“Where wast thou when ” laid the foundations of the earth’?
Declare if thou hast understanding Who determined the measures thereof, if thou knowest?
Or who stretched the line upon it? Whereupon were the foundations fastened?
Or who laid the cornerstones thereof? When the morning stars sang together, And all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Where is the way to the dwelling of light
And as for darkness, where is the place thereof;
That thou shouldest take it to the bound thereof,
And that thou shouldest discern the paths to the house thereof?” – Job.
“We have tried to discuss whether present-day science has anything to say on certain difficult questions, which are, perhaps, set for ever beyond the reach of human understanding. We cannot claim to have discerned more than a very faint glimmer of light at the best; perhaps it was wholly illusory, for certainly we had to strain our eyes very hard to see anything at all. So that our main contention can hardly be that the science of to-day has a pronouncement to make; perhaps it ought rather to be that science should leave off making pronouncements: the river of knowledge has too often turned back on itself.” -Sir James Jeans.
The little book1 which ends with the second of the above quotations presents a brief outline of the more important deductions of modern physicists, and the author’s conclusions therefrom.
What seem to be the “facts” of the universe are so far removed from our experience that we cannot really comprehend the meaning of the terms we use to describe them. The majority of stars are “so large that hundreds of thousands of earths could be packed inside each and the total number of stars in the universe is probably something like the total number of grains of sand on all the sea-shores of the world.”
And at the other end of the scale are the atoms, each made up of a number of still smaller electrons. There are 179,200,000,000 coins in a million tons of halfpence; yet, we are told, this “is nothing in comparison with the number of atoms in even the smallest piece of matter with which the earlier physicists could experiment.”
Considering extremes of another kind, Sir James tells us that the greater part of the substance in the universe is far too hot, and “space” is far too cold to support life as we know it. The zones within which life is possible occupy, roughly, a thousand million millionth part of the whole of space. The word “life” is qualified. “Life of the kind we know on earth.” (But did not a king once cast three men into a furnace, so hot that those who went near were slain. Yet of the three it was said “the fire had no power upon their bodies, nor was the hair of their head singed, neither were their hosen changed, nor had the smell of fire passed on them”).
But, to return to those incomprehensible numbers and extremes. They suggest the question, “Is life just an accident? Did the particular set of conditions to produce it happen to come together simply by chance? Are magnetism and radio-activity the results of other chance combinations of conditions?
The author quotes Huxley as saying “that six monkeys, set to strum unintelligently on typewriters for millions of millions of years, would be bound in time to write all the books in the British Museum.” Somewhere among the conglomeration of letters, there must be a Shakespearean sonnet. It has been suggested that the occurrence of life on the earth is the result of a similar accident, because, given sufficient time, every conceivable accident is bound to happen.
But we are reminded that before we accept such a theory, yet another series of questions must be faced. “Is a living cell merely a group of ordinary atoms arranged in some non-ordinary way, or is it something more? Is it merely atoms, or is it atoms plus life? Or, to put it another way, could a sufficiently skilful chemist create life out of the necessary atoms, as a boy can create a machine out of “Meccano” and then make it go? We do not know the answer. The Bible teaches that only the Divine chemist can supply “the breath of life,” “the spirit,” which, at death “returns to God, who gave it.”
There is no intention, in this brief review, of referring to all the scientific theories dealt with. The book itself must be read for those, and in order to appreciate the author’s reticence in coming to definite conclusions. The greater a man’s knowledge, the more frequent use he makes of the phrase “We do not know.”
New theories do not usually displace old ones. They take our knowledge a step further; even though the step is sometimes as great as that from Newton to Einstein. We know now that light does not always travel in straight lines, but the theodolite is still a practical surveying instrument.
Probably modern knowledge is taking us towards Truth, but we still “see is a glass, darkly.” Most of the questions which silenced Job still silence us.
Even “chance” is sometimes overruled. A choice lay before Jesus Christ, either to use or misuse the powers entrusted to Him. But God had seen that, apart from His own intervention “there was no eye to pity and no arm to save.” And the Son of Man was “made strong.”
The scientist views life on the earth, absolutely dependant on the sun, “yet inexorable dynamical laws are even now driving the earth ever farther away from the sun into the outer cold and darkness until life is frozen off the earth.”
The apostle John sees in vision the New Jerusalem which “hath no need of the sun.”
Reference
- The Mysterious Mysterious Universe, by Sir James Jeans. Cambridge University Press, 2.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One