Explanation:
Should scientists even try to answer questions about the purpose of the universe? Most researchers assume that science and religion are completely separate fields—or, in the phrase coined by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, “nonoverlapping magisteria.” But as physicists investigate the most fundamental characteristics of nature, they’re tackling issues that have long been the province of philosophers and theologians: Is the universe infinite and eternal? Why does it seem to follow mathematical laws, and are those laws inevitable? And, perhaps most important, why does the universe exist? Why is there something instead of nothing?
ADVERTISEMENT
Medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas posed similar questions in his 13th-century book Summa Theologica, which presented several arguments for God’s existence. He observed that all worldly objects can change from potential to actuality—an ice cube can melt, a child can grow—but the cause of that change must be something besides that object (warm air melts the ice cube, food nourishes the child). The history of the universe can thus be seen as an endless chain of changes, but Aquinas argued that there must be some transcendent entity that initiated the chain, something that is itself unchanging and that already possesses all of the properties that worldly objects can come to possess. He also claimed that this entity must be eternal; because it is the root of all causes, nothing else could’ve caused it. And unlike all worldly objects, the transcendent entity is necessary—it must exist.
Aquinas defined that entity as God. This reasoning came to be known as the cosmological argument, and many philosophers elaborated on it. In the 18th century, German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz described God as “as “a necessary being which has its reason for existence in itself.” It’s interesting to note that Leibniz was also a mathematician and physicist; he invented differential and integral calculus at about the same time that Isaac Newton did. (They developed the math independently.) Both Leibniz and Newton considered themselves natural philosophers, and they freely jumped back and forth between science and theology.
By the 20th century, most scientists no longer devised proofs of God’s existence, but the connection between physics and faith hadn’t been entirely severed. Einstein, who frequently spoke about religion, didn’t believe in a personal God who influences history or human behavior, but he wasn’t an atheist either. He preferred to call himself agnostic, although he sometimes leaned toward the pantheism of Jewish-Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who proclaimed, in the 17th century, that God is identical with nature.
Likewise, Einstein compared the human race to a small child in a library full of books written in unfamiliar languages: “The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly.”
Einstein often invoked God when he talked about physics. In 1919, after British scientists confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity by detecting the bending of starlight around the sun, he was asked how he would’ve reacted if the researchers hadn’t found the supporting evidence. “Then I would have felt sorry for the dear Lord,” Einstein said. “The theory is correct.” His attitude was a strange mix of humility and arrogance. He was clearly awed by the laws of physics and grateful that they were mathematically decipherable. (“The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility,” he said. “The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”)
ADVERTISEMENT
But during the 1920s and 1930s, hefiercely resisted the emerging field of quantum mechanics because it clashed with his firm belief that the universe is deterministic—that is, physical actions always have predictable effects. Einstein famously criticized the indeterminacy of quantum theory by saying, God “does not play dice” with the universe. (Niels Bohr, the father of quantum mechanics, is said to have remarked, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”)
Although quantum theory is now the foundation of particle physics, many scientists still share Einstein’s discomfort with its implications. The theory has revealed aspects of nature that seem supernatural: the act of observing something can apparently alter its reality, and quantum entanglement can weave together distant pieces of spacetime. (Einstein derisively called it “spooky action at a distance.”) The laws of nature also put strict limits on what we can learn about the universe. We can’t peer inside black holes, for example, or view anything that lies beyond the distance that light has traveled since the start of the big bang.
