I’m fascinated with astronomy — always have been — and had I been better at math, I might have taken that as a career path instead of the writing/journalism route. The former would have definitely earned me more money.
In recent years, there’s been a lot more news articles out there about the topic; not just about terraforming Mars, but really 22nd century stuff such as parallel universes (and M-theory and string theory) ; dark matter, the heliopause, exoplanets and building cloud cities on Venus.
Just this month, one of the two winners of the Nobel prize for physics is a scientist who put together a theoretical framework for what happened just after the Big Bang.
There’s more journalism out than ever on sophisticated astro topics and the motherlode of all astronomy pieces is Medium, which offers several a day on the specialized feed that I receive. Popular Science, Scientific American and Business Insider are other sources. But in all the discussions about the Big Bang and beyond, there is one thing that is never mentioned.
Yes, we are talking about what came before the Big Bang or what/who made the Big Bang happen 13.8 billion years ago. In other words, journalists are avoiding the debates about God. Most pieces I read are silent on the topic, although this Quanta magazine piece wonders if the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was right when he said the universe has no beginning.
National Geographic, in the video shown above, puts the God question into a “creation myths” category. Generally, religion isn’t treated seriously in science media. I quote from this piece in Medium about what happened just after the Big Bang is typical of silence out there.
Immediately after the Big Bang, when the Universe was nothing more than a hot sea of subatomic particles, photons crashed into and scattered off of everything they encountered. Then, as space expanded and time elapsed, various different regions of higher energy began to have the same pressure as regions of lower energy. Gradually, certain sectors of the Universe were able to collapse into the seedlings of primordial Black Holes. …
(By the way, Business Insider offers a good explanation of black holes and terms like singularity, event horizon and portals for hyperspace travel — if you watch movies like “Interstellar” and can’t keep the terms straight.
The closest I’ve seen to a reporter forcing the God question was in this New Yorker Q&A last January in which staff writer Isaac Chotiner tried to get Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, to admit whether or not there is Someone Out There. Loeb responded by comparing the devout to, well, cave men.
“… the way you said that reminded me of an argument I have heard for creationism, which is that if you find a watch on the beach, you know it must be man-made, and, since our eyes are as complex as a watch, we must also be designed by a creator.
An advanced technological civilization is a good approximation to God. Suppose you took a cell phone and showed it to a caveperson. The caveperson would say it was a nice rock. The caveperson is used to rocks. So now imagine this object—‘Oumuamua—being the iPhone and us being the cave people. We look at it and say it’s a rock. It’s just an unusual rock. The point of this analogy is that, for a caveperson, the technologies we have today would have been magic. They would have been God-given.
In other words, what we think of as God is probably a much more technologically advanced civilization with god-like powers.
Have your religious beliefs, or beliefs about God, changed in any way in the time you have been studying astronomy?
I am not religious. Why do you make that assumption?
I didn’t. I was wondering if your thoughts had changed one way or the other.
First of all, it depends on what you mean by God. But if you take something that is zero and multiple it by any number, it remains zero. I was secular to start with. I am not religious. I am struck by the order we find in the universe, by the regularity, by the existence of laws of nature. That is something I am always in awe of, how the laws of nature we find here on Earth seem to apply all the way out to the edge of the universe. That is quite remarkable. The universe could have been chaotic and very disorganized. But it obeys a set of laws much better than people obey a set of laws here. My work as a scientist is purely based on evidence and rational thinking. That’s all.
Undark magazine recently came out with a piece explaining why physicists aren’t exactly staying up late nights coming up with alternative creation theories.
The reason? Job security.
DURING A 2015 conference on theoretical cosmology at Princeton University, Roger Penrose, a pioneer in the field of mathematical physics, was asked to speak on a panel about the origin of the universe. For decades, the leading theory had been that, during roughly the first trillionth of a trillionth of a nanosecond following the Big Bang, there was a single period of extremely rapid expansion, known as inflation, that formed the universe we observe today.
When it was Penrose’s turn to speak, however, he wanted no part of that dogma. Instead, he reiterated his belief that the theory of inflation was false, and he proposed that the universe could instead be better described by an alternative theory, conformal cyclic cosmology, which posits that our universe continually alternates between periods of expansion and contraction. In Penrose’s formulation, the universe as we know it began not so much with a bang but with a bounce.
But Penrose was going up against greats like Hawking and many minds were already made up as to the mysteries of the early universe. And if the knives are out for physicists who are against inflation, imagine how it would be for someone introducing a God particle into all the math.
So the scientists are going to concentrate on what happened a split second after the beginning of time but not the ultimate beginning of it all at absolute zero. Only the theologians are allowed to discuss what happened then, although some Christian websites dedicated to science have pieced events together as well. But they consider Genesis to be a historical document explaining creation; again, a minority opinion among intellectuals.
If science writers won’t tackle questions about the God ingredient, it may be up to religion writers to do so.
Most of us, unfortunately, don’t have the background in physics to do such a piece and many interviewees aren’t going to dumb it down for us. So the definitive journalistic piece on theistic questions linked to creation remains undone, not because the opportunities aren’t there, but because it’s not really been tried. Plus, many scientists who think that God creating matter ex nihilo makes sense are afraid to speak out. Once again — job security issues.