Is Physics Theology? or, Physics and Metaphysics: God's Universe, by Owen Gingerich

Owen Gingerich is a retired Harvard professor and Smithsonian Institution astronomer. These days he writes articles about global warming and gives lectures about Copernicus. He also wrote a book called God's Universe. The introduction sets the tone for the whole book by pointing out that naturalistic explanations of how things happen neither contradict nor confirm teleological explanations of why they happen. Yet Gingerich also rejects the non-overlapping magesteria (NOMA) model proposed by Stephen Jay Gould, wherein science sticks to how and lets religion deal with why.

Gingerich opens this series of talks by explaining that for him,

"a final cause, a Creator-God, gives a coherent understanding of why the universe seems to congenially designed for the existence of intelligent, self-reflective life.... Somehow, in the words of Freeman Dyson, this is a universe that knew we were coming. I do not claim that these considerations are proof for the existence of a Creator; I claim only that to me, the universe makes more sense with this understanding." (p. 12) 

And this statement is typical of Gingrich's tone. He is not strident, he is not doctrinaire, and he does not seem to be trying to bend facts to fit his theology, nor bend theology to fit the latest scientific findings, nor yet to wall the two fields off from each other. 

In the first lecture included in this book, he demonstrates at some length how the Copernican principle, also called the principle of mediocrity, is both an essential aspect of a certain perspective on physics and a strong basis for the conception of the universe as having been designed to support life. And yet he demonstrates that it has never been found useful to solve any actual question in astronomy! From there he meanders over to the tantalizing possibility that we are not alone in the universe, as expressed everywhere from Star Trek to SETI. His sense is that although the Copernican principle almost requires that there be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, attempts to communicate with it, as the SETI project does, are, paradoxically, deeply anthropocentric. They assume that ET not only exists but developed along lines so similar to ours that we will be able to find a point of contact.

Yet evolutionary theory presents us with a path to consciousness that is truly a garden of forking paths, a virtually infinite number of possible outcomes. How many dice had to be rolled the right way for life to even exist at all? And how many more for the emergence of the human brain, which Gingerich calls "the most complex physical object known to us in the entire cosmos"? Therefore, intelligent life was not inevitable on this planet, nor on any other, and the forms it could have taken here or could take elsewhere are by no means inevitable.

Gingerich then, supported by Paul Davies, provides this rather unexpected summary of "two diametrically opposed worldviews":

"The one view, that intelligent life emerges at best very rarely through extraordinary and improbably contingencies, encapsulates a strict Darwinian understanding: humankind is a glorious accident. The other view, that the universe is abundantly inhabited by intelligent creatures, carries the hidden assumption of design and purpose, in other words of teleology." (p. 40)

So you would think that Gingerich, who has already said he finds theism to be the most compelling explanation for the why of the universe, would come down in favor of the principle of mediocrity, that is, the idea that our solar system, our intelligence, our very self-awareness is not unusual but is the natural consequence of a universe designed for life by a life-loving God. And yet Gingerich concludes, "We human beings are the most extraordinary creatures we know about, and part of our glory is that we can imagine we are not the most remarkable creatures in the entire universe."

Reading Gingerich does not make me feel like I understand everything, or, for that matter, anything, about physics. It makes me feel like I can fearlessly learn more and more, never fearing that I will come to the end of what can be known, because, to rip a verse right out of its context, "Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!" (Romans 11:33)