General Relativity and Graeitation, Vol. ~6, No. 9, 1994
Book Review Quantum C o s m o l o g y a n d t h e Laws o f N a t u r e :
Scientific P e r s p e c t i v e s o n D i v i n e A c t i o n . Edited by R. 3. Russell, N. Murphy and C. J. Isham. Vatican Obserwtory, Vatican City State and The Centre for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley, California 1993. 468p, $45.00. This book is a report of a Conference held in 1991 at the Vatican Observatory. The conference was the first in a planned series of five in the decade of the 1990s on theology, philosophy and the natural sciences. The overarching goals of the series are "to contribute to constructive theological research as it engages current research in the natural sciences and to investigate the philosophical and theological elements of ongoing theoretical research in the natural sciences". The steering committee for the series decided to extend the aim beyond looking at the role science ought to play in theology and to investigate the possibilities for a two way interaction. With these aims it is striking if not surprising that the book only deals with Christian Theology. Given the publishers this can be explained but it is a pity that wider interpretations were not called upon. It may seem rather out of place to be reviewing such a book here. As Weinberg writes in Dreams of a Final Theory, "On the rare occasions when conversations over lunch or tea touch on matters of religion, the strongest reaction expressed by most of my fellow physicists is mild surprise and amusement that anyone still takes all that seriously." The way the review in Field and Stream of Lady Chat~erley's Lover concentrated on the gamekeeping and came to the conclusion that it would not replace J.tt. Miller's Practical Gamekeeper is described by Barrow in Worlds within the World and commends caution. When asked to review the book I agreed because colleagues and friends whose views I respect had written seven of the essays and some of the chapter headings whetted my appetite. I had not realised that the goals were so strongly theological and in this respect the setting out of the title is misleading - - the key to the book comes in 933
0001-7701194]0900-0933507.00]0 (~ 1994 Plenum PublisId.ngCorporation
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the sub-title. I am tempted to believe that books and conferences such as this one are, at least in part, a response to the the recent explosion in popular science literature and in particular the success of Hawking's A Brief History of Time, in which he makes the widely quoted remark: "...for then we would know the mind of God". This idea is not new. Milne refers to it in in his Cadbury lectures which were published posthumously as Modern Cosmology and the Christian Idea of God in 1952. The difference lies in the wide exposure, but not only that. Physicists, especially particle physicists and cosmologists, have made a concerted and largely successful effort to make their ideas accessible to a larger public. In doing so they have had to create a language in which new conventions have grown up around the (over) simplifications that are made. While this is admirable and, being a mathematician, I wish mathematicians were better at it, there are dangers. There is in reality no simple map from formal scientific knowledge to practical problems and common sense. The constructions have some characteristics of metaphor but are not metaphors. Also, and this is usually missed by the general public, the language contains conventions which indicate the level of confidence physicists attach to their theories. In the book the essay by Isham ("Quantum Theories of the Creation of the Universe") is an excellent example of careful writing within the style to convey the speculative nature of, and confidence level physicists attach to, quantum cosmology and theories of the very early universe. Despite his care the theologians do not make the distinctions which are essential to understanding. The considerable mathematical difficulties that underlie the terminologies are not appreciated. It is not that Science and Theology are incommensurable where they overlap but theologians have to accept that scientists can live with uncertainty whilst they cannot. Appleyard is very aware of how uncomfortable uncertainty is and it is that which drives his passionate book, Understanding the Present, which is against the scientific approach. These different views of the confidence one can place in theories surface repeatedly in this book and to my mind undermine most of the attempts to transfer scientific ideas to theology. The central issues in the book are divine action and, from cosmology, the role of time and in particular the significance of t = 0, the big bang time. I found no convincing evidence in the arguments in the book for divine action. A believer might well see things differently but that requires particular beliefs, interpretations and convictions, a point which Ellis makes clear in his essay, "The Theology of the Anthropic Principle". The book is divided into five sections and starts with a comprehensive introduction by Russell who describes the objectives of the series and the
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way in which the conferences are to run and reviews the main issues and key ideas dealt with in the papers. The first section, '~Jcientific Background: Standard and Quantum Cosmology" comprises two papers, one by Ellis and Stoeger on General Kelativity and Cosmology and the other by Isham on Quantum Theories and the Creation of the Universe. Both give good introductory surveys of the ideas at an appropriate level subject to the proviso described above. Isham is very careful to emphasise the tentative nature of quantum cosmology, a caution overlooked by some of the theologians later in the book. This section is followed by "Methodology: Relating Theology and Science", which contains papers by Heller and Happel. The issue here is the one with which I began this review: how are scientific theories/ideas mapped to theological ones and vice versa. Heller attempts to tie down the philosophical interpretations of science and Happel uses a discussion of four theories of metaphor to try to relate the use of metaphor in the two fields. He identifies what he regards as certain open questions for scientists with respect to the use of metaphor, e.g. "Scientists, in turn, are encouraged to develop an approach which overcomes the symmetricalasymmetrical arguments concerning temporality". We would all like to see with the arrow of time clarified. The two recent attempts that spring to mind are not at the level of changing the metaphor, viz., Penrose's Weyl Curvature Constraint on the initial singularity and Prigogine's search for emergent structures in non equilibrium thermal processes. Neither have received wide acceptance. The discussion then moved to "Philosophical Issues: Time and the Laws of Nature". Isham and Polkinghorne discuss two views of time suggested by relativity theory, viz., time as a label on events or as an independent parameter describing a flow. This matter seems to have considerable importance to some theologians although I am not sure why; given that we can accommodate both views God should be able to do so quite easily. Davies develops his view that the laws of nature lie outside the scope of science and therefore other methods are required to produce an ultimate explanation. He claims to have an open mind on what that explanation may be. I found the paper by Stoeger in this section to be the most interesting. He takes the view that the laws of nature are human constructions built on careful research about a reality which we perceive only poorly. That is, he argues against Platonism. What we see is real but we are limited by our senses: This relates to a well known theological position but Stoeger develops it interestingly in this context. The final two sections deal with the '~rheological Implications" and here I found the papers hy Ellis, Murphy and Polkinghorne the most in-
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teresting. Ellis and Murphy in their two related papers discuss Anthropic Principles, fine tuning, and first causes and they endeavour to set out a programme of research in theology in the Lakatos sense. They take an unambiguous position with respect to their beliefs and in this sense their deductions follow and can be discussed. However they go on to include fine tuning of the universe and ideas of a first cause and a designer which are not included in the assumptions. If one is to do this then regardless of philosophical standpoint one has to confront the work of Dawkins. He is one of the few to have gone beyond plausibilty arguments to make a case either for or against a designer, and he comes out against. Polkinghorne's paper, which concludes the volume, makes a case, which he has done before, for God having a role in the emergence of order in chaotic systems. The future is not determined uniquely by the present and this leaves room for human (free will) and Divine action. While this does leave room for them it gives us no hope of separating out the role of the initial conditions, chance, divine action or free will and hence of proving that divine action or free will exist. Theologians resist moves by scientists to push them off to work on the hard problems of ethics and morals. But the contacts between science and theology go beyond the creation event and the nature of physical laws. The book flirts with the idea that ethics and morals remain the preserve of theology. This is not true. Biology and socialisation undoubtedly play a role in behaviour both good and bad. There is not space to comment on all the papers in the book so I decided to concentrate on those that I thought would be of greater interest to the readers of GRG. For the record the other essays are by A. A. Grib, W. Alston, J. R. Lucas, K. Ward, R. J. Russell (the editor), T. Peters and W. B. Drees, and are in the main more theological. The presentation of the book is good and, with a small number of exceptions, style is very accessible considering the difficulty of the subject matter. The proof reading was good and the text is almost error free with the exception of Ward's paper where printer's gremlins appear to have produced a number of trivial typographical errors. Finally the length of this review does not reflect my opinion of the significance one way or the other of this book. In fact only relativists with a strong interest in theology are likely to find it of value. However I enjoyed finding out what colleagues have written on the subject and think
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that I may not be alone .in having an overdeveloped curiosity. D. R. Matravers School of Mathematical Studies University of Portsmouth Portsmouth, U.K.