And that will mark the beginning of a new outlook on the creation of existence.

And that will mark the beginning of a new outlook on the creation of existence.” Pagels is confident that “from microcosm to macrocosm, from its origin to its end, the universe is described by physical laws comprehensible to the human mind.”9 Paul Davies, who has written extensively on physics, cosmology, and their philosophical and theological implications, thinks that the theory of an inflationary universe accounts for the emergence “out of nothingness” of both fundamental particles and spacetime itself “as the result of a causeless quantum transition.” In this remarkable scenario, the entire universe simply comes out of nowhere, completely in accordance with the laws of physics, and creates along the way all the matter and energy needed to build the universe as we now see it.10 Although recently Davies has become less enthusiastic about the promises of the new physics, a decade ago he wrote the following: For the first time, a unified description of all creation could be within our grasp.

No scientific problem is more fundamental or more daunting than the puzzle of how the universe came into being. Could this have happened without any supernatural input? Quantum physics seems to provide a loophole to the age-old assumption that ‘you can’t get something from nothing.’ Physicists are now talking about the ‘self-creating universe’: a cosmos that erupts into existence spontaneously, much as a subnuclear particle sometimes pops out of nowhere in certain high energy processes.

The question of whether the details of this theory are right or wrong is not so very important. What matters is that it is now possible to conceive of a scientific explanation for all of creation. Has modern physics abolished God altogether. .?11 In an even more radical…