Ken Smith wrote:

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.

———————————

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.

———————————

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.

———————————

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.

———————————

That’s enough for one post.

Don:

Especially since it is all of questionable relevance to the subject at

hand, which is (again) “How are we meant to understand Genesis?”

What are these tedious extended quotations meant to show? That

scientists can pontificate about ‘religion’, or have religious

thoughts? So what? Even demons believe in the existence of God; but

they are closer to the truth than many big name scientists who hold

forth on religion, because at least the demons believe that there is

one true God (James 2:19), not some pantheistic ‘god of the

equations’, or some such.

The deist Thomas Paine would be happy with these statements by these

scientists. Paine’s anti-Christian nonsense is refuted here:

http://www.tektonics.org/lp/painet01.html (most village atheist web

sites still trumpet Paine’s outmoded arguments).

Is evolution ‘anti-religion’? It depends.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v22/i4/antireligion.asp

Don