'Did God Have a Choice?'

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"New-style natural theology in no way seeks to be a rival to scientific explanation but rather it aims to complement that explanation," he writes. "Science rejoices in rational accessibility of the physical world...but it is unable of itself to offer any reason why [the laws of nature] take the particular form that they do, or why we can discover them through mathematical insight." For Polkinghorne, the most satisfying answer to the question of how the universe came to be special enough to spawn self-conscious life is that God created it and is present in it.

"The elegant order and beauty of the universe, to me, seems to point to an intelligent creator of it," says University of Alberta cosmologist Don Page, an evangelical Christian who studied with physicist Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University and lived with him for a time. "It seems simpler to believe that this ordered universe was created by an intelligent being than to believe that it exists just by itself." Page, whose work in quantum cosmology investigates what happened when the universe was so small that quantum mechanics would have applied, reads the Bible and believes God listens to his prayers.

Cosmologists, like the rest of us, run the gamut from atheist to devout. Some believe the universe is fascinating enough without attributing to it any divine intervention. "I love and admire life and the world around me, from small flowers in the backyard to friends and colleagues to galaxies at the end of the observable universe. It's enough for me," says Princeton University cosmologist Jim Peebles, who was raised in the Anglican Church of Canada but is now agnostic. For those who feel otherwise, says cosmologist John Barrow, a professor of mathematical sciences at the University of Cambridge, "the scope of modern cosmology is so broad that I don't think it really places strong constraints on any particular system of religious beliefs." Allan Sandage, a leader in measuring the rate of the universe's expansion, is a Christian, and South African George Ellis, who won the 2004 Templeton Prize, is a Quaker.

In the world of science, cosmologists may have more room for religious faith than do their peers in other fields. "Evolution, with its great wastefulness, is maybe hard for a biologist to come to terms with from a religious perspective," says Harvard University astronomer and historian of science Owen Gingerich. Cosmology's purview encompasses the unimaginably immense scale of space and time; a cosmological proof, unlike a fossil, cannot be held in your hand. "The thing about cosmologists is that we're open-minded because we're fumbling with the deepest issues," says theoretical physicist Paul Davies.

But even cosmologists like Sandage, Ellis, and Page usually keep their faith from tiptoeing on their science, and vice versa. "I am skeptical of claims that from science, one can prove or disprove various religious statements," Page says, adding, however, that his belief in the theory of evolution does influence the way he interprets Scripture. "And I am skeptical of claims that from religion, one can prove or disprove various scientific statements."

The challenge for religious cosmologists is no different than the one facing scientists everywhere: to develop theoretical models that not only make predictions about nature, but match empirical observations as well. The big bang theory, for example, which implies that the universe had a well-defined beginning point, is a natural extrapolation of observational data. If the present universe has always increased in both size and age, but is neither infinitely large nor infinitely old, it must have had a starting point-a smallest size and an earliest time.

Cosmological investigation of the early universe requires Einstein's theory of general relativity to deal with its large mass and quantum mechanics to deal with its tiny size. The two theories don't fit together very well, but the places where they do intersect have turned out to be fertile ground for esoteric mathematical speculation. Still, the countless mathematical models often compete with each other, and when coupled with the enormous challenges posed by trying to observe the early universe, they have left philosophically inclined cosmologists both intrigued and puzzled by the universe's birth.

In the early 1980s, Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, attempted to combine aspects of general relativity and quantum mechanics in a no-boundary universe-one that is self-contained and did not begin with a singularity (a point where space and time are infinitely compressed), as a big-bang universe might have. Hawking has claimed that the no-boundary universe requires no creator. This theory may have merit, but, says Page, it doesn't get rid of God, who was not only present in the beginning, but also sustains the universe and is everywhere at all times. Whether the universe has a beginning, claims Page, has "no relevance to the question of its creation."

Davies, who works at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology in Sydney, believes that people need to be persuaded to "abandon their fixation with the origin of things." While Davies describes himself as having "faith," he does not practice an organized religion or use the word "God"; where Page would see a creator, sustaining the universe from outside, Davies, like Einstein, sees the eternal laws of physics. "I hate the idea of a God who upsets the natural order of things," he says, choosing instead to see God as "underpinning the natural order" of a universe with a purpose. "[To say] these laws exist reasonlessly-are grounded in absurdity-is not satisfactory to me," he adds. "The universe is about something. It seems to be doing something significant."

What exactly it is doing, and of what exactly it is composed, is hard to know. Cosmologists speculate that the universe accelerates in its expansion because of a mysterious "dark energy." String theorists claim there are far more dimensions hidden beyond the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time that we live in.

Joel Primack, a cosmologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a practicing Jew who participates with his wife in Friday night Shabbat prayers and candlelighting, spends much of his time looking at cold dark matter. Primack says it's unusual for Jews to see conflict with science the way Christians sometimes do because Jews don't have a particular dogma. "There are Jewish fundamentalists," he admits, "but I've never met one." On the one hand, he says, he has his religion, and on the other hand, he has his science, and the two don't seem to overlap. "Cosmology," Primack says, "is producing the true history of the universe."

Still, there is a place for God, a place similar to the one Einstein carved out: Primack's God is reflected in every aspect of the universe, but not beyond it. "I have faith that the universe is organized in a coherent and beautiful way that we scientists are going to understand," he says. "My faith is reinforced by success."

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