STORIES FROM THE STREET: What might theology have to say about homelessness?

THE SHAPING OF CHARACTER and SOUL-SHAPING

WHAT MATTERS MOST IN LIFE 

In the 2012 Preface to his book The Shape of Living, Regius Professor of Divinity David F Ford comments that 'it was liberating to be thinking as directly as possible about what matters most in life, and to reach out to a wide audience'. Mark Oakley, whose wonderful book The Splash of Words finally saw the light of day this year and has already reached a wide and appreciative audience, has this to say towards the end of a chapter on R S Thomas' poem Raptor:

We are far from being an atheist culture: indeed, there is a hunger for the sacred that persists, even intensifies, in an era when knowledge is exploding. This hunger I believe is rooted in something more fundamental than intellectual confusion. Regardless of religious orthodoxies, it seems that people cannot brush aside the sense that there are things that matter and that this mattering is not a mere question of knowledge or social convention. It implies an orientation of one's life towards what lies outside it, a recognition of values that transcend the individual and even the culture ... 

Heart and hospitality: shadows of the stricken

Earlier this year we saw in Ford's Chapter 1 (Shaping a Heart) that the degree to which our 'community of the heart' is hospitable towards those who differ most from us is the best test of its quality'.  Writing (the original edition) in 1997, Ford's words, picking up a phrase of Micheal O'Siadhail about relationships and hospitality across personal boundaries, are weirdly prescient of our continent and country in 2016, where intruders threaten to disrupt 'normal' life:

The boundaries of our being continue to shift as each of us introduces new faces and voices, and the scope for border disputes is endless.  ... We constantly meet with faces and voices which appeal to us to help, to have compassion, or to take some practical responsibility that goes beyond what our commitments or inclinations oblige us to do. 

He quotes from a poem by O'Siadhail called 'Intrusion':  'But what if between our gazes/ shadows of the stricken fall,/ the stares we seem to veil/ keep on commanding us?'  And the last stanza asks: 'Is love a threadbare blindfold?/ 'Yes,' say our shadows, 'unless/ you turn to face the faceless.'/ Who'll re-envisage the world?'  Tempted to shield our comfort and security, we 'recognise the hard heart, the cold heart, the closed heart, the paralysed heart, even the dead heart'.

In a world of good and bad 'overwhelmings', Ford asks us what could convince us one way or the other. In his own testimony to the possibility that love might be the ultimate reality, O'Siadhail in his poems, The Other Voice and Out of the Blue, superficially about romantic love, seems to be reaching towards something universal.

My love is your freedom.  Do or die or downfall,/  it's all or nothing and I have chosen all. 

The most intimate aspects of our self which we call our soul

In chapters 3 and 4, he turns to The Shaping of Character, with discussions of power, virtue and wisdom, and Soul-Shaping, with explorations of the 'secrets' and 'disciplines of intimacy' - including a poem where St Francis addresses St Clare - and 'practices of excess', which includes a paean to the fruitfulness of silence as 'the perfection of secrecy and of discipline together'. Quite a recipe. But as Ford says:

Dealing with secrets shapes the most intimate aspects of our self which we call our soul. And as modern psychology and psychoanalysis have stressed, many of our life-shaping secrets are ones we are not even conscious of - they are repressed, forgotten, denied or deposited in our unconscious.  Our disciplines of living must take account of these depths too. 

Divine Comedy - a story of multiple overwhelmings

Jumping ahead to the final chapter, we find the subheadings 'Joy', 'Feasting', and ... 'The Hospitality of God'.  Ford introduces us to the Greek term Perichoresis, which describes the circling and interweaving of a dance. 'It was daringly taken up by the early Church to suggest what goes on in the very life of God,' he says. 'It is worth trying to understand why ...'  We then get quotations from Dante, Ezekiel and O'Siadhail. No wonder that last chapter is titled Kaleidoscope.

Join us, however much - or little - of the book you have managed to read, at Wychwood Library on Sunday, November 6th at 7pm.  The circle will be open, intimate and informal. 

THE SHAPE OF LIVING (II)

THE LONG ENTANGLEMENT BETWEEN RELIGION AND SCIENCE

"Ultimate curiosity, the impulse to see beyond the rim of the physical world, becomes ... a continuous driver for new discoveries within the physical world."

As Andrew Briggs and Roger Wagner seek to show in their massive history of human inquiry, the 'integrative struggle to unite our internal mental world' has led directly and indirectly to the ceaseless struggle to understand the whole physical world and the universe and our place within it. 

They quote someone called Qoholeth (or 'the teacher') in the Hebrew bible who says of what he sees as the God-given reach and the limitations of the human condition:

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart, yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

For many Christian churches we are now in the period of 'Creationtide'.  This is a time of celebration (eg Harvest Festival) and gratitude and maybe just a few thoughts about climate change and treasuring the earth's resources.  Over much of human history, Creation, or the natural world, has sparked intense interest, from cavemen to fifth-century Greek philosophers to astronomers, cosmologists and scientists, from Aristotle to Galileo and from Darwin to our own day.  One might also say from Athens to Alexandria and from Baghdad to the CERN collider in Switzerland.  

The views of all these thinkers and scientists on religion and faith are inevitably intertwined with their researches and beliefs and influenced by their environment and life experiences.  As Briggs and Wagner pause for breath at the end of Part IX of their book, they anticipate chapter 45 and two Oxford buildings of the mid-19th century which beckon from that next chapter as they 'stand at the threshold of the modern scientific world': 

"The idea of Creation as a framing hypothesis, a rubric written over the whole physical universe, has been a thread which (though frequently becoming snagged on literalistic interpretations of Scripture and coercive attempts to police religious thinking) has run through Jewish, Islamic, and Christian thought for roughly two thousand years.  

...[I]t might come as a surprise to discover the extent to which a strong slipstream of religious motivation was responsible for pulling individuals, professions, and even whole universities over that threshold." 

Wychwood Circle events are always open to anyone who has an interest in our varied topics. They usually happen on the first Sunday evening of the month. A retiring collection enables us to cover our costs. 

THE PENULTIMATE CURIOSITY - an illustrated discussion based on their new book, by Roger Wagner and Andrew Briggs

THE SCIENCE OF THE INCONCEIVABLE

THE PENULTIMATE CURIOSITY: SCIENCE AND THE ULTIMATE QUESTIONS

Wychwood Circle seems to have got entangled with science in recent months, with the science of climate change as a background to considering the ethics, and with cosmology and the new physics getting us onto even larger questions of the universe (s).

An article in this month’s Prospect magazine is entitled The science of the inconceivable and for a discussion group like ours which often comes up against mystery, limits of knowledge, science and religion and so on, that title is a natural draw.  With a professor of nanomaterials on our guest list for 2016-17 it also seems appropriate that we move our attention from cosmology to the opposite extreme, quantum theory – which this article is all about, starting from an experiment in 2015 that links back to Einstein in 1905.

The first paragraph by Philip Ball ('Science Commentator of the Year') is worth quoting in full:

‘Late last year, an experiment carried out by scientists at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands appeared to demonstrate that one object can affect another from afar without any physical interaction between the two. The finding confirmed an idea so extraordinary that, nearly a century ago, Albert Einstein had rejected it with the dismissive phrase “spooky action at a distance”.  In quantum theory this phenomenon is known as “entanglement”, and many physicists now regard it as the most profound and important characteristic of the physical world at the smallest scales, which quantum theory describes.’

In case we might think that this is some abstruse and ignorable bit of theorising by mad scientists, Ball assures us that ‘entanglement is arguably the central mystery of quantum theory … an idea that now stands at the very limits of our ability to understand the physical world.’  There follows a 4-page article which is at the very limits of the ability of a non-scientist to follow, but the conclusion is perhaps also worth quoting:

 ‘The much vaunted “spooky action at a distance”, is, then, neither spooky nor action.  Instead, it’s one of the strangest characteristics of the physical world – and may yet turn out to be one of the most revelatory.’

This may just be good summer journalism but to a WyC mind it rings all sorts of bells of recognition and curiosity.  In an age when ‘science’ is treated by some as almost a god (the name for the associated religion is ‘scientism’), It reminds us just how much ‘science’ in fact covers a vast multitude of disciplines (rather like ‘humanities’), and maybe suggests that any one science cannot begin to explain the world we live in, that a so-called ‘theory of everything’ is probably beyond any one mind, etc.  (It might remind, let’s say for the sake of argument, outspoken biologists that realism, let alone, humility would recognise quantum physicists (for example) and maybe even philosophers, poets, artists and theologians as having some useful and unignorable contributions to make to the biggest issues of all!)

Given the magnitude of the issues we can be grateful at Wychwood Circle that a fascinating duo of scientist and artist have not only written a book, The Penultimate Curiosity, combining the history of science and metaphysics, but also agreed to come to the Wychwoods to present their thesis, which is that ‘science swims in the slipstream of ultimate questions’.   According to the FT reviewer John Cornwell those ultimate questions are (and always were) ‘spiritual, aesthetic and philosophical in nature’.  Commending the book he concludes, somewhat acidly:

‘Without espousing a particular faith or denomination, the authors have provided a much-needed antidote to the New Atheists’ promotion of science at the expense of spirituality, a campaign that has done much to coarsen and misinform public understanding of both.’

A different approach clearly informs Richard Joyner’s review in the Times Higher Education: he puts the book in the context of ‘the race for dominance between science and religion’ and though critical of their premise and their conclusion says the book is ‘well worth reading’: ‘their narrative is fascinating and this is a beautiful volume…’, he says, though he thinks their quest for meaningful answers ‘may be long and unrewarding’.

While Andrew Briggs is professor of nanomaterials at Oxford, Roger Wagner is a painter and art historian and their presentation to us – like the beautifully produced book – will be fully illustrated and we will benefit from the excellent equipment at the Village Hall in Milton under Wychwood.  The book is available from various sellers and there are also two copies at Wychwood Library: the authors have invited us to read at least some of it in advance of their visit.

Join us if you can on Sunday, October 2^nd at 7pm in Miton under Wychwood Village Hall (to be confirmed) on Shipton Road, or if not in the Library (High Street, OX7 6LD).  

GOD, SELF AND THE NEW COSMOLOGY

'A SUPERINTENDENT HAS MONKEYED WITH THE PHYSICS'

Thus Fred Hoyle in the 1950s, as quoted below.  As we prepare for our Cosmology and Religion event on July 3rd, here are some extracts from authors who have pondered the subject professionally.   

KEITH WARD (God, Chance & Necessity, 1996):

When one considers all the elements involved in the Big Bang, it begins to look like an extremely complex event, and not a simple elementary fact at all.  So it [still] seems to stand in need of explanation.  To say that such a very complex and well-ordered universe comes into being without any cause or reason is equivalent to throwing one’s hands up in the air and just saying that anything at all might happen, that it is hardly worth bothering to look for reasons at all.  And that is the death of science.

[from ch 1 where he considers whether the universe came into being by chance, or by necessity or for a particular purpose]

PAUL DAVIES (The Goldilocks Enigma, 2006):

[So] let’s take a look at the hypothesis that the appearance of design in the universe is the result of a designer/creator.  Although by definition this is not a scientific explanation (since it appeals to a supernatural cause), it is still a rational explanation. …

Intelligent design of the laws [of nature] does not conflict with science, because it accepts that the whole universe runs itself according to physical laws, and that everything that happens in the universe has a natural explanation.  … You don’t even need a miracle to bring the universe into existence in the first place, because the big bang may be brought within the scope of physical laws too, either by using quantum cosmology … or by assuming something like eternal inflation. …

The central objection to invoking such a being to account for the ingenious form of the universe is the completely ad hoc nature of the explanation.  Unless there is already some other reason to believe in the existence of the Great Designer, then merely declaring ‘God did it!’ tells us nothing at all.

[ch 9 in a section entitled: Laws by design versus anthropic selection in a multiverse]

Although a strong motivation for introducing the multiverse concept is to get rid of the need for design, this is bid is only partially successful.  … The popular multiverse models shift the problem elsewhere – up a level from universe to multiverse.  To appreciate this, one only has to list the many assumption that underpin the multiverse theory.

[ch 9: Who designed the multiverse? ]

ANGELA TILBY (Soul: God, Self and the New Cosmology, 1992):

The weak anthropic principle

The weakest statement of the anthropic principle starts from the realisation that it is becoming harder and harder to believe that we can observe the universe from a truly neutral position.  In 1974 Brandon Carter, a former research student of Stephen Hawking’s, made the suggestion in a journal of the Royal Society that our location in the universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers. …

The weak anthropic principle … states clearly that the universe does not revolve around us.  What it does say is that our universe, of necessity, has to take account of our presence.  …

But the consequences of the anthropic principle are more far-reaching than this.  In classical and quantum physics, as we have seen, life is something of an anomaly…  What has been surprising to physicists is to discover that in purely physical terms life is not as anomalous to the basic structure of the universe as they once assumed.  In fact the conditions for life seem to have been woven into the fabric of things from the very beginning. …

Fred Hoyle …  was so struck by the scale and number of coincidences which allowed for the balance of elements necessary for life that he remarked, ‘A superintendent has monkeyed with the physics.’

The strong anthropic principle

… claimed that the universe must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage.

…  It says that, given the way the universe is, carbon-based intelligent observers have to come into existence at some stage in its evolution. This would seem to introduce an element of deliberate design … We are meant to be here … ‘The universe knew we were coming.’

There are three possible interpretations of the strong anthropic principle.  …

[1] There is only one possible universe, which has been designed with the goal of bringing conscious observers into existence.

[2] Our universe depends on the existence of many other different universes.

[3] The universe requires conscious observers in order to bring itself into being.

…

Spirituality and participation

…Our existence is a miracle, but it is a miracle with meanings we are yet to discover. Looking at the world as an interconnected web, a web which seems to require conscious observers to make it more and more fully real, suggests that the maker of this world may be difficult to discern not because God is hidden, but because God is so enormous and all-encompassing that we cannot see God as being separate from the wholeness of things. …

[ch 8 The Anthropic Universe]