Why should deities exist

As argued by scholars such as Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh , mathematics exists independent of physical reality. It is the job of mathematicians to discover the realities of this separate world of mathematical laws and concepts. Physicists then put the mathematics to use according to the rules of prediction and confirmed observation of the scientific method.

But modern mathematics generally is formulated before any natural observations are made, and many mathematical laws today have no known existing physical analogues. In some cases the physicist also discovers the mathematics. Isaac Newton was considered among the greatest mathematicians as well as physicists of the 17th century. Other physicists sought his help in finding a mathematics that would predict the workings of the solar system. He found it in the mathematical law of gravity, based in part on his discovery of calculus.

Indeed, Newton made strenuous efforts over his lifetime to find a natural explanation, but in the end he could say only that it is the will of God. Despite the many other enormous advances of modern physics, little has changed in this regard. In other words, as I argue in my book, it takes the existence of some kind of a god to make the mathematical underpinnings of the universe comprehensible.

In the great British physicist Roger Penrose put forward a vision of a universe composed of three independently existing worlds — mathematics, the material world and human consciousness. As Penrose acknowledged, it was a complete puzzle to him how the three interacted with one another outside the ability of any scientific or other conventionally rational model.

I was in lockdown when I received this question and was instantly intrigued. It's no wonder about the timing — tragic events, such as pandemics, often cause us to question the existence of God: if there is a merciful God, why is a catastrophe like this happening?

The idea that God might be "bound" by the laws of physics — which also govern chemistry and biology and thus the limits of medical science — was an interesting one to explore. If God wasn't able to break the laws of physics, she arguably wouldn't be as powerful as you'd expect a supreme being to be. But if she could, why haven't we seen any evidence of the laws of physics ever being broken in the Universe?

To tackle the question, let's break it down a bit. First, can God travel faster than light? Let's just take the question at face value. We learn at school that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light — not even the USS Enterprise in Star Trek when its dilithium crystals are set to max. But is it true? A few years ago, a group of physicists posited that particles called tachyons travelled above light speed. Fortunately, their existence as real particles is deemed highly unlikely.

If they did exist, they would have an imaginary mass and the fabric of space and time would become distorted — leading to violations of causality and possibly a headache for God. It seems, so far, that no object has been observed that can travel faster than the speed of light.

This in itself does not say anything at all about God. It merely reinforces the knowledge that light travels very fast indeed. If God exists, one question would be whether they would be bound to the laws of sciences such as physics Credit: Alamy. Things get a bit more interesting when you consider how far light has travelled since the beginning. Or rather, the observable Universe's existence. As time goes on, the volume of space increases, and light has to travel for longer to reach us.

There is a lot more universe out there than we can view, but the most distant object that we have seen is a galaxy, GN-z11, observed by the Hubble Space Telescope.

This is approximately 1. But when the light "set off", the galaxy was only about three billion light years away from our galaxy, the Milky Way. We cannot observe or see across the entirety of the Universe that has grown since the Big Bang because insufficient time has passed for light from the first fractions of a second to reach us. Some argue that we therefore cannot be sure whether the laws of physics could be broken in other cosmic regions — perhaps they are just local, accidental laws.

And that leads us on to something even bigger than the Universe. Does the response require backward causation? Is such a response metaphysically tenable? Does Jewish monotheism, especially as developed by Jewish mystics, entail acosmism, pantheism or panentheism? How are we to understand the mystical doctrine of tsimtsum divine contractions that made space for the world?

What exactly is the debate between those who espouse tsimtsum kipshuto literal contraction and tsimtsum lo kipshuto non-literal contraction? Does God, in Judaism, especially in light of the apophatic tradition of Maimonides, have any attributes? How are we to understand the mystical doctrines about the eyn sof divine endlessness? Probably not, to all of these questions!

If we were closer to the galactic center, yes: the star formation rate is higher and the rate of supernovae is higher. But the main thing that means is that large numbers of heavy elements are created faster there, giving complex life an opportunity starting from earlier times. Here in the outskirts, we have to wait longer! Even a focus, ultra-energetic, nearby supernova might not be enough to extinguish life on a Multiple scenarios for the asteroid belt may each have advantages for life evolving on the inner Perhaps none of them are prohibitive to the evolution of intelligent life.

Feild, STScI. Same deal for asteroids. Yes, a solar system without a Jupiter-like planet would have many more asteroids, but without a Jupiter-like planet, would their orbits ever get perturbed to fling them into the inner solar system?

Would it make extinction events more common, or rarer? The evidence that we need a Jupiter for life is specious at best, just like the evidence that we need to be at this location in our galaxy is also sparse.

And finally, we did come along relatively early, but the ingredients for stars and solar systems like our own were present in large abundances in galaxies many billions of years before our own star system formed. The conditions that we need for life to arise, to the best we can measure, seem to exist all over the galaxy, and hence probably all over the Universe as well. Potentially habitable worlds may be possible around a large variety of stars.

How rare or common are these conditions elsewhere in the Universe? So the worlds are there, around stars, in the right places! In addition to that, we need them to have the right ingredients to bring about complex life.

What about those building blocks; how likely are they to be there? Organic molecules are found in star forming regions, stellar remnants and interstellar gas, all Humphreys University of Minnesota.

Believe it or not, these heavy elements — assembled into complex molecules — are unavoidable by this point in the Universe. Enough stars have lived and died that all the elements of the periodic table exist in fairly high abundances all throughout the galaxy. But are they assembled correctly?