Phil. Inquirer: Did New Scientist just say cosmologists figure the big answer is …. god?
At the Philadelphia Inquirer the clever Faye Flam went into full deconstruction mode on Monday, quarreling with creationists’ glee over their declaration that big shot scientists just stumbled across the creator. She did so in her column, Planet of the Apes, which revolves around evolution issues and, one has to say, cosmic evolution surely can be squeezed in among them.
The news she parses is that a big meeting in the UK among cosmologists led to discussion of Stephen Hawking, whose 70th birthday was the meeting’s cause even though he was too ill to attend, and specifically Hawking’s allusion to god in context of efforts to divine (heh heh) the mechanisms by which the universe arose. This in turn led New Scientist to run a story by Lisa Grossman earlier this month entitled “Why physicists can’t avoid a creation event,” followed by an editorial “The Genesis Problem.” Your tracker has not read either to its end, as they are mostly hidden by a pay wall I’ve not had energy to breach. Flam says the magazine did deliberately imply that the physicists entertained the Almighty as an explanation for everything. Could be.
But one suspects that whatever was said at the party, they are not literal proclamations that scientific method has led physicists to Jehovah or other lord above. Scripture, not just biblical but all kinds, includes a large share of the most vivid and unforgettable writing ever composed. So it is no wonder writers and thinkers of all sorts borrow from its parables and cosmologies to give their words extra oomph. It doesn’t mean they believe it, but they appreciate it. After all, Einstein once said he doesn’t believe that god plays dice with the world. That’s a figure of speech. It’s not a prayer, or a revelation (gad, scriptural imagery all over) that if there is a god it would ever roll dice as tie-breakers.
Anyway….apparently creationists took New Scientist’s reporting as Good News. And Flam took that as a cue to write some savvy lines. They include explanation, via her sources and herself, that when science runs out of hypotheses or evidence to explain something, it may be a mystery but that doesn’t make it a miracle from heaven.
– Charlie Petit
