Who's Afraid of The Big Bad Bang?

By Dennis Overbye

Scientists, it seems, are becoming the new villains of Western society. Once portrayed as heroes, they now appear in movies betraying Sigourney Weaver to bring home an alien for "the company" or being oblivious to Susan Sarandon's desperate search for a cure for her son. We read about them in the newspapers faking and stealing data, and we see them in front of congressional committees defending billion-dollar research budgets. We hear them in sound bites trampling our sensibilities by comparing the Big Bang or some subatomic particle to God.

Last summer a journalist named Bryan Appleyard rode this discontent to the top of England's best-seller lists with a neoconservative polemic called Understanding the Present, subtitled Science and the Soul of Modern Man. In Britain, the book inspired headlines such as FOR GOD'S SAKE FIRE THE BIG BANG BRIGADE. Its publication in the U.S. has begun to strike sparks. Science, maintains Appleyard, devalues questions it can't answer, such as the meaning of life or the existence of God. Its relentless advance has driven the magic out of the world, leaving us with nothing to believe in. With no standards, liberal democracies descend into moral anarchy and cultural relativism. Once Galileo looked through that telescope, it seems, the Los Angeles riots were only a matter of time. Science, he concludes ominously, must be "humbled."

Appleyard would lay the woes of the 20th century at Stephen Hawking's wheelchair. Commenting on Hawking's oft-expressed hope that physicists may soon construct a theory that would unite all the forces of nature into one mathematical equation suitable for a T shirt, a so-called theory of everything, he declaims alarmingly that it could be used to predict that "a particular snowflake would fall on a particular blade of grass or that you would be reading this now." Never mind that such deterministic ambitions died long ago with the discovery of quantum uncertainty. Faced with that prospect, who would not reach for the candles and tarot cards?

Scientists are partly to blame for this mess. They have silently acquiesced in the proposition that if we just keep writing checks and leaving them alone, science could solve the problems of the world. They have promoted the presentation of themselves as antiseptic drones, whose work is uncorrupted by influences like sex, greed or ambition, which muddy life for the rest of us. But science is done by real people who do not check their humanity at the lab door. Lamentably but humanly, they do shoot their mouths off too much about God and the egregiously misnamed theory of everything. The Young Turks of every generation for the past hundred years have proclaimed the imminent end of physics, but every advance has only opened new vistas of mysteries. There is no reason to think we even know the right questions yet, let alone ultimate answers. The currency of science is not truth, but doubt.

And, paradoxically, faith. Science is nothing if not a spiritual undertaking. The idea that nature forms some sort of coherent whole, a universe, ruled by laws accessible to us, is a faith. The creation and end of the universe are theological notions, not astronomical ones.

We can only wonder whether some law of laws will stand revealed some day at the end of the grudging trial-and-error process of science. The theory of everything, even if it existed, however, could not pretend to tell us what we most want to know. It could not tell us why the universe exists -- why there is something rather than nothing at all. And it could not tell us if our lives have meaning, if God loves us.

Written on a piece of paper or on a T shirt, the theory of everything would just lie there waiting for something else to breathe fire into it. The question of whether the universe is steady state or Big Bang, or whether it has 10 dimensions or four, is just decorative trim around the grand mystery of why anything or any law exists. But by reminding us of our deep cosmic ignorance, science, far from dulling the mystery of existence, sharpens it the way garlic wafting on the evening breeze whets your appetite. It reminds us that we dwell in a mystery that is ultimately more to be savored than solved.

On God's love science is also silent, and that silence is the wind of liberation. Physicists can neither prove nor disprove that Jesus turned water into wine, only that such a transformation is improbable under the present admittedly provisional physical laws. Quantum theory and tensor equations are part of nature as much as trees and rains and sex. We are, all of us, including Appleyard, free to make what we want of it. We are free to wake up every morning grateful for the feeling of sunshine on our face or grumpy for the prospect of tomorrow's rain. The fact that science cannot find any purpose to the universe does not mean there is not one. We are free to construct parables for our moral edification out of the law of the jungle, or out of the evolution and interdependence of species. But the parables we choose will only reflect the values we have already decided to enshrine.

If this be alienation, make the most of it. We could have used a little more in, say, Nazi Germany. If history teaches us anything, it is to beware people who know the truth. Appleyard and his neoconservative friends moan about the demise of moral and cultural authority and bash liberal democracy because it fails to choose. But the failure to choose is itself a choice. What it chooses is that people are, or can be, grownups. That too is a value, the notion that we all individually or collectively may be the salvation of one another. Cosmic ignorance does not diminish us, it ennobles us.