Stargazing

Years ago I lay on my back at the beach with a young son, looking up into a brilliant star-filled night sky. He broke the long silence by asking unbidden the ultimate ontological question: “Daddy, who made God?”

This issue contains two marvelously thoughtful and thought-provoking articles that approach my son’s question. Karl Giberson begins by observing that timelines of the history of the universe shown in freshman astronomy textbooks often begin with a question mark. Science has pushed all the way back to the Big Bang but not before it. In fact, there is a debate within the scientific community about whether the matter of ultimate causation is even a scientific question.

Giberson cites Freeman Dyson, a distinguished scholar and not a conventional believer: “The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense knew that we were coming.”