From the dawn of time till now, man has looked up to the heavens with awe, asking innumerable questions and posing the God-hypothesis. Thousands of years later, his offspring still yearn to know the truth about everything and behind everything. We probe further and further with our telescopes and closer and closer with our microscopes. We are hard to discourage and not particularly humble in assessing our capabilities and our achievements. The aim of this article is to draw on some points of dialogue between man's scientific discoveries in the field of physics and his insatiable search for God, gnawing at the question of whether in the tertio millenio adveniente it is still rational to believe in God.

In 1980, Stephen W. Hawking, who holds Newton's chair as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, had the audacity to suggest that we had in fact come so far that before the end of this century we might find a theory that would explain everything that is happening, has happened, or ever will happen in the universe (a Theory of Everything, or TOE). Eight years later, in his A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam Books, 1988), he was to write that after we have such a theory in hand, we might just go on to know the 'Mind of God.' If 'the Mind of God' is a eupehmism for the sum of all laws of physics, then 'God' is not beyond the reach of science. But Hawking has written: "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 scientific approach of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the question of why there should be a universe for the model to describe.

Most books on cosmology are usually confined to a rather select clientele. Not so, Hawking's book. Published in 1988, it has sold 5.5 million hardback copies world-wide. It has inspired newspaper articles, theological papers, books, a TV film and even a film about the making of the film. But why should a book which deals with such everyday (!) concepts as 26 dimensional spaces and quantum theories of gravity become such a best-seller, inspiring so many people who gave up science after having struggled to pass their O' level in physics? The answer surely is not Hawking himself. Though hailed as the greatest scientist after Einstein, recent biographies came nowhere near A Brief History of Time in terms of sales. To say, therefore, that the public interest is just Hawking himself does him the disservice of not taking seriously the questions that he is engaging in. In the forward to the book, Carl Sagan, an astrophysicist and populizer of science, characterises A Brief History Of Time as : "a book about God ... or perhaps the absence of God... The word 'God' fills these pages ...a universe with no edge in history, no beginning or end in time and nothing for a Creator to do."

In The Fire In The Equations (London: Bantam Books, 1994), Kitty Ferguson writes that "there was a time when to write about science and God in the same book was reserved only for theologians or eccentrics trying to argue that God was a spaceman." Today, this trend is reversed. Physicists are interested in the God-question. Prof. Paul Davies, theoretical physicist at Adelaide University, has pursued the relationship of God and the origin of the universe in a series of books and articles, arriving at the conclusion that "science offers a surer path to God than religion" (Cf. God and the New Physics, London: Dent, 1983).[1] Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker, London: W. W. Norton & Co.,) and Hawking are not so convinced; rather, they see science as eradicating the need for God, although both authors seem to be obsessed with God. Whether it is true or not, both give the impression that the fact that the scientific theory they are writing about erases our need for God is far more reason for celebrating than the fact that the theory makes a new part of this mysterious universe accessible to human beings. This cannot be called a religiously neutral point of view. Thus, science, for Hawking and Dawkins, is not essentially Godless. Fred Hoyles' statement strikes me in this regard: "I have always thought it curious that while most scientists try to eschew religion, it actually dominates their thoughts more than it does the clergy" - (Quoted in Paul Davies; The Mind Of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning, London: Simon & Schuster, 1992). The "surer path to God" has, however, led to a god remade to harmonise with the prevailing scientific ethos.[2] Hanbury Brown, an Australian astronomer, has recently stated that this is what needs to be done to religion: the idea of God as a person is dismissed as belonging to an earlier, simpler stage in the history of thought. The god of such scientists, however, is surely not the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.

But why are physicists become increasingly open to the God-question? The most common reasons are:

1. Anthropic balances. These are balances in nature - lack of space prohibits me from listing quite a number - which are so finely-tuned with one another thus making life and the universe itself possible. Sir Fred Hoyle who discovered such an arrangement later said: "Nothing has shaken my atheism as much as this discovery" - (Quoted in [Rev.] David Wilkinson; God, the Big Bang and Stephen Hawking, Kent: Monarch Publications, 1993: 108). Critics, however, ask why should we be surprised by coincidences. After all, they say, the universe is one event. Although it would be very surprising on the basis of probability for me to win the Lm 120 000 draw, someone has to win. Nevertheless we are surprised. In terms of the universe, however, it is not just the fact that there are anthropic balances but the scale of them that raises the 'why' question. Some others keep their faith in some deeper fundamental law that will explain these balances. This should be accepted; e.g. inflationary models do explain naturally how the universe is so close to the critical rate of expansion. But to explain 'how?' does not take away the question of 'why?' the universe should have this property.

2. Incomprehensible comprehensibility: It was Einstein who remarked that the only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. This is a basic assumption of science from quantum theory to general relativity and indeed it is central to any TOE.

3. Awe in the face of it all. The physicist Richard Feynman spoke of being a scientist as: "The same thrill, the same awe and mystery, comes again and again when we look at any question deeply enough ... it is true that few unscientific people have this type of religious experience" - (What do you care what other people think? London: Unwin Hyman, 1988: 243). And Simone Weil has written: "Scientific research is simply a form of religious contemplation" - (The Need for Roots, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952: 250)

Indeed, the scientist's problem with religious statements is that they are unscientific, which may be translated thus: "The God-hypothesis is unfalsifiable and thereby unacceptable." At this point, the theories of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper are sure to 'pop up' in our minds: science should not proceed by trying to prove a hypothesis but by trying to falsify it. Experiments are not set up to try to prove a particular hypothesis; rather they are set up to see whether a particular hypothesis explains a new situation.

Obviously, if theologians cannot set up experiments to try and falsify their claims, thereby making their God-hypothesis 'true', neither can Stephen Hawking ever be able to go to his lab to see whether his 'singularity'[3] with a specific set of 'initial conditions'[4] or whether his snippet of space-time could give rise to a universe like the one we can observe. So how do scientists try to falsify their theories to see whether they are coherent with observation and with other theories?

Mathematics is one such very useful tool. There is nothing particularly wrong with this. After all, Pluto's existence was first predicted because of the mathematics behind the unusual orbit of Uranus. It was this that led scientists to 'search' for Pluto, eventually finding it 50 years later. So why should one find a problem with mathematics when dealing with the origins of the universe? The problem is pointed out by Godel's Incompleteness Theorem: in any mathematical system rich enough to include the addition and multiplication of whole numbers, there must exist mathematical statements whose truth and falseness can't be decided from within the system. This, translated in everyday language, would mean that strictly speaking, theories such as Hawking's postulating a universe with no beginning or end in time (even though a Big Bang did happen)[5] are unfalsifiable because they are based on mathematical statements whose truth or otherwise depends on something external (God?). Thus, as Kitty Ferguson points out "if all explanations for the origin of the universe are equally unfalsifiable, all acts of faith, then one may be as good as another." In The God Particle: if the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?, (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993: 1), Nobel physicist Leon Ledermann reiterates: "When you read or hear anything about the birth of the universe, someone is making it up. If Genesis 1 is a world of fiction, so is much of Chapter 8 in A Brief History Of Time."

So is science objective? Well, yes, but science itself offers examples of a subjective bias, of a 'spectacles-behind-the-eyes', so to say, in such eminent physicists as Einstein and Eddington, to name but two. Einstein, for example, did not want to accept uncertainty at the quantum level as inherent uncertainty.[6] "God does not play dice", he declared, to which Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist who was convinced that the quantum world as intrinsically uncertain, answered: "Albert, don't tell God what he can do!" Today we know that Bohr was right. Also, when the implications of his equations began to emerge, Einstein was quite disappointed. As he wrote in a letter, "to admit such a possibility [of an expanding universe] seems senseless." He decided to adjust his theory to cancel out the prediction of an expanding universe by putting in a new constant of nature, a 'cosmological constant', a mathematical term which corresponded to a force of repulsion or anti-gravity. Einstein was later to dub this cosmological term - this concession to his own preconception and that of his contemporaries - "the biggest blunder of my life." On Eddington, an imminent scientist who ridiculed the 24-year-old Subrahminyan Chandrasekhar while reading a paper on Black Holes to the Royal Astronomical Society in Cambridge in 1935, Chandrasekhar has this to say: "He was a great man. He said that there must be a law of nature to prevent a star from becoming a black hole. Why should he say that? Why does he assume that he has a way of deciding what the laws of nature should be?" In 1983, Chandrasekhar received a Nobel Prize, partly because of work based on that paper.

This, however, is the way science proceeds: a hypothesis has to be formulated which scientists will later try to falsify, thereby hoping to verify it. Thus, there is art to science. As Einstein once wrote: "when I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come close to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge." (Cf. John Winokur; Einstein: A Protrait, (California: Pomengranate Art Books, 1983.) Hawking himself says: "The ability to make these intuitive leaps is really what characterises a good theoretical physicist" - (Quoted in Michael Harwood, "The Universe and Dr Hawking", New York Times Magazine, 23 January 1983: 57) Obviously, however, being a good scientist does not mean that your conclusions are correct.

So where does all this discussion leave us on the relationship between science and religion. An old distinction was that science deals with the 'how?' while religion deals with the 'why?' I say 'old', because, as I hope I have pointed out, scientists are increasingly being concerned with the 'why?' questions as well.[7] A new distinction might be this: science deals with 'public knowledge' while religion is 'personal knowledge', especially if we consider where the most significant testing of religious evidence takes place. Who is it that ends up convinced, or otherwise, by the evidence after all? This may seem to be an unorthodox conclusion running counter to formal church authority, but it is not. The Judaeo-Christian tradition recognises that at its profoundest level it deals with relationships between human beings and God and it provides plenty of precedent for thinking that a decision whether or not to establish a relationship is never really a group decision. Jacob struggles alone with God, in spite of all his family connections. Job must stand alone before God, not along with his friends. One 'lost lamb', must be brought back, one 'prodigal son'. All heaven holds its breath, as though the fate of the universe hangs in the balance, while one man or one woman choose whether or not to believe; but not for the outcome of a debate between academics as to whether science has erased the need for God. After all, the God we believe in is not a 'God of the gaps" or a God who creates and then goes to take a nap (Cf. I Kings 18: 27; Rothman Tony, "God takes a Nap" in Scientific American, vol. ??? 1988) but a God who, though being the agnostos theos and le paisible silence, reveals 8himself through the Logos, His only Son, who enters a relationship with human persons through his ensarkosis (Cf. Myrrha Lot-Borodine; La Déification de l'homme. 1970.) Karl Barth suggest that we must occupy ourselves "neither with God in Himself nor with man in himself but with the man-encountering God and the God-encountering man and with the dialogue and history in which their communion takes place and comes to its fulfilment. For this reason theology can think and speak only as it looks at Jesus Christ and from the vantage point of what He is" - (The Humanity of God, Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1960: 55) Thus, as Hans Küng warns us: "Theology cannot simply take over a paradigm from the natural sciences, or abstract from science the raw material from which to construct a new theological paradigm (as Aquinas did with Aristotelian physics or Protestant theology with Descartes and Newton)" - (Hans Küng and David Tracy; Paradigm Change in Theology, New York: Crossroad, 1989: 443)

Instead of trying to speculate theories in order to rule out God, scientists can help us discover the beautiful act of creation. It is however up to the scientist, in as much as he is a man who is himself called to enter into this relationship of God-encountering man and man-encountering God, to establish this personal relationship with his Creator. This relationship, or absence thereof, will in turn leave its imprint on how the scientist himself goes about doing his speculation.

Notes:

[1] It is might be of interest to note that on 4 May Paul Davies has been awarded the Templeton Prize for 1996.

[2] When Laplace presented his 4000 page mathematical work on celestial motions to Napoleon he was asked, "M. Laplace, they tell me that you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator." Laplace replied, "Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis." He was reacting against Newton who invoked the hypothesis of God to stop the universe from collapsing in on itself. Thus, Newton inserted God into the gaps of knowledge which science could not explain. This is despairingly known, among modern theologians, as God-of-the-Gaps theology. This, however, is skating on thin ice because the more science explained things the more God was pushed out of the gap.

[3] These are particular situations of infinite density and space-time curvature. These are a serious "road black" to science, since all known laws of physics break down at singularities [Physical theories can't really handle infinite numbers]. Relativity theory predicts that we should find these at the centre of black holes, at the beginning of the universe and possibly also at the end of the universe.

[4] The conditions of the universe at the instant of beginning, before any time whatsoever had elapsed.

[5] Having a Big Bang does not prove that we have a beginning. Hartle and Hawking hold that there are no boundaries in space and - more significantly - in time. Therfire, there was no beginning. For them, the concept of past ends in the early universe just as the concept of north ends at the north pole, without a boundary or an edge off which to fall - without a beginning. As Hawking puts it : "The boundary condition so the universe are that there are no boundaries.

[6] Events observed at the quantum level can be 'uncaused events', happenings without a certain history. Also, at this level one can measure the momentum or the position of something, but not both at the same time. This might be seem to be an obvious place wehre to find a loophole of chance and choice. British neurophsyciologist and Nobel laureate John Eccles thinks that it is from the quantum level that the possibility arises for both human and divine choices. However, though Cambridge physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne believes that God does indeed exercise choices in the universe, he does not favour Eccles' interpretation which sees the quantum level as a loophole for God's activity.

[7] It appears that natural science is no longer satisfied with asking 'how?', but is becoming concerned with 'why?' questions as well. It is at these boundaries that natural and theological science (that is to say, scientists and theologians) may enter into dialogue in order to help in healing the slit in our culture between the natural and the human sciences. (Rev. Dr. F. LeRon Shults; "A Theology of Chaos" in Scottish Journal of Theology vol. 45.)