Originally published March 6, 2012
This
is a tale of the birth of an atheist, with cosmology as midwife.
I
was raised in a moderately observant Jewish family. My maternal grandfather, a great
influence on my life, set the religious tone for us. He was trained as a
rabbi in the old country but left after seeing one pogrom too many.
Arriving in America in 1896, he found that rabbis were a dime a dozen, became a
successful businessman, but remained an observant Jew. He was liberal in his
Judaism, never imposing his way of practicing on his children or
grandchildren. I remember once asking him whether I should fast on Yom
Kippur. His reply: "That's between you and God."
God
as a presence just came along with my upbringing. I received about the same
amount of religious training as was usual for boys in the same milieu in the
late 1930s and early 1940s. It culminated in my bar mitzvah in 1943. I
suppose you could say that I was a God-fearing child, fearing the
anthropomorphic and often-malevolent Yahweh of the Old Testament.
As I
aged in a secular society, doubts crept in of course. I was learning
about the universe, just then being understood to have more than only our
Galaxy; we gradually found out that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies,
each with hundreds of billions of stars. As a budding scientist/engineer,
I couldn't help asking myself whether, as theists would have it, a Creator
could be bothered with this speck of dust we call Earth.
By
my twenties I had adopted an Einsteinian view, that God is
Order-in-the-Universe. Einstein couldn't abide by the idea that the
universe contains the probabilistic maelstrom then being propounded by a new
generation of quantum physicists. As he famously said, "God does not play
dice with the universe."
There
matters stood with me as I pursued my career and raised a family. When my
children asked whether I believed in God, whether in fact there is a God, I
would agnostically hedge by saying that I didn't know. I asserted that
acting in a godly manner would lead to a better life for them. So I gave
them religious training, much attenuated from my own, justifying it by telling
them that the cradle of religion would serve them well, especially when they
encountered the inevitable crises in their lives. Even as my agnosticism
grew, I continued my own observance, sometimes on Shabbat, always on Yom
Kippur, both to set an example for them and because such observance within a
community brought some sense of cosmic order and belonging to my own life.
This
pleasant existence was shattered when I hit my own life's worse crisis: my wife
Helen was diagnosed with cancer fifteen years
ago and died of it a year and a half later; she was only sixty-three. The
comforting structure of religion that I assumed would be the bedrock on which I
could stand turned out to be quicksand. Shortly after Helen's death, while
attending Yom Kippur services, I looked at the Ark in which God's presence is
supposed to dwell and found myself engulfed in the rage of one who has been
deceived, or has deceived himself. Far from being comforted, I was
plunged deeper into despair.
When
I emerged from my grieving, I had the time and need to consider more seriously
my history of belief and then agnosticism. I felt I had to face the question
that has puzzled millennia of humans: where did it all come from? A
standard argument against a Creator as prime cause has been the retort,
"Then what was the Creator's cause?" But cosmology seemed to
have no better answer, for one had to ask what was the cause of the Big
Bang. Recent cosmological speculation is beginning to answer that latter
question.
I
recently watched a splendid video lecture, then read an
equally splendid book, by
cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss, both
entitled A Universe from Nothing: Why There
Is Something Rather than Nothing. I'm not sure that I get it all, but here's what I take from
the book and the video, roughly and in very abridged form. (You should watch
the video and/or read the book to get the fuller story.)
There is a convincing case to be made that our universe
is just one in a multiverse, which extends
infinitely in time and space. This multiverse is seemingly mostly empty,
but actually is filled on the quantum level with a theoretically indicated and
experimentally verified quantum froth. In this froth, particle-antiparticle
pairs constantly and spontaneously appear and then quickly annihilate each
other. (Einstein was wrong about non-randomness on the quantum scale;
quantum phenomena are
probabilistic.)
In this frothy multiverse, it is likely—in fact certain
over a long-enough period of time—that there will be places and times where
and when enough particle-antiparticle pairs simultaneously pop into existence
that a new universe is born in a big bang such as that which engendered
ours. These big bangs are unstable, undergoing the exponential
inflation characterizing our own universe in its very early times, with most of
the antiparticles (or in other cases possibly most of the particles) being
annihilated, leaving a universe of only particles (or antiparticles).
Given the infinite extent of space and time in the
multiverse, it therefore contains a huge number (even an infinity) of distinct
universes. They are all beyond the light horizon from each other--i.e., unable
to see each other--because during their inflation their spaces expand, as ours
did, more rapidly than the speed of light. (This is allowed by general
relativity for the fabric of space, although not for matter and energy.)
Krauss differentiates this very strange cosmology from
equally strange sorts of theism by making two assertions: (1) so far every
scientific measurement and observation we have made in our own universe
allows--even points to--this cosmology, (2) no scientific measurements support
the possibility of or need for a prime-mover God that started our universe at
the time of our Big Bang 13.72 billion years ago (much less the Biblical 6000+ years ago).
In effect, Krauss answers the questions of when and from what it all started by the mind-blowing statements "never" and "from nothing." The multiverse has always been around, and every once in a while a universe such as ours pops out of the quantum froth. As Alice might have said, "curiouser and curiouser."
But for me this very curious conclusion, or something
like it, is much more comforting and coherent than requiring that a Creator or
the Big Bang started it all at some initial time. "It has always
been and will always be" appeals more to my sense of order.
Here's a final irony. This past Yom Kippur, that
solemn day of repentance and forgiveness, I was finally able to forgive God for
having taken Helen so early. After all, in his non-existence he could
scarcely have been responsible. So I was able to attend High Holiday services
without animus, after a thirteen-year hiatus rejoining the community to which
my grandfather belonged.