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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2011
At a meeting in Leningrad in December 1948, Soviet astronomers affirmed the need to fight against the “reactionary-idealistic” theory of a “primeval atom.” Support for this theory, later dubbed the “Big Bang” by one of its fiercest critics, would, the Soviets claimed, help clericalism.1 While such anxieties might seem astonishing today, they may have seemed plausible in the 1940s, especially since the theory had first been proposed by a Catholic priest, Father Georges Lemaître. Furthermore, while Lemaître himself was careful to avoid drawing theological inferences, the association of his theory with the religious doctrine of Creation, especially by Pope Pius XII in 1951, helped to motivate the search for alternative approaches such as the “steady-state” theory.2 In recent years, by contrast, the perception has been growing that the Big Bang theory has ceased to be offensive to atheist sensibilities. It is claimed that the Big Bang can now be accommodated safely within a self-sufficient system of natural causes, possibly by embedding the universe within an infinitely larger and eternal “multiverse.” Indeed, just a few months ago, the media reported with enthusiasm the assertions made by Stephen Hawking in his latest book, that contemporary physics has solved the mysteries of the Big Bang making recourse to God obsolete.3
1 Kragh, Helge, Cosmology and Controversy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996) 262Google Scholar.
2 Ibid., 256–59.
3 Hawking, Stephen and Mlodinow, Leonard, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam, 2010Google Scholar) esp. 171–81.
4 Ibid., 116-119, 180-181.
5 Woit, Peter, Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics (new ed.; London: Vintage, 2007Google Scholar); Smolin, Lee, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science and What Comes Next (London: Penguin, 2008Google Scholar).
6 The apparent paradox is to ask why the twin left behind is not ageing more slowly from the travelling twin's point of view. The resolution of the paradox is that the symmetry is broken, since only one twin accelerates and decelerates. Note that while this scenario is science fiction at present, similar effects have been confirmed experimentally. For example, when unstable particles are fed into the accelerators at CERN, they decay more slowly than their sluggish cousins as measured by the laboratory clocks.
7 To illustrate the kind of problem that arises, general relativity and quantum mechanics imply at least one contradiction that cannot be ignored under such extreme conditions. According to relativity there is no absolute minimum time or spatial extension, since it is always possible to find a reference frame in which such limits are transgressed. According to quantum mechanics, by contrast, there is an absolute minimum time and spatial extension.
8 Even in mathematics, it is possible to find counterexamples to dichotomies that seem intuitively obvious. For example, it might seem incontrovertible that every real number other than zero is either positive or negative. One can, however, write down a rule for constructing a number X as follows. If the first decimal place for the first sequence of 1000 straight zeros of the decimal expansion of π is an odd number, X = -1; if this decimal place is an even number, X = +1 and if 1000 straight zeros never appear, X = 0. Is X positive or negative or zero? Depending on one's philosophical stance, the question is either undecidable or meaningless. We simply do not know and have no way of determining an answer, unless we happen to come across 1000 straight zeros and can trust the computer generating the expansion to have made no mistakes. Even the most plausible dichotomies can contain hidden assumptions.
9 See, for example, Coveney, Peter and Highfield, Roger, The Arrow of Time: The Quest to Solve Science's Greatest Mystery: (new ed.; London: Allen, 1990Google Scholar).
10 Smolin, , The Trouble with Physics, 257Google Scholar. Smolin illustrates his point by a picture of a graph showing a process unfolding in time as a line on a graph with the x-axis as space and the y-axis as time. He speculates that this conceptual framework may be the “scene of the crime” in terms of what may be blocking our ability to make progress in overcoming certain problems in physics.
11 See, for example, Stump, Eleonore, Aquinas (New York: Routledge, 2003Google Scholar) ch. 3.
12 Cf. Isaiah 53:2.
13 I thank the physicists, philosophers, and theologians of the Oxford Forum on Science and Religion who kindly discussed a draft of this review at their meeting at St John's College on 3 December 2010. I also acknowledge that this publication was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation or of the Oxford Forum.