Socrates in the City: Conversations on Life, God and Other Small Topics
Eric Metaxas
Following the extraordinary success of the New York Times bestseller Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas's latest book offers inspirational and intellectually rigorous thoughts on the big questions surrounding us all today.The Greek philosopher Socrates famously said that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. Taking this as a starting point, Eric Metaxas founded a speaking series that encouraged busy and successful professionals to attend forums and think actively about the bigger questions in life. Thus Socrates in the City: Conversations on ‘Life, God, and Other Small Topics’.This book is for the seeker in all of us, the collector of wisdom, and the person who asks ‘what’s the point?’. Within this collection of original essays that were first given to standing-room-only crowds in New York City are serious thinkers from all around the world taking on Life, God, Evil, Redemption, and other similarly small topics.Luminaries such as Dr. Francis Collins, Sir John Polkinghorne, Tom Wright, Os Guinness, Peter Kreeft and George Weigel have written about extraordinary topics vital to both secular and Christian thinking, such as ‘Making Sense Out of Suffering’, ‘The Concept of Evil after 9/11’, and ‘Can a Scientist Pray?’. No question is too big – in fact, the bigger and the more complex the better. These essays are both thought-provoking and entertaining, because nowhere is it written that finding answers to life's biggest questions shouldn't be great fun…
SOCRATES IN THE CITY
CONVERSATIONS ON “LIFE, GOD, AND OTHER SMALL TOPICS”
Eric Metaxas
Editor
Contents
Cover
Title Page (#uca1f760b-3b5b-5761-a4b5-add43ea04b44)
Socrates in the City - Eric Metaxas
Belief in God in an Age of Science - Sir John Polkinghorne, Frs, Kbe
Introduction
Talk
Q & A
Making Sense out of Suffering - Peter Kreeft
Introduction
Talk
Q & A
The Importance of Fatherhood - Paul Vitz
Introduction
Talk
Q & A
Can an Atheist Be a Good Citizen? - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus
Introduction
Talk
Q & A
Who Are We? C. S. Lewis and the Question of Man - Jean Bethke Elshtain
Introduction
Talk
Q & A
The Good Life: Seeking Purpose, Meaning, and Truth in Your Life - Charles W. Colson
Introduction
Talk
Q & A
Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense - N. T. Wright
Introduction
Talk
Q & A
The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World - Alister Mcgrath
Introduction
Talk
Q & A
The Case for Civility—and Why Our Future Depends on It - Os Guinness
Introduction
Talk
Q & A
The Language of God: A Believer Looks at the Human Genome - Francis S. Collins, Md, Phd
Introduction
Talk
Q & A
How Good Confronts Evil: Lessons from the Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Eric Metaxas
Introduction
Talk
Q & A
Eric’s Acknowledgments
Speaker Biographies
Selected Published Works
About the General Editor
Copyright
About the Publisher
Socrates in the City An Introduction (#u4c795878-179c-5e1a-aeec-921158822330)
Can you imagine how happy I am that this book has come out? If not, let me tell you how happy—very, very. It’s a tremendous joy for me to look at the evidence of something we’ve been doing for ten years now and to realize that these talks are just as fresh on the page as they were the actual evenings of the events. That is saying a lot, because most of these events were magical. Just ask the people who have attended over the years.
In reading the talks in this book, I’ve come to the conclusion that they are treasures, nothing less, and to think that they are available to the readers of this book—that they are not lost to the ether but are right here for you to enjoy, just as we enjoyed them on the evenings of our events—absolutely thrills me.
But before I say more, perhaps you don’t really know what Socrates in the City is. Let me explain: We are a UFO cult. There, I’ve said it. Of course, that’s not for public consumption. To the public we present ourselves as an elegant and upscale Manhattan speakers’ series. So, I’ll have to stick with that description going forward in this essay, but you and I will know that I am really talking about a UFO cult and that underneath our terribly sophisticated street clothes, we wear cult-issue silver unitards with a nifty lightning-bolt-and-leaping-leprechaun logo. It’s quite a logo. But we won’t mention this again.
But seriously, it’s hard to believe it’s been more than ten years since I started Socrates in the City with the simple idea that the philosopher Socrates was quite right when he famously said that the “unexamined life is not worth living.” It struck me that in New York City, where I live, people weren’t being much encouraged to think deeply about the big questions—or should I say, the Big Questions. It seemed that there was something about our culture which worked against examining the Big Questions. I wanted to remedy that a bit.
Also, I realized that I have had the privilege of being acquainted with a number of brilliant writers and speakers who had thought rather a lot about the Big Questions and who had some pretty terrific answers to those questions. Why not bring them to New York? And why not invite my friends to hear them? And why not serve wine and hors d’oeuvres? And so, Socrates in the City was born.
As it happened, eight of our first ten speakers were named Os Guinness. That’s not a weird coincidence, but it is evidence of the generosity of a dear friend, to whom we here gratefully doff our caps.
I remember that our second event—Os was not the speaker—took place the day after the hotly contested 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Everyone had stayed up till three or four a.m. the night before, hoping to find out who had won. Little did they know the issue would drag on for many weeks.
So, the next night a handful of our audience members had some difficulty keeping their eyes open during David Aikman’s terrific talk on Solzhenitsyn, Nelson Mandela, and Elie Wiesel. Quel dommage! In all these years that has never happened again, but should it ever happen to you at a Socrates event, you should probably consider getting a good night’s sleep the night before and cutting back on the pre-talk libations. The act of open-mouthed snoring while Bishop N. T. Wright or Sir John Polkinghorne—or any other ecclesiastical worthy—is holding forth is still considered déclassé in most respectable New York social circles.
Almost all of our events have been held in the ornately gorgeous rooms of the most exclusive private clubs of Manhattan. The Union League Club, the University Club, the Union Club, and the Metropolitan Club have been a few of our favorites. The art in some of them is reason enough to attend Socrates in the City events. Besides, listening to a talk on how a good God can allow suffering is always somehow improved if your gaze can wander to a 1903 bas-relief of Hercules slaying the Erymanthian boar. We don’t know how this works, but it does.
We always begin our events with a reception where wine and hors d’oeuvres are served. Because of a lawsuit, we’ve had to cut back on the unlimited sangria and shrimp, but please keep praying; perhaps the judge will see things our way. After the reception, we begin our program with my introduction of the speaker.
My introductions have always been calculatedly dopey—or dippy— because we firmly believe that’s the surest way of letting the audience and the speaker know up front that we expect to have fun and that this will not be a ponderous intellectual exercise. We will not abide pretentiousness, but we will sometimes countenance a freewheeling Marx Brothers approach to the search for truth. To this point, my opening comments and introductions have often taken their cues from the speeches of Foster Brooks and Charlie Callas at Dean Martin’s celebrity roasts. This is intentional.
After all, who said that the exploration of the Big Questions and fun can’t go together? It was probably La Rochefoucauld, but who cares what he thinks? Seriously, I think that the fun we have is vital to what we do. We know that no matter how serious the subject (suffering and evil and death, for example), we will enjoy ourselves. We hope we’ve captured something of that juxtaposition between the covers of this book.
My philosophy is that answering the Big Questions about “life, God, and other small topics” can be fun if you know in advance that there are actually good and hopeful answers to those questions. Somehow, we actually do know that. Don’t ask me how. But it does follow logically that if you know there are good and hopeful answers to these Big Questions, then asking them becomes far less frightening. It is our firm belief that one shouldn’t fear asking such questions, and so, we do not. On the contrary, “let us beard the lion in his own den!” Or something like that.
So, yes, over the last ten years we have asked some of the biggest, baddest questions imaginable, and I think it’s safe thus to say that we have had some of the most wonderful evenings imaginable. It has always bothered me that more people couldn’t be there to experience them—which is one reason we’ve put this book together.
Our goal in this book was to somehow capture the ineffable—dare we say tingly?—feeling of what it is like to be at an actual Socrates event. Of course, there are limits. For example, our publisher balked at providing assorted nuts, cheeses, and two glasses of wine with every copy of the book. They suggested that this might be more cost-effective when the book comes out in paperback; so, keep your fingers crossed. But we really have tried hard to approximate the feeling of being there, of hearing my introductions and the speakers’ fabulous talks and the terrific question-and-answer section at the end of each talk.
In order to retain the freshness of these evenings, we have only lightly edited the raw transcriptions. To make the reading process a little bit smoother, we have, of course, removed any ums, ahems, and achoos from the originals. If you find an achoo in your copy, please keep in mind that it may have gotten there after the book was printed; so, you might want to ask your friends and family if they are responsible. And if you find that there is an errant um or an ahem, by all means feel free to contact the publisher or your local bookseller about it. But to save time, we always recommend first dipping a clean rag in some club soda and dabbing at the unnecessary word with short, vigorous strokes. If that fails, you might try some benzene and cotton or wool. Sometimes a fresh India rubber will also do the trick.
I should say that this book contains some heavy thinking, and thus it is not meant to be read in one sitting. It is meant to be savored and read slowly. Some of these essays are intense and will require periods of serious concentration. Please do not attempt to read them while driving a rickety panel van or operating dangerous machinery. The point of reading Peter Kreeft’s talk on suffering is not to get points on your license or lose a limb! Please read responsibly. As Socrates once said: “Know thyself”—and thy limits.
Incidentally, no Socrates in the City event would be complete without a celebrity sighting! Was that Abe Vigoda in the men’s room just now? Is that Godzilla slap-fighting Mothra in the coat-check line? Very sadly, we could not coax any celebrities into making appearances in this book. Jackie Mason made an appearance in some early proofs, but regretted that he could not stay for the initial printing.
But seriously, we have had a number of notable persons show up at our events over the years, many actors among them. Tina Louise (Gilligan’s Island), Tony Roberts (Annie Hall), Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond), and Armand Assante (Kojak, Belizaire the Cajun) have all visited us. The vegan pop star and musician Moby has attended, as has the carnivorous Ann Coulter. The incomparable Dick Cavett has come to a number of our events—and finally, this year we persuaded him to be our special guest speaker on the subject of “celebrity, fame, and other genuinely small topics.” Were you there? Incidentally, that was no piñata; that was the celebrity exercise guru Richard Simmons!
Usually, we simply have a speaker, but sometimes we’ve tried other formats, with great success. In September 2010, we hosted a terrific debate between King’s College president, Dinesh D’Souza, and Princeton’s Peter Singer entitled “Is God the Source of Morality?” Though the heavy rain that evening scared off a few of the wimpier New Yorkers among us, more than six hundred people attended nonetheless.
And in 2006, we had our first Socrates on Broadway film premiere. Norman Stone, who is the director of Shadowlands, the BBC film on C. S. Lewis, had just finished another Lewis film titled Beyond Narnia. So, that April, we premiered the film and then had a killer panel discussion featuring C. S. Lewis scholar Thomas Howard,
(#ulink_559c4f38-a4c6-5f5f-8436-0f68e4400f82) Bel Kaufman (the ninety-four-year-old friend of Lewis and his wife, Joy Gresham), Anton Rodgers (the actor who played Lewis in the film), and Mr. Stone himself.
But for the most part, our events are just like what you see in this book— an introduction and a talk and some questions and answers. Our goal in these evenings is not to answer these questions definitively and finally but to whet the audience’s appetite for further exploration. So, we hope that anyone who comes to our events—and who reads this book (that would be you, specifically)—will want to dig further and read the books written by our speakers. We hope you will want to continue the conversation, as it were. Yo, what it is.[Exit, pursued by a bear.]
You might wonder how with so many terrific talks to choose from we chose the eleven in this book. Basically, we were looking for the most typical and representative talks over the last ten years. All of the more than sixty talks we’ve had in the last decade are wonderful in their own way, with the embarrassing exception of the last talk in this book, which was shoehorned in by the board of Socrates in the City over the angry objections of the speaker, who is currently lawyering up like crazy for a battle royale that will likely fill the pages of the New York Post for months. Just you wait.
Let me close by saying that we would love for you to come to an actual event in New York City. Even though we’ve done a handful of events in other parts of the country—Chicago and Dallas and San Francisco—Socrates in the City is very much a Manhattan-based phenomenon. By the way, I almost forgot to mention that we have even had invitations to hold SITC events in London and Berlin.
Where were we? Oh, yes, we would love for you to visit us and experience our events for yourself. That’s a fact, and we look forward to meeting you in person. But until you can join us at one of our events, we are genuinely thrilled to be able to bring the spirit and substance of Socrates in the City to you in this handy book form. It is our sincere privilege and pleasure to be able to do so. Soli Deo gloria.
Eric Metaxas
Founder, president, and host, Socrates in the City
May 2011
(#ulink_c00b642c-0c40-55c1-8515-a0398b37f951) Dr. Howard has also been a Socrates in the City speaker, giving a spectacular 2003 talk on his must-read book Chance or the Dance? That talk would be in this book, but we somehow lost the recording of it. Rest assured we are still lashing ourselves with wet noodles over this, by way of penance. We do very highly recommend that stagger-ingly wonderful book to you, dear reader. It’s published by Ignatius Press.
Belief in God in an Age of Science (#u4c795878-179c-5e1a-aeec-921158822330)
SIR JOHN POLKINGHORNE, FRS, KBE
October 29, 2003
Introduction (#ulink_75ec9e95-71ba-5855-af07-40cea235f7d8)
Good evening, and welcome to Socrates in the City. My name is Eric Metaxas, and I will be your server for the evening. Anytime you like, you can make your way over to the salad bar, and in a few moments I will be back to tell you about our specials. Thank you.
I’m amazed by the crowd tonight. I’m curious: How many people are here at a Socrates event for the very first time? Would you raise your hands? Amazing.
Now be honest. . . . How many people are here tonight for the last time?
Before I get into anything profound, I want to say that we are anxious to stay in touch with you. We’ve been having administrative problems, because I am the administrator.
I hide behind the idea that I am a right-brain person; so this isn’t easy for me. They were on your seats a moment ago, blue or salmon-colored index cards. Blue or salmon. Salmon is kind of a pink, for those of you who don’t know that.
If you would do this, while I’m talking— certainly not while Dr. Polkinghorne is talking— but if you would, before the evening is over, put down your name and address, even if you have done this before, because we’re starting a new database, and I know that we’ve lost a few of you. Put down your name and address, SAT scores. . . .
Socrates in the City, for those of you who are new to these events, is designed to help busy New Yorkers take a moment out of our busy lives to stop and think a bit more deeply about what life is all about— to answer the big questions or to try, at least, to begin to answer them. Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I think many of us could probably do with a bit more self-examination. I know I could, and having speakers like Dr. Polkinghorne is meant to make that process a bit easier for us.
Of course, these events are only the tip of the iceberg. We would like to think that these events, these evenings, would kick off the Socratic process in each of us and that in between these events, you might read one or more of these books that are available on the book table. I recommend them very highly to you. We’re selling them at no profit to us. They’re wonderful books, and they’re wonderful to give away to your particularly unthoughtful friends. Of course, Dr. Polkinghorne will happily autograph his books, and I will autograph any of the other books that you would like to have autographed.
By the way, I should say that tonight’s event is generously being sponsored by the New Canaan Society, a group I had a very small hand in founding almost nine years ago. The New Canaan Society is a men’s fellowship that has, as its modest goal, the idea of helping its members be better husbands and fathers. We have dinner events in New York about once a month, among other things, and if you would like more information, we’ve got some literature on our front table.
We proudly count David Bloom, the NBC correspondent who recently died in Iraq, as one of our members, and he certainly was a dear friend.
So, to tonight’s subject: belief in God in an age of science. In the last one hundred years or so, many people have come to think that somehow “modern man” ought to be beyond believing in God. This idea has continued to enjoy a kind of strangely unchallenged popularity and has rather dramatically affected our culture, often negatively, as is the case with many unchallenged assumptions. I thought it behooved us to apply a bit more rigor to our examination of this matter than we have generally applied, and tonight is meant as a small initial application of that selfsame rigor. And I can repeat that sentence.
It has come to my attention that for some of the very brightest minds on our planet, there is, in fact, no disparity between the truth as promulgated in the biblical faiths and the truth promulgated by scientific discovery. But, as I say, we don’t often hear from those bright minds, and I’m very happy to remedy that tonight, with, if I may say so, one of the brightest. I think no matter where you come out on this issue, it will do us all kinds of good to hear from our guest speaker tonight, Sir John Polkinghorne.
I first came to hear Dr. Polkinghorne in Cambridge, England, just over a year ago at a C. S. Lewis conference that was held at Oxford and Cambridge universities. As luck would have it, Oxford and Cambridge universities are located in Oxford and Cambridge, England, respectively. It is all a little too neat, isn’t it?
In any case, I was very taken with Dr. Polkinghorne, and I asked him to come to New York City and speak at Socrates. And, of course, here he is.
Now, I have to say that we have never had a Knight of the British Empire at Socrates in the City, at least not that I know of. I’m not quite sure what the protocol is exactly. I assumed that the fact that Dr. Polkinghorne was a knight didn’t mean he would necessarily be wearing armor. Just to be on the safe side, I asked him not to wear any armor. It seems that he has complied with my request, unless he’s hiding a Kevlar vest under there, which we will never know.
But I said to him that if he did feel compelled to wear armor, he might at least wear his beaver up, like Banquo’s ghost in Hamlet, so that we might better hear what he had to say.
Thank you to all the Banquo fans out there for laughing at that.
A bit of a word on our format. Dr. Polkinghorne will speak for about thirty-five to forty minutes, and then we will have plenty of time for questions and answers. If you have a question, I implore you, please, to step to the microphone here. I implore you to be brief and to speak clearly— and to end your question with a proper punctuation mark. I think you know what I mean.
Nothing like a punctuation-mark joke to get the crowd warmed up.
Now, to introduce the Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS, DDS, Notorious B.I.G. That’s a typo. That’s a hip-hop joke. I don’t expect you to get it, Dr. Polkinghorne.
In any case, the Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne comes to us from Cambridge University, England. He is a fellow of the Royal Society; a fellow and former president of Queens College, Cambridge; and Canon Theologian of Liverpool Cathedral.
Dr. Polkinghorne is married to Ruth Polkinghorne. They have three children: Peter, Isabelle, and Michael. Dr. Polkinghorne’s distinguished career as a physicist began at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied under Dirac and others. He became a professor at Cambridge in 1968. In 1974, he was elected fellow of the Royal Society. During that time he published many papers on theoretical, elementary particle physics in learned journals. If it sounds as if I know what I am talking about, I just want to say I got a 1 on my AP physics exam. That is not a good score.
In 1979, Dr. Polkinghorne resigned his professorship to train for the Anglican priesthood. He served as curate in Cambridge and Bristol, and was vicar of Blean from 1984 through 1986.
In 1986, he was appointed fellow, dean, and chaplain at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. In 1989, he was appointed president of Queens College, Cambridge. His own words in reaction to this honor from his official bio: “You could have knocked me over with a feather.” That is actually in the bio. You can go online and look that up.
I have to say that I’m surprised that particularly as a top physicist, Dr. Polkinghorne would have been so naive as to believe that someone might have actually knocked him over with a feather— even a very, very, very large feather. One from an emu or ostrich, perhaps, would hardly be able to knock over an average-sized adult male, even if he were temporarily stunned by his appointment to the presidency of a Cambridge college. As I say, even I, as a non-physicist, who got a 1 on his AP exam, know that, and I am embarrassed to report that Dr. Polkinghorne, with all his fancy degrees and honors, somehow did not know that.
Given Dr. Polkinghorne’s weight and any reasonable μ [“mu”] friction coefficient, I think the idea of his being knocked over by a feather is patently and demonstrably absurd. But I’m sure that by now, he has repented of the statement.
In any case, Dr. Polkinghorne retired as president of Queens College in 1996. He is a member of the General Synod of the Church of England and of the Medical Ethics Committee of the British Medical Association.
He was appointed KBE— Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire— in 1997. Now, a word to the wise: I am told that like many knights, Sir John is handy with a broadax, and if you aren’t in full agreement with his talk tonight, he might very well be forced to smite you or cleave you, as the case may be.
As most of us know, Dr. Polkinghorne has published a series of remarkable books on the compatibility of religion and science. These began with The Way the World Is. He said, “It was what I would have liked to have said to my scientific colleagues who couldn’t understand why I was being ordained.” The Way the World Is is available on our book table. It’s a fabulous book.
Just last year, Dr. Polkinghorne won the prestigious— very prestigious— Templeton Prize for progress in religion. The award has previously been awarded to such figures as Mother Teresa and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Contrary to popular belief, it has never been awarded to Sir Elton John or to Sting. Glad to clear that up for some of you.
So, let me say then what a pleasure it is now to welcome to this podium at Socrates in the City— Sir John Polkinghorne.
Talk (#ulink_a869992f-869b-5780-9281-7ece8a971b60)
Oh, dear, what an act to follow. Let me say, I’m very pleased to be here to try to stumble along in Eric’s wake.
You gather that I am someone who wants to take science absolutely seriously, and I think that we are right to do so in this age of science. I am also someone who wants to take religion, particularly my own religion, Christianity, absolutely seriously as well. I believe that I can do that, not, of course, without puzzles occasionally, but without intellectual dishonesty and, indeed, with some degree of mutual enhancement, because it seems to me that science and religion have one extremely important thing in common— they both are concerned with the search for truth.
The question of truth is as important to religion as it is to science. Religion can do all sorts of things for you. It can comfort you in life and in death, but it cannot do any of those things unless it is actually true. Of course, science and religion are looking for different aspects of the truth.
Science has purchased its very great success by the modesty of its ambition. Science does not seek to ask and answer every sort of question. It restricts itself essentially to asking questions of process, which are “how questions” of how things come to be. It also restricts the kind of experience that it takes into account in framing and finding its answers to those questions. Science treats the world as an object, as an it, as something that you can put to the experimental test, that you can pull apart to see what it is made of, and we have learned all sorts of very significant things by doing that.
We also all know that there is a whole realm of human experience— personal experience— and, I would wish to add, the chance personal experience of encounter with the sacred reality of God, a realm of experience in which testing has to give way to trusting. If I’m always setting little traps to see if you are my friend, I would destroy the possibility of friendship between us. Religion is asking a different set of questions, deeper questions, and, in my view, more interesting questions, even than those of science— questions of meaning and purpose: “Is there something going on in what is happening in the world?”
So, there are lots of questions, it seems to me, that are necessary to ask and meaningful to ask, but which are just not scientific questions in their character and, therefore, are questions which science by itself is unable to answer. Interestingly enough, some of those questions arise from our experience of doing science but take us beyond science’s self-limited power of inquiry. You might call them meta-questions— questions that take us beyond.
I want to start by considering briefly with you two of those meta-questions, and the first one is this. It’s a very simple question, so simple, in fact, that most of the time, we don’t even stop to think about it, but I think it’s worth thinking about. It is simply this: Why is science possible at all? In other words, why can we understand the physical world in which we live?
“Well,” you might say, “that’s pretty obvious. We’ve got to survive in the world. If we don’t understand the world, we’ll soon come a cropper [British term meaning ‘run into trouble’].”
Of course, that’s true up to a point. It is true of everyday knowledge and everyday experience. If we couldn’t figure out that it’s a bad idea to step off the top of a high cliff, then we would not stay around for very long. We would stay around a bit longer in my part of the world, which is extremely flat. Nevertheless, we would obviously come to grief.
But it does not follow from that everyday practicality that somebody like Isaac Newton can come along and, in a quite astonishing, imaginative leap, see that the same force that makes the high cliff dangerous is also the force that holds the moon in its orbit around the Earth and the Earth in its orbit around the sun and discover the mathematically beautiful law of universal inverse square or gravity, and in terms of that can explain the behavior of the whole solar system. Of course, back two hundred years after Newton, Einstein comes along and discovers general relativity, which is the modern theory of gravity; then, in terms of that, he is able to explain not just our little local solar system but to frame the first genuinely scientific cosmology account of the whole universe. Incidentally, he got it wrong, but that is another story.
So, why do we have this amazing power? I worked in quantum physics, in small-particle physics, the smallest bits of matter, and the quantum world is totally different from the everyday world. In the quantum world, if you know where something is, you don’t know what it’s doing. If you know what it’s doing, you don’t know where it is. That’s the high-and-low of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in a nutshell. That world is totally different from the everyday world, and if we are to understand it, we have to think differently about it. But we have learned how to do that. We have powers to understand the world that greatly exceed anything that could be considered as just a survival necessity, just a mundane necessity, or, indeed, be considered as some happy additional spin-off from necessities of that kind.
I don’t know whether you are a Sherlock Holmes fan, but I hope you might be, and if you are, you will remember that when Holmes and Watson first meet each other, they’re having breakfast in a London hotel, and right from the start, Holmes is pulling Watson’s leg. He says to Watson, “I don’t know, I don’t know. Does the earth go around the sun? Or does the sun go around the earth?” The good doctor is horrified at this deplorable scientific ignorance, and Holmes just says, “Well, what does it matter for my daily work as a detective?” It doesn’t matter at all, but we all know many, many things. Science has told us many, many things that are actually intellectually satisfying to know and that are certainly not connected with the certainties of everyday life.
So, why is science possible? Why can we understand the world so thoroughly and so profoundly? In fact, the mystery is greater than that even, because it turns out that mathematics is the key to unlocking the secrets of the physical universe. It’s an actual technique in fundamental physics to look for theories whose mathematical expression is in terms of beautiful equations. Some of you will know about mathematical beauty, possibly not all of you. It’s a rather austere form of aesthetic pleasure but something that those of us who speak the language of mathematics can recognize and agree upon. This is the experience of three hundred years of doing theoretical physics in which the theories that fundamentally describe the world always turn out to be framed in terms of beautiful equations. It’s an actual technique of discovery to look for equations of that sort.
The greatest theoretical physicist I’ve known personally was Paul Dirac, one of the founding figures of quantum theory and a professor in Cambridge for many years. He was not a religious man, nor a man of many words. He once said, “It is more important to have beauty in your equations than to have a fit experiment.”
Of course, by that, he didn’t mean it didn’t matter, or [that] empirical adequacy is a dispensable thing in science. No scientist could possibly mean that, but if you had a theory and it didn’t look as though, at first sight, your equations were going to fit the experiment, there were just possibly some ways out of it. Almost certainly you would have had to solve the equations in some sort of approximation. Maybe you made the wrong approximation or you hadn’t gotten the right solution or maybe the experiments were wrong. We’ve learned that more than once, I have to say, in the history of science. But if your equations were ugly, there was no hope for you. They could not possibly be right.
Dirac was, undoubtedly, the greatest British theoretical physicist of the twentieth century. He made those discoveries due to a relentless and highly successful lifelong pursuit of beautiful equations.
Now, something funny is happening there. We’re using mathematics, which, after all, is a very abstract form of human activity, to find out about the structure of the world around us. In other words, there seems to be some deep-seated connection between the reason within— the mathematical thoughts in our minds, in this case— and the reason without, which is the path and order of the physical world.
Dirac’s brother-in-law, Dr. Eugene Wigner, who also won a Nobel Prize in physics, once asked, “Why is mathematics so unreasonably effective?”
Why does the “reason within” apparently perfectly match the “reason without,” that is, the wonderful order of the world in which we live? That’s a deep question, a meta-question, and those sorts of questions do not have simple knocked-out answers. They are too, too profound for that, but for me, a highly intellectually satisfying answer is the following: The reason within and the reason without fit together because, in fact, they have a common origin in the rational mind of the Creator, whose will is the ground both of our mental experience and the physical world of which we are a part.
You could summarize what I have been trying to say so far by saying that as physicists study the world, they study a world of wonderful order, a world shot through, as you might say, with signs of mind. If that’s so, then it seems to me it’s, at least, a hypothesis worth considering, because, in fact, the capital-M Mind of the Creator lies behind that wonderful order. I, in fact, believe that science is possible, that the world is deeply intelligible, precisely because it is a creation. To use ancient and powerful language, we human beings are creatures made in the image of our Creator. The power to do theoretical physics is a small part— a small part, no doubt— of the imago Dei [image of God].
So, that is one sort of meta-question, and it illustrates the way our religious belief and understanding does not tell science what to think in its own domain. We have every reason to believe that scientifically presentable questions will receive scientifically articulated answers, even though some of those answers may prove very difficult to find. But the meta-questions take us beyond science, and it seems to me that religion can provide intellectually satisfying and coherent responses, enabling science to be set within a wider and more profound setting of intellectual intelligibility.
I would like to ask a second meta-question: Why is the universe so special? Scientists do not like things to be special. Our instinct is to like things to be general, and our natural assumption would be that the universe is just a common-variety garden specimen of what our universe might be like— nothing very special about it. But as we’ve studied and understood the history of the universe, we’ve come to realize we live in a very remarkable universe, indeed, and if it was not as remarkable as, in fact, it is, we would not be here to be struck at the wonder of it.
The universe started extremely simply; 13.7 billion years ago is the rather accurate figure that cosmologists say. It started as almost a uniform expanding ball of energy, which is about the simplest possible physical system you could ever think about. One of the reasons why cosmologists talk with a certain justified boldness about the fairly early universe is because it is a fairly easy thing to think about. But our world is not so simple; it has become rich and complex, and after almost fourteen billion years, it has become the home of saints and mathematicians. We’ve come to realize, as we understood the steps by which that has happened, that though it took a long time— as far as we know, ten billion years for any form of life to appear and fourteen billion years for self-conscious life of our complexity to appear— nevertheless, the universe, in a very real sense, was pregnant with life from the very beginning. It is, in this sense, that the physical fabric of the world— that is, the given laws of nature that science uses as the basis of its exploration of what is going on, but whose origin science itself is unable to explain, which are the unexplained given, in terms of which science frames all its subsequent explanations— had to take a very precise, very finely tuned form, if the evolution of any form of carbon-based life, like ourselves, was to be a possibility in cosmic history.
Of course, the evolution of life, the evolution of the universe, was an ongoing process, but evolution by itself has to have the right material to act upon. Unless the physical fabric of the world was finely tuned for the possibility of carbon-based life, the universe could have evolved away forever, and nothing interesting would have happened. This history would have been boring and sterile in the extreme. So, we live in a very special world.
Let me just give you a couple of illustrations of why we think that is so. There are many, many arguments that point in that direction. I could spend all evening trying to list them, but I won’t do that. I’ll just give you a couple of examples. The first example is this: The very early universe is very simple, and so, it does only very simple things. For the first three minutes of the universe’s life, the whole universe is immensely hot, immensely energetic. It is a sort of cosmic hydrogen bomb with nuclear reactions going on all the time.
As the universe expanded, it cooled. After just about three minutes, the universe was so sufficiently cooled that nuclear reactions on a universe-wide scale, on a cosmic scale, ceased, and the gross nuclear structure of the world was frozen out as, in fact, what we see it to be today, which is three-quarters hydrogen and a quarter helium. The early universe was very simple and made only very simple things. It made only the two simplest chemical elements, hydrogen and helium, and those two elements have a very boring chemistry. There is nothing very much that you can do with them.
The chemistry of life actually requires about thirty elements, of which possibly the most important is carbon. We call ourselves, when we think about it, carbon-based life. The reason for that is that carbon is the basis of those very long-chain molecules, and the chemical properties of carbon seem to be necessary for living entities. But the early universe has no carbon at all. So, where did carbon come from?
As the universe began to get a bit clumpy and lumpy as gravity began to condense things, stars and galaxies began to form. Then, as the stars formed, the matter inside the stars began to heat up, and nuclear reactions began again, no longer on a cosmic scale, no longer universe-wide, but in the interior nuclear furnaces of the stars. It is here in the interior nuclear furnaces of the stars that all heavy elements— there are ninety of them altogether and about thirty of them necessary for life— were made beyond hydrogen and helium.
One of the great triumphs of the second half of the twentieth century in astrophysics was working out how those elements were made by the nuclear reactions inside the stars. One of the persons who played an absolutely leading role in that was a senior colleague of mine in Cambridge called Fred Hoyle. Fred was with Willy Fowler from Caltech— they were thinking together about how these things might happen, and they were absolutely stuck at the start.
The first element they really wanted to make was carbon, and they could not for the life of them see how to make it. They had helium nuclei— we call them alpha particles— around. To make carbon, you have to take three alpha particles and make them stick together. That turns helium-4 into carbon-12, and that is a very, very difficult thing to do. The only way to do it is to get two of them and make them stick together. First of all, that makes beryllium, and then you hope that beryllium stays around for a bit. A third alpha particle comes wandering along and eventually sticks on and makes carbon-12. Unfortunately, it does not work in a straightforward way, because beryllium is unstable and does not oblige you by staying around to acquire that extra alpha particle.
So, Fred and Willy really could not figure out how to do it. On the other hand, there they were, carbon-based life, thinking about these things: It must be possible to make carbon. And then Fred had a very good idea. He realized it would be possible to make some carbon out of even this very transient beryllium if there was an enhancement— what, in the trade, we call a resonance— present in carbon that would produce an enhanced effect. That is, it would make things go much, much more quickly than you would expect. However, you not only had to have a resonance but also had to have it at the right place; it had to be at the right energy for this process to be possible. If it were anywhere else, it would not affect the rate at which things happen.
So, Fred is convinced that there must be a resonance in carbon at precisely this energy and writes down what the energy is. The next thing, he goes to the nuclear data tables to see if carbon had such resonance, and it is not in the nuclear data tables. Fred is so sure it must be there that he rings up his friends the Laurences, who are very clever experimentalists at Caltech, and says to them, “You look. You missed the resonancy in carbon-12, and I’ll tell you exactly where to look for it. Look at this energy, and you’ll find it.” And they did— a very staggering scientific achievement. It was a very, very great thing, but the point is this: That resonance would not be there at that absolutely unique and vital energy if the laws of nuclear physics were in the smallest degree different from what they actually are in our universe.
When Fred saw that and realized that— Fred has always been powerfully inclined toward atheism— he said, in a Yorkshire accent, which, I am afraid, is beyond my powers to imitate, “The universe is a put-up job.” In other words, this cannot be just a haphazard accident. There must be something lying behind this. And, of course, Fred does not like the word God; he said there must be some capital-I Intelligence behind what is going on in the world. So, there we are; we are all creatures of stardust. Every atom of our bodies was once inside a star, and that is possible because the laws of nuclear physics are what they are and not anything else.
Let me give you just one more example of fine-tuning. This is the most exacting example of all. It is possible to think of there being a sort of energy present in the universe, which is associated simply with space itself, and that energy these days is usually called dark energy. It used to be called the cosmological constant, but it has come to be called dark energy, because just recently astronomers believe they have measured the presence of this dark energy. In fact, it is driving the expansion of the universe.
What is striking about that expansion is that this energy is very, very small, compared to what you would expect its natural value to be. You can figure out— now, I won’t go into the details— what you would expect the natural value of this energy to be. If you’re in the trade, it is due to vacuum effects and things of that nature, but it turns out that the observed dark energy— if the observations are correct— is ten to the minus-120 times the natural expected value (10
); that’s one over one followed by 120 zeroes.
Even if you’re not a mathematician, I am sure that you can see that is a very small number indeed. If that number were not actually as small as it is, we would not be here to be astonished at it, because anything bigger than that would have blown the universe apart so quickly that no interesting things could have happened. You would have become too diluted for anything as interesting as life to be possible.
So, there are all these sorts of fine-tunings present in the world. All scientists would agree about those facts. Where the disagreements come, of course, is in answering the meta-question: What do we make of that? What do we think about the remarkable character of the world, the specific character of the world? Was Fred right to think that the universe is, indeed, a put-up job and that there is some sort of Intelligence behind it all?
I am sure you all know that these considerations about the fine-tuning of the universe are called the anthropic principle— not meaning that the world is tuned to produce literally Homo sapiens, but anthropoi, meaning beings of our self-conscious complexity. I have a friend who thinks about these things and has written, I think, the best book about the anthropic principle, Universes. His name is John Leslie. He’s an interesting chap because he does his philosophy by telling stories, which is very nice. He’s a parabolic philosopher. That is very nice for chaps like me who are not trained in philosophy, because everybody can appreciate a story, and he tells the following story:
You’re about to be executed. You are tied to the stake, your eyes are bandaged, and the rifles of ten highly trained marksmen are leveled at your chest. The officer gives the order to fire, the shots ring out, and you find that you have survived. So, what do you do? Do you just walk away and say, “Gee, that was a close one”? I don’t think so. So remarkable an occurrence demands some sort of explanation, and Leslie suggests that there are really only two rational explanations for your good fortune.
One is this: Maybe there are many, many, many executions taking place today. Even the best of marksmen occasionally miss, and you happen to be in the one where they all miss. There have to be an awful lot of executions taking place today for that to be a workable explanation, but if there are enough, then it is a rational possibility. There is, of course, another possible explanation: Maybe there is only one execution scheduled for today, namely yours, but more was going on in that event than you are aware of. The marksmen are on your side, and they missed by design.
You see how that charming story translates into thinking about the anthropic fine-tuning— the special character of the universe in which we live. First of all, we should look for an explanation of it. Now, of course, obviously, if the universe was not finely tuned for carbon-based life, we, carbon-based life, would not be here to think about it. But the coincidence is that the fine-tunings required are so specific and so remarkable that it is no more sensible for us to say, “We’re here because we’re here, and there’s nothing more to talk about it,” than it would be for that chap who missed being executed to say, “Gee, that was a close one.” So, we should look for an explanation.
Basically, there are two possible explanations. One is that maybe there are just many, many, many different universes— all with different laws of nature, different kinds of forces, different strengths of forces, and so on. If there are enough of those universes— and there would have to be a lot of them, an enormous number of them— but if there are enough of them, then, of course, by chance, one of them will be suitable for carbon-based life. It will be the winning ticket in the cosmic lottery, as you might say, and that, of course, is the one in which we live, because we are carbon-based life. That would be a many-universes explanation.
Of course, there is another possibility. Maybe there is only one universe that is the way it is, because it is not just any old world but is a creation that is being endowed by its Creator with precisely the finely tuned laws and circumstances that will allow it to have a fruitful history.
So, many, many, many universes or design, a created design. Which shall we choose? Leslie says we don’t know which one to choose. It is six of one and half a dozen of the other. I think in relation to what I have just been talking about— these anthropic fine-tunings— that Leslie is right about that. Both suggestions are what you might call metaphysical. Sometimes, people try to dress the many universes all up in scientific vestment, but essentially I think it is a metaphysical guess. We do not have direct experience of those many, many, many universes. That is a sort of metaphysical guess, just as the existence of a Creator God is a sort of metaphysical guess. So, what should we choose?
If that is the only thing we are thinking about, we can choose one or the other with equal plausibility, but if we widen the argument, then I think we shall see that the assumption that there are many, many, many universes does only one piece of explanatory work. The only thing it explains is to explain away the particularity of our observed and experienced universe. The piece of work is to diffuse the threat of theism, but the theistic explanation— it does seem to me— does a number of other pieces of work.
I have already suggested that a theistic view of the world explains the deep intelligibility of the world that science experiences and exploits, and I also believe, of course, that there is a whole swath of religious experience of the human-testified encounter with the reality of the sacred, which is also explained by the belief in the existence of God. So, it seems to me, there is a cumulative case for theism in which the anthropic argument can play one part, but only one part. It will not, of course, surprise you, given what you know about me, that it is that latter explanation which I myself embrace.
There we are. That is one aspect of the relationship between science and religion. The intelligibility of the world and the particular fruitfulness of the universe are striking things that science draws to our attention but does not itself explain. It seems to me that religion can offer science the gift of a more extensive, more profound understanding to set the remarkable results of science within a more profound matrix of understanding.
Science also, it seems to me, gives gifts to religion. The gifts that science principally gives to religion are to tell religion what the history and the nature of the world are like and have been, and religious people should take that absolutely seriously. Those seeking to serve the God of truth should welcome truth from whatever source it comes, not that all truth comes from science, of course, by any means. But real truth does come from science, and we should welcome that. The truth of science, in my view, is able to help religion with its most difficult problem.
What is the most difficult problem for religion? What holds people back from religious belief more than any other? What troubles those of us who are religious believers more than any other? I am sure we are likely to agree that it is the problem of the suffering that is present in the world— the disease and disaster that seems to be present in what is claimed to be the creation of a good and perfect and powerful God. I do not need to explain what that problem is. It is only too clear.
Interestingly enough, the insights that science offers— the world is an evolving world, and evolutionary thinking is fundamental to all scientific thinking about the history of the universe, not just the evolution of life here on Earth— is, of course, part of the story. But the evolving part of the universe itself— the processes by which the galaxies and the stars formed and so on— all of these are evolutionary processes.
It is interesting that when Darwin publishes his great work On the Origin of Species in 1859, there is a sort of popular, absolutely, totally, historically ignorant view that that was the moment of the fantastic head-on collision between science and religion, with all the scientists shouting, “Yes, yes, yes!” and all the religious people, the clergy particularly, shouting, “No, no, no!” That’s absolutely, historically untrue!
There was a good deal of argument and confusion on both sides of the question. Quite a lot of scientists had lots of difficulties with Darwin. It was only when Mendel’s discovery of genetics was rediscovered and the neo-Darwinian synthesis came along that people really began to see and feel on surer ground in relation to it.
Equally, there were religious people who from the start welcomed the insights of evolutionary thinking into the nature of God’s creation. I am happy to say that two of those people who welcomed that were Anglican clergymen in England. One was Charles Kingsley, and the other was Frederick Temple, and they both coined the phrase that, I think, perfectly encapsulates the theological way to think about an evolving world. They said, “No doubt, God could have snapped the divine fingers and brought into being a ready-made world, but God had chosen to do something cleverer than that. For in bringing into being an evolving world, God had made a creation in which creatures could make themselves.”
In other words, from a theological point of view, evolving process is the way in which creatures explore and bring to birth the deep fruitfulness of potentiality with which the Creator has endowed creation. That gift of being themselves, making themselves, is, I think, what you would expect the God of love to give to that God’s creation. The God of love will not be the puppet master of the universe, pulling every string.
So, I think that a creation making itself, an evolving world which is a creation making itself, is a greater good than a ready-made world would be. However, it is a good that has a necessary cost, because that process of shuffling exploration of potentiality will necessarily involve ragged edges and blind alleys. The engine that has driven, for example, the evolution of life here on Earth has been genetic mutation in germ cells that have produced new forms of life, but the same biochemical processes that enabled germ cells to mutate and to produce new forms of life will necessarily allow somatic cells, body cells, also to mutate and become malignant. You cannot have one without the other.
So, the fact that there is cancer in the world, which is, undoubtedly, an anguishing aspect of the world and a source of grief and anger to us, is, at least, not gratuitous. It is not something that a God who was a little more compassionate or a little more competent could easily have removed. It is the shadow side of the creativity of the world. It is the necessary cost of a creation allowed to make itself. Now, you could argue whether it is a cost worth paying. I am not suggesting for a minute that this consideration I have been laying out in the last couple of minutes solves all the problems of evil and suffering, but it does at least help us. I say that it seems to indicate these problems are not gratuitous.
We all tend to think that if we had been in charge of creation, we would have done it better. We would have kept all the nice things (the sunsets, the flowers) and thrown away all the nasty things (the disease and disaster), but the more scientifically we actually understand the processes of the world, the more we see how inextricably interlinked all these things are and that there is a dark side as well as a light side to what is going on. That is a small hope, a small help, in relation to what is going on.
I always finish what I have to say, and the conversation will be the most interesting part of the evening. If you are totally convinced by everything I have said this evening, it would have led you no more than to a picture of God as the great mathematician or the cosmic architect. It has been a limited form of inquiry, and there is still much more that one might ask about the nature of God and much more that one might seek to learn about the nature of God; that will have to be found in other forms of human experience. A very important aspect of belief in God is that not only is there a Being who is the Creator of the world, but also this Being is worthy of worship, and I just indicate with a tiniest sketch how I would approach that issue.
I am deeply impressed by the existence of value in the world— something that science directly does not take into account. But our physical world, of which we are a part, is shot through with value, with beauty. For example, music is very interesting. Suppose you ask a scientist as a scientist to tell you all he or she can about music. They will say, “It is neuro-response— neurons firing away to the impact of vibrations in the air hitting the eardrum,” and, of course, that is true and, of course, in its way, it is worth knowing. However, it hardly tells you all you might want to know about the deep mystery of music. Science trolls experience with a very coarse-grained net, and the fact that these vibrations in the air somehow are able to speak to us— and, I believe, speak truly to us of a timeless beauty— is a very striking thing about the world.
Similarly, I think we have moral knowledge of a surer kind than any that we possess. I do not, for a minute, believe that our conviction that torturing children is wrong is either some kind of curious, disguised genetic strategy or just a convention of our society. Our tribe just happens to choose not to torture children. It is a fact about the world that torturing children is wrong. We have moral laws. Where do these value-laden things come from? I think they come from God, actually. Just as I think that the wonderful order of the world and the fruitfulness of cosmic history are reflections of the mind and purpose of the Creator, so I think that our ethical intuitions, our intimations of God’s good and perfect will, and our aesthetic experiences are a sharing in the Creator’s joy in creation.
For me, theistic belief ties together all these things in a way that is deeply satisfying and intellectually coherent, and then there would be many other questions still remaining. Even if there is such a God worthy of worship, does that God care for you and me? That is a question I could not answer without looking into taking the risk both of commitment and ambiguity and looking into personal experience. For me, that would mean looking into my Christian encounter with the person and reality of Christ. That is a subject for another discussion.
Here I am. I stand before you as somebody who is both a physicist and a priest. I am grateful for both of those things, and I want to be two-eyed. I want to look with the eye of science on the world, and I want to look with the eye of my Christianity on the world. The binocular vision those give me enables me to see and understand more than I would be able to with either of them on their own.
But it would be nice to know what you think about these things, and I think the time has come to let you have a go. So, over to you.
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