Did It All Start with the Big Bang? And What Difference Does That Make for the Meaning and Purpose of Our Lives?

I have written about "The Big Bang Theory"--the popular television show that ran on CBS from 2007 to 2019.  Every episode began with a clever theme song that ended with the line: "It all started with the Big Bang."

Is that true?  The brief answer is: We don't know.  

We don't know because the earliest history of the universe is beyond what we can observe.  Whatever is beyond any possible observation cannot be known to exist or not to exist.  Asserting its existence is a matter of belief or faith, not a matter of scientific knowledge.  It's an assertion of religion (or revelation) not of science (or reason).  Here I agree with physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's insistence that scientific models of reality must always be tested against observational evidence because otherwise they are just speculative stories that are more like religion than science (Hossenfelder 2022).

What difference (if any) does this make for how we think about the purpose of our lives?  The brief answer is that we must choose between at least two alternatives.  We can believe in a divinely caused Big Bang that can support a moral cosmology that gives our lives a divinely appointed purpose that might include eternal life after death.  Or we can recognize a moral anthropology that gives our lives a human purpose in satisfying our natural desires--such as the desire to understand the universe, which can be expressed either as a desire for religious understanding through Revelation or a desire for intellectual understanding through Reason.

If human beings are to be free to pursue these alternative ways of life and to debate their relative merits, people must have the religious and intellectual liberty secured in a Lockean liberal open society that allows for freedom of thought and expression.  The kind of freedom that is manifest even in some popular culture such as the "Big Bang Theory" television show.

THE BIG BANG?

Human beings wonder about their origins.  They want to know where they came from.  They ask about not only their ancestral and social origins but even about the origin of everything.  That's why every human society has stories about how all things came to be as they are.  Commonly, they are religious stories about how divine beings brought the world into existence.  "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."  So declares the first verse of the King James Bible.

But what exactly does that mean?  And is it true?  Some theologians have said that God created everything ex nihilo (from nothing).  But others have said He created everything ex materia (from some preexisting material).  Some have said God created only one universe--the one that we live in.  But others have said that He might have created other universes, perhaps even an infinite number of them.

Some philosophers and scientists (like Aristotle) have said that there was no need for divine creators because the world was eternal as composed of eternal matter and thus had no beginning and no end.  But others (like Lucretius) have argued that the world has arisen spontaneously from the random motion of atoms without any need for divine intervention, and that atomic flux would eventually dissolve every world and create a new one.

Thomas Aquinas defended the orthodox Christian doctrine that God did indeed create everything from nothing.  But he admitted that this could not be scientifically demonstrated.  "It is by faith alone do we hold and not by any demonstration that can be proved, that the world did not always exist. . . that the world began to exist is an object of faith, but not of demonstration or science" (ST, I, q. 46, a. 2).

But then when Georges Lemaitre (a cosmologist who was also a Jesuit priest) first proposed a Big Bang theory of the universe, Pope Pius XIII pointed to this as a scientific demonstration of the divine creation of the universe from nothing.  Lemaitre himself, however, criticized the Pope for failing to see how this scientific theory had nothing to do with the Christian doctrine of creation, which could be believed by faith but not known by demonstration.

As I have indicated in my essays on the Big Bang, the scientific theory of the Big Bang has been invoked by some people (like William Lane Craig) to prove that God exists and by other people (like Stephen Hawking) to prove that God does not exist.  I have argued that both are mistaken.  

Craig states his argument as a syllogism:

 1. If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.

There are good reasons to doubt that those two premises are really scientific statements rather than affirmations of religious faith.

The first premise is not "obviously true," as Craig says, because while we all have experience of how natural causes work within the universe to bring things into existence, we do not have experience with how transcendent causes work outside the universe to bring the universe itself into existence. 

Consequently, while the "principle of sufficient reason"--that for everything there must be a causal explanation--might hold true for our ordinary experience of how things work within the universe, this principle does not necessarily apply to what things are like outside the universe, because none of us has ever stood "outside the universe" to see if the principle of sufficient reason holds true there.  Standing "outside the universe"--experiencing the transcendent or the supernatural--is a matter of religious imagination that is beyond our empirical experience of the world and thus beyond empirical science.

Therefore, the first premise of Craig's syllogism might be a statement of religious faith, but it is not a statement of scientific truth.

The same can be said about the second premise.  "The universe began to exist."  What exactly is being stated here?  There are two possibilities.  The universe began to exist out of nothing.  Or the universe began to exist out of something. 

Craig's argument requires that he equivocate between these two different statements.  The universe began to exist out of nothing is the Christian theological doctrine of creation ex nihilo.  But, then, this would deny Craig's claim that this premise is "religiously neutral."  In fact, that the universe began to exist out of nothing is not a scientific statement at all, because there is no human observational experience of absolute "nothing" that would make the study of "nothing" part of empirical science.  I even doubt that any of us really understands what we're saying when we talk about absolute "nothing," because it's beyond ordinary human experience.

And yet scientists like Stephen Hawking do speak about how the Big Bang could have come from "nothing" without any need for God.  His explanation is that "the laws of nature we call quantum mechanics" tell us "that not only could the universe have popped into existence without any assistance, like a proton, and have required nothing in terms of energy, but also that it is possible that nothing caused the Big Bang.  Nothing" (Hawking 2018, 34-35).  Far from the Big Bang proving God's existence, as Craig claimed, Hawking claimed to have shown that since nothing caused the Big Bang, God does not exist.

Hawking appeared five times on the "Big Bang Theory" show as the one scientist that Sheldon most admired.  He playfully mocked Sheldon, but he also recognized his brilliance.  Nothing was said about Hawking's atheism.

Notice that in his argument for atheism, Hawking had to assume at the origin of the universe the reality of the laws of quantum mechanics and of quantum vacuum states.  That's not nothing!  That's something!  Notice also that Hawking had no explanation for where those laws of physics came from.

Moreover, Hawking's model for the origin of the Big Bang is only one of many Big Bang models that scientists have proposed over the past 30 years.  By some counts, there are over two dozen such models (Afshordi and Halper 2025).  Some physicists say our universe is one of infinitely many universes, and each one is a bubble in a rapidly expanding quantum fuzz.  Others say the Big Bang started from the hot gas of tiny, vibrating strings.  Others say the Big Bang was a bounce of a collapsing universe into an expanding one.  Others say the universe is always in a state of eternal inflation.  In this video, Phil Harper gives the top ten answers to the question of what happened before the Big Bang:

Remarkably, in the end, it doesn't matter which model you choose because you end up with the same outcome--the universe that we live in today.  That it doesn't matter which story you believe points to a fundamental problem: there is no data to tell us which model is right.  The reason for that is that the fundamental constituents of nature are either too small, too far away, or too far in the past to be observed directly by us or indirectly through our instruments, and thus nature's secrets are buried so deep or so far away that we have no way to test our theoretical speculations about them.

Below is a sketch of the limits on the scale of human observational experience of nature.  At the small scale, microscopes have extended our experience beyond our visual reach, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has extended our reach even deeper.  We have gone from scales of centimeters to millionths of a millionth of a millionth of a centimeter.  But we have reasons to believe that the fundamental constituents of nature that string theory attempts to describe lie at a distance scale 10 million billion times smaller than the resolving power of the LHC.  At the cosmic scale, telescopes have extended our experience of the astronomical universe; but no telescope will ever look beyond our universe's cosmic horizon and see the other universes assumed by the multiverse hypothesis.  The white area is the range of scales within human experience.  The grey area is outside that range.  You can click on the image to enlarge it.

Notice that the limit of the observable universe at the right end of this scale is the cosmic microwave background.

The oldest light we can see is the cosmic microwave background, emitted nearly four hundred thousand years after the hot Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago.  It is almost perfectly uniform, with tiny variations in temperature at 1 part in 100,000, which are shown as red (hot) and blue (cold) spots.  This is the most important store of data for early-universe cosmology.  Multiple satellites with telescopes have studied these fluctuations.  Shown here is the most recent map produced by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite probe.

This illustrates how we can make and use technical instruments (such as telescopes) to extend the range of our observational experience of nature.  But it also illustrates the limits on how far that extension can go. 

When Aristotle explained his theological cosmology of a geocentric universe in De Caelo ("On the Heavens"), he admitted that it was hard to study the heavenly bodies--the stars, the sun, the planets, and the Moon--because "we have very little to go on, and we are placed at a great distance from the phenomena that we are trying to investigate," and "very few of their attributes are perceptible by sense experience" (286a7, 292a15-b25).  

So when Galileo defended his Copernican heliocentric system, he argued that Aristotle would have been persuaded by the evidence that Galileo had gathered from his telescope because Aristotle would have welcomed the use of the telescope to extend the range of human observational experience of distant planets and stars.

In the 400 years since Galileo, telescopes have become more powerful; and sending telescopes into space has expanded the depth of their observational power.  So that now we have stunning images of deep space from the James Webb Telescope and images of the cosmic microwave background that take us back over 13 billion years into the history of the universe.  But notice that the image of the cosmic microwave background is dated at four hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.  It's not clear that we will ever get any closer than that to the Big Bang, or to whatever there might have been before the Big Bang, which might forever be beyond our range of observational experience.  

Consequently, it will be impossible to test our models of the Big Bang against observational data, which will mean that our models will be little more than speculative origin myths that rest on belief or faith rather than scientific knowledge.

COSMIC PURPOSE?  HUMAN PURPOSE?

Asking about the origins of the Cosmos might seem like a very abstract kind of questioning that doesn't have much to do with ordinary human life.  But in fact it's one of the fundamental questions that we must ask as we try to make sense of our lives.

Must we believe that in the beginning God created the Universe and created man in His image if we want to give some cosmic meaning to our lives?  If this Divine Creator cares about us and for us, and if He endowed us with a knowledge of His moral law as an eternal standard of right and wrong to guide our moral life, and if He promises to help us live according to that moral law, or to save us from our sinful flaws, and then to reward those who love Him with eternal life, doesn't that give us a cosmic purpose to our lives?

But if we believe that in the beginning the universe arose through some impersonal process of natural evolution of matter and energy, and if eventually we somehow emerged as but blips of complexity in that uncaring universe, then how can we believe that our life has any meaning if there's no purpose to it?

Or should we see that even if there is no cosmic purposefulness in our lives grounded in the moral cosmology of a divinely created universe, there is a natural purposefulness in our lives grounded in the moral anthropology of our natural human desires?  Even if we live in an uncaring universe, we care for ourselves, and we strive to satisfy our natural desires.  Perhaps that is what makes our lives meaningful.

And so, for example, all human beings have some natural desire to understand the universe and their place in it.  This began when natural selection favored species that made correct predictions about their environment, and then organisms became increasingly better at understanding nature, until the evolution of the human cerebral cortex reached a point where human beings could understand their world by probing deeply into nature through intelligence, symbolism, and observation.

But then this natural human desire for understanding could be expressed either as a desire for religious understanding or a desire for intellectual understanding.  Human beings moved by the desire for religious understanding could imagine that they and their universe were created by a supernatural Mind analogous to the human mind.  Human beings moved by the desire for intellectual understanding could imagine that they and their universe were created by natural laws of evolution.  Some human beings can be theistic evolutionists who believe that God originally created the laws of nature and then allowed the universe to evolve naturally according to those laws, while occasionally intervening miraculously in that natural history to reveal Himself to human beings.

The tension between the natural desire for religious understanding and the natural desire for intellectual understanding is manifest in the Reason/Revelation Debate.

THE REASON/REVELATION DEBATE IN "THE YOUNG SHELDON"

Much of "The Big Bang Theory" revolves around Sheldon and his life story.  He grew up in East Texas in a Southern Baptist family that struggled to understand him because he was a child prodigy with an IQ of 187, who used his intelligence to make scientific arguments against religious belief.

From 2017 to 2024, CBS broadcasted a spin-off prequel--"Young Sheldon"--about Sheldon's childhood in the 1980s and 1990s.  The theme of scientific cosmology as supporting atheism against religious belief continued in this show.  

Pastor Jeff is the minister of the Southern Baptist church where the Cooper family goes every Sunday.  The young Sheldon is determined to show everyone that he can use science to refute Pastor Jeff's religious beliefs by arguing that the Bible's story of Creation is denied by the evidence for the natural evolution of the universe and human life.

One example of this conflict between science and religion is the third episode of the second season (airing on October 4, 2018) entitled "A Crisis of Faith and Octopus Aliens."  This episode begins with the Cooper family attending church on a Sunday.  Pastor Jeff is delivering his sermon, and suddenly Sheldon raises his hand to ask a question.  He challenges Pastor Jeff to tell him what God would look like in an alien planet inhabited by octopuses.  Would God look like an octopus?  Jeff struggles to answer.

Then, that Sunday afternoon, Sheldon's mother Mary receives a phone call and is told that the 17-year-old daughter of her friend Stephanie Hanson had died in an accident.  Mary and her husband George go to the funeral.  Throughout the week, Mary is troubled by the question of why an all-good God would torture a good Christian like Stephanie by killing her innocent child.  She talks with Pastor Jeff, but he cannot give her a satisfactory answer.

On Saturday night, Mary takes her mother to a bar named "Lucky's Place," where they drink and play billiards.  She tells her mother about her religious struggle and how this has depressed her mood.  She is drunk, and she is driven home by her mother.  Her husband George takes her to bed.

The next day, Sunday, she does not go to church, and she does not say a prayer at the family dinner.  Her husband and children are shocked to see these signs that she is doubting her faith in God.

Later, in the evening, Sheldon comes out to the front porch of their house to talk with her and attempt to comfort her.  Here's the scene:

Notice that even though Sheldon is an atheist, he makes a scientific argument for the existence of God based on the "fine-tuning" of the universe.  The strength of gravity must be mathematically precise--neither too strong nor too weak--to make it possible for the universe to exist as a place where human life can emerge.  Isn't it unlikely that that could be just an accident?  Doesn't this logically suggest the need for God to design the precise conditions that make the universe and life possible?  Sheldon indicates that he is still an atheist, but he does see this as a scientifically logical argument for religious belief.

Mary responds by saying that her problem with God is not a matter of logic in her head but what she feels in her heart.  Sheldon then makes another argument that might appeal to her heart.  In a world of over five billion people, how likely is it that I would have the one woman who is a perfect mom for me?  Mary is moved by this, and she thanks God for giving her Sheldon as her child.  In the voice-over, the adult Sheldon tells the viewers that he didn't tell his mom that he shouldn't have to share credit with God for making the argument that comforted her.

One of the YouTube clips of this scene has a comment from "B Sharp" about Sheldon's first argument:  "I love Young Sheldon, and this is a sweet moment.  However, Sheldon is using the fine-tuning apologetics argument, which is fallacious.  The universe wasn't created for humans.  Humans evolved to exist in this universe."

One could also respond in a similar way to Sheldon's second argument.  That a son loves his mother is not an unlikely event that requires some supernatural intervention, because parent-child bonding is an evolutionary adaptation of human nature.

But then what if evolved human nature includes a natural desire for religious understanding--for transcendence and transcendent meaning?  This emotional desire is not based on pure logic, and therefore it cannot be refuted by logical argument.  And, therefore, as Rebecca Goldstein has shown, the emotional longing for religious transcendence prevails over scientific reasoning, particularly when science faces fundamental mysteries in the universe that cannot ever be explained by reason alone; and thus Revelation cannot be refuted by Reason.  Perhaps this is what Mary Cooper meant when she pointed to what she felt in her heart.

Nevertheless, the fine-tuning argument is one of the best scientific arguments for God as the Intelligent Designer of the universe.  Christian astrophysicists like Owen Gingerich and Deborah Haarsma like to invoke this argument.  And yet, I have written some posts indicating the flaws in this line of reasoning.

It is not really clear, for example, that scientific cosmology shows that the universe is precisely fine-tuned for life, and particularly human life.  Most cosmologists agree that the universe will come to an end, and that all life will be extinguished.  Consider one line in the theme song for "The Big Bang Theory":

"It's expanding ever outward, but one day it will pause and start to go the other way, collapsing ever inward, we won't be here, it won't be heard.  Our best and brightest future that it'll make an even bigger bang!"

Does the end of the universe in a Big Collapse mean that far from being fine-tuned for life, the universe has been fine-tuned for death?  Or should we have faith in those eschatological religions that promise us eternal life after death?

In a liberal open society, we are free to openly debate such questions--even in popular television shows--without fear of persecution.

And in that debate, one of the big questions for us will be:  Did it all start with a Big Bang?

REFERENCES

Afshordi, Niayesh, and Phil Halper. 2025. Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hossenfelder, Sabine. 2022. Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions. New York: Viking.

The Second Coming of Christ in 2060? Isaac Newton and the Obscurity of Biblical Eschatology

On February 22, 2003, the London Daily Telegraph published a front-page story entitled "Newton Set 2060 for End of the World."  It was reported that a Canadian academic, Stephen Snobelen, had studied the thousands of pages of Isaac Newton's unpublished papers on the Bible held by a library in Jerusalem, and Snobelen had discovered that Newton had read the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation as prophesizing the end of the world--or at least the Second Coming of Christ--in the year 2060.  This story created an international sensation as newspapers and television news organizations around the world reported that Newton had decoded from the Bible when the world would end--and it was only 57 years away.  

Snobelen has written a report on this incident as showing how surprised people were to discover that Newton the great modern scientist--perhaps even the founder of modern science--was also an apocalyptic reader of the Bible.  Snobelen has also explained the global interest in this story as aroused by its coming in the spring of 2003, when the United States and its allies were preparing to invade Iraq, which is the country that includes the area that was once ancient Babylon, which is prominent in Biblical Prophecy (the "Whore of Babylon").  Some people wondered whether the world was headed to the final battle--Armageddon. 

For me, this shows how Newton was one of the first of a long line of modern scientists who have been Biblical religious believers, who have seen their scientific study of the Book of Nature and their religious study of the Book of Scripture as two ways to study the One Truth of God as the Author of both books.  This includes Christian scientists such as Francis Collins, Deborah Haarsma, Owen Gingerich, and John Polkinghorne.  (I have written previously about this "two books" tradition.)   But Newton's reading of the Bible also shows the failure of Biblical Revelation to convey a message that is authoritative, clear, and reliable--particularly, in its eschatology.  And this renders the "two books" conception of truth implausible. 

Newton's theological writings that were never published in his lifetime were only recently made easily accessible through the online "Newton Project" website.  Of this massive material--over four million words--only Newton's Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John had been published in 1733, five years after Newton's death in 1727.  As Robert Iliffe (the first General Editor of the "Newton Project" at Oxford University) has explained, Newton kept these theological writings secret during his lifetime because they show that he was a Christian heretic in denying the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity:  he believed that while Jesus was divine, he was not God.  He thus took the side of Arius against Athanasius in denying the Athanasian Creed that the three persons of the Trinity--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--are "the same substance" (homoousion), and that no one who denies this can win eternal salvation.  Since the Church of England embraced the Athanasian Creed, Newton could not have publicly denied it without persecution.  He could not have had a professional career at Cambridge University, the Mint, or the Royal Society.  Iliffe has elaborated his account of Newton's secret religious life in Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (Oxford University Press, 2017).

The importance of the Athanasian doctrine of the Trinity for orthodox Christianity is celebrated today--June 4, 2023--in all of the Western liturgical churches as Trinity Sunday, which is the Sunday following Pentecost and eight weeks after Easter Sunday.  This is one of the few days in the Christian liturgical calendar devoted to a doctrine.

Newton's scorn for the doctrine of the Trinity was crucial for his interpretation of Biblical eschatological prophecy in the books of Daniel and Revelation.  Newton believed that the true religion of the early Christians was not trinitarian because while they worshipped Jesus as the Messiah, they saw Jesus as subordinate to God, and God alone was to be worshipped as the supreme God.  But then when the Catholic Church adopted the Athanasian doctrine of the Trinity and imposed this false doctrine on all Christians, this began the apostasy of the Trinitarian Church that is identified in Biblical prophecy as "Babylon."  The time of the reign of Babylon is identified in the Bible as 1260 days (Daniel 12:11, Revelation 11:3, 12:6, 13:5).  But since Newton interprets this symbolically as one day equaling one year, then Babylon's reign will last 1260 years.  After the fall of Babylon and the battle of Armageddon, Christ will return to Earth to restore the true Christian Church and reign with the saints on Earth for a thousand years (the Millennium) (Revelation 20:1-6).  After that, will come the final Resurrection and Judgment of all humanity, with eternal bliss for the saved and eternal suffering for the condemned.

Consequently, once Newton has identified the first year of the Babylonian apostasy of the Church, determining the date of the Second Coming of Christ is a simple matter of arithmetic--adding 1260 years.  Newton decided on 800 A.D. as the beginning of the apostate Church, because that was the year Charlemagne was crowned emperor of Rome in the west by Pope Leo III in Rome, which established the supremacy of the corrupt Trinitarian Church.  Newton could then see that 2060 would be the date for Christ returning to Earth to establish his thousand-year reign.

Newton's general view of the book of Revelation is what today would be called "historicist"--the idea that Revelation surveys the entire history of the Christian Church from the time of John to the present and on to the future end of history.  So, for example, the breaking of the seven seals in chapters 6-7 is usually identified with the barbarian invasions that brought down the Western Roman Empire.  (For an account of the different ways of interpreting Revelation, see Steve Gregg, Revelation: Four Views [Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2013].)

The date 2060 appears twice in Newton's unpublished writings.  At the "Newton Project," you can find these two passages in the online "religious writings" at the "Miscellaneous Drafts and Fragments on Prophecy" (number 75), in the "Fragments on the Rise of the Papacy and Revelation" (number 32, 7.3g), and the "Miscellaneous Historical and Apocalyptic Jottings on Various Scraps of Paper" (number 40, 7.3o).  These passages are also quoted by Stephen Snobelen in his "Statement on the Date 2060."

When the newspapers in 2003 reported that Newton had predicted the "end of the world" coming in 2060, they were mistaken.  The Second Coming of Christ will not be the end of the world strictly speaking, but it will be a transformation of the world under the rule of Christ.  What we might consider the end of the world comes after the Millennium, with the judgment of the dead, and anyone whose name is not in the Book of Life is thrown into an eternally burning lake of fire, while the saved enter the New Jerusalem of Heaven that is a new Eden of perfection (Revelation 20:11-22:5).

Although Newton is meticulously careful in his interpretation of this Biblical teaching, he cannot overcome the fundamental problem for all interpreters of the Bible--its obscurity.  Like all Protestant Christians, Newton assumes the doctrine of the clarity or perspicuity of the Bible.  The Bible is assumed to be clear enough so that any Christian, relying on the Holy Spirit for guidance, can determine the true meaning of the Bible, or at least what is necessary for salvation.  All individual Christians can act as their own priests in interpreting the Bible for themselves.  And yet Catholics recognize the falsity of this doctrine of Biblical perspicuity, because they see that the Bible is obscure, and that's why Catholics rely on their Church's clergy--exercising the teaching function of the Church (the Magisteria)--to maintain the traditional interpretations of the Bible by the Church.  This Catholic doctrine has been well developed by Casey Chalk in The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing "Sola Scriptura" and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2023).

Newton implicitly recognized this problem--that the Bible is not clear but obscure--when he admitted  that he was not completely confident about his date of 2060 for the Second Coming, and he saw the need "to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail."  Newton knew that there had been hundreds of prophetic predictions based on readings of Daniel and Revelation that had failed to come true.  In the Middle Ages, many people predicted the final Antichrist would come in the years 1000, 1184, 1186, 1229, 1345, and 1385.  In Renaissance Florence, Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican monk, became so popular through his public lectures on the book of Revelation, in which he preached that Florence would become the New Jerusalem, that the people appointed him to become their ruler in 1494.  But then, in 1498, he lost the support of the people, and he was hanged and burned in the public square of Florence. Thomas Muntzer took part in the Peasant's Revolt of 1524 with this expectation that this would bring the Last Judgment.  But after 6,000 peasants were killed, he was captured and executed.  The early Baptist leader Thomas Helwys, persecuted by King James I, believed that he and his followers were experiencing the "great tribulation" predicted in Revelation.

After Newton's death, failed prophecies of the "end times" based on Revelation have continued for 300 years right up to the present.  Most recently, Hal Lindsey's book The Late Great Planet Earth, first published in 1970, told elaborate stories of how the Biblical prophecies of the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world would be soon fulfilled.  By the end of the 1990s, twenty-eight million copies of Lindsey's book had been sold.

Beginning in 1995, Timothy LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins wrote a series of Left Behind novels based on the idea of "rapture"--that before the Antichrist became the despotic ruler of the world, all the true Christians would be "raptured" (taken up) into Heaven so that they would not suffer the age of tribulation predicted by Daniel and Revelation.  When LaHaye died in 2016, eighty million copies of his novels had been sold.  There had also been a series of popular movies based on his novels.

Beginning in 1992, prophecy scholar Harold Camping began predicting that the rapture would occur on September 6, 1994.  When it didn't happen, he moved the date to September 29, and then to October 11.  Eventually, he gave up on 1994, and confidently set the date at May 21, 2011.  When that day passed, he identified October 21 as the day.  Finally, on October 22, he quit and admitted that he had been wrong.  Many of the people who had believed his predictions sold all their property and left their homes to prepare to be raptured on the designated day. 

One good history of many of these prophecies based on the book of Revelation is Jonathan Kirsch's A History of the End of the World (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006).

Notice how all these prophets have differed from Newton.  They all predicted that the end was coming soon--during their lifetimes.  But Newton thought his predictions would not be fulfilled for a long time after his death--maybe 330 years in the future.  Once again, this indicates the obscurity of the Bible, which means that the Holy Spirit has failed to clearly convey the truth of Revelation.

The book of Revelation repeatedly declares that the prophecies in that book "must shortly come to pass" (1:1, 3; 3:11; 22:7, 12, 20).  Jesus' last words in the Bible are "I am coming soon" (22: 20).  

Here Revelation in the New Testament explicitly differs from Daniel in the Old Testament.  In Daniel (8:26), the angel says to "seal up the vision, for it concerns the distant future."  But in Revelation, the angel says: "Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this scroll, because the time is near" (22:10).

Newton offered no explanation as to why he rejected this expectation of the first Christians that Jesus' Second Coming would occur in their own lifetimes.  But then, of course, he had to do this if he was going to avoid interpreting the Bible's prophecies as falsified by their failure to be fulfilled.

There are other ways to interpret the book of Revelation so that its prophecies are not falsified by subsequent history.  For example, Augustine interpreted the thousand-year reign of Christ and the saints as having already begun with Christ's first coming, because from the first coming of Christ, he could be understood as ruling over a spiritual kingdom--the City of God on Earth--that could later become the City of God in Heaven.  This has been adopted by the Catholic Church as its favored interpretation of Revelation.

But still, the fact that Christians cannot come to any agreement on this shows the failure of the Bible as Revelation.  Either there has been no Revelation, or the Holy Spirit has failed to convey that message of Revelation clearly to all believers.

We must conclude that the Book of Scripture is too obscure to be understood by human beings--perhaps as obscure as the Book of Nature that can only be partially and fallibly understood.

The Theme Song for The Big Bang Theory--Scientific Cosmology or Divine Creation?

 

The Big Bang Theory was one of the most popular television shows of all time, and its reruns continue to attract viewers.  It ran on CBS from 2007 to 2019, with 279 episodes over 12 seasons.  

The theme song that begins each episode was written and sung by a Canadian singing group named the "Barenaked Ladies."  Here's the full song, which goes beyond the first nine lines broadcast on the show.

Our whole universe was in a hot dense state
Then nearly 14 billion years ago, expansion started (wait)

The Earth began to cool
The autotrophs began to drool
Neanderthals developed tools
We built a wall (we built the pyramids)
Math, science, history, unraveling the mystery
That all started with the big bang
(Bang!)

Since the dawn of man is really not that long
As every galaxy was formed in less time than it takes to sing this song
A fraction of a second and the elements were made
The bipeds stood up straight
The dinosaurs all met their fate
They tried to leap, but they were late
And they all died (they froze their asses off)
The oceans and Pangaea
See ya, wouldn't wanna be set in motion by the same big bang
It all started with the big bang

It's expanding ever outward but one day
It will pause and start to go the other way
Collapsing ever inward, we won't be here, it won't be heard
Our best and brightest figure that it'll make an even bigger bang

Australopithecus would really have been sick of us
Debating how we're here, they're catching deer (we're catching viruses)
Religion or astronomy, Descartes or Deuteronomy
It all started with the big bang

Music and mythology, Einstein and astrology
It all started with the big bang

It all started with the big bang

The first sentence is a remarkably pithy and accurate statement of the Big Bang Theory:  "Our whole universe was in a hot dense state, then nearly fourteen billion years ago, expansion started."  Notice that this offers a purely scientific account of the origin and evolutionary history of the universe with no reference to God as the Creator of it all.  Here there is no "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."  It recognizes both science and religion as products of human cultural evolution: "Religion or astronomy, Descartes or Deuteronomy.  It all started with the big bang!"  But it relies on science rather than religion to explain the evolution of the universe.

This is fitting for a show that is all about scientists who are also atheists.  Almost all of the leading characters are scientists.  Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter are physicists at Caltech.  Howard Wolowitz is an aerospace engineer.  Raj Koothrappali is an astrophysicist.  Bernadette Rostenkowski is a microbiologist.  Amy Farrah Fowler is a neuroscientist.  Actually, the actress who plays Amy--Mayim Bialik--has a Ph.D. in neuroscience.  The only leading character who is not a scientist is Penny, who is a waitress.  Her ignorance of science becomes a running joke.  The comic theme running through the show is the social awkwardness and autistic behavior of all these nerdy scientists.

To make sure the scientific discussions were accurate, David Saltzberg, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, served as the science advisor.  Also, Mayim Bialik sometimes offered advice about biology.  Some prominent scientists were so interested in the show that they were willing to make cameo appearances, which included Stephen Hawking and Neil de Grassie Tyson.  

Hawking and Tyson are both atheistic scientists.  I have written about Hawking's atheism.  But I have also written about many prominent scientists today who are religious believers--such as Francis Collins, Owen Gingerich, and Deborah Haarsma.  That The Big Bang Theory makes no reference to scientists like this suggests that the producers and writers for this show are deliberately promoting the claim that modern science must be atheistic.

Much of the show revolves around Sheldon and his life story.  He grew up in East Texas in a Southern Baptist family that struggled to understand him because he was a child prodigy with an IQ of 187, who used his intelligence to make scientific arguments against religious belief.

Since 2017, CBS has broadcast a spin-off prequel--Young Sheldon--about Sheldon's childhood in the 1980s and 1990s.  The theme of scientific cosmology as supporting atheism against religious belief continues in this show.  

Pastor Jeff is the minister of the Southern Baptist church where the Cooper family goes every Sunday.  The young Sheldon is determined to show everyone that he can use science to refute Pastor Jeff's religious beliefs by arguing that the Bible's story of Creation is denied by the evidence for the natural evolution of the universe and human life.

One example of this conflict between science and religion is the third episode of the second season (airing on October 4, 2018) entitled "A Crisis of Faith and Octopus Aliens."  This episode begins with the Cooper family attending church on a Sunday.  Pastor Jeff is delivering his sermon, and suddenly Sheldon raises his hand to ask a question.  He challenges Pastor Jeff to tell him what God would look like in an alien planet inhabited by octopuses.  Would God look like an octopus?  Jeff struggles to answer.

Then, that Sunday afternoon, Sheldon's mother Mary receives a phone call and is told that the 17-year-old daughter of her friend Stephanie Hanson had died in an accident.  Mary and her husband George go to the funeral.  Throughout the week, Mary is troubled by the question of why an all-good God would torture a good Christian like Stephanie by killing her innocent child.  She talks with Pastor Jeff, but he cannot give her a satisfactory answer.

On Saturday night, Mary takes her mother to a bar named "Lucky's Place," where they drink and play billiards.  She tells her mother about her religious struggle and how this has depressed her mood.  She is drunk, and she is driven home by her mother.  Her husband George takes her to bed.

The next day, Sunday, she does not go to church, and she does not say a prayer at the family dinner.  Her husband and children are shocked to see these signs that she is doubting her faith in God.

Later, in the evening, Sheldon comes out to the front porch of their house to talk with her and attempt to comfort her.  Here's the scene:

Notice that even though Sheldon is an atheist, he makes a scientific argument for the existence of God based on the "fine-tuning" of the universe.  The strength of gravity must be mathematically precise--neither too strong nor too weak--to make it possible for the universe to exist as a place where human life can emerge.  Isn't it unlikely that that could be just an accident?  Doesn't this logically suggest the need for God to design the precise conditions that make the universe and life possible?  Sheldon indicates that he is still an atheist, but he does see this as a scientifically logical argument for religious belief.

Mary responds by saying that her problem with God is not a matter of logic in her head but what she feels in her heart.  Sheldon then makes another argument that might appeal to her heart.  In a world of over five billion people, how likely is it that I would have the one woman who is a perfect mom for me?  Mary is moved by this, and she thanks God for giving her Sheldon as her child.  In the voice-over, the adult Sheldon tells the viewers that he didn't tell his mom that he shouldn't have to share credit with God for making the argument that comforted her.

One of the YouTube clips of this scene has a comment from "B Sharp" about Sheldon's first argument:  "I love Young Sheldon, and this is a sweet moment.  However, Sheldon is using the fine-tuning apologetics argument, which is fallacious.  The universe wasn't created for humans.  Humans evolved to exist in this universe."

One could also respond in a similar way to Sheldon's second argument.  That a son loves his mother is not an unlikely event that requires some supernatural intervention, because parent-child bonding is an evolutionary adaptation of human nature.

But then what if evolved human nature includes a natural desire for religious understanding--for transcendence and transcendent meaning?  This emotional desire is not based on pure logic, and therefore it cannot be refuted by logical argument.  And, therefore, as Rebecca Goldstein has shown, the emotional longing for religious transcendence prevails over scientific reasoning, particularly when science faces fundamental mysteries in the universe that cannot ever be explained by reason alone; and thus Revelation cannot be refuted by Reason.  Perhaps this is what Mary Cooper meant when she pointed to what she felt in her heart.

Nevertheless, the fine-tuning argument is one of the best scientific arguments for God as the Intelligent Designer of the universe.  Christian astrophysicists like Owen Gingerich and Deborah Haarsma like to invoke this argument.  And yet, I have written some posts indicating the flaws in this line of reasoning.

It is not really clear, for example, that scientific cosmology shows that the universe is precisely fine-tuned for life, and particularly human life.  Most cosmologists agree that the universe will come to an end, and that all life will be extinguished.  Consider, again, the theme song for The Big Bang Theory:

"It's expanding ever outward, but one day it will pause and start to go the other way, collapsing ever inward, we won't be here, it won't be heard.  Our best and brightest future that it'll make an even bigger bang!"

Does the end of the universe in a big collapse mean that far from being fine-tuned for life, the universe has been fine-tuned for death?  Or should we have faith in those eschatological religions that promise eternal life after death?

That's the topic for the next post.

Looking at the Evolutionary History of the Cosmos Through the James Webb Space Telescope: What Will This Tell Us About the Meaning of Our History in the Cosmos?

The Launch of the James Webb Space Telescope into Space

First Images from the James Webb Space Telescope 

 

         At the Center of this Hourglass Structure, A Star Is Being Born in Nebula L1527

                                  A Three Quarter View of the James Webb Space Telescope

                           The Bottom of the Telescope, the Side Facing the Sun and the Earth

Ever since the emergence of human self-conscious awareness, human beings have wondered about how the world came to be, how humans came to be, and how the human place in the world illuminates the meaning of human life.  To answer their questions, human beings have told themselves myths about cosmic history, and generally these myths have appealed to religious beliefs about the powers of supernatural beings. 

Now, modern natural science is attempting to explain the evolutionary history of the cosmos from the Big Bang (about 13.8 billion years ago) to the present and into the future through natural laws that do not depend on supernatural beings.  We must wonder whether that can be done--whether this modern scientific story can fully explain cosmic history, and whether that story can replace those religious myths in a way that explains the meaning of human life.  Or must that scientific story always be limited by the unknown and unknowable depths of the cosmos?  And if so, will those limits to scientific knowledge show the need for religious myths (true myths?) to fully explain the cosmos and the meaning of human life within the cosmos?  Or is it reasonable to choose scientific reason over religious revelation even as we recognize the inevitable limits of natural reason in explaining everything?

The James Webb Space Telescope will help us to think about those questions. 

LOOKING THROUGH A TELESCOPE TO SEE THE HISTORY AND MEANING OF THE COSMOS

For thousands of years, in the Western World, astronomy was understood through a religious conception of the universe as a divinely created order that constituted a moral cosmology supporting a divine law to guide human life.  It was a geocentric cosmos.  The Earth was at the center.   Circling around the Earth were the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Beyond that were the fixed stars, and then finally the crystalline sphere of the Primum Mobile and the Paradise of Heaven.  Beneath the Earth were Purgatory and Hell.  

Even Plato and Aristotle endorsed pagan versions of this religious astronomy.  But Aristotle noted that this cosmic model was based mostly on traditional myths that could be known by faith or trust (pistis) but not by scientific study, because the planets and stars were so far away from the Earth that they could not be known very well by sense experience.  Aristotle thought that biology was a more empirically grounded science than astronomy because plants and animals could be directly observed by human beings.

This changed with the invention of the telescope in 1608.  The word telescope was coined from two Greek words for "far-seeing."  In 1609, Galileo built his own telescope and turned it toward the night sky.  He could see the mountains and craters of the Moon, the planets, and a ribbon of light stretched across the sky that would later be identified as the Milky Way galaxy.  He could also see that Copernicus was right about the heliocentric Solar system, with the Earth revolving around the Sun.  The telescope had extended the range and clarity of the human visual system deep into the night sky.

In 1633, the Catholic Inquisition condemned Galileo as a heretic for endorsing the Copernican heliocentric theory of the Earth as moving around the Sun, because this seemed to deny those Biblical passages that spoke of the fixity of the Earth. Galileo was sentenced to house arrest, and his book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was put on the Church's Index of Prohibited Books.

By the middle of the twentieth century, Pope Pius XII praised Galileo as an intellectual hero and declared in his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis that there was no necessary conflict between Biblical faith and the theory of evolution. Pope John Paul II apologized for the condemnation of Galileo, and in 1996 he declared that the Church did not oppose Darwin's theory. A few years ago, I wrote a short essay on John Paul's statement.

After Galileo first turned his telescope to the sky, for the next three and a half centuries, telescopes became larger and more complex in ways that improved the depth and accuracy of astronomical observations.  But all of these telescopes were limited by their location on the Earth because of the distorting effects of the Earth's atmosphere.  By the middle of the 20th century, astronomers began to think about the possibility of sending telescopes into space beyond the atmosphere of the Earth.  This dream was fulfilled in 1990 when five astronauts onboard the space shuttle Discovery released the Hubble Space Telescope into an orbit around the Earth about 340 miles above the surface.  

Hubble did indeed produce stunning images of the cosmos that allowed for the study of cosmic history over billions of years.  But in the 1990s scientists began to think about new space telescopes that could detect objects up to 100 times fainter than Hubble can, and objects much earlier in the history of the universe.

The James Webb Space Telescope was designed to employ infrared astronomy to detect high-redshift objects that are very early in the history of the universe and very distant.  Infrared light also passes more easily through dust clouds than visible light.  As light travels through space, it is stretched by the expansion of the universe.  Consequently, many of the most distant objects shine in infrared light, which is longer in wavelength than visible light.  Unaided by optical instruments, the human visual system can see only a narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.  The Hubble telescope captures a slightly broader portion of the spectrum, including the near ultraviolet and the near infrared.  The James Webb telescope captures a much broader spectrum, including the near and midinfrared spectrum.

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on Christmas Day one year ago.  It was placed in a halo orbit, circling around a point in space known as the Sun-Earth Lagrange point, approximately 930,000 miles beyond the Earth's orbit around the Sun.  The combined gravitational pull of the Earth and the Sun allow the James Webb spacecraft to orbit the Sun in the same time that it takes the Earth.

James Webb has four key goals: to search for light from the first stars and galaxies that formed in the universe after the Big Bang, to study galaxy formation and evolution, to study star formation and planet formation, and to study planetary systems and the origins of life.

One example of the stunning images produced by James Webb is the image of the star Earendel.

                                                           James Webb Views Earendel

Earendel is the most distant individual star ever seen.  It was first detected by the Hubble Telescope early in 2022, but then a better image of it was captured by the James Webb Telescope.  Its light took 12.9 billion years to reach the Earth.  This means that this is what this star looked like shortly after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, only 900 million years from the Big Bang.

The many ways in which the James Webb Telescope might contribute to our understanding of the cosmos is surveyed in a recent article in the New York Times and in a series of articles in the latest issue of Scientific American (December, 2022). The broadest coverage of the work with James Webb can be found at the NASA website.

This coverage of the James Webb research fails, however, to probe the deep philosophic and theological questions that should arise from this research--questions about the limits of natural scientific knowledge, the mystery of First Cause, the mystery of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life, and the cosmic teleology of human purposefulness.

THE LIMITS OF NATURAL SCIENCE

The fundamental assumption of modern natural science is that to understand nature we must engage in both thinking and looking.  In thinking about nature, we speculate about what nature might be like, and we formulate theories or hypotheses about the order of nature.  But thinking is not enough.  We must also look at nature:  we must engage in observations or experiments that will test our theories or hypotheses and either verify or falsify them.  Many scientists agree with Karl Popper that conjectures about nature that cannot be falsified by empirical observations or experiments do not count as scientific knowledge.

But as I have noted previously, some critics of this Popperian philosophy of science have argued that it ignores the fact that the human experience of the world cannot extend into the fundamental depths of nature, and therefore we can only speculate about that deepest reality of nature, without being able to empirically test our speculations.  The fundamental constituents of nature are either too small, too far away, or too far in the past to be observed directly by us or indirectly through our instruments, and thus nature's secrets are buried so deep or so far away that we have no way to test our theoretical speculations about them.

So, for example, while the James Webb Telescope can expand our vision ever deeper into the cosmos, there will always be a cosmic horizon beyond which we cannot look.  And although we might push that cosmic horizon ever closer to the Big Bang, we will never be able to look beyond the Big Bang to see what there was before the beginning of time.  Consequently, we might speculate that we are living in only one of many (infinite?) possible universes, but we can never test that multiverse speculation because we cannot in principle ever look beyond our universe.

THE MYSTERY OF FIRST CAUSE

The limits of natural science are manifested in those fundamental mysteries of nature that might never be resolved--such as the mystery of First Cause as conveyed by the question, Why is there something rather than nothing?  I have written about this previously.

I have written about the debate between William Lane Craig and Sean Carroll over this question.  Craig presents a syllogism for the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God as supported by modern natural science.

1. If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.

Craig claims that (1) is "obviously true," because no one believes that things just "pop into existence" without a cause, and if the whole universe came into existence at some point in time, the cause must have been transcendent--namely, a divine First Cause.

The controversial premise, he says, is (2).  Previously, traditional proponents of the Cosmological Argument have made logical arguments for why the universe could not be eternal and so must have an absolute beginning in time.  But now, beginning in the 20th century, we have scientific empirical evidence from astrophysical cosmology supporting the theory of the Big Bang--most importantly, evidence for the expansion of the universe and evidence from the second law of thermodynamics that the universe has moved from an original state of low entropy to high entropy.

Craig says that the scientific support for premise (2) coming from Big Bang cosmology is "religiously neutral," but when the empirical truth of premise (2) is combined with the metaphysical truth of premise (1), the logical conclusion supports the existence of a transcendent cause of the universe that must be God.

There are, however, good reasons to doubt those two premises as scientific statements rather than affirmations of religious faith.

Premise (1) is not "obviously true," because while we all have experience of how natural causes work within the universe to bring things into existence, we do not have experience with how transcendent causes work outside the universe to bring the universe itself into existence. 

Carroll makes this argument, and Craig refuses to answer it.  Craig just repeats how silly it sounds to say that things "just pop into existence" without a cause.  But as Carroll observes, the language of "popping" implies a context within which cause and effect relationships make sense.  So we can sensibly ask why the chicken crossed the road, because we have a contextual understanding of what roads are, what might be on the other side of a road, what might motivate chickens to cross a road, etc.  We have a context here of things interacting within a universe governed by natural laws.

But if we try to ask why the universe exists, we have no context outside the universe that would make it possible for us to seek a causal explanation.  Indeed, to even talk about transcendent causes implies that our natural experience of causality inside the universe has no application here.  Thus, Craig is employing the sophistical technique of equivocation: if it's silly within our natural experience of the universe to say that things can just "pop into existence," then it is also silly standing outside our natural universe to say that our universe could have come into existence without a cause.  This is a fallacious inference, because our ordinary experience of causality within the context of the universe does not necessarily apply outside that context.

THE MYSTERY OF FINE-TUNING FOR HUMAN LIFE

Part of the mission of the James Webb Space Telescope is to locate and study the exoplanets (the planets beyond the Solar System) that have the conditions favorable to life, or even to intelligent life.  Although intelligent life might be rare in the universe, and although it might even turn out to be uniquely found only on the Earth, it is remarkable that some of the physical and chemical constants of the universe appear to be finely tuned for the emergence of life and intelligent life.

Some astrophysicists, such as Owen Gingerich, believe that this evidence of fine-tuning or the anthropic principle becomes comprehensible only if one believes that this fine-tuning is the purposeful work of a Creator.  There are many parameters of physics and cosmology that are set at precise values, such that if there were even a slight deviation from these values, the universe would not be hospitable to any form of life or to intelligent life.  There can be as many as 34 of these finely tuned parameters.  For example, if the expansion rate of the universe had been slightly larger, no stars and planets could have formed; and if it had been slightly smaller, the universe would have collapsed before any stars and planets could have been formed.  The nuclear energy level ratio of carbon to oxygen is set precisely, so that if it had been larger, the universe would contain insufficient oxygen for life, and if it had been smaller, the universe would contain insufficient carbon for life.  If the earth were closer to the Sun, it would be too hot to sustain life.  If it were farther away from the Sun, it would be too cold to sustain life.  Just as Goldilocks found the bowl of porridge that was neither too hot or too cold but just right, it seems that the universe is just right for the emergence of intelligent life. 

Gingerich sees only two possible ways to explain why the universe is so precisely fine-tuned for the evolution of intelligent life on Earth.  We either say that this all happened through an astonishing sequence of accidents.  Or we say that it was intentionally planned by the Creator.  Gingerich thinks the latter is much more plausible, because it is easier to believe that the Creator intentionally set the finely-tuned parameters of the universe to make it inevitable that not just life, but intelligent human life would emerge on a planet just like the Earth.  He endorses the statement of Paul Davies "that the laws of nature are rigged not only in favor of complexity, or just in favor of life, but also in favor of mind.  To put it dramatically, it implies that mind is written into the laws of nature in a fundamental way" (God's Universe, 38).  It's as though nature has been designed so as to be hospitable to minds that can contemplate nature.

It is easier to believe that the universe's being finely tuned for intelligent life is purely accidental if one believes in the multiverse theory accepted by some scientists today.  If our universe is only one of many universes, and if each of those universes has a different set of natural laws and natural physical and cosmological parameters, then we might imagine that through a random evolution of universes, at least one universe could have arisen like ours hospitable to intelligent life.  The problem with this, however, as Gingerich and other scientists have observed, is that this is a purely imaginary conception, for which we have no observational evidence, because we have no way of stepping outside our own universe.  For this reason, many scientists think the theory of multiverse is not a scientific theory at all, because it is not empirically testable.

Even if from the standpoint of the present moment, we as intelligent beings can look back on 13.8 billion years of cosmic history and see ourselves as the purposeful peak of that fine-tuned evolutionary history, which is what Gingerich does, we might wonder about the remote future of the cosmos.  Is the cosmos so fine-tuned for life and intelligent life that such life will continue forever?  Gingerich never asks that question or considers what scientific cosmology would suggest about the distant future of the cosmos.

Although Gingerich quotes from Paul Davies as saying that the universe seems rigged to favor the emergence of not just life but intelligent life, he does not quote Davies' remarks about what the universe will look like in the very remote future.  He imagines "an inconceivably dilute soup of photons, neutrinos, and a dwindling number of electrons and positrons, all slowly moving farther and farther apart.  As far as we know, no further basic physical processes would ever happen.  No significant event would occur to interrupt the bleak sterility of a universe that has run its course yet still faces eternal life--perhaps eternal death would be a better description."

If we look at the entire history of the cosmos, we see that during the first 10 billion years, there was no life; and then after a few billion years of life, the universe became eternally dead again.  So now life, including intelligent life, seems to be only a momentary event in cosmic history.  Now, it seems that the cosmos has been fine-tuned for an eternity of mindless death.

A NATURAL TELEOLOGY OF HUMAN MEANING?

Gingerich looks to the fine-tuning of the universe as evidence for a cosmic teleology--for a cosmos that has been created purposefully to bring about the emergence of human beings, which thus gives cosmic meaning to the place of human beings in the universe.

But rather than looking for some cosmic teleology of the universe, we should be satisfied if we can see the immanent teleology of living species, including the human species.  Cosmic teleology is the conception of all of nature as a whole in which all beings serve a cosmic purpose set by an intelligent designer or creator.  By contrast, immanent teleology is manifest in the internal purposiveness of organisms in their generation, their structure, and their activities.  Darwinian biology rejects any cosmic teleology by which the universe as a whole would be seen as ordered to some end or purpose.  Evolution by variation and natural selection explains the purposiveness of species without reference to any forces guiding nature to secure some cosmic scale of perfection.  And yet, although the evolutionary process does not serve goals, the organisms emerging from that process do.  Reproduction, growth, feeding, healing, courtship, parental care of the young--these and many other activities of organisms are goal directed.  Biologists cannot explain such processes unless they ask about ends or purposes immanent in each species. 

Human beings show such immanent teleology in that the evolved human nature of Homo sapiens includes natural desires and inclinations that are directed to goals or ends, and we can judge the happiness of a human life by how well those goals or ends are satisfied.  I have argued that there are at least 20 natural human desires, and that we judge societies as better or worse depending on how well or how poorly those societies provide the conditions for the harmonious satisfaction of those desires.  This is not a cosmic standard of the good, because this standard of the good is relative to the human species.  Nor is this an eternal standard of the good, because the human good exists only as long as the human species exists.  And modern scientific cosmology teaches us that human beings will exist for only a brief moment in cosmic history.  But for as long as that human species exists, even if it seems fleeting in the huge expanse of cosmic history, the human good is a natural reality.

The evidence of cosmological fine-tuning does not clearly show a fine-tuning for human life.  If we look at the entire history of the cosmos, we see that during the first 10 billion years, there was no life, during the first 13 billion years, there was no human-like intelligent life, and in the remote future, as the Sun and the other stars burn out, the universe will become dark, cold, and dead.  We could conclude that the universe has been fine-tuned for an eternity of mindless death, and so from the point of view of the universe, we are utterly insignificant.

But it does not follow from this, however, that if the universe does not care about or for us, our lives have no meaning.  Even if our lives have no cosmic meaning, they still have human meaning for us.  The universe doesn't care.  But we care about ourselves and others.

Even if the universe does not care about or for us, and even if we can never fully understand that universe, we still want to probe as far as we can into the awesome depths of that universe, and the James Webb Space Telescope will help us do that.