Chapter 10: The Scientist and his Faith

The universe, with its matter, energy, physical laws, and mathematics: Why is it there? Why does it exist? Who has thought it out and made it? Why has our universe been planned and designed? Why does it have a purpose? Does a serious scientist also believe in something? What kind of a faith does he have?

John Polkinghorne was Cambridge Professor of Mathematical Physics. Now he is President of Queen’s College, in Cambridge, England. He says: "An act of faith is necessary for the scientist: a commitment to the metaphysical belief that the world is intelligible and open to our rational exploration. ... One of the most striking features of the physical world is its rational transparency to us. We have come to take it for granted that we can understand the universe, but it is surely a highly significant fact about it that this is the case. ... Time and again we have found that the physical theories which fit the facts are characterized in their formulation by the unmistakable quality of mathematical beauty.

"It is an actual technique in fundamental physics to seek theories endowed with mathematical economy and elegance, in the (historically justified) expectation that they will be the ones which describe the way the world actually is. There is a marvelous congruence between the workings of our minds (the mathematical reason within) and the workings of the physical world (the scientific reasons without). ... If our thoughts did not match in some degree the world around us, we should all have perished.

"Science does not explain the mathematical intelligibility of the physical world, for it is part of science’s founding faith that this is so. ... The meta-question of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics insists of being answered. A coherent and elegant explanation would lie in the theological claim that the reason within and the reason without are linked together by their common origin in the Rationality of the Creator. The physical universe seems shot through with signs of mind. ... it is God’s Mind that lies behind its rational beauty." (1991:76, 77).

"We don’t live at the centre of the universe, but it does look as though the very fabric of the cosmos has been given a character which is required if the emergence of beings like us to be a possibility. There seems to be the chance of a revised and revived argument from design - not appealing to Paley’s Cosmic Craftsman working within physical processes (which science explains in a way not requiring intervention by such a God of the gaps). - but appealing to a Cosmic Planer who has endowed his world with a potentiality implanted within the delicate balance of the laws of nature themselves (which laws science cannot explain since it assumes them as the basis for its explanation of the process). In short, the claim would be that the universe is indeed not ‘any old world’ but the carefully calculated construct of its Creator. To my mind a metaphysical speculation of equal coherence and greater economy is that there is just one universe anthropically fine-tuned because it is the creation of a Creator who wills it to be capable of fruitful purpose." - Polkinghorne, J. (1992:78, 79).

John D. Barrow

John D. Barrow is Professor at the Astronomy Centre, University of Sussex, England. He admits now, though believing in evolution: "A mystery lurks beneath the magic carpet of science, something that scientists have not been telling, something too shocking to mention except in rather esoterically refined circles: that at the root of the success of twentieth century science there lies a deep ‘religious’ belief - a belief in an unseen and perfect transcendental world that controls us in an unexplained way, yet upon which we seem to exert no influence whatsoever. Scientists believe there to be one Universe with a single universal legislation from which all the diverse subdivisions of science ultimately receive their marching orders." (1992:1, 2).

"The existence of mathematical entities inhabiting some realm of abstract ideas is a lot for many modern mathematicians to swallow, but three hundred years ago a Newton or a Leibniz would have taken for granted the existence of mathematical truths independent of the human mind. They had faith in the existence of the Divine Mind in which perfection lived and so they saw no problem at all with the concept of perfect forms." (1992:257).

"There is one curious example of the effectiveness of mathematics that weighs heavily upon the side of those who would convince us that mathematics is discovered and existed before there were any such creatures as mathematicians. When modern astronomers observe the structure of the distant Universe of stars and galaxies they are not determining the nature of the Universe’s structure ‘now’. They are seeing distant objects as they were far in our past. In fact, in many cases we are seeing them long before any form of life existed on the Earth. For light travels through space at a speed that can never exceed three hundred thousand kilometers per second and so when we observe a distant quasar billions of light years away we are seeing it as it was when the light was emitted billions of years ago.

"The fact that the mathematical structure of the object being observed coincides with that given by our mathematical analysis on Earth here and now witnesses to the fact that there is an intrinsic mathematical aspect to these objects that is observer-independent. Moreover, we can actually observe different quasars so widely separated on the sky that there has not been time for light to travel between them during the time since the expansion of the Universe began. They are independent of one another and cannot influence one another in any known way, yet we find that detailed aspects of the spectrum of light that they emit are identical. This gives us confidence in the existence of some universal substructure that is mathematical in structure." - Barrow, J. D. (1992:268, 269).

"The most extreme example of this direct observation of the past arises from our understanding of what occurred in the Universe during the brief interval of time between one second and three minutes after it began its present state of expansion from some unknown state that we usually call ‘the beginning of the Universe’... Our mathematical theory allows us to determine the ambient conditions in the Universe during those first few minutes of cosmic history from what we observe at present, some fifteen billion years later. It shows that during those first three minutes the entire Universe should then be hot enough and dense enough to sustain a brief chain of nuclear reactions which would burn the material in the Universe into heavier elements of deuterium, two different isotopes of helium, and lithium. The percentages of the total mass of the Universe to be found now in these elements now are predicted at 1/1000, 1/1000,22 and 1/100 000 000 respectively; the remaining nuclei (roughly 78%) will be hydrogen. One of the great successes of modern cosmology, upon which our confidence in our understanding of the expanding Universe back to these early times rests, is the fact that our astronomical observations confirm these detailed predictions. Helium, deuterium, and lithium are all found in the abundances predicted by the mathematical theory of the expanding Universe.

"Clearly, this remarkable success is relevant for our present inquiry. It confirms that the mathematical notions that we employ here and now apply to the state of the Universe during the first few minutes of its expansion history at which time there existed no mathematicians. The residual abundances of the elements that were created at those early times are like time capsules which carry information about the nature of reality fifteen billion years ago when the Universe existed independently of the presence of minds to appreciate them. And they are the same properties that hold here and now.

"Mathematics is something larger than the physical Universe. ... Mathematics is transcendental. It exists as a form of logic, which governs how everything else should be. ... Mathematics exists apart from mathematicians. Whether it be a world of structures, or a world of things, somehow we are in contact with this immaterial reality in mysterious ways." (1992:269-271).

"But we have found that at the roots of the scientific image of the world lies a mathematical foundation that is itself ultimately religious. All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics ‘is’; we know neither why it works nor where it works; if it fails or how it fails. Our most satisfactory picture of its nature and meaning force us to accept the existence of an immaterial reality with which some can commune by means that none can tell." - Barrow, J. D. (1992:296, 297).

In a World of the Lie

By believing in the false religion of evolution, natural science is living in a world of the lie. Erwin Chargaff is a retired American Professor of Biochemisty, a renowned pioneer in DNA-research. He says: "... our present-day sciences [live] in a world of the lie. ... In no other field of mental activity is the distance between that, which is actually executed, and the deductions that one draws from it, as huge, as in the natural science of the present. A composer, a painter, a poet, but also a linguist or historian, no matter, how important their performances may be, does not have the impudence, to expect of me that I revise my philosophy or my belief, because I do admire their great feats so much. They have put there, what they just had to produce. They have shown it to me. Then they leave me alone. Different it is in the natural sciences, because they want to teach us wisdom. ...

"The world of the lie namely began, when the natural sciences became a sort of substitute for religion and philosophy. They have arisen as a branch of philosophy. For centuries, one has observed them with great tension and still greater awe. And natural science has stayed for a long time within its appropriate limits. Galilei said in the ‘Saggiatore’ that nature is written in a mathematical language. But I don't believe that he has taken the writing for the text. But one has begun already then, to restrict oneself to the texts, which they were able to decipher with the help of this particular dictionary. At first slowly, the success led them (the natural scientists) to claims for exclusivity, to a type of infallibility-dogma that has become in our century a true dictatorship. Thereby we have this forgotten, while keeping the vessel above the content: The natural area, which science is able to study, is only a small part of that which is important to us, just as the essential part about a chair is not that it consists of wood." - Chargaff, E. (1988:204-206).