The Science of God

by Gerald L. Schroeder

Class Notes

Questions to ponder:
1. Did God really create the universe in six days?
2. Is Genesis chapter 1 literally true?
The most significant agreement between Genesis 1 and science is that there was a beginning.
- pre-Einstein, scientists thought the universe was eternal, without beginning or end
- with relativity, scientists had to concede a beginning
Schroeder proposes that the 6 days of Genesis is consistent with current scientific understanding of the age of the universe (15.75 billion = 15,750,000,000 years) and palentalogical epochs.
chapter 3: The Age of Our Universe: Six Days and Fifteen Billion Years
1. The "time" of the six days is from a cosmic perspective, whereas; "time" in the rest of bible is ordinary, earthly time
2. relativistically, the flow of time at a location with high gravity or high velocity is slower than a location with lower gravity or lower velocity (time dilation)
3. Δt _v= ^Δt₀/_{sqrt(1-(V²/c²)}, Δt _v= change in time; Δt ₀= change in rest time; V=velocity; c=speed of light
4. thus, the duration between ticks of a clock or beats of a heart is longer in high G
5. gravity not only affects weight, it affects time
6. For example, an imaginary planet, Hadas, whose gravity was 350,000Gs
  - 2 years on earth would only be 3 minutes on this imaginary planet
  - For someone on Hadas, only 3 minutes passes
  - Someone observing on earth, we see the Hadarite moving in slow motion
7. Relativistic time has actually been measured
  - clocks ticking off 1 year on earth, tick off 67 seconds less on the Sun (with 30Gs)
  - measured use the frequency of light
  - light is the cosmic clock
  - light waves coming from the Sun are stretched 2.12 ppm
  - stretched light waves => slower time
8. Now Schroeder looks at a "day" in the 6 days from a cosmic perspective
9. light as the cosmic clock
  - The clock of Genesis starts with the creation of the universe through the creation of humanity
  - It must identify the relative passage of time not between locations, but between in the cosmological history of the universe.
  - Right after the Big Bang, the universe was gravitationally undifferentiated and the relative passage of time varied very little.
  - Shortly after, gravity wells formed and time varied noticably.
  - For the perspective of Genesis, we want to look from the moment shortly after the Big Bang into the future (our present)
  - The cosmic background radiation (CBR) (Penzas and Wilson, 1965) is a measure of this undifferentiated moment.
  - The CBR frequency is the basis of cosmic (proper) time => the clock of Genesis 1.
10. At the Big Bang, the entire visible universe was packed into a miniscule speck.
11. The universe has been expanding ever since: the edge of the universe has stretched out billions of light years
12. The waves of CBR have also stretched by the same proportion as the universe.
13. E.g., has the size of the universe doubled, the distance between wave crests doubled, and cosmic time passes at half its original rate
14. The universe was a million million (10¹² times smaller at 0.00001 seconds after the Big Bang (when matter formed)
15. This validated in the laboratory where the frequency of that moment can be measured; it is a million million times higher
16. Thus the cosmic clock has slowed by a million million times
  1. looking back in time to the Big Bang, the universe is 15.75 billion years old
  2. looking out from the Big Bang, time is moving a million million times faster
  3. looking forward from the Big Bang, the universe is six days old!
  4. The cosmic clock records the passage of one minute, when we experience a million million minutes
  5. 15.75 billion years = 15,750,000,000 years = 5,750,000,000,000 days = 5.5 x 10¹² days
  6. 1 million million = 10¹²
  7. 5.5 x 10¹² / 10¹² = 5.5 days
17. Genesis and science are both correct
18. Note: light exists in timelessness: no time passes on a light wave

chapter 4: The Six Days of Genesis

As the universe expanded, its size (scale) became ever more similar to our scale
The "duration" of each successive 24 hour Genesis day encompassed a period ever closer to our own.
The million-million factor is thus an average
Each doubling of the universe, slowed the cosmic clock by half
The cosmic duration of each "day" is halved (p. 67):

genesis day duration in years
1 8,000,000,000
2 4,000,000,000
3 2,000,000,000
4 1,000,000,000
5 500,000,000
6 250,000,000
Genesis 1 is like a zoom-lens focusing with ever - increasing detail (uses a logarithmic scale)
Each successive Genesis day represents fewer years as perceived from our earthly vantage point.
From our perspective the length of each Genesis day schrinks.

genesis day	duration in years
1	8,000,000,000
2	4,000,000,000
3	2,000,000,000
4	1,000,000,000
5	500,000,000
6	250,000,000

Synopsis of the Six Days of Genesis (p. 67)

Day	start	end	bible's description	science's description
One	15,750,000,000	7,750,000,000	creation of the universe; light from dark (1:1-5)	Big Bang: let there be light; galaxies begin to form
Two	7,750,000,000	3,750,000,000	heavenly firmanent forms (1:6-8)	Milky Way forms; Sun forms
Three	3,750,000,000	1,750,000,000	oceans and dry land appear; first life, plants appear (1:9-13)	earth cools, liquid appears 3.8 billion years ago; followed almost immediately by the first forms of life: bacteria and algae
Four	1,750,000,000	750,000,000	Sun, Moon, stars become visible in the heavens (1:14-19)	Earth's atmosphere becomes transparent; photosynthesis produces oxygen
Five	750,000,000	250,000,000	first animal life in water; followed by reptiles and winged animals(1:20-23)	first multicellular animals; Cambrian explosion
Six	250,000,000	6000	land animals; mammals; humans(1:24-31)	massive extinction destroys over 90% of life. Land repopulated: hominids and then humans

Discussion questions
1. If Schroeder is correct, how did the biblical writers know to write Genesis 1?
2. Is Genesis 1 a validation of science? Science of Genesis 1?
3. What if the science is wrong (e.g., the age of the universe is 10 billion or 30 billion years?)
4. But Schroeder's point is the bible and science are complementary. What is the significance of these great and powerful endeavors being complementary and not opposing?

Genesis and the Evolution of Life
- chapter 6
- Life could not have started by chance
  1. Stanley Miller's experiment in 1953 producing amino acids by chance
  2. "Since 1979, articles based on the premise that life arose through chance random reations over billions of years are not acepted in reputable journals [p. 85]."
  3. Life requires:
    - inherent chemical property of molecular self-organization, and/or
    - reachtion-enhancing catalysts at every step of their development
  4. "And the Earth brought forth" life [Gen. 1:12]
  5. There is no special creation of life:
  6. The laws of nature, part of God's creation, orchestrate the flow of the universe towards life
  7. God has ordered creation, such that life is likely to emerge.
- scientists once thought that life would arise given random mutations and time
- but palentologists discovered that as soon as water appeared on earth, life emerged almost immediately
- panspermia is also given as a possibility by Crick (re. co-discoverer of DNA)
- Life often appears "suddenly" in the fossil record in a staccatto fashion
- The Cambrian explosion (530 Myrs ago) is the most apparent example
  1. all the body plans in the 34 animal phyla "evolved" simultaneously in the Cambrian epoch
  2. this development occurred within 5 Myrs
  3. in a leap life moved from single-celled protozoa to multicellular complexity.
  4. 3 Byrs separate the sudden appearance of single-celled life and multicelled life
- how did this happened?
  1. no one knows for sure, but ...
  2. contemporary single-celled creatures (algae and protozoans) have space in their DNA for latent information that could lead to multi-celled life
  3. primordial life likely to have developed this latent information
  4. then when conditions were riped for multi-celled life, the information was expressed
  5. this environment-induced expression is common: chickens grow hair, instead of feathers, under the right conditions
    - fish, reptiles and mammals belong the phylum Chordata
    - fish is at the base of this phylum
    - babies will sometimes be born with gill-slits.
- but why would algae, protozoa, and amoebae keep this latent information?
  1. no immediate (the only time frame that evolution knows) genetic benefit in it
  2. if it was being expressed, it was in a radically form than expressed in the Cambrian epock
  3. fundamentally, multicelled life was pre-programmed into single-celled life
  4. 6 phyla have vision apparatus
  5. at least 5 phyla use the same basic gene set to express vision
  6. the possibility of evolving this gene set independently is infinitesimal
  7. hence the gene set must have been in a common pre-Cambrian ancestor
- evolution is not a free agent
  1. it is channelled by the laws of nature
  2. randomness without law simply falls into chaos
  3. physics-wise, disorder is more common than order
  4. without the laws of nature there would be only the hot plasma of the big bang
- 65 Myrs ago a killer meteorite 10 kms in diameter struck the Carribbean
- all animals bigger than 5kgms died within a few years
- was this just a meaningless, random event?
- or was God retuning life: the dinosaurs were a dead end and now the mammals have their chance
- Discussion questions
  1. What forces must be inherent in the laws of nature for life to emerge?
  2. How does God guide evolution?
  3. How does God guide evolution, given the gift of co-creation
Genesis and Free Will
- Chapter 10
- Questions:
  1. Do the laws of nature, cause and effect, determine all future events?
  2. Aure we so completely programmed by our genetic code, our DNA, that our future desires are beyond our control?
  3. If God knows the future, does it matter that physics and biology might allow choice?
- The physics of free will
  1. Causality: the "law" of cause and effect is intutive: A given cause always produces the same effect.
  2. Laplace: therefore if we know all causes we can predict the future (determinism)
  3. Causality is everywhere in physics and chemistry:
    - The law of gravity
    - The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics: high energy states devolve to low energy states.
    - Chemical reactions in our bodies
  4. If every effect (or space-time event) must have a deterministic cause, then the future is predetermined.
  5. But ...
  6. Heisenberg, 1927, the Uncertainity or Indeterminacy Principle: The more closely one determined the momentum of an object, the less precisely one could measure the object's position.
  7. The exact value of both can never be measured.
  8. Not a problem with the instruments!
  9. Intrinsic to the Universe
  10. There is a limit to scientific knowledge
  11. Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Max Born (Copenhagen interpretation): "...there is no specific reality in the physical world. All the possibilities for existence that fall within athe uncertainty of the measurement might actually exist, and only when we make an observation at one specific point do the other possibilities vanish."
  12. This gives birth to Quantum Mechanics (QM):
    - objects actually do not have well-defined boundaries
    - They have fuzzy boundaries, extending throughout the universe.
    - Recent experiments confirm this.
    - The unverse is made up of quantum objects, "infinitely extended through all of space by some currently unknown and immeasurable phenomenon that possibly resides in a dimension outside of time and space."
    - Causality is not universely true.
    - Note the wave-particle duality of the electromagnetic spectrum
    - Light is a wave, with crests and troughs and the associated interference patterns(pp150-151
    - Light is a particle, made of individual photons with energy levels
    - how can it be both? no one knows -- but experiments show it is both
    - other objects as exhibit the duality property: electrons and atoms -- possibly everthing
    - Bohr: if we measure an object as a particle, it is a particle;
      if we measure it as a wave, it is a wave
    - "We see the world as we assume it exits.
    - if we fire one atom at a time through one or two slits on a plate, they will form interference patterns just as if a wave was passing through the slits (p. 154)!
    - In some unknown fashion a particle knows whether one or two slits are opened and forms a pattern accordingly.
    - if one (and only one) of two slits is monitored to detect which slit a particle goes through, the interference pattern is not formed!
    - Particles going through eiter slit know the detector is at one slit.
    - The particles are effected by non-causal conditions -- cause and effect does not hold
  13. Uncertainty, an essential ingredient of free will, is intrinsic in physics
- The biology of free will
  1. Genes present tendency; not a dictate of our actions.
  2. For example, identical twins are NOT the same (such as both may not be gay -- though with a higher probability that both will be than for nontwin siblings).
  3. nature vs nurture
  4. Our biology does not override free will.
- Free will and the omniscient God
  1. So if God has give us free will, how can she be omniscient?
  2. Time, like matter and space, are created as cosmology now understands.
  3. Process teaches that God is dipolar; see Cobb, John B. and David Ray Griffin; Process Theology: an Introductory Exposition; The Westminster Press. Philadelphia ©1976.
    - The primodial nature of God exists outside of space-time in an eternal "now".
      - Schroeder: past, present, future exist simultaneously
      - God as the ground of all possibilities
      - God knows all possibilities
      - Not all possibilities can happen at once, hence process (temporality)
      - God as the divine Eros urging us on to creativity.
      - God as the lure to novelty.
    - Whereas, the consequent nature (Whitehead) of God is immanent in space-time.
      - God's concrete actuality
      - For God, past, present, future stream linearly
      - God is temporal, relative, dependent, and constantly changing. "In each moment of God's life there are new, unforeseen happenings in the world which only then have become knowable (p. 47)."
      - God is omniscient in the sense that God knows everything that is knowable (hence future events, having not happened, are not knowable and hence God does not know them).
      - God's emotional state is dependent on the creation.
    - God as creative-responsive love: primodial/consequent natures integrated
    - The metaphor of light
      - "Let there be light": the link between eternity and temporality
      - light (photons) exit in an eternal now
      - a photon exits in the past, present, and future simultaneously
      - photons are massless particles traveling at the speed of light (300M meters/second) where time ceases
      - photons are timeless
      - The EM spectrum is metaphorically the eternal (primodial nature of God) intruding upon the temporal (the consequent nature of God)
      - light is the eternal aspect; matter the temporal aspect of energy: E = mc²
  4. The past influences the future, but does not dictate it
  5. Hence tendencies develop that bias possibilities towards lesser or greater chance of occurring.
- Discussion
  1. How does God influence us without interfering with the "laws" of nature?
  2. What is a miracle?
  3. "I set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse, therefore choose life that both you and your children may live [Deut. 30:19]": Why between life and death and not good and evil?
Why Bad Things Happen in Nature
- Opening discussion
  1. Describe a nature disaster that you have witnessed
  2. What divine action did/do you discern in it?
  3. How do these natural disasters fit into God's Kingdom/Shalom?
- Schroeder's explanation
  1. We don't know if natural disasters are part of God's plan and intent.
  2. But we are called to deal with them faithfully.
  3. Often the causes of a natural disaster also are the causes of great benefits.
  4. The regular movement of the Earth's molten core causes both earthquakes and the magnetosphere needed to protect us from the Sun's radiation
  5. The random mutations in our genome produce both good changes leading to improvements and bad, even dangerous, mutations leading to a deformed child.
  6. Cross and resurrection: suffering is inherent in the creation, but new life can follow
  7. Free will (randomness and its associated uncertainity) acts out in nature just as it does among humans.
  8. Without it there would be no life, only robotic sameness.
  9. This does not happen, because God is unable to stop them, but because God chooses to withdraw and allow free will to happen.
  10. What then is God's point in free will, even in nature?
  11. Nature is infused with nefesh: the spirit of free will
  12. We see this clearly with animals who have free will: the ability to choose and optimize their situation.
  13. In addition humans have neshama: the sense of the transcendent
  14. How does this sense call us into a particular relationship with God in the face of overwhelming odds?
- A process alternative
  1. God is the ground of novelty and possibility
  2. God is the lure towards joy, the improvement of our condition
  3. God is verb: the action of the sacred and holy in nature
  4. God is the attaction of Shalom in our lives
  5. Does God cause or let happen natural disaster to provoke novelty?
  6. How would we express faithfulness in the face of a natural disaster?
- See also The Trinity and Natural Disasters
- Gaia
  1. Note the Toho monster movies: they are critiques of Gaia defending herself
  2. Gaia: the creation is a web of life with a soul and free will
  3. To what extent are natural disasters simply Gaia's growth vs Gaia's "pain" of our abuse?
  4. How might we live in harmony with Gaia?

For more information contact: Rev. John A. Mills, Director, Wisdom's Light wislit@worldnet.att.net