Socrates in the City: Conversations on Life, God and Other Small Topics

Of course, there is another possibility. Maybe there is only one universe that is the way it is, because it is not just any old world but is a creation that is being endowed by its Creator with precisely the finely tuned laws and circumstances that will allow it to have a fruitful history.

So, many, many, many universes or design, a created design. Which shall we choose? Leslie says we don’t know which one to choose. It is six of one and half a dozen of the other. I think in relation to what I have just been talking about— these anthropic fine-tunings— that Leslie is right about that. Both suggestions are what you might call metaphysical. Sometimes, people try to dress the many universes all up in scientific vestment, but essentially I think it is a metaphysical guess. We do not have direct experience of those many, many, many universes. That is a sort of metaphysical guess, just as the existence of a Creator God is a sort of metaphysical guess. So, what should we choose?

If that is the only thing we are thinking about, we can choose one or the other with equal plausibility, but if we widen the argument, then I think we shall see that the assumption that there are many, many, many universes does only one piece of explanatory work. The only thing it explains is to explain away the particularity of our observed and experienced universe. The piece of work is to diffuse the threat of theism, but the theistic explanation— it does seem to me— does a number of other pieces of work.

I have already suggested that a theistic view of the world explains the deep intelligibility of the world that science experiences and exploits, and I also believe, of course, that there is a whole swath of religious experience of the human-testified encounter with the reality of the sacred, which is also explained by the belief in the existence of God. So, it seems to me, there is a cumulative case for theism in which the anthropic argument can play one part, but only one part. It will not, of course, surprise you, given what you know about me, that it is that latter explanation which I myself embrace.

There we are. That is one aspect of the relationship between science and religion. The intelligibility of the world and the particular fruitfulness of the universe are striking things that science draws to our attention but does not itself explain. It seems to me that religion can offer science the gift of a more extensive, more profound understanding to set the remarkable results of science within a more profound matrix of understanding.

Science also, it seems to me, gives gifts to religion. The gifts that science principally gives to religion are to tell religion what the history and the nature of the world are like and have been, and religious people should take that absolutely seriously. Those seeking to serve the God of truth should welcome truth from whatever source it comes, not that all truth comes from science, of course, by any means. But real truth does come from science, and we should welcome that. The truth of science, in my view, is able to help religion with its most difficult problem.

What is the most difficult problem for religion? What holds people back from religious belief more than any other? What troubles those of us who are religious believers more than any other? I am sure we are likely to agree that it is the problem of the suffering that is present in the world— the disease and disaster that seems to be present in what is claimed to be the creation of a good and perfect and powerful God. I do not need to explain what that problem is. It is only too clear.

Interestingly enough, the insights that science offers— the world is an evolving world, and evolutionary thinking is fundamental to all scientific thinking about the history of the universe, not just the evolution of life here on Earth— is, of course, part of the story. But the evolving part of the universe itself— the processes by which the galaxies and the stars formed and so on— all of these are evolutionary processes.

It is interesting that when Darwin publishes his great work On the Origin of Species in 1859, there is a sort of popular, absolutely, totally, historically ignorant view that that was the moment of the fantastic head-on collision between science and religion, with all the scientists shouting, “Yes, yes, yes!” and all the religious people, the clergy particularly, shouting, “No, no, no!” That’s absolutely, historically untrue!

There was a good deal of argument and confusion on both sides of the question. Quite a lot of scientists had lots of difficulties with Darwin. It was only when Mendel’s discovery of genetics was rediscovered and the neo-Darwinian synthesis came along that people really began to see and feel on surer ground in relation to it.

Equally, there were religious people who from the start welcomed the insights of evolutionary thinking into the nature of God’s creation. I am happy to say that two of those people who welcomed that were Anglican clergymen in England. One was Charles Kingsley, and the other was Frederick Temple, and they both coined the phrase that, I think, perfectly encapsulates the theological way to think about an evolving world. They said, “No doubt, God could have snapped the divine fingers and brought into being a ready-made world, but God had chosen to do something cleverer than that. For in bringing into being an evolving world, God had made a creation in which creatures could make themselves.”

In other words, from a theological point of view, evolving process is the way in which creatures explore and bring to birth the deep fruitfulness of potentiality with which the Creator has endowed creation. That gift of being themselves, making themselves, is, I think, what you would expect the God of love to give to that God’s creation. The God of love will not be the puppet master of the universe, pulling every string.

So, I think that a creation making itself, an evolving world which is a creation making itself, is a greater good than a ready-made world would be. However, it is a good that has a necessary cost, because that process of shuffling exploration of potentiality will necessarily involve ragged edges and blind alleys. The engine that has driven, for example, the evolution of life here on Earth has been genetic mutation in germ cells that have produced new forms of life, but the same biochemical processes that enabled germ cells to mutate and to produce new forms of life will necessarily allow somatic cells, body cells, also to mutate and become malignant. You cannot have one without the other.

So, the fact that there is cancer in the world, which is, undoubtedly, an anguishing aspect of the world and a source of grief and anger to us, is, at least, not gratuitous. It is not something that a God who was a little more compassionate or a little more competent could easily have removed. It is the shadow side of the creativity of the world. It is the necessary cost of a creation allowed to make itself. Now, you could argue whether it is a cost worth paying. I am not suggesting for a minute that this consideration I have been laying out in the last couple of minutes solves all the problems of evil and suffering, but it does at least help us. I say that it seems to indicate these problems are not gratuitous.

We all tend to think that if we had been in charge of creation, we would have done it better. We would have kept all the nice things (the sunsets, the flowers) and thrown away all the nasty things (the disease and disaster), but the more scientifically we actually understand the processes of the world, the more we see how inextricably interlinked all these things are and that there is a dark side as well as a light side to what is going on. That is a small hope, a small help, in relation to what is going on.

I always finish what I have to say, and the conversation will be the most interesting part of the evening. If you are totally convinced by everything I have said this evening, it would have led you no more than to a picture of God as the great mathematician or the cosmic architect. It has been a limited form of inquiry, and there is still much more that one might ask about the nature of God and much more that one might seek to learn about the nature of God; that will have to be found in other forms of human experience. A very important aspect of belief in God is that not only is there a Being who is the Creator of the world, but also this Being is worthy of worship, and I just indicate with a tiniest sketch how I would approach that issue.

I am deeply impressed by the existence of value in the world— something that science directly does not take into account. But our physical world, of which we are a part, is shot through with value, with beauty. For example, music is very interesting. Suppose you ask a scientist as a scientist to tell you all he or she can about music. They will say, “It is neuro-response— neurons firing away to the impact of vibrations in the air hitting the eardrum,” and, of course, that is true and, of course, in its way, it is worth knowing. However, it hardly tells you all you might want to know about the deep mystery of music. Science trolls experience with a very coarse-grained net, and the fact that these vibrations in the air somehow are able to speak to us— and, I believe, speak truly to us of a timeless beauty— is a very striking thing about the world.

Similarly, I think we have moral knowledge of a surer kind than any that we possess. I do not, for a minute, believe that our conviction that torturing children is wrong is either some kind of curious, disguised genetic strategy or just a convention of our society. Our tribe just happens to choose not to torture children. It is a fact about the world that torturing children is wrong. We have moral laws. Where do these value-laden things come from? I think they come from God, actually. Just as I think that the wonderful order of the world and the fruitfulness of cosmic history are reflections of the mind and purpose of the Creator, so I think that our ethical intuitions, our intimations of God’s good and perfect will, and our aesthetic experiences are a sharing in the Creator’s joy in creation.

For me, theistic belief ties together all these things in a way that is deeply satisfying and intellectually coherent, and then there would be many other questions still remaining. Even if there is such a God worthy of worship, does that God care for you and me? That is a question I could not answer without looking into taking the risk both of commitment and ambiguity and looking into personal experience. For me, that would mean looking into my Christian encounter with the person and reality of Christ. That is a subject for another discussion.

Here I am. I stand before you as somebody who is both a physicist and a priest. I am grateful for both of those things, and I want to be two-eyed. I want to look with the eye of science on the world, and I want to look with the eye of my Christianity on the world. The binocular vision those give me enables me to see and understand more than I would be able to with either of them on their own.

But it would be nice to know what you think about these things, and I think the time has come to let you have a go. So, over to you.

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