Comparing Science And Religion In Alan Lightman's The Accidental Universe
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In the novel, The Accidental Universe, written by Alan Lightman, contains a persistent theme of discussion about the differences between science and religion, and how they affect the world as we know it. Many of the human beings on this planet have sided with the ideas and theories stating that a God governs our world and our universe. People have come to disavow scientific principles and laws, which have been proven to be true by physicists, and still believe that science has no factor to the creation and maintainment of this world. In multiple chapters throughout the book, Lightman delivers the point of views from both believers in theories of religion and theories of science. Through the ideas of the multiverse, the relationships within…show more content… Steven Weinberg, an elderly physicist, stated this concept about the multiverse theory and believes that the idea of a Creator, or a God, is not required to maintain balance and order and life within our universe and on our planet. The multiverse idea contains the theory of there not being just one universe that we live in, but that there are an infinite amount of universes around our own. Weinberg offers this view of the multiverse to give the idea of other universes that are all different from eachother. He believes that, “science has weakened the hold of religion… by invalidating arguments for God based on what we observe in the natural world” (13). If we have observed the laws of physics and nature in our universe to be true, then the idea of a multiverse completely compels them. Our laws that we know of will break in the other dimensions of the other universes. Properties and principles that maintain our universe would simply become futile and worthless. Arguments and conflicts will arise between religion and sciences if this multiverse is to be proven true, and nonsensical questions and theories will spawn from this discovery. As a believer in these scientific laws of nature, I simply cannot believe in this multiverse theory, since it would end all of…show more content… He says this in relevance to his topic of how the universe is “temporary” and that it will slowly end, only to soon repeat it’s beginning as a new universe. Lightman points out all of the lost generations from every century that are gone, the downward hill of atoms becoming to erratic to function properly, and the overall chaos within the galaxy and universe that will cause our world and other worlds to end. He makes these reasons as to why the universe will end. He then brings up the idea and argument of immortality and about how every religion on the planet has expressed immortality to some extent. The collapse of our universe is happening, theoretically, quicker than scientists expected, and religions are turning to the discover of immortality as their ownly way of survival. Lightman points out that “nature is missing something even more exquisite and grand: some immortal substance,” and he believes that the immortal substance is “something beyond time and space. Perhaps it is God” (34-35). Religious people look to God as their savior and believes that he shall save them from impending doom. They take him for the creator of the universe, and so, he has the capability of saving his own universe. However, scientists and physicians have proven that even if the universe is expanding, it is also collapsing and