Arno Penzias : Purposeful Creation!

Light of Truth

Augustine Pamplany CST


Arno Penzias (1933-) is an American physicist and radio astronomer. After obtaining a Ph. D in physics from Colombia university in 1962, he went to work at the Bell Laboratory in New Jersey with Woodrow Wilson on radio astronomy. They developed ultra-sensitive cryogenic microwave receivers. The radio noise which they detected and which they could not explain then was identified to be the cosmic background radiation originating from Big Bang as predicted by some cosmologists. Arno Penzias received the Nobel Prize in Physics along with Woodrow Wilson in 1978 for the discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The CMB radiation provided one of the most convincing proofs for the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. In 1975, Penzias became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.
He believed in God and his faith in God was motivated by the purposiveness and order that he found in the universe. He states: “If there are a bunch of fruit trees, one can say that whoever created these fruit trees wanted some apples. In other words, by looking at the order in the world, we can infer purpose and from purpose we begin to get some knowledge of the Creator, the Planner of all this. This is, then, how I look at God. I look at God through the works of God’s hands and from those works imply intentions. From these intentions, I receive an impression of the Almighty.”
Along with Scripture, he found nature to be the revelation of God. He stated in an interview in 1994 that, “maybe God always reveals Himself. Again I think as Psalm 19, ‘the heavens proclaim the glory of God,’ that is, God reveals Himself in all there is. All reality, to a greater or lesser extent, reveals the purpose of God. There is some connection to the purpose and order of the world in all aspects of human experience.” As a Jew, he considered Torah to be both the “word of Moses and the word of God through Moses.”
He claimed that his researches in astrophysics offered him “evidence of a plan of divine creation…. This world is most consistent with purposeful creation.” As regards the creation of the Universe, he said, “If God created the universe, he would have done it elegantly…. what you have is half a page of mathematics that describes everything. In some sense, the power of the creation lies in its underlying simplicity.”
He takes a dig at those who think that the idea of creation is “dogmatic” and the idea of uncreated and eternal matter is “factual.” The idea of eternal matter is a case of the intuitive belief of several physicists and not a conclusion from scientific research. Observational data so far suggest that the universe is created. He opines that contrary to the conventional idea, “…the people who reject the data can arguably be described as having a ‘religious’ belief that matter must be eternal. These people regard themselves as objective scientists.”

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