THE BEGINNING OF ALL THINGS

Hans Küng and Keith Ward are among the best informed and most brilliant commentators on the science and religion interface writing today. Küng is perhaps better known for his writings on theology and the development of the global ethic, but here he brings the full force of his penetrating mind to argue that science and religion are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Keith Ward will be well known to many readers as the Emeritus Professor of Divinity at Oxford, and one of the most articulate critics of the new atheism who has taken part in many live debates. The five parts of Küng's book discuss how a unified theory of everything might be arrived at, God as beginning, creation and evolution, life in the cosmos, and the beginning of humankind covering physical and psychological development, mind and brain and the evolution of human ethics.

Küng regards reality as a riddle. The meaning of the Greek word cosmos evolved gradually towards that of harmony, world order and universe. The modern scientific project has been a heroic attempt to explain the nature of reality in purely causal and material times. However, a difficulty with this approach, as Stephen Hawking points out is that we and our models are both part of the universe we are describing, so physical theory is self referential and is therefore likely to be either inconsistent or incomplete. For Küng, reality refers to the universe, the human being and most immediately to the self, which materialism argues is entirely subject to biological and physical causality. However, we do not experience ourselves like this, and given Hawking's insight, a purely physical model is likely to be incomplete; and we find that consciousness itself is self-referential. Nor should we rely solely on what Descartes called l'esprit de géometrie, the rational faculty, while forgetting l'esprit de finesse, representing sensing, feeling and what Küng calls intuitive holistic knowing. So he argues that science and theology are different perspectives, that science is not the totality but also that theology needs to be self-critical. We must distinguish between 'phenomena that can be grasped by science and reality as a whole.'

It is at this point that Küng himself brings in the work of Keith Ward in a section where he observes that Kant rejected not only proofs in favour of God but also proofs against God, a point seldom noted by atheists who are often insufficiently self-critical about their own assumptions, failing to distinguish between science as a method and scientism as an ideology. Much of Keith Ward's short book on why there is almost certainly a God is devoted to defending God as a philosophical rather than a scientific or historical hypothesis. This hypothesis proposes that 'the reality in which we live can be best understood by postulating one kind of reality as ultimate, and as accounting for all the rich array of realities that we seem ourselves to experience.' Expressed slightly differently, the key question is whether intelligent mind is an ultimate and irreducible feature of reality or whether mind and consciousness is a by-product of a material evolutionary process. There can be no completely certain answer to this question, but Keith makes a persuasive case for the God hypothesis.

One of his central points, also referred to in the longer book on big questions in science and religion, concerns the nature of personal explanation, by which he means the common sense experience of desires and intentions being expressed in deliberate actions. Dawkins does not regard this as a proper explanation, which for him has to be in terms of physical causes and general laws. In attempting to create a single coherent scheme of thought, the materialist hypothesis tries to connect the personal to the physical by reducing the one to the other, thus conflicting with our own immediate experience. Rejecting the validity of personal explanation is in fact incoherent since it entails the nonexistence of explicit intentions and desires which we all know we have (even allowing for the power of the unconscious). The two levels of explanation have different functions. Indeed, the ultimate constituents of the universe, as Keith argues, must include conscious states: 'creativity and mind, value and purpose have to be included in any final explanation of the universe.' The reader will find Keith's discussion both thorough and engaging, and at times very amusing, for instance when he deals with infinite regress arguments featuring timeless turtles. Everyone will make their own assessment of his arguments, and many readers of this Review will be sympathetic to his position that consciousness and purpose may be at the heart of objective reality.

His longer book systematically addresses ten principal questions in science and religion, discussing not only Christian perspectives but also those from other religions. Themes include the beginning and end of the universe, evolution and creation, miracles and the laws of nature, space and time, self and soul, epistemology, origins of morality and the question of whether science allows for revelation and divine action. Written with his customary clarity, scholarship and verve, Keith explores the multiple aspects involved in each of these important topics. In asking whether it is still possible to speak of the soul, he explains the nature of the human person in Eastern and Western philosophies and the way in which this has been discussed in 20th-century philosophy in terms of materialism, dualism and double aspect theories of brain and consciousness. As one might expect, he devotes some space to the question about causal efficacy of conscious states, putting forward the various possible views. He himself argues for humans having a dual nature, and that the death of the brain need not necessarily mean the end of consciousness. Hans Küng also devotes his last section to these questions are, but his psychosomatic unity view is rather different and he also struggles with duality and dualism. He quotes a manifesto on the present and future of brain research to the effect that neuroscientists have to distinguish between what they can say and what lies outside the sphere of competence, just as musicology can say something about a Bach fugue without being able to explain the unique beauty of the experience. Like Keith, he observes that brain researchers presuppose responsible authorship in themselves, that is the causal efficacy of conscious states, and to explain this self understanding as an epiphenomenon is a form of deterministic dogmatism. Küng both begins and ends his book with light; at the beginning the light in Haydn's Creation and at the end dying into the light, which he describes with the interesting phrase as a 'farewell inward, and entry and homecoming into the ground and origin of the world.' Readers wishing to keep up with developments in the science and religion field will want to read all three of these brilliant books.