I always watch Alice Roberts’ programmes on television. They are invariably well-made, and I found The Incredible Human Journey essential viewing. She upset me a bit recently when she tweeted: “I get really confused when churches ask me to give lectures because they’re looking for an ‘ecumenical’ approach. Perhaps they’re confused.” I don’t know if the double use of ‘confused’ is deliberate, but the remarks weren’t designed to be friendly to those who’d approached her. I’m not blaming her for not fancying an evening in a draughty church hall, even with a lukewarm glass of prosecco afterwards, but I don’t think that was her problem. She has no need for their hypothesis.
I’m not a life scientist. Prior to a long business career in the electricity industry I read Physics, and at the end of my career did a Divinity degree. I would readily admit to the usual physicist prejudice of thinking the life sciences to be a branch of librarianship. No doubt my medical friends would respond that physicists, along with theologians and businessmen, are neither use nor ornament, a charge I would find difficult to resist. Back in the sixties, when quantum mechanics was still hip, I can remember my delight in deriving uncertainty and exclusion principles with digitised quantum energy levels from continuum wave equations. I would never stand on firm ground again, but I am a cradle Anglican. Later I was to read how Gödel had effectively shown that no finite mathematical system could contain its entire explanation. Even Stephen Hawking now thinks that there will not be an ultimate theory of everything with a finite number of principles. Despite the ingenious ways that mathematicians find of dealing with infinities in their equations, I still think that the concept of a physical infinity is incoherent. Gödel agreed with this, preferring to take the infinite outside the system.
That’s not the same as postulating a loving, personal God. I do think that an intelligent being similarly standing outside the system could view the development of reflective beings that we humans have become as remarkable.(And our dogs too, I’m not being exclusive!) But does that imply purpose? There is no explanation that comes close to a justification to humankind for the sheer volume of sentient pain from natural and moral evil. If there’s a God he certainly doesn’t appear almighty. Yet without those tectonic plates shifting, would there have been the background for us humans to evolve in the Rift Valley?
I’m not a full dualist in the philosophical sense, as I feel the mental and physical worlds meet on edges, which I guess makes me a dual-aspect monist. I don’t give too much agency to the mental, accepting that I usually seem to do whatever’s convenient and then repent, but I don’t discount the possibility. As a physicist, it’s difficult not to see scientific explanations as reductionist, given our use of mathematics, even when the equations don’t reduce. Yet there is a world of virtues, perhaps also vices, which cannot be put into Maths. Life scientists do at least usually work in language, if not one readily available to the amateur. Perhaps they never feel that their discipline can’t contain its own answers.
There have been some strange coincidences in my life. My father was a keen amateur cricketer back in Lancashire. Just after the war, he clean bowled five batsmen in five balls to win the game. In 2011, on the thirteenth anniversary of his death, my youngest son George did just the same bowling for his Hertfordshire School Under Fifteens. My howl of disbelief and delight could have been heard back in Lancashire. Just coincidence, say some. But there’s no way they’ve assessed the probabilities, and no way I have the data to do so either. If they did, their statistics would look at the possibility of it happening to anyone, I’d look only at the possibility of it happening to me, thus probably shifting the odds against by millions. Others say it’s in the genes. Maybe, though I never bowled five straight in a row in my life and George had been all over the place until that final over. It’s like humour, if you ask why it’s funny, it no longer is.
My novel Where’s Sailor Jack? has a set of events that come together at one critical juncture. It’s a happy outcome for one, an engineer, who then declares all equations to be maya, the truth but not the whole truth. OK, the story line was contrived by me, though I never quite felt I wrote it. The philosopher Charles Taylor sees our sense of self as the story we tell ourselves about our lives. That’s why I wrote a novel. I do need a hypothesis. Dylan reckons that the devil rules the world, and God is the judge. I’ve no better explanation. To mean more, our stories need a loving God. In mine, he’ll have everyone in his eternity, the devil included.
I’m happy to drink the prosecco. The Communion wine is even better.
Recent Comments