Reading from "God and the Big Bang", by Daniel C. Matt, Jewish Light Publishing, Woodstock, Vermont p. 71:

As members of the cosmos, we derive from the big bang. Every quark within each of us was present at the beginning, not figuratively or metaphorically, but actually. The universe is still reverberating from the big bang, as evidenced by cosmic micro-wave background radiation, which has been coursing through space for fifteen billion years. Our highly developed mind may be able to perceive the origin of the universe. Through science, the deductive mind observes and gropes its way back as far as possible and as close as possible to the beginning of time and space. Through contemplation, the meditative mind observes and gropes its way back. The two approaches, while not the same, are complementary paths from our limited, human van-tage point to the beginning.

Why does the scientific approach work? Granted that much remains unknown, how is it that we can piece things together to the extent that we can? As Einstein wondered, "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is compre-hensible." Because the evolution of our brains followed the workings of natural law, they resonate with the organization of the natural world. We, too, emerged from the cosmic order, so our cognitive capabilities reflect that order. As children of the cosmos, we not only explore the nature of our universe, but glimpse its laws.

In Genesis, God gives man and woman dominion over the rest of creation. This is a pernicious notion that has lead to a lack of human appreciation for the balance of nature and a self-destructive arrogance in dealing with the rest of creation. Our modern scientific story of creation presents a very different picture of humanities place in the cosmos. In this version humankind appears on the scene so very late in the time span of the world as to be a veritable flash in the pan, an afterthought in the long span of creation.

This is a serious lesson and a warning to be heeded. The Universe is 13.7 billion years old. Life on Earth has existed for 3.7 billion years. Human beings have been around for about 200,000 years. Earth and its life have done fine without us and probably can do just fine without us again if we insist on making it impossible for the biosphere to sustain us. This should be cautionary and humbling. While I tell you this, I still do wonder if our ability to contemplate the awesomeness of creation is really just a chance accident of the creative process or something more significant. Our understanding of natural history tells us that we are but a passing blink in the vastness of Creation. None the less the more we learn of creation, the more it appears to be pregnant with the possibility of life and, perhaps, even self-aware life.

We do share a oneness. Everything is made up of the same collection of matter, all created simultaneously during the Big Bang. Most everything is stardust fused in the furnace of stars and perhaps deeply connected through the fabric of space-time, a fabric that still holds greatest mysteries. With this can we not say that intelligent life might just be a manifestation of the Universe striving toward self-awareness. This is a mystical idea and one that I would be very hard pressed to defend logically in the context of my understanding of existence. Evolutionary science tells us that there is no direction to evolution other than achieving the fitness for a set of environmental conditions, conditions that change in the blink geologic time. Still, once intelligence appears it does afford great evolutionary advantage particularly when combined with social cohesion. These advantages also carry the seeds of our destruction. I believe that part of the great cosmic experiment is to find out if so called "intelligent life" is intelligent enough to stop sowing its own destruction. If we survive, then we might somehow become like cells in the great brain of universal self-consciousness. Even though I have not the slightest notion how that might come to pass, this mystical conception does appeals to me and I believe that our survival as a species does depend on a significant portion of humanity buying into the modern creation story and demonstrating a species capacity for rational understanding of our world.

As a professional scientist I have spent my life trying to understand and ferret out various facets of nature through this process we call the scientific method which involves detailed observations and recordings of natural phenomena that are then codified and integrated through comparison with a logical construct we call theory. In much of science, theory is often realized in the form of algebraic equations. It is always so in physics. A large part of scientific work involves finding or creating the right equations. To me it still seems rather mysterious that we humans, as products of this creation, can formulate a representation of nature that is so good that solving equations broadens our understanding of nature. Really, do think about this! How is it that nature is understandable and quantifiable and at all predictable by this method? Why should it or how can it be that algebra and calculus, allow a logical description of nature and permit us in many cases to even extend our understanding into predicting the future or ferreting out the past?

Through calculus we can describe the trajectory of a comet predicting its location tomorrow. We can place a satellite in orbit around the earth using Newton's laws of motion as realized in an algebraic form. Through simple algebra derived from quantum theory we look at the light emitted from sunspots and deduce the strength and direction of the magnetic field in the surface of the sun or look at distant stars and deduce the atmospheric composition from analyzing the emission spectra. How wonderful and mysterious it is that this cosmos is quantifiable.

Did human beings invent mathematics or did they discover it? Does the Universe do mathematics? Most scientific investigation is carried out with the belief that a quantifiable description of natural processes can be determined. The quantifiable and predictable nature of physical processes is so embedded in our understanding of science that we assume that poor predictions result from a poor understanding of the science not a fallacy in the scientific method. We call meteorology an imprecise science because it doesn't predict tomorrow's weather exactly. We assume as we understand the weather better we will get better and better at predicting future weather. And to a certain extent that is justified by past performance because with computer models and satellite data meteorologist do a lot better today than they did do twenty years ago.

What had Newton done? He had taken Kepler's rules of planetary motion that were based on Tycho Brahe's measurements and formulated a theory of motion and gravity which he then turned into algebraic equations. He then invented calculus to solve those equations and demonstrated that he could quantitatively reproduce Kepler's Laws of planetary motion and precisely demonstrate the orbits of celestial bodies. He could then precisely predict the future return of Halley's Comet and explain the geometric form of the planetary orbits. This is a revolution in human thinking. The mysteries of nature had become accessible to the human mind through observations of nature and the formulation of quantifiable algebraic expressions.

When the monotheistic god of the Jews replaced the Greco-Roman pantheon, that one God simply replaced all the others as the ever present actuator. Newton, without meaning too, turned this on its head. He showed humanity that God had created the Universe with governing laws and principals so that the system could run completely on its own. God could have started the creation with a set of rules and walked away only to peak in once in awhile to see what had come about as a result of this particular set of rules. This idea gained acceptance pretty quickly because people were very much accustomed to thinking of God as the law and rule-giver. After all Moses came down from Mount Sinai with a set of Laws. That was what God did. He made Laws and rules and Isaac Newton showed us that God's rules could be discovered by use of the scientific method and a well- prescribed application of reason.

In Newton's case that logical process was tightly embedded in an algebraic structure. He created equations that represented the rules and then he needed only solve those equations to discover just what nature was up to. The strict rules of the algebra force a logical progression of thinking that produced the conclusions. One of the great powers of this methodology is that it produces results and predictions that are not obvious in the original formulation of the equations. In the 1860's the Scottish physicist Clerk Maxwell working with the experimental data and mathematical ideas developed by Michael Faraday and Andre-Marie Ampere, used calculus to formulate a set of eight equations to describe electric and magnetic fields. In solving his equations he discovered that they predicted a wave in space that traveled at the speed of light. What he had discovered from the equations was that light was a wave formed by propagating electric and magnetic fields.

The equations also predicted the existence of the here-to-for unknown electromagnetic spectrum, which included radio waves. As a result of these mathematical predictions Heinrich Hertz succeeded in producing radio waves in1878 and demonstrating that they traveled at the speed of light verifying Maxwell's predictions. People were reaching into the mind of God to see how the Universe had been created. Would we have ever discovered radio waves without those equations? I don't think so!!

In the process of organisms developing that were appropriately suited to their environment, predictability and the ability to take advantage of predictability created our form of intelligence. That intelligence is therefore characteristic of the universe and in consonance with it and naturally adapted to create a predictive system suited to that universe. As I have pointed out we humans only stumbled on to this understanding a little over three hundred years ago. That understanding has made it possible to majorly change our relationship to and understanding of nature.

As we understand today, through application of the scientific method, our kind has existed on this earth for about 200,000 years. Yet in only 300 years, 1/500th of human existence, we have utterly changed how a significant proportion of humanity lives. We have tripled life expectancy, greatly reduced the impact of disease, and have eliminated for many humans hunger and famine, a scourge of existence which dominated human experience over much of the preceding 1,500 centuries. And that has happened in only 3 centuries. If we can manage to survive as a worldwide civilization over the next century through a concerted application of the scientific method we might actually make it through another million years. Of course there is still some significant portion of human kind that does not appreciate the power of reason and its child, the scientific method. And if we cannot get them educated to the lessons it brings, our civilization may not make it into the next century.

[Delivered August 23, 2009. David J. Simons is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland in 1974. His doctoral thesis concerned the energization mechanisms of electrons in the Aurora Borealis. He led the atmospheric sciences group at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1980's, working on a diverse set of physics and chemistry problems related to nuclear explosions, radio propagation, radiations transport, lightning physics, near earth space plasma dynamics and complex terrain atmospheric circulation. He has worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 2001.]