October 2, 2020
PHYSICIST
Freeman Dyson once said: “Science is not a monolithic body of doctrine. Science
is a culture, constantly growing and changing. … Science has as many competing
styles as painting or poetry. The diversity of science also finds a parallel in
the diversity of religion.” This diversity Dyson talked about includes many
scientists whose scientific ideas reflect their beliefs, not science. Two areas
in particular that encapsulate many scientists’ unscientific beliefs are the
origin of the universe and of life.
Many
scientists believe that everything in the universe was created from ‘nothing’
in a process called ‘inflation’ just after the Big Bang. Physicist and science
fiction writer Lawrence Krauss is one of them. Eminent physicist George Ellis
once said about Krauss’s book, A Universe from Nothing, “What he is presenting
is not tested science. It’s a philosophical speculation, which he apparently
believes is so compelling he does not have to give any specification of
evidence that would confirm it is true.”
Scientists
have a very good idea of what happened just after the Big Bang. But science
does not explain and quite possibly cannot explain what or who initiated the
process that caused the creation of the universe.
Since the
Big Bang theory does not answer a number of questions about the universe, the
theory of inflation, formulated by MIT’s Alan Guth in 1982, has become a sort
of religion for many cosmologists. Inflation refers to a brief period at the
moment of creation during which the universe expanded faster than the speed of
light. Inflation helps scientists answer a lot of questions, but still leaves
many unanswered. Many leading scientists do not want to ‘believe’ in inflation
without much scientific evidence to support it.
Princeton’s
Paul Steinhardt, who made significant contributions to the theory of inflation,
is now a vocal critic of it. Steinhardt has claimed that most cosmologists are
uncritical believers. In an article he co-wrote in 2017, he said, “Cosmologists
appear to accept at face value the proponents’ assertion that we must believe
the inflationary theory because it offers the only simple explanation of the
observed features of the universe.” He added that inflationary cosmology
“cannot be evaluated using the scientific method”.
The reality
is that inflation attempts to solve only one ‘problem’: that the observable
universe appears to be created with exquisite fine-tuning for life to exist.
This is not really a problem of science. Physicist David Albert says that the
fundamental laws of nature “have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where
the elementary stuff came from”.
Along with
inflation, many physicists have propagated the multiverse hypothesis with
religious zeal in recent years. According to this hypothesis, the universe we
live in is just one of an innumerably large number of universes, each with its
own set of laws and characteristics. This helps scientists explain why our
universe is so fine-tuned for life’s existence. In essence, its proponents
argue that if ‘our universe’ is just one universe in a multiverse, there is a
chance that more universes may have conditions suitable for life to exist.
However, they still cannot explain what or who initiated the process that
created the multiverse.
Many
prominent physicists believe that, since it is impossible to prove or disprove
the existence of other universes besides our own, the idea of multiverse is not
really science. Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has argued that “Believing in the
multiverse is logically equivalent to believing in god, therefore its religion,
not science”.
Another
issue that is embarrassing to atheists is how life began on Earth and the
remarkable complexity of living organisms. Scientists know that the probability
of life arising as a result of inanimate matter accidently combining in the
right permutation to form the basic building blocks of life — such as amino
acids, RNAs and DNA — is infinitesimally small and practically zero. Yet they
continue to believe in this lucky accident.
This
attitude is not very different from that of the Nobel Prize winning
physiologist George Wald, who wrote candidly in 1954: “When it comes to the
origin of life, we have only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is
spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural
creative act of God. There is no third possibility. … Spontaneous generation
was scientifically disproved 100 years ago by Louis Pasteur, Spelazani, Reddy
and others. That leads us scientifically to only one possible conclusion — that
life arose as a supernatural creative act of God. … I will not accept that
philosophically because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to
believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous
generation arising to evolution.”
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Iftikhar
U. Hyder is a finance professional based in the US.
Original
Headline: Unscientific science
Source: The Dawn, Pakistan
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-science/unscientific-science-creation-universe-life/d/124296
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