Of course, you cannot do without the experts, because the experts might tell you what might be on the agenda. So, we need a debate, and it much grieves me that in my own country— and I rather suspect in this country too— so much of moral debate is the clash of single-issue pressure groups, one side shouting, “X is wonderful,” and the other side shouting, “X is terrible”— whatever X is. It is very unlikely to be either of those things. X could be good for some purposes and bad for others. We need a more careful, temperate, and nuanced ethical discussion.
Q: My question is aimed more at the artistic side of the search. I now am a playwright and a designer, and one of the things that I come across more than anything is the search for truth, both in my clients and in myself. I am a Christian, and I feel very strongly. In one of your books, you had said that art is between, I think, theology and physics or theology and science. You also had said in that book something about how Earth is the theater where all this plays out. So, could you possibly elaborate on that a little bit?
A: It is a big subject, and I did refer to it very briefly. At the end, I was talking about God being worthy of worship and the role of value. One of the things I am always trying to encourage in myself and others is to take a rich and generous view of the world we live in, the multilevel reality within which we live; for example, to believe— as I do, indeed, believe— that the personal is as important, indeed more important, than the impersonal; that the unique and unrepeatable is as significant as the repeatable. Science is concerned largely with the impersonal and the repeatable.
In my talking to my friends, it’s hard to get from science to God in one step; that is far too big a leap. So, I ask them what they think about music— and I broached that subject very briefly this evening. I ask them what they think about music, and it encourages them, I think, to take seriously a more generalist metaphysic. That is a very important thing.
If you think science told you everything that is worth knowing, it would be a very cold, impersonal world that we so described. We wouldn’t find ourselves in that world. So, I think the arts are very, very significant in that respect, if we reflect on human nature. For example, what is it to be a human being? One of the prime windows into human nature is through literature. Great literature is always concerned with the individual and the personal. The subject of great literature is not every man or every woman, but Hamlet or King Lear or whatever it is. We have to take those things seriously.
Q: I first have a comment. I observe that the unfortunate relationship between religion and science is that religion is often a science-stopper. That is, for example, in the creationist-versus-evolution debate, there were problems in science about what the creationists called irreducible complexity. The answer to this problem was God— the God of the gaps. I think there are biochemical processes we understand where a lot of these problems of irreducible complexity have been addressed.
I have two questions. Basically, I think, you have presented two arguments for, at least, an Intelligent Designer. One is the conformity between the reason within and the reason without, and you say that this is a metaphysical question beyond the realm of science. I am wondering if we can pose this as actually a scientific question. How is it that human beings are able to reason about deep, abstract mathematical truths?
I would guess that one answer is that the very same cognitive processes of generalization and inductive reasoning which allow a person to look at one cliff that has one shape and another cliff that has one shape and generalize that when you go over both of them, you die— these are the very same cognitive processes that allow us to think deeply and abstractly about mathematical problems.
The second question is with the anthropic argument. I am wondering if you would agree that there are two premises behind the anthropic argument that are unproven, one that it is possible for the universe to have other cosmological constants or other natural laws. I think it is an unproven premise of the argument. The second premise is like ten marksmen aiming at a person— that it was highly improbable that the constants are what they are. Again, I think that is a premise that has not been proven. I am wondering if you would agree with those statements.
A: The first question is about everyday reasoning leading us to unreasonable effectiveness in mathematics. I tried to deal with that, and I think the answer is “No, it won’t.” The quantum world requires a type of thinking about it— indeed, it requires a type of logic that is different from the Aristotelian logic of the everyday world. So, we certainly didn’t get that out of just somehow generalizing our everyday experience. I think my answer would be no.
Let me try to answer the last part. Some people suggest that maybe the true constants of nature are absolutely fixed by consistency of the theory. I think that is only even remotely credible if you already suppose the theory has to contain quantum theory and gravity, because that is the only thing that would sharpen it up. But supposing that would, I am still very doubtful there will not be scale parameters in any successful combination of those two theories. Secondly, suppose it was the case that the only logically consistent theory happened also to be a theory that produced beings of our complexity. I would think that [to be] the most astonishing anthropic coincidence of all, in actual fact.
Q: Regarding what you said about mutations being both beneficial and harmful as part of your model of a created-by-design universe, as a layman, I have observed and heard constant news reports about genetic defects and so on, and that obviously points to harmful mutations. Do we have actual evidence— observable and empirically so, in the laboratory or in just everyday life— of bona fide beneficial mutations, as opposed to something by inference that we assume from billions of years ago?
A: We certainly have in things like bacteria, which have very rapid reproduction rates. It is beneficial to bacteria, but it is not beneficial to us. They mutate and produce strains that resist antibiotics, and then those strains, of course, become dominant. So, at the bacterial level, certainly we see that, and maybe a bit higher up, too. I think we do have that; that does happen.
Q: If natural laws reflect the mind of the Lawgiver and if natural laws contemplate cancer as a necessary component of evolution, what do you say to the skeptic who rejects the idea of God based on God’s culpability for the content of his laws?
A: That is a very fair point, and I did say that I didn’t think that observation removed, by any means, all the difficulties. They are considerable. We live in a world that is remarkably fruitful and beautiful, remarkably chilling and frightening and destructive. It is a very ambiguous sort of picture, and somehow or other, the bad things are the necessary cost of the good things. That is not an argument you can utter without a quiver in your voice. The world is too complex and too strange for that.
I have to say one specifically Christian thing this evening: For me, the possibility of religious belief really centers on my Christian belief. A Christian understanding of God’s relationship to suffering is not that God is simply a compassionate spectator looking down on the strange and bitter world that God holds in being. As a Christian, I believe that God is participating in the suffering of the world, that God is truly a fellow sufferer. The Christian God is the crucified God. That is a very deep and mysterious, though, I believe, true, insight. That is the deep level at which the problem of suffering has to be met, and the possibility for religious belief really, for me, rests at that level.
Q: This sort of involves both Eric and you, Sir John. In Eric’s joke about you being able to be knocked over by a feather, could you maybe use your applied physics to determine when the joke reached terminal velocity? Or retrograde? I had to say that.
There are several people here who are artists, writers, and people from California with questions. Here you described a theorem or a mathematical equation, when it is right, being beautiful. There is order and structure, maybe even scientific structure, and that is involved in beauty. You also mentioned obviously in physics and life, there