Modern Physics and Ancient Faith - Stephen M. Barr

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"It is a very curious circumstance that materialist, in an effort to avoid what Laplace called the unnecessary hypothesis of God, are frequently driven to hypothesize the existence of an infinity of unobservable entities." (157)


"The idea that quantum theories of the Big Bang are competing against God as Creator is based on some crude misunderstandings. The real question that monotheism is attempting to deal with is a much more basic question than whether the Big Bang can be described by a mathematically consistent set of laws. It is rather why anything exists at all. Why are there any physical system, any "states", any laws, any anything?

Just having a mathematical framework which describes a universe with a beginning, whether the framework is classical or quantum, or whether the beginning is smooth or melodramatically singular, does not explain why the mathematical framework describes anything real.

The crucial question was lucidly posed by Stephan Hawking, who pointed out that a theory of physics is "just a set of rules and equations", and then went on to ask, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the question of why there should be a universe for the model to describe."" (278)


"There is a circularity about the materialist position that becomes obvious whenever its logic is carefully examined. The idea that everything may not be reducible to physics or mathematics is said to be mysticism, mysterianism, or mystery-mongering because it supposedly involves a rejection of rational explanation. That, in turn, follows from the supposition that all rational explanation must be explanation in terms of equations and quantities. This supposition is based on the fact that such quantitative explanations have been found to be sufficient in the realm of physics and on the assumption that what is true in physics must be true of all reality. But what justifies that last assumption? Why, simply the idea that all of reality is nothing but physics!" (256)



"Religion is sometimes attacked by materialists as a realm of make-believe and speculation in which untestable assertions are made about things that cannot be observed. It is true that the things that are of most concern to religion are things that cannot be smelled, or touched, or tasted - such as freedom and rationality, good and evil, truth and falsehood, love and beauty. It is true that these will never register in the devices of experimentalists, or appear as quantities in the equations of theorists. but, as we have seen, religion does make claims even about the physical world. One would be quite justified in calling these claims predictions.

One of these predictions is that the physical world cannot be "casually closed". One hundred years ago this prediction seemed well on the way to being falsified. Everything in the history of physics up to that time pointed to a most rigid determinism. And yet that determinism did in fact give way in the face of new discoveries. Why shouldn't this be counted as a successful prediction?"