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.

The Incoherence of Deborah Haarsma's Christian Astrophysics in the Reason/Revelation Debate

 

What do you see in these pictures?  

The first picture is from the Hubble Space Telescope.  It's a tiny area of the sky (about one thirty-two millionth of the sky) visible only in the Earth's Southern Hemisphere.  It's centered on SMAC 0723, a galaxy cluster in the constellation of Volans.  As many as 10,000 galaxies are visible in this picture, and each of those galaxies probably have an average of 100 million stars.  The picture includes light from galaxies as they existed about 13 billion years ago, only about 400 to 800 million years after the Big Bang.

The second picture of this same area of the sky is from the James Webb Space Telescope.  A few weeks ago I wrote a post on the James Webb Telescope.  This picture was first revealed to the public at an event at the White House with President Joe Biden on July 11, 2022.  The picture from the Webb Telescope is clearer and more detailed than the Hubble picture.

Christian astrophysicist Deborah Haarsma sees in these pictures confirmation of what the Bible says in Psalms 19:1 (King James Version)--"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork."  

Is she right?  You might agree with her if you take the side of Revelation in the Reason/Revelation debate.  But you will probably disagree with her if you take the side of Reason.  Is there any way to decide which side is right?  Or can the two sides be reconciled?  Would most human beings be inclined to agree with her religious interpretation of these pictures?  If so, does this express a natural propensity of our evolved human mind?

Some Christians have reported that looking at these pictures from the Webb Telescope made them "feel very small."  One Christian journalist observed: "It's hard and uncomfortable to comprehend being a tiny speck on a tiny speck in a universe full of tiny, beautiful specks," which sent her into "a sort of existential crisis."  But when she asked Haarsma about this, Haarsma told her: "You don't have to look at the vastness of the universe and feel insignificant.  You can look at it and see how great God's power and love are."

Haarsma said that on the Sunday after the Webb Telescope images were released, she went to services at her church where the images were projected on a screen, and the congregation sang hymns about nature.  "They created an opportunity to thank God for the wonders of the natural world."

HAARSMA'S THEISTIC EVOLUTION

Haarsma received her Ph.D. in astrophysics from MIT.  She became a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Calvin College (now Calvin University).  She is now President of BioLogos, an organization founded by Francis Collins to promote the idea of theistic evolution among evangelical Christians who otherwise might reject evolutionary science as contrary to the Bible.  As suggested by name "BioLogos," the idea is that biology and natural science generally are "the language of God": "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God" (John 1:1).  Christians should see the modern scientific study of nature as the natural revelation of God's creative activity.

In a recent lecture, Haarsma explained "Why I Never Had a Faith Crisis Over Science." She noted that of the many young people today who are losing their religious beliefs, many say that "the church seems to reject much of what science tells us about the world."  She said that it doesn't have to be this way if Christians understand that faith and science are not in conflict, and then she explained how she had reached this conclusion in her own life.

She grew up in a Calvinist evangelical church that "grounded me in the faith."  "When it came to Genesis and the age of the Earth, my church knew of only two options.  One was godless evolution, with a godless Big Bang billions of years ago.  The other option was a Creator God who made the universe in 6 days following the text in Genesis.  Given those two choices, of course we picked the one with the Creator!"

At the same time, however, as a schoolgirl, Haarsma had a love of math and science.  As an undergraduate at Bethel University, a Christian school, she majored in physics and music.  Then, as a graduate student in physics at MIT, she developed an interest in astronomy and astrophysics.  At that point, she was forced to reconsider whether astronomy and the Genesis account of creation were compatible or contradictory.

She came across the book Portraits of Creation, with chapters by Christian geologists and Christian astronomers who explained how the scientific account of the evolution of the Earth could be reconciled with their faith.  There was also a chapter by Old Testament scholar John Stek, who explained the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian accounts of how many gods created the universe so that there was a flat Earth with a solid dome sky with water above it, called a "firmament."  This interpretation of the Old Testament as shaped by its ancient Near Eastern cultural context has been deepened by scholars like John Walton who is on the BioLogos Advisory Council.

Haarsma observes:

"I realized that in Genesis chapter 1, on the second day of creation, God takes credit for making this firmament.  That means God didn't try to correct their misconceptions about the natural world; it would have distracted them from the larger message.  God had other goals in mind.  I concluded that if God didn't put modern science into Genesis, I shouldn't be trying to get modern science out of Genesis.  Instead I should focus on God's primary message: that there is one sovereign Creator (not a pantheon of gods), that creation is good, and that humans are made in God's image."

In this way, she could accept the modern scientific account of the evolution of the universe while also accepting the revelation of God's "primary message" in the Bible.  Science and Christian faith are therefore compatible.  The mission of BioLogos is to convey that message to her fellow evangelical Christians.

Notice that Haarsma's conclusion that "God didn't try to correct their misconceptions about the natural world," because this "would have distracted them from the larger message," comes not from her reading of the Bible but from her reading of Old Testament scholars like John Stack and John Walton.  Why did she have to go outside the Bible for this?  Does that mean that God's revelation in the Bible does not guide the reader to its correct interpretation?  Does that mean that the Bible by itself is not a clear revelation of God's teaching?  A Christian reader of the Bible like Ken Ham would deny this, because he would say that the clear teaching of the Bible about the six days of Creation must be true, and it should not be distorted by scholarly commentary on the Bible that denies its literal teaching. 

In contrast to the Young Earth Creationism of Christians like Ham, the fundamental intellectual framework for Haarsma's project is what is often called "theistic evolution" or what Haarsma calls "evolutionary creation."  God is the omnipotent Creator of everything, but God has chosen to exercise his creative activity by establishing the laws of nature that allow for the natural history of the universe to emerge through a natural evolutionary process that can be studied by natural science.

As I have indicated previously, theistic evolution depends upon the principle of dual causality that was developed by medieval Islamic and Christian thinkers as a way of defending natural science or natural philosophy against the charge of being irreligious: God's supernatural power as primary cause can be understood as compatible with the natural laws of secondary causes as studied by natural science.

RECONCILING REASON AND REVELATION THROUGH THE TWO BOOKS OF ONE TRUTH?

I have written a series of posts on the reason/revelation debate, in which I have agreed with Leo Strauss that there is no way of reconciling reason and revelation by synthesizing them, and that a Socratic philosopher or a Darwinian scientist is justified in adopting a zetetic position:  The zetetics believe that while philosophy or science cannot refute revelation, it is rational for those with the natural desire and capacity for philosophy or science to choose the philosophic life, when this is rightly understood as a Socratic or Darwinian quest for knowledge that never attains the full knowledge of the whole that would refute revelation by denying the possibility of supernatural miracles.

Against this position, Haarsma assumes that the debate between reason and revelation can be resolved through a synthesis of the two in the idea that there is one truth revealed in "two books"--the Bible and nature.  As a student at Bethel College, Haarsma reports:  "I was excited to discover that a science career didn't mean pushing God out of the picture.  I was introduced to John Calvin's phrase 'All truth is God's truth'; even if some truth in nature is discovered by an atheist, it could still be from God.  By studying science, I would be investigating God's world as well as God's word, both nature and scripture.  Science could be a Christian vocation; I didn't have to be a missionary to serve God, but could serve God with my mind, as well as my heart and soul."

This attempt to reconcile reason and revelation through the two books of one truth fails, however, because Haarsma fails to show how the clearly revealed truth of the Bible (particularly, in the first chapters of Genesis) concerning the divinely created origins of the universe and of human beings is consistent with the natural science of the evolutionary origins of everything.  I have already made this argument in some previous posts about how revelation fails to resolve the creation/evolution debate among evangelical Christians because the Holy Spirit has failed to guide them to agreement about the Biblically revealed teaching concerning origins.

Haarsma first confronted this problem while she was studying astrophysics in graduate school at MIT: "studying astronomy meant that all of my questions about Genesis were back on the table.  I believed, and still believe, that the entire Bible is God's authoritative word for our lives.  I didn't want to just pick and choose which verses to accept, or let science dictate that some verses weren't true."

But as we have already seen, Haarsma really does "let science dictate that some verses weren't true."  When she learned that the Bible's account of God's creating the "firmament" (the King James translation of the Hebrew word raqia) was using the language of ancient Egyptian and Babylonian creation myths that were contradicted by modern astronomy, she decided that this Biblical teaching about the "firmament" as a solid heavenly dome needed to be rejected as false.

In Egyptian iconography, the starry sky is represented by the goddess Nut, whose body arched over the land.  This was the boundary between heaven and earth, and it held back the water above.  The concept of heavenly waters was a natural deduction from the experience of precipitation from the sky.

The Bible echoes this image in the Genesis account of the "firmament" in the second day of creation.  "And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.  And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.  And God called the firmament Heaven.  And the evening and the morning were the second day" (Gen. 1:6-8).  This is the same Hebrew word for firmament that appears in Psalms 19:1--"and the firmament shewth his handywork."

But when we look at the Hubble and Webb pictures of deep space, we know that this is not a picture of a solid starry "firmament," because we know that astronomy shows the falsity of the Egyptian image of the sky.

As we have seen, according to Haarsma, in God's revelation in Genesis, "God didn't try to correct their misconceptions about the natural world; it would have distracted them from the larger message."  

But in response to Haarsma on this point, Ken Ham (a young Earth creationist) has complained that this "accuses God of using error to teach truth."   As far as I know, Haarsma has never replied to this criticism.

If God had corrected the errors of ancient Near Eastern cosmology, wouldn't this have confirmed God's revelation as truth that was beyond human understanding prior to modern science?  If there is no correction of ancient cosmology, does this imply that this is not really a revelation of a truth beyond the human beliefs of that time?

Haarsma might respond that we can see this was a true revelation because it corrects ancient theology in teaching a monotheistic religion of a creator God that was new.  But if we're going to read the Bible within its cultural setting, as she does, then we might notice that parts of the Bible seem to accept the polytheistic idea that different peoples have different gods (for example Judges 11:24).  We might then wonder whether Yahweh was originally one of many gods who at some point was elevated to be the one universal and transcendent god of Israel, which is the argument of Thomas Romer in The Invention of God (Harvard, 2015).  So why isn't God a cultural invention?  To deny this, it would help to have a revelation in the Bible of cosmological truths that correct traditional cosmologies in ways that people of the ancient Near East could not have understood, but which might be confirmed by modern science.

This illustrates the impossibility of rationally proving that a claim of supernatural revelation really is a miraculous revelation from God rather than the invention of human imagination.

This also illustrates how Haarsma's attempt to synthesize reason and revelation forces her into heresy in denying some of the fundamental theological tenets of the evangelical Christian Reformed Church (CRC) to which she belongs.  It is common for CRC schools like Bethel University and Calvin University to have a "Statement of Faith" that all the students and faculty must accept, and faculty members can be fired if they disagree with any article of that faith.  A fundamental tenet is that the Bible is "inerrant" or "without any error."  Haarsma denies that when she says that the Bible did not correct the "misconceptions about nature" in the Egyptian understanding of the sky as a "firmament" dividing the waters above from the waters below.

She also assumes that the Biblical account of all humanity originating in Adam and Eve is an error because the evolutionary science of human evolution from ancestral primate species does not recognize the origin of all humans in two individuals.  As I have written in some previous posts, this debate over the historical reality of Adam and Eve has led many evangelical Christians to identify theistic evolution as heresy, and some faculty members at Christian schools (including Calvin University and Bethel College) have been fired for denying the Bible's claim that human history began with Adam and Eve.  When Howard Van Till, a professor of physics at Calvin University, identified himself as a theistic evolutionist, he was charged with heresy; and eventually he was forced to retire from the University in 1999.  His position was filled by Loren Haarsma, Deborah's husband.

What we see here is that rather than achieving a reconciliation of reason and revelation, Haarsma has fallen into an incoherent position in which she vacillates between appealing to revelation to correct the claims of reason and appealing to reason to correct the claims of revelation.  So, for example, as we have seen, she will appeal to modern astronomy to correct what the Bible says about the heavenly "firmament."  But, then, when she writes about the "fine-tuning" of the universe, she corrects those scientists who deny that this is evidence for God, and she says that "from the perspective of biblical faith, science merely investigates the physical world that God created and sustains."

This debate over how to understand the First Cause of everything, including the laws of nature, points to the deepest problem for human understanding--the problem of ultimate explanation. All explanation depends on some ultimate reality that is unexplained. To the question of why nature has the kind of order that it has, we might answer that we must just accept this as a brute fact of our experience. That's just the way it is!

The response of the biblical creationist is that it is very unlikely that the Universe would exist uncaused, and it is more likely that God would exist as the uncaused cause of everything.

In our search for ultimate explanations, we must appeal either to nature or to God as the unexplained ground of all explanation. Thus does the natural desire to understand leads us to this most fundamental of choices--nature or God, reason or revelation. Philosophy cannot refute revelation, and theology cannot refute philosophy, because any attempted refutation would have to beg the question at issue. As Leo Strauss observed: "All alleged refutations of revelation presuppose unbelief in revelation, and all alleged refutations of philosophy presuppose already faith in revelation. There seems to be no ground common to both, and therefore superior to both."

WHY HAS BIBLICAL REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT FAILED TO RESOLVE THE CREATION/EVOLUTION DEBATE?

In a previous post, I have written about Haarsma's contribution to the edited book Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design.  As indicated by the editor Jim Stump, the purpose of bringing together the four authors in this book--Haarsma, Hugh Ross, Ken Ham, and Stephen Meyer--was to see if evangelical Christians who have studied the creation/evolution debate could come to some agreement in this debate as guided by God's revelation through nature and through the Bible.  But they failed to reach any agreement.  Why?

In John 17, Jesus prays to God that all believers will be as one, that they will come to complete unity, "so that the world may believe that you have sent me."  It seems that Christians give witness to the truth of revelation by showing their agreement about that revelation.  In Stump's "Introduction" to Four Views, he says that a primary purpose of this book was to pursue unity in what revelation teaches about origins (16).  But in his "Conclusion" to the book, he laments that this has not been achieved: "I doubt that readers will come away from this book with the feeling that we are any closer to the goal of Christian unity on the topic of origins" (232).

There are three possible explanations for this.  Either there has been no revelation (through the Bible or through nature) of God's teaching about origins. Or there has been such a revelation, but it's so obscure that it conveys no clear message. Or the revelation does convey a clear message, but human beings have a stubborn bias that blinds them to that clear message.  Hugh Ross says that "since most humans will choose autonomy over submission to God," most humans will refuse to see the clear evidence of God's creative activity in nature (166).  But this atheistic bias cannot explain why faithful Christians--like the four authors in this book--would refuse to recognize the clear teaching of revelation.  So, we are left with the first two explanations for why these Christians cannot come to agreement about origins: either there has been no revelation about origins, or the revelation is not clear enough to be understood.  All four of the authors believe that God has sent the Holy Spirit "to guide us persistently to truth" (71, 76, 107), but here the Holy Spirit has failed to guide them to agreement about the revealed teaching concerning origins.   

It would strengthen Haarsma's position if she could explain this failure of the Bible and the Holy Spirit to lead Christians to some agreement about the origins of the Universe and human beings.

The End of Everything: Rational Cosmology or Revealed Eschatology?

 

          Some Astronomers Have Reported the First Observation of a Star Consuming a Planet

"In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever beasts invented knowledge.  That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of 'world history'--yet only a minute.  After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die."

Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense."

If everything must come to an end--and I mean EVERYTHING--should that cause us to worry?

For instance, recently some astronomers have reported the first direct observation of a star eating a planet (De et al. 2023; Naoz 2023).  If this shows us what is likely to happen when the Sun eats the Earth, should we worry about that, because it means the end of the world as we know it?  Or should we say that since this deadly fate of the Earth is probably at least 5 billions of years in the future, this is too far off to bother us today?  

Should we worry that not only must the Earth come to an end, but even the entire Universe?  If the Universe must end, when and how will it end?  If the Universe must end, is this the "most terrible truth" of Lucretian science--as Leo Strauss said--so terrible that we cannot think about it without becoming sad because it deprives our life of all meaning and purpose?  Or should our understanding of this truth fill us with awe?

Can we answer such questions by Reason alone--through the science of cosmology?  Or should we have a religious faith in the Revelation of eternal life after death with "a new Heaven and a new Earth," with a final divine judgment of the saved (going to Heaven) and the damned (going to Hell)?  

Can we resolve the apparent tension here between Reason and Revelation?  Does the freedom of thought and speech in a liberal social order rightly allow for an open debate between Reason and Revelation over these questions about our place in the cosmos?  Or does any morally healthy society require the enforcement of religious orthodoxy about the ultimate meaning and purpose of human life in the universe?  Must that enforcement of orthodoxy be legally coercive?  Or can it come from the natural associations of familial life and the voluntary associations of civil society without legal coercion?

I'm sorry.  I do have a bad habit of asking too many questions to which I don't have the answers.  But here I go anyway.

THE END OF THE WORLD?

The New York Times article on astronomers spotting a dying star swallowing a large planet says that this shows us "a grisly sneak peak of the literal end of the world."  But identifying this as the "end of the world" depends on what one means by "the world."

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the primary definition of "world" is "the state or realm of human existence on earth."  But one of the secondary definitions of world is "the material universe or the cosmos."  In the first sense, the end of the world will probably come in five billion years, because from what we know about the evolution of stars, the Sun will by then expand into a red-giant star, which will incinerate all life on Earth, and later the Earth is likely to be absorbed by the expanding Sun.  But while this would end "human existence on earth," we can imagine that if the human species survives for five billion years, by then humans might have migrated elsewhere in the Solar System or even beyond the Solar System.  Or, the human species might have evolved into some transhuman species or cyborg.

Even so, the end of human existence on earth might seem "grisly" as the reporter says, because it's the end of the world as we know it.  But there's an even grislier prospect--the end of the whole "material universe"--because this would be the end not just of human life but all life, and even all ordered structures.  This would be what Leo Strauss identified as the "most terrible truth" of Lucretian atomistic evolution--that "nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable."

We must wonder, then, whether modern cosmology confirms this terrible truth, and if so, what does this mean for our sense of purpose or meaning in the cosmos?  Or can religious eschatology persuade us that there is an eternal life that is lovable?

THE END OF THE (OBSERVABLE) UNIVERSE?

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University have recently produced an online interactive map of the universe.  Using the data collected by astrophysicists, artist Pablo Carlos Budassi has produced a logarithmic map of the observable universe.

What you see here are the large-scale outer limits of the observable universe.  The Big Bang is dated at about 13.8 billion years ago.  At about 370,000 years after the Big Bang, the first atoms (hydrogen and helium) were formed, and these atoms released photons that can still be detected today as the cosmic microwave background radiation.  This is the oldest direct observation we have of the universe.  This is the outer limit of the observable universe.  So, on any map of the universe, the period before this is dark because it is not detectable by human observers with telescopes.

Moving down to the small-scale limits of the observable universe--the atomic and subatomic particles and forces--the limits are set by our instruments for detecting microscopic reality--microscopes and particle colliders.  Beyond the limits of the Large Hadron Collider, the subatomic world is not detectable.

I have written about this previously as showing the limits on the scale of human observational experience of nature.  Here is an image of the "Ends of Evidence."  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.

At the small scale, microscopes have extended our experience beyond our visual reach, and particle colliders have extended our reach much 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 Large Hadron Collider.  

At the cosmic scale, telescopes have extended our experience of the astronomical universe.  I have written about how the James Webb Space Telescope is extending our view deep into the earliest history of the Universe.  But no telescope will ever look beyond our Universe's cosmic horizon and see the other universes assumed by the multiverse hypothesis.

Many scientists have inferred from this that the superstring theory and the multiverse theory are not really scientific theories because they are in principle beyond experimental and observational testing and thus beyond the scientific method that depends on empirical testing and falsification.  This points to the ineluctable limits of scientific reasoning and thus suggests that complete human understanding of the natural universe by reason alone is impossible, because the human mind has evolved as an evolutionary adaptation for exploring the ordinary range of human experience, which does not encompass the whole universe.

This bears upon the question of the end of the Universe, because we cannot know whether with the end of our observable Universe, there might still be other universes.

FIVE WAYS FOR THE UNIVERSE TO END

Cosmologists have considered five possible ways that the Universe could end:  Heat Death, the Big Crunch, the Big Rip, Vacuum Decay, and the Big Bounce.  The Wikipedia articles on these five possibilities and on the "Ultimate Fate of the Universe" are all pretty good.  But the best account of all of this that I have seen is Katie Mack's book The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) (Scribner, 2020).  She also has some good YouTube videos.

                                             Katie Mack on the Death of the Universe

                                                    Katie Mack's Poem "Disorientation"

In my next post, I will examine those five cosmological theories of how the Universe might end.  And then I will consider how this scientific cosmology compares with religious eschatology.

REFERENCES

De, Kishalay, et al. 2023. "An Infrared Transient from a Star Engulfing a Planet." Nature 617 (May 4): 55-60.

Mack, Katie. 2020.  The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking).  New York: Scribner.

Naoz, Smadar. 2023. "Planet Swallowed After Veering Too Close to Its Star." Nature 617 (May 4): 38-39.

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.