My dad used to recite an old doggerel about 19th century Boston:

And here's to good old Boston
The land of the bean and the cod
Where Lowells talk only to Cabots
And Cabots talk only to God.

But it could easily have been written about the sciences:

And here's to graybearded physics,
the greek trade in -inos and -ons
where astros talk only to cosmos
and cosmos the pantheon.

Once upon a time, nearly every physicist had a right to talk about God, or perhaps, the limitations of God. Newton the opticker spent 10 years writing commentaries on Revelation. Maxwell the electromagnetician gave lectures on the matter God created. But in recent years, the mantle of high priesthood has fallen on cosmologists, who bear their responsibility gravely.
 
I will never forget the 1992 cover of Scientific American showing a photograph of the Doppler shift in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) taken with NASA's COBE satellite that George Smoot had entitled "The Face of God".  At first I groaned, thinking that he was pulling a bad PR stunt. Then I got upset, thinking he was criticizing Christianity. Now I feel pity, because I think he was serious. That is the face of his god--a cold, inscrutable, empty gaze that he poured 30 years of his life achieving. His 2006 award of the Nobel prize for this picture makes me even sadder, thinking of the thousands whom he has converted.

What is it about Cosmology that makes it the high priest of physics? Why are most cosmologists so eager to hypothesize about God, the Universe, and Theories of Everything? (Richard Feynman viewed it as a curse afflicting physicists in middle age.)

It probably has to do with beginnings. Every religion has its stories of beginnings that explain "Why Things Are The Way They Are", and cosmologists feel the heavy burden of explaining "The Real Nature of the Universe"  in their airy tales, for night skies aflame with stars and primeval world beginnings have always been intertwined. The Psalmist writes "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims His handiwork." St Paul writes, "For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made."

It is just that today's cosmologists seem to have lost all faith. The late Stanley Jaki took them to task in his book "God and the Cosmologists" for having mangled their science solely to reject their God. For example, the ancient Greek idea of a universe of eternal atoms was constructed in 500BC simply to avoid the necessity of a Creation and a Creator God. For 2000 years such a view was ridiculed, not only because it was atheistic, but also because it could not explain the data. As Heinrich Olbers pointed out, if there are an infinite number of stars in the sky, and an infinite time to observe them, the night sky should be white, not black. Likewise, as Isaac Newton understood perfectly, even if there be only two stars in the sky but an infinite time for gravity to work, they should have all clumped together by now.

These are listed in the textbooks as "paradoxes", which suggest that rather than being taken as support for a beginning, they are taken as removing support for the obvious solution of an eternal cosmos. This is exceeding strange, for over the past 4000 years, godless "eternal" creation myths have dominated less than 10% of the time.

Nevertheless, it was a big shock when the discovery of the CMBR in 1962 destroyed all hope for an eternal "steady-state" universe, and cosmologists grudgingly admitted a beginning to space and time. Robert Jastrow's book "God and the Astronomers" chronicles this upsetting period in modern cosmology.

But the atheist need not have worried. Forty years of theoreticians have gone to work to recover the eternal (and therefore atheist) universe. Two theories that collide and morph continuously like clashing armies in the night (or is that M-branes in higher dimensions?) are Andrei Linde's "multiverse" of Big Bangs occurring everywhere and continuously, and Lee Smolin's "landscape" of 10^500 ways for string theory to roll up.

The peculiar thing about "landscapes" and "multiverses" is that by definition they are impossible to observe. Like debates about "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin", these are proxy wars of metaphysics, these are creation myths that cannot be either proven or disproven. And this fragile state of the myth has led to heated debates between Smolin and Susskind over whose unprovable theory is superior.

This debate would be a yawner were not the scientists, in their eagerness to prove their point, grasping at the weapons of theology and philosophy. So it was with interest that I read Lee Smolin's argument why a timeless _meta-universe makes no sense. That is, Linde's multiverses pop up from somewhere, and likewise a string landscape has to have a location, which turns out be be a "_meta-place" without time or physics or dreams so various, so beautiful, so new,  but only some sort of mathematical Platonic austere existence. And guess who Smolin blames for this state of affairs?

The separation [by Newton] of scientific explanation into law and initial conditions leads to one of the most universal and powerful notions in physics — the notion of configuration space. This is the space of all possible configurations, or states, of the system. In classical and quantum physics we assume that this space exists a priori and outside of time, and that it can be studied independently of the laws of motion. These laws then specify the rules for how the point that describes the initial conditions in configuration space evolves in time. We call this the Newtonian schema for explanation.

And what is Smolin's evaluation of Newton?

The Newtonian schema is the basis for the claim that time is not fundamental in cosmology....This argument is faulty for two reasons....By discarding the Newtonian schema for cosmology and dispensing with the notion of the multiverse, we also no longer have any reason to suspect that time is an illusion.

But now Smolin has a different problem. Rejecting Plato's eternal realm brings us back to Aristotle's inductive science and Lessing's Ditch. Here's Smolin's take:

This alternative metaphysical framework has im­plications for the nature of physical law. Since nothing is true or real outside of time, there is no possibility of speaking of eternal laws. Laws are regularities that we discover hold for very long stretches of time, but there is no reason for laws to be true timelessly — indeed, there is no way to make sense of that notion. This opens the door to the possibility that laws evolve in time,...

Well I'm all for making time real, but I'm also all for universal laws. Is it really true that we can have one or the other but not both? Smolin seems to be ditching Kant for Hegel, he's abandoning Parmenides for Heraclitus. As I mentioned earlier, we keep rehashing the one-and-the-many problem, this time in cosmology. But the worrisome part for modernists raised on the concept of absolute truth, is that Smolin is drifting off into pantheism, where god is truth, and truth is the universe, and the universe is evolving, so god is evolving.

Leonard Susskind isn't ready to give up on either absolute truth or Newton, or for that matter on Darwin either. He credits both of them for having solved this serious metaphysical problem. In his response to Smolin he writes,

Darwin was not particularly interested in astronomy or physics, yet his impact on cosmology was enormous but in a way subconscious. In successfully explaining the origin of species, he eliminated superstition and set a new standard for what an explanation of nature should be like. As I wrote in my book The Black Hole War (Little Brown, 2008), Darwin’s masterstroke was to have “ejected God from the science of life”. True, Darwin was not the first scientist to cast out supernatural beliefs. Two centuries earlier, Newton — another great Cambridge scientist — had done so more than anyone before his own time...
In other words, before Darwin, even the greatest physicists had little alternative to a supernatural explanation of the origin of life, and therefore of nature itself. It was the success of Darwinism that forced the issue and set the standard for future theories of origins, whether it be it of life or of the universe. Explanations must be based on the laws of physics, mathematics and probability — and not on the hand of God.

It seems odd that Susskind is crediting a scientist for proving a metaphysical belief, as if Darwin provided some sort of evidence of the spontaneous origin of life. But notice what Susskind replaces God with--physics, math and more math. And as he explains, the "physics" of choice is string-theory, which many have called pure mathematics with no experimental basis or proof. So as Smolin warned in his earlier exchange, Susskind's timeless multiverse landscape is all math. What then is Susskind's bottom-line defense against Smolin?

Whether string theory with its huge landscape, and eternal inflation with its reproducing pockets of space, will prove to be correct is for the future to decide. What is true is that as of the present time, they provide the only natural explanation of the universe that lives up to the standard set by Darwin.

So there you have it. If you don't want to be a Christian pantheist, you'd better side with Susskind. What better proof of cosmology do you need?

Alas, neither is appealing to me.  As Jaki was always quick to say, neither the atheism of Greece nor the pantheism of India produced the science of the Enlightenment. Rather, the metaphysics of a Christian God who can be both transcendent and immanent, both absolute and particular, both promise-keeping and prayer-answering, both eternal and temporal, is necessary for cosmology to exist. Smolin and Susskind alike are squandering their borrowed capital, and the more they display their riches, the clearer their paupery appears.