Thank you very much to the Albertus Institute,
Dr Mark Harris and all those who have contributed
to this conference. Actually the title of
my talk was originally going to be ‘Cosmology
and Being’ but afterwards I thought that
might be a little bit too pretentious so its
slightly more modest, ‘Cosmology: a clarification
of the philosophical questions’. You can
see there is a screen there so I will try
to follow my own talk. Ok, is this working?
Right.
The warning of Hamlet, Act 1 Scene V. Can
anyone guess what this is? ‘There are more
things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than
are dreamt of in your philosophy’. That is
really the bottom line of what I want to talk
about. We have certain models that we keep
building of the world and some of those models
become somewhat ingrained to part of the way
we think and we forget they are models at
all and we think that is the world and that
is the big problem. It is having a huge impact,
it is having a kind of casting like a veil
over our ability to make progress in certain
fields including, I would say, cosmology itself.
Now modern books on physics usually present,
I see this has distorted my talk slightly- this computer
never mind, usually present a limited kind
of cosmology, generally in terms of laws of matter in motion in
a space time box; albeit a stretchable box
after Einstein. And what I put to you is if cosmology,
the etymology of the word, the definition
of the word being the science or theory of
the universe being an ordered whole. If we
take that seriously and the universe is all
that is created then the cosmology is not
limitable or defective has to take account
of what it is to be, not to be and coming
to be with a very broad understanding of the
word being. A very broad understanding of
the word being. That is where the philosophy
comes in. Now even some of our leading scientist
today have little or no training of philosophy. About
two years ago I had the privilege of taking
part in a round table discussion with the Director General
of CERN and some of the leading scientists
at CERN. After three days and what was interesting
was that the Director General spent a long
time listening and what was also interesting
was how basic philosophical questions kept
coming up; like what is truth? Seriously we
debated that for two or three hours; what
is truth? What is knowledge? What I was aware
of coming away from that meeting is how little
training our best scientist have in philosophical
questions, it is not as if questions of truth
are new for human beings we have been talking
about these things for 23 centuries or more.
But the kind of training we are now getting
in natural sciences means that although we can
now calculate quantum electrical dynamics,
many people who are highly trained mathematically,
do not have the experience of engaging with
philosophy. I think that may be at the root
of some difficulties in contemporary science. And
it is, of course, also true of theology. At
when Oxford University started for example, you weren’t
allowed to study theology until you had first
studies philosophy and astronomy and various
other disciplines before you were  even allowed
to touch the theology books because you needed
to have this training in philosophy. I think
we all need philosophy 101 as they say in
the United States.
Now it is always good to have a foil. By the
way those of you starting out in graduate studies,
get a foil, get something to wrestle with.
I have chosen this statement in a popular
book, The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking
and Leonard Mllodinow, I am not quite sure
how to pronounce his name, apologies, if someone
could correct me I would be grateful. Well,
I will just read it to you: ‘Traditionally
, these are questions’, questions which
are referring to cosmology. ‘These are questions
for philosophy, but philosophy is dead…’,
that is quite a strong statement. ‘We will
describe how M-theory may offer answers to
the question of creation…M-theory predicts
that a great many universes were created out
of nothing…multiple universe arise naturally
from physical law’. Page one and page eight
of The Grand Design. Now ,this is the kind
of book that I would have been fascinated
by as a teenager, a lot of our teenagers
are reading these books and one page on philosophy
is dead so do not look at it, that is what
Stephen Hawking is telling you. This is quite
serious stuff right. So what I want to do
is ask the question: Is philosophy dead,
its role usurped by science? Can M-theory
(or any theory) answer questions of creation?
Can even a single universe - let’s make
a more modest claim – can even a single
universe arise from physical law? How
should we explore the question of creation?
So briefly I want to look at, I want to go
back a little bit because modern physics
is changed certain ways of looking at the
world from ancient physics. I want to look
a bit at ancient physics to understand those
changes better. I want to look then at the
implications for science and philosophy, responding
to the Hawking challenge and then, as I used
to work in business as well, I want to look
at added value: what does faith do, if anything,
for cosmology?
Ok, so personal background. I worked at an
experiment which was the biggest in the world
at the time but nothing compared to Professor
Bussey’s work on the ATLAS experiment these
days, back in the late 80s and early 90s I
worked at the Large Electron Positron Collider,
helping with the muon builder and test the
muon chambers built at Oxford.
And, that’s a page from my PhD thesis, all
completely superseded now. Ok, so I have to
say as a physicist what did intrigue me was
not so much the technical details of the particle
experiments but seeing beauty in the basement
of reality and just at the time I was working
at CERN, I think we were – there was a lot
of interest in fractol, from the Mandelbrot
Set for example. These things go on forever
but they never repeat. I am not sure what
philosophical lessons to draw but I always
have a sense of awe that there is beauty down
in the basement of reality.
So Philosophy 101. The question ‘Why?’.
I have jumped ahead a little bit. So the point
I was going to make is that children ask the
question why and when I was ten years old
I remember going to France to Lourdes actually,
with my family. There was this French boy
running around the camp site saying: ‘pour
quoi, maman, pour quoi?’. Really annoying
his mother. So they ask it in other languages
as well, it is natural for children to ask
the question why. The first word to any question
why is because, which as two parts; what are
the two parts of because? Be and cause, the
cause and the being of a thing. So philosophers
ask the question why, children ask the question
why and of course, as they grow up, they tend
to ask how and then how much. Our challenge is
to get them asking why questions again and
any question why generates an answer that
refers to the causes of the being of a thing
. And so, if you are going to do philosophy
you are going to look at causes, this has
a pretty dead battery, sorry. OK. So any ordered
or valued knowledge involves understanding
causes. There is a lot of trivial knowledge
you can get; Thomas Aquinas gives an example,
‘How many stones are there in a river?’
That is trivial knowledge. Presumably there
is some kind of answer but it a pretty useless
fact. But knowledge that is valued and ordered
involves understanding causes. Roughly speaking
the principles or that which brings about
the being of a thing. And the more philosophical
and valued knowledge deals with the first
causes and principles. This is a statement
actually made at the beginning of the Metaphysics
of Aristotle: ‘The most exact of the science
are those which deal most with first principles;
for those which involve fewer principles are
more exact than those which involve additional
principles’.
Ok let’s turn that into a heuristic. So
roughly speaking, the way we have looked at
the world in the western intellectual tradition
particularly is an ever smaller number of
ever more powerful causes and to some extent
the passage between knowledge and wisdom is
the passage between many particular things
which are easy to know about and a small number
of universal causes that are hard to discover.
This same heuristic has shaped all kinds of human endeavours,
for example material reality. You can start
with a very large number of compounds, a very
much smaller number of elements- a huge achievement
to know, to discover that a small number of
elements are responsible for these millions
of chemical compounds. And, of course, the
work of particle physics tries to find the
smaller units on which these are based. Now
in a heuristic, every now and then the funnel
opens up some times and it shrinking down
but we are happy, we generally like to see,
an ever smaller number of ever more powerful
causes. But it is not just restricted to material
reality but ourselves so particularly human
actions like washing, waking up, eating lunch
with friends, going to college. Why do we
do these things, what are we looking after?
Most answers to that question have to do with
the flourishing of the body, society and the
mind. Why do we do those things? Why do we
want body, mind and society to flourish? We
spend a lot of time and money on these things.
Well, yes, you get a clue from this going
to supermarkets, so I sometimes start philosophy
by advising students to look at the packaging
in supermarkets because I once found a packet
of biscuits offering my snacking nirvana.
I once found a yoghurt called Bliss and a
cheese called Heaven. I said to the lady selling
the cheese: ‘We are obviously in the same
business but you are making more money than
I am’. But the point is, advertising, I
don’t know if you know the history of this,
advertising started with the nephew of Sigmund
Freud, a man called Bernays, who understood
that all human beings seek happiness and are
dissatisfied with what they have. So again,
you get the same sort of narrowing funnel.
Now some people may be puzzled by what it
is that philosophy studies but it studies
everything. Everything that is said to be
but, in terms of the narrow end of the funnel so everything:
chemicals, music , wine making, ideas, grammar;
everything at the broad end of the funnel.
But the first cause and principles are where
philosophy has its distinctive discipline.
Now I put it to you that this is one reason
why god does not go away and part of the reason
why is because we get an ever smaller number
of ever more powerful causes then naturally
the question to ask is what is at the end
of the funnel? And that is why a lot of the
people who call themselves atheists are not
actually disputing that existence of a first
cause, which is the philosophical definition
of god, but they are actually disputing the
personal first cause. They are actually trying
to substitute a personal first cause with
something else that purports to do the same
job. The real battle you might say is not
over whether god is but what god is. There
is one exception to this and as we are in
Edinburgh and I have just passed the statue
of David Hume, there is. Hume took the much
more radical path and understood that if you
really want to get rid of god you have got
to attack the notion of causation. And, of
course, if you follow that through to its
logical conclusion you have to dispense with
a lot of other things as well including, I
would say, a lot of science. But anyway that
is the other route or if you like, opposing
theism , but most people who oppose theism
end up offering a substitute to the first
cause.
You may think that is a bit fanciful but let
me give you an example. So ‘Millions of
flowers on the earth tell us his love, Blue
waves of the ocean sing his work, He is the
creator of happiness’. Now where would you
expect to see these words, normally speaking?
A dubious hymn, yes exactly. Not a very well
written hymn, that’s right. As I’m sure
some of you would know it is the patriotic 
song of North Korea. The reason I show that
is that North Korea is an interesting example of a society where
all belief in a transcendent god is outlawed, outlawed.
As a catholic priest I could never work in
North Korea at the moment. We have only one
Catholic Church in the capital but we can’t
appoint a priest there. You can’t worship
publicly as a Christian in North Korea. But
what has happened to religion? Basically the
divine attribute have been shifted to a god
substitute, in this case Kim Jong-II, of course
this is slightly out of date as it is now
his son, the grandson of god, Kim Jong-Un.
I should warn people by the way if you abolish belief
in a transcendent god you create a job vacancy.
So change, constancy and Aristotelian physics.
So the business of a wise person is to order,
that is a phrase that by the way comes from
beginning of Aquinas’ commentary on ethics.
The business of a wise person is to order.
But understanding order involved in change is
something of a challenge because change involves something which changes and also something that
does not, some kind of constant against which
the change can be said to be and to be known. This is
one reason, by the way, for the doctrine of
divine simplicity, the doctrine that god does
not change, so you would need the change to
be with reference to something more fundamental
than god which is a contradiction of terms.
So change in the cosmos requires something
changing but also something that does not change.
One of the major philosophical questions of
all time and the answers to which are at the
root of different divergent schools of philosophy is:
what are the principles that provide this
constancy? What are the principles that provide
this constancy? So order and change. The hands
of a clock, you also need the clock face.
It is an interesting question whether if you
just had the hands of a clock and nothing
else in your cosmos whether the clock could ever be
said to move, I do not think so.
The three main schools of thought and these,
by the way, are constantly resurrected in
different stages of history and in modern
terms as well. The three main schools of thought.
The one associated with Parmenides in a very
crude way of putting it is that nothing changes
and perhaps a modern way of thinking about
this is on a silly film you might see the
different frames of a film, you might see a film where the characters
appear to move, in reality all the frames
are static. And some people think of the universe
like that, a 4D box universe, where time is
an illusion. And then you have on the opposite
side of the arena you might see the Heraclitan.
Heraclitus was famous for saying you can’t
step into the same river twice. And his pupil
Cratylus said you can’t step into the same
river once. But everything changes, perpetual
flow; a process theology that all fits in
that school. Most philosophers are a mixture
of somethings changes and others do not. But
the choice influences a great deal of how
they approach the cosmos.
So roughly speaking the irrefutables of thought:
Plato with forms and ideas, Aristotle with
substances. Now the change you get in modern
science is to space and time. Now Einstein
shifted that again but we have subverted his insight.
Einstein thought of light as more fundamental
than space and time. We have mathematicised
it and subverted his insight. With Christian
theology we have taken mixtures of different schools at
different times but the one unique theory emerging
form Christian theology is the person, what
we have borrowed from the other schools, particularity
the Aristotelian school.
Substance. So one of the challenges of first
principles is that you can’t define them
very easily with things that are more basic.
So you often have to have several definitions
to give you an understanding of the term and
that is true of the substance. There are about six or seven 
definitions in Aristotle’s work but there
are a couple that are particularly standout.
‘ That which is called a substance most
strictly, primarily, and most of all - is
that which is neither said of a subject nor
in a subject, the individual man or the
individual horse.’ It is interesting that
he uses biological prototypes for substances
in this example. Or ‘that while remaining
numerically one and the same, it is capable
of admitting contrary qualities’.
Where he is getting this from is the study of biology,
Aristotle invented biology. There is a wonderful
documentary on BBC 4 a couple of years ago
called Aristotle’s Lagoon, if you have a
chance to watch it I do recommend it. It describes
something of his remarkable experiments with
living things, learning about living things,
he was fascinated with living things that
all the matter is organised towards the flourishing
of the living thing. Living things can undergo
all sorts of changes and yet remain the same
being in some sense throughout. We undergo
extraordinary changes in our lives yet we
also have this sense of identity throughout
our lives as well. So Aristotle took this
as a first principle, an organising principle, for other kinds of changes.
And an example of this in Metaphysics IV,
2: ‘So, too, there are many sense in which
a thing is said to be but all refer to one
starting point; some things are said to be
because they are substances, or affections
of substances, or a process towards a substance,
or destruction of substance, or generative
of substance, or relative of substance, or
negations of substance, or substance itself,
etc’. So he is organising his account of
change around the principle of substance.
And he sees different kinds of accidents as
having being associated with substance and
these being changeable while the substance,
in this case Socrates, remains in some sense
the same. The deeper implications of this
model are not actually widely appreciated,
one of them being that being in the world
only fits together in certain ways. One of
the things that may undermine the ordering
of grammar. Children are often able to acquire
a grammar more easily than formal rules would
suggest and part of the reason is perhaps
they are picking up the ordering of the world
suggested by that nature only fits together
in certain ways. This is in contrast to nominalism,
where in a sense the various objects labelled
by the same term have nothing in common but
their name. A lot of the way that modern logic
works has tends to be nominalistic so some of these
distinctions are often lost.
The origins of the word physics. It is a Greek
work phusis which often translates as nature
but often refers precisely to the principle of imminent
self-perfecting activity, especially in living
things. ‘What each thing is when fully developed
, we call its nature, whether we are speaking
of a man, a horse, or a family’. So actually
Aristotle thinks natures are obvious this
is an interesting contrast to Newton who talked
about natures as occult things. Now as used
by Aristotle, what was studied under physics, he actual wrote this huge book which we translate
‘physics’ would probably best be described
as a biologically-inspired metaphysics. But
the root metaphor for understanding the world
is the living organism. And from a Catholic
perspective this has had a huge impact on
theology, most famously every Sunday in
Mass where the creed is recited we are using
a term borrowed from philosophy, homoousious,
of the same substance of the father and the
son.
And, of course, Aristotle’s four causes
of substance uses living things as examples
of these things and he distinguishes different
kinds of causes operate in the world by how they contribute
to the being or the flourishing of substances
and also artefacts, slightly different artefacts.
And just also for a bit of background knowledge
these three concepts are very closely related in
Aristotle and also Thomas Aquinas. Nature,
determined by the fully developed form of a
being. The end, the final form of a being.
And the good, what the being seeks to become
by nature.
Ok, so just a few interim definitions at this
point. So philosophy: the love of wisdom,
deals with first causes and principles.
Nature: what each thing is when fully
developed, whether we are speaking of a man,
a horse or a family. And substance: that which
is called a substance most strictly, primarily,
and most of all - is that which is neither
said of a subject nor in a subject,  the
individual man or the individual horse. So
that is a bit of background to Aristotelian
physics, now all that changes with the rise of
modern science.
Now this change is pre-figured in all kinds
of other developments in the western intellectual
tradition. One of which being the development of perspective
of being in art. A lot of 14th and 15th century
art, you get the size of the figures determined
by how holy they are. So it is interesting if you look at Quarton’s Coronation
of the Virgin you see these little tiny figures
on the earth below and you see these huge
images of the saints above dominated by the
trinity and the Blessed Virgin Mary in the
centre. But you see here with linear perspective
the size of the images is, the size of the figures is determined by the
observer. But what I want you to be aware
of here is how this is beginning to affect the
way we are thinking about the world as things
moving in a kind of geometric box. And with
the Cartesian geometric revolution, this process is
taken a step further and put on a geometrical
basis. So in Descartes ‘Discourse on Method’
, he introduces the idea of specifying, a
point or object on a surface, using two intersecting
axes as measuring guides. Now think of the
implications of that today, Cartesian graphs,
and all kinds of coordinate systems; modern
science is unthinkable without all of these
things. It has given us tremendous power in
terms of our ability to explore the physical
world but it may also be affecting, and in
some ways limiting, the way we are thinking
about the physical world. And we start off
from a young age, children, imposing or forming these
ideas in the minds of school children. Now
what is not often appreciated is that for
Descartes, extension in length, breadth and
depth, constitutes the nature of corporeal
substance. The extensions of a thing are not
just some properties, but the principal properties
or essence of the thing. These Cartesian graphs
carry metaphysical baggage of which people
are often unaware. Now with Galileo and with
Newton, you get this process applied still
further and really giving birth to what we
call modern science. Newton inaugurated the
modern study of gravitation and the laws of
motion. He neither discovered nor explained
the causes of gravitation. And in fact he
was a bit sensitive about this point so he
could not really actually explain or offer
a cause for action at a distance and he said:
‘I do not feign hypotheses’. He actually
solved a different problem, what he did instead
was to offer a mathematical description of
how planetary positions, modelled as point
masses, are described and changed over time
with respect to a hypothetical and immutable absolute 
space, a space and time. For this world view
space and time are the new immutable first
principles against which change occurs. So
whereas Aristotle, it is substance, being
organised around substance, now it is space
and time against which change happens.
This is the world we have grown up with, it
is part of the air we breathe. Basically things
moving in a space time box bumping into one another,
coalescing and interacting in various ways.
This was an extraordinary achievement in certain
ways. So having modelled each planet as a
point mass, relative to absolute space and
time, in a state of mutual gravitational attraction
with the sun alone, the two-body assumption,
Newton was able to describe their present
orbits and predict their positions indefinitely
into the future using calculus and that is
still true today. We know where Jupiter will
be in a thousand years’ time, it is an amazing
achievement. We are able to launch a probe
and reach a comet and land a probe on a comet,
that’s an extraordinary achievement. We
are also able to make discoveries of things
that were hidden, that were causing perturbations
in our predictions so the most famous example
is the discovery of Neptune. The planetary
orbits are perturbed and this led to a prediction
that there was another planet which we hadn't yet discovered
and was discovered in 1846 and that was Neptune. Now this was
so successful that it helped to promote a radical change
from an organic Aristotelian view of the world
to a mechanistic view of the world which still
constitutes the dominant root metaphor underpinning our thinking
about the cosmos.
Obviously Newton’s Laws of motion, I learnt
them first at the age of 13 or 14, later I
began to realise how subversive they are because
there are several things here that would just
not fit into the understanding of causation
in the ancient world.
Now this caused a shift in all kinds of different aspects of philosophy
and the way we approach the world. The study
of the natural world shifted from the investigation
of natures and causes to laws. Laws governing
phenomenical representations under which the
property of one thing measured under rigorous
experimental conditions could be compared
to the same property of any other thing measures
under similar conditions and we have an ever
expanding set of conventional representations
such as second, kilogram, metre, specific
heat capacity, charge capacitance and so on.
The units of which represent an implicit ratio
by which an object can be categorised by some
conventional standard. So a simple way of
thinking about this is if you have a set of
bathroom scales and you put a dog on the scales
or a sack of potatoes on the scales, the scales
will not distinguish whether it is a dog or
a sack of potatoes, the only thing the scales
will measure is the force exerted on them
due to gravity. And this is the way we do
a great many things in science we look at
how things will respond under experimental
conditions and most of these conventional 
representations ultimately link back to space
and time. Space and time are the absolutes
in the background in all of these things.
So for example, a famous example, one of the
last sort of, of the old style artefacts for
these units; here is the standard kilogram.
A kilogram it is actually an object i, a physical
object, in a French Laboratory. To say that
a mass is one kilogram is to say that a object
will accelerate, with respect to space and
time, at the same rate as the standard kilogram
if subjected to the same force. It is an implicit
ratio. It is fine if we remember we are doing
this, the problem is if we forget we are doing
this and it becomes all there is to know.
So Science, on modern definition;
by the way if you look at the Oxford English
Dictionary of Science you will actually see
about 14 or 15 different definitions, a very
difficult word to define but here is part
of one of them. A branch of study that deals
with a connected body of demonstrated truths
or with observed facts systemically classified
and more or less comprehended by general laws.
This idea of a law and by laws, this is a
complicated definition. By Laws is intended,
in modern natural sciences, an assertion of
a general type, normally expressed under mathematical form
intended to define and explain the behaviour
of a physical system, in accordance with experimental
measurements pertaining to situations of the
same type. Sorry it is so long. But you see
it is looking at the quantitative phenomena
associated with an object under experimental
conditions, it is not so good at saying what
a thing is and it is interesting as one recent
example of this as people think limitations
with science are just with big questions like
god and the soul but there are actually rather
simpler questions about science limitations.
Is Pluto a planet? Is Pluto a planet? This
was a big problem for the international astronomical
union about ten years ago and they all had
to become amateur Aristotelian philosophers
for a few years as they debated this. Literally
they drew a genus species diagram, ‘Well
it is bigger to be in a sphere and orbit
the sun and clear its orbit’. They actually
had to go through a process of Aristotle would
have recognised because you do not get that
answer to that kind of question out of the
laws of science alone because they do not
deal with essences they deal with how things
respond under experimental conditions.
Implications of modern science for philosophy.
All that background which may be familiar
to some of you but it is worth going over
it again because it has led to certain assumption
to how we look at the world, we tend to forget
our assumptions. One of the geometric representations
of the world; object moving against an absolute
space time background. This has been symbiotic
with applications of geometry and science and technology,
art and architecture. We live in actually a society
that is actually very Cartesian, everywhere
you look, you know, there is are 90 degree
angles in this room. Now a philosopher whom
this revolution had a great impact on was
Kant, who has in turn influenced many theologians, I’m afraid.
Actually I have a gripe about
this, personal gripe time, it is interesting
a lot of philosophers love Kant and Kant's view
of science became outdated about 1850 but
they love him so much they say: ‘That’s
ok we are still going to carry on using him’.
Because absolute space and time by about 1850
that had begun to be questioned. Nevertheless
it is such a powerful unifying way of looking
at the word it continues almost by inertia.
So prioritisation of measurement, it is the
gold standard. The scientific revolution,
sorry I know it is a slightly outdated term,
but the scientific revolution lent prestige
to precise quantitative measurements as the
gold standard of epistemological value. Now
it is, so I am taking an interest in what
is going on in experimental psychological
today; experimental psychologist go to a lot
of pain and trouble to turn what is intuitively
obvious into some kind of quantitative measurement.
So it is not enough to say that babies recognise
their mother’s right within minutes of being
born and they can pick out faces within minutes
of being born. That’s amazing never seen
a face before. But you also have to add a
measurement to that so how many times an infant
smiles within a certain number of minutes
on average with a stop watch. Then it becomes
knowledge you can actually publish in a journal.
We all had to go through this process and
this is good discipline and so on but there is a slight
absurdity in it. The ambiguity of species,
nature’s essences and matters. All these
terms have been in some ways denatured or denuded of value,
including matter incidentally. And I mentioned
the problem of defining what a thing is,
also micro-entities, what is a cork? And all these
things are, there is a big debate whether
they can be sort of as real, whatever that means, or whether they
are just convenient entities for the construction
of useful models and the meaning of matter itself
is left quite ambiguous.
The eclipse of teleology has left a huge impact
on philosophy. You see, go on a bit. So if
you take the initial state of a Newtonian
system like the planets in a circular orbit,
you reverse its time. You flip its spatial coordinates
you end up with what you started with. And
we say that Newton’s laws of motion are
time symmetric. There are some wired exceptions
to that, entropy is one weird exception to
that and gives us an error of time. There are some
really weird maybe Professor Bussey may be
able to shed some more light on this a little later.
The Neutron Kaon system in particle physics
is for some reason time does not have time
invariance which is weird. But anyway a lot
of the way we think about the world, time
is treated like space. There is a wonderful
book by Lee Smolin called, The Trouble with
Physics, who is a theoretical physicist, and
it was generally interpreted as being an attack
on string theory but actually it really someone
thinking hard about what physics is and where
there are perhaps certain blind spots in physics.
There is one graph I remember in this book
which is space and time and it just shows
space on one axis and time on the other and
he says: ‘Is this a smoking gun? Is this
where we are going wrong? Can we represent
time without turning it into space?’ That
is what we do with Newtonian science. And
you see if time is just like space does it
exist at all? And if time is like space we
haven’t got a genuine telos or end of mechanical
systems then where does goodness come from?
You see Newton had a huge effect on ethics
because if you have got rid of teleology,
if you have got rid of a telos of a system,
a natural end of a system then when do you
get notions of good and evil from? Actually
there are only three basis as far as I know
for how you can then ground ethics: either
god commands it - that could be very misused,
or socially – the state says it, there is
no choice; or I say it. Where else can you
ground ethics if it is not these three? Generally
speaking Catholics take a view that the Euthyphro
dilemma, you have heard of the Euthyphro dilemma?
Does god love a thing because it is good or
is a good thing good because god loves it?
Most Catholics take the first view rather
than the second. But if you get rid of natural
law then it is a second view, if you are a theist
and god commands whatever, you know.
So decline of belief in uncaused causes. So
Newtonian mechanics does not actually say
that god cannot intervene. It’s often interpreted
as if it does and along with that, that you
get physical systems where you can predict
where this is going to be in the future, there
is a sense that coming into the western mind
that we do not have spontaneity in nature,
voluntary action in nature, we do not have
free will. It is not the laws of physics that
produces that way of thinking in themselves
but it encourages certain habits in a way
we think about the world that makes it difficult.
And one consequence in the 18th century was
the clockwork universe of Deism according
to which god never intervenes in human affairs or
suspends the natural laws, even though such
laws do not, in themselves, preclude such
intervention. And of course other problems,
problems of induction, what justifies the
straight line though a set of data points?
I won’t go into that now and matter itself.
You know so it might seem that modern physics
is intrinsically linked to a world that prioritises
matter and is often linked to materialism
as a philosophy of the world. But the role
of matter in physics, as it has developed
from Newton, is more paradoxical than it seems.
A Newtonian analyses the orbit of a planet
about the sun as mutually attracting point
masses. The stuff, the matter fades out of
consideration, and nothing matters about matter
except in so far as it contributes to a resistance
to acceleration. Everything measured, calculated
and predicted is actually formal. Future states
are analytically reducible to present states
and time becomes like space.
So materialism is paradoxically really formalism
in the way we think about the world. I mean
matter does not seem to matter. It is not
uncommon to find the claim that reality reduces
to number even though for Aristotle number
was a dependant reality. The mathematical
universe of Max Tegmark for example despite
the philosophical challenges that quantity
is inherently ontologically dependent.
Ok, so responding to the Hawking-Mlodinow
challenge. So going back to that challenge
I presented at the beginning, The Grand Design: ‘philosophy
is dead… M-theory may offer answers to the
question of creation … with…multiple universes
arising naturally (out of nothing) from physical
law’. But philosopher, yes they are still
around -back from the dead, would make a few
claims and ask a few questions of their own.
First, how can a law cause anything? You
write down if there was a grand unifying theory
write it down. Great, wait, where is the universe?
Laws are not going to create anything, laws
are about things; are explicitly or implicitly
about something that is more fundamental. And there
is a lot of doubt about whether in scientific
terms is a causal at all. Newton himself
was sensitive to the philosophical limitations
in his own work on gravity, he stated he did
not ‘feign hypotheses’ about the cause
of the changes described by his law of gravitation.
And there are also lots of other limitations.
The philosophical challenge of laws being
adequate causes of being, you can write down
a law but it doesn’t cause a universe, it
doesn’t destroy matter. There is also the
challenge of modes of being that are not captured
by quantitative laws. Going back to the old
Aristotelian model, substance and nine different
attributes or accidents of substance; quantity
is only one of many. How many of those can
be reduced to mathematics? I think one of
the big failures of the artificial intelligence
programme upon which billions of dollar has
been spent, has been the challenge of reducing reality
mathematical representations. It sounds easy
when you are talking about chess boards but
when it comes to daily life it is very hard
to encapsulate, to catch or reduce, the richness
of interactions, of being in the world to
mathematics. Interesting book about this,
still valid after more than three decades,
Dreyfus, Herbert Dreyfus, What Computers still
can’t do?
Well when people say they have a grand unifying
theory of everything they are often talking
about mathematical laws but how can you capture
all of reality that isn’t expressed by mathematics?
The challenge to the apparent irreducibility of observers to
objects in quantum mechanics. I do not want
to get too into this area because it is a matter
of huge debate and it is very hard to know
how we can empirically decide between the
different schools of thought. How to interpret
quantum mechanics. I think most people would agree, who
think about it deeply would that it
is really odd. And you get situations where
apparently the act of observation seems to
change physical systems in empirically verifiable
ways and the different schools of how to get
around that, maybe the hidden variables,
but the space for hidden variables seems to
be shrinking, or there is a rather drastic
option where all paths are taken at decision
point and we ourselves are in multiple states from each decision
points of change in the universe but that
is rather drastic. Either way we seem to have
to violate our common sense view of reality.
There is a challenge of light being more fundamental
principle than space
and time. That is a beautiful image of light
being curved by a gravitational lensing of
different galaxies. And I think this has been
subverted, this is something that Lee Smolin
picks up in his book, The Challenge with physics,
you see we write down physics today in relation
of things changing in relation to space and
time but the essential insight of Einstein
is the thing that does not change is light,
the speed of light in a vacuum in different
reference frames. Space and time do change.
So light is more fundamental than space and
time. How do we really capture that mathematically
without freezing the insight and subverting
it? A lot of modern physics, including the
work on string theory, isn’t properly linked
in with relativity.
And there is also everyday stuff. Of the three
things I mentioned: quantum mechanics and
relativity. This one probably attracts the
least attention and yet it is the easiest
to understand and to get some philosophical
traction from. I mentioned about the two-body
assumption, most people don’t know, at least
I didn’t when I started to study physics,
that Newton did not solve the three-body problem
and in fact he tried to solve the earth-moon-sun
system and discovered he couldn’t integrate
it. His successors tried but they failed and
they were able to invent certain ways around
it, perturbation theory, and all kinds of clever
techniques for getting around it. We can’t
integrate a three-body system but not perfectly
in a general range of cases. And since you
mentioned computers, we discovered that some
of these systems when they are modelled have
end-directed action and we give names to these
things like ‘strange attractors’ and ‘chaotic
systems’. So you can start of in a phase
space some state of the system represented
in the phase space and it orbits in the phase
space. We lose predicted power of where exactly
the point will end up but where the point
does end up in the vicinity of an ordered
shape.
Most famously the Lorenz attractor, that is
where it started and there have been many
others discovered since then. This is a state
to which the system evolves and it is not
through dissipation of energy, like a ball
rolling to the bottom of a gravity well, the
systems move towards final states. What is
interesting is that you cannot reduce the
final state to the other causes of the system
– not mathematically. So two things come
out of this that were apparently abolished
by Newtonian science. One is the concept of
a telos, an end, and the other is a concept
of matter because the only thing connecting
the final state to the initial state is some
principal continuity which is there when all
the formal stuff is taken out. That is matter.
So you get matter and end back in physics.
So it is interesting in the last few centuries
we have been moving the mechanical view of
the world encroaching on biology and encroaching
on human beings. Now we seem to be going the
other way; we have got metaphysics inspired
by biology which is actually going the other
way even into quite simple mechanical systems.
By the way, teleology does not mean automatically that 
god did it because in fact people think
that teleology is so close to theism that
some people do not touch it for that reason
because they do not want faith. But actually
teleology in nature is part of nature, it
doesn’t automatically mean that it automatically
takes you to theism, I would tend to think
it gets you there in the end. And, of course,
all kinds of phenomena these day which are,
we recognise as being examples of, if you
like, strange attractors or something a bit
like that in chaotic systems.
So deflating hubris. So going back to Stephen
Hawking, The Grand Design, is philosophy dead
and usurped by science? No. Can M-theory or
any theory answer questions of creation? No.
Theories deal with whatever already is and
describe how, in modern science, the quantitative
aspects of phenomena change over time. Can
even a single universe arise from physical
law? No, laws do not create anything in themselves.
How should we explore the question of creation?
Humility. And Wisdom. It is a lovely admission
at the end of Lee Smolin’s book that he
wrote this book partly to avoid having to
think because it is actually quite hard thinking,
really thinking deeply, it is much easier
to be in academia and manage processes and
administration and teach this and that but
actually sitting down and thinking hard, in
the same way that Einstein did when he thought:
‘What would you like to write on a beam
of light’. That’s hard, because you have
to really question the assumptions that our
lazy thinking, that is quite painful. There
is a sacrifice involved. Humility and wisdom
will take us further than mathematical theorising
alone. The mathematical theorising is wonderful,
we get that right, we are very, very good
at that but we need the other stuff as well.
We have got a bit of a hiatus it seems in
certain sciences because in a sense what we
are missing is the other stuff, having some
philosophical training which I think would
enrich the wonderful work we do in computing
and mathematics.
So very finally as a little annex, sorry I
have gone on a bit, what does faith do, if
anything, for cosmology? Well I do not think
faith does not give us facts about the word
we cannot find out about other means but it
does shape how we think about the world. Ii
gives us evidence for how the perception of
the ideas of the world give us faith though
there are few facts worth noting about. Obviously
you know who this gentleman is, don’t you?
Ok and I hope you all know who this gentleman
is? Who does know who this gentleman is? Who
is it? Thankyou. Does everyone know the man?
Some people do, some people don’t. OK, I
have added some value, good, there they are.
He, of course, is the father of the Big Bang
theory. But he had another job, what was his
job? He was a priest. I mention this even
among such an esteemed audience because there
are some people who do not know that a priest
invented the Big Bang theory. Very few people
know that is was banned in the Soviet Union
for  30 years pretty much. There was a meeting
in 1948 in Leningrad were astronomers were
urged to oppose the Big Bang theory because
they say it is ‘promoting clericalism’.
I prepare posters for schools about these
things because people just do not know this
stuff.
And I mention in passing Father Angleo the
father of Astrophysics. So just a bit of general
knowledge. Faith forms understanding by philosophy
and time. What I want to do is show you. It
also, if you like, shapes the way we look
at the world. This was the world, actually
a view of happiness for human beings as it
was seen in 1432. This is one of my favourite
pictures, the Van Eyck ‘Adoration of the
mystic lamb’ in 1432. And you will see here
the idea of the Saints gathered in glory around
the Lamb of God. Nature perfected, nature
ordered, nature beautiful.
Now in 1524 you can being to see the Saints
are getting smaller, the landscape is getting
bigger. And by 1569 the focus is on nature
and there is a little church in the background
but it is very small. By, of course, the late
19th century, sorry early 19th century, we
have some beautiful landscape paintings but
notice what is not there, what would have
been the theme of most western art between
500 and 1500AD: the saints, the sacraments,
cross, salvation – all those sorts of things.
All those are gone and the focus is on nature.
By late 19th century the perception of nature
is becoming a bit strange: this is Van Gogh’s
Wheat Field with Crows. The road is going
nowhere, the vertical dimension, the transcendent
dimension is beginning to collapse and by
1947, Jackson Pollock’s Enchanted Forest.
I do not want to make a value judgement, I
just want to say one thing- very careful – I do not want to make a
a value judgement. Faith, if you like, the
faith that shapes our grand narrative of our
culture, our society and our minds also shapes
the way you perceive the world. I speculate the
one way this happens is through right hemisphere
cognition or all the thing metaphorically
associated with right hemisphere cognition.
But we have some kind of ability not to just
conceive the world in terms of point facts
but also the grand narrative within which
the facts are unified. And without that we
get the details right but we lose the big
picture and we do not get the bits to fit
together properly anymore. That is why I think
it is so important particularly for those
who are teaching in religious studies and
education to know the stories, to know the
parables. The story of exodus in the Old Testament
by the way is also the story of a soul: original
sin, baptism, 40 years in the wilderness - this
life, Eucharist from heaven, crossing the
river Jordan into the promised land. You see
it is actually the story of a soul. A lot
of the Old Testament is the New Testament
for the right brain hemisphere. God is smart
you see.
Ok and faith forming understand by hope it
doesn’t end in chaos, dust and death.
Let me give you two brief narratives here.
This was Simon Blackburn, Professor Simon
Blackburn from Cambridge, reviewing one of
John Polkinghorne’s books and he is saying:
‘Nature shows us no particular favours’.
We are not that nice to each other, we occupy
an infinitesimally small space in time, we
evolve through cosmic accidents; there is
no order, no purpose, no nothing. And this
is Clement I of the Corinthians at the beginning
of the first Christian century and he is talking
about the harmony of the cosmos. And I have
often wondered which one over the long term
will be most fruitful for doing cosmology.
The early Christians had other things to worry
about but they are already thinking about
cosmology in 96AD, isn’t that amazing.
So the world view bequeathed by Galileo, Newton
and Descartes still shapes to a large extent
our approach to science and cosmology. As
a result of new developments the problem scope
of the philosophical principals inspired by
early modern science are more clearly seen.
I think we need humility, wisdom and the sacrifice
to think hard which will take us further than
mathematical theorising alone. Without drawing
a strict cause and effect relationship relation,
history suggests that a perception of the
world shaped by certain kinds of faith either
in the first order sense, personal faith,
or second order sense, by if you like shaping
the culture, has proved fruitful – including
to science. Thank you very much.
