Does the Universe Need God?

Abstract

To appear in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, ed. James B. Stump and Alan G. Padgett, forthcoming. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."In many religious traditions, one of the standard roles of the deity has been to create the universe. The first line of the Bible, Genesis 1:1, is a plain statement of this role. Much has happened, both in our scientific understanding of the universe and in the development of theology, since that line was first written. It's worth examining what those developments imply for the relationship between God and cosmology.In some ways of thinking about God, there's no relationship at all; a conception of divinity that is sufficiently ineffable and transcendent may be completely separate from the workings of the physical world. For the purposes of this essay, however, we will limit ourselves to versions of God that play some role in explaining the world we see. In addition to the role of creator, God may also be invoked as that which sustains the world and allows it to exist, or more practically as an explanation for some of the specific contingent properties of the universe we observe.Each of these possibilities necessarily leads to an engagement with science. Modern cosmology attempts to come up with the most powerful and economical possible understanding of the universe that is consistent with observational data. It's certainly conceivable that the methods of science could lead us to a self--contained picture of the universe that doesn't involve God in any way. If so, would we be correct to conclude that cosmology has undermined the reasons for believing in God, or at least a certain kind of reason?This is not an open--and--shut question. We are not faced with a matter of judging the merits of a mature and compelling scientific theory, since we don't yet have such a theory. Rather, we are trying to predict the future: will there ever be a time when a conventional scientific model provides a complete understanding of the origin of the universe? Or, alternatively, do we already know enough to conclude that God definitely helps us explain the universe we see, in ways that a non--theistic approach can never hope to match?Most modern cosmologists are convinced that conventional scientific progress will ultimately result in a self--contained understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe, without the need to invoke God or any other supernatural involvement. 1 This conviction necessarily falls short of a proof, but it is backed up by good reasons. While we don't have the final answers, I will attempt to explain the rationale behind the belief that science will ultimately understand the universe without involving God in any way. The Universe We KnowA century ago, we knew essentially none of what are now considered the basic facts of cosmology. This situation changed rapidly, first on the theoretical front in the 1910's, then on the observational front in the 1920's.Cosmology studies the universe on the largest scales, and over large scales ...

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