Religion in an Age of Science by Ian Barbour
Chapter 5: Astronomy and Creation
IV. Theological Implications
1. Intelligibility and Contingency
existence of humanity. He concludes,
[God] would, of course, still have had the freedom to choose the laws that the universe obeyed. This, however, may not really have been all that much of a choice; there may well be only one, or a small number, of complete unified theories, such as the heterotic string theory, that are self-consistent and allow the existence of structures as complicated as human beings who can investigate the laws of the universe and ask about the nature of God.
Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the
equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe.34
Hawking says here that the equations of a unified theory could not answer the question of why there is a universe at all. Yet his final paragraph seems to hold out the hope that a complete scientific theory may someday answer just that question:
However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - - for then we would know the mind of God.35
the conviction that the cosmos is rationally intelligible. Physicists must, of course, check their theories against experimental evidence, but they are convinced that a valid general theory will be conceptually simple and aesthetically beautiful. To the critical realist, simplicity in our theories reflects a simplicity in the world and not just in our minds.
Einstein said that the only thing that is incomprehensible about the world is that it is comprehensible.
Historically, the conviction that the cosmos is unified and intelligible had both Greek and biblical roots. The Greeks, and later the Stoics in the Roman world, saw the universe as a single system. The Greek philosophers had great confidence in the power of reason, and it is not surprising that they made significant progress in mathematics and geometry. But historians have claimed that the biblical doctrine of creation made a distinctive contribution to the rise of experimental science because it combined the ideas of rationality and contingency.
(This was cited in chapter 1 as an example of the boundary questions discussed by advocates of the Dialogue position.) If God is rational, the world is orderly; but if God is also free, the world did not have to have the particular order that it has. The world can then be understood only by observing it, rather than by deducing its order from necessary first principles, as the Greeks tried to do.36 The church fathers said that God voluntarily created form as well as matter ex nihilo, rather than
imposing preexisting eternal forms on matter.
Thomas Torrance has written extensively on the theme of "contingent order." He stresses God’s freedom in creating as an act of voluntary choice. God alone is infinitely free, and both the existence and the structure of the world are contingent in the sense that they might not have been. The world might have been differently ordered. We can discover its order only by observation. Moreover, the world can be studied on its own because in being created it has its own independent reality, distinct from the transcendent God. Science can legitimately assume a "methodological secularism" in its work, while the theologian can still assert that the world is ultimately dependent on God.37
Einstein, on the other hand, saw any contingency as a threat to belief in the rationality of the world, which he said is central in science. "A
conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a high order."38 He spoke of a "cosmic religious sense" and "a deep faith in the rationality of the world." He rejected the idea of a personal God whose acts arbitrarily
interfere in the course of events; he subscribed to a form of pantheism, identifying God with the orderly structure itself. When asked if he believed in God, he replied, "I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists."39 Einstein equated rationality with orderliness and determinism; he never abandoned his conviction that the uncertainties of quantum theory only reflect temporary human ignorance, which will be left behind when the
deterministic underlying mechanisms are discovered. He felt that Bohr’s ideas of paradox and complementarity were a departure from rationality.
He was mainly concerned about the necessity of events, but he also thought that the laws of physics are logically necessary. In a similar vein, Geoffrey Chew holds that all the laws of physics will be uniquely derivable from the requirement of self-consistency alone.40
The physicist James Trefil describes the search for unified laws in cosmology, and in an epilogue he writes,
But who created those laws?. . . Who made the laws of logic?. . . 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 marvelous universe inevitable than I do with the old-
fashioned God who had to make it all, laboriously, piece by piece.41
Here the assumption seems to be that of deism rather than pantheism:
the laws of physics are contingent but events governed by those laws are
"inevitable."
John Polkinghorne, physicist and theologian, discusses the intelligibility of the world in a theistic framework. The key to understanding the physical world is mathematics, an invention of the human mind. The fit between reason in our minds and in the world would be expected if the world is the creation of mind. God is the common ground of rationality in our minds and in the world. Orderliness can also be understood as God’s faithfulness, but it does not exclude an important role for chance.
Polkinghorne invokes the early Christian concept of logos, which, as we have seen, combined the Greek idea of a rational ordering principle and the Hebrew idea of the active Word of God. He maintains that the theist can account for the intelligibility that the scientist assumes.42
Robert Russell makes a helpful distinction between global, nomological, and local contingency.43 In the light of my earlier discussion of
cosmology, I suggest a fourfold distinction by adding the second point below:
1. Contingent Existence. Why is there anything at all? This is the
question of greatest interest to theologians. The existence of the cosmos as a whole is not self-explanatory, regardless of whether it is finite or infinite in time. The details of particular scientific cosmologies are irrelevant to the contingency of the existence of the world. Even if a theory shows that there is only one possible universe, the universe would still only remain possible; nothing in the theory provides that a universe actually exists or that the theory is instantiated.44
2. Contingent Boundary Conditions. If there was a beginning, it was a singularity to which the laws of physics do not apply, and as such it cannot be scientifically explained. If time is infinite, there would be no beginning, but at any point in time, no matter how far back, one would have to postulate a particular state of affairs, treating it as a "given."
Hawking’s theory may avoid contingent boundary conditions, but the interpretation of imaginary time in his theory seems problematic.
3. Contingent Laws. Many of the laws of cosmology appear to be
arbitrary. But some of them may turn out to be necessary implications of more fundamental theories. If a unified theory is found, however, it will itself be contingent. Insofar as it is required by laws of logic (for
example, two-valued logic), those laws reflect axioms that are not necessary in any absolute sense. Moreover, some laws applicable to higher emergent levels of life and mind are not derivable from the laws of physics. Such higher laws would only be instantiated with the novel occurrence of the phenomena they describe. It is misleading to refer to a unified theory in physics as a "Theory of Everything," for its unity would be achieved only by a very high degree of abstraction that leaves out all of the diversity and particularity of events in the world and the emergence of more complex levels of organization from simpler ones.
We could hardly expect a TOE to tell us very much about an amoeba, much less about Shakespeare, Beethoven, or Newton.
4. Contingent Events. To the critical realist, uncertainty in quantum physics reflects indeterminacy in the world and not simply the limitations of our knowledge. (Similar contingency is present in the
bifurcations of nonequilibrium thermodynamics, random mutations in evolution, and freedom in human life.) We have seen that quantum phenomena played a role in the very early history of the Big Bang. The cosmos is a unique and irreversible sequence of events. Our account of it must take a historical form rather than consisting of general laws alone. The most important questions are not about beginnings but about subsequent historical events.
Of course, many scientists today are atheists or agnostics and confine themselves to strictly scientific questions. Yet wider reflection on
cosmology seems to be an important way of raising what the theologian David Tracy calls "limit questions."45 At the personal level,
cosmologists often express a sense of mystery and awe at the power unleashed in the Big Bang and the occurrence of phenomena at the limits of our experience, language, and thought. If there was an initial singularity, it appears to be inaccessible to science. At the philosophical level, cosmology encourages the examination of our presuppositions about time and space, law and chance, necessity and contingency.
Above all, the intelligibility of the cosmos suggests questions that arise in science but cannot be answered within science itself.