Saturday, August 8, 2009

Our Cosmic Defender: The Planet Jupiter

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the brash and bold physicist/futurist Michio Kaku often seen on the Science Channel wrote about the recent asteroid that plowed into Jupiter's atmosphere. From a scientific perspective, this is an important occurrence because it provides us with more information about the potential damage of comet or asteroid impacts without us having to experience one. Further, we recognize that we too could be the recipient of such an impact, so we must be vigilant to continue looking to the heavens and crafting a plan of action in the event that a potentially damaging terrestrial object is heading directly in our path. Yet the most interesting point Kaku makes is:
The good news is that Jupiter was just doing its job, cleaning out the solar system of stray comets and asteroids. Jupiter, 318 times more massive than the earth, acts like a cosmic vacuum cleaner, sucking in or deflecting debris left over from the solar system’s birth 4.5 billion years ago. If it weren’t for Jupiter’s colossal gravitational field, we wouldn’t be here, since the earth would be hit with deadly comet and meteor impacts every month or so. Most of the U.S. would just be an empty graveyard of bleak craters.
Kaku makes a provocative statement that Jupiter was "just doing its job" by acting like a "cosmic vacuum cleaner" to protect us from deadly comet and meteor impacts. So the key question is if this is an unplanned happenstance whose fortuitousness simply allows us to be here to ponder the question, or or is Jupiter truly "doing its job" as it was designed to do? In other words, was this the work of a designer that we would call God? When asked about his view of God in a recent video, Kaku does not directly answer the question of whether there is a God, but prefers to use Einstein's conception of there only being two possible types of Gods. The first God is a personal God who intervenes, who is a God of prayer (one who would, for example, listen to our prayers for Christmas, or who would, he says somewhat derisively, "smite the Philistines"). The second God is a God of order, harmony, beauty, simplicity, and elegance. The God of Spinoza. That's the God Kaku says Einstein believes in because the universe is gorgeous, but didn't have to be that way. It could have been chaotic and messy, yet we have a universe where all of the equations of physics can be placed on "one sheet of paper."

As a Christian, I believe in the first God that Einstein describes (albeit, having nothing to do with Einstein), while acknowledging that Einstein's second is a quite compelling description that would be the natural choice for someone who had a prior commitment to metaphysical naturalism. Unlike Kaku, I take history into account and don't limit the possibilities of God's action only to what is personally acceptable to me, or to my personal experience in life, which more closely aligns with Einstein's second God. So my commitment to the first God he described is based first on me feeling that I have done my epistemic best in trusting the biblical account, and secondarily, me being true to my faith though my sight may show something different. In the end we, as Christians, do indeed walk by faith (that is far from blind), and not by sight.