Ideas & Trends
God Is Also a Cosmologist
By MARGARET WERTHEIM
Published: June 8, 1997
BEHOLD how through my effort God is being celebrated in astronomy.'' So wrote Johannes Kepler, the world's first astrophysicist, in 1595. For Kepler, as for Newton, the cosmos was a reflection of God. Its very structure mirrored the holy trinity.
The idea of the universe as a reflection of God has become unfashionable in scientific circles since the Enlightenment. Yet given a recent survey that found that 40 percent of American scientists believe in a personal God they can pray to, it is clear that being a scientist is not incompatible with religious faith.
Last month, the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, in Berkeley, Calif., hosted an international gathering of cosmologists and astrophysicists to explore just how contemporary cosmology, the scientific study of the universe, might be compatible with various religions. Each of the three monotheistic faiths were represented: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Though not all participants believed in a personal God, it was evident that numerous religious interpretations could be sustained by one cosmology.
Joel Primack, a cosmologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, suggested an analogy between the inflationary model of cosmological origin and the myth of creation in the cabala, a body of Jewish mystic writings dating from the late Middle Ages. God is believed to have sent a shaft of light into the empty space from which he had withdrawn. The light overflowed into the 10 aspects of God that form the core of the cabala, the sephirot, and created the universe. ''Of the 10 sephirot,'' Mr. Primack said, ''the first three correspond fairly closely to concepts from the theories of inflation and eternal inflation.''
A Bubbling Potential
The first of the sephirot is Keter, a symbol of God's infinite potential to create. It can be likened to what cosmologists call ''eternal inflation,'' the infinite bubbling potential from which they believe the universe arose before the Big Bang. The second, Hokhmah, is the bursting through of the universe from the realm of pure potential to actual physical existence, which, Mr. Primack says, is like the initial blinding instant of the Big Bang itself. The third, Binah, is the female womb in which creation expands, which he sees as analogous to the unfolding of space, time and matter out of the Big Bang.
But Andrei Linde, a Stanford University physicist who developed the theory of eternal inflation, does not see any similarity between his theory and monotheistic beliefs. ''According to eternal inflation, there is not just one universe but many different universes,'' he said, ''with different laws of physics operating in each of them. New universes are coming into being all the time, hence the name eternal inflation.'' Mr. Linde warns against any superficial religious interpretation of this theory but suggests that it might be paralleled to the polytheism of Indian religions.
Given that all the scientists study the same universe with the same set of mathematical laws, how do they explain their various religious positions? The English physicist John Barrow from Sussex University said the fuzziness of cosmology might be an explanation. ''Cosmology is a peculiar science because it is so close to many unanswerable questions,'' he said, so it is not always clear what the science is telling us. ''The evidence is open to multiple interpretations.''
Sometimes it verges on theology. ''Theological tradition often informs the development of science,'' Mr. Barrow said.
Mr. Linde said, ''When scientists start their work they are subconsciously influenced by their cultural traditions.''
The central idea of modern cosmology -- that there must be one set of laws describing everything -- comes from the monotheistic tradition, he said.
Modern cosmology has even incorporated ideas about the Judeo-Christian God, said Edward Harrison, an astrophysicist with the University of Massachusetts.
''Astronomers often don't appreciate how the definitions and properties ascribed to God were eventually translated into properties of the universe,'' he said. ''Take, for example, the idea that God is everywhere and occupies no point.'' This became the notion that the universe is the same everywhere and has no center, known as the cosmological principle.
One point on which almost everyone at the gathering agreed was that cosmology does not necessarily bump humanity from its exalted position in the cosmos. Bruno Guiderdoni, a Muslim astrophysicist from the Institute of Astrophysics of Paris, argued that cosmology is ''teaching us that we are at the top of a huge cosmic building.'' The universe of man has to be old (and hence enormous) because it needs time to have synthesized all the elements that make up human bodies -- carbon, nitrogen and so on.
The Integrity of Nature
The Jesuit astronomer William Stoeger of the Vatican Observatory Research Group at the University of Arizona at Tucson said that since scientists now know the atoms of human bodies were forged in the stars, modern cosmology shows how humans are woven into the entire cosmic network. Science, he said, also reinforces the Thomist theological tradition of the ''functional integrity of nature.'' Scientists now know, for instance, that if the law of gravity was even slightly stronger or weaker, planets could not form in stable orbits around stars. Life could not exist -- at least not human life.
But is there really a functional integrity to the universe? While this idea is inherent in Judeo-Christianity, Mr. Linde challenged it as another monotheistic interpretation of the scientific evidence. ''In a polytheistic culture,'' he said, ''they may not think this way at all.''
Photo: Searching the heavens for clues. The philosopher Maimonides is believed to have studied the world's oldest known Old Testament. A page shown at left. (Associated Press)