Science and Theology

FROM DENIAL TO BELIEF IN GOD Isaac Newton and his contemporaries. Just as classical Christianity presents God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, physicists envisage their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships. Furthermore, Christians believe the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case. Correspondingly, physicists declare that eternal laws govern the universe, but the laws remain impervious to events in the universe. Outdated Theory I think this entire line of reasoning is now outdated and simplistic. We will never fully explain the world by appealing to something outside it that must be accepted on faith, be it an unexplained God or an unexplained set of mathematical laws. Can we do better? I propose that the laws are like computer software: programs run on the fabulous cosmic computer. They emerge with the universe at the Big Bang and are inherent in it, not stamped on it from without like a maker’s mark. Man-made computers are limited in their performance by finite processing speed and memory. So, too, the cosmic computer is limited in power by its age and the finite speed of light. Seth Lloyd, an engineer at MIT, has calculated how many bits of information the observable universe has processed since the Big Bang. The answer is one, followed by 122 zeros. Crucially, however, the limit was smaller in the past because the universe was younger. Just after the Big Bang, when the basic properties of the universe were being forged,