Two key points about science and religion

Just because we can explain something without God (e.g. the Big bang, evolution of life) does not mean that God is not involved in the process.

Just because science cannot explain something now does not mean that it requires an explanation involving God.

Adjusting our expectations

Last night my son and I watched The Adjustment Bureau starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. Overall I found the movie weird, flat, and disappointing. It is interesting that some religious writers have suggested that the movie provides an exploration of free will vs. determinism and pre-destination. It does raise the question, but it is so weird and superficial I found it hard to engage with.

[Aside: I think I recall that at the White House Correspondents dinner President Obama made a joke about how bad the movie was].

The movie also continues the Hollywood pre-occupation with and idolatry of "relationships". The belief is that there really is that ONE special person out there who you are going to "fall heads over heals in love" with, based on a five minute encounter. If that hasn't happen keep searching. And if it did happen years ago, don't let go of it. Dream the dream. Only that person can make you whole. You have to sacrifice everything (and everyone else) to find them and be with them. Furthermore, "fate" or the universe or God is geared to making this happen.

Am I being too harsh or just rambling?

The identity of the creator

In his wonderful book, Karl Barth, John Webster  gives a nice overview of the content, context, and significance of Barth's doctrine of Creation. He points out that Barth's doctrine is distinctly different from that of other modern theologians. Specifically, it is not apologetic. It is trinitarian. It is not prolegomena, i.e. it is not just introductory material to more substantial doctrine. Furthermore, Barth freed the doctrine from abstract debates about ``causality.'' The doctrine is “not simply an account of origins, the doctrine …. talks of the creator’s identity rather than of some opaque act undertaken by a nameless force.”

God separates light from darkness, Raphael (1518-1519).

The interplay between football and politics

Football is art; but also politics, economics, and sociology.

I bought a great book for my family for Christmas, How Soccer explains the world: an unlikely theory of globalization. I really enjoyed reading the fascinating mix of history (both football and political). Each chapter focuses on a different country (Serbia, Scotland, Italy, Ukraine, Brazil, England, Spain, ...) and how football clubs become expressions of politics, racism, corruption, capitalism, and nationalism. As a purist who enjoys football for its own sake, I found aspects of the book are quite depressing. It almost makes you want to never watch a professional football game again.

The book is very well written and easy to read. The main weakness is it does not achieve what its title (and every chapter heading) claims. It does not really show that football explains anything. What it really does (and does it very well) is show how football reflects and interacts with significant social change such as globalisation. The book reflects the common fallacy of not distinguishing between causality and correlation. For example, the Rangers-Celtic rivalry/animosity in Glasgow does not cause or explain the origins of the ethnic (Irish vs. Scottish) / "religious" (Catholic vs. Protestant) animosity. I think the Rangers-Celtic rivalry provides a vehicle for some people to express some of these hatreds.

The book also illustrates humanities deep need for community, group identity, to be right, and to express passionate emotions. I sometimes think that being a fanatical fan can provide outlets that God intended us to express in worship and church life. 

The author is Franklin Foer, who was editor of The New Republic from 2006-2010. There is an interesting review in the New York Times. 

In conclusion, it is a great piece of literature and even if you are not a football fan, you will learn a lot about the world from reading it.

Inter-disciplinary studies require great discipline

"The problem with a lot of multi-disciplinary studies is that they do not show a lot of discipline."
I am told this was said by Michael Fisher, a famous theoretical physicist, who at one time was a Professor of Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics at Cornell University.

As someone who works at the interface of chemistry and physics, and has an interest in the dialogue between science and theology I see this problem of lack of discipline more often than I would like.

It is fascinating to find connections and parallels between concepts, phenomena, and ideas which at first may appear different and unconnected. But when are these good and helpful? When are they just silly and misleading?

It should always be born in mind that correlation does not equal causality. Rich people eat more fresh tomatoes than poor people but this is not what makes them rich!

Here are a few examples of attempted connections that I find weak:

In the classic art history textbook Gardner's Art through the Ages it is argued that it is no accident that early in the twentieth century two revolutionary new ways of looking at the world developed: the cubism of Picasso and the relativity of Einstein.

Chaos theory and postmodern literary criticism are both concerned with instability and "nonlinearity". Much of this "connection" was made by Katherine Hayles in her book, Chaos Bound. It was widely acclaimed in literary circles but panned in Higher Superstition by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt.

The attempt of Sir Roger Penrose in The Emperor's New Mind to make connections between consciousness, intractable computations, the quantum measurement problem, and quantum gravity.

So caution is in order. What criteria should we use for judging success?

I am not sure, but one is that at least one of the two disciplines should be enriched by interaction with the other.

Polkinghorne on emergence in science and theology

At the end of the month I am speaking at a conference Quantum Theory and the Nature of Reality in honour of the 80th birthday of Sir John Polkinghorne, who has done so much to promote a meaningful and scholarly dialogue between science and theology.

As well as giving the talk I have been asked to prepare a white paper (due this friday), Is emergence the nature of physical reality? Consequently, I am wrestling with a chapter The Nature of Physical Reality, from Polkinhorne's 1991 book, Reason and Reality: The Relationship between Science and Theology, which was reprinted in the journal Zygon. Here are a few extracts I am trying to digest.

Abstract. This account of the dynamical theory of chaos leads to a metaphysical picture of a world with an open future, in which the laws of physics are emergent-downward approximations to a more subtle and supple reality and in which there is downward causation through information input as well as upward causation through energy input. Such a metaphysical picture can accommodate both human and divine agency.

Subatomic particles are not only not “more real” than a bacterial cell, they also have no greater privileged share in determining the nature of reality.

.... If apparently open behavior is associated with underlying apparently deterministic equations, which is to be taken to have the greater ontological seriousness—the behavior or the equations? Which is the approximation and which is the reality?

....epistemology and ontology are intimately connected. One can see how natural this view is for a scientist by considering the early history of quantum theory. Heisenberg’s famous discussion of thought experiments, such as the gamma-ray microscope, dealt with what can be measured. It was an epistemological analysis. Yet for the majority of physicists it led to ontological conclusions. They interpret the uncertainty principle as not being merely a principle of ignorance (as Bohm, for example, would interpret it) but as a principle of genuine indeterminacy. In an analogous way, it seems to me to be a coherent possibility to interpret the undoubted unpredictability of so much of physical process as indicating that process to be ontologically open.....

d’Espagnat [who discussed the philosophical implications of quantum theory] does not go all the way with Kant. He insists that independent reality is veiled rather than inaccessible; it is elusive rather than absolutely unknowable.

I am driven to greater metaphysical boldness .... I believe that his cautious invocation of veiledness is, at the least, not inconsistent with the kind of openness about the nature of reality that I am trying to explore.

.... such a world of intertwined order and novelty is just that which might be expected as the creation of a God both faithful and loving, who will endow God’s world with the twin gifts of reliability and freedom....

The correct lower-level description can only provide an envelope of possibility within which top-down causation will find its scope for realization. 

..... God’s interaction with God’s own world can be expected to respect its freedom (including our own). God’s acts will be veiled within the unpredictability of complex process. They may be discernible by faith, but they will not be demonstrable by experiment.

Reconciliation: past, present, and future

A story [maybe apocryphal?] is that Karl Barth told Billy Graham that he should not be telling people to "Be reconciled to God" but rather than "You are reconciled to God."

To illustrate these issues, it is interesting to just focus on one verse, Romans 5:10, and see how it includes past, present, and future tenses:

¹⁰For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.

I take this as a caution to not be too rigid in my thinking about these profound issues, and particularly not importing "logic" from other areas of life and thought.

John Webster has said that a significant achievement of Karl Barth's Doctrine of Creation is that he liberated the doctrine from a pre-occupation with questions of causality. This preoccupation was arguably due to the influence of scientific concepts, from both Newton and Darwin. In science, (well at least in Newtonian mechanics) notions of causality (i.e., cause and effect) are well defined, meaningful, and helpful. But are they here?