WASHINGTON -- As astronomers and physicists close in on the earliest moments of the big bang, many people are asking whether there is room enough at the beginning of the universe to include God and a purposeful Creation.

After all, if the theoretical physicists can't say what came before the big bang to trigger the evolution of the universe, stars, planets and people, doesn't that call for a deity with a big starter pistol?

And as science gets closer to reducing all the forces, motions and matter in the universe to a unified set of laws and mathematical formulas, won't that be evidence enough for an intelligent design, and therefore a Designer?

"I have to admit that when physicists go as far as they can go, there is an irreducible mystery that science will not eliminate," Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg says.

That realization has prompted a lot of writing in recent years by scientists who have considered religious explanations for mysteries that science has been unable to answer: Why does the universe exist? Why has it evolved with conditions that seem so precisely tuned to produce life? Why is its design intelligible to science? Does it have a purpose?

But unlike many other scientists, Weinberg -- an outspoken atheist -- is conceding nothing to theology. He simply means that there are physical limits to what science can know. Even those who insert God at the start of the equation, he says, have to contend with another "irreducible mystery" -- God himself.

As for evidence of "God's design" in the apparent mathematical order of the universe, Weinberg says, "Any possible universe could be understood as a result of a design." A completely chaotic universe might simply have been designed "by an idiot."

Weinberg spoke at a three-day conference at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History. Scientists and theologians gathered to discuss "Cosmic Questions" before a diverse audience of more than 250 people. It was sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science as part of its "Program of Dialogue Between Scientists and Religion."

At first glance, the answer to the conference's first question -- "Did the universe have a beginning?" -- might seem obvious. Since the 1920s, when Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding, astronomers and physicists have been tracing that expansion back to its beginning, to the titanic explosion of a tiny "singularity" some 15 billion years ago that seems to have set it all in motion.

Although the time scales were a surprise, the notion of a single instant when all space, time, energy and matter got their start meshed so well with Judeo-Christian traditions about a Creation out of nothingness that many took it as scientific support for just such a divine Creation.

It was so convenient that scientists such as the English astronomer Fred Hoyle resisted the big-bang theory. In 1948, Hoyle proposed an alternate "steady state" theory that argued for an eternal, unchanging universe.

The crush of evidence for the big bang has since demolished the steady-state idea. It has also bolstered the arguments of those who see an intelligent design in the way an ordered, predictable universe evolved out of the violence and chaos of the big bang.

It's called the "anthropic principal." Some scientists contemplating the accumulating scientific knowledge about the universe are struck by how precisely it seems to have been "tuned" to produce mankind.

A slightly denser universe after the big bang would have collapsed back on itself. Less dense, it would have flown apart without producing stars and planets. Small differences in subatomic forces or the mass of protons would have made it impossible for stars to forge the heavy elements, such as carbon, vital to the evolution of life. A more variable star, a different arrangement of planets or an ill-timed asteroid hit -- any of these might have extinguished life, or cut off human evolution before we had a chance to contemplate the universe.

Some argue that had it been otherwise, we would not have been here to ask the question. But "for believers, it is a substantial confirmation," says Anna Case-Winters, a professor of theology at the McCormick Theological Seminary. "For nonbelievers, it is a source of fascination and wonder. Many, many questions remain."

The greatest scientific threat to the idea of a single, purposeful Creation may lie in the notion of "eternal inflation." The word inflation refers not to the expansion of the universe, but to a specific instant during the big bang.

Modern particle theories predict that at high energies, such as those present in the initial instant of the big bang, there should exist "a state of matter that creates gravitational repulsion," says Alan Guth, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This bizarre "reverse" gravity may have powered the first fractions of a second of the big bang, until more familiar forces took over and continued the process that Hubble discovered, and which continues today.

It also explains a list of other puzzles about the big bang that have been pestering scientists. Scientists like ideas that answer lots of nagging questions.

But this idea added a profound new one: Inflation apparently wouldn't have happened just once. Guth says this peculiar state of matter would have occurred again and again, in "patches." And each patch would have produced its own budding universe, a single, expanding bubble in a foam of universes bursting from some cosmic shaving-cream can.

"It seems inevitable," he says. It might have happened once, setting off an eternal series of big bangs, each one creating a universe with its own unique conditions and fate. Or, our big bang may be just one of a series that extends forever into the past -- each one different, inaccessible and unknowable to the rest.

If any of this is true, it would have grave import for proponents of the anthropic principle. With an infinite variety of universes, it would be inevitable, given endless time, that one would evolve that was just right for producing intelligent human life. A purposeful Creation is not needed.

Or, says John Leslie, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Guelph, in Toronto, if God has created "hugely many" universes, "We couldn't expect ours to be the very best of the bunch."

Weinberg, and many others on a planet seemingly pervaded by evil, have argued that this universe clearly is not what a benevolent supernatural Designer would have prescribed.

Given the cruel history of war, holocaust, disease and religious zealotry, Weinberg says, "I see no sign of a remarkable benevolence in the world." And if there is any moral order, it is not something eternal. It is mankind's responsibility to impose it on himself.

John Polkinghorne, a particle physicist and Anglican priest, is more hopeful. "God created a world that can make itself," he argues. "It is not the puppet theater of a cosmic tyrant." Disasters happen. Cells turn malignant. People exercise free will and do evil. "In a non-magic world, it could not be different," he said.

Yet, he says, "How do we explain our amazing ability to contemplate and understand the improbable and counter-intuitive world of quantum physics or curved space? It's too profound to have simple knock-down answers."

Religious belief can explain more than unbelief can, Polkinghorne insists. "I believe science is possible because the universe is a creation."

Pub Date: 4/22/99