Einstein’s added “cosmological term” has the effect of a repulsive aspect of gravitation.  His original idea was that this could balance ordinary attractive gravitation so that matter could remain at rest.  Without the cosmological term we would expect an expanding universe to be continually slowed by gravity, though the expansion might never stop.

The finding in the 1990s that cosmic expansion is not slowing but in fact speeding up, a discovery that has just earned Perlmutter, Schmidt and Riess the Nobel Prize in Physics, requires reconsideration of Einstein’s “blunder.”  Several theoretical suggestions have been made for the “dark energy” that causes this acceleration but the simplest, Einstein’s cosmological term, explains the data satisfactorily.  Is this serendipity, just dumb luck, or something deeper?  In spite of considerable discussions, there are some aspects of this question that have not gotten adequate attention.

Why did Einstein think that the universe was static?  In the early 20th century that was the common belief.  (While traditional Jews and Christians thought that the universe had been created at a finite time in the past, God was thought to have brought it into being in pretty much its present form.)  It seems, however, that Einstein was not just succumbing to popular prejudice.  Max Jammer, in his helpful book Einstein and Religion, pointed out that Einstein’s commitment to the pantheism of Spinoza may have been significant here.  For Spinoza, “God” and “nature” were simply two ways of speaking about the same thing – Deus sive natura.  And if, as Spinoza believed, God is immutable, so is the natural world.

So it’s possible that Einstein’s belief in a static universe was an expression of his religious faith.  Perhaps his blunder was, at bottom, religious.

That possibility is strengthened by the fact that it’s difficult to maintain that it was a scientific blunder at all.  Observational data in 1917 gave no reason to think that the universe was expanding.  Astronomers at the time were still debating the status of what we know today to be galaxies outside the Milky Way.  And as far as theory is concerned, the cosmological term is in accord with the basic ideas of general relativity and satisfies the criteria Einstein originally used to establish his gravitational equations.  If he hadn’t introduced it when he did, some other theorist would soon have suggested it simply as a logical possibility.

After Hubble’s announcement of the general recession of galaxies many workers in relativity abandoned the cosmological term, in spite of the fact that there was no evidence against it.  There was pretty wide scope for a non-vanishing value of this term because uncertainties in the speed of cosmic expansion and its rate of change were large.  Some physicists seem to have rejected it in deference to Einstein’s authority.  But there were always some – Eddington and his students were notable – who refused to go along.

More importantly, some attempts to go beyond general relativity required a non-vanishing cosmological term.  The affine theory developed by Schrödinger in the 1940s (described in the last chapter of his Space-Time Structure) is the best example.  A change in the rate of cosmic expansion in addition to that produced by ordinary gravitation is thus a natural part of this theory, although we cannot say a priori whether the cosmological constant would be positive or negative.  This contrasts with other models of dark energy that have been developed only to explain the observational results.

What lessons can we draw from this?  Some might say “Don’t be a Spinozan  pantheist,” and it’s true that biblical faith has to reject an equation of God with the universe.  (Spinoza was placed under the ban by the Amsterdam synagogue.)  But in the present case the problem is not just that but the idea that God is immutable, utterly unchanging, a view that much of traditional Christianity has also accepted.

Perhaps more to the point would be a warning to be careful about the way we try to correlate scientific cosmology with our theology.  Some Christians have seized upon big bang cosmology as a proof that there was a beginning of time, the essential truth of Genesis 1, and/or the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.  It is now quite certain – as the intro to a popular sitcom reminds us each week – that about 14 billion years ago the whole universe that we can observe was in a hot, dense state and then expanded to its present condition.  But this does not prove that time had a beginning or that there was a singularity (somewhat misleadingly designated t = 0) that we can’t get beyond.

There are presently viable cosmological models, such as the one developed by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok and described in their 2007 book Endless Universe, which go back before the big bang.  Christians should have learned from their long attachment to Aristotelian physics not to tie their theologies too closely to any cosmological model.  Today they need to think about how to formulate their doctrines of creation to take into account the possibility that the big bang isn’t the last word.

And scientists need to be willing to reconsider old theories if earlier objections to them turn out to be unfounded.  Theories like Schrödinger’s that were dismissed because they required a cosmological term deserve a second look.

Those familiar with current cosmology will note that I have said nothing here about quantum vacuum energy which apparently yields an effective cosmological term that is far too large.  I have some ideas about how to deal with that but this is not the place to present them.

Our goal continues to be to provide a forum for active discussion on seminal topics. The issue of historical Adam and Eve is extremely important to all of us. Scientific data now seem to dispel any alternative theories allowing for a one-couple human ancestry from the biological perspective. How does this impact our faith?

We encourage active and open discussion in this forum by ASA members to reflect the wide spectrum of views within our membership even as we are united in the body of Christ.

Specifically, members are encouraged to use this forum to comment on the following issues:

1. Is your own understanding of the Bible in conflict with the scientific views of the origin of humans? Your church’s? How are you dealing with it?
2. What actions do you feel are needed to make progress in this issue? What role can ASA play in bringing clarity to this issue?

My purpose here is not to argue for or against the historicity of Adam and Eve or to defend either Augustine or Pelagius. Nor – as anyone familiar with my work will know – is it to criticize Darwinian evolution. I do, however, want to try to remove some of the confusion about the idea of original sin that has distorted many discussions of these matters.

This confusion arises from the fact that “original sin” has two meanings. It may mean “the first human sin” which occurred at the beginning of the human race. Traditionally, of course, Genesis 3 has been seen as an account of this event. But “original sin” can also mean “the sinful condition in which every human life originates.” And it is this second sense which is the most important theologically.

Those who do hold to the latter view of original sin will then need to address the question of why our lives originate in that way if they want a coherent theology. Tracing that condition to “original sin” in the first sense provides one answer, though those who accept evolution won’t be able to take over conventional ideas about Adam and Eve without some modification. But they don’t need to answer the “why” question in order to hold the truth of original sin in the second sense.

Jonathan Edwards’ The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended is witness to this prioritization. Its long first chapter is titled “The Evidence of Original Sin from What Appears in Fact of the Sinfulness of Mankind.” This evidence to which he referred is not taken from secular history but from what the Bible says about the state of humanity. It is the fact that scripture speaks of all humans beings (except Jesus) without distinction as sinners that is the basis for the doctrine of original sin.

The ambiguity of the term “original sin” can be avoided by using the technical terms “original sin as originating” for an historically first sin and “original sin as originated” for the universal human condition, but these are clumsy. I have previously suggested as an alternative that we use “original sin” exclusively for the putative first sin in human history and another traditional term, “sin of origin,” for sin in which each of us begins life.

In any case, once we have resolved the ambiguity we can see that there is no fundamental conflict between an evolutionary origin of humanity and the Augustinian teaching that all human beings start out in a sinful state. If we realize that then we will see that there is no basis for the claim that the necessity of Christ’s saving work depends on the historical character of Adam and his sin. That idea has had the unfortunate result of “historical Adam” being raised by some Christians to the level of a fundamental dogma. But in turn, the difficulty of maintaining the traditional picture of Adam in view of scientific data has made this a convenient point of attack for opponents of Christianity.

One can certainly argue for the historicity of Adam on the basis of beliefs about the inerrancy and authority of scripture. It seems hard to square that with genetic data but those who are willing to be honest with the science are welcome to try. My point here though is just that the claim that Christ can’t be the savior of the world if there wasn’t an historical Adam is false. The world needs a savior because everyone is a sinner. It’s that simple.

While Augustine’s view of the human condition has been generally accepted by western Christians until recently, there have always been those who have been more sympathetic to Pelagius. It’s not surprising that many people prefer the view of the British monk to the gloomier one of the African bishop. Debates among Christians about these matters can be carried out on the basis of what scripture says about human capacities. But arguments for Pelagius’ position cannot be based simply on the fact that humanity has come into being through the processes of Darwinian evolution, any more than Augustine’s position can be proved by pointing to the deplorable historical record of human evils.

I begin by confessing that, growing up in the 1950s, I read a huge amount of science fiction.  Not all of it was about space travel but there was a common assumption in that literature that we would explore and colonize bodies in our solar system, and perhaps beyond it.  There was also recognition that this would be dangerous.  People would get killed.  The history of the development of aviation made that seem quite plausible.

There had been deaths in the U.S. and Soviet space programs before January 1986, and while those individual events were unexpected, people weren’t totally surprised that there were such accidents.  But some people reacted to the Challenger explosion with the idea that if space travel couldn’t be safe, it wasn’t worth doing.  This always seemed strange to me.  Certainly  we shouldn’t be casual about the lives of astronauts or careless in our preparations.  Later investigation showed that the accident could and should have been avoided.  But the earlier near-disaster of Apollo 13 showed that the old saying about the plans of rodents and hominids holds in space as well as on earth.

That just introduces the larger issue.  Not only the possibility of unforeseen accidents but the quite foreseeable dangers of cosmic rays and zero gravity on extended missions and the expense of trips to the moon or Mars cause some to question the wisdom of space travel.  In addition, some scientists argue that sending men and women to explore the solar system is unnecessary because our machines can gather the data we want and send it back to us.

Should we be travelling the planets and satellites in our system and perhaps colonizing some of them?  Christians might pose that as a theological question.  Does God intend for us to be spacefaring creatures?  Or are we, as ‘adham, the creature of earth, supposed to stay on the planet of our origin?  Are the arguments that I noted against space travel to be seen as a way in which God imposes quarantine on us?

Blame it if you will on my juvenile expense of time spent on science fiction instead of Latin, but I don’t think so.  There has been danger involved in exploration ever since our remote ancestors picked up camp and started looking for better lands for hunting or farming.  If safety were the highest priority, God wouldn’t have called Abraham to leave his home and go to Canaan.  Extended weightlessness and exposure to cosmic radiation are indeed problems but they are not insurmountable.  Establishing a lunar base or going to Mars will cost a lot of money but we need to look at our priorities.  What if we’d focused on those programs instead of spending a trillion dollars or more on an unnecessary war in Iraq?

Can our spacecrafts and robotic rovers do everything that needs to be done with humans themselves going into space?  I don’t think so.  Certainly we’ve gotten a lot of information with such technologies.  But if we find evidence that in the past there was life on Mars or one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, will we really be content to examine it at a distance?  That seems even more unlikely if we find that life still exists on some other body.  And who said that gathering scientific data was the only purpose for space travel?  Just the possibility, remote as it might be, of some disaster making the earth uninhabitable for us suggests that we ought to spread out a bit.

On the other hand, I certainly can’t claim that God has given us any explicit command to explore space.  But the cosmic scope of the rule of our brother Jesus, emphasized especially in the Letters to the Ephesians and Colossians, would seem to be relevant here.  It suggests that there is no place in the universe where we would be complete strangers.

At first Gleiser was a “unifier” himself, but gave up the search for a Grand Unified Theory. He seems to have undergone a “conversion” to a Buddhist-like, new-age outlook–though I’m sure he would deny any religious component to the shift in his thinking. No, it’s the prevalence of “asymmetry” in the natural world he encountered as a scientist that led him to decry a basic assumption of both particle physics and cosmology: that some kind of ultimate “symmetry” must exist. The subtitle of the book is A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe. The book blends his personal experiences with a convincing summary of the status of modern science, ending with a naturalistic account of living things. The biochemistry rings true to me so I’m inclined to trust him about things I know nothing about, such as the Higgs boson and super-string theory.

I thought that calling attention to Gleiser’s book might start a good discussion. Some of you may be interested in how I came across it. That story goes back to the late 1990s, after Stephen Jay Gould’s scathing review of Phillip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial appeared in Science. I think it was Owen Gingerich who convened a small seminar to get Johnson and Gould in the same room to hash things out. I’ve heard several different accounts of that meeting, which was apparently not very successful. One person present was a distinguished geologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, retired from a career at the U.S. Geological Survey, living near Washington, DC, and now intensely concerned about policy issues having to do with environmental sustainability.

Somebody, possibly Owen, gave the geologist a copy of my then recently published book, Being a Christian in Science. Soon I received a letter saying that he liked what I said about science, adding that he was “in no way a Christian.” I doubted that he would say such a thing unless he wanted to discuss it. Thus began a weekly exchange of thoughtful letters by postal mail about all sorts of topics, including religion, science, philosophy, history, literature, art, politics, sustainability, injustice, war, etc. In all this I’ve tried to be a consistent witness to biblical faith in Jesus Christ. I write to him every Sunday as part of my “reasonable service” (or “spiritual worship,” depending on your translation of Romans 12:1).

After some twelve years of correspondence, he remains skeptical toward the gospel, but I consider him one of my closest friends. We’ve met only once, when I flew to the DC area in 2007 to address the “Korean Christians in Science” group inspired by ASA. It was my geologist friend who suggested the Gleiser book to me, saying he would like to have my take on it. The rest of this post is an excerpt from my letter of 01/23/2011:

Thank you for making me aware of Marcelo Gleiser”s A Tear at the Edge of Creation. I can say I liked the book and I’m glad I read it.

I liked Gleiser’s writing style and especially the interweaving of his personal story with the technical stuff. I got a little tired of his mantra, “We know only what we can measure,” which must have been repeated a dozen times, but other than that I didn’t mind a certain amount of repetition because I read the book in segments over a period of several weeks. I bogged down in the sections on the current state of cosmology and of particle physics, though I’ve had a layman’s familiarity with the development of both fields. I first started trying to follow particle physics as an undergraduate chemistry major, not too long after the neutrino was discovered. I don’t think I’ve really understood anything about particle physics since then, in spite of my reading and a number of conversations with practitioners in that field. (I referred to the overthrow of parity in “Scientist’s Psalm,” a poem I wrote in 1963 not long after Lee and Wu accomplished the overthrow both theoretically and experimentally.) Gleiser didn’t make particle physics much clearer to me, but he gave it a good try.

Philosophically, my quibbles may be somewhat different from yours. We’ve discussed before the question of whether science is the only kind of knowledge. Gleiser’s mantra would have had more appeal to me if he had said, “In science, we know only what we can measure.” In several of his personal anecdotes, especially the one of his time on a jungle island, he seems to have been experiencing a different kind of “knowledge,” sensing a direct personal contact with nature that left a deep impression on him. If challenged on this point, he might say, “But that wasn’t knowledge (it had nothing to do with measurement), it was just feeling.”

The final story of what his grandparents’ home in the Brazilian countryside meant to him in acquiring a personal contact with nature was very poignant, especially his sense of loss when years later he saw it going to ruin. It’s clear that he was personally offended by the fact that “seminary students” were letting it fall apart, which may account for his giving up on Christian faith and eventually on monotheistic monism or “unification” itself. I think the basic glitch in his thinking is essentially the same as that of the ICR: seeing biblical faith as an “alternative explanation.” I see faith as only indirectly related to explanation of the natural world. One kind of asymmetry seems to have escaped him. In the final section he contrasts “naturalists” and “supernaturalists,” without noting that while a completely naturalistic worldview eliminates anything supernatural, the opposite is not a mirror image. A supernaturalist view can incorporate naturalistic explanations but go beyond them. He ends up with a moral imperative about ecological responsibility, but it seems clear to me that he comes to that through his experiential relationship to nature, not through measurement. Measurement may help in making a case for either preserving or despoiling the environment, but doesn’t tell us which case to make. That requires commitment, less akin to objective science than to a more personal kind of “knowledge.”

I appreciated his review of the Drake equation and the improbabilities that other intelligent beings might exist in the universe or that earthlings might make contact with them. I personally don’t see why knowledge of the existence of other intelligent beings in the universe should have the profound influence on our moral sense that he talks about: “We would never be the same.” We already know of plenty of intelligent beings in, say, Haiti; does such knowledge “change our thinking forever”? As I see it, we are already aware that we are “alone” in our self-awareness as a unique living individual, yet “not alone” because we belong to a family and a species (and are related to other species). As human beings (and to me, as creatures to whom God has revealed himself) we are individuals in relationship to other selves (and to the cosmos).

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone link the historic origin and rise of science to biblical ideas as closely as Gleiser does. Usually that connection is made by Christians! But people of faith would not go along with his idea that the only meaning in the world is the meaning we invent. Despite his scholarly and sophisticated approach (which carries weight with me because of his own participation in GUT research and of his reasons for abandoning it) his position does seem to boil down to a kind of idol worship warned against throughout the Bible: worshiping created things instead of the Creator. I’m not sure that worshiping all of creation (i.e., nature) is much of an advance over worshiping a chunk of it. Gleiser capitalizes “Nature” and reveres it for its god-like creative power. But “life” is clearly the center of his theology, even though he doesn’t capitalize the word: “We may not be the measure of all things but we are the only things that can measure. The acceptance of our cosmic loneliness is a wake-up call, ringing to arouse a new consciousness. Humans! Wake up and save life with all that you have! Life is rare. Treasure it, worship it, make it last, spread it across the universe! That is our supreme mission as the minds of the cosmos (p. 249).” Who knows? Maybe in Christ he will someday encounter “the living God” of the Bible. Physicists express truth in equations; biologists in histories; human beings in autobiographies. Welcome to humanity, Marcelo!

–Walt
wvhearncat@att.net