October 8, 2009
WHICH IS TO UNDERSTATE THE QUANTUM ENIGMA:
Without God We are Nothing: My claims this afternoon are simple. It is more reasonable to believe in God than to reject the hypothesis of God by appealing to chance; more reasonable also to believe than to escape into agnosticism. (CARDINAL GEORGE PELL, October 4, 2009, CERC)
As well as being an accomplished philosopher Antony Flew is also an excellent populariser, able to express controversial thoughts forcefully and pithily.The most controversial claim in his recent book is "that of all the great discoveries of modern science, the greatest was God".
This is provocative for unbelievers, especially unbelieving scientists, and provocative for believers, who know that the roots of monotheism are found with Abraham about 3,700 or 3,900 years ago.
Although much of public opinion still regards science as an enemy of religious understanding and therefore of God, recent developments in physics and now in biology have strengthened the case for God the Creator as a first rate mathematician as well as being prodigal and unpredictable in His creation.
We cannot arrive to God within the framework of science, because God is outside space and time. Flew explains neatly that when we study the interaction of physical bodies, such as sub-atomic particles, we are doing science. When we ask how or why these particles exist, we go beyond physics to metaphysics. We are doing philosophy.
I should repeat that the God for which we are arguing is not a God of the gaps, not a God who is brought in to paste over the gaps in our present scientific knowledge, which might be filled later as science progresses. It is the whole of the universe which is not self-explanatory, including the infrastructure and elements we understand scientifically.
Many people over the ages have found evidence for the Mind of God in the laws of nature, in their regularity and symmetry.
The law of the conservation of energy, Newton's first law of motion and Boyle's law, mathematically precise regularities, universal and tied together, are the examples Flew gives as he asks how nature is packaged in this way.
Flew shows that as well as Einstein, the great scientists who developed quantum physics, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Dirac were all theists.
If the quantum physicists are correct, God is necessary to collapse the waves.