Creation, Religion and WMAP

By Neil Earle

"Cosmic Baby Picture."

That was Time magazine's gently teasing title for its February 24, 2003 report that the satellite Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (or WMAP) has beamed back new information on the age of the universe. That figure now stands at 13.7 billion years (give or take a couple of hundred million years).

WMAP has apparently confirmed that the cosmos underwent a period of turbocharged expansion before it was a second old. What's the significance of all this? Just that it indirectly confirms the Big Bang theory. "The first stars turned on just 200 million years after the Big Bang," Princeton University's David Spergel confirms. Before WMAP's recent relays, astrophysicist John Bahcall was skeptical of the notions of dark matter, dark energy and black holes. Now, WMAP has made him a believer. "This implausible crazy universe has now been confirmed with exquisite detail," he says.

New Food For Thought

WMAP's findings, coming less than a year after the death of Stephen Jay Gould in May, 2002, gives adherents of science and believers in God some new food for thought. Gould was one of the most respected and prolific American writers, exponents, and reformulators of evolutionary theory. He had dismantled so many of Charles Darwin's founding principles that it was becoming possible, thought some, to reopen discussion on the centuries old breach between Science and Religion.

For more than two generations it had become quite fashionable to wall off these two major disciplines by what some call the "two-language theory" – scientists ask how, theologians ask why! Yet a growing number in both categories were increasingly unhappy with this neat division. The distinguished German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg was one of them. He would not let this neat dichotomy stand. Pannenberg, Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Munich, has been adamant that scientists cannot push "God questions" into the corner reserved for students of morality and ethics. "If nature can be appropriately understood without reference to the God of the Bible," writes Panneneberg, "then that God cannot be the creator of the universe, and consequently he cannot be truly God and be trusted as a source of moral teaching either."

Scientific View Incomplete

This is a bold assertion. To the natural scientists and physicists Pannenberg says: "If the God of the Bible is the creator of the universe, then it is not possible to understand fully or even appropriately the processes of nature without any references to that God."

More than a few physicists now line up with Pannenberg's assertion that the scientific view of nature &ndash ;still heavily influenced in the popular mind by Newton and Darwin – is incomplete. Recent studies into quantum theory, quarks, and subatomic particles reveal a very strange world indeed. Nature's very elements are not as predictable and quantifiable after all. Erwin Schrodinger, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, commented: "The scientific picture of the world around me is very deficient."

Three factors seem to be drawing at least some theologians and physicists closer together:

First, WMAP's findings now confirm what both astrophysicists and some religionists have been saying for some time: the universe has a measurable history. We can now put it at 13.7 billion years. What this means is significant to those who believe in God as Creator. It means that the reality of nature is first and foremost a historical reality – in a way a parallel to the historical books of the Bible. Theology matters because, in Ted Peter's words, "theology can be understood as the history of God's activity" – a musing on the works of God's hands (Psalm 143:5). The 5 billion years of earth history can be then viewed not as a tale of pointless deaths and extinctions but as God turning repeatedly to the work of his hands and overseeing his creation. At least that is one way to interpret the data.

We Were Meant To Be Here

Second, the universe is bearing more and more the marks of having been brought into existence as a habitation to support human life. Physicist Murray Gell-Mann wrote: "It is difficult to imagine that a handful of residents of a small planet circling an insignificant star have as their aim a complete understanding of the entire universe." Yet such is the case and Isaiah 40:26 encourages this very project. "Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these? He who brings out the starry host one by one, and calls them each by name. Because of his great power and strength, not one of them is missing."

After WMAP, believers in God can now be more properly humbled by the age of the cosmos as well as its indescribable size!

Third, as Stephen Jay Gould well knew, there were real problems with the traditional evolutionary picture of the "ascent of man" or the "ladder of life." Far better, some are conceding, to accept the emergence of life as tied to an Intelligence standing outside the system with the power to intervene, as implied in Romans 8:21. That is what Kurt Goedel intimated way back in the 1930s – you can't understand a system from inside that system. The only possiblity of a full understanding is from a point of view outside the system. Christians have always claimed that this is what happened in the revelation granted in Genesis 1:1 and even more through the Incarnation: "He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him" (John 1:10).

At the very least it is more and more acceptable to say along with scientific philosopher and theologian Nancey Murphy that "We are the cosmos beginning to understand its Creator."

If the universe has a history – and we now know more certainly that it does – then it also had to have a beginning. Maybe not the 6000-year old earth of some Christian fundamentalists but a far grander origin in time than was thought possible (or provable) less than century ago. Perhaps the next to last word should go to Pannenberg who has maintained this truth all along: "History presents itself as a series of ever-new occurrences which despite many similarities are unseen. And exactly in this, Israel experienced ever anew the power of its God" (Toward A Theology of Nature, page 82).

And the last word? To the Psalmists of old: "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hand" (Psalm 19:1).