God, Man, and the Universe

Circling Polaris in Winter, Amherst MA, Photo by S.Vardatira
(Taken with a Pentax P3 camera,
90 minute exposure, ASA 100 film)

To anyone who looks up at the stars at night and wonders about it all, it’s been a fascinating few months.  We’ve had a near-pass by an asteroid, a meteorite exploding across an entire region in Russia, the Pan-STARRS comet to keep an eye on, and last night’s green streaking bolide, seen across much of the northeast. And that doesn’t even count the brilliance of Jupiter on a cold winter night; the glittering, dependable march of the constellations, like Orion and Taurus with the Pleiades; the random meteors that grace our skies every night; the promised meteor showers arriving at the appointed time each year; and the moon waxing and waning through it all. And then, as if all those visual riches were not enough, over the past few months astrophysicists have also presented us with some tantalizing glimpses into how all of this has come to be - from confirmation of the existence of the Higgs Boson particle, to this week’s announcement about what the universe looked like some 370,000 years after the Big Bang. According to The New York Times, one cosmologist, Max Tegmark from MIT, described this week’s findings as “’very exciting.’ It could be, he said, that ‘the universe is trying to tell us something.’”

But what exactly is the universe trying to tell us?

More than 30 years ago now, I saw Saturn through a telescope for the first time. If you have not had the opportunity, I highly recommend it. As many photos as you’ve seen of Saturn and however blasé the images may now seem to you, trust me – there is nothing quite like seeing it with your own eyes. It won’t be as big as the pictures, of course, and you won’t be able to see the linear gradations of color on the surface of the planet or even discern the hundreds of clearly demarcated rings, but you will see Saturn and you will see its rings - sharp, clear, and stunningly real in that moment. Indeed, seeing Saturn for the first time can be an utterly transformative experience.  It was for me, as well as for countless amateur and career astronomers I have met over the years. Looking out into the night sky is always a reminder of how vast the universe is, and how small we are by comparison; paradoxically, in that very awareness of our smallness, we can also feel immutably connected to everything that exists. And, very often, gazing up also inspires us to ask the big questions: What is this universe we are looking out into? How did this all come to be? What does it mean?

I was an astronomy/religion double major in college. Aside from the occasional “oh, the study of heavenly bodies” quip (usually delivered up by science nerds, although we didn’t use that term then), most people reacted with confusion – “what in the world do those two fields have in common?”  And to answer, I would simply say, “the big questions.”

My honors thesis – entitled God, Man, and the Universe (and let me apologize right now for my pre-feminist consciousness title) – was an impossibly ambitious attempt to describe the intersection over the last two millennia between Western, science-based views of the universe and Judeo-Christian religious ideology about God and humanity. Simply put, I argued that religion has often been pushed to expand concepts of the divine as a result of scientific discoveries. And I also looked at how religious thought has permeated and driven scientific inquiry (as much as some scientists would hate to admit it). It may seem almost silly nowadays to imagine the Church going to such extremes to squelch Copernicus and Galileo, but their astronomical observations about the motion of the planets completely upended traditional theological doctrine, threatening (at least in the Catholic Church’s mind at the time) the centrality of God and humanity in the cosmos.

Which brings us to this month’s revelations about Higgs Boson (often referred to as the “God particle”) and the Big Bang.  In his 1978 book, God and the Astronomers, astronomer and NASA scientist Robert Jastrow points out the religious implications of the Big Bang and some astronomers’ corresponding discomfort with what was, at the time, still a relatively new cosmological concept. Jastrow describes Steady State theorists as “being unhappy that the world began in this way,” preferring instead a theory of existence that does not require a beginning and, by extension I suppose, something to begin things. Jastrow ends his book with the metaphor of the scientist, for whom “the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to climb the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” When I first read this book back in the day, I loved this ending. Aside from the fact that it perfectly brought together my two fields of study, there was something wonderfully satisfying about the theologians  - perhaps through a mere “leap of faith” – coming to the same conclusion as all those scientists slogging through endless math equations and mind-numbing observations. 

What I notice about Jastrow’s metaphor now, however, is that both the theologians and scientists (all men, it should be pointed out) are sitting on top of the “mountains of ignorance” together.  Maybe it’s because I have three decades more living under my belt, but I have come to understand that “scaling mountains of ignorance” does not necessarily bring you to a “mountain of knowledge.”  But perhaps the most telling thing about this metaphor is that God is not there on the top of the mountain, hanging out with the theologians and scientist. In fact, although Jastrow may be implying that both groups have discovered God in the end, there is no evidence that this is the case. The scientist is simply gazing at the theologians in surprise, and they are all atop the mountain together.

This week’s news about how the Planck satellite’s image has changed our understanding of the universe may not change your day-to-day life in any marked way, but it’s exciting to think about just the same. I find myself looking out at night and seeing things differently than I did the day before, even if the whole scene appears identical. Of course, nothing about the universe is static, and especially not those first few fractions of a second. As the Christian Science Monitor (3/21) explained it, “The Big Bang – the most comprehensive theory of the universe's beginning – says the visible portion of the universe was smaller than an atom when, in a split second, it exploded, cooled and expanded faster than the speed of light.”

Wait. Read that sentence again. The visible portion of the universe was smaller than an atom. That would mean everything we can see around us, including the universe of stars and galaxies, was smaller than an atom. I was imagining how this could even be possible (how could all that potential mass exist in such a state, never mind travel faster than the speed of light?) when I thought about the Higgs Boson particle, that subatomic particle that is thought to imbue elementary particles with mass. Was that what enabled pure energy to transform to matter? And once you wrap your mind around that (if you can), the questions just keep coming.

Mind-blowing doesn’t begin to describe these concepts.

I never ended up working in astronomy or theology, but I still love the big questions. Because in the end, it’s not being on top of the mountain of knowledge (or ignorance) that’s important, but the climb. What Jastrow’s theologians missed was the exquisite beauty of the search – the amazing “ah ha” moment of first gazing at Saturn through a telescope or wondering what it means when a meteor steaks across the sky.