In this very brief history of modern cosmological physics, the laws of quantum and relativistic physics represent things to be wondered at but widely accepted: just like biblical miracles. M-theory invokes something different: a prime mover, a begetter, a creative force that is everywhere and nowhere. This force cannot be identified by instruments or examined by comprehensible mathematical prediction, and yet it contains all possibilities. It incorporates omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence, and it's a big mystery. Remind you of Anybody?
Tim Radford: Review of Hawking's The Grand Design
There is another interpretation of "Biblical miracles." It's not that they are to be widely accepted, or even to be wondered at.
ReplyDeleteIt is that they, like the stories of Creation in Genesis, indicate and express a relationship between humanity and creation, and between God and creation, where "creation" equals the cosmos as we know it. Genesis doesn't establish how God created the world; it establishes that God is Creator, and so related to creation, and so interested and involved in creation, and that humanity is of a piece with this creation.
This is a radically different view from, say, the Greeks, who saw the cosmos as an imposition of Logos (reason) on Chaos, an imposition that Logos finally loses, and the state of the cosmos returns to its primordial one: chaos. Now, if we want to argue about how this universe, of the possible universes that exist per M theory can provide all the constants that make intelligent life as we know it possible, we can argue that Logos fortunately made that happen. Or that simply because it happened, here we are. Either explanation takes place in the background of the primary state of the cosmos being chaos, no matter what order may appear to rule now.
But science assumes order, else science fails to work at all, or at least at the edges. The interesting question is: where does that order come from? Why is the universe orderly at all? The Greeks at least dared ask that question.
The story of Creation is a different kind of answer entirely. Call it an ethical one.
That will get you somewhere.
I am amused by a theory which "allows" for no less than 10 to the 500th power universes in order to begin to explain this one.
ReplyDeleteIt is like a Biblical miracle, isn't it?