I AM a professional theologian, and I have got used to being defensive. Ever since Immanuel Kant devastatingly criticised all proofs of the existence of a creator in the 18th century, theologians and philosophers have been almost embarrassed about God. They have tended to talk of an uncreated being that brought everything else into existence as a leap of faith, instead of seeing it as a natural thing to think.
Today, however, there is no need to be defensive, for modern physicists have pushed the pendulum the other way. Almost every popular science book has a final chapter about God and the creation of the universe. Indeed, modern physics makes belief in God more plausible than it has ever been since Kant.
This might sound counter-intuitive. For a theist, all material reality depends on a fundamental spiritual or conscious reality. Science, on the other hand, deals with the physical, and has sometimes been used in support of a materialistic world view in which mind is at best totally dependent on matter, at worst an illusion.
Advertisement
Yet science has long offered an alternative hypothesis in which fundamental reality is more like mind than matter, and the material world is dependent on mind. Galileo and Newton took this for granted. Darwin accepted it 鈥� though he came to doubt the benevolence of the creator 鈥� and so did Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg, though they did not associate the underlying mentality of the cosmos with any religious idea of an interested and interacting God.
Now cosmologists have given this understanding a whole new meaning with their search for a 鈥渢heory of everything鈥� as an explanation for the state of the universe. This resonates strongly with the religious idea of God as a cosmic mind. 杏吧原创s seek an ultimate intelligibility, something like a final self-explanatory mathematical theory whose necessity in some way generates this material universe. This is an exciting, creative and positive view, and I believe it is vital that religion digests it.
The two come together most notably in the 鈥減ossible worlds鈥� theory postulated by Hugh Everett in 1957, in which every possible world exists. Many cosmologists take this as the most plausible explanation for the immensely improbable way our universe is fine-tuned for intelligent life. 鈥淲e seem to have three choices鈥� in accounting for this fine-tuning, says Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal of England, in Our Cosmic Habitat. 鈥淲e can dismiss it as happenstance, we can acclaim it as the workings of providence, or (my preference) we can conjecture that our universe is a specially favoured domain in a still vaster multiverse.鈥� If this multiverse contained every possible set of laws and conditions, then the existence of our own world with its particular characteristics would be inevitable.
鈥淎 theory of everything resonates strongly with the idea of God as a cosmic mind鈥�
It does not take any great leap of faith to go from there to the religious notion of a cosmic consciousness. If we suppose that mathematical realities exist only when conceived by some consciousness, we can frame the idea of a consciousness in which all mathematical structures, all possible states, and all moral and aesthetic values exist. We can speak of this ultimate consciousness as omniscient, since it conceives of all possible states. We can speak of it as omnipotent since it has the power to bring into reality all possible states. We can speak of it as a Supreme Good, since it contains an indefinite number of forms of beauty, intelligibility and bliss. Here we find ourselves very close to the classical Christian, Jewish or Muslim idea of God.
We can take the multiverse theory even further. Consider the religious principle of plenitude, according to which every possible sort of good should exist so long as its existence does not cause excessive or pointless harm. In the 4th century, Saint Augustine even suggested that there might be 鈥渨orlds without end鈥� 鈥� an infinite number of different universes 鈥� to accommodate this principle, though he was reluctant to decide on the issue. Where saints hesitate, cosmologists rush in. Of course, a theory of plenitude could never be part of natural science, for it speaks of that which is beyond the natural. But its advocates share with scientists the most profound motivation to understand why the cosmos is the way it is.
Religion and cutting-edge science can inform each other. The idea of a cosmic consciousness can help make comprehensible the beauty and intelligibility of the physical world. As Stephen Hawking recently said, a strictly scientific search for a theory of everything seems doomed. Mathematical theories do not exist on their own, and there seems no way of 鈥渂reathing fire into the equations鈥� 鈥� of accounting for the existence of a cosmos from purely mathematical facts. We need a richer idea of reality.
Modern cosmology refines and articulates the idea of an ultimate mind in a very exciting way. For the believer, the ultimate mind it points to is perfectly good and beautiful. And the contemplation of that good for its own sake is the heart of religion.
