Eighteen months ago someone asked me at a party if early man had lived on dinosaur steak, or if it was the dinosaurs who dined on people. I said with 65 million years between them, neither had devoured the other. Someone else asked if earth had been created with the the Big Bang, and when we humans had started to make music. When someone else said it was impossible to keep track of so much time, I had accepted the challenge of writing a book about all time that non-scientists could understand. That’s how my book, The Big Bang to Now: A Time Line, began.
I am a cognitive psychologist,I knew from the beginning of the project that more than thirteen billion years, which is how old the universe probably is, is simply too vast for most people to understand first off. Millions, billions, trillions, or thousands of years mesh together into a cloud of incomprehensibility. But it doesn’t have to be so impossibly hard to understand. There are ways that perfectly normal people can learn to grasp these huge numbers and make sense of them. This blog is a continuation of the dialogue that began at that party eighteen month ago. Writing the book opened up a fascinating world, and I keep learning. Sometimes from journals, from the internet, from colleagues. Most of all from my readers. I hope you will keep on telling me what you think.
Terry Herman Sissons, Ph.D.
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On my desk I keep Victor Weisskopf’s comment that “When life is very bad, two things make life worth living – Mozart and quantum mechanics.” I first thought quantum mechanics was closely related to making cars and trains run, but it is now, along with music, the doorway I use to step into a universe that is a mystery that gets bigger and deeper everytime I look at it. It’s a place where, along with Mozart’s music, I find unfathomable hope even in the blackest confusion when nothing seems to make any sense at all.
I read some of your earlier posts and you are absolutely right in saying that God (or our belief in God) is not threatened by whatever questions people may ask. In fact we should be able to ask anything. If our ‘idea’ of God is likely to fall apart under robust examination, then we need to get a more reliable theology. Unless a person knows everything he or she cannot really say, ‘There is no God,” for God may exist in those areas of which they have no knowledge – and for human beings, we are far more ignorant than informed.
Yes! I’ve thought for a long time that it is presumptuous of us to insist that God has to fit into the narrow confines of our limited human intelligence. Who are we to decree what God can or can’t do? Even among ourselves, we cannot fully understand even another human being, and it is insulting for one person to tell someone else what they are thinking or feeling or intend.
Almost everyone (who believes in God) should know that the earth was created because of Him. Not because of the Big Bang (well… how should I know what the Big Bang is? The truth is… I DON’T!!).
Kelly, isn’t it possible that the universe was created by God using a Big Bang? It doesn’t seem to me you necessarily have to choose between one or the other.
Thank you for your comment.
Terry Herman Sissons
Terry, you might be right. I would’ve never thought of that.
The need for an all powerful supernatural being for some human minds is as strong as the need for an animal organism to breath oxygen. I believe this is driven by the emotion of fear and fear of personal annihilation, which genetically speaking is counter to the need for survival. The explanation of a supernatural being who is responsible for the creation of the universe and benevolently interacts with humans is a poignant denial that the molecules that go to make up a person, will someday revert to its component atomic parts once again to become available to recombine into some other thing. It is comforting, and I think wholly arrogant, to think we survive somehow after our cellular life is over. What would be the point of living eternally anyway? The stories of religion make incredible claims about death and promises about what existence is after death. But in the hundreds of thousands of years humans have existed, no evidence of an afterlife has been provided. Only hopes of one. When someone provides reasonable justification for belief in a god and an afterlife, then there will be justification to believe.
While it is true nothing can ultimately and absolutely be “proved,” justification for provisional belief that is the kind science offers is not too much to require for an inquiring mind. That requirement testifies equally to the far reaches the human mind can extend right along with the reach for religious explanatory inventions that cannot provide a body of knowledge in contrast to science that can provide much. Science always leaves the door open for new discoveries whereas religions do not. Religion is dogmatic, science is not. What one wants to believe, however, is a different thing, and the scientific explanation and the religious one are the choices. Questioning beliefs is for me the epitome of human psychology. At some point, some conclusions are less refutable than earlier. It is obvious which my voice speaks for.
Thank you for such a thoughtful comment. Like you, I too have wondered why so many people believe in God and have done so for thousands of years. Is it only fear? a desire to avoid the total annihilation of death? certainly it includes these things. But I wonder if there is some times something more for some people – a sense of something in the universe, some mystery, some intuition of the profound which seems to be more than the reducible world of science. Whatever I may or may not understand, however, I am certain I will never believe in the anthropomorphic god of so many – an angry tyrant whose lack of forgiveness carries down endless generations.
Like you, too, I have a great delight in science. As you say, science cannot deliver us absolute certainty. But it has delivered us a world that simply stupendous, amazing, overwhelming in its majesty and beauty.