God's Universe

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 160 pages
• Published by: Belknap Press September 30, 2006
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0674023706
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0674023703
• Book Dimensions: 7 x 4.7 x 0.5 inches
• Weighs: 4 ounces

From Scientific American
In God’s Universe, Owen Gingerich, a Harvard University astronomer and science historian, tells how in the 1980s he was part of an effort to produce a kind of anti-Cosmos, a television series called Space, Time, and God that was to counter Sagan’s "conspicuously materialist approach to the universe." The program never got off the ground, but its premise survives: that there are two ways to think about science. You can be a theist, believing that behind the veil of randomness lurks an active, loving, manipulative God, or you can be a materialist, for whom everything is matter and energy interacting within space and time. Whichever metaphysical club you belong to, the science comes out the same. In the hands of as fine a writer as Gingerich, the idea almost sounds convincing. "One can believe that some of the evolutionary pathways are so intricate and so complex as to be hopelessly improbable by the rules of random chance," he writes, "but if you do not believe in divine action, then you will simply have to say that random chance was extremely lucky, because the outcome is there to see. Either way, the scientist with theistic metaphysics will approach laboratory problems in much the same way as his atheistic colleague across the hall."

George Johnson is author of Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order and six other books. He resides on the Web at talaya.net

From Booklist
Astronomer Gingerich believes in a designed universe, although not in intelligent design (ID), the antievolution theorizing that some Evangelical Christian activists want taught in public-school science courses. His intent isn't, however, to flay ID as Michael Shermer does in Why Darwin Matters (see review on p.22); it is to explore a few topics in science that suggest design and a designer, God. He weighs the Copernican principle that intelligent life isn't exceptional in the universe against the Darwinian emphasis on the uniqueness of life on Earth. He probes the differences between atheist and religious scientists (this is where he dismisses ID along with "evolution as a materialist philosophy" as ideologies), especially over the big bang and cosmological teleology. Finally, he raises some "Questions without Answers" to point up the different, irreconcilable concerns of physics as opposed to metaphysics, science as opposed to religion. Utterly lacking scientific or religious triumphalism, demonstrating why both ways of knowing are indispensable, Gingerich's highly rereadable remarks may well outlast all the brouhaha of the ID-evolution fracas. Ray Olson
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Reader Reviews
Owen Gingerich is Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and of the History of Science at Harvard's Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In this concise and readable work, he advocates a broad framework for integrating science and religion -- one that does not artificially mandate a secular explanation for every facet of the universe. Dr. Gingerich is addressing cutting-edge astrophysics. But his approach to science is not new. It was the dominant worldview of the founders of his school. Harvard was formed to honor God through the integrated pursuit of science and religion. As reflected in the original Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Harvard's founders believed that "the encouragement of arts and sciences ... tends to the honor of God." (Article I) More recently, in the early 20th Century, Harvard Professor of Philosophy Alfred North Whitehead argued vigorously and persuasively that modern science would never have developed without the confidence in a rational universe, a confidence produced by the fusion of Stoicism and Christianity: "Centuries of belief in a God who combined the personal energy of Jehovah with the rationality of a Greek philosopher first produced that firm expectation of systematic order which rendered possible the birth of modern science." Dr. Gingerich's work continues that Harvard tradition, suggesting areas of inquiry (such as the cause of the Big Bang and the fine-tuning of the universe for life) in which religious explanations should be considered. Religion and science, working together, to fully explore both physics and metaphysics.