. Why does this universe with this amount of order exist? Physicist Freeman Dyson has put it this way: 'The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.'
The chemical elements of which you and I are and our planet with its atmosphere are made are manufactured inside the cores of stars through nuclear reactions. Sir Fred Hoyle, the famous Cambridge astrophysicist, who was also a militant atheist, discovered that in order to make carbon, the building block of life, and oxygen, also essential for life, the forces of nature have to be balanced in a very remarkable way. He was moved to remark that '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 chief argument used by opponents of design to explain these amazing coincidences is to postulate the existence of infinitely many universes in which the constants of nature and the initial conditions at the Big Bang take on all possible values, and we are not then supposed to be surprised to exist in a universe with the very special conditions ours has, since we couldn't exist in the other universes, even those where conditions were ever so slightly different.
This idea of the existence of many universes, which opponents of design are virtually driven to, is fraught with problems. I haven't got time in a sermon to go into these in any detail; I do that in my book God, the Multiverse, and Everything. Just a few brief remarks will have to suffice for now.
The most obvious problem is that this is the only universe we can observe. The other universes in a so-called multiverse are unobservable in principle and their existence therefore a matter of pure speculation. Another problem is that the question of why the universe is special is simply transferred to the multiverse. Why is it so special that one or maybe more of its members is conducive for life? A third problem is that a multiverse is not a simple explanation and scientists generally go for the simplest of competing explanations for any phenomenon. The idea of creation by an intelligent being seems far more rational on these grounds than the invocation of a vast collection of universes which we shall never be able to know anything about.
I hope that my line of argument here will at least prompt you to think that the alternative explanation, namely that the universe is designed by God, ought to command serious attention.
I talked at the beginning about God the Creator who intervenes in history, the God of the Old Testament, and I have dwelt on why we might believe in a Creator God in the light of modern cosmology. But the New Testament makes the most astonishing claim of all. That is that, in the person of Jesus Christ, the eternal and transcendent Creator of the universe has broken into his world as man, has lived the perfect human life, and by dying on the cross and rising again draws wayward human beings back to himself. That claim is put forward in various ways in different parts of the New Testament but particularly clearly in the verses from Paul's letter to the Colossians which were read to us. Jesus is the image of the invisible God, existing from all eternity, and it is through him and for him that all things were created. He is before all things and in him all things hold together. In other words, God doesn't just light the blue touch paper at the Big Bang and let it run, but he sustains the universe in existence moment by moment, and does this through his Son, Jesus Christ.
Of course these are amazing claims, and to justify them is another sermon. But let me just point you in the direction. Contrary to what Richard Dawkins says, 'faith' to the Christian doesn't mean belief when you have no evidence (belief in many universes is closer to that definition). No, we have the evidence I have described for believing that the universe is designed by God. And we have the evidence of the resurrection for belief that God became man in Jesus Christ to reconcile the world to himself. And the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is very strong - the empty tomb, the many appearances alive to various people and groups, the fact that the witnesses to it were willing to die for their belief. My advice is to examine the evidence. But be warned! Not only does this majestic and transcendent God reveal himself to human beings as one of them, die for them and rise again. He calls each one of us to 'come, take up your cross, and follow me.' But he's also there to help, just as in the days of Nebuchadnezzar, and in the days of Jesus' earthly ministry.
To respond to Jesus' call is the most exciting challenge any of us can face, and, as I can testify from my own experience and journey of faith, from conversion in Cambridge, to work as a scientist exploring God's creation, to ordained ministry in God's church, it is the most rewarding and enriching call to follow. Amen.