The investigator in my mystery series, Evan Wycliff, is a young Baptist minister who is beset with doubt. When he was in college, he gave up his studies in the seminary because what he learned of Christian history was far too grim. Then he took up astrophysics and found more troubling questions than answers.
Like the rest of us when we bother to fret about the state of the world, Evan wants to know:
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Why is there evil in the world?
Why do bad things happen to good people?
I don’t have any satisfying solutions to those riddles, but I have recently read two books that offer some explanations. The first is Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by physicist Brian Greene. Here’s a more lucid presentation of astrophysics and cosmology than I’ve yet encountered. Unfortunately from the standpoint of traditional religious teaching, Greene seems to side with the “godless universe” theorists, who hold that the dual processes of entropy and evolution, over 14 billion years of chaotic interaction, are sufficient to explain the complexity of our physical world and its dazzling life forms. Greene does stop short of attempting to explain how consciousness arises. He’s as stumped as anyone about whether a computer will ever be able to know it exists. (I’ve written more about Greene’s book here.)
The most intriguing and persuasive scientific world view I’ve found so far is in Harold J. Morowitz‘s 20-year-old text The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex. Like Greene, Morowitz is a hard-headed physicist, but he seems to think there is more to the purpose of evolution than random outcomes, however complex or sophisticated. He’s in sympathy with the Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who theorized that all evolution tends toward the Omega Point, the pinnacle of creation decreed by its Creator. The breadth of Morowitz’s analysis is amazing – he begins with quantum particles and concludes with complex brain structure – hinting that the next step in evolution is into the spiritual realm, although he offers no opinions about what intelligent beings can find there.
If you are tempted to dive into Morowitz – and if you’re curious, I encourage you to take the plunge – feel free to skim the chapters on organic molecular chemistry. That’s the author’s specialty, and there’s way too much information here for anyone without an advanced degree in his field. Nevertheless, I promise that making your way through this ambitious book will be a rewarding experience.
