OUTLOOK
ISSN 0969-1049 INCORPORATING THE SWEDENBORG MOVEMENT NEWSLETTER
- Levitas
- WB Yeats and Swedenborg
- Books that might have been
- A town built on a hill
- Keeping the score
- The Big Bang
- Jesus, man or God ? the Easter Question
- Promise of Spring
- Science and truth
- The Millennium
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Last summer a group of leading scientists showed up in Berkeley for the most explicit face-to-face discussion with theologians in decades. 250 years ago, Swedenborg felt that we already knew enough about natural law to find abiding confirmations of the essential principles of a spiritual faith.
However, the fact is that we have lived with an enormous tension between science and faith - and it would be a rare person whose faith has been truly unaffected.
The Berkeley conference showed that an impressive number of eminent physicists and astronomers are in fact developing personal theologies of meaning and faith. And the number one sacred text, if you will, is the documentation virtually proving the 'Big Bang' genesis of our physical universe.
The Big Bang has changed many scientists' feelings towards a purposeful God. The scientific assumption regarding the origin of life has been something like this: Life, including human intelligence, evolved from lower forms, and ultimately from inorganic chemicals. It seemed likely that the evolution of something like human intelligence was basically inevitable - given all time, because the whole soup possessed enough fertility that given billions and billions of years, hitting the combination that led to us was odds-on.
Believing all that leaves plenty of room to conclude that randomness is the modus operandi, and that is enough of a reason to call into doubt that there is anyone with some big Game Plan. It is just random dirt flying around making some stuff happen in the infinite possibilities of all time. The big bang, it turns out, points its barrel straight at such an assumption and blasts it right into some other universe.
As more facts emerged, this assumption about likely odds for human life has become virtually untenable. First it was pretty much settled that this universe, perhaps only one of many, must have begun from a very 'big bang' that dispersed matter outward. The most crucial piece of evidence is that the background microwave temperature is universally the same everywhere - which means two things. First it seems to prove that the entire universe is of the exact same age: it also means that once the universe was superheated everywhere, and has been cooling down ever since. Combine that with Hubble's proof that the universe is not static, but expanding, and you get what scientists now generally believe - some version of the Hot Big Bang. Genesis is starting to sound pretty cagey.
But it is the next level of discovery that has made all the difference. What happened in the first milliseconds of this universe's life seems to have set the stage for a rather inevitable outcome - human life. A long jump? Not according to some pretty hard-headed and hitherto irreligious scientists.
Now, far from being pretty likely, the consensus is that the eventual random possibility of an environment compatible with life is highly unlikely - odds as bad as many billions to one. As Stephen Hawking, a much reluctant agnostic, has said: "The evidence points overwhelmingly to a purposeful intent in the facts of creation." Allan Sandage, one of the world's leading astronomers, told the Berkeley conference that contemplating the finely-tuned intricacies of the milliseconds following the big bang turned him into a believer in God - that an intentional and purposeful and aware force wanted life to be.
What Hawking, Sandage, Townes and others are talking about are extremely narrow mathematical values on factors such as Planck's Constant, radiation temperatures, the speed of light, the mass of protons compared with neutrons. If any number of exquisitely precise values out of an enormous range of possibilities were the tiniest bit different atoms simply could not have held together. The conditions of life would have been obliterated. Other sets of numerical values might have yielded a very beautiful universe - but it would be a universe without anyone to wonder at its beauty or to relate to it.
John Polkinghorne, a distinguished Cam-bridge physicist who became an Anglican priest sixteen years ago, says flatly, "When you realise that the laws of nature must be incredibly fine-tuned to produce the universe that we see, that conspires to plant the idea that the universe did not just happen, but that there must be a purpose behind it."
Swedenborg declared 235 years ago, when he himself dropped out of the full-time empirical and theoretical scientific chase, that fundamental knowledge of the force and purpose of the divine in the natural world would be obtainable through natural science, but that it was going to take hundreds or even thousands of years. Much better to receive the truth intuitively, he said: let revelation act on your heart, and your mind will sense its exciting soundness.
He often declared the purpose of the natural creation: to bring about free and rational beings who through their powers of free-will can exponentially increase divine love and wisdom itself. The whole thing 'big bangs' all over again every time a human mind and heart chooses to love God, to marvel in the understanding of divine love, and to grow in constructive relation-ship with that love.
Swedenborg also pronounced his legendary assurance that rational and free conscious life has cropped up in innumerable places throughout the universe. We are not the only earth with life. It is a very successfully universe in achieving its primary goal.
Today empirical science is coming within peering distance of where Swedenborg fast-forwarded as a spiritual mystic. Professor Hawking asks the question, "Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing at all?" And this still-officially-agnostic sleuther in God's mysteries answers with a touch of reluctance: "The initial state of the universe must have been very carefully chosen indeed if the hot big bang model is correct right back to the beginning of time. It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us."
This is a much abbreviated version of an address delivered by Dr. Lawrence in San Francisco last August.
