Can One Worship a Hypothesis? 
Victor J. Stenger
Beyond the Big Bang: Quantum Cosmologies and God, by
Willem B. Drees (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1990),
323 pp., paper, $18.95.
Published in Free Inquiry 12, Summer 1992, p. 55.

	In 1951, Pope Pius XII declared that "Science has
provided proof of the beginning of time. . . . Hence,
creation took place in time.  Therefore there is a Creator;
therefore, God exists."  Recent results from the
Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite have
provided further confirmation of the big-bang theory,
which postulates that the current universe is the
expanding remnant of an explosion that happened about
15 billion years ago. The media has taken this as
confirming the biblical view of Creation and, by
inference, the existence of a creator.   They quote
preachers and even some scientists as saying that
something must have caused the big bang to happen to
bring the universe into being; that something is God.
	Willem Drees is a physicist and a theologian, and
smart enough not to draw that unjustified conclusion.  He
understands that the standard Big Bang theory does not
take us back all the way to t=0, that perhaps t=0 cannot
even be defined as a meaningful concept.  He recognizes
that science provides no evidence for the existence of
God, and probably never will.  Nothing in current
cosmology demands that the universe was purposefully
created.  In fact, the most economical hypothesis,
consistent with all astronomical observations and the
established theoretical structure of modern physics and
cosmology is that the origin of the universe was a
quantum fluctuation, absent of any design or plan.
	In Beyond the Big Bang, Drees accepts that God is a
hypothesis motivated more by human desires than
scientific facts.  Nevertheless, he believes that the
hypothesis of God is worth making, and seeks to
establish criteria by which ideas of God can be brought
into consonance with science, in particular modern
physics and cosmology.
	Drees goes beyond the big bang to examine in detail
several recent trends in cosmological thought.  The
chaotic inflation of Andrei Linde, the timeless quantum
cosmology of Stephen Hawking, and the time-asymmetric
cosmology of Roger Penrose are discussed in some detail. 
Also coming under scrutiny are the anthropic principles
that have been put forward to claim evidence for human-
centered design in the universe, and the highly original
prospects for a cosmic future in the face of
thermodynamic death imagined by Freeman Dyson and
Frank Tipler.
	All these ideas are better characterized as
speculations than legitimate scientific theories, but
Drees does not simply dismiss them as examples of the
limitations of science and proceed to exploit them as
openings for theology to fill.  He very wisely makes no
attempt to fill scientific gaps with theological concepts,
recognizing that science has a way of eventually filling
its own gaps.  Besides, Drees does not regard a "God of
the Gaps" as a desirable metaphor to describe his
hypothesized God.  His God is transcendent, beyond space
and time.
	God the designer of a mechanical universe does not
work either, in the author's view.  Cosmological
speculations show a variety of ways to an uncreated
universe.  In Linde's cosmology, bubbles of spacetime
foam pop up as quantum fluctuations, inflating into
unconnected universes with different physical laws.  We
are in one of the infinity of these bubbles, with the laws
of our universe accidently selected from an infinite
variety of possibilities.  Our universe is governed by
those physical laws that happened to freeze out in one
particular bubble.
	Linde's cosmology has no beginning of time. 
Neither does Hawking's where time is replaced by a
boundless fourth dimension of space, having no beginning
nor end, in analogy with a meridian on a spherical earth. 
Unlike Linde,  Hawking suggests that only one set of
physical laws is possible, since his universe requires no
boundary conditions to provide other choices.  As Carl
Sagan has put it, Hawking's cosmology leaves
"nothing for God to do."  
	Penrose's cosmology is far more conservative,
with a rather conventional view of time.  He basically
argues that our fundamental theories are necessarily
incomplete because they do not adequately explain the
asymmetry of time.  But Penrose has no concrete
suggestion for a time-asymmetric theory, and Hawking
has not yet produced any significant results from his
timeless cosmology.   Linde has done a bit better. 
Although his specific idea of multiple universes remains
highly speculative and probably unverifiable, the
inflationary universe models that Linde, Alan Guth, and
other particle physicists developed in the 1980's
solved a number of outstanding problems that had left
more conventional gravitational cosmologists such as
Hawking and Penrose stumped.  Further, the universe-as-
fluctuation model has the virtue of economy:  It is
consistent with all known principles of physics and
requires no new ones - and no miraculous origin.
	Drees presents the anthropic arguments for a
universe designed for humankind, and finds them wanting
on a number of fronts.  These arguments are based on
certain cosmic coincidences, without which human life
could never have developed.  They are so unlikely, it's
argued, that they must be a basic part of the structure of
things, put there by God for the purpose of producing life
and consciousness on earth.  
	But, Drees points out, perhaps science will someday
find the physical laws that explain these coincidences. 
The anthropic God is again a God of the Gaps.  I would add
that even if the coincidences are accidental, we cannot
conclude that life is so unlikely.    Many things happen
that are highly unlikely, but something has to happen.  If
our kind of life is unlikely, some kind of life someplace
is probably highly likely, especially if an infinite number
of universes are popping off all the time, as in Linde's
cosmology.
	Moving from the beginning of the universe billions
of years ago, to many billions upon billions of years in
the future, Drees discusses the optimistic proposals of
Dyson and Tipler that some form of intelligent life will
be able to avoid indefinitely the ultimate heat death of
the universe required by the second law of
thermodynamics.
	Dyson estimates that all the information contained
in the organization of the human species from now to
eternity requires no more energy than is radiated by the
sun in eight hours.  Now I would have thought that
eternity requires infinity, but the point is still valid. 
Life does not require much energy, astronomically
speaking.  Viewing life as information, one can imagine
smaller and smaller pockets of efficient high level
organization surviving far into the future without
violating the second law of thermodynamics, feeding
entropy to the rest of the universe as they decrease their
own.
	Tipler imagines a single pocket of increasingly
higher level organization evolving to the Omega Point of
Teillard de Chardin.  He makes use of his Final Anthropic
Principle,  developed with John Barrow, which declares
that intelligent information processing once brought into
existence will never die out.   Tipler proposes that the
Omega Point will contain all of past life within its
information processing system, and thus every being who
ever lived will become resurrected at that time - as a
computer simulation.  Not only that, everything that can
be known will be known, and so not only will each of us
live our lives over and over an infinite number of times
in an instant, we will live all the other lives we might
have lived, experience every conceivable pain and
pleasure.
	If ever there was a materialistic theory of heaven
and hell, handed on a platter to those who want to believe
in God, this is it.  But Drees does not buy it either.  Some
theologian!   He detects the flaw in Tipler's
cosmology:  It is totally deterministic.  I find that
incompatible with quantum mechanics (though Tipler has
arguments to answer this objection).  Drees simply does
not like the idea of a God that is so far in the future that
he can have no possible current relevance, especially
since we will all be resurrected anyway, saints and
sinners alike.
	Since he accepts that God is only a hypothesis,
Drees is free to reject the Omega Point God.  Similarly he
rejects the Zero Point God, at least in the sense of a God
who creates the universe and its laws, and then leaves it
alone.  Drees wants a God of the present, and argues that
such a God is consonant with all the cosmologies
considered.  Admitting that this is a want and not a
proof, that God is unnecessary to explain the data, Drees
argues that God's presence shines through in our
desire for perfection and justice in a world apparently
devoid of either.
	Drees classifies three types of response to the
apparent absence of perfection in the world.  In the first,
we simply deny the imperfection.  This he relates to the
New Age movement and modern American pop-psychology,
in which all the ills of society are seen as simply a
crisis of perception.  Life is in harmony with the world,
if only we see it that way.  We are capable of anything,
from becoming rich to walking on fire.  If we think we
can do it, then we will.  The Dyson and Tipler proposals
for ultimate harmony, fully within the material world,
are also seen as this type of response, as are the more
modest visions of progress that most people hold - the
idea that things will someday be better.  But
realistically, we have no evidence that these are any
more than wishes and fantasies.  Perhaps things will
never get better.
	The second response to apparent imperfection is
that of physicist Steven Weinberg, as representative of a
widely-held view among scientists (including me):  As
the universe becomes increasingly comprehensible,
it's pointlessness becomes increasingly clearer. 
There is simply no sign of a grand design.  But, as humans
we can make our own design and, by our modest efforts in
art and science, lift human life above the level of farce
and give it some of the "grace of tragedy."
	Drees forthrightly admits that he has no argument
against this position, except that it might paralyze the
person who holds it.  My answer:  It did not paralyze
Weinberg, the late Richard Feynman, and many others who
hold it.  Far from being paralyzing, the absence of belief
has always had a great liberating effect on the intellect.
	Drees personally prefers a third response.  The
world is sufficiently ambiguous that, while perfection
and justice appear absent, they cannot be ruled out.  So
the hypothesis of God, as a present transcendent reality
representing the locus of the possibilities of perfection,
can still consistently be made.
	So Drees finally proposes a model for God that he
claims is consonant with science and the other
cosmologies discussed.  God is immanent,  that is,
present in the processes of nature.  God is temporally
transcendent, both as creator and perfecter.  God is
spatially transcendent,  perhaps embedded in higher
dimensions of space so he can be equidistant from all
points, like the center of a sphere.   God is the locus of
values and possibilities, the source and sink of
perfection and justice.  Finally, God is the source of
actuality.   Even if the universe appeared out of nothing, a
quantum fluctuation in a vacuum, that nothing is
something, and God is the source of that something.
	But God remains a hypothesis.  By making that
hypothesis we affirm our belief in the basic goodness of
the world.  And since we have no convincing evidence that
God exists, individuals play an active role in making that
choice.  We are not forced to believe, by evidence or
duress.
	With this book, Willem Drees has made an
important contribution to a sensible dialog between
science and theology.  Understanding the science better
than most religionists, he has been able to define a basis
for belief, but one (I think he would agree) that is not
wholly rational;  it still requires the usual complement
of faith.  In the end, Drees has affirmed that God is an
additional hypothesis not required by the data.  Despite
our inherent desire for justice and perfection, rational
human beings cannot violate Occam's razor by adding
more hypotheses than are necessary to explain the
evidence presented to our senses.  
	Belief in God requires abandoning rationality.  The
ancient introduction of immaterial spirits were human
attempts to explain the unexplained.  But science has
gradually filled in the explanations with matter alone
and uncovered no sign of spirits or gods.  Drees still
presents us with a God of the Gaps as an explanation for
the remaining mysteries of the universe.  Humanity may
someday explain these mysteries without recourse to the
transcendent, as it has the many mysteries of the past.  
Drees asks, "Can one worship a hypothesis?"  He
can.  I can't.
___________________
Victor J. Stenger is professor of physics at the
University of Hawaii and the author of Not By Design:  The
Origin of the Universe  (Prometheus Books, 1988) and
Physics and Psychics:  The Search for a World Beyond the
Senses  (Prometheus Books, 1990).