Francesca, my brilliant wife, was raised Catholic. She entered my life as my student at a Catholic college for girls. This was my first foray as an adjunct physics instructor after getting my PhD. I was not good at it. Teaching a class full of teenage Catholic girls taught me a great deal about teaching, and more about how wary I needed to be when teaching girls, a lesson I had not fully incorporated when a few years later I taught a math class at Wellesley College. “Do tell, do tell”, I hear you say. Well too bad. That’s not what I’m here to discuss.
Francesca has recently revived her Catholicism. It had never died – there are cathedrals all over France and Italy in which she has lit candles for family and friends – but until recently I had the impression it was just simmering.
Attending mass at the Duomo in our favorite coastal Italian town was, I believe, a part of the reason for her revival. She is presently reading the bible – all of it. Her Harvard PhD in material sciences applied to archaeology is helping her connect what she is reading to actual places and events for which we have good evidence for their existence, supporting her forays into the bible as history.
Still, she is a hard scientist, and she has delved into ideas like this one (quoted from google): “The fine-tuned universe hypothesis is the observation that several fundamental physical constants must fall within a highly narrow range for any form of life to exist. If these constants were changed even slightly, the universe would be completely hostile to biological matter.” This is certainly true, and suggests there is a hidden hand adjusting the dials just so, because the mind behind that hand wants life to exist. Contrarians suggest there are actually infinitely many universes, all set perhaps randomly, and that some must inevitably be set to allow biological life. (Personally, I hate this idea; it’s a “nothing more to see here; move along” cop out.) And of course one can always argue that our knowledge of physics is insufficient to explain the constants, but that a sound physical explanation does exist that will rule out Intelligent Design.
Francesca sought further evidence supporting her desire to reconcile religion and science. She found it in the works of Stephen C Meyer, who used information theory, probability theory and chemistry to argue that the universe is far far too young for life to have evolved by mere chance.
Edward J. Steele, a molecular immunologist summed it up in a paper published in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 136 (2018), 7: “The transformation of an ensemble of appropriately chosen biological monomers (e.g. amino acids, nucleotides) into a primitive living cell capable of further evolution appears to require overcoming an information hurdle of superastronomical proportions, an event that could not have happened within the time frame of the Earth except, we believe, as a miracle (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1981,1982,2000). All laboratory experiments attempting to simulate such an event have so far led to dismal failure (Deamer, 2011; Walker and Wickramasinghe, 2015).”
Personally, I am a polytheistic agnostic. At the very least, to my untrained eye, there is in our universe (its biophysics) a gradient of sorts that enhances the odds for the evolution of multicellular life – even intelligence. Happily I am too ignorant to be willing to ascribe to this gradient an intelligent helping hand. Nor would I be unhappy if that proved to be true. It would explain a lot that I will not discuss.
What I firmly believe
There are only three nontrivial parallelizable spheres: 1-sphere; 3-sphere; 7-sphere. This implies (given my 40+ years of incontrovertible published work in mathematical physics) that we must live in a Standard Model (mostly) universe, and that there is an antimatter twin, and the two are connected by a 6-dimensional space which carries color charges. Now that is Intelligently Designed. It is, at the very least, the framework, rigid, immutable and glorious, on which any higher creative power must build. It is a stainless steel pot: the chemicals of life, and the various physical “constants”, etc., are ingredients being stirred about within. God is a mathematician (but most of us already knew that).