THE MIND OF GOD - Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning
THE MIND OF GOD is the title of a book published in 1993 (re-issued since) by Paul
Davies, English physicist, astrobiologist and cosmologist, who has held
academic posts at universities from Cambridge to Adelaide and now at Arizona
State University. Chapter headings range from ‘Reason and Belief’ through ‘Why is the World the Way It Is?’ to ‘The Mystery at the End of the Universe’
– three promising themes for future discussion at our open forum at Wychwood
Library, if the group so chooses, following a recommendation by Clive Fieth.
Davies is not, as far as I know, a believer but he won the
prestigious Templeton Prize in 1995 for his work on the deeper meaning of
science. His Address at Westminster Abbey on that occasion, entitled Physics and the Mind of God, is a more
distilled example of his thoughts and argues against the ‘widespread belief
that science and theology are forever at loggerheads’. Where The
Mind of God draws attention to the limits of rational explanations of the
universe, in this address he is perhaps trying to persuade a more religiously
inclined audience not to cling to a childish concept of a ‘cosmic magician’ but
to ‘confront modern scientific thought’:
The position I have
presented to you today is … one that regards the universe, not as the plaything
of a capricious Deity, but as a coherent, rational, elegant, and harmonious
expression of a deep and purposeful meaning.
Chapter 1 of The Mind
of God sets out to answer the questions, ‘Can we really hope to answer the
ultimate questions of existence through rational enquiry, or will we always
encounter impenetrable mystery at some stage? And just what is human
rationality anyway?’ He goes on to
discuss the Big Bang, continuous creation, the Laws of Nature and The Cosmic Code, mathematics (far too
much for me), Leibniz, Hawking and Hume, cosmology, astronomy, you name it… This is not a book for the scientifically
faint-hearted. However it bears dipping
into and drives on relentlessly towards his concluding chapters.
By chapter 9 he is suggesting that ‘it has to be admitted
that our concept of rational explanation derives from our observation of the
world and our evolutionary inheritance’.
After quoting Stephen Hawking’s
‘turtle story’ as a symbol of the search for ultimate answers, he questions
whether we should limit ourselves by identifying ‘understanding’ with ‘rational
explanation’ and asks whether there are ‘other forms of understanding which
will satisfy the inquiring mind’. Alluding
to a number of scientists, from Einstein onwards, he dares to broach the topic
of mystical knowledge and revelatory experiences, both within and outside the
scientific community. The way we read of
such experiences – which Davies says he himself has never had – varies
depending on the culture of the person describing them, from Eastern mystics to
Christian monastics to Roger Penrose the mathematician, and some such accounts are of course
an immediate turn-off.
However, whether it is through turtles or Eastern mysticism,
it is hard to resist being drawn – like much of twentieth-century mathematics,
it seems – into pondering the infinite and hence what Davies, with only a hint of flippancy, calls ‘the mystery at the end of the
universe’. The final section of the final chapter is,
appropriately, entitled What is Man? and includes this deliberately inconclusive
conclusion: ‘We are barred from ultimate knowledge, from ultimate explanation,
by the very rules of reasoning that prompt us to seek an explanation in the
first place.’
