This is the first of what I expect will be a number of postings simply providing quotations from various scientists, and, occasionally, from a religious non-scientist who mentions scientific matters. They will cover the nature of science and the procedures used by scientists, philosophical ideas, comments about religion, and, in short, anything which relates to the discussion about interpreting the Bible in this scientific age.

I will not be adding any comments, but will let the writers speak for themselves. In contrast to the modern `sound-bite’ idea these will not be short, pithy comments, but will cover at least a complete paragraph in the author’s published books, so that the context of the words can be understood.

I will only quote from published books, or articles in collections of essays, and not from any secondary writings which may cite these works, to ensure that the actual words of the writers are quoted correctly.

And I’ll do my best to make each post not longer than about 200 lines.

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John Barrow, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Sussex, writes in the first paragraph of the Preface in “The World Within the World” (Oxford University Press, 1988):

In recent years there has been a vast increase in the publication rate of so-called `popular’ science books. Regardless of whether they do indeed turn out to be popular with anybody but their authors, their common aim has been to explain in simple terms the constant stream of new ideas and discoveries that have emerged in the fundamental sciences during the last decade. In this book the aim is not simply to pick up again upon one of these esoteric fields at the frontiers of fundamental science and attempt to explain it in simple terms. Rather, it is to pick upon the traditional unspoken assumptions to which we owe all these abstract and pragmatic developments: that the universe is ordered, that it is logical, that it is mathematical, that it is predictable, that it is governed by something outside ourselves which is the same everywhere and everywhen, but which has a deep resonance with the workings of our own minds: to explore something of the origin and possible meanings of the idea that there exist `laws of nature’ and some of the unsuspected realms that such an idea has led us. This quest will lead us from pre-history to the evolutionary development of key notions in fundamental physical science and the attendant philosophy it has helped to shape. Time and again it will bring us back to old questions in a new guise: sharpened, widened, and deepened by the unvisualizable worlds of inner and outer space where we find Nature’s logic laid bare by that complexity masquerading as simplicity that we have come to recognize as the hallmark of all natural phenomena. Are there really laws of Nature that exist out there independently of our way of thinking waiting to be discovered, or are they just the most convenient way of describing things that we have been able to write down? Are these natural laws the same everywhere? Are there places where they cease to hold? Can they change with time? Indeed, is it possible that there aren’t really any laws of Nature at all? Why is the language of mathematics found to offer us such a ready translation of the Universe’s workings? What are the implications of our own existence for our interpretation of the Universe’s structure? Do we have the intellectual capability to understand the deepest principles behind the harmony and complexity of Nature?

On page 365, in a paragraph which is part of a section entitled “Is the Anthropic Principle an argument for the existence of God?” Barrow writes:

There are two simple things about well-meaning logical and scientific quests for the existence of God (or gods). The logical arguments are all of a piece. They begin with some assumptions (`axioms’ as the logicians like to call them), and then proceed to deduce the existence of God by a series of inexorable logical steps. But in the last analysis we are left not with a conclusion, but a choice. Only if we believe the assumptions at the outset must we believe the conclusions. There cannot be an ineluctable logical proof of God’s existence or non-existence. There will always be a choice about the credibility of assumptions. Furthermore, one suspects that even the great propounders of logical arguments for the existence of God, like Thomas Aquinas, had a personal faith that would not have been perturbed one iota by the undermining of their logical or scientific demonstrations, because it was grounded elsewhere. By the same token, they could not honestly have expected their arguments to sway anyone else to accept their conclusion.

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John Barrow, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Sussex, writes on page xii in the Preface of “The Origin of the Universe” ( Wedenfeld and Nicholson, 1994):

The various creation stories of ancient times were not scientific theories in any modern sense. They did not attempt to reveal anything new about the structure of the world; they aimed simply to remove the specter of the unknown from human imaginings. By defining their place within the hierarchy of creation, the ancients could relate the world to themselves and avoid the terrible consideration of the unknown or the unknowable. Modern scientific accounts need to achieve much more than this. They must be deep enough to tell us more aboutthe universe than what we have put into them. And they must be broad enough to make predictions, as a check on their credentials to explain the things we already know about the world. They should bring coherence and unity to collections of disconnected facts.

On page 110 Barrow writes:

Despite the confidence with which some modern cosmologists have addressed questions about the origin of the universe — a confidence that has seen the publication of research papers bearing titles like “The Creation of the Universe out of Nothing” — one should be cautious. All these theories need to assume at the outset the existence of a good deal more than one’s everyday conception of “nothing” in order to say anything of interest. In the beginning, there must exist laws of nature (the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, in our discussion), energy, mass, geometry; and, of course, underpinning everything seems to be the ubiquitous world of mathematics and logic. There needs to be a considerable substructure of rationality before any complete explanation for the universe can be erected and sustained. It is this underlying rationality that most modern theologians emphasize when questioned about the role of God in the universe. They do not regard the Deity as simply the Great Initiator of the expansion of the universe.

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James Trefil is Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia. In his book “The Moment of Creation: Big Bang Physics from before the First Millisecond to the Present Universe” (Macmillan, 1983) the final section (on pages 221-223) is entitled “What About God?”, and reads:

When I talk to my friends about the fact that the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed relentlessly back toward the moment of creation, I am often asked about the religious implications of the new physics. That there are such implications is obvious, particularly in the speculations about how the universe came into existence in the first place. Physicists normally feel very uncomfortable with this sort of question, since it cannot be answered by the normal methods of our science. For what it is worth, I will give my own personal views on the subject here, with the caveat that these views may not be shared by other scientists.

It seems to me that the unease people feel when they think about the sort of scientific advance implicit in the new physics arises from a notion that applying the techniques of science to the creation of the universe is somehow encroaching on terrain that has been staked out by religion. I imagine that this is how our ancestors felt in the nineteenth century when Darwin finally bit the bullet and applied the laws of evolutionary biology to human beings. Yet, in retrospect, we can see that the fact that human beings evolved from lower life forms does not damage the central tenets of anyone’s religious beliefs. To take Christianity as an example, evolution is simply irrelevant to the doctrine of salvation through faith or any other important teaching.

I suspect that if we are successful in understanding the mysteries of the moment of creation, our descendants will have much the same attitude toward that fact as we have toward evolution. The reason for this expectation has to do with the nature of the scientific process. No matter how deeply we probe into any scientific subject, we will always find something unexplained and undefined. Medieval philosophers took the earth as given and attributed its existence to the special creative work of God. In the nineteenth century, it was realized that the existence of the solar system followed naturally from the law of gravitation and the existence of the galaxy, and in this century we have discovered that the existence of the galaxy is a natural consequence of the Big Bang. In all of these cases, the frontiers of knowledge have been pushed back by the discovery of new laws of nature. At each step, however, there was a point at which one could say, “Our scientific knowledge has brought us this far; beyond this point we may, if we wish, postulate a special creation.”

It now appears that our new discoveries of the laws that govern the nature of elementary particles may allow us to push the frontiers back to the very creation of the universe itself. This does not, however, alter the fact that there is a frontier. All it does is to transfer our attention from the material form of the universe to the laws that govern its behaviour. I can hear a twenty-first century philosopher saying, “Very well, we agree that the universe exists because of the laws of physics. But who created those laws?” And even if, as some physicists have suggested, the laws of physics we discover are the only laws that are logically consistent with each other (and therefore the only laws that could exist), our philosopher would ask, “Who made the laws of logic?”

My message, then, to those who feel that science is overstepping its bounds when it probes the early universe is simple: don’t worry. No matter how far the boundaries are pushed back, there will always be room both for religious faith and a religious interpretation of the physical world.

For myself, I feel much more comfortable with the concept of a God who is clever enough to devise the laws of physics that make the existence of our marvellous universe inevitable than I do with the old-fashioned God who had to make it all, laboriously, piece by piece.

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That’s enough for one post.

Salaam

Dr Ken Smith