It Had To Be Perfect

Moses doesn’t get the credit he deserves.  I often picture him in Heaven, sitting in the majestic dwelling place afforded him by the Father, reading a newspaper that chronicles the current discoveries of the scientific community.  He is in a leather reclining chair, with a warm beverage sitting on a table to his left that remains undisturbed when he throws down the paper, looks at Zipporah, who is seated across the room, and shouts “I was talking about that 3500 years ago!”

His wife, of course, rolls her eyes as she offers a consoling, “Yes dear” to her clearly grouchy husband.

“Kids these days” he bristles, “they think they’re soooo clever.”

He feels better now – after venting – and is able to return to the blessed relaxation of his morning routine, a wonderful way to start his days that are largely filled with basking in the eternal glory of God (Revelation 22:5).

Moses’ slights, though, are many.  The scientific community has discovered that the universe is expanding , Moses said the same thing in Genesis 1:6.  Einstein declared that time is relative to the physical situation of the individual observer – also know as the Theory of Relativity.  Moses also said this, though excluding the part pertaining to physics and focusing on time being different to God, in Psalm 90:4.

This great servant of God also documents the development of the universe. Where the cosmos start as a singular conjoined substance (Genesis 1:2) that separates as space expands within it (Genesis 1:6), a process that results in stars and planets separating from one another and taking their eventual shape and coming into their current relational vantage points with one another (Genesis 1:17). A progression that affects our galaxy – and our planet in particular – which was chosen to be one that fosters life. Plants came first (Genesis 1:12), followed by sea creatures Genesis 1:21), land animals (Genesis 1:25) and then people (Genesis 1:27).

But while these things have been in Scripture for millennia, and the belief that the world we live in both had a starting point and is uniquely fitted for life has been the sentiment of the faithful throughout the ages, such discoveries of scientific proofs along these lines have created massive upheaval in the scientific community.

We discussed this paradigm shift with the evidence for the Finely Tuned Universe and how an incredible number of factors have to be just right – which thankfully happens to be how they are – in order for life to exist. If any of those facets were not as they are then everything we know – including our own existence – would never have been possible.  We also talked about Edwin Hubble’s discovery that the universe is expanding. The fact that the universe is expanding has been very disruptive to scientific theory because many scientists and philosophers have chosen to seek to understand the origins of the universe in only naturalistic terms.

If one resolves to limit himself in this way then he must look at the universe as a balloon that is being blown up, or yeast-filled bread that is expanding as it bakes in an oven and must then trace back the current rate of expansion to a beginning point.   Physicists have approached this in a couple of ways.

2 Approaches to Understanding the Big Bang

The primary approach – which is based heavily on mathematical theory – postulates that “any universe that is on-average expanding must have had a beginning” (Meyer, ROG).   The physicists credited with this approach are Alan Guth, Arvind Borde and Alexander Vilenkin, who combined principles from geometry with Einstein’s theory of special relativity to trace the expanding universe backwards in time to a place where it would have converged on itself geometrically.

The second approach expands on this by taking what happens in black holes – where “the dense concentration of matter will warp or bend the fabric of spacetime, creating a tightly curved, self-enclosed region of space” that is so dense that it creates a “kind of gravitational trap that prevents anything on the inside of the tightly curved space from getting out, even light” (Meyer, ROG) – and applies that to the beginning of the universe.  This approach, which was pioneered by Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose and George Ellis, goes a step further from the first in stating that the universe before the Big Bang was a “singularity” and as such something that mysteriously doesn’t conform to the Laws that govern the Universe as we know them.

Singularities are interesting concepts, and I would recommend reading the Return of the God Hypothesis by Stephen Meyer where a more in depth explanation of them is given in chapter 6, but for now we can simply state that these men believed that if one took the expanding universe and “pushed rewind” and followed its current trend backwards that he would see that it “would attain an infinitely tight spatial curvature corresponding to zero spatial volume.”  It would be in this place where “the known laws of physics would break down” and it would be from this state that the “universe would have begun its expansion.” (Meyer, ROG)

In short, some of the most celebrated minds in the scientific community adamantly say that if we trace the history of the universe back in time then we will find 2 things: 1) A time when there wasn’t a universe 2) A time when there were no natural laws.

I have said before that I am skeptical of the idea that we can observe the world as it is today and then trace that backwards into the distant past as a means of definitively knowing its history.  And I will explain how the expanding universe can be interpreted in other ways that are not bound to the narrow approach of scientific naturalism in a future post but it also is important to state that in this theory we have the consensus of mainstream scientists stating that the universe has a beginning and that this starting point is something that is in itself mysterious and beyond our ability to understand.

Does that sound familiar to anyone (Genesis 1:1)?

So, while I don’t feel the need to hitch my wagon to this theory (though I’ll admit that I’ve been tempted to do so), I must confess that I find it fascinating.  And so did many of the great thinkers of the 20^th century.  They did so not only because of the puzzle of what – or who – may be lurking behind this singularity, but also because of what they believe had to have happened after the Big Bang itself for life to have been possible in the universe.

It Had to be Perfect

If one embraces a purely materialistic approach towards understanding the origins of the universe and goes along with scientific consensus by tracing the current expansion of the universe backwards in time to arrive at a belief in the Big Bang, then he would find himself with a fresh set of problems.  The first problem – that we mentioned above – is that he would have to accept that there is an eternity of time, that precedes the Big Bang, that is permanently walled off from science.  The second is that there is also a cause of some kind that made the Big Bang happen, that likewise is outside the reach of scientific inquiry.  Those 2 problems alone are disastrous to atheistic belief systems.

But this is just the beginning of the implications that the Big Bang has for those who embrace a purely naturalistic approach towards understanding the history of the material world.  What scientists have begun to realize about the Big Bang is that it’s not just that they believe that it had to have happened, but that it had to have happened in a certain way.

The Density and Mass of the Universe

For starters the mass of the universe would have been a very important factor right after the Big Bang.  Eric Metaxas harps on this in Is Atheism Dead saying “if there were any more mass in the universe …. the gravity would be too much and would not have allowed the universe to expand from the Big Bang to where it is now.  At some point the gravity – if it were even the tiniest bit greater – would have overtaken that expansion…. It would have eventually pulled everything back down into objects much larger than our sun, which would have ended up as black holes and neutron stars.”  He goes on to say that conversely “if there were any less mass in the universe, then its expansion would have been too fast.  So gravity would not have had the chance to create the stars that exist now, nor the planets, and so the universe would just be an endless scattering of gas and dust.”

Stephen Hawking has similar things to say in his book A Brief History of Time where he states “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 size.” (Metaxas, IAD)

The Laws of Physics

We discussed the mysterious nature of the Laws of Physics in my post called What a Wonderful World.  Those who take a purely naturalistic approach to understanding the history of the universe believe that these Laws must have come into being at the moment of the Big Bang and that they were instrumental in the development of the early universe.

Metaxas explains this by discussing how if the strong nuclear force was “just 2 percent weaker than it is, it wouldn’t be strong enough to hold the protons and neutrons together…they would drift apart, giving us an entire universe consisting only of hydrogen – whose nucleus has only one proton and no neutrons.”  (Metaxas, IAD) This obviously describes a universe in which life could not exist. He goes on to state that conversely “if that same strong nuclear force were just 0.3 percent stronger than it is, it would also be disastrous.  It would cause protons and neutrons to attract each other too much, so that they would pile up and create only large nuclei, such as are found in heavier elements.  So that in this case there would be no hydrogen at all, and any universe without hydrogen is just as useless as a universe with only hydrogen.  No life could exist.” (Metaxas, IAD)

He goes on to discuss the electromagnetic force saying “we remind ourselves that for life to be possible, we need a whole raft of elements – not just hydrogen, oxygen, iron, helium, nitrogen and carbon.  At a bare minimum human beings require about twenty-two different elements.  We may remember from chemistry class that the way elements are formed has to do with electrons leaping from their orbits in one atom over to the orbit of another atom.  It is the electromagnetic force that keeps the electrons in orbit around their nuclei.  So science tells us that if this force were slightly weaker, electrons would leave their orbits too easily.  But if it were slightly stronger, they would never budge from their original orbits.  In either case, for enough elements to exist, this force needs to be perfectly calibrated.  And yes, it just happens to be perfectly calibrated.  And here we are.” (Metaxas, IAD)

There is honestly so much about the Fine-Tuning of the Laws of Physics and how they would have factored in to the developing universe (should one assume a purely naturalistic perspective) that I must refer the reader who wants to go deeper to Eric Metaxas’ book Is Atheism Dead or to Stephen Meyer’s book The Return of the God Hypothesis.  In reading these monumental works the reader will find the way that the finely-tuned ratios between these forces play an important role in the production of iron within giant stars, which after they explode, release this iron into the universe.  Iron of course is necessary for life on the earth.

The Initial Entropy of the Universe

Continuing on with our theoretical exercise of what one finds if he accepts the assumptions of scientific naturalism (which just to make sure I’m not misunderstood, is a position that I personally do not take), we move to the initial setup of the Big Bang itself.  In a way that is similar but slightly different to the initial mass of the universe, the “initial distribution of mass-energy” or “entropy” of the universe had to be specifically fine-tuned.  Stephen Meyer explains that entropy “measures the amount of disorder in a material system – of molecules, atoms, or subatomic particles.”  The more ordered a system is the lower its entropy, whereas the less ordered a system is the higher its entropy.  As such scientists have found that the universe must have had a very low entropy at its beginning.

This is important because when a scientist with a naturalistic perspective explores this idea, he is coming from a place that views everything in the world as random.  The entropy of the early universe, in his mind, could have been anything, so he finds himself compelled to calculate the possible range of values that it could have been to see just how lucky all of us really are.  Roger Penrose was an example of a scientist like this and he found out that the chances of having an early universe with the precise entropy level needed for our cosmos to possess its current order was what “mathematicians call a hyper-exponential number – 10 raised to the 10^th power (or 10 billion) raised again to the 123^rd power.”  A number so vast that it should be understood as excluding the element of randomness from consideration.

Pointing to a Giant Question Mark

The way the Density and Entropy of the early universe, combined with the 4 Fundamental Forces, had to be perfectly Finely Tuned in order for the universe to have progressed from the Big Bang to where we are today is incredibly compelling, but this doesn’t even tell the whole story.  The reader will have to purchase Metaxas’ or Meyer’s books in order to hear about how factors like the expansion rate or the cosmological constant also are theorized to have played a necessary role – and that, as we would now expect, if they were any different, then life in our world would have been impossible.

Such exercises in naturalistic theory are fascinating, even if the reader – like myself – doesn’t accept the assumptions of materialism.  They are powerful because they show that even if one excludes the supernatural from the picture and only limits himself to what we know about physics, then the material world points to a giant question mark.  One that looms over our lives like a specter, begging for a conclusion to be drawn, but unable to be answered by the very discipline that discovered it.

We will follow the logic of naturalism more in the next post but for now is it not a wonderful thought to consider that even within the frame of mind that specifically excludes God, that even this way of thinking ultimately seems to point to Him?

 

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.*All References to (Meyer, ROG) are taken from The Return of the God Hypothesis by Stephen Meyer

**All References to (Metaxas, IAD) refer to the incredible book Is Atheism Dead? by Eric Metaxas that can be purchased here: https://socratesinthecity.com/product/is-atheism-dead/