Sunday Superposition #35

Deep philosophy and religion, Cosmic Scoops, The Last Laugh

Sunday Superposition is a premium perk for paid subscribers, an end-of-the-month collection of spiritual themes and links to stuff I find interesting. This week I’m featuring an entry from a book I’m writing inspired by the faith of some of the great Christian scientists.

Deep Philosophy Turns the Mind to Faith

It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion; for while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate, and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity. –Francis Bacon

The Path to Doubt

When I started my hobby of gathering quotes from scientists of faith, I was thrilled to stumble upon what seemed like a modern echo of Bacon’s words, attributed to Werner Heisenberg: “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” This metaphor was perfect, but there was a problem: there is no record of Heisenberg actually saying it. Despite its apocryphal nature, I still share the Heisenberg quote because it translates Bacon’s Elizabethan eloquence into relatable terms.

The lesson from both versions is clear: The worst thing that can happen to a person is to gain a little knowledge. If you were to plot confidence against knowledge on a graph, it would look like something like this:

Confidence soars with those first gulps, peaks, then wanes as one realizes how much more there is to learn. The period of overarching confidence often occurs during the teen years, and it is a risky phase when atheism can take root.

Raised in an atheist household, I took my first gulps of science as an adolescent and quickly became convinced that religion was merely an intellectual and emotional crutch. My confidence hit its peak when I grappled with the concept of relativity—the notion that no state is absolute—and used it to argue away the existence of heaven and hell. When my then-atheist father praised my argument, my confidence soared. At the age of 15, I believed I had single-handedly dismantled religion.

But my reign as religion’s supposed vanquisher was short-lived. When I became a serious student of physics at university, my journey took a turn from certainty to doubt. The more I learned, the more I was humbled into recognizing how little I truly knew. Before me stretched not just the vast expanse of all that was known in science, but the shadowy realm of all that was unknown. Beyond that loomed an even more daunting place—the hidden realm of the unknowable. This revelation did not immediately lead me to God, but it turned the once firm philosophical ground beneath my feet into sand.

The Cosmic Time Machine

Between my sophomore and junior years, I landed a physics research internship at the University of California – San Diego, where I finally began to behold the chain of causes confederate, as Bacon so poetically put it.

My mentors were testing one of the predictions of the big bang model—the grand paradigm of all of physics. This model tells us that the universe burst into existence from an unknown state, rapidly expanding from a point of unimaginable heat and density, akin to a cosmic furnace like the Sun’s core. In just minutes, this fiery expansion forged nearly all the light elements we see today: hydrogen, deuterium, helium, and lithium. The heavy elements vital for life came later, crafted in the hearts of stars or in the violent aftermath of stellar explosions and collisions. As stars live and die, they transform the universe’s chemistry, converting hydrogen into heavier elements and dispersing them back into space. We were testing a prediction of the big bang model about the precise abundance of these light elements in the universe’s infancy, a time before stars had their say. To do this, we needed to peer into the chemistry of the early universe.

Here is where God gives us a divine gift through the laws of nature—the finite speed of light. Light zips through space at an astonishing 300,000 kilometers per second, but it is this very limitation that grants us a window into the past. Because light takes time to travel from its source to our eyes, we see celestial objects not as they are now, but as they were when the light began its journey. When you gaze at the Moon, you are seeing it as it was half a second ago. Spot Mars in the night sky, and you are looking back twelve minutes. In darker skies, you might catch the Orion Nebula, a faint fuzzy patch in the sword of Orion, revealing how it looked when the Western Roman Empire was crumbling and Christianity was beginning its rapid spread across Europe.

For those ambitious enough to peer millions of years into the past, just look towards Andromeda. On winter nights, this galaxy appears as a faint, ghostly glow through our Milky Way’s stars. Each time you see it, you are witnessing light that set off on its journey when Homo habilis was hunting mammoths on a frozen Earth.

This property of light is not just a scientific boon; it is a divine invitation. If light traveled instantly, unraveling the universe’s history would be nearly impossible. But with its finite speed, we have our very own cosmic time machine, allowing us to explore the universe’s story from almost its very beginning.

Our cosmic time machine has just one control: distance. To peer back through time, you must gaze further into the cosmos. My research team’s mission was to glimpse the chemistry of the nascent universe, examining the primordial gas clouds that birthed today’s stars and galaxies. These clouds had to be distant enough that their light had embarked on its journey before Earth even formed. We needed exceptionally bright light sources, positioned even deeper in space, to illuminate these clouds, allowing us to detect their elemental signatures. These sources needed to be not only powerful but also pure in their emission, free from their own chemical fingerprints. Enter quasars—massive, erupting black holes in galaxies far, far away. My role was to sift through the light from thousands of these cosmic beacons, hunting for traces of the simplest elements in the ancient clouds they lit up.

The Revelation of God in the Cosmos

As a student, I was used to navigating through well-trodden knowledge, exploring the time-honored theories of Newton, Bernoulli, and Pascal—now the bedrock of practical science. But as a budding researcher, I found myself at the bleeding edge of discovery. We were looking back billions of years, into the very infancy of the universe, with no certainty of what we would uncover. Would our findings uphold the big bang model or shatter it, opening new mysteries?