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COMMENTARY
June 25, 2005
Creation science
">umankind cannot stand very much reality," wrote T.S. Eliot, a poet who seems finally to have gone out of fashion, after a good long run (and whom I appreciate the more, as I grow older). As he argued in the Four Quartets, we go to extraordinary lengths to conceal from ourselves what is perfectly obvious. This is especially the case in the struggle against religion, where the desire to avoid any encounter with God, or morality, leads us into extraordinary intellectual acrobatics.It is an art, rather than a science -- this business of positing a universe in which the role of a creative God can be replaced by “random processes”. It has come to be called “science”, by the ideologists who promote it, but they misuse the term. “Scientia” means “a knowing”, yet the term is used today more to exclude knowledge; and to preclude the consideration of anything that smacks of purposeful creation or intelligent design. The universe is made “random” only by circular reasoning. By no coincidence, the greatest of modern cosmologists, from Copernicus and Kepler through Newton and Einstein, were all “creationists” -- men who deeply apprehended God, and made their discoveries out of the very instinct to seek purposeful order in things. Look, and you will find it everywhere; do not look, and you will not see. This is true more broadly of the long tradition from ancient Babylonians through Greeks, who were surprised to find the mathematics they had discovered through abstract thought could be applied to predict motions in the actual earth and sky -- often, indeed usually, with scarifying precision. On Thursday, I went to see the Canadian premiere of a film entitled The Privileged Planet, given a small private showing to curious people at the University of Toronto. It was simultaneously receiving its world premiere at the Smithsonian, in Washington. While none of the material in this film (which will eventually be shown on television) could be seriously contested, it is nevertheless controversial. For the film suggestively assembles the inner core of known physical facts about the universe -- which turn out to be identical with the long chain of physical requirements for biological life on this earth. Tweak even one of the physical constants slightly, and the chance of life anywhere is gone. Knock so much as the moon out of its orbit, and the chance of life on earth is gone, too. Moreover, the same causal chain which makes his existence possible, also leaves man ideally placed in space and time to observe how the universe works. The obvious inference, is that far from being a random accident -- as the late Carl Sagan used to preach on PBS -- the production of sentient men has been, from its beginning in an infinitessimal pinprick some billions of years ago, the universe’s whole point. There are a book and a website under the same title, so the interested reader may look into this for himself. That the institutional ideologues of post-modern scientism would rather you didn’t, is an additional incentive for looking. (Quite a few self-appointed defenders of Darwinian evolution angrily protested the Smithsonian’s temerity in even showing the film, unaware that it doesn’t deal with Darwin.) The film is structured around the majestic phenomenon of the solar eclipse, in which almost every coincidence about the earth’s “privileged” position as a scientific “platform” comes into conjunction. The interview subjects and the graphics combine to explain elementary physics with wonderful clarity. Yet unfortunately, by quoting a highly misleading statement by the astronomer Robert Jastrow in a key moment, the film subverts its own message. Dr. Jastrow -- unquestionably an accomplished astronomer -- says that prior to Edwin Hubble’s demonstrations of deep galactic fields at the Mount Wilson observatory in the 1920s, scientists believed the universe was no bigger than the galaxy in which the earth happens to be located. This is simply not true. For centuries before this, and among the diehards for several decades after, scientists assumed the universe is infinite. It was Hubble who ultimately established that it isn’t. This fact is significant because, underlying both the old ideas about physical cosmology, and Darwin’s quaint theory of evolution by natural selection, was the notion that random evolutionary processes had as much time as they needed to occur. This was necessary to avoid the question of “creation”. But now that we know they didn’t, the question of creation swims, despite the best efforts of “scientists”, directly into view. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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