WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL, TOUCHING AND WISE

I enjoyed half-an-hour with a cappucino and Alain de Botton in Blackwell’s the other day. It’s great: you can read a chapter and then put him back on the shelf.  The book in question, which demanded to be dipped into, was Religion for Atheists, grist to the mill when you’re into exploring the boundaries of theology.  The author graciously admits that religions can be ‘sporadically useful, interesting and consoling’ and then goes on to write a whole book about how to pick out what they have to offer. Anyone who is serious about life (someone on this page recently described ‘being spiritual’ as precisely that) might want to do the same, positively but less patronisingly.

De Botton’s starting point is as good as any and would have chimed in with Reverend Andrew Thayer’s presentation to Wychwood Circle earlier this month (“Thank God I’m an atheist”). It is neatly summed up in this  sentence:

It is when we stop believing that religions have been handed down from above or else that they are entirely daft that matters become more interesting.

It’s a bit long to go on the bottom of our Wychwood Circle posters but it would make a good advert for our discussions.  He ends his first chapter with the words of our heading – he says he wants to 'rescue what is beautiful, touching and wise from what no longer seems true'.

Had we managed to organise a head-to-head between Alain and Andrew, I suspect the latter would have wanted to know just what it is that “no longer seems true” to Alain and then mostly agreed with him.  Andrew gave us a brief but lucid, and welcome, exposition of a twenty-first-century - as contrasted with a first-century - view of three aspects of his faith, under the headings Cosmology, Biology, and Christology. There are plenty of present-day Christians who would not agree with that contemporary view and they have a lot to answer for in terms of making Christianity both incomprehensible and irrelevant to people’s twenty-first century lives.  But in the spirit of de Botton and ‘postmodern’ theologians we do better to look for what is meaningful rather than what isn’t.

Andrew Thayer showed us how you can leave behind the first century view of the universe as ‘heaven above and hell below’, for instance, and yet retain that first-century ‘sense of infinitude’; that a present-day view of 'salvation' would need to ask, salvation how and from what?, but that a Christian can still see Jesus Christ having a key role in revealing that elusive mystery to us;  that a one-line description of what Christ was about (such as a favourite Bible quotation or a phrase from the Book of Common Prayer) will be as inadequate as describing Martin Luther King by the single phrase for which he is now famous.

Andrew’s most telling analogy – surprisingly for us, but appropriately for a Texan – was probably the Chisholm Trail in the States.  This is a two-mile wide cattle trail from Texas to Chicago, one of several visible from space and dating from the days when cattle fetched 10 times as much in Chicago as it did in Texas.  He compared this vast trail to the Christian tradition: it’s very long and it’s very wide and you’ll never use it all up.  Any atheistic critique of religion cannot therefore afford to be either narrow or binary.  And as John Macquarrie (former Professor of Divinity at Oxford University) wrote in his Principles of Christian Theology, in an understatement passing almost as a throwaway remark: 'The idea of God has undergone many changes in the course of its history.' *

Macquarrie, incidentally, points out in the same chapter:  ‘the word atheism must also be understood in relation to what it denies. Presumably most modern men deny the the gods of mythology, and so from the point of view of a believer in these gods, they are atheists.’ An atheist friend of mine recently related that there have been around 2600 ‘noted and recognised gods’ over the years and that this makes us all atheists regarding the 2599 even if we are monotheists.  The point is that you cannot be an atheist without describing what it is you don’t believe in and therein lies the weakness and sterility of the argy-bargy of the ‘new atheist’ debates: we probably agree about a good 99% of what we don’t believe in.  Better to begin with De Botton and at least explore, as he entitles his first chapter, ‘Wisdom without doctrine’, even if you don't go any further.

On October 6^th we meet again at Wychwood Library to explore the very positive theme of “What guides our choices”.  Ian Cave has kindly offered to lead the discussion and there is a short piece entitled Blindness in Springtime which will act as a springboard for people’s ideas, beginning: “If I had my life over again…” Plenty of scope for wisdom, with or without doctrine, there. 

* Macquarrie, in his monumental modern study of the Principles of Christian Theology (SCM Press, 1966, 1977) devoted the first third of the book to Philosophical Theology, where amongst much else besides he traces these changes from the mythological level through traditional theism to what he calls ‘the phase of existential-ontological theism’.  Macquarrie’s systematic ‘philosophical theology’ is worth looking up, particularly if you have any sympathy with existentialism – as he does, for instance comparing Sartre’s conclusions with the religious one.  In the light of our Wychwood Circle discussions, it is interesting to find a Canon of Christ Church, Oxford stating (at the start of chapter 5 on Being and God): ‘It has already been made abundantly clear that faith is not primarily assent to propositions, but an existential attitude of acceptance and commitment.’ From this point of view it probably reduced his appeal to our very mixed audience that Andrew Thayer began his talk with an elaborate reference to the Church’s Nicene Creed  – but then he is an Anglican priest as well as a theologian and it was arguably a suitable if provocative point of departure, given our topic.  

THANK GOD I'M AN ATHEIST

September 8th 2013 at 7pm in Wychwood Library: 

An exploration of the boundaries between theism and atheism

by Reverend Andy Thayer, actor, musician, theologian, priest - and Texan!

Do join us. Andy is in the UK to work on a PhD on ecclesiology and Derrida at Mansfield College, Oxford. While he does so, we are lucky to have him as Associate Priest in the CHASE benefice (Chadlington, Ascott, Spelsbury, etc).  This talk arose out of a broader discussion of the subject matter of his thesis as well as the sort of issues which were being discussed at Wychwood Circle. 

Wychwood Circle is all about making sense of faith, breaking down barriers, exploring boundaries imposed by our education and culture, discussing spirituality, ethics and how we choose to live.  Six months on from our guest, Brian Mountford, who in March 2013 talked about the ideas developed in his book, Christian Atheist, this is a welcome return to the exploration of this particular boundary or set of boundaries.  We are an open forum, always glad to welcome anyone who cares to look in, pass on, or stay and contribute. 

SPIRITUALITY - WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT'S NOT

Philip Sheldrake:  Spirituality - A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2012)

Not for the first time, this useful series of pocket-sized readers for short train journeys has provided stimulation and edification. The book begged to be written in the context of that over-used phrase "spiritual but not religious". Philip Sheldrake tackles the subject in 7 succinct chapters, beginning by pointing out the difficulty of defining such a 'chameleon-like word' which takes on the shapes and priorities of its contexts. Nevertheless he finds a number of 'family resemblances' and quotes Evelyn Underhill (1911, 1930) who suggested that human beings are vision-creating beings and not just tool-making animals. He goes on: 

In other words, ‘spirituality’ expresses a sense that human life involves more than biology. As human beings we are naturally driven by goals beyond physical satisfaction or mental supremacy to seek a deeper level of meaning and fulfilment. 

In his conclusion he identifies 3 critical features of the concept, and these too are worth quoting: 

First, spirituality expresses the reflective human quest for identity and meaning beyond a purely pragmatic approach to life. Second, it suggests that a full human life needs to move beyond self-absorption to a sense of the greater good and service of others. Finally and vitally, S relates to a process of unlocking the creativity and imagination that enables us to touch the edge of mystery. 

'I want to cultivate my sensibility'

Coincidentally Rowan Williams and Julia Neuberger were at Edinburgh last week and Williams had quite a lot to say about what 'spirituality' is not: 

Sharing a platform at the Edinburgh International Book Festival with Julia Neuberger, president of the Liberal Judaism movement, Williams launched a withering critique of popular ideas about spirituality. "The last thing it is about is the placid hum of a well-conducted meditation," he said.

 He said the word "spiritual" in today's society was frequently misused in two ways: either to mean "unworldly and useless, which is probably the sense in which it has been used about me", or "meaning 'I'm serious about my inner life, I want to cultivate my sensibility'". 

He added: "Speaking from the Christian tradition, the idea that being spiritual is just about having nice experiences is rather laughable. Most people who have written seriously about the life of the spirit in Christianity and Judaism spend a lot of their time telling you how absolutely bloody awful it is." Neuberger said she found some uses of the word self-indulgent and offensive. Williams argued that true spirituality was not simply about fostering the inner life but was about the individual's interaction with others. 

 Williams went on: 

"I'd like to think, at the very least, that spiritual care meant tending to every possible dimension of sense of the self and each other, that it was about filling out as fully as possible human experience," he said. 

Guardian review, Aug 15th 

Interreligious spirituality

Dialogue between faiths developed strongly in the 20th century and not just in terms of intellectual debate. Recently there has been increasing contact between Christianity and Buddhism and between Christianity and Hinduism. There will be much to pursue here at Wychwood Circle and Islam will be high on the list. 

I will be fascinated to look further into three 'iconic figures in interreligious spirituality' whom Sheldrake describes briefly: the Dalai Lama (b. 1935), Thomas Merton (1915-68) and Raimundo Pannikar (1918-2010), as well as other intriguing accounts of interreligious encounters. 

Whether this sort of dialogue leads to syncretism or pan-religious integration of spiritual experience is a question Sheldrake touches on in the same chapter. He quotes Rabbi Sacks who says, no, religious diversity is actually divinely intended.  Others point to their belief that

the never-ending process of dialogue without any obvious final resolution has a spiritual value in itself. For them, God is found precisely on the borders or the spaces between different faiths and in the continual and challenging movement back and forth between what is familiar and what is strange or ‘other’. 

The 'borders or the spaces' between faiths, between faith and non-faith, and indeed within faiths have already been explored at Wychwood Circle meetings and we hope to invite several guests to help us to do so in the new season. 

THANK GOD I'M AN ATHEIST

CHRISTIAN THEISTS AND CHRISTIAN ATHEISTS

This review of a Wychwood meeting was written for the local magazine 'The Wychwood' (April/May 2013)

Earlier this year Wychwood Library saw over 20 people assemble for Wychwood Circle’s visiting speaker. Canon Brian Mountford, Vicar of St Mary the Virgin’s, the University Church in Oxford, spoke about his recent book “Christian Atheist: Belonging without Believing”, a title which seemed to tempt along many who don’t go for Christian as a label or don’t go for Atheist, or feel there must be common ground to explore between the two.

The title, Brian told us, originated with a conversation with Philip Pullman, the Oxford author.  The Canon, maybe trying to emphasize his credentials as a man of the world, said he would describe himself as ‘secular’; to which Pullman (an atheist) said, well he would call his own outlook on life ‘religious’.  So roles seemed to be reversed and Brian has had a number of similar conversations with members of his Oxford city congregation.  Many choose to belong because of the music, or th Anglican liturgy, or because a partner sings in the choir. They are drawn to religious ethics, language, art and community.  Brian welcomes them all and the question of belief, in the sense of signing up to a certain body of doctrine, becomes secondary. The more important question is: “how shall I be?”

Brian’s congregation will not be alone in being grateful to be told that you can be a Christian in this sense without anyone else’s permission. Many, he said, were looking to be taken out of themselves – by the aesthetics of an ancient ceremony in a beautiful building, by a sense of ‘the other’. Karen Armstrong, whose book we read last year, was fond of the Greek word ekstasis – stepping out of yourself – and others with a psychoanalytical bent might emphasise the benefits of leaving our ego behind.  But who is to say, as was voiced by our group, that this couldn’t be done through a Pink Floyd concert as well as Handel’s Messiah, a country walk as much as cathedral architecture?

The same day Radio 4’s Something Understood was on the theme ‘Should I stay or should I go?’ Religion, it said, may originate from the root ‘to bind’.  Church, on the other hand, should ideally feel like home.  So apparently it’s ok to go to church – or even to believe in Jesus’s God – because you want to rather than because you are ready to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

So, six months on, we might ask yourselves: what exactly is it 'to believe'? Marcus Borg, hearking back to the Old English be loef, prefers to read it as 'to belove'. Karen Armstrong too relates the word back to its Middle English meaning of 'to prize, to value, to hold dear'. The word 'faith' similarly has acquired some new connotations since its translation from the Greek pistis which meant 'trust, engagement, commitment' or the Latin fides which means 'loyalty'. All this is very different from thinking you have to assent to a set of intellectual propositions before you can say you 'believe in God'. It also offers some promising new (or old) meanings for a contemporary definition of being 'a Christian'. What fun you can have once you start connecting up pre-modern with post-modern! 

On September 8th Wychwood Circle returns to this broad theme when it will be led by an invited guest, Revd Andy Thayer, associate priest in the Chase Benefice (Chadlington, Ascott, etc), actor, musician, and theologian, who is currently working on a doctorate at Oxford University. His provocative title is: "Thank God I'm an atheist". 

Do join us at Wychwood Library in High Street, Milton under Wychwood, from 7pm to about 9pm on Sunday 8th September. The following meeting is scheduled for October 6th and will be led by Ian Cave, an atheist and one of the founders of the group in 2012. 

RELIGION, THEOLOGY AND DANCE

I was rather pleased recently to come across another way of defining religion. Previously I related the word to the Latin root ‘ligare’,  which meant religion was all about binding or being bound.  Another way of doing the etymology is to think of ‘re-ligare’ as about reconnecting, which is much more appealing.  Is this not also what spirituality is about? William Bloom in his very readable book on Modern Spirituality divides his subject into Connection, Reflection and Service.

If we start off – as probably most of us do – from a position of being disconnected and fragmented, as a society if not as individuals, then perhaps what we seek in religion or spirituality is to be ‘reconnected, put back together with God, with one another, reintegrated within ourselves, reconnected to the world we are part of’. (A new kind of Christian, Brian D McLaren)

Our Wychwood Circle has been doing its own bit of soul-searching recently as we reached a pivotal point.  Our equilibrium seemed under threat and questions were even asked about the continuation of the group – despite  18 fascinating months of meetings for discussion and exploration.  At the start we decided not to call the group a ‘theological society’ since that would sound pompous and off-putting to the wide constituency we wanted to attract. Yet, taken back to its essentials, the word theology also reveals a new, open and holistic interpretation. 

Theology is after all merely ‘talk about God’ or even just talk about ‘theism’ or our particular conception of god or gods.  As someone has said:  “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” Which is what makes it so valuable to be able to explore such things with the help of others.  Wychwood Circle will continue for a while yet. 

There is another analogy which I like in this context.  Former bishop Richard Holloway wrote a book some time ago called “Dancing on the Edge” – which described his position in the church at the time (he has since left it)*.   More recently I came across this favourite quotation of Nietzsche: ‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.’  Dancing here becomes a metaphor for faith, religion, or just personal philosophy. 

Dancing is not something you have to persuade or convert people to.  The joy of dancing isn’t achieved by rational argument or emotional intimidation – and we certainly don’t go in for anything like what our parents called dancing! You may tempt people to dance with you, you may invite them to, or they may simply not be able to resist joining in.  Others won’t hear the music and so will wonder what you’re doing, or they may just not get the same sense of liberation from moving their bodies to the music as you do. Maybe it’s not for them.

One can extend the metaphor.  Dance varies from culture to culture and nobody wins, nobody loses, nobody is right, nobody is (necessarily) wrong.  It is something you get caught up in, but it’s not for everybody.  It can be slow and meaningful, or fast and fun, it may be casual and spontaneous or carefully studied and professionally produced.  But, more often that not, it is a social activity and one that is best shared, and this is another good reason for Wychwood Circle’s existence and openness. 

A final thought which I owe to the Bishop of Oxford in a letter to church-goers in his Diocese on the vexed question (for the church) of their response to the gay marriage debate. He concludes a long column on the subject with the words: ‘The gospel must always be Good News.’  That is indeed  the meaning of ‘gospel’ and a timely reminder to his confused flock - but I would want to extend that hope more widely, and to other people’s ‘religion’ too. 

*Jill Greer has kindly drawn our attention to a retreat which Richard Holloway is leading at Launde Abbey in October.  His most recent book was an autobiography called, poignantly, “Leaving Alexandria”, reviewed by Mary Warnock here.  Jill recommends the setting of Launde Abbey. 

Wychwood Circle will take a break in August but will resume in September – possibly the 8^th rather than the usual first Sunday in the month. TBC . 

INSTANCES OF THE NUMBER 2

At our Sunday evening forum in Wychwood Library we recently dipped into Jonathan Sachs’ book The Great Partnership, a book about bringing together two very different approaches to understanding the world. The third section of the book is entitled Faith and Its Challenges. In the chapter ‘Where Religion Goes Wrong’, Sachs bravely tackles a number of instances of religion getting a bad name, sometimes with good reason.  He mentions five ‘hazards’ to which he admits the Judeo-Christian tradition has been prone, of which one is Dualism.   

Dualism

Dualistic thinking seems to be everywhere these days.  Chambers English Dictionary defines philosophical dualism as a view which seeks to explain the world by means of two separate elements, as in spirit and matter or good and evil.  It is to the second of these that Sachs refers.  The conclusion it is tempting to draw from the existence of ‘unjust suffering’ in the world, he says, is that there must be ‘forces of evil, as an independent, active force, apart from and opposed to God’.  With the Woolwich massacre fresh in our minds and the ensuing attacks on mosques, it is all too easy to recognise this sense of good and evil, of judgment, violence and vengeance.

And do we not recognise in our own instincts the sort of dualism of the sort Sachs decries?  From the playground  where it remains trivial (“It wasn’t me; it was him”) to war zones and fascist states where it  goes to the other extreme  (“it’s not us; it’s them”) mankind sets up a dualism which spares us (and our god?) and blames the others: the outsiders, those who are different or disabled or unemployed or have a different religion or ethnicity or nationality.  Look at Nazi Germany, or the Balkans, or the Middle East, or Woolwich and its aftermath.  As Sachs rather dramatically puts it: ‘There is a straight line from dualism to demonisation to dehumanisation  to genocide.’

Sachs’ answer is simple, even if it would need a sermon to unpack it: ‘The most powerful antidote to dualism is monotheism.’  Monotheism, he says, ‘refuses to split light and dark, good and evil, into separate forces or entities’.  Sachs’ God created them all and encompasses them all and ‘forces us to wrestle with the ambiguities of our own character, the necessity for moral choice and the inescapability of personal responsibility’.  Tell that to the reasonable-sounding Tommy Robinson of the EDL.

Two halves of life 

Another related instance of dualism is found in a recent book about what one might call “spirituality for the ageing”!  Dualistic thinking is here not spirit and matter, nor good and evil, but rather what the author calls ‘the well-practised pattern of knowing most things by comparison’.

We are all happier knowing where we are in terms of up or down, in or out, right or wrong, for me or against me, black or white, gay or straight. But Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest addressing a Christian audience albeit with an intriguing Jungian agenda, says this dualistic thinking is characteristic of a ‘first half of life’ attitude.  In his book subtitled A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, he says we need to build on this phase but also move on from it into what Jung called the ‘second half of life’.  A new capacity for ‘non-dualistic thinking’ or ‘both-and thinking’ is, he says, ‘almost the benchmark of our growth into the second half of life’. 

As someone who definitely hit the stereotypical mid-life point some time back, I have asked lots of new questions and been dissatisfied with the traditional answers.  I have also looked back at what my own first half of life was like and I found a lot of resonance in Rohr’s book. Dualistic thinking is necessary in the first half of life in order to draw boundaries and set up clear goals.  We desperately need to find an identity – so much easier if we can do so by excluding what we are not or wouldn’t want to be.  But this approach exists only through comparing and labelling, judging and polarising.

The danger, as Rohr sees it, is that we get trapped into this way of thinking: Most people do not see things as they are; rather, they see things as they are. …  Buddhism has helped people see this in themselves probably better than most of the world religions. … In the first half of life, the negative, the mysterious, the scary, and the problematic are always exported elsewhere.  Doing so gives you a quick and firm ego structure that works for a while. [But]… Eventually this overcompensation in one direction must be resolved and balanced. This integration … is the very name of growth, maturity, and holiness.

  

The divided brain

There is more than just an echo of the ‘divided brain’ analysis here.  If you are looking for balance and integration, start with an understanding of how your own brain works! Which of course was the principal thesis of Jonathan Sacks’ book.  Using the still relatively new concept of the divided brain he works on the premise that the two hemispheres of our brains lead us into contrasting but compatible, or even ‘more than compatible’, views of the world.  As Sachs explains:

Since Pierre Paul Broca discovered the location of language-processing skills in the left side of the brain, neuroscientists have come to understand the marked difference between the brain’s two hemispheres and how they process information. The left hemisphere tends to be linear, analytical, atomistic and mechanical. It breaks things down into their component parts and deals with them in a linear, sequential way. The right brain tends to be integrative and holistic. 

A much bigger book, Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, goes further and suggests that western civilisation has for several centuries been adversely affected by the predominance of the left hemisphere in our thinking.  What may be most challenging to us in our self-confidently scientific modern world is the possibility that we took a wrong turn a couple of hundred years ago and are not as clever as we think!  Mary Midgley’s summary of this huge book in a Guardian review of January 2010 is provocative and striking :  

McGilchrist's suggestion is that the encouragement of precise, categorical thinking at the expense of background vision and experience - an encouragement which, from Plato's time on, has flourished to such impressive effect in European thought - has now reached a point where it is seriously distorting both our lives and our thought...

Dualism again 

But is this about dualism or dualistic thinking?  The Guardian review is worth quoting at length, not least because it asks whether the origin of this split way of thinking and the subsequent predominance of the literalist and empiricist view does in fact lie in dualism of the spirit/matter variety:

Our whole idea of what counts as scientific or professional has shifted towards literal precision - toward elevating quantity over quality and theory over experience - in a way that would have astonished even the 17th-century founders of modern science, though they were already far advanced on that path. ... And the ideal of objectivity has developed in a way that would have surprised those sages still more. 

This notion, which now involves seeing everything natural as an object, inert, senseless and detached form us, arose as part of the dualist vision of a split between body and soul. ... It therefore showed matter itself as dead, a mere set of billiard-ball particles bouncing mechanically off each other, always best represented by the imagery of machines. For that age, life and all the ideals relevant to humanity lay elsewhere, in our real home - in the zone of the spirit. ... But the survival of this approach today, when physicists have told us that matter does not actually consists of billiard balls, when

we all supposedly believe that we are part of the natural biosphere, not colonists from spiritual realms - when indeed many of us deny that such realms even exist - seems rather surprising. 

It is a massive book but a fundamental one to our human journey – and I may say that it is quite possible to dip into it and miss out the more technical and mathematical chapters.  The final word on his theme should go to Iain McGilchrist himself:

We have been sold a sadly limiting version of who we as human beings are, and how we relate to the world.  Inside each one of us there is an intelligence, in fact a superior intelligence, that sees things differently from the way we have been told - if we would only listen to it. Let's hope that we can. 

Conclusion

A suggestion emerged at the end of a fascinating Cheltenham Science Festival event this month on the so-called ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ of science and religion.  Actually -  the immunologist and bishop of Swindon advanced - they do overlap and that overlap is precisely where we really get talking about ‘what it is to be human’.  Which is as good an anti-dualist point as any to round off this post. 

THE MYSTERY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

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.’ 

Much scope for discussion here and some thoughts which would probably not sit uncomfortably with our current author and searcher for meaning, Jonathan Sacks, philosopher, theologian and, for a little longer, Chief Rabbi.