Close-up of the cover of 'It Keeps Me Seeking'. Photo: Courtesy of Oxford University Press.
It Keeps Me Seeking: The invitation from science, philosophy and religion
Reg Naulty reviews a book by Andrew Briggs, Hans Halvorson, and Andrew Steane
Andrew Briggs is a physicist, currently working in nanomaterials at the University of Oxford. Andrew Steane is also a physics professor at Oxford. Hans Halvorson is a professor at Princeton. The latter’s doctoral thesis was about the foundations of quantum physics, and he spent a year in the Experimental Tests of Quantum Reality project at Oxford. At 360 pages, these scholars have written a book that is not small (and it is bigger than it looks, as the print is small and the page margins are narrow). But it is worth close attention as it aims to take a fresh look at how science contributes to the bigger picture of human flourishing.
Faith and science are often presumed to be in conflict. As Hans Halvorson writes: ‘There have been those who treat science as achieving a very high level of certainty, and religion as this kind of mushy, subjective believe-what-you-want-to attitude.’ He adds that this combination of views is common in the US. It is in Australia, too, and probably in the West at large. Moreover, one reads that in the Muslim world the most respected professions are medicine, science and technology. If that is so, the attitudes which Hans Halvorson deplores may soon become entrenched there.
Do the authors make significant inroads against these attitudes? Well, not exactly. They did not set out to write a work of apologetics. Rather, they intended to present ‘a picture’ of their position. Even so, a major theme of the book is that scientific reasonableness is not the only kind of reasonableness. One is surprised to find a forty-page demolition of the teleological argument (that is, the argument from the orderliness of the world to a designer). But before getting into that, it is noteworthy that the authors seem to assume some version of the ontological argument: ‘The phrase “If God doesn’t exist” is meaningless or a contradiction’, and ‘anything so paltry that its very existence could be questionable is not God and should not be named as God.’
Generally, though, the authors do not pursue an ontological argument. They put great store by the Bible. They take the Old Testament name for God (‘He Who Is’) for granted, from which it follows for them that anyone who questions God’s existence is at least muddled.
Now to the teleological argument. Let us say that the pieces of evidence used in this argument are the systematic interconnections in nature as expressed in equations. The authors put this point very well: ‘The natural world has profound mathematical harmony built into it at a deep level.’ But one of the things wrong with the teleological argument, according to Hans Halvorson, is that it is a God-of-the-gaps argument. But which gap is being filled here? Presumably, the inability of nature itself to explain how the deep mathematical harmony got there. On the other hand, if it always had been there, it would be enough to make us suspect that some prior Great Mind had built nature that way.
Hans Halvorson would still be unimpressed. The process of inferring to God is entirely misplaced, he argues. God is a person. We get to know God as we get to know people. That, of course, has been argued before, notably by another Oxford professor, HH Price, in his book Essays In The Philosophy of Religion. There, in a chapter called ‘Latent Spiritual Capacities’, he explained, with due attention to the epistemological niceties, how a process of prayer can lead to an experience of God.
That is not what these authors have in mind. They insist, over and over again, that we come to know God only through our knowledge of Jesus, and that includes doing what he said. That has to carry a lot of weight in the book. What goes on in a person’s life which discloses God to them through Jesus? The following passage is about as much as there is: ‘The absolute Father has met with Peter’s [the disciple’s] open thoughtfulness and responded as one person to another. It is in this kind of encounter that God makes his Presence known to us. It is an exchange of perfect respect… as wise as what wisdom we have got, and as deep as we have so far become.’
Does anything mystical occur in this process? Apparently not. The words ‘mystical’ and ‘mysticism’ are not in the index. ‘Transcendent experience’ gets a mention, but its meaning is not explained. Mysticism might have helped. The authors emphasise how uncertainty is prevalent in science. For example, it is part of quantum physics, which is, nevertheless, very valuable. They point out that the same is true in religion, and warn us of the dangers of certainty in religion. One wonders what the authors would say about the mysticism of Blaise Pascal, who, like them, was a scientist and a deeply religious man. In his description of his mystical experience, he wrote: ‘FIRE. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob. Not of the philosophers and the learned. Certitude. Joy. Certitude. Emotion. Sight. Joy.’ As well as certitude, what would the authors say about ‘sight’?
What do they say about miracles? Can we expect them? Not at all. The authors mount a thirty-six page polemic against miracles. What of Jesus’ miracles? They are different. In him, we encounter ‘a uniquely significant person’. Did he really change water into wine? ‘After exploring further, one may come to the conclusion that this was a judiciously chosen moment in which Jesus decided to teach an important lesson, and many gallons became wine.’
What of the miracles in the Old Testament? The authors assure us that there were not many of them. Did they in fact happen? It appears so: ‘Such events are not a breakdown of a given law, but a breaking in of a higher law.’
This seems to undermine their polemic against miracles, since a breaking in might occur again.
On a different point, the authors maintain that there is no separate entity called a soul: ‘Contemporary neuroscience provides an increasingly large amount of evidence that the human mind is inseparable from the body.’
What, then, is it that makes us human? After not a great deal of argument, the authors affirm that it is the fact that we are responsible. This implies that we are accountable to others, including God. When does the accounting take place? It doesn’t seem to have happened to Joseph Stalin in his earthly life. Did it happen in a later one? The authors mention resurrection, but it is not clear whether that is just Jesus’, or ours, too. If it is ours, given that there is no soul, is a perfect replica of us resurrected in the life after this? If it is, would it be just to reward or punish it for what it never did, but what someone else did?
This is an ambitious book and should elicit many responses.
It Keeps Me Seeking is available now from Oxford University Press.
