How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [74]
For instance, the people near the omega point could not, even if they wanted to, speak to us or communicate their wishes to us, or work miracles (today). They did not create the universe, and they did not invent the laws of physics—nor could they violate those laws if they wanted to. They may listen to prayers from the present day (perhaps by detecting very faint signals), but they cannot answer them. They are (and this we can infer from Popperian epistemology) opposed to religious faith, and have no wish to be worshiped. And so on. But Tipler ploughs on, and argues that most of the core features of the God of the Judaeo-Christian religions are also properties of the omega point.
Where Tipler and Davies see God in the cosmos, Deutsch and others do not. For example, in Alan Guth’s well-received book, The Inflationary Universe, there is no mention of God or religion whatsoever. In his final chapter, “A Universe ex Nihilo,” Guth concludes:
While the attempts to describe the materialization of the universe from nothing remain highly speculative, they represent an exciting enlargement of the boundaries of science. If someday this program can be completed, it would mean that the existence and history of the universe could be explained by the underlying laws of nature. That is, the laws of physics would imply the existence of the universe. We would have accomplished the spectacular goal of understanding why there is something rather than nothing–because, if this approach is right, perpetual “nothing” is impossible.
For Lee Smolin, in his 1997 The Life of the Cosmos, “the present crisis of modern cosmology is also an opportunity for science to finally transcend the religious and metaphysical faiths of its founders.” Smolin’s multiverse model includes an evolutionary mechanism where, like its biological counterpart, natural selection chooses from a variety of “species” of universes, each containing varying forms of laws of nature. Some of those universes with laws of nature like ours will be “selected” for intelligent life, which at some point in its evolution develops big enough brains to consider such questions of origins. Beyond that, Smolin admits, questions about ultimate existence and purpose “are in the class of really hard questions, such as the problem of consciousness or the problem of why there is in the world anything at all, rather than nothing. I do not see, really, how science, however much it progresses, could lead us to an understanding of these questions.”
Maybe our universe simply popped into existence out of the quantum fluctuation of the vacuum of some larger multiverse. Maybe our universe is just one of those things that happened for no reason at all.
THE NEW CREATIONISM
On the heels of the new cosmology is the new creationism, but with a far more activist agenda in working to see Genesis taught in public schools. In the twentieth century, creationists have employed three strategies to achieve this end: (1) banning the teaching of evolution, (2) demanding equal time for Genesis with Darwin, and (3) the demand of equal time for “creation-science” with “evolution-science.” All three of these strategies were defeated in court cases, starting with the famed 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” and ending with the 1987 Louisiana trial, which went all the way to the United States Supreme Court where it was overturned by a vote of 7 to 2. This ended what I have called the “top-down” strategies of the creationists to legislate their beliefs into culture through public schools.
With these defeats they turned to “bottom-up” strategies