God's Universe [Hardcover]

Owen Gingerich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2006

We live in a universe with a very long history, a vast cosmos where things are being worked out over unimaginably long ages. Stars and galaxies have formed, and elements come forth from great stellar cauldrons. The necessary elements are present, the environment is fit for life, and slowly life forms have populated the earth. Are the creative forces purposeful, and in fact divine?

Owen Gingerich believes in a universe of intention and purpose. We can at least conjecture that we are part of that purpose and have just enough freedom that conscience and responsibility may be part of the mix. They may even be the reason that pain and suffering are present in the world. The universe might actually be comprehensible.

Taking Johannes Kepler as his guide, Gingerich argues that an individual can be both a creative scientist and a believer in divine design--that indeed the very motivation for scientific research can derive from a desire to trace God's handiwork. The scientist with theistic metaphysics will approach laboratory problems much the same as does his atheistic colleague across the hall. Both are likely to view the astonishing adaptations in nature with a sense of surprise, wonder, and mystery.

In God's Universe Gingerich carves out "a theistic space" from which it is possible to contemplate a universe where God plays an interactive role, unnoticed yet not excluded by science.

Editorial Reviews

From Scientific American

In God’s Universe, Owen Gingerich, a Harvard University astronomer and science historian, tells how in the 1980s he was part of an effort to produce a kind of anti-Cosmos, a television series called Space, Time, and God that was to counter Sagan’s "conspicuously materialist approach to the universe." The program never got off the ground, but its premise survives: that there are two ways to think about science. You can be a theist, believing that behind the veil of randomness lurks an active, loving, manipulative God, or you can be a materialist, for whom everything is matter and energy interacting within space and time. Whichever metaphysical club you belong to, the science comes out the same. In the hands of as fine a writer as Gingerich, the idea almost sounds convincing. "One can believe that some of the evolutionary pathways are so intricate and so complex as to be hopelessly improbable by the rules of random chance," he writes, "but if you do not believe in divine action, then you will simply have to say that random chance was extremely lucky, because the outcome is there to see. Either way, the scientist with theistic metaphysics will approach laboratory problems in much the same way as his atheistic colleague across the hall."

George Johnson is author of Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order and six other books. He resides on the Web at talaya.net

From Booklist

Astronomer Gingerich believes in a designed universe, although not in intelligent design (ID), the antievolution theorizing that some Evangelical Christian activists want taught in public-school science courses. His intent isn't, however, to flay ID as Michael Shermer does in Why Darwin Matters (see review on p.22); it is to explore a few topics in science that suggest design and a designer, God. He weighs the Copernican principle that intelligent life isn't exceptional in the universe against the Darwinian emphasis on the uniqueness of life on Earth. He probes the differences between atheist and religious scientists (this is where he dismisses ID along with "evolution as a materialist philosophy" as ideologies), especially over the big bang and cosmological teleology. Finally, he raises some "Questions without Answers" to point up the different, irreconcilable concerns of physics as opposed to metaphysics, science as opposed to religion. Utterly lacking scientific or religious triumphalism, demonstrating why both ways of knowing are indispensable, Gingerich's highly rereadable remarks may well outlast all the brouhaha of the ID-evolution fracas. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; First Edition edition (September 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674023706
• ISBN-13: 978-0674023703
• Product Dimensions: 4.4 x 0.7 x 7.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #313,252 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 62 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Science and religious belief meet peacefully. November 12, 2006

By Wesley L. Janssen VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Gingerich, a Harvard professor emeritus of astrophysics and science history, is perhaps America's best known living astronomer. His book God's Universe will fascinate and inform anyone interested in either natural science or religious belief, but it will especially invite those interested in the interface and supposed conflict of science and religion. Gingerich's views echo those of John Polkinghorne: both a studied religious belief and the modern progression of natural science are thoughtfully embraced. The anti-science views held by many religious people are often due to ignorance of science (and religion), and these views can prove superfluous to orthodox religious belief. Similarly, the anti-religious views held by many scientifically oriented people, are also often due to a comfortable ignorance, and are likewise expendable. Like Polkinghorne (British quantum physicist and cleric), Gingerich believes the world is best explained and understood if it is something that is intelligently purposed. Given the almost unfathomable fine-tuning of the laws of physics, materialistic demands that there cannot be any such intelligent agency are contraindicated, based in personal psychologies or ideologies rather than scientific evidence (are scientifically arbitrary), venture well beyond the domain of natural science, and ultimately lead to no truly deep explanations of the world. A God-ordained world simply makes better sense than the alternative. In Gingerich's words, "a common-sense and satisfying interpretation of our world suggests the designing hand of a superintelligence." Einstein famously agreed. But Gingerich is leery of many formulations of Intelligent Design arguments and distances himself from the ID movement.... However he also believes that certain intelligent design arguments are not understood by many who dismiss them due to a kind of knee-jerk conditioning, and a philosophical commitment that departs from strict science.

The book is small precisely because it is efficiently presented. Repetition is virtually absent. Many writers who argue against a God-ordained universe inflate books with repetitive assertions (Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins being the obvious example). The second characteristic that distinguishes this book is Gingerich's dispassionate focus. His assertions have the flavor of straightforward observation rather than argument. The emotional belligerence that many writers have brought to the topic is completely absent. Read more ›

41 of 46 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars faith and science at its best January 17, 2007

By Daniel B. Clendenin

Format:Hardcover

Owen Gingerich (b. 1930), Emeritus Professor of Astronomy and History of Science at Harvard University, was born in Washington, Iowa to a devout Mennonite family. After graduating from Goshen College in Indiana, at age twenty-one he enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard. A leading authority on Johannes Kepler and Nicholas Copernicus, he has an asteroid named in his honor ("2658 Gingerich") and has preached in Washington's National Cathedral. He fondly recalls viewing the rings of Saturn through a simple telescope that his father helped him build from a mailing tube and leftover lenses from a local optometrist.

Gingerich's book contains his three public addresses for Harvard's William Belden Noble Lectures (November 2005), and as Peter Gomes notes in his foreword, they are characterized throughout by their "disarming understatement" and "intellectual modesty." Gingerich argues that science deals with what Aristotle called "efficient causes"--a description of how something happens, but not with "final causes"--an explanation of why something happens. At its best, science adopts a methodological naturalism as a research strategy, and thus remains neutral about metaphysical or philosophical claims outside of its narrow purview. "It is just as wrong," writes Gingerich, "to present evolution in high school classrooms as a final cause as it is to fob off Intelligent Design as a substitute for an efficacious efficient cause."

The cosmos in general and the earth in particular, with their complexity and fine-tuning, are remarkably congenial for humankind to flourish. Nor was humankind--with our complex language, altruism, conscience, creativity, self-consciousness, and abstract reasoning--"necessarily inevitable...." It would seem, then, that humankind is an unimaginably lucky and "glorious accident," or perhaps part of a cosmological design or telos. Science can inform one's thinking on the matter, but it cannot, ultimately, determine the answer. For Gingerich, a religious view of the universe makes more sense, explains more, and is more satisfying than a non-theistic view. He admits that this is hardly a proof, just a matter of personal persuasion, what John Polkinghorne likes to call verisimilitude or "the ring of truth."

Gingerich ends his book by quoting the prayer with which Johannes Kepler concluded his The Harmony of the World (1619): "If I have been enticed into brashness by the wonderful beauty of thy works, or if I have loved my own glory among men, while advancing in work destined for thy glory, gently and mercifully pardon me: and finally, deign graciously to cause that these demonstrations may lead to thy glory and to the salvation of souls, and nowhere be an obstacle to that. Amen." Reading this slender volume which culminates a lifetime of dedication to robust Christian faith and rigorous world class science was a privilege that filled me with awe, admiration and gratitude. Read more ›

75 of 91 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Broad-Based, Integrated Approach to "Veritas" September 14, 2006

By B. D. Weimer

Format:Hardcover

Owen Gingerich is Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and of the History of Science at Harvard's Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In this concise and readable work, he advocates a broad framework for integrating science and religion -- one that does not artificially mandate a secular explanation for every facet of the universe.

Dr. Gingerich is addressing cutting-edge astrophysics. But his approach to science is not new. It was the dominant worldview of the founders of his school. Harvard was formed to honor God through the integrated pursuit of science and religion. As reflected in the original Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Harvard's founders believed that "the encouragement of arts and sciences ... tends to the honor of God." (Article I)

More recently, in the early 20th Century, Harvard Professor of Philosophy Alfred North Whitehead argued vigorously and persuasively that modern science would never have developed without the confidence in a rational universe, a confidence produced by the fusion of Stoicism and Christianity: "Centuries of belief in a God who combined the personal energy of Jehovah with the rationality of a Greek philosopher first produced that firm expectation of systematic order which rendered possible the birth of modern science."

Dr. Gingerich's work continues that Harvard tradition, suggesting areas of inquiry (such as the cause of the Big Bang and the fine-tuning of the universe for life) in which religious explanations should be considered. Religion and science, working together, to fully explore both physics and metaphysics.