Two distinguished professors pitted religion against the human mind Tuesday in the second Trotter Endowed Lecture Series, bringing differing viewpoints to the ongoing debate about God’s place in the world of science, as well as the rest of the universe.
Dr. Alan Guth, a physics professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, an Anglican priest and former professor of mathematical physics and president of Queens College in Cambridge, were this year’s lecturers.
Guth and Polkinghorne presented two sides to a story that is as yet unfinished.
“God is the ordainer and sustainer of natural laws,” Polkinghorne said. “In my view, religion and scientific theory can live in harmony.”
The big-bang theory ties into what Polkinghorne has to say about God’s role in the universe.
“No explanatory system of the universe can have an unexplained starting point. Nothing comes from nothing,” he said.
Guth, however, struck a more humanistic tone.
“Do we really need the concept of God to understand the universe. I don’t really see how God helps this idea. I do believe there is a purpose for our existence, but I believe it is a purpose that we must find for ourselves,” Guth said.
Regardless of their views, both scientists bring a lot to the table when it comes to scientific theory.
Guth is known as the father of the inflationary universe theory — a tie-in to the classic big-bang theory — which proposes that the universe started in an extremely small state, where the laws of physics are not applicable.
“Inflationary theory takes advantage of results from modern particle physics, which predicts that at very high energies there should exist peculiar kinds of substances which actually turn gravity on its head and produce repulsive gravitational forces,” Guth said.
A form of matter possessing high energy would be capable of producing a sort of reverse gravity that drives objects away from each other, a concept known as gravitational repulsion. Assuming that a small portion of this matter was present at the very beginning of the universe, Guth’s theory proposes that only an amount one billion times smaller than a proton is all that was necessary to set in motion the expansion of our universe.
“The universe today is in fact not slowing down due to gravity,” Guth said. “It is in fact accelerating. This acceleration is attributed to repulsive gravity material, which goes by the name of ‘dark energy’ because we don’t know what it is.”
This dark energy is believed to comprise 60 percent of the matter in the universe, according to modern astronomers.
Polkinghorne takes a more metaphysical approach to his theory of the origin of the universe. He suggests that the existence of scientific law does not discount the existence of God, nor does the existence of God discount science.
To explain the phenomenal ability of mankind to explain the mechanics of the universe around us with the use of physics, Polkinghorne said that the physical laws of the universe and human imagination share a common source.
“The reason is our minds and the structure of the universe have a common origin,” he said. “That is God.”
The Trotter Endowed Lecture Series was established in the memory of Dr. Ide P. Trotter, former dean of the Graduate School at Texas A&M, in Fall 2001.
Trotter lecture touts scientific heavy-hitters
March 6, 2003
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