God and Natural Order

Physics, Philosophy, and Theology

Shaun C. Henson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415729185
• eBook ISBN: 9781317915010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

In God and Natural Order: Physics, Philosophy, and Theology, Shaun Henson brings a theological approach to bear on contemporary scientific and philosophical debates on the ordered or disordered nature of the universe. Henson engages arguments for a unified theory of the laws of nature, a concept with monotheistic metaphysical and theological leanings, alongside the pluralistic viewpoints set out by Nancy Cartwright and other philosophers of science, who contend that the nature of physical reality is intrinsically complex and irreducible to a single unifying theory. Drawing on the work of theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg and his conception of the Trinitarian Christian god, the author argues that a theological line of inquiry can provide a useful framework for examining controversies in physics and the philosophy of science. God and Natural Order will raise provocative questions for theologians, Pannenberg scholars, and researchers working in the intersection of science and religion.

1
God as Unifier

Scientific Unification and Its Theological Alliances

It is not difficult to establish, from either religious or scientific vantage points, that human beings have an intrinsic need for the intelligibility both of their own lives and of the world around them. Such intelligibility, when found, tends to display inextricable connections with various concepts of unity. The impulse to unify is a means to achieving this desired intelligibility, finding easy ground in drives to reduce and comprehend, which are further common human impulses. These have all given physics seeds for its rise and current power in Western civilization. One could go further, declaring that all human religious and scientific endeavors emanate from these elemental intellectual and emotional drives.¹ Theologies and the sciences work in the human mind to unify and make intelligible our existence.

Among the sciences, physics is particularly like religion in seeking an ultimate explanation for all that we see and experience. This reductionist attitude in physics comes from a conviction that all of nature’s principles or laws are as they are because of deeper, underlying principles or laws.² The view arises from the observation that as these principles or laws continue to be uncovered, they begin to merge, uniformly pointing toward yet deeper, shared aspects of the forces and structures of nature.

This trend continues until quantum mechanics, special relativity, and Newtonian mechanics merge to form the two pillars of modern physics—quantum field theory and general relativity.³ Locating the guiding principle combining these final two would be a step toward a quantum theory of gravitational interactions—yet to be definitively uncovered—like string theory.⁴ The very deepest of these explanatory principles or laws is envisioned to be metaphorically like the monotheistic God found in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam—no less than an explanation of everything. As this “final” explanation hints toward philosophical implications, it has in recent decades come to be known as a “theory of everything.”⁵ The attainment of this singular theory or equation enabling a comprehensive understanding of the origin, workings, and destiny of our universe has been noted as the greatest unsolved problem in physics today.⁶

Einstein spent his final thirty years on the project, and a growing number of physicists have dedicated their energies and lives to the puzzle. The search began, however, long before Einstein, or anyone now continuing the investigations.

The One and the Many: Early Philosophical Foundations for Natural Unity

The search for a simple, elegant, and unified theory of nature has appeared in many guises for two millennia, far predating modern physics. A belief in the unity of nature finds clear expression in philosophy before Plato (ca. 429–347 bce) and the natural philosophies of Aristotle (384–322 bce) and Democritus (ca. 460–ca. 370 bce).⁷ Attempts at considering natural unity formally are recognizable in academic discussions beginning with the first Greek thinkers inspired by notions of monism. They supposed that while sensory experiences may suggest a nature seemingly boundless in variety, some underlying unity must exist if the world is to be comprehended. Hidden beneath appearances must lie some fundamental principle or substance uniting everything, from which all else emerges.⁸

In harmony with this assumption, Greek philosophers sought to explain and unify the variety of phenomena evident in nature on the basis of simple and even single principles. This search, by those who may be viewed as the first unifiers of the eventual science of physics, highlighted one of the most enduring philosophical issues in human history: the question of “the One or the Many.” Pre-Socratic thinkers Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca. 550–480 bce) and Parmenides of Elea (ca. 544–460 bce) typified by their quarrels the eventual disparate approaches of many thinkers and issues at stake. In early Greek philosophy alone, systems were proposed offering plentiful choices. The One might be constituted by a pluralism with mobility (Heraclitus),⁹ pluralism with divisibility (Leucippus, Democritus),¹⁰ unity with no diversity (Parmenides and the Eleatics),¹¹ and diversity with no unity (Cratylus, a disciple of Heraclitus, who argued that reality is so diverse as to be beyond intelligible comprehension).¹²

The Pythagoreans, by the fifth century bce, reasoned that numbers were a key to any proposed unity. Followers of Pythagoras of Samos, the group developed early basic arithmetic and geometry, analyzed music mathematically, and viewed the universe and its constituent parts as being numerically composed.¹³ Beginning with the idea of the One, they sketched a comprehensive account of the world. “And indeed all the things that are known have number; for it is not possible for anything to be thought of or known without this,” Philolaus argued.¹⁴ Each number was seen as nothing more than unity multiplied.¹⁵ The Pythagorean emphasis on mathematics revealed itself in the works of Plato and others. Formal scientific confirmations ensued from early physicist-astronomers like Kepler and Galileo.

God as the One Unifying the Many: Theological Foundations

Given the basis of physics’ current search in elementary human impulses and early formal philosophy, it is of no surprise that at various points in history intimate relations have existed between monotheistic religious concepts, mostly Christian, and scientific searches for unity. And it is no great leap to compare the relevance of the latest theoretical physics on questions concerning the nature of ultimate reality with metaphysical or theological concepts about the same reality.¹⁶ To deny the metaphysical and theological underpinnings of much in Western scientific development, not least of physics since the seventeenth century, would be to engage in acute historical error. Much disputed, nevertheless, is the proper interpretation of these connections, however factual.¹⁷ Yet with the gradual secularization of the sciences, including physics, it is remarkable that the character of a scientific search for a theory of everything has remained delicately contiguous with questions concerning God and the nature of creation.¹⁸ In physics these considerations have usually centered on long-standing connections between concepts of a unified nature and traditional Christian or Jewish monotheism.

Unification and the History of Divine Laws of Nature

Acknowledging the metaphysical and theological bases that have given rise to concepts vital for physics’ current search for unity still offers limited insights into the science of physics overall. For instance, the concept of law, like the concept of unity so dependent on it, has definite roots partly in religious thought, specifically in natural theology when “laws of nature” were imagined as human versions of God-given edicts. Rom Harré in Laws of Nature notes this religious-scientific belief among the likes of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, and Newton, emphasizing their confidence that through these laws God’s governance of nature was enacted.¹⁹ Jane E. Ruby, in “The Origins of Scientific ‘Law,’” argues against such prima facie claims, conceding the theological origins of law, but contending that the idea in modern use had several starting points, only one of which was to do with divine legislation. The modern idea of law, she argues, emerged “through different processes at different times in several distinct fields.”²⁰

While today “law of nature” is a thoroughly secular concept, two hundred and fifty years or so ago, Berkeley defined laws in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge as follows:

Now the set of rules or established methods, wherein the Mind we depend on [in this case meaning the spiritual being who causes our ideas] excites in us the ideas of sense, are called the laws of nature; and these we learn by experience, which teaches us that such and such ideas are attended with such and such other ideas, in the ordinary course of things… this consistent uniform working… so evidently displays the goodness and wisdom of the Governing Spirit whose Will constitutes the laws of nature….²¹

Two features of laws of nature as conceived by these early natural religionists have survived the centuries, though they are admittedly now also devoid of religious meaning: universality and necessity. The very term “law of nature” elicits notions of universality intimating unity, as in laws being universally true of nature.

Theologizing with Scientists: On the God of a Unified Nature

What kind of God might a “Unifier of Nature” be, and what further implications concerning that God might be derived from the view? One can explore this by examining the concept in the works of several thinkers foundational to physics’ search for a unified natural order. From the sixteenth century onward, pivotal figures like Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), René Descartes (1596–1650), Isaac Newton (1642–1727), Michael Faraday (1791–1867), James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879), Albert Einstein (1879–1955), and recent others like Stephen Hawking (1942–) and Steven Weinberg (1933–) have all contemplated a unified natural order, or worked explicitly on theories of everything.²²

While some physicists today focus exclusively on a unified theory, it has been argued that all past great advances in physics have been steps toward this goal.²³ Isaac Newton’s seventeenth-century unification of celestial and terrestrial mechanics, James Clerk Maxwell’s nineteenth-century unification of optics with the theories of electricity and magnetism, and Einstein’s merging of space-time geometry and gravitation from 1905 to 1916 are prime examples. The unification of chemistry and atomic physics via quantum mechanics in the 1920s opened a flurry of continued work toward a desired ultimate unification.²⁴ Physics gained further momentum for this project through the work of many, like Weinberg, Hawking, Straus, Kaluza, Klein, Weyl, Eddington, Schrödinger, de Broglie, Dirac, and Born.

The interweaving of monotheistic theological concepts with the unification of physics has been so pervasive that to write a truly inclusive history of the relationship could take several volumes. What one can do is give sufficient evidence for, and some clarification of, these connections, while neither attempting nor purporting to offer a complete history.

Physics is like many scientific disciplines in having found early mutual support with metaphysics, and most often with Christian theology.²⁵ This co-ratification has extended occasionally to include monotheistic concepts from other traditions or religions, and theological offshoots and ideologies derived from major monotheistic faiths. The Deism of England and France of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was derived from mainstream European Chr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 God as Unifier: Scientific Unification and Its Theological Alliances
• 2 God as Pluralist: Philosophical Challenges to Scientific Unification
• 3 Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Trinitarian Creation
• 4 Material Limits
• 5 Methodological Limits
• 6 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index