LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING
Whatever happened to Bunsen burners and copper sulphate crystals? School science was always so straightforward in the old days - even if you couldn’t understand it very well! At least science was science, maths was maths, French was French and history was boring.But over the last 20 years there has been a revolution in science, although the schools are only just catching up with it. And it’s no coincidence that the vague and all-embracing New Age Movement has flourished alongside Quantum Theory, the New Physics, New Biology and Chaos theory. Fractals go hand in hand with Acid House parties, and Schrödinger’s Cat is now the mystical symbol of enlightenment! No idea what any of those terms mean? Then read on.
All things bright and beautiful...
Two of the cornerstones of Christian apologetic have traditionally been the arguments from the observed universe: that there must surely be a Designer behind this complex fabric; and that there appears to be Purpose behind humanity’s existence. They have always been under fire from a small minority of scientists and philosophers, but never more so than at the present time.
Design
The argument from Design goes back to Genesis Chapter 1, David (Psalm 19), Paul (Romans 1.20), Aquinas in the 13th century and was popularised by William Paley in the 18th.
Suppose you were to find a watch floating through outer space. You would be unlikely to deduce that this was just a random collection of molecules which space and time had thrown together. You would conclude that anything this complex was designed for a purpose and that there must be a designer. The universe is a far more complex construct than any watch and a human being is the most elaborate of all known mechanisms, vastly sophisticated in even its most simple functions.
If you are fit enough, you can balance on one leg, hop on to a chair, steady yourself and hop off again. We can make a machine to land on the moon, but we can’t make one that will hop on to a chair!
The Blind Watchmaker
The Scottish philosopher, David Hume had pointed out weaknesses in the Design argument back in the 18th century, but Richard Dawkins has argued that it was only developed Darwinism (neo-Darwinism) which offered an alternative explanation for the complexity of life. His book, The Blind Watchmaker, is full of wonder, but not directed towards a personal Designer/God, rather towards the amazing process of cumulative selection - tiny changes in the long evolutionary saga that can lead to fernseeds and elephants, gnats and Mozarts.
In other words, tiny, simple, ‘random’ changes, which follow the laws of physics, can lead eventually to mind-boggling complexity. And this is where Chaos Theory has recently come into the scientific drama.
Order out of Chaos
“Oh, everything has its rules, even the unruly”, Ooze said. (A great line from Amanda & The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer - see the book list.) Sometime in the mid 80’s, chaos became Chaos and neo-scientists began to assert that the study of disorder is the key to understanding order. The keystone of this is the Butterfly Effect - the knowledge that, whatever the TV weather person may say, a butterfly flapping it’s wings in rural Kent can eventually produce a hurricane in China. In evangelical terms, a shoeshop conversation can lead to the conversion of Moody, Billy Graham, and several present British bishops!
GUTs (Grand Unified Theories) and TOEs (Theories of Everything) have been around in the new physics for some decades now, but Chaos Theory is another way of trying to fit in not only earthquakes and quasars, but beauty and worship. It offers a global solution to understanding everything, and incidentally, through the Mandelbrot Set (not Acid House freaks with patterned T-shirts, but a set of mathematical equations), can produce the most beautiful designs, called “fractals”.
These patterns, which occur throughout the natural world from coastlines to snowflakes, can also be generated on home computers. The simple equations produce the most complex designs, which when examined more closely, themselves contain just as intricate a pattern. Paisley pyjamas or a drop of milk falling on to a still surface of milk can be examples of fractal patterns.
Chaos and Capitalism
All this maths and philosophy is not confined to the academic elite. House (a boppy style of contemporary music) clubs, and Acid House parties (on their way out now) often use fractals by way of decoration, with all the overtones of the psychedelic drug trips of the 60’s. And after a lull in the 70’s and 80’s, the mystical drawings of William Blake are coming back into fashion again. There are cyberdelic videos, comics and films and together with all the other SciFi coming out of the New Physics (Terry Pratchett’s fun Discworld series, Frank Herbert’s monumental Dune saga, Star Wars and, most recently, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - ask your children!) New Age science is Big Money.
Simplicity and Complexity
Some talk of fractal maths doing away with the need for God, while others see it as God’s thumbprint on the universe; a signature on the lower left hand corner of the cosmos. But for most, it all points to the New Age god, found within yourself and everything. It has the universal inclusiveness of Eastern religion, where we are all absorbed into the Oneness; yet the individualistic, particularism of Western Christianity, with its emphasis on self-fulfilment and self-understanding. That’s a powerful synthesis.
This is partly a reaction to the fragmentation of science, philosophy and theology in the last century and most of this century.“Holism” has tried to take everything into account and produce an overarching philosophy of life and science. Read one of Hofstadter’s comprehensive works such as Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Penguin, £8.95) or, a little lighter, Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (Pan, £3.95). Biblical Christianity at its best already has this Unity in diversity: the Trinity. It already embraces the complex within the simple. In Christ we become more fully ourselves while becoming part of the Whole - the Church and the cosmos summed up in Christ. (Col.1) We can out-New Age the New Agers if we just preach the Bible!
Why are we all Here?
Alongside the Design argument for the belief in a creator God, is the argument of Purpose, or the Teleological argument: that there is Direction in the universe. Out of the simple has come the complex because God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year. In the last few years this has sometimes been expressed in terms of the Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP - there is also a WAP [Weak..] and FAP [Final..]).
This can be simply expressed thus: of all the possible universes that could exist, this one does exist, because we are here observing it. “Not very profound”, I hear you thinking. But an infinitesimally slight change in any of the physical constants governing the universe would result in a cosmos in which human life was impossible. So the constants which we observe and measure must be such that we can exist to observe them. Read the inset about Schrödinger’s Cat and then forget about this paragraph.
SCHRÖDINGER’S CATA Brief History of Time
This is a thought exercise to illustrate the strange ‘truth’ of quantum physics.
At a more microscopic level than atoms (sub-atomic), only energy, probability and patterns exist. Furthermore, how it exists - the form of reality which we see - depends upon our observation of what is happening. The observation somehow makes it happen in any one of a particular number of ways.
Imagine a cat in a box. A box with a vial of cyanide and a little mechanical hammer that can break the glass vial, release the cyanide and so kill the cat. Suppose the hammer is triggered by a random sub-atomic event such as the decay of a radioactive particle. There is a 50/50 chance that the cat will get the chop. So has the event happened and is the cat dead? Open the box!
Now quantum physics requires us to believe that the ‘electron’ that starts the chain of events does not make up its mind whether is kills the cat or not until we look in on it. It requires us to believe that there are two ghostly alternatives already there: a dead cat and a live cat. Only when we look, does one of the ghosts disappear. Bizarre? You ain’t see nothing yet! As Bertrand Russell wryly commented about the absurdity of the particles we call matter -“Matter is merely a convenient word for describing what happens where it isn’t!”
Now this only affects the subatomic, micro world. But there is more than a suggestion in the Strong Anthropic Principle that this process is at work in the macro world of real cats and people. The physicist and New Ager Fritjof Capra finds striking parallels between quantum theory and Eastern mysticism.“Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science; but man needs both.” (The Tao of Physics)
Stephen Hawking is the charismatic and remarkable wheelchair-bound Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, best known for his work on Black Holes and cosmology. His book A Brief History of Time is so much of a best-seller that it can still afford to be exclusively in hardback! The first few chapters are all good stuff on physics, cosmology and the wonder of the universe. The excitement bubbling through it and the relative simplicity of explanation account for much of its popularity. But aided and abetted by Karl Sagan’s introduction, it soon strays into bad theology. A God-of-the-gaps is set up and gently knocked down. God is relegated to a nice idea with no personal involvement in the cosmos, and this too contributes to the book’s popularity; a condescending dismissal of Christianity.
Hawking dislikes scientific humbug and unnecessary mystery - elsewhere he has said that he reaches for a gun whenever Schrödinger’s Cat is mentioned! But he oversteps the mark when he concludes that God (if there is one) no longer intervenes in his universe. And as for Karl Sagan, it might well have been him of whom the physicist Landau said “cosmologists are seldom right, but never in doubt!”
I will not repeat what Roy Peacock has done so well in A Brief History of Eternity - a response to Hawking. It is sufficient to say that although Hawking describes the“how” of the universe as we presently understand it, and very well too, he cannot proceed from there to the“why” with which he grapples.
By Faith
The writer to the Hebrews reminds us that it is“by faith we understand the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.” (Heb.11.3) All the developments in physics, cosmology, Chaos theory, and even Schrödinger’s Cat point us to the wonder of the God whom the Bible and our hearts reveal as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let the New Agers hang on to their fuzzy abstractions if they like, but as for me, I will explore the universe hand-in-hand with the Maker.
A CHRISTIAN RESPONSE
1. Examination & Excitement
If the Big Bang is how things began, then everything in our bodies (apart from hydrogen) has been processed through at least one star, at least a thousand million years ago! Read some of the books and articles on all this. It’s exciting and makes you want to skip with God, which even CS Lewis knew when he wrote The Magician’s Nephew. Science is theologically neutral, even if the authors of science books aren’t. And remember that science is often wrong, but still exciting. Enjoy it, but maintain a healthy scepticism.
2. Exposure
Whether it is zany New Age theories or the theological ramblings of eminent scientists, we must point out what science can tell us and what it can’t. Never be intimidated by the conclusions of clever scientists. They have no more right to tell us what we can believe, than footballers do to tell us what we should eat for breakfast!
3. Extremism
Some Christians always feel under attack and therefore over-react to much of the pseudo-scientific New Age material. They rush to an extreme that says it must be of the Devil because some intellectuals use the new discoveries to undermine trust in God. We can turn many of the new insights into the cosmos into opportunities to point to the Creator. For some it may mean some re-interpreting of their faith, keeping in line with the Bible. But that painful process has been going on in all men and women of faith since Adam and Eve were thrown out of the garden. We have nothing to fear but our fears. All truth points to God, and all falsehood will be shown as such.
More Chaotic Reading
* start with these three if you really are a novice. They will whet your appetite for more!
Chaos by James Gleick (Cardinal, 5.99) is a ‘popular’ history of Chaos Theory and easier to read than Ilya Prigogine’s and Isabelle Stengers’s Order Out of Chaos (Heinemann, £9.95). Ian Stewart’s paperback Does God Play Dice? (Penguin, £6.99) takes up Einstein’s fascinating comment regarding ‘chance’ in the cosmos“God does not play dice”. (Stewart concludes, incidentally, that if God did play dice, he would win!) The treatment is very mathematical in places and John Houghton’s book of the same title * Does God Play Dice? (IVP, £3.95) is more general and covers a much wider field, concentrating more on cosmology and God’s involvement in the world than chaos theory. The science is still difficult in places but not beyond the persistent non-scientist.
Richard Dawkins is very readable, but even so, both his strong defences of neo-Darwinism, The Selfish Gene (OUP, £5.95) and The Blind Watchmaker (Penguin, £4.95) take some determination to get through.
Look through a copy of i-D in a newsagent to see if you can cope with the style and then get April’s (1990) chaos issue (no.79, 2) which looks at youth culture, House music and chaos theory.
If you want a really weird novel which the Washington Post described as ‘A sexy, dazzling, high-flying blend of funk, fantasy, physics and feminism’, then read Amanda & The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer by Carol Hill (Bloomsbury, £4.95). It’s good science, ecologically sound, theologically off the wall and a great read!
The First Three Minutes is a mind-bending exploration of the origins of the Universe and Big Bang theory (Steven Weinberg, Fontana, £2.50) which Adam Ford contemplates, together with evolution and some broader issues in Universe: God, Man and Science (Hodders, £6.95). John Polkinghorne was Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge before he became a vicar (and now Master of Queen’s College Cambridge) and all his books are stimulating in this area, particularly his latest Science and Providence - God’s Interaction with the World (SPCK, £5.95).
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (Bantam, £14.95 & now in paperback as well) is ably discussed by Roy Peacock in * A Brief History of Eternity (Monarch, £6.99) which is much cheaper and saves your having to buy Hawking.
Fritjof Capra’s classic works on the new physics and its reinforcement of Eastern mysticism and New Age in general are worth dipping into: The Tao of Physics (Fontana, £3.95) and The Turning Point (Fontana, £4.95). A more sober, fascinating and well-written treatment comes from Paul Davies in * God and the New Physics (Dent, £8.95).
There are lots of other books that could be mentioned but why not read some good book reviews on most of the above and keep abreast of what’s going on in this whole area, by subscribing to Science & Christian Belief (Paternoster Press, 3 Mount Radford Crescent, Exeter, Devon, EX2 4JW, £9.40 p.a.) the 1989 and 1990 issues are all relevant and generally accessible to the non-scientist.
