Thursday 23 April, 2009

Science/Nature

By Andrew Halloway

This year’s Templeton Prize, awarded for academic excellence “affirming life’s spiritual dimension”, has been won by French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat.
And the Duke of Edinburgh will present the prize to Dr d’Espagnat on May 5 in a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

The sheer fact that there has been a continual stream of eminent scientists who have won the Templeton Prize over the years undermines the oft-repeated claims of some atheists that science has made God redundant, or that you can’t be both a good scientist and a believer. D’Espagnat has worked with some of the most famous names in modern science.

John Templeton Jr, chairman and president of the John Templeton Foundation, said d’Espagnat had consistently employed the most rigorous scientific standards to expand the potential of what science may tell us far beyond the laboratory: “Instead of simply measuring the limits of quantum physics, he has explored the unlimited, the openings that new scientific discoveries offer in pure knowledge and in questions that go to the very heart of our existence and humanity.”

Quantum physics is a complex theory that doesn’t easily lend itself to simple explanations for lay people, but it is hugely successful nonetheless because its predictions about the behaviour of sub-atomic particles are confirmed by experimentation. But in many ways it raises more questions than it answers.

The reason it is difficult for anyone without a PhD in physics to follow the theory in detail is that it is often counter-intuitive. It doesn’t sit well with a ‘common sense’ understanding of the world. For example, some scientists suggest that quantum physics shows that observers actually affect the nature of what they are observing. Famous physicist John Wheeler said the universe “has not really happened, it is not a phenomenon, until it has been observed to happen.”

It’s a bizarre conclusion that suggests there is something beyond the laws of physics that we don’t understand. In fact, many serious scientists believe that quantum physics opens up a spiritual view of the world.

D’Espagnat would agree. He worked with Wheeler, but came to a very different conclusion about the observer implications of quantum theory. D’Espagnat believes instead that quantum physics shows us that reality is ultimately “veiled” from us. The theory only gives us a glimpse behind that veil, which is why we can’t make any real sense of what is happening. He says his research has led him to believe that, underlying the physical reality of the world, there “is a mysterious ‘ultimate reality’, not embedded in space and (presumably) not in time either… this ultimate reality is beyond any concept that we can construct.”

That description comes pretty close to the Christian understanding of the spiritual world that exists behind our physical world, outside of space and time. In fact, D’Espagnat is a Christian and believes that hidden reality is not only spiritual but divine.

Another ‘great’ in modern science, Oxford physicist Roger Penrose, believes that mathematics gives a similar impression of the world. He says it indicates that there is a world beyond the immediate, material one that “contains” mathematics and other abstract ideas.

Yet another leading scientist, John Polkinghorne, worked on quantum physics before being ordained an Anglican minister. He believes not only that science and religion are entirely compatible, but that science can help us understand God’s handiwork. In fact Polkinghorne calls science and theology “intellectual cousins”.

The fact that there is order rather than chaos in the physical universe enables it to be studied, and that order is exactly what you would expect if you believe in an orderly God. The laws of science suggest there is a ‘law-giver’. Even Einstein believed in some kind of a God because of the ‘beauty’ and ‘elegance’ of mathematics and because the ordered universe clearly implied there was an organised Mind behind it.

Now believers can be forgiven for smirking and saying, “We told you so.” Christians have always believed that God and the spiritual realm are inaccessible or “veiled” to science, because science is the study of the physical, not the spiritual. But it is also increasingly clear that science can point us in God’s direction. From there, we need God’s own direct revelation to us – the Bible – to discern spiritual reality.