THEOLOGY AND MODERN PHYSICS

Sometimes it is a pleasure to give a hostile review to a book which is good enough to be bad. Western Science has surpassed and rendered irrelevant the science of all other civilisations, and is transforming the global civilisation of mankind at an exponential rate. Why has it been uniquely successful? Hodgson's answer is that Western civilisation is Christian civilisation, and that Western scientists have always had at the back of their minds the belief that the universe is the creation of a rational God. The argument is unconvincing when it is not tendentious, but it has the merit of focussing on a fundamental issue.

By "theology", Hodgson means Christian theology, and by Christian theology he means the basic doctrines of the Roman Catholic church. As the title indicates, by "science" he means physics. The omission of biology will be seen to be important. His thesis is that western science grew up in a civilisation which believed in a Judeo-Christian God who created the universe, but Who is outside his Creation. This means that the universe is governed by rational laws which are there to be discovered, and magical and occult powers have no part in the observed physical world. It is not certain how, or why, Christianity has been favourable towards scientific inquiry, though at times it certainly has. Christianity is a complex alloy of Semitic religion and classical philosophy, and the original teachings of Jesus are other worldly and contain no injunction whatsoever to seek knowledge of this world, but only salvation in the next. It is more likely that it is the Greek legacy which has made it sympathetic to the search for knowledge for its own sake

The importance of the background belief in a creator God in the rise of science was put forward by Herbert Butterfield in "The Origins of Modern Science" though Hodgson gives him credit only in his index. There are, however, difficulties with this. Science began with Babylonian astronomy and was taken forward by classical Greece, neither of whom had the concept of monotheism. In the past both Muslim science and Chinese science were in advance of the West. The failure of Muslim science is explained by the triumph of fundamentalism, for if everything that happens is the will of God, as the Qu'ran teaches, then events cannot be subject to scientific law, because God is above any law. Hodgson says that Christianity avoided this error because it has a central authority which can pronounce on the correct interpretation of scripture. There are Protestant theologians who would dispute this. It seems that the concept of a creator God has to be fine tuned to allow both for science, and human free will, and yet also the possibility of Divine intervention through miracles. As for Chinese science, neither its initial success nor its subsequent stagnation are explained. Hodgson asserts, surely correctly, that science is a search for truth based on an open, critical inquiry, and yet he wants to preserve the Vatican as an ultimate authority . He finds this circle difficult to square. All his examples show that any authority claiming absolute power inhibits scientific progress. Science under Nazi or Soviet rule illustrates this. The intolerance of the "rightly guided" Caliphs stamped out Muslim science. In his arrogance the Ming emperor thought that there was nothing worthwhile outside the Celestial Kingdom , and so put an end to voyages of discovery which were better equipped than Columbus. In this way Chinese science came to a full stop. Entrenched authority is bad for science. What happens then when the scientific quest collides with the doctrines of the church ? In the test case of Galileo Hodgson concedes that Cardinal Bellarmine was a little too forward in pressing his opinion that the heliocentric theory was only a hypothesis, and not a proven scientific fact. He does not discuss the right of the Inquisition to have such opinions or to enforce them with house arrest and threat of torture .It is an interesting question to ask what would have happened to the sciences of biology and genetics if the Counter-Reformation church had retained its power right down to the 20th century. The Catholic church denounced the idea of evolution until the death of Pius XII . Of course what happened in the interval was the Reformation, and this is often suggested as one of the prime causes of the explosive expansion of science since the 16th century. Luther and Calvin were as obscurantist and intolerant as any pope, if not more so, but crucially they weakened the church by fragmenting it. In this way they led to the Enlightenment and rise of modern science.

The book has a very extensive survey of the present state of quantum physics and cosmology: perhaps this is to secure its scientific credentials. At the beginning the account takes the side of Einstein in the controversy with Bohr as to whether sub-atomic events are causal and not merely statistical. As Einstein put it "God does not play dice". However the survey ends by insisting that it is not possible to argue from science to God, or from God to science. Hodgson is even dubious about the Anthropic principle. Our universe may represent the coalition of a fantastically improbable set of parameters, but this not prove the existence of a Creator. One tricky question is noted, however. Official Christianity insists that the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ in Palestine 2000 years ago was totally unique. What then if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe? However unlikely, this is less unlikely than the existence of this universe itself. Hodgson leaves unsolved the relation between physics and theology in this case.

The solution to the problem of physics and theology seems to be to keep them as far apart as possible. There is an alternative approach. This is that the critical experiential open process of scientific inquiry might turn and face that dimension of conscious experience we term "spiritual".. However Hodgson is wedded to the offical Catholic condemnation of "pantheism", and so will have none of this.