Cosmology and Creation: From Hawking to Aquinas in Memory of Józef Życiński

Peter Atkins, a physical chemist at Oxford, has never been afraid of commenting on what he calls “the great questions of existence.” In “Beginning,” the first chapter of his new book, On Being (2011), he confronts what he calls the biggest question of all and notes that it is his “intention to show that everything, including Nothing, is within science’s reach, and that science provides the prospect of understanding even the most stupendous of phenomena . . . [that] there is hope for a scientific elucidation of creation from nothing.”¹ What he has in mind is that somehow a kind of primal, absolute nothing (which he capitalizes as Nothing) unfolds into the polar opposites that comprise what we understand to be energy (positive and negative) and other fundamental features of the world. More than fifteen years earlier, in an essay titled “The Limitless Power of Science,” Atkins observed that science must be able to account for the “emergence of everything from absolutely nothing. Not almost nothing, not a subatomic dust-like speck, but absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Not even empty space.”²

Atkins claims that the domain of scientific discourse is truly limitless; there is no corner of the universe, no dimension of reality, no feature of human existence, which is not properly the subject of the modern natural sciences. He frames his analysis of the triumph of science in terms of a contest between a religious, sentimental, poetic view of the world and a hard-headed, rational, empirical, scientific view of the world. He ridicules those contemporary scientists who regard both religion and science as legitimate but distinct domains of enquiry and argues that any attempt “to reconcile science and religion” ought to be rejected. Those who refuse to accept the reductionist view of science, according to which, at least in principle, all of reality can be exhaustively accounted for by the natural sciences, are “guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion.” Neither philosophy nor poetry have much, if anything, to contribute to our understanding of the world or ourselves. But it is religion that is the special object of Atkins’s ire:

Theologians, incidentally, have contributed nothing [to the understanding of the Universe]. They have invented a world and language of their own, like some mathematicians, but unlike many mathematicians have sought to impose its percepts and precepts on this world. In so doing they have contaminated truth, and wasted the time of those who wish to understand this world. Scientists have had and are continuing to have to scrape away the detritus of religious obfuscation before they can begin their own elucidation.

Scientists, with their implicit trust in reductionism, are privileged to be at the summit of knowledge, and to see further into the truth than any of their contemporaries. . . . Scientists liberate truth from prejudice, and through their work lend wings to society’s aspirations. While poetry titillates and theology obfuscates, science liberates. The grave responsibility of scientists is to use their voices to blow back the fog that shrouds the minds of those who have not yet seen.³

Although we may be less than thrilled by what Richard Dawkins calls “the chiseled beauty of Peter Atkins’ prose,”⁴ we can recognize in Atkins some of the confusion about the traditional philosophical and theological conceptions of creation that inform so much of contemporary discussion concerning the implications of cosmology for an understanding of the ultimate origin of the universe. We can see such confusion in comments about CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Physicists have great hopes that this huge particle accelerator, built three hundred feet underground on the Swiss-French border, will provide new and fascinating insights into what the universe was like shortly after the Big Bang. Enthusiasm for what the information these experiments might provide led physicist Michio Kaku of City College of New York to remark: “This is a huge step toward unraveling Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1—what happened in the beginning. This is a Genesis machine. It’ll help to recreate the most...