These texts show that God is human-oriented: human beings are like God, and he values us highly. Scientists estimate that the observable universe, the part of it we can see, is around 93 billion light years across. The whole universe is at least times as large as the observable universe. Our own planet is m kilometres away from the sun. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains anywhere from to billion stars. The observable universe contains around sextillion stars.
Humans occupy the tiniest fraction of it. The landmass of planet Earth is a drop in this ocean of space. Why does it seem to follow mathematical laws, and are those laws inevitable? And, perhaps most important, why does the universe exist? Why is there something instead of nothing? He observed that all worldly objects can change from potential to actuality—an ice cube can melt, a child can grow—but the cause of that change must be something besides that object warm air melts the ice cube, food nourishes the child.
The history of the universe can thus be seen as an endless chain of changes, but Aquinas argued that there must be some transcendent entity that initiated the chain, something that is itself unchanging and that already possesses all of the properties that worldly objects can come to possess.
And unlike all worldly objects, the transcendent entity is necessary—it must exist. Aquinas defined that entity as God. This reasoning came to be known as the cosmological argument, and many philosophers elaborated on it. They developed the math independently. Both Leibniz and Newton considered themselves natural philosophers, and they freely jumped back and forth between science and theology.
He preferred to call himself agnostic, although he sometimes leaned toward the pantheism of Jewish-Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who proclaimed, in the 17th century, that God is identical with nature.
That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. True or False: Scientists are not religious. Culture of science. Does science disprove the existence of God? Ready to take the quiz? Tell me more about the differences between science and religion. Learn More. So they are different ways of understanding the world?
Are scientists religious? Do religious people see a role for science in explaining the world? Can people who are religious accept evolution? Credit H. How do they explain their acceptance of evolution? Why is evolution so important? Can science explain the origins of life on Earth? How are scientists studying the specifics of the origins of life? Know it all? Prove it. Science is unable to explain the purpose of the universe because c.
This is approximately 1. But when the light "set off", the galaxy was only about three billion light years away from our galaxy, the Milky Way. We cannot observe or see across the entirety of the Universe that has grown since the Big Bang because insufficient time has passed for light from the first fractions of a second to reach us.
Some argue that we therefore cannot be sure whether the laws of physics could be broken in other cosmic regions — perhaps they are just local, accidental laws. And that leads us on to something even bigger than the Universe. Many cosmologists believe that the Universe may be part of a more extended cosmos, a multiverse , where many different universes co-exist but don't interact. Inflation is an important theory because it can explain why the Universe has the shape and structure that we see around us.
But if inflation could happen once, why not many times? We know from experiments that quantum fluctuations can give rise to pairs of particles suddenly coming into existence, only to disappear moments later. And if such fluctuations can produce particles, why not entire atoms or universes? It's been suggested that , during the period of chaotic inflation, not everything was happening at the same rate — quantum fluctuations in the expansion could have produced bubbles that blew up to become universes in their own right.
But how does God fit into the multiverse? One headache for cosmologists has been the fact that our Universe seems fine-tuned for life to exist. The fundamental particles created in the Big Bang had the correct properties to enable the formation of hydrogen and deuterium — substances which produced the first stars.
Could quantum physics help explain a God that could be in two places at once? Credit: Nasa. The physical laws governing nuclear reactions in these stars then produced the stuff that life's made of — carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.
How come all the physical laws and parameters in the universe happen to have the values that allowed stars, planets and ultimately life to develop? Some argue it's just a lucky coincidence. Others say we shouldn't be surprised to see biofriendly physical laws — they after all produced us, so what else would we see? Some theists, however, argue it points to the existence of a God creating favourable conditions. But God isn't a valid scientific explanation. The theory of the multiverse, instead, solves the mystery because it allows different universes to have different physical laws.
So, it's not surprising that we should happen to see ourselves in one of the few universes that could support life. Of course, you can't disprove the idea that a God may have created the multiverse. This is all very hypothetical, and one of the biggest criticisms of theories of the multiverse is that because there seem to have been no interactions between our Universe and other universes, then the notion of the multiverse cannot be directly tested.
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