Books about God by Scienists

There are three books out now by astrophysicists discussing God and I have just heard about a fourth one in progress. First, Arnold Benz, a distinguished professor of astrophysics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, author of two textbooks and over 200 scientific papers, published The Future of the Universe: Chance, Chaos, God? Second was my own book, The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields and What’s Behind It All. Close on its heals was God’s Universe, by Harvard professor of astronomy and historian of science Owen Gingerich, the world’s foremost expert on Copernicus . (The one in progress is by a well known researcher in the field of solar-stellar astrophysics who is not yet ready to go public.) All of these books take the idea of a God behind the Universe seriously — though not necessarily in a conventional fashion — and all of them accept a 13.7 billion year old Universe born in a Big Bang and Darwinian evolution of life forms on Earth.

And on the other side we have a trio of new strident atheist books: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris and God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist by Victor Stenger.

Things are heating up in part because there are some extremely suggestive discoveries emerging in physics and astrophysics over the past two decades that are now essentially undisputed: that certain key physical constants have just the right values to make life possible. In principle these constants could have taken on values wildly different from what they actually are, but instead they are in some cases within a few percent of the “just right” values permitting us to exist in this universe. As Sir Martin Rees, the British Astronomer Royal and one of the world’s foremost cosmologists writes in his widely read Just Six Numbers: “Our emergence and survival depend on very special ‘tuning’ of the cosmos — a cosmos that may be vaster than the universe that we can actually see.”

The dominant mainstream interpretation is that there is one and only one way to explain the fine-tuning of the universe. An infinite number of universes must exist, each with unique properties, each randomly different from the other, with ours only seemingly special because in a universe with different properties we would never have originated. Our existence is only possible in this particular universe, hence the tuning is an illusion. But is an infinite number of undetectable universes any less difficult to slice with Occam’s razor than the existence of an infinite intelligence? It is high time for some open-minded recognition and discussion of dogmatism in both religion and science.

Bernard Haisch