Throughout the history of science, the naturalistic turn of mind has been to look for a history for physical stuff. And the supernaturalistic turn of mind has been the opposite. Plato famously excluded a history for the world by postulating eternal forms, and in Western thought afterwards only human society was seen as having a history: outside mankind, the physical world was essentially unchanged over time. If it had any history at all, it consisted in one-time creation by eternal God or divine Mind.
During the early modern period, the discovery of fossils created doubts about this unchanging nature of the world. Although many scientists initially pushed back and denied that fossils were relics of previous forms of animals, eventually the evidence became undeniable. Those scientists with a naturalistic turn began to look for explanations of how species might evolve and change over time—that is, to develop a natural history.
As we know, this eventually led to Charles Darwin’s identification of natural selection as the key ingredient of speces’ evolution (just as artificial selection was the key to evolution of domesticated animals).
In the 20th century, Georges Lemaître proposed what is today called the “Big Bang” origin of the universe, in opposition to the bent of Fred Hoyle’s Steady State theory. Where Hoyle limited the history of the universe to development of stars from an original hydrogen cloud, Lemaître pushed that history back to an earlier non-uniform quantum/plasma state.
In a recently rediscovered 1964 interview, he explained his opposition to creation stories (whether pantheistic or theistic) and in fact he saw his own theory as one that precluded a creation story for the universe. See https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.07198.pdf for a transcript of this interview. [GLM = Georges Lemaître]
GLM: [A] very long time ago, before the theory of the expansion of the universe (some 40 years ago), we expected the universe to be static. We expected that nothing would change. It was an a priori idea that applied to the whole universe… [interrupted by JV]
JV: …that was consistent with experiment… [interrupted by GLM]
GLM: No, not at all. Not at all! It was an a priori idea. For which there was no experiment. And the facts relating to the expansion of the universe made this theory inadmissible. So we realized that we had to admit change. But those who wanted for there to be no change wanted to minimize this change. In a way, they would say: ”while we can only admit that it changes, it should change as little as possible”. Let it change only in scale. That everything happens on a larger scale but that it happens in the same way. And this is what was first introduced by Milne [Edward Arthur Milne, Fellow of the Royal Society] under the name of ”cosmological principle” and later under the name of ”perfect cosmological principle” and then by the very idea of the Steady State Theory.
He goes on to criticize the Steady State Theory as an attempt to buttress a supernatural worldview.
So this is how this theory presents itself. As a theory imposing an assumption analogous to the apriori that you should look for a static solution … [unclear] … that you are looking for a solution with a minimum of change. Which, for my part, along with others, I am opposed to [that static solution] in the sense that I don’t think that it is the tendency of modern physics to admit that there are global laws in the universe, absolute laws, laws that, in Hoyle’s expression, would imply a ”design”, would imply a plan. I cannot picture things working that way.
Thus Lemaître is not just insisting on a history for everything physical, his naturalistic mindset also pushes back against the notion of universal a priori laws of physics.
So that from the point of view of astronomical development of the whole universe, we find ourselves with distinct gaseous clouds which are almost entirely made up of hydrogen. Now this is the key point of Hoyle’s theory: it all starts with hydrogen. The essential difference is whether this hydrogen is produced naturally by a reasonable physical process or, on the contrary, it is a kind of phantom hydrogen which appears with just the right amount of hydrogen to verify an a priori law.
In the 20th century, Lemaître’s discovery of the expansion of the universe (from the red-shift of starlight) led to the scientific realization that the universe had a history. The steady-state theory was a response that wrote that history back to primordial hydrogen and stopped there. But Lemaître argued that cosmic rays (similar to the discovery of fossils in rocks) meant that the history of the universe went back even further. (The discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation shortly before his death added an exclamation point!)
This is a theory that was put forward not only by myself, but by Regener [Erich Rudolf Alexander Regener] a long time ago, who called cosmic rays fossil rays in the sense that they are the testimony of the very first ages of the world. And I, for my part, preferred to call them the rays of the primeval fireworks, which are preserved in the remarkably empty space and reach us… giving us a testimony of the first ages of the world… obviously, a bit of poetry in there.
At this point the interviewer asked him,
[D]oes the fact that the universe, according to your theory, has a beginning (at least one beginning)… does it have a religious meaning for you, a religious significance?
Lemaître was reluctant to discuss religion (even though he was a Catholic priest as well as astronomer and theoretical physicist), but he was willing to talk about the notion of the universe being created.
When one poses the problem of the beginning of the world, one is almost always faced with a rather essential difficulty: to ask oneself, why did it begin at that moment? Why didn’t it start a little earlier? And in a certain sense, why wouldn’t it have started a little earlier? So it seems that any theory that involves a beginning must be unnatural. [emphasis added] To say ”we decide at this point that it begins”… This is what was expressed by saying: ”it is made of nothing”. That is to say that we expected it to come from something; and we say ”it doesn’t come from this something, it’s made of nothing”. Well… the point of view I’m coming to is quite different. That is, the beginning is so unimaginable, so different from the present state of the world that such a question does not arise. And even more than that. This beginning is the beginning of multiplicity. The fundamental idea is… I can’t develop it with more details now… it is the beginning of multiplicity. It is the idea that the universe, which exists in quanta, in packets of determined energy, begins with a single quantum, or a very small number of quanta, so that it is impossible to wonder from what it would come, from what it would have been divided from. The whole development of entropy is that quanta divide themselves, develop, etc. At the beginning, if there is only one, we cannot ask ourselves where it comes from. Then the question does not arise to say that it comes from nothing. It is a background of space-time for which no problem arises. Or if you want, when one holds oneself as the spiritualist, with the idea that it comes from God, etc. … well, one would like to take God in default for this ’initial flick’ as Laplace [Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace] said. Well it doesn’t hold, because the beginning… the bottom of the space-time is so different from all our conceptions that there is no more problem. And then obviously for an atheist, everything/anything cannot remain, I cannot continue to speak if God doesn’t support me in the existence, that’s for sure, isn’t it? But that’s nothing, that’s the general stance of christian philosophy. But there’s nothing special about the beginning. And the beginning is not a place where you would touch God as a hypothesis, where if you like, I’ll talk about Laplace’s initial flick, since we’re now talking about conferences in English… I recall Jeans [Sir James Hopwood Jeans, Fellow of the Royal Society] words ”the finger of God agitating the ether” [dramatic voice], that was the beginning. Well, that’s not… that’s not a pleasant idea for a religious mind. It’s an idea that brings God down into the realm of primary causes, and I think one of the contributions that a theory like mine can make is to avoid just such difficulties.
JV: So, to state things plainly, you refuse to accept the idea that God should explain the movement of galaxies.
GLM: Of course, it goes without saying! Absolutely.
Although Lemaître was a Catholic priest (the epitome of someone with a supernatural worldview, it would seem), when it came to studying the physical world his mindset was, as we have seen, very naturalistic. He devoutly separated his scientific mindset from his religious mindset, nor did he see a conflict in doing so. The Wikipedia article on him states,
In relation to Catholic teaching on the origin of the Universe, Lemaître viewed his theory as neutral with neither a connection nor a contradiction of the Faith; as a devoted Catholic priest, Lemaître was opposed to mixing science with religion,[16] although he held that the two fields were not in conflict.[37] —https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître (captured Feb 4, 2023) Wikipedia’s sources for this interpretation are Lambert, Dominique (1997). “Monseigneur Georges Lemaître et le débat entre la cosmologie et la foi (à suivre)”. Revue Théologique de Louvain (in French). 28 (1): 28–53. doi:10.3406/thlou.1997.2867. ISSN 0080-2654 and https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ni/2012/06/father_of_the_big_bang.html
Ironically, Lemaître’s adversary in the field of astronomy, Fred Hoyle (despite being a self-described atheist), lacked this naturalistic mindset. Hoyle believed there was intelligent design behind the origin of life.
Rather than accept the fantastically small probability of life having arisen through the blind forces of nature, it seemed better to suppose that the origin of life was a deliberate intellectual act. …
A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. —Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections”, Engineering and Science, November 1981, p. 12. https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/527/2/Hoyle.pdf
In contrast, those with a naturalistic turn of mind understand implicitly that mind-stuff (including intellect) is not primary. They comprehend the mistake of inserting consciousness, intelligence, or conceptual laws in order to jump-start the history of the universe. In this vein, we must admire Lemaître’s opposition to a priori laws of physics, and appreciate his reluctance to insert God (consciousness or mind) as creator of some beginning state of the universe—much less as manager of its development. Lemaître rejected the lazy human tendency to forego investigation of the past in favor of simplified, automatic answers.
Instead: history—without origin in formula or theology.
And this “history” is just homo sapiens, as scientists, figuring out best we can what has happened.
Human thought naturally wants to start at a beginning and stop at an end. But this instinct of human thought is biological; it is not a priori, it doesn’t apply to the physical universe.
__
*Georges Lemaître Interview link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.07198.pdf
