Black Holes In A Brief History by Niraj Pant (the reading list book TXT) 📕

Introduction: The Dark Tower

 The Dark Tower

 

Burningly it came on me all at once.

This was the place!

Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came ”

Abandon a faith that abhors science. But if your newfound science won’t abide faith you’ve left

one narrow minded path to follow another. It’s possible to delight in both, but it isn’t easy.

Shelves sag with exciting books written for laymen like me, about how the universe began and

functions–cosmology and physics, but most are written by scientist who won’t tolerate faith and

thrill to say so. It’s a heavy obligation to show that in their contra-religious mentality these

scientists are narrowminded. Heavier still for a layman like me--I was a roughneck most of my

life, sweating and freezing night and day, summer, winter on an oil drilling rig, making some

oilman rich. We Starks were an uneducated lot, vagabond oilfield laborers who arrived in

California from Oklahoma in nineteen-fort-one. Only I, of four brothers and three sisters, ever

finished high school. I stayed only because of sports. Even then, I’m less an athlete than most in

my family. Less financially successful than most of them, too. So if I’m dwarfed by my seven

self-educated siblings, I’m a fool to take on scientists of Stephen Hawking’s ilk.

Why pick on Hawking?

Please. I can’t pick on Hawking. I agree with most of what he says that I have sense enough to

understand. Much of it I don’t understand and have no reason to object to. Only in those few

areas where Hawking attacks needlessly (and after at least twenty years, fruitlessly) humanity’s

hopes for meaning do I feel compelled to risk my considerable self esteem. His books are

enormously popular and his ideas influential. So if I’m going to make a fool of myself trying to

defeat the message that ours is an accidental universe, devoid of meaning beyond what physics

describes in theory and mathematics, why not at the expense of someone who is most influential

there, someone whose rich intellect can best afford it?

And a fool I am. Fool enough to hope that some young person reads my story and goes early

where, late, I wish I had gone. Or that my story will allay the fears of someone who yearns to

know how the universe began and functions but is afraid his faith won’t survive the

investigation. Oh, that mine had been one long journey of faith and science that began with

deliberation and, as with a Robert Frost poem, “assume(d) direction with the first line laid

down.” That I could reflect on a body of work like that of Arthur Koestler or Graham Greene,

then top it off with something of an autobiography describing the road I had traveled. Had I

talent enough and time...but I’m short of both. I do have a perspective on life denied Koestler or

Greene–I view reality through the lens of an undistinguished education. Should I have

contemplated suicide, as Graham Greene did, it could never have been on the Oxford campus

that I put the pistol to my head. Only by the good grace and long suffering of York College did I

ever set foot on a college campus, and then, nineteen-fifty-six, only because the new school

needed students lest it be a campus with teachers and no students. They scoured the continent

and came up with some surprisingly brilliant students, and me. I went because they allowed me

to and because I detested going back on that oily drilling rig. And while I would never have had

the courage to put a pistol to my own head, I’m sure there were several of my teachers who

would like to have.

Why do I rake up all this oilfield trash? To emphasize that if physics and cosmology excite a

man like me because they illustrate design in the universe, they can excite you, and should. If

you follow the logic of those many science books that sag the shelves, and not their illogical

prejudices against design, you’ll enjoy the splendor of science and remain as convinced as I am

that the evidence for design in the universe is, if not unassailable, compelling.

Nothing rewards like love. It’s its own reason to exist. The same goes for wonder. Love and

wonder are what humans are made for. But when one is confronted with evidence that makes

him suspect that all he has had faith in is fantasy, then wonder turns to despair. That happened to

me when first I peered through a microscope at fossils washed to surface from the bottom of a

ten-thousand foot oil well. There was no more hiding of the facts from what little faith remained

after a lifetime of sheltering it. No chance of holding Galileo in house arrest. I knew that the

earth was no longer the center of the universe, that fossils existed older than Noah’s flood, that

fifteen-billion years ago the universe deployed in what we call the big bang. No Grand Inquisitor

in my lifetime could stifle that knowledge. One follows for years a weak faith that allows only a

biblical interpretation of the physical universe until one day he suspects that he is arguing more

with God’s evidence than with the scientists who interpret it. Better, engage the evidence early.

Ah, there’s the rub; the rules for engaging God through his physical evidence are the same as

those for engaging him in meditation–ask honest questions, accept honest answers and prepare to

have your perspective changed forever.

There was no point at the end of my wandering where faith suddenly stepped forward like the

priests bearing the ark of the covenant, their feet striking the flowing waters of the Jordan and

halting it and Joshua leading the children of Israel into the promised land. Mine was a journey

like “Child Roland To The Dark Tower Came.” I was not sure I was even on a quest, I had

wandered aimlessly so long. “Burningly it came on me all at once. This was the place,” and I

was dauntless before the dark tower. But I was a battered old man at the end of a quest I began as

a boy. I had not conquered fear; somewhere on the long journey fear became disinterested in me,

shrugged his shoulders and walked away. Go early into science, it will alter your faith, but if this

book is successful it won’t destroy it.

What this book won’t do: It won’t change–does not attempt to change–people whose tragic

experiences in life have robbed them of faith–“If there were a God, how could He have let such

an evil thing happen?” I have nothing but compassion for such people. Not pity, compassion.

God’s existence is not contingent upon our belief in him, nor is he good or evil because we think

he is or is not. If God is good and someone rejects him because their experience in his creation

has been tragic and they can’t believe that a good God would allow such bad things to happen,

then their reasons for rejecting God as evil are good reasons. If God exists and is good, he thrives

in such doubts. But it is the good that drives these doubts. It is not scientific observation and

mathematical calculations. This book is zeroed in on scientific and mathematical calculations

aimed to dissuade people from believing in design in the universe. Physical things are neither

good nor evil, and physical existence is the study of physics. Scientists who argue that it is

impossible that a good god could have created a world riddled with evil should frame their logic

in theological or ethical proofs, not scientific ones.

But this book is not about religion poking holes in science, it is about logic poking holes in the

non-scientific claim against design in the universe. I’m convinced that the universe was

designed. Why it was designed as it is, and why there is evil in it, I do not know. The tsunami in

south Asia, the day after Christmas, two-thousand-four, left me shaking my fist at the heavens

one moment and perplexed the next at why a lotus eater like me, who flees catastrophe, is

privileged to share the same planet with others who rush to it risking their lives to bring relief;

and others who voluntarily leave the wealth and comfort I avidly pursue, to live in squalor so as

to make life less miserable for those who can’t escape it. When in this book I reason from first

cause, which has traditionally been called God, it is not because I aim to sell anyone on religion,

I am not associated with organized religion and have nothing to sell. I am grateful that mine is a

rich niche in time and place, a paradisaical time warp in man’s usual fare of famine, disease, war

and death. I cannot show you how a path back to the beginning will put you at the feet of a

beneficent First Cause of creation. But as I follow logic back to the big bang it leads inevitably to

the yawning question of First Cause and before I know it I have fallen in and can no more escape

than if it were a black hole.

Burningly it came on me all at once.

This was the place!

Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came ”

Abandon a faith that abhors science. But if your newfound science won’t abide faith you’ve left

one narrow minded path to follow another. It’s possible to delight in both, but it isn’t easy.

Shelves sag with exciting books written for laymen like me, about how the universe began and

functions–cosmology and physics, but most are written by scientist who won’t tolerate faith and

thrill to say so. It’s a heavy obligation to show that in their contra-religious mentality these

scientists are narrowminded. Heavier still for a layman like me--I was a roughneck most of my

life, sweating and freezing night and day, summer, winter on an oil drilling rig, making some

oilman rich. We Starks were an uneducated lot, vagabond oilfield laborers who arrived in

California from Oklahoma in nineteen-fort-one. Only I, of four brothers and three sisters, ever

finished high school. I stayed only because of sports. Even then, I’m less an athlete than most in

my family. Less financially successful than most of them, too. So if I’m dwarfed by my seven

self-educated siblings, I’m a fool to take on scientists of Stephen Hawking’s ilk.

Why pick on Hawking?

Please. I can’t pick on Hawking. I agree with most of what he says that I have sense enough to

understand. Much of it I don’t understand and have no reason to object to. Only in those few

areas where Hawking attacks needlessly (and after at least twenty years, fruitlessly) humanity’s

hopes for meaning do I feel compelled to risk my considerable self esteem. His books are

enormously popular and his ideas influential. So if I’m going to make a fool of myself trying to

defeat the message that ours is an accidental universe, devoid of meaning beyond what physics

describes in theory and mathematics, why not at the expense of someone who is most influential

there, someone whose rich intellect can best afford it?

And a fool I am. Fool enough to hope that some young person reads my story and goes early

where, late, I wish I had gone. Or that my story will allay the fears of someone who yearns to

know how the universe began and functions but is afraid his faith won’t survive the

investigation. Oh, that mine had been one long journey of faith and science that began with

deliberation and, as with a Robert Frost poem, “assume(d) direction with the first line laid

down.” That I could reflect on a body of work like that of Arthur Koestler or Graham Greene,

then top it off with something of an autobiography describing the road I had traveled. Had I

talent enough and time...but I’m short of both. I do have a perspective on life denied Koestler or

Greene–I view reality through the lens of an undistinguished education. Should I have

contemplated suicide, as Graham Greene did, it could never have been on the Oxford campus

that I put the pistol to my head. Only by the good grace and long suffering of York College did I

ever set foot on a college campus, and then, nineteen-fifty-six, only because the new school

needed students lest it be a campus with teachers and no