Psychology and Mad Science

Wow, my psych book is provoking all kinds of thought tonight… Just some quick things it says about evolution and the Big Bang that might interest…

First, the awesome St. Augustine says: 

“The universe was brought into being in a less than fully formed state, but was gifted with the capacity to transform itself from unformed matter into a truly marvelous array of structures and life forms.” 

Augustine understands that, just because nature seems to be developing itself, it doesn't mean the whole organism of the universe wasn't originated by, nor isn't carefully watched and controlled by a Divine power.

And now, a bit about the Big Bang: 

"Meanwhile, many people of science are awestruck at the emerging understanding of the universe and the human creature. It boggles the mind—the entire universe popping out of a point some 14 billion years ago, and instantly inflating to cosmological size. Had the energy of this Big Bang been the tiniest bit less, the universe would have collapsed back on itself. Had it been the tiniest bit more, the result would have been a soup too thin to support life. Astronomer Sir Martin Rees has described Just Six Numbers (1999), any one of which, if changed ever so slightly, would produce a cosmos in which life could not exist. Had gravity been a tad bit stronger or weaker, or had the weight of a carbon proton been a wee bit different, our universe just wouldn’t have worked. What caused this almost-too-good-to-be-true, finely tuned universe? Why is there something rather than nothing? How did it come to be, in the words of Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Owen Gingerich (1999), “so extraordinarily right, that it seemed the universe had been expressly designed to produce intelligent, sentient beings”? Is there a benevolent superintelligence behind it all? Have there instead been an infinite number of universes born and we just happen to be the lucky inhabitants of one that, by chance, was exquisitely fine-tuned to give birth to us? Or does that idea violate Occam’s razor, the principle that we should prefer the simplest of competing explanations? On such matters, a humble, awed, scientific silence is appropriate, suggested philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” 

This makes two important points, I believe. First, that the Big Bang is quite compatible with Divinity, in fact, if anything, confirms it. Second, that science cannot ever completely explain God, or us for that matter. This is because God created science, and is not subject to it. The mysteries of the universe are just that–mysteries. Much of the trouble in the world comes when people think they can understand the mysteries, change the laws, manipulate Truth to accommodate for their own ideas. I hope we stop using science for evil–"mad" science, I guess you could call it–and use it for what it was meant to be–a beautiful design that points us to the infinite wisdom, and the perfect creative mastery of God.

Maybe more on this later…for now, I bid you goodnight, for real now. God bless!