The Penultimate Curiosity

This magisterial and beautifully illustrated book is a cooperation between the religious painter Roger Wagner and the physicist and theologian Andrew Briggs. If the ultimate curiosity refers to the question why beyond the visible universe, then the penultimate curiosity of the title investigates the physical world and the question how, the traditional role of science. The thesis of the book is that science swims in the slipstream of ultimate questions that are spiritual in nature. The prologue sets the scene by explaining how a spiritual as well as scientific quest is implied in sculptures and inscriptions on the Oxford Science Museum and the original Cavendish Laboratory in the centre of Cambridge. In this sense, it is instructive to learn that, for mediaeval thinkers, religio referred to interior acts of devotion, while scientia was considered a habit of mind or intellectual virtue. As such, there is no inherent conflict, even though the conflict thesis has been dominant in the relationship between science and religion, especially in an intellectual sense since the 19th century. More recent work has been informed by CSR - the cognitive science of religion drawing on a number of fields.

The authors guide the reader through the whole history of the relationship between science and religion, going right back to cave art. This includes the history of Greek philosophy, the role of Alexandria, the work of Arab scholars including one I did not know called Ibn al-Haytham, who suggests that truths are immersed in uncertainties, and that scholars should test everything, accepting nothing on authority. Then we have the founding of the universities, Roger Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Francis Bacon, Newton, Leibniz and Pascal. In the 19th century, there is an enormous expansion of intellectual horizons, not only in science, but also in biblical criticism and anthropology. Throughout all this, the concept of a transcendent unity underlying the physical universe remains present, even if scientific materialism has tried to dispense with it. People will continue to put both sides of the argument in relation to the evidence they are considering, for instance the contrast between Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris. Yet, the 'ultimate metaphysical curiosity is rooted in the human need to make sense of the world as a whole' (p. 411). This can be seen in role of mathematics, concepts of law and order and the pursuit of truth through investigation and experiment. By the end of the book, the reader has an appreciation of the different and evolving forms of thought that cultures have used as an expression of both ultimate and and penultimate curiosity.