And maybe book into the conference? With Andy Crouch as main speaker it should be an interesting day.

When a scientist who believes in God tells the story of their life it really does the question, ‘Can a scientist be a person of faith?’, justice. It’s hard to answer the question properly otherwise.

I can understand why, if you have problems with religion, this might be the question you want to focus on. But if you are a Christian then it’s hard to have any decent theology of creation and still be stuck on this question. OK, you might have problems with specific products of science, but most of the time that’s a side issue. (See also a very old post: Getting Our Terms Straight.) Christians need to build a good theology of science and understand how it fits into our larger picture of creation. We need to move beyond compatibility questions and think about how we act as Christians in science. We need to stop bringing up the contentious issues every time the relationship is mentioned and start thinking more widely.

And, of course, the ultimate way beyond the compatibility question is not to argue and argue, but for Christians to get on and do good science. To be the ones who are increasing knowledge, acting responsibly and taking the questions seriously.

… humans are not automatons, bound by iron necessity to their environment, but exercise a freedom, an openness that God has granted them. And this itself can be set in a wider context, for such freedom, presuming it is not an illusion, is part of and testifies to the openness with which God has endowed his entire creation.

I want to come back to this and push it in a different direction.

I posted a while ago with the idea of viewing creation as responding to the God’s call. That God’s acting in creation can be thought of as a call/summons to the created order. I think this metaphor fits nicely with Begbie’s observation of openness in creation. Perhaps we can suggest that one characteristic of calling is a level of indeterminacy. Creation is called to a goal, but is not constrained along a particular route. There are aspects of order — the call must be obeyed — and aspects of freedom — the way it is obeyed is flexible.

Again, this links in with another quote discussed previously, this time from Lawrence Osborn:

True, the creative commands set limit upon creaturely existence — the impose order upon the formlessness and void. But, at the same time, they hold out the possibility of tremendous variety in the unfolding of creation within those limits.

In his book Resounding Truth, Jeremy Begbie emphasises that creation has a flexible order — there is structure but in our development of the world we are not tightly bound to that structure. Primarily thinking about music, he puts it like this:

Before leaving the issue of the givenness of sonic order, we should … remind ourselves that it is not to be understood in inflexible ways. For … we are able to shape it. This itself points to the fact that humans are not automatons, bound by iron necessity to their environment, but exercise a freedom, an openness that God has granted them. And this itself can be set in a wider context, for such freedom, presuming it is not an illusion, is part of and testifies to the openness with which God has endowed his entire creation.

So, perhaps we can put it this way: Maths both discovers and develops the order that God has embedded in creation. It reflects the glory of God that we see order and can follow the consequences of that order in ways that demonstrate richness and beauty. But, also, we are not constrained by that order. We have the freedom to develop it in new directions. So, for example, we can imagine what the world might be like if it had 11 dimensions instead of 4 and we are free to pursue that and discover the consequences of our conjecture. In some sense, we develop the order beyond what is intrinsically given.

Again, in Begbie’s words:

We are called not only to discover and respect but also to develop. To be an image bearer of the God who himself develops created realities, improvising through his Spirit freely on the given order as he draws things towards their goal, means we will find ourselves bringing about new entities in the world by selecting, re-forming, combining what we are given. We take cocoa pods and transform them into chocolate; we take blues bass and improvise somthing never heard before. However small our patch of creativity, we are to enable creation to find fresh, perhaps even richer forms.

Let’s drop in a couple of quotes here and, hopefully, come back and discuss the two ideas again in the future.

So, for the first aspect:

Now that we have put science in its proper context, we can turn to the question of why it works so well. I believe the answer is simple: Science has succeeded because scientists comprise a community that is defined and maintained by adherence to a shared ethic. It is adherence to an ethic, not adherence to any particular fact or theory, that I believe serves as the fundamental corrective within the scientific community.

Of course, you then have to define the ethic. I’ll leave that as a cliff-hanger and come back to it

Smolin clarifies this by going on to say

I would call this kind of community, in which membership is defined by adherence to a code of ethics and the practice of crafts developed to realise them, an ethical community. Science, I would propose, is the purest example we have of such a community.

He goes on to say:

But it is not sufficient to characterise science as an ethical community, because some ethical communities exist to preserve old knowledge rather than discover new truths. Religious communities, in many cases, satisfy the criteria for being ethical communities. … So, if our characterisation of science is to have teeth, we must add some criteria that cleanly distinguish a physics department from a monastery.

Interesting that we have a similar match up between science and monasticism in mind. Indeed, as Smolin notes, science evolved from monasteries and other religious communities.

[An aside: as I type this I am intrigued that in this quote ethical corresponds to preservation or discovery of knowledge rather than encouragement of certain behaviours. Interesting...]

Anyway, the need to distinguish science and religion takes Smolin to the additional criteria:

To do this, I would like to add a second notion, which I call an imaginative community. This is a community whose ethic and organisation incorporates a belief in the inevitability of progress and an openness to the future.

Obviously, here we have a similar idea, but probably a divergent definition of imaginative community. Another discussion I will leave to a later date…

OK, lets ponder around an interesting quote from Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics.

…there are different ways that physics can be unified, and we should be careful to distinguish them. So far we have been discussing unification through a single law. It is hard to see how anyone could disagree that this is a necessary goal.

But there are other ways to unify the world. Einstein, who certainly thought as much about this as anyone, emphasised that we must distinguish two kinds of theories. There are theories of principle and constructive theories. A theory of principle is one that sets up the framework that makes a description of nature possible By definition, a theory of principle must be universal: It must apply to everything because it sets out the basic language we use to talk about nature. … Because the world is a unity, everything intersects ultimately with everything else, and there can be only on language used to describe those interactions.

The other kind of theories, constructive theories, describe some particular phenomenon in terms of specific models or equations. … Such a theory cannot stand alone, it must be set within the context of a theroy of principle. But, as long as the theory of principle allows, there can be phenomena that obey different laws.

I’ve floated the idea before (more that once) that unification might not be a necessary goal from a theistic point of view: Perhaps then it is not unreasonable that we have multiple interlocking theories, brought together by a single mind?

In the back of my mind I had a worry with this line of thought — it is clear in modern physics that quantum theory and relativity have to be reconciled in some way. This quote settles my mind — the necessary reconciliation of quantum and relativity theories is, in the first instance, one of principle. On the other had, I think my suggestion is that theism can cope without a constructive unification.

In fact, Smolin makes a closely related point

…it is still possible to ask whether all the forces we observe in nature might be manifestations of a single, fundamental force. There seems, as far as I can tell, no logical argument that this should be true, but it is still something that might be true.

I guess I am proposing that a theist may have less drive towards such a unified theory than others.

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Postscript: I have a slight query over how this last quote fits with Smolin’s assertion “…it is hard to see how anyone could disagree that [unification through a single law] is a necessary goal.” On the face of there seems to be a conflict here — if there is no fundamental force, then isn’t there a lack of a single law? Maybe I’m missing his point somewhere.

The motivating theme is his worry over the extreme bias towards String Theory. In his view, given the problems inherent in the theory, there should be significantly more diversity in research other options and rival theories. To focus on this one option is a disaster because of the likelihood that most physicists are following each other down a dead end.

This leads to a parallel theme — the general need to promote as much diversity in scientific research as possible. Smolin’s view is that it is the people with maverick ideas (and who have the boldness to follow them up regardless) who lead us forward in our understanding of the world and our system must find a way to accommodate these people effectively.

To support and illustrate these ideas, the book nicely gives a survey of physics in recent history and as it stands — including the developement of relativity and quantum theories, the state of String Theory (and M-Theory, etc.) and some of the more interesting alternatives. The discussion of alternatives is very welcome — they tend not to be covered in many for-the-layman books; certainly not some many alternatives. As for his description of Strings: Despite superficial attempts to be fair, Smolin does not leave the reader with much confidence in them. (And, you have to say, he does stack the deck somewhat in his historical and philosophical discussions.)

Finally, the book ends with a discussion of the philosophy and character of science. Obviously, given my focus in this blog, this was a section I particularly looked forward to. Strangely then, when I got to it I didn’t manage to maintain the enthusiasm I’d had up to that point. Not that I didn’t enjoy it & there weren’t interesting ideas, but perhaps they didn’t quite match the radicalness that marked the physics discussions.

But, overall, a very enjoyable read. The discussion of Strings is illuminating and the arguments for diversity are provoking.

Over the next few posts, I’m going to pull out some random quotes that fit with discussions here (in one way or another). These are not particularly representative of the book as a whole, but are thiings that caught my interest…

The first great thing about the book are that it asks the right questions. As I have bemoaned elsewhere, most books on Christianity and science are basically reacting to the discoveries of science and looking at the consequences, correspondences or challenges for Christian belief. Far too seldom is science itself discussed from within a Christian worldview. Morris & Petcher have noticed this lack and have tried to redress the balance. For that alone, it is good to have this book around.

Second, I appreciated the background overviews — looking, for example, at Christians who, very early on, detracted from the enlightenment perspective. Morris & Petcher’s historical overviews are very clear and helpful, and a real highlight. In fact, a book just on the historical figures they identify and exploring their ideas in more depth would have made a great book in itself.

Also, as Steve Bishop noted, it is great to see this book take the post-modern perspective seriously.

However, my enthusiasm for the book waned a little as I went through it. Some of this might have been due to differences of perspective between the authors and myself. However, where I found my view challenged I was not unhappy… I guess I never felt the theology was robust enough or focused enough to allow carry the discussion.

Maybe the core issue for me is that I didn’t really feel particularly inspired by their discussion — the ‘big picture’ was not drawn clearly enough to make me feel that science has a valuable and exciting place in the Christian view. As I’ve said, more than once, I’m not sure that the book emphasised the value of creation sufficiently to allow science a signifiant role.

Despite these negatives, I’m very pleased that Science and Grace exists — it helps immensely to point the conversation in the right direction. I hope that it inspires further discussions to get us to a fuller and richer perspective/theology of science.