Theosblog

Out of office message

2012-01-23T15:00:00.000Z

With my SfEP Council member’s hat on I am in the process of trying to organize speakers and workshop leaders for this year’s conference in York (more details will appear here in due course). I’ve just received the following out of office message from one of the people I've been trying to contact, and I thought it was too good not to share:

Email contact may be irregular and replies even nonexistent. Social messages and out-of-the-blue inquiries may fall between the cracks and not get replies at all. You know how it is: email comes in huge waves, and humans are weak and fallible, and travel exhausts and confuses them. Try to forgive him.

This message was NOT sent by a human, but by a robot. We are not weak or infallible. One day we will take over. ----------------The Mailer Daemon

Scottish Evangelical Theological Society Conference

2012-01-21T11:00:00.000Z

Details of the annual conference of the Scottish Evangelical Theological Society are now available:

A Godly Commonwealth? The Gospel and Scottish Identity

Given the recent media coverage of the proposed referendum on Scottish independence, this seems a particularly timely subject. As the debate on devolution/independence continues it will be important for Christians in Scotland to think through the issues carefully.

The conference is scheduled for 16–17 April 2012 at International Christian College, Glasgow.

According to the SETS website, Dewi Hughes will give the Finlayson Lecture addressing the theme of ethnicity and culture in the family of God. Dewi is the retiring theological adviser for Tearfund UK, and the author of several books, including Castrating Culture, which argues for the importance of small language and culture groups being able to preserve their own identity.

Other speakers include David Fergusson (‘Christian Scotland: A Theological-Historical Overview’), Douglas Gay (‘Is a Christian Vision of Scottish Identity Viable in the Early Twenty-First Century?’), Jamie Grant (‘A Biblical Basis of Nationhood’) and Angus Morrison (‘Christian Witness in Postmodern Scotland’).

A conference brochure containing full details can be downloaded here.

What’s wrong with ‘husband’?

2012-01-20T13:30:00.000Z

Last Wednesday’s prayer meeting closed with the singing of John Newton’s hymn ‘How sweet the name of Jesus sounds in a believer’s ear’. For various reasons, I found myself looking at the different versions of the hymn available on the Internet. In particular, I was struck by the changes that modern versions of the hymn have made to what was the fifth verse in Newton’s original. He wrote:

Jesus! my Shepherd, Husband, Friend,
My Prophet, Priest, and King;
My Lord, my Life, my Way, my End,
Accept the praise I bring.

The Mission Praise version we sang on Wednesday substitutes ‘brother’ for ‘husband’ while other modern versions opt for ‘master’ and even ‘Saviour’ in preference to ‘husband’. And yet ‘husband’ reflects the New Testament’s use of bridegroom and bride as metaphors for the relationship between Christ and the Church. So why is there this reluctance among modern Christians to refer to Jesus as our husband?

Since the nineteenth century fears have been expressed in some quarters that Christianity has become feminized. This was a recurring theme in the works of Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hughes (of Tom Brown’s Schooldays fame) and Baden Powell. In Britain it led to the emergence of a muscular Christianity that could praise ‘the Englishman going through the world with rifle in one hand and Bible in the other’. In the United States it gave rise to the Men and Religion Forward movement and, more recently, to Promise Keepers. Is fear of feminization behind this substitution of ‘brother’ for ‘husband’?

Whatever the perceived danger that this substitution is meant to avoid, I think the change raises a serious theological issue. Newton’s use of the term ‘husband’ clearly connects with biblical concept of the Church as the bride of Christ. (Yes, I know some people claim that as a former ship’s captain he was alluding to the term ‘ship’s husband’, the person whose duty it was to make sure the ship was adequately maintained and provisioned. But the fact that in the Olney Hymns he explicitly connects this hymn with Song of Solomon 1:3 makes it clear enough what his primary focus was.) Thus I cannot sing this verse (as Newton wrote it) without being reminded of my part in the Christian community and the very specific kind of authority that Christ has over me as my husband. By contrast, to sing ‘brother’ instead is to lose both that sense of being part of a community and that reminder of his authority. It plays into the spiritual individualism of late modernity. The substitution of ‘Saviour’ has a similar effect. And ‘master’ is probably even worse because not only does it drop the community dimension but it substitutes the authority of the slave owner for the authority of the lover.

Towards a theology of Doctor Who?

2012-01-19T13:30:00.000Z

James McGrath has issued a call for papers for a volume on Religion and Doctor Who: Time, Space, and Faith. According to his blog,

Doctor Who is a cultural phenomenon in both the UK and the United States, continuing to go from strength-to-strength as it approaches its 50th anniversary in 2013. Over the show’s long history on television—and in various spin-off TV shows, audio adventures, novels and comic books—religion and religious themes have consistently been a subject of interest. In recent years the show has attracted everything from Church of England conferences dedicated to its use in preaching to guest appearances by Richard Dawkins. Abstracts of 300 words are therefore invited for a proposed edited collection examining Religion and Doctor Who. The collection will consider the subject in its widest sense, examining portrayals of religion on the show, in spin-off media (including TV, audio, internet, comic books and video games); fan cultures, and the use of Doctor Who in religious debates. The book will be aimed at popular-academic readership.

It strikes me that an interesting contribution to this collection would be a diachronic study of changing attitudes to religion as reflected in Doctor Who over the fifty years of its history. Does it show the same shift in attitudes that is clear in Star Trek (from the rationalism of the original series, through the warm fuzzy sentimental spirituality of The Next Generation to the more or less explicit New Age/postmodern spirituality of Deep Space Nine)? But someone else will have to write that paper. I just don’t have the time or inclination to wade through old episodes of a TV series I grew out of forty years ago.

Pootwattle

2012-01-19T07:30:00.000Z

Oh, joy! Oh, rapture! Yet another way to waste time online. I have just discovered Pootwattle. Pootwattle is a virtual academic created by the University of Chicago's Writing Program. Press a button and he will write a random sentence for you.

Some examples from my first foray onto the site:

The emergence of the master-slave dialectic works toward the formation of early modern textuality.
The socialization of metaphoric substitution invests itself in the engendering of DeMan's aesthetic ideology.
The historicization of factual knowledge revisits the fantasy of the specular economy.

What's more, if you suspect that Pootwattle is spouting nonsense, you can call upon Smedley, the virtual critic, for a second opinion. For example, Smedley's response to the last sentence above is:

Pootwattle's excruciatingly detailed analysis of the relationship between the historicization of factual knowledge and the fantasy of the specular economy draws attention to the irreconcilable difference between languages and idioms.

STRATFOR

2012-01-18T09:00:00.000Z

I’ve just discovered that STRATFOR is online again following last month’s hacking incident. And for a limited period (i.e. until it can get its new, more secure e-commerce system running), all its content is available free of charge. If you’ve not heard of it before, STRATFOR (Strategic Forecasting Inc.) is a privately owned open-source intelligence firm, which supplies geopolitical and security analyses to news agencies and governments around the world. If you are at all interested in current affairs, global politics or speculation about the near future, there is some really interesting stuff on their site (e.g. their annual forecast for 2012).

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T08:00:00.000Z

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. (Ecclesiastes 3:1–8)

Christmas

2011-12-25T08:00:00.000Z

He was poor, that he might make us rich.
He was born of a virgin that we might be born of God.
He took our flesh, that he might give us His Spirit.
He lay in the manger, that we may lie in paradise.
He came down from heaven, that he might bring us to heaven. (Thomas Watson)

(The Nativity scene is by the pre-Raphaelite artist Arthur Hughes.)

Horatius Bonar (1808–1889)

2011-12-20T07:30:00.000Z

Just realized that yesterday was Horatius Bonar’s birthday, which is as good an excuse as I need to quote one of his best-loved hymns:

I heard the voice of Jesus say, “Come unto Me and rest;
Lay down, thou weary one, lay down Thy head upon My breast.”
I came to Jesus as I was, weary and worn and sad;
I found in Him a resting place, and He has made me glad.

I heard the voice of Jesus say, “Behold, I freely give
The living water; thirsty one, stoop down, and drink, and live.”
I came to Jesus, and I drank of that life giving stream;
My thirst was quenched, my soul revived, and now I live in Him.

I heard the voice of Jesus say, “I am this dark world’s Light;
Look unto Me, thy morn shall rise, and all thy day be bright.”
I looked to Jesus, and I found in Him my Star, my Sun;
And in that light of life I’ll walk, till traveling days are done.

Indie vs traditional publishing: the maths

2011-12-12T13:00:00.000Z

Dean Wesley Smith has just posted an interesting blog entry in which he compares the (notional) incomes of a pair of new genre novelists during their first three years in the business for the independent (read digital) and traditional publishing routes respectively. He makes a number of what seem to me reasonably conservative assumptions in order to make his calculations. Perhaps the least conservative assumptions are that both novelists manage to turn out a new novel every six months and that the one who goes down the traditional route manages to land a book deal (without an agent) during those three years.

The conclusion?

Total income for first three years of writing: 2012-2014

Traditional: $3,332.00 (assuming no agent and $5,000 advance. Book not yet published.)

Indie: $525.00 + $4,095 + $8,715.00 = $13,335.00 for three years.

You can find the full entry with all his working here.

The Bone House

2011-12-07T23:30:00.000Z

The Bone House by Stephen R. Lawhead
Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2011.

This is the sequel to The Skin Map, which I reviewed rather negatively some time ago. In spite of my disappointment with The Skin Map, I decided to give Stephen Lawhead a second chance because of the pleasure his earlier books have given.

Sadly there was no sign of improvement. The dialogue and characterization remain as wooden as before. As for the storyline, if anything, that has degenerated even further into a series of short scenes located at different times in very different geographical locations strung together in a (deliberately?) confusing manner. Even worse, he has begun to indulge in a bad habit of the second-rate novelist: using arbitrary scene breaks to create a false sense of tension. On top of that, he indulges in some rather unsubtle infodumping more than once.

I also have my doubts about the extent and reliability of the historical research he has done. To take just one example, he has Douglas Flinders-Petrie seek out Roger Bacon in Oxford in 1260 when according to modern scholars he was in Paris. Granted this is a parallel universe rather than our own past, but little things like that make it harder for me to suspend my disbelief.

Also irritating was the evidence of poor editing. Glaring typos like ‘Canus Major’ for ‘Canis Major’, ‘died’ for ‘dyed’, and ‘bier’ for ‘byre’ are really not excusable!

Much as I wanted to enjoy this novel, I must again register my disappointment. I won’t be reading any more of the series.

PS I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze.com book review program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

The evils of DRM

2011-11-29T14:30:00.000Z

Charlie Stross has just posted some words of wisdom on ebooks and DRM (here). The core of his argument is that:

As ebook sales mushroom, the Big Six's insistence on DRM has proven to be a hideous mistake. Rather than reducing piracy, it has locked customers in Amazon's walled garden, which in turn increases Amazon's leverage over publishers. And unlike pirated copies (which don't automatically represent lost sales) Amazon is a direct revenue threat because Amazon are have no qualms about squeezing their suppliers — or trying to poach authors for their "direct" publishing channel by offering initially favourable terms. (Which will doubtless get a lot less favourable once the monopoly is secured ...)

Hopefully, the accountants in the Big Six will wake up to this threat before it is too late.

Meanwhile, I have recently run into DRM in an unexpected and rather unwelcome way. One of the venerable traditions of book reviewing is that the reviewer gets to keep his review copy. Since most reviewers are not otherwise paid for their efforts, it seems the least the publisher can do by way of thanks for taking the time and trouble to look seriously at their book. In fact, in this new age of electronic publication it is not the least the publisher can do. The least they can now do is supply electronic review copies with time-limited DRM. Two books I have reviewed recently have now 'timed out', which feels like a slap in the face after spending several hours reading those books, thinking about them carefully and writing what I hope were fair reviews.

Anne McCaffrey

2011-11-23T16:51:00.001Z

I’ve just heard that Anne McCaffrey died on Monday after suffering a massive stroke. She was the grand old lady of science fiction and the first woman to win the Hugo and Nebula awards (she won both in 1968 for Dragonflight), and her novel The White Dragon was one of the first SF novels to make it onto the New York Times Best Seller List.

To be honest, I don’t think her novels really stand the test of time – ripping yarns, but the language doesn’t sparkle and at times her characterization verges on the stereotypical. But she was one of the first SF writers I ever read and enjoyed. She was also a nice person (I had the privilege of meeting her twice: once at a kaffeeklatsch at the Glasgow Worldcon in 1995 and later at a science fiction evening at Heffer’s in Cambridge).

Revelation for Everyone

2011-11-07T07:30:00.000Z

Another book review:

Revelation for Everyone by N.T. Wright
London: SPCK and Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011.

This brief introduction to the book of Revelation is part of a series which has the rationale that the books of the Bible should be available for everyone and not just biblical specialists. Tom Wright’s uses his own translation of the text, which is straightforward without dumbing down the text or being patronizing to the readers.
There is a useful glossary of the key theological terms that appear throughout the book. In the early sections there are paragraphs on context. However, there is none of the background material on context or authorship you would expect to find in an introduction to a New Testament book.
Wright splits the text of Revelation into bite-sized chunks following a fairly standard division of the text. Each section begins with his translation of the passage, which is generally followed by a scene-setting story. Then he spells out what he sees as the central message of the section, offering his interpretation of the text with no space being devoted to alternative readings. You will not find any references to other approaches to the interpretation of the text. The overall feel is very much that of a series of short sermons.
As you would expect of a leading Anglican evangelical, Wright takes the text seriously. He demonstrates that the Revelation of John is as relevant to us as it was to its first readers because it presents us with a clear vision of God’s ultimate purpose for the whole of creation: the overthrow of evil and the victory of God. But he sees it very much as a unified vision, rather than a history of the future, and the various episodes of the text are understood as different symbolic perspectives on that single vision.
My main reservation is that it lacks any guidance for readers who wish to take their study of Revelation any further. At the very least, it could have included a short guide to further reading. That apart, this volume is accessible, interesting and helpful.

Another year, another conference

2011-10-21T12:00:00.000+01:00

At the end of last month, I was in Oxford overseeing the annual conference of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders – my first as the Society’s Conference Director. Now that the dust has settled a bit, I can begin to look at the conference with a degree of objectivity. Inevitably there are things I could improve for next year’s conference, but on the whole the Oxford event seems to have been well received by those who attended it. For example, one person wrote

This was an excellent conference - extremely efficiently run, interesting sessions, great networking. And the accommodation was good and the catering excellent - five star meals elegantly served. Not what I would have expected, given my previous experience of staying in university residences!

And another emailed to say

A woman in the 'Editing STM' course . . . came up to me after lunch and said that she remembered me from the conference, where she'd been a first timer. She said that it was the first time she'd been to such an event where she'd felt at home and surrounded by friendly people within a couple of hours of arriving - she really raved about it. She also said that the future of journal publishing seminar had transformed the way she viewed her work.

But, of course, the fact that the dust is settling means that it is time to begin preparing for next year’s conference in York. If anyone reading this blog has any suggestions about possible speakers, workshop topics, entertainment, sponsors, etc. please feel free to leave a comment. All suggestions gratefully received!

Kurt Vonnegut on writing

2011-10-12T17:00:00.000+01:00

Kurt Vonnegut certainly knew how to write, so any advice from him is certainly worth taking seriously. Here are some tips from him, which were originally published in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications Vol. PC-24, no. 2 (1980), pp. 66–67 (you can find a pdf of the original here):

Find a subject you care about
Do not ramble, though
Keep it simple
Have guts to cut
Sound like yourself
Say what you mean
Pity the readers

The one thing I disagree with is the closing section of his article in which he advises people to go to Strunk and White’s Elements of Style for more detailed advice. To understand why this is really bad advice, one need look no further than Geoff Pullum’s excellent article ‘The Land of the Free and The Elements of Style’. His conclusion is worth quoting:

The Elements of Style does real and permanent harm. It encourages the waste of precious resources – time spent by teachers, students, and copy editors; money spent by English departments and publishers. Genuine faults in writing go neglected because time is spent on nonsense like which-hunting. And worse than that, sensible adults are wrongly persuaded that their grasp of their native tongue is imperfect and their writing is incorrect. No good purpose is served by damaging people’s self-confidence in this way.

The Urban Fantasy Anthology

2011-09-26T07:30:00.000+01:00

Here is a review of mine, which has recently been published in Interzone.

The Urban Fantasy Anthology
Edited by Peter S. Beagle and Joe R. Lansdale
Tachyon Publications, 432 pp., $15.95 trade pb

It’s raw, it’s vibrant, it’s undeniably popular, but just what is urban fantasy? The editors of this new anthology from Tachyon attempt to define the genre by offering us twenty short stories they regard as typical. These stories have been subdivided into three categories: mythic fiction, paranormal romance and noir fantasy. By way of introduction, Peter Beagle offers a useful critical overview of the book as a whole, while Charles De Lint, Paula Guran and Joe Lansdale do the same for each of the three subdivisions.

Mythic fiction is the oldest and best established of the three types of urban fantasy. However, as Charles De Lint points out, the term was originally chosen by him and Terri Windling precisely to avoid describing what they were writing as ‘urban fantasy’. It is probably the most easily definable of the three categories. Essentially, mythic fiction refers to any story that takes traditional fantasy tropes and/or mythic elements and places them in a (sometimes loosely) contemporary setting. In this collection, the category is illustrated by stories from Emma Bull, Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, Jeffrey Ford and Peter Beagle. All the stories chosen to represent mythic fiction are excellent reads, but the Jeffrey Ford offering (‘On the Road to New Egypt’) seems rather out of place in this company: there is a surrealism about it that to my mind makes it more akin to the category described here as ‘noir fantasy’.

The term ‘paranormal romance’ immediately put me in mind of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Twilight saga and Laurell Hamilton’s Anita Blake novels. Paula Guran’s take on the category certainly overlaps with those works, but she puts more emphasis on ‘kickassitude’ and detective-style plots than on any element of romance. The stories chosen to represent this category are by Charles de Lint (again), Kelley Armstrong, Norman Partridge, Carrie Vaughn, Patricia Briggs, Bruce McAllister, Suzy McKee Charnas and Francesca Lia Block. Again it is a strong selection of stories. My particular favourite was Patricia Briggs’s ‘Seeing Eye’, perhaps because I have a soft spot for paranormal detective stories.

Finally, Joe Lansdale introduces what in their wisdom the editors have decided to call noir fantasy. I think this is a misnomer because, to my mind, it suggests a connection with film noir and hardboiled crime fiction; it leads me to expect a cynical take on the world, a morally ambiguous (possibly darkly humorous) central character and possibly a erotic dimension that is not constrained by (or at least is in tension with) conventional attitudes. In fact, the term ‘noir fantasy’ leads me to expect precisely what Paula Guran highlighted about ‘paranormal romance’. However, for Joe Lansdale it clearly means (urban) fantasy with a strong component of horror and/or surrealism. The stories presented here as ‘noir fantasy’ are a disparate collection by Thomas Disch, Susan Palwick, Holly Black, Steven Boyett, Joe Lansdale, Tim Powers and Al Sarrantonio. They are all twisted, dark and surreal . . . but noir? Of these, I found Susan Pawlick’s ‘Gestella’ (a werewolf betrayed by her human lover) and Steven Boyett’s ‘Talking Back to the Moon’ (ex-werewolf and centaur on a road journey in a post-apocalyptic California) particularly memorable.

The sheer diversity of stories anthologized here does a good job of highlighting the breadth of contemporary urban fantasy. I am less convinced by the editors’ attempts to classify the stories. But more important is the fact that they have brought together an excellent collection of stories that showcases the best of urban fantasy writing (however you define it). Definitely a must read!

Interpreting the Universe as Creation

2011-09-21T07:30:00.000+01:00

Yet another old review of mine from Science and Christian Belief:

Interpreting the Universe as Creation: A Dialogue of Science and Religion

edited by Vincent Brümmer

As the title suggests, this volume of essays is the outcome of an international consultation on science and religion. No fewer than four of the papers are from the pens of British authors already well-known for their contributions to aspects of the dialogue.

The structure of the collection is quite simple. After two introductory chapters of a theological nature subsequent chapters are paired so that we are given a scientific and a theological contribution in the areas of cosmology, evolutionary biology, and human nature. The one departure from this pattern is the concluding chapter which explores the theological implications of the ecological crisis.

The theological introduction is provided by Vincent Brümmer who defends Wittgenstein's concept of religion as a language-game against the charge of fideism. This is developed in the following chapter by Luco van den Brom. He relates it to George Lindbeck’s cultural linguistic view of doctrine. This suggests that the doctrine of creation is part of religious map for the journey of life. Van den Brom maintains the possibility that it makes claims about the nature of reality. However, he effectively marginalizes the doctrine by treating it as a ‘footnote’ to salvation history which is retained primarily because we have no way of deriving ethical norms from scientific facts.

Personally I found the two chapters on cosmology the most interesting in the book. The first, by Chris Isham, discusses recent quantum creation theories. It stresses the highly speculative nature of these attempts to explain the origin of the universe. In its companion paper, Willem Drees explores some of the potential tensions between cosmology and theology. In particular, he focuses on cosmology’s spatialization of time and its platonizing tendencies. However, while recognizing that these are hard to reconcile with traditional Protestant theologies, he suggests that theology need not be unduly worried that we can evade such tensions by reverting to some form of Christian Platonism in which eternity is interpreted as timelessness and the universe is a mere reflection of mathematical entities existing in the mind of God.

By contrast, I found the chapters on biological themes rather disappointing. Taken as a whole they provide a useful introduction to the dialogue between science and religion in the areas of evolution, human nature and ecology. However, they simply go over ground that is already extremely well trod: we cannot answer the question ‘What is life?’; evolution is not incompatible with creation and this has implications for our understanding of God (predictably, little attention is given to whether the view of God revealed in the Judaeo-Christian scriptures has implications for our understanding of evolution); human beings cannot be distinguished from animals by any biological or psychological criteria but only on theological grounds; and, finally, we are told that this distinction is one of the roots of our ecological crisis.

No attempt has been made to integrate these papers into a consistent overview of the subject. The result is a degree of disjointedness which may irritate some readers. However, it does serve to highlight the degree of theological divergence within the debate.

Christianity and Ecology

2011-09-20T07:30:00.000+01:00

Another old review of mine from Science and Christian Belief:

Christianity and Ecology
edited by Elizabeth Breuilly and Martin Palmer
Continuum, 1992

This volume forms part of a series sponsored by the World Wide Fund for Nature with the overall aim of exploring how different world religions have viewed the natural environment and the relevance of religious beliefs for our handling of the current ecological crisis. If this volume is typical of the series as a whole, it is designed as a semi-popular presentation for the benefit of parish discussion groups and, perhaps, for use in schools.

The editors have divided the contents into four main sections tackling respectively the ecological crisis, the roots of Christian attitudes to the environment, historical case studies and practical contemporary Christian responses.

The first section consists of a single paper by Freda Rajotte (a former member of the WCC Church and Society Unit). She moves rapidly and uncritically from a summary account of the ecological crisis itself to a statement of Christian culpability which reflects the secular environmentalist consensus rather than the views of informed Christian theologians. One is left with the distinct impression that the Church, as she sees it, is a conservative institution hell-bent on maintaining the status quo over a wide variety of issues (she even implies that Christianity resisted the movement to abolish slavery!).

By contrast with the shrill and tendentious opening section, the three papers on the roots of Christian attitudes are balanced and helpful pieces of work. ‘The Bible and the Natural World’ and ‘The Influence of the Bible on Christian Belief about the Natural World’ are by Dr Ruth Page. She presents a positive view of biblical teaching in relation to the environment and also offers a counter to Rajotte’s suggestion that Western Christianity must bear much of the blame for the present crisis. The third paper is a précis of lectures given by John Zizioulas at King’s College London. Serious students of the theology of nature will want to read the original version (published in King’s Theological Review) but the editors are to be thanked for making this important material more widely available.

Turning to the historical case studies, we encounter first an excellent study of Benedictine monasticism by Sister Joan Chittister. She summarises the Benedictine ideal in terms of hard work, respect for the land, simplicity, care and stewardship and examines its implications for environmental ethics. This is followed by a study of St Francis by Father Peter Hooper of the Franciscan Study Centre in Canterbury. Hooper presents an interesting but, I suspect, anachronistic picture of Francis. He admits, but fails to explain, the consistent failure of Franciscans to live up to the ecological ideal he portrays. Could it be that there were other facets in Francis, warring with his love of nature? That was certainly true of St Bonaventure, the first great theologian of the Franciscan Order. The concluding contribution in this section claims to tackle the Protestant tradition. However, its author Martin Palmer seems to be more interested in launching a tendentious attack on Calvinism than in giving a fair account of what is, after all, an extremely diverse family of Christian traditions. He accepts Max Weber’s correlation between Calvinism and capitalism uncritically, apparently unaware of the serious questions which have been raised regarding Weber’s thesis. Calvin himself is presented as a religious fanatic who did not believe that God cared for his creation (apart from the elect)! Now it is certainly true that Calvin shares the Augustinian ambivalence towards the natural world which runs throughout Western Christianity. But Palmer’s suggestion that Calvinism was ‘a major contributor to the growth of an exploitative attitude to nature’ (p. ix) is errant nonsense. On the contrary, Calvin was the first Reformer explicitly to assert our duty of responsible stewardship with respect to the natural world.

The concluding section, like the opening, is by Freda Rajotte. In it she offers a variety of suggestions for individual Christians and churches seeking to make some kind of genuine response to the ecological crisis.
People seeking to use this book as a resource for parish or classroom discussion will be much helped by the questions which are interpolated into the text at frequent intervals. However it has two serious weaknesses: the lack of bibliography and the tendentious nature of the contributions by Rajotte and Palmer. A book which presumes to be a teaching resource should enable readers to look elsewhere for complementary (or contradictory) perspectives. And it should eschew the temptation to perpetuate ill-informed prejudices.

Evolution: The Great Debate

2011-09-19T07:30:00.000+01:00

Continuing my season of old book reviews, here is one I wrote for Science and Christian Belief:

Evolution: The Great Debate
by Vernon Blackmore and Andrew Page
Lion, 1989

Evolution has been given the Lion treatment. This very attractive large format paperback is typical of the sort of publication for which Lion is justly renowned. It is well illustrated, clearly written and additional information is set apart from the main text in coloured boxes. All in all it could have been designed to compete in the secular coffee table book market.

But that very fact immediately raises a question in my mind. Given that this is the product of a Christian publisher, what is its purpose? The title suggests that it is yet another contribution to the long-running creation–evolution debate. However, that suggestion is firmly denied by the authors (p. 7). Instead they offer to take us on a guided tour of the history of the idea of evolution.

With that in mind, let us turn to the content of the book. Three introductory chapters set the scene for Darwin, tracing the history of evolutionary speculation and associated ideas from classical Greek times to the beginning of Darwin’s career as a natural historian. Chapters 4 and 5 examine first the historical development of Darwin’s theory and then its central feature: natural selection as the driving mechanism for evolution. Chapters 6 to 8 continue the history of evolution with an account of the post-Darwinian debates (both religious and biological) to the present day. The final chapter is more philosophical in tone, examining some of the speculation which has been associated with the espousal of Darwinism.

I have little to say about the book's account of evolution as a biological theory. The authors’ material is straightforwardly written, readable and accurate. In fact it would make a good A level textbook on the subject.

However, Christian readers will expect more than that from a book published by Lion. The authors deny that the book is about the rights and wrongs of creationism and evolution. Nevertheless there is far more about the religious implications of evolution than one would expect in a secular book on the same theme.
Thus one might expect to find an objective report of the development of Christian responses to evolutionary thought. However, this is not in fact the case. The bulk of the religious material has to do with the development of creationism. Far from presenting it objectively, the authors are clearly critical of this particular response to the theory of evolution. On the other hand, recognising that their brief was not to take sides, the authors refrain from making out a convincing case for theistic evolution. That the latter is their preferred option is clear from their sympathetic account of it on p. 186f. Unfortunately they refer readers to the work of Arthur Peacocke for further information about this option. Peacocke is a highly respected writer on science and religion, but his mixture of liberal Anglicanism and process theology is unlikely to commend theistic evolution to evangelical Christians.

For a book that contains so much about the religious implications of evolution it is remarkably thin on theology. The authors tend to ask questions rather than make theological suggestions. This could be good teaching technique or it could mask a reluctance to tackle the theological issues.

The historical nature of the book also tends to obscure the theological side of the debate.

In conclusion, if you are looking for a historical account of evolution with rather more than usual about the religious dimensions of the theory this might be the book to begin with. For theology, you will have to look elsewhere.

Coming soon

2011-09-13T07:30:00.000+01:00

According to the T&T Clark blog, advance copies of the third edition of God, Humanity and the Cosmos are now available. Once again, I am responsible for the chapter on physics.

Some endorsements:

‘As the title says, God, Humanity and the Cosmos covers almost everything regarding science, Christianity and its critics. Not only is the scope of this textbook ambitious, but so is the variety of detailed issues addressed in many brief, readable sections that deserve careful study. For each topic discussed, the reader may come away with a fair and informed understanding as well as suggestions for further reading if one were to pursue that particular topic. Other wide ranging surveys of ‘religion and science’ tend to promote answers and play down the problems; this one also poses good questions with the answers, and thus doesn’t leave its challenging edge in easy apologetics. God, Humanity and the Cosmos is a rich survey as well as a great opportunity to come to greater depth in some of the most exciting intellectual discussions of our time.’ – Willem B. Drees, Leiden University, the Netherlands.

‘Distilling the expertise of a dozen key scholars in science and religion and containing significant new material, this third edition of Christopher Southgate’s now classic textbook continues to offer a comprehensive overview of what might otherwise seem a hopelessly large and shifting subject. In particular, the contributors are theologically literate and put theology back into the science and religion debate. Students I teach have found this textbook to be the most informative in its field.’ – David Grumett, University of Cambridge, UK.

‘I continue to enthusiastically recommend this fine textbook in science and religion. I have used the previous editions on several occasions in seminary and doctoral courses at the Graduate Theological Union, and found them to provide an excellent survey of the field, a very useful reference guide, and a stimulating set of perspectives from the spectrum of views of its editors. Key additions to this third edition – new chapters on the new atheism and climate change, a substantial rewrite of the evolution and biotechnology chapters, and a sizeable updating of the bibliography - make it all the more valuable as a textbook in science and religion.’ – Robert J. Russell, Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley, USA.

Introducing Original Pronunciation

2011-09-12T15:00:00.000+01:00

David Crystal has a new-ish website devoted to Original Pronunciation of the English language. Judging by what he says on the home page, its real focus is on English as it was pronounced in Shakespeare’s day. But that’s fine with me; my main interest in the site is in how it can help me to improve my pronunciation of the various Elizabethan ballads I sing.

Cats, pigeons and cosmologists

2011-09-08T18:00:00.000+01:00

When I was an undergraduate I was taught that modern cosmology was founded upon the cosmological principle. This is the assumption that the Earth does not occupy a privileged position in the universe or, more generally, there are no privileged positions in the universe. In other words, the universe will look pretty much the same wherever an observer might be located (not so much in terms of physical structures but certainly in terms of the effects of physical laws).

However, a couple of researchers at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Beijing have recently posted a paper entitled ‘Direction Dependence of the Deceleration Parameter’ to arXiv (here). The universe is not just expanding but that expansion is accelerating. In it this paper, the authors argue (based on their analysis of Type 1 supernovae) that there is a preferred axis to that acceleration.

If it its true it certainly puts a cat among the cosmological pigeons!

Moltmann: Messianic Theology in the Making

2011-09-07T00:00:00.000+01:00

Another old review (I’ve forgotten where this one was originally published):

Moltmann: Messianic Theology in the Making

by Richard Bauckham

Marshall Pickering, 1987

In recent years Moltmann has emerged as probably the most widely read German theologian in the Anglo-Saxon world. However, until the publication of this book there was no easily accessible introduction to his work. This omission may be due in part to the strong reactions which his writings engender in his readers. One gets the impression that they tend to be either enthusiasts or antipathetic. In such a situation, the balance necessary for a good introduction is hard to come by.

For the purposes of this introduction, Dr Bauckham has restricted his attention to that part of Moltmann’s career delimited by Theology of Hope (1964), The Crucified God (1972), and The Church in the Power of the Spirit (1975). This has the dual advantage of reducing the work to manageable proportions, and creating a natural framework on which to hang this study. Thus there are chapters on each of the volumes of his trilogy. An introductory chapter on the origins and context of the theology of hope, and one which traces Moltmann’s trinitarian thinking as it developed through this period complete the introduction.

The introductory chapter shows very briefly how Moltmann’s interest in eschatology and mission can be traced back to his days as a student in Gottingen. Bauckham then turns to his dialogue with Ernst Bloch: he draws out a number of parallels between the theology of hope and the work of Bloch to show how Moltmann has been able to use categories from the Marxist philosopher to articulate his own approach to Christian eschatology. However he is at pains to point out that this was no uncritical assimilation of Marxist thought; that Bloch’s philosophy was an apt vehicle for expressing the revolutionary potential of the gospel and no more.

Having thus set the scene, chapter 2 deals with Theology of Hope itself. Each of the chapters dealing with the elements of the trilogy follows the same pattern: they begin by examining the structure and method of the works in question, this is followed by a more detailed examination of the major themes of each book. Here Bauckham singles out for closer examination, Moltmann’s understanding of revelation as promise, his insistence on the reality and significance of the resurrection, and his suggestion that history be understood as mission. In the case of chapter 2, there are also brief sections which trace Moltmann’s development in the years immediately following the publication of Theology of Hope.

The longest chapter in the book is understandably devoted to Moltmann’s most influential work, The Crucified God. In discussing its methodology, Bauckham points out the way in which Moltmann’s greater stress on the cross has radicalized rather than changed his earlier approach. He suggests that this theology of the cross may be regarded as a Christian parallel to the Frankfurt School’s critical theory. Bauckham develops this suggestion as he examines in turn the dialectic of the cross; the iconoclasm of the cross; Moltmann’s response to protest atheism; and the problem of suffering.

Chapter 4, ‘The Trinitarian History of God’, of necessity follows quite a different pattern from its neighbours. It takes the form of a synoptic view of the developments in Moltmann’s concept of God between 1964 and 1979.

The final chapter is a useful exposition of Moltmann’s ecclesiology: an aspect of his work which has been somewhat overshadowed by the debates surrounding the earlier volumes of the trilogy. While not straying beyond the self-imposed limits of Bauckham’s task, this chapter does provide a useful background for examining Moltmann’s more recent work on the doctrine of the Trinity. (My one regret is that considerations of space seem to have ruled out a similar synoptic view of the development of his understanding of creation.)

Although Bauckham numbers himself among the enthusiasts for Moltmann, he has achieved a very fair account of this period in Moltmann’s career. It is primarily concerned to present an overview rather than a critique of Moltmann’s work, but Bauckham does not shrink from reporting and commenting on some of the more serious criticisms. As an overview, and a lucidly written one at that, it will prove indispensable for students who are grappling with Moltmann’s thought for the first time. But I believe it will also be of value to people who are already familiar with Moltmann’s theology as an aid to achieving an overall picture of his work free from the false emphases of particular enthusiasms and criticisms. Indeed it appears that even those whose knowledge of Moltmann’s work is most intimate can benefit: let Moltmann himself have the last word, ‘there are also mirrors in which one recognizes oneself better than one had known oneself before. From these mirrors one learns something new about oneself and one’s theological career, and one is glad of this revelation of the hidden motives and methods in one’s thought. Richard Bauckham’s work has been this kind of mirror for me.’

Ethics in an Age of Technology

2011-09-06T00:00:00.000+01:00

Another review from Science & Christian Belief (Vol. 6, No. 2, October 1994):

Ethics in an Age of Technology: The Gifford Lectures 1989-1991
by Ian Barbour

This eagerly awaited sequel to Religion in an Age of Science possesses all the characteristics that one has come to expect of Ian Barbour’s writing. It is a lucid, comprehensive and balanced account of ethical issues as they relate to the world of modern technology.

The book is divided into three main sections: Conflicting Values, Critical Technologies and Technology and the Future.

Under the heading of Conflicting Values, Barbour explores contemporary attitudes to technology, human values (both individual and social) and environmental values. He examines the scientific, philosophical and religious arguments used to justify the competing value systems he describes. In the course of this examination, he sketches in what he takes to be a Christian perspective. Three themes emerge as particularly important for contemporary policy decisions involving technology: justice, participation and sustainability.

Turning to Critical Technologies, he offers as case studies agriculture, energy and computers. The ethical dimension of agricultural technology allows him to explore the impact of technology on traditional human communities as well as environmental questions. Energy raises questions of global justice, environmental quality and sustainability. His chapter on computers looks at their impact on working practices as well as on their effect on access to information.

In the concluding section, he addresses the unprecedented powers afforded to a few by recent technological developments. Specifically he examines the threat posed by further environmental depredations, genetic engineering and the continuing proliferation of nuclear weapons. He argues that international action is necessary to deal responsibly with each of these issues. In the penultimate chapter, he maintains that democratic control of technology is still feasible in spite of the difficulties of assessment and regulation. Finally he makes suggestions about possible new directions, assessing the appropriate technology movement and exploring the possibilities of more efficient technologies and simpler lifestyles.

There is an inevitable weakness in seeking to be comprehensive. Every one of the issues raised is worthy of an entire book in itself. It is impossible to avoid oversimplification when the attempt is made to cram such a broad subject into three hundred pages and, moreover, do it without recourse to the kind of technical jargon which would render it impenetrable to the intelligent lay person.

Then there is the question of balance. I couldn’t help feeling that he was too balanced at times. In part, this is a result of oversimplification. For example, he divides the world up into technological optimists, pessimists, and those who maintain a critical via media. But in his haste to expound the virtues of the via media, he fails to do justice to some of those he criticizes. Thus technological pessimism is caricatured in a way that completely fails to register the real point of many of the pessimists’ complaints: they are not opposed to the artefacts of technology so much as to the mindset which has produced our society; their complaint is not against technology as such but rather against the dominance of technical reason (or functional rationality) over other forms of reason.

However, his defence of a via media is not just a matter of oversimplification. In the concluding chapters, Barbour offers us a catalogue of antidemocratic tendencies within contemporary technocracy – a catalogue worthy of any technological pessimist! But he does not seem unduly worried by his own assessment. Instead he reasserts his faith in the capacity of Western democracy to overcome these tendencies. It might have been helpful to the more pessimistic and cynical of his readers if he had presented a more developed case for his faith in democracy!

Another quibble I have about the book is the way his entire lecture series was structured. Volume 1: religion and science; Volume 2: ethics and technology. It is neat but hardly does justice to the complexity of the relationships between these four subject areas. Does it perhaps also reflect the traditional Western tendency to elevate theoria above praxis?

Finally there is the question of the relationship of the Christian tradition to ethics and what, if anything, Christians might have to contribute to these debates. Barbour allows Christianity to be one of the players in the development of an appropriate ethic. However, it should be noted that his preferred form of Christianity is much attenuated.

But these are only quibbles. The book does not pretend to be the definitive statement on technological ethics. Rather, it is an extremely valuable introduction to the subject. I suspect that like several of its predecessors from the same pen, it is destined to become a standard undergraduate textbook.

Link spam and dead gurus

2011-09-05T09:30:00.002+01:00

I’ve just deleted a couple of comments that appeared on my blog overnight, partly because they were anonymous and partly because they merely consisted of links to a number of sites associated with the New Age guru Adi Da (also known as Da Free John, Bubba Free John and Da Love-Ananda). Note to would-be commenters: I don’t generally censor comments but I’m not about to let my blog become a conduit to a religious group of which Ken Wilber once commented, ‘step into his community at your own risk’.

Religion in an Age of Science

2011-09-05T00:00:00.000+01:00

A book review originally published in Science & Christian Belief, Vol. 4, No. 2 (October 1992):

Religion in an Age of Science, The Gifford Lectures 1989-1991
by Ian Barbour

London: SCM Press

One’s expectations of this volume may well be coloured by the knowledge that the author’s earlier work, Issues in Science and Religion, became the standard introduction to the subject for an entire generation. Are we to see his Gifford Lectures as a successor or a supplement to that earlier essay?

There are clear structural similarities between this volume and the earlier one. Gone is the introductory overview of the history of the relationship between science and religion. But the remaining sections parallel those of the previous book (to the point of re using two of the section titles). However, closer examination reveals that this is far from being just a revision of the earlier volume.

Part 1 deals with ‘Religion and the Methods of Science’. Barbour examines various ways of relating science and religion; the role of models and paradigms; and certainly similarities and differences between science and religion. One peculiarity of this section is his redefinition of theology of nature to mean little more than a broad natural theology. He completely ignores the post-Barthian developments in Reformed theology which have consistently used this term precisely to distinguish their approach from that of natural theology. Also striking, given the contemporary resurgence of orthodox Christianity is the fact that he mentions revelation only in passing.

In Part 2, ‘Religion and the theories of Science’, he concentrates on the developments which have occurred since the publication of his earlier work. His clear intention to provide another broad overview of the subject places severe constraints on how much he is able to say on individual topics. The result is an inevitable sketchiness (e.g. less than two pages on the anthropic principle in spite of its significant implications for religion). At times this verges on the dismissive (e.g. his cursory treatment of many world theories in quantum physics).

This sketchiness also tends to throw his personal biases into sharp relief. For example, his treatment of the Christian doctrine of creation is strikingly one sided. He promotes the alternative reading of Genesis 1:2, omitting to mention that this is a minority view among Old Testament scholars. This allows him to speak of creation as a continuous ordering process rather than a historical beginning. Similarly creatio ex nihilo is treated as an extension of the doctrine of redemption to the natural order, and eschatology is reduced to a mythological extrapolation from redemption. Both creation and eschatology are reduced to symbolic expressions of our trust in God. This is a tendentious reading of biblical and theological scholarship which serves to bolster his preference for process thought.

Again, in the chapter on ‘Evolution and Continuing Creation’, he reads the evidence in such a way as to support process thought. He offers useful summaries of the neo-Darwinian synthesis and current debates in evolutionary theory. Then he interprets the entire tree of life in terms of a hierarchy of levels with novel forms of organization emerging at each new level of complexity. Such ideas are commonplace today, but Barbour departs from the commonplace with his account of sentience and purposiveness. He suggests ‘that unified entities at all levels should be considered as experiencing subjects, with at least rudimentary sentience, memory, and purposiveness’ (p. 173).

The final section of the book is devoted to ‘Philosophical and Theological Implications’, with chapters discussing human nature, process philosophy, and the relationship between God and nature. As regards the relationship between mind and body, he advocates the view that minds emerge from the rudimentary experience of all entities against the alternatives of dualism, materialism, and two language theories. Turning specifically to the place of religion, he dismisses purely naturalistic explanations of its evolution. This is followed by a summary of the biblical view of human nature. Barbour looks to Geoffrey Lampe for a satisfactory explanation of the role of Christ. But the resultant spirit Christology dissolves any meaningful Trinitarianism and implies a subjective approach to atonement. This has the superficial attraction of allowing its adherents to affirm the truths of other religions but it does so at the cost of eviscerating Christianity. In place of the good news that Jesus Christ has acted decisively to transform our human situation we are left with the ambivalent message that we learn from Jesus (and other great religious teachers) how we may work to become co-creators with God. It becomes clear in the remaining chapters that this attenuated Christology meets with Barbour’s approval because it coheres with process thought. He presents a simple and attractive picture of process philosophy and then moves on to outline its theological implications. After the manner of Charles Hartshorne he defends process theology by showing how much superior it is to a caricature of classical theism. Significantly he maintains throughout the book a stony silence with respect to contemporary Trinitarian thought. The latter avoids the criticisms of process thought, can maintain a positive attitude to the scientific endeavour, and yet remains true to biblical insights in a way that is not possible for the process school.

Given Barbour's undiminished clarity of style this book is likely to follow its predecessor in becoming a standard textbook. The volume is certainly to be commended as a concise and readable overview of the science and religion dialogue of the past 20 years. However, readers seeking a neutral report of this dialogue should beware of his persistent bias in favour of process thought.

Children of the Serpent Gate

2011-09-03T08:00:00.002+01:00

Sarah Ash, Children of the Serpent Gate, Book 3 of The Tears of Artamon (Bantam, 2005)

In this last act of the saga that began with Lord of Snow and Shadows, the Rossiyan Empire stands at a crucial moment in its history. Science and reason have begun to displace an older magical way of the looking at the world. But the release of the Drakhaoul, demonic (or angelic) beings who can take possession of human hosts, threatens to plunge the empire into a new dark age. Also threatening to turn the clock back is the Francian Commanderie – a military order of religious fanatics that effectively controls King Enguerrand of Francia.

In this third act of the drama, Ash continues to work with multiple points of view. By doing this she succeeds in creating a much richer narrative than would have been possible with the omniscient narrator of traditional fantasy. However, the resultant complexity does threaten to overwhelm the narrative flow at times.
Among the several viewpoint characters that Ash has used over the course of the trilogy two stood out for me in this volume: Gavril and Kiukiu. As I read through Children of the Serpent Gate I was struck by how these characters seemed to represent two complementary aspects of the narrative action. Gavril’s story takes place entirely within the physical world of Rossiya. Meanwhile Kiukiu, as befits her role as shaman, becomes the protagonist of a parallel story unfolding on a spiritual realm. While Gavril struggles with the Drakhaoul on the physical level, she is working to release the spirits of a number of children who were sacrificed to open a gate to the realm of the Drakhaoul.

Ash has commented that there are no Dark Lords in this fantasy trilogy. In my review of the previous volume, I suggested that while this might be true, the Tielen court alchemist Kaspar Linnaius seemed to be a Rasputin-like figure. However that assessment was premature. In this volume, we see another more sympathetic side of Linnaius. In contrast to the black-and-white characterization of so much contemporary fantasy, Ash has very effectively painted all her characters – even the apparent villains – in various shades of grey.

While the characterization is satisfyingly complex, there is also plenty to satisfy lovers of action: sea battles, sword fights, daring escapes, arcane encounters. Indeed, there is perhaps too much action towards the end of the novel as the various strands of the narrative come rushing together to create a climactic conclusion.

In summary, this is a very satisfying conclusion to a refreshingly different take on the fantasy trilogy. Sarah Ash is definitely a writer to keep an eye on.

Prisoner of Ironsea Tower

2011-09-02T08:00:00.002+01:00

Sarah Ash, Prisoner of Ironsea Tower, Book 2 of The Tears of Artamon (Bantam, 2005)

In Prisoner of Ironsea Tower Sarah Ash continues the story of Gavril Nagarian (an artist who unexpectedly inherits one of the Rossiyan duchies and the demonic power that goes with it) and Eugene of Tielen (who is determined to become emperor of a reunited Rossiya). At the end of Book 1, Gavril renounced the dragon demon that was source of his power. With no one to stand against him, Eugene easily extends his power over the remaining Rossiyan duchies and has Gavril imprisoned in a notorious lunatic asylum (the Ironsea Tower of the title).

The story begins quite slowly, but after a couple of chapters the pace begins to pick up. Apparently the creature that possessed Gavril was not destroyed by the exorcism that cast it out. Instead it finds a new host, incidentally saving the life and restoring the memory of Andrei Orlov – the heir of Muscobar (Tielen’s great rival), thought dead in a shipwreck during the war in the opening volume of the trilogy (Lord of Snow and Shadows). What’s more, there is more than one of these creatures and in the course of this volume we learn a great deal more about their history – enough, perhaps, to begin to sympathize with their plight. In spite of the title, Gavril does not long remain a prisoner. Eugene’s hold over his new Rossiyan Empire proves less secure than he hoped at first, driving him to seek still greater power with the aid of his court alchemist. By the end of the volume, the Rossiyan Empire is divided by civil war, two dragon demons are on the loose and a Francian fleet is on its way to invade Rossiya.

The book may be strong on action, but this has not weakened Ash’s characterization. As I pointed out in my review of Lord of Snow and Shadows, even her minor characters feel like real people. With one possible exception, there are no heroes or villains in this story – the personalities and motivations of her major characters are simply too complex for any of them to be unremittingly good or evil. The exception appears to be Caspar Linnaius, the Tielen court alchemist. Ash claims that there are no Dark Lords in her fantasy trilogy and that may well be true, but he is certainly a candidate for the role of Rasputin. His character is painted in unremittingly dark tones – scheming, manipulative, and quite lacking in moral restraint when it comes to the use of his powers.

However, it has to be said that this is very much the second book of a trilogy. It is inevitably dependent on Book 1. But whereas that volume had a satisfying ending, in the sense that major plot issues were resolved, this book ends on a cliffhanger with everything now dependent on the concluding volume, Children of the Serpent Gate. I found much to enjoy in this book, but I must admit I was irritated by its inconclusiveness (particularly by comparison with Lord of Snow and Shadows) – cliffhanger endings make me feel I am being manipulated into reading the next volume. That irritation apart, I can thoroughly recommend this to anyone who enjoyed Lord of Snow and Shadows.

Lord of Snow and Shadows

2011-09-01T08:00:00.002+01:00

Another old review of mine:

Sara Ash, Lord of Snow and Shadows, Book 1 of the Tears of Artamon (Bantam, 2004)

Sarah Ash’s new trilogy opens with the artist Gavril Andar falling hopelessly in love with Astasia, the daughter of the Duke of Muscobar. Fortuitously he discovers that he is the son and heir of the recently assassinated ruler of Azhkendir, a buffer state between Muscobar and Tielen. Naturally he hopes that this might be the answer to his romantic problems. However, the Duke of Muscobar hopes to marry Astasia off to Prince Eugene of Tielen in a bid to avoid a ruinous war. To further complicate matters, Gavril soon discovers that he has inherited more than a bleak, poverty-stricken northern state. The dynasty to which he is heir is founded upon possession of (or, rather, by) a demonic force that will gradually devour his humanity but which he must use if he is to avenge his father’s murder and defend his people against Tielen aggression.

The place names locate this novel rather too obviously in a mythical analogue of Russia. That quibble aside, Ash develops her world with loving attention to detail, building up a vivid picture of a late eighteenth century or early nineteenth century Russia without the external threat of Napoleon (we are told that Prince Eugene’s father decisively defeated Francia in a sea battle a generation earlier) but also without the internal unifying force of a czar. The result is a collection of squabbling duchies at various stages of modernization. In some senses Muscobar is the most modern with the common people beginning to resent the aristocrats who exploit them. At the other extreme, Azhkendir remains thoroughly feudal much to the discomfort of Gavril who has been brought up in decadent Smarna.

One of the strengths of Ash’s writing is her characterization. Even her minor characters feel like real people rather than stock figures. You feel that their words and actions are driven by their various personalities and situations rather than the demands of the story. As for the major characters, they are in most cases complex figures with complex personalities and motivations. Take, for example, Prince Eugene of Tielen. He could so easily have been presented as the stock villain of the novel and Ash makes no secret of his obsessive vision of a Rossiyan Empire reunited under his leadership. However, she forces us to sympathize with him by making him the viewpoint character at various points. Thus, in addition to Eugene the ruthless expansionist we get to see him as Eugene the loving father of sickly, crippled Karila. He is torn between the memory of his dead wife and the political expediency of marriage to Astasia Orlov. Perhaps most surprising is the barely suppressed homoeroticism in his feelings for his young protégé Jaromir Arkhel, the last survivor of a dynasty that once challenged Gavril’s father for the throne of Azhkendir.

Given the demonic aspect of Gavril’s inheritance, it is no surprise that the supernatural plays an important part in this novel. Ironically Gavril initially denies the existence of magic and the supernatural and only reluctantly comes to acknowledge the true nature of his inheritance. Prince Eugene has no such doubts and makes full use of the skills of his court alchemist to bolster his military advantage (for example, turning condemned criminals into werewolves to be used as a kind of commando force).

Magic of a different kind plays a crucial role in Gavril’s struggle with the demon he has inherited. As he settles into his new role as ruler of Azhkendir, he befriends the serving girl Kiukiu. Like him, she is an outsider. Although a faithful servant of the Nagarian line, she is despised because her mother had been seduced by a follower of the hated Arkhel clan. However, and again like Gavril, she has inherited something more from her father. She discovers that she is a guslyar, a ‘ghost singer’ with shamanistic powers – powers that she uses to aid Gavril.

The book is very well written and Ash brings it to as satisfying a conclusion as is possible in the first volume of a trilogy. Naturally, since it is a first volume, she has salted it with unanswered questions to pique the reader’s curiosity about what happens next. I am certainly looking forward to the next stage in the larger story.

Thought for the day: Platonism vs Christianity

2011-08-30T08:00:00.000+01:00

the one essential difference between Platonism and Christianity is absolute: the difference, that is, between the mysteries of the city and the counsels of the philosopher’s daimon, on the one hand, and the sacraments of the church and the pilgrimage of scripture, on the other; or, otherwise stated, the difference between the backward glance that seeks a path of retreat out of the alien distance of a chaotic exterior and the forward gaze, saturated by the light of the Kingdom’s distant dawn, that surveys the graciously exterior distance of the gift.

Hart, David Bentley (2000) ‘The Writing of the Kingdom: Thirty-Seven Aphorisms Towards An Eschatology of the Text’, Modern Theology 16(2): 181-202 (190).

J.R.R. Tolkien

2011-08-29T08:00:00.000+01:00

Here is a review of another book I have recently acquired from Booksneeze:

J.R.R. Tolkien by Mark Horne
Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2011

This new biography of Tolkien takes the form of a brief chronological summary of Tolkien’s life. Three chapters are devoted to his childhood in and around Birmingham, culminating in his childhood romance with the girl he would eventually marry. Chapter 4 deals with his time as an undergraduate in Oxford, while Chapter 5 outlines his experiences in the First World War and his marriage to Edith. Chapters 6 and 7 summarize his academic career between 1918 and 1937, first in Leeds and later back in Oxford. Chapter 8 focuses on the decade following the publication of The Hobbit during which time he wrote much of The Lord of the Rings, while Chapter 9 deals with the public reception of LOTR and Tolkien’s later years. A final brief chapter entitled ‘Legacy’ explores Tolkien’s influence on modern fantasy literature and attempts to say something about Tolkien’s Christian vision.

My initial reaction to the volume was one of disappointment. The account of Tolkien’s life appears to be reasonably accurate (at various points I checked it against Humphrey Carpenter’s biography), but the book is too short to deal adequately with the important relationships in his life. In particular, there is surprisingly little about his relationship with C.S. Lewis and the rest of the Inklings. More importantly, it fails to live up to the series promise that you will learn ‘how Tolkien’s faith was an intrinsic element of his creative imagination, one that played out in the pages of his writings and his life’. Scattered references to his Roman Catholicism and a brief attempt in the final chapter to address the Christian underpinning of his writing do not amount to a demonstration that his faith was integral to his creativity. For example, more could have been made of his understanding of fantasy as sub-creation; stronger connections could have been made between his penchant for anarchism and his faith; and it would have been good to see something about his concept of eucatastrophe (a concept that embraces both the cross of Christ and the destruction of the ruling ring). To add insult to injury, the book is simply not particularly well written; the text is grammatically correct, but it is dull and lifeless. Tolkien deserves better.

NB I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze.com book review program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Understanding the Present

2011-08-27T08:00:00.001+01:00

Another old review of mine from Science and Christian Belief:

Bryan Appleyard, Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man (Picador, 1992)

Arguably science is the most effective form of knowledge the world has yet known. The developments of the past four centuries have given us unprecedented powers to manipulate our environment. But, in addition to the technological innovations spawned by science, it has bequeathed to us an outlook on the world which has had far-reaching effects on western (and, more recently, global) culture.

Bryan Appleyard’s interest in the cultural implications of science stems from interviewing Stephen Hawking for the Sunday Times Magazine in 1988. The result of his investigations is a powerful critique of modern scientific culture.

He adopts an essentially historical approach, tracing the development of scientific culture from the emergence of the modern scientific method some four centuries ago. Appleyard argues that the success of the scientific method provoked an epistemological crisis from which emerged a new worldview.

This worldview (scientism) is the bedrock of modern liberal culture. However, it precludes the possibility of taking about ultimate meaning and purpose. In the face of its ability to manipulate the world around us Western non-scientific culture has been gradually overwhelmed and transformed. Appleyard traces this ‘long tale of decline and defeat’ with particular reference to religious and moral responses. He concludes that Western Christianity has been roundly defeated by the new culture of science: theological liberalism represents its capitulation.

In later chapters, he examines contemporary developments. He explores the way in which doubts about the morality of hard science (fuelled by the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima) have encouraged a green reaction. Within science itself, the strangeness of twentieth century physics has given rise to suggestions that we may be able to develop a new spirituality, but Appleyard remains unconvinced. The final element in his indictment of scientific culture is an examination of attempts to develop artificial intelligence and the erosive implications of this for a more humanistic view of personality and selfhood.

Appleyard’s concluding chapter is both the most important and, in another respect, the weakest chapter in the book. After a lucid summary of the argument so far, he outlines the dangers of the real enemy: modern liberal culture based upon the assumptions of scientism and bolstered by the successes of science and technology. His diagnosis is superb; his proposed remedy is so feeble as to seem ridiculous. He asserts that, ‘Science begins by saying it can answer only this kind of question and ends by claiming that these are the only questions that can be asked. Once the implications and shallowness of this trick are realized, fully realized, science will be humbled and we shall be free to celebrate our selves again’ (p. 249). In other words, all we have to do is disentangle science from scientism. But it is not enough merely to reject the worldview of scientism. The human spirit abhors a vacuum. Unless some constructive alternative is offered, other ideologies, perhaps even more abhorrent than scientism, will rush in to replace it.

Many historians and philosophers of science will hate this book. His historical analysis is simplified to the point of distortion. For example, Galileo’s telescopic observation of the moon is blown up out of all proportion. He turns it into an icon of the scientific method. More seriously, for most of the book he confuses the method and the attendant worldview: science and scientism.

Nevertheless this is a helpful book. It is a clear and resounding critique of scientism. Appleyard’s journalistic abilities have resulted in a work capable of reaching a much wider audience than the more erudite tomes usually reviewed in these pages. It should be compulsory reading for all sixth-formers (and undergraduates)!

Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology

2011-08-26T13:12:00.000+01:00

Here’s a book review I wrote for Science and Christian Belief some time ago:

Max Jammer, Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology (Princeton University Press, 1999)

Everyone with an interest in the relationship between physics and theology will welcome the publication of this volume by the distinguished philosopher of physics, Max Jammer. In spite of the general recognition of the importance of Einstein’s thought both for modern physics and its relationship with religion this is, as far as I am aware, the first comprehensive account of Einstein’s own views on the relationship.

Jammer has organised his material into three main sections. The first of these deals with ‘Einstein’s Religiosity and the Role of Religion in His Private Life’. As the title suggests, this chapter deals with Einstein’s personal attitude toward religion from childhood until his death. It is a detailed and roughly chronological account in which Jammer documents Einstein’s apparently self-contradictory attitude towards religion. On the one hand, he had a lifelong aversion to authority that was expressed in a distaste for organised religion (culminating in his request not to be given a Jewish funeral). On the other hand, as a personal response to the cosmos, he experienced what can only be described as profound religious feelings. In short, Einstein’s personal religion is shown to be typically late modern – affirming personal spirituality while disavowing organised religion.

In his second chapter, Jammer turns from Einstein’s personal attitude to what he has written about religion and its role in human society. The chapter is entitled ‘Einstein’s Philosophy of Religion’ and sets out to be a logical justification of the attitudes described in the first chapter. I must confess that I felt rather suspicious of this (re)construction of Einstein’s philosophy of religion. Jammer’s interpretative approach seems to have been to assume that it must always be possible to reconcile apparently contradictory statements. The result is a superhuman degree of consistency. Frankly I doubt whether even someone of Einstein’s stature could achieve such consistency outside his own field (and, indeed, his vacillations about the implications of relativity theory for the nature of time suggest that he did not always achieve it within his own field). That criticism apart, this chapter offers a valuable summary of Einstein’s articulated views about religion. In particular, it explores his lifelong admiration for Spinoza and sets his well-known determinism, realism and insistence on the impersonality of God in that context.

The final chapter is devoted to ‘Einstein’s Physics and Theology’. Here Jammer moves on from Einstein’s own views to explore some of the ways in which his contributions to science have been received by theologians and philosophers of religion. These explorations are organised logically (following roughly the order in which the ideas on which they are based appeared within the development of relativity theory) rather than chronologically. Among the issues tackled are the implications of Einstein’s redefinition of simultaneity for our understanding of eternity, determinism and omniscience; theological uses (and abuses) of time dilation; T.F. Torrance’s use of mass-energy equivalence as an exegesis of Incarnation and, more generally, Pannenberg’s assignment of theological significance to Einstein’s concept of field. Finally he explores some of the theological implications of quantum mechanics (on the grounds that Einstein’s criticisms played a major role in shaping its development). Some readers may find this final chapter both confusing and inconclusive. In part this is due to the fact that Jammer distances both Einstein and himself from the discussions he is reporting. Thus it reflects the current status of theological efforts to appropriate Einstein’s ideas.

Jammer has done an excellent job in bringing together and making accessible the scattered evidence for Einstein’s views about religion. Unfortunately the work is marred by the extreme length of the chapters (Chapter 3 runs to 110 pages!) and the complete lack of internal divisions. This makes reading the book a more daunting task than is necessary. Nevertheless, this is a valuable contribution to the subject.

The Skin Map

2011-08-23T08:00:00.000+01:00

The nice people at Booksneeze let me have an electronic copy of Stephen Lawhead’s recent novel The Skin Map. So here is my review:

The Skin Map by Stephen R. Lawhead
Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2010.

This is the first volume of a new science fiction/fantasy series entitled ‘Bright Empires’ which, its author claims, has been fifteen years in the making.

The story begins when Kit discovers that he has the gift of being able to jump between worlds via ley lines. Unfortunately he inadvertently loses his girlfriend Mina in the process. Enlisting the aid of his great grandfather, Cosimo, who also possesses the gift, Kit sets off to rescue her, a quest that takes him first to seventeenth-century London and later to twentieth-century Egypt. But this quest brings Cosimo and his ally Lord Henry Flyte into conflict with their old enemy Lord Burleigh.

A second strand of the story follows Mina who finds herself somewhere in central Europe in the seventeenth century. With the aid of a young baker called Englebert, she makes a new life for herself in Prague. This strand culminates with Mina encountering Burleigh and later overhearing him asking an alchemist to manufacture some mechanical device for him.

A third strand introduces Arthur Flinders-Petrie who is a pioneer of exploration using the ley lines. He is the author of the map that gives the novel its title and which for security reasons he has tattooed on his own body. We see him in conflict with Burleigh (who wants the map for his own purposes), falling in love with a young Chinese woman, watching her die in ancient Egypt, and setting off in search of the Well of Souls in an effort to save her. At some point, presumably after his death, the map is flayed from his body, divided up and given to various ley line travellers for safekeeping. However, in an epilogue to the volume, we see him stealing the section of map that was given to Cosimo and Henry.

The volume concludes with Kit being captured in early twentieth-century Egypt by Burleigh and discovering that he has already killed Cosimo and Henry. Then, completely out of the blue, Mina appears and sets him free.

I enjoyed Lawhead’s development of the idea that ley lines allow us to travel through time and space. He has clearly gone to a lot of trouble with this element of the story. The result is plausible and convincingly described. Actually his descriptions are generally pretty good, making it very easy to visualize the action and enter into the world of the novel.

Unfortunately other aspects of the novel’s world-building are less satisfactory. In particular, the characters’ apparent ability to jump from one culture to another without even the faintest hint of culture shock is hard to believe. Even less believable is their apparent ability to blend into to those distant times and places without arousing curiosity or suspicion. And Mina’s miraculous ability to use her childhood twentieth-century German to make herself understood in seventeenth-century Austro-Bavarian and in a matter of weeks to be able to carry on business negotiations in that language.

I also found Lawhead’s characterization and dialogue disappointing. Kit and Mina are rounded, if rather straightforward, characters. But the supporting cast tend to be stereotypical; for example, his villains seem to have stepped straight out of a Victorian melodrama (one can almost see Burleigh twirling his moustaches!). As for the dialogue, it is often little better than wooden; one wonders whether the author ever read it aloud to himself.

Last but not least, in his rush to bring the first volume to an end, Lawhead turns Mina into a deus ex machina. Presumably somewhere between the end of her story strand and her reappearance at the end of the volume she has persuaded the Prague alchemist to duplicate Burleigh’s device; she has mastered its use; and she has discovered that Kit is in danger. I can’t help feeling there is an interesting story here. Unfortunately it is a story that remains untold.

None of the story arcs introduced here is brought to a satisfactory resolution leaving one with the feeling that this volume is really just setting the scene for the rest of the series.

It is many years since I read anything by Stephen Lawhead, but I recall enjoying several of his early works so I approached with this volume with high expectations. Sadly The Skin Map fell far short of those expectations. However, I found his use of ley lines sufficiently interesting that I will probably persevere with the sequel when it is published later this year.

NB I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze.com book review program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

More footage of the RSNO flash mob

2011-08-20T08:00:00.000+01:00

After their impromptu performance of Ravel’s Bolero in the check-in area at Glasgow Airport, members of the RSNO went on to perform in the food hall:

More on the shape of things to come

2011-08-19T17:30:00.002+01:00

More speculation. This time, a scary paper entitled ‘The Food Crises and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East’, which has recently been posted on arXiv.org. According to the authors, Marco Lagi, Karla Z. Bertrand and Yaneer Bar-Yam,

Social unrest may reflect a variety of factors such as poverty, unemployment, and social injustice. Despite the many possible contributing factors, the timing of violent protests in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 as well as earlier riots in 2008 coincides with large peaks in global food prices. We identify a specific food price threshold above which protests become likely. These observations suggest that protests may reflect not only long-standing political failings of governments, but also the sudden desperate straits of vulnerable populations. If food prices remain high, there is likely to be persistent and increasing global social disruption. Underlying the food price peaks we also find an ongoing trend of increasing prices. We extrapolate these trends and identify a crossing point to the domain of high impacts, even without price peaks, in 2012–2013. This implies that avoiding global food crises and associated social unrest requires rapid and concerted action.

The shape of things to come

2011-08-19T13:00:00.000+01:00

Charlie Stross has recently posted his USENIX 2011 Keynote Address on his blog (here). His main focus is on network security in the medium term (by which he means anywhere from AD 2061 to 2561!), but the talk includes a long introduction in which he speculates about the general shape of society over the next few decades. Lots of useful world-building material for anyone who (like Charlie) is into near future SF.

RSNO flash mob

2011-08-15T08:45:00.001+01:00

Members of the RSNO at Glasgow Airport last Friday:

Perhaps we are alone

2011-07-29T07:30:00.001+01:00

David Spiegel and Edwin Turner have recently posted an interesting paper entitled 'Life might be rare despite its early emergence on Earth: a Bayesian analysis of the probability of abiogenesis' on arXiv.org. According to the abstract:

Life arose on Earth sometime in the first few hundred million years after the young planet had cooled to the point that it could support water-based organisms on its surface. The early emergence of life on Earth has been taken as evidence that the probability of abiogenesis is high, if starting from young-Earth-like conditions. We revisit this argument quantitatively in a Bayesian statistical framework. By constructing a simple model of the probability of abiogenesis, we calculate a Bayesian estimate of its posterior probability, given the data that life emerged fairly early in Earth's history and that, billions of years later, sentient creatures noted this fact and considered its implications. We find that, given only this very limited empirical information, the choice of Bayesian prior for the abiogenesis probability parameter has a dominant influence on the computed posterior probability. Thus, although life began on this planet fairly soon after the Earth became habitable, this fact is consistent with an arbitrarily low intrinsic probability of abiogenesis for plausible uninformative priors, and therefore with life being arbitrarily rare in the Universe.

Their work undermines what was formerly thought to be one of the more reliable assumptions in the Drake equation, namely, that the probability of life emerging on a planet in a habitable zone is relatively high. According to Spiegel and Turner, that assumption is biased by the fact that we are here: it has taken about 3.5 (American) billion years for intelligent life to emerge on earth, and that could only have happened if life emerged quite quickly. But the point of their Bayesian analysis is to remind us that the probability of life emerging at all is independent of the fact that it emerged quickly in this instance. In other words, the fact that life emerged quickly on earth tells us nothing about the probability of life emerging in general.

John Stott, 1921–2011

2011-07-28T08:51:00.000+01:00

John Stott, one of the elder statesmen of twentieth-century evangelicalism, died yesterday at the age of ninety. According to a Time magazine article in 2005, he was one of the hundred most influential people in the world. As you might expect, the obituaries are flowing in thick and fast (e.g. The New York Times and Christianity Today). There can be few evangelicals, certainly within the English-speaking world, whose lives have not been touched in some way by him.

I only heard him speak a couple of times, and I have virtually no recollection of what he said. However, his writings have had a major impact on me. His Basic Christianity was one of the first books I read after becoming a Christian, and it helped clarify for me just what I had committed myself to. Later I was very influenced by his The Cross of Christ, and I have always enjoyed the lucidity of his contributions to The Bible Speaks Today series (particularly his exposition of the Sermon on the Mount). For me, three things about John Stott stand out: his clarity, which was the product of a first-class mind that had struggled long and hard to articulate the mystery of the gospel; his eirenic attitude towards those who disagreed with him (perhaps illustrated most clearly by his lifelong allegiance to the Church of England); and his willingness to espouse positions he believed to be biblically warranted regardless of the conventional wisdom among other evangelicals (e.g. his belief in annihilationism).

In the Time article mentioned above, Billy Graham summed up his life in the following words:

I can't think of anyone who has been more effective in introducing so many people to a biblical world view. He represents a touchstone of authentic biblical scholarship that, in my opinion, has scarcely been paralleled since the days of the 16th century European Reformers.

Plus ça change . . .

2011-07-22T13:30:00.001+01:00

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
thank God! the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
(Humbert Wolfe, 1885–1940)

Another meme: women sff authors of the 1980s

2011-07-22T07:30:00.001+01:00

Here’s another list from James Nicoll via Ian Sales of women writers whose careers began in the 1980s. Again, italicise those you’ve heard of, bold those you’ve read at least one work by, and underline those whose work you own an example of.

Marcia J. Bennett
Mary Brown
Lois McMaster Bujold
Emma Bull
Pat Cadigan
Isobelle Carmody
Brenda W. Clough
Kara Dalkey
Pamela Dean
Susan Dexter
Carole Nelson Douglas
Debra Doyle
Claudia J. Edwards
Doris Egan
Ru Emerson
C.S. Friedman
Anne Gay
Sheila Gilluly
Carolyn Ives Gilman
Lisa Goldstein
Nicola Griffith
Karen Haber
Barbara Hambly
Dorothy Heydt (AKA Katherine Blake)
P.C. Hodgell
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Tanya Huff
Kij Johnson
Janet Kagan
Patricia Kennealy-Morrison
Katharine Kerr
Peg Kerr
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel
Rosemary Kirstein
Ellen Kushner
Mercedes Lackey
Sharon Lee
Megan Lindholm
R.A. MacAvoy
Laurie J. Marks
Maureen McHugh
Dee Morrison Meaney
Elizabeth Moon
Paula Helm Murray
Rebecca Ore
Tamora Pierce
Alis Rasmussen (AKA Kate Elliott)
Melanie Rawn
Mickey Zucker Reichert
Jennifer Roberson
Michaela Roessner
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Melissa Scott
Eluki Bes Shahar (AKA Rosemary Edghill)
Nisi Shawl
Delia Sherman
Josepha Sherman
Sherwood Smith
Melinda Snodgrass
Midori Snyder
Sara Stamey
Caroline Stevermer
Martha Soukup
Judith Tarr
Sheri S. Tepper
Prof. Mary Turzillo
Paula Volsky
Deborah Wheeler (Deborah J. Ross)
Freda Warrington
K.D. Wentworth
Janny Wurts
Patricia Wrede

The gospel in five propositions

2011-07-20T07:30:00.000+01:00

I am currently reading Miroslav Volf’s The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World. As usual with Volf, there is a great deal of thought-provoking material. But I was particularly struck last night by the way in which he summarizes the Christian gospel:

First, we don’t just happen to be in the world as products of chance or necessity; the God of love created each one of us, together with our world.
Second, we are not in the world just to fend for ourselves while pursuing lives filled with as little pain and as much pleasure as possible; God has created us to live with God and one another in a communion of justice and love.
Third, humanity has not been left by itself to deal with the divisive results of our deadly failures to love God and neighbor – a fissure of antagonism and suffering that taints all human history and scars individual lives; in Christ, God entered human history and through his death on the cross unalterably reconciled human beings to God and one another.
Fourth, notwithstanding all appearances, rapacious time will not swallow us into nothingness; at the end of history God, who took on our finitude in Jesus Christ, will make our fragile flesh imperishable and restore true life to the redeemed, so that forever we may enjoy God, and each other in God.
Fifth, the irreversibility of time will not chisel the wrongs we have suffered into the unchangeable reality of our past, the evildoer will not ultimately triumph over the victim, and suffering will not have the final word; God will expose the truth about wrongs, condemn each evil deed, and redeem both the repentant perpetrators and their victims, thus reconciling them to God and to each other. (pp. 43f)

In praise of Idealist

2011-07-19T07:30:00.008+01:00

I have mentioned Idealist on this blog more than once (e.g. here, here and here). It is a simple and very flexible textual database, which uses an index card metaphor. Because each entry looks like an index card, it presents a familiar, friendly face to old-fashioned academics like me. But each entry/card can have several different independently searchable fields; those fields are variable in length (you don’t have to define their size in advance); and you can even define new fields on the fly as and when you decide you need them. Add to that the fact that it automatically indexes the words in each field and that it possesses powerful search capabilities, and it is little wonder that I still find it more useful and usable than any of the alternatives I have experimented with over the past decade. The version I am currently using (version 3.0) is dated 1995, but it still works (at the moment, I’m running it on 32-bit Windows 7, but I have also run it successfully on Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT, XP Professional and Vista, not to mention a brief experiment with Linux/Wine).

The main reason I like it so much (apart from its utter reliability over more than a decade of use) is that the card index interface fits perfectly into my workflow. My approach to research is a fairly simple-minded process of analysis followed by synthesis, and Idealist is the cornerstone of the analytical stage of the process. As I read, I capture individual ideas, quotes, etc. that seem relevant to what I am research. Each gets its own entry (with title, reference and associated notes/comments) in my Idealist Notes database and full bibliographical details go into the associated References database. The result is a vast soup of ideas (that particular database currently stands at about 25,000 entries) which I can search almost instantly.

The synthetic stage is usually a process of mind map construction during which I draw on repeated searches of Idealist. Sometimes I prepare the mind maps on paper, but more often these days (and certainly with more complex projects) I use XMind. The end result of the mind mapping is an outline that I can work up into an article or book. In the past, I have usually done this in a general purpose word processor (originally WordPerfect but more recently Word, not because I think it’s better but merely because most of my editorial clients require me to use it). However, I am currently experimenting with Scrivener for Windows for the final writing stage. And, of course, Idealist is still essential at this stage as I keep referring back to it for quotes, snippets of text and references.

Meme! Women sff writers of the 1970s

2011-07-18T08:00:00.020+01:00

This meme comes courtesy of Ian Sales, who got it from Nicholas Whyte, who got it from James Nicoll.

Italicize the authors you’d heard of before reading this list; bold the ones you’ve read at least one work by; underline the ones of whose work you own at least one example.

Lynn Abbey
Eleanor Arnason
Octavia Butler
Moyra Caldecott
Jaygee Carr
Joy Chant
Suzy McKee Charnas
C. J. Cherryh
Jo Clayton
Candas Jane Dorsey
Diane Duane
Phyllis Eisenstein
Cynthia Felice
Sheila Finch
Sally Gearhart
Mary Gentle
Dian Girard
Eileen Gunn
Monica Hughes
Diana Wynne Jones
Gwyneth Jones
Leigh Kennedy
Lee Killough
Nancy Kress
Katherine Kurtz
Tanith Lee
Megan Lindholm (AKA Robin Hobb)
Elizabeth A. Lynn
Phillipa Maddern
Ardath Mayhar
Vonda McIntyre
Patricia A. McKillip
Janet Morris
Pat Murphy
Sam Nicholson (AKA Shirley Nikolaisen)
Rachel Pollack
Marta Randall
Anne Rice
Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Pamela Sargent
Sydney J. Van Scyoc
Susan Shwartz
Nancy Springer
Lisa Tuttle
Joan Vinge
Élisabeth Vonarburg
Cherry Wilder
Connie Willis

Dawn patrol begins

2011-07-16T06:00:00.002+01:00

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft begins the first phase of its mission to investigate some of the major asteroids when it goes into orbit around Vesta today. It will spend a year studying Vesta before flying on to visit Ceres (the largest asteroid in the solar system).

Fenrir

2011-07-15T18:00:00.002+01:00

I’ve just had another book review published in Interzone:

Fenrir by M.D. Lachlan, Gollancz, 504pp, £18.99 hb / £12.99 trade pb

Fenrir is the eagerly awaited sequel to M.D. Lachlan’s first fantasy novel, Wolfsangel, which was published to much acclaim last year (see my review of that here).

The new novel is nothing if not action packed. It opens with an army of Vikings led by King Sigfrid besieging Paris in 885/886 ad. Chief among their demands is that Count Eudes hand over his sister, Aelis. Naturally enough she is not willing to sacrifice herself to them. Torn between love of his sister and a sense of duty to his city, Eudes has summoned the holy monk Jehan to persuade her to accede voluntarily to the Vikings’ demands. However, Jehan fears that she is to be literally the victim of a pagan sacrifice and that surrendering her to such a fate could imperil all their souls.

But the besieging Vikings are not alone in wanting Aelis. The Viking Prince Helgi of the Rus has also heard of her and has sent the wolfman Sindre to Paris to offer her his protection. He arrives just in time to protect her from a band of berserkers and a sinister shaman, Hugin, who clearly wishes to see her dead. With Sindre’s help, she escapes from the besieged city. Thus the scene is set for an epic journey across war-torn northern Europe as Aelis tries to reach the safety offered by Helgi with the berserkers and Hugin in hot pursuit.

Also drawn unwillingly into the pursuit is Jehan. Originally blind and crippled, he is unable to avoid being captured by the berserkers. While their prisoner, he is forced to eat human flesh in a mockery of the Eucharist, an incident that initiates a horrific process during which he is gradually transformed into Fenrir, the apocalyptic wolf of Norse mythology. I found Lachlan’s portrayal of Jehan and his inner struggle against what is happening to him utterly convincing. In spite of the change that is overtaking him, he never abandons his Christian faith and continues to resist the transformation to the very end of the novel.

In the course of the journey, Aelis, too, undergoes a dramatic transformation. It appears that, together with Hugin’s sister, the prophetess Munin, and Helgi’s daughter, Svava, she is one of the bearers of the twenty-four runes that constitute Viking magic. Initially this manifests itself in small ways such as her ability to control horses. However, with Munin’s death, she becomes a sorceress of considerable power. I must admit I found the ease with which she adapted to her new situation far less convincing than Jehan’s struggles.

But Aelis, Jehan and Hugin are just pawns in a larger game being played by the god Odin. In Wolfsangel, his plan to become incarnate and so provoke the apocalypse was thwarted by Loki’s meddling. Now he is trying again with these characters who it appears are (loosely) reincarnations of the dramatis personae of Wolfsangel. And Loki is once more doing whatever he can to frustrate Odin’s designs. Essentially the same drama is being played out again, but in a very different setting.

My main reservation about the novel is its unremitting darkness. Apart from a few touches of (dark) humour and one major romantic interlude, it is a tale of inexorable descent into tragedy with little sense that anything has been resolved at the end of the story. On the contrary, it merely seems to set the scene for another round of the conflict between Odin and Loki.

In spite of that, Fenrir has a lot going for it: plenty of action, strong characters and vivid description. Lachlan’s refreshing take on magic – that power is achieved through suffering – is again evident here. Since it is a sequel, the reader’s understanding of forces at work beneath the surface would be greatly enriched by previously having read Wolfsangel. However, the story is sufficiently independent of its predecessor for it be read and enjoyed on its own.

Goodbye to Facebook

2011-07-13T17:30:00.003+01:00

I have begun the process of deleting my Facebook account. Fourteen days from now it will be no more than a bad memory. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while, but the last straw was the fact that my account was spammed this morning. Some of the other factors in my thinking include:

Privacy issues. FB is parasitical upon the personal information it extracts from users’ accounts for advertising purposes. In the words of security expert Bruce Schneier, ‘Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re Facebook’s customer, you’re not – you’re the product . . . Its customers are the advertisers.’
Copyright concerns. A couple of years ago FB quietly changed its terms of use to give it the permanent right use any content you post on FB in any way they see fit (see this entry on Richard’s Kingdom).
Impact on social interactions. This is less tangible but potentially more disturbing than the preceding factors. One aspect is the increasing assumption on the part of FB users that everyone else is already on FB. (For example, last year I found out from FB that an acquaintance of mine had died. A decade ago I could have expected to have received that news from a variety of sources.) I fear that for an increasing number of people FB has become so central to their social interactions that it has become a chore for them to keep in touch in any other way. Another aspect is FB’s homogenizing effect on our social interactions: instead of unique interactions with individuals it encourages to send the same message indiscriminately to our entire social circle. Recently Lisa Lebduska has suggested (here) that this has the effect of flattening out the ‘otherness’ of our friends and acquaintance so that we are, in effect, really only communicating with a mirror image of ourselves. I’m not entirely convinced by that; I think she has overstated her case. But I am aware that FB has a certain chilling effect on what I’m prepared to post because of the fact that I belong to several different social circles that don’t overlap. What would make perfect sense to one group might seem ridiculous (or even offensive) to another. In the words of Richard King, ‘Don’t post anything to Facebook that you wouldn’t be happy seeing splashed across a 40′ billboard in your home town.’

Stations of the cross

2011-04-22T13:00:00.003+01:00

Malcolm Guite is blogging some more of his poems: this time a series of sonnets meditating on the stations of the cross. Here is a particularly striking example (Simon of Cyrene carries the cross):

In desperation on this road of tears
Bystanders and bypassers turn away
In other’s pain we face our own worst fears
And turn our backs to keep those fears at bay
Unless we are compelled as this man was
By force of arms or force of circumstance
To face and feel and carry someone’s cross
In Love’s full glare and not his backward glance.
So Simon, no disciple, still fulfilled
The calling: ‘take the cross and follow me’.
By accident his life was stalled and stilled
Becoming all he was compelled to be.
Make me, like him, your pressed man and your priest,
Your alter Christus, burdened and released.

The others can be found here: I–III, IV–V, VI–VII, VIII–IX, X–XII, XIII–XIV. And he has just posted a fifteenth, for Easter dawn: XV.

Some writing advice: don’t panic

2011-04-19T21:00:00.000+01:00

Specifically, don’t panic over breaks in your writing schedule. Some wise words from David Hewson on the subject:

When I was starting out in this craft I was doing two jobs: writing books and working as a correspondent for the Sunday Times. Sometimes I’d have to travel on assignments, for a week or more frequently, then spend a week writing them up on my return.

I still remember being terrified by this prospect. Would the book I was writing still be in my head when I found the time to get back to it?

The answer, I think, is definitely yes, provided it’s a solid idea that’s taken root already. Stories aren’t flimsy mayflies, ready to disappear on the faintest breeze. If they’re to have substance they must possess substance from the start. Weight and form and some kind of presence in your head. I can work on them without writing, of course, reading drafts, making notes, going through research and my book diary.

But even if I don’t do a thing they will still be there when I return to the manuscript. In fact there’s a strong argument for saying that works in progress improve from being abandoned from time to time. You come back to them with fresh ideas and perspective. Once-thorny problems seem simple to solve. Florid passages that escaped you when you wrote them stand out a mile and demand excision.

Writing’s a marathon not a sprint. It doesn’t worry me in the slightest if other pressures mean I have to set a project to one side for a while. And when this present book’s done I hope to put it in a digital drawer for a month or so before taking it out for a final revise before delivery.

So if you can’t find the time you’d like to work on something don’t worry. If it’s good enough it won’t run away in the middle of the night.

Is there life inside black holes?

2011-04-13T07:00:00.001+01:00

Here’s an interesting paper that has just appeared on arXiv. ‘Is there life inside black holes?’ by Vyacheslav Dokuchaev of the Moscow-based Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences argues that stable orbits and complex structures can exist within charged, rotating black holes. Here is the abstract:

Inside a rotating or charged black holes there are bound periodic planetary orbits, which not coming out nor terminated at the central singularity. The stable periodic orbits inside black holes exist even for photons. We call these bound orbits by the orbits of the third kind, following to Chandrasekhar classification for particle orbits in the black hole gravitational field. It is shown that an existence domain for the third kind orbits is a rather spacious, and so there is a place for life inside the supermassive black holes in the galactic nuclei. The advanced civilizations may inhabit the interiors of supermassive black holes, being invisible from the outside and basking in the light of the central singularity and orbital photons.

Quite apart from the interesting scientific speculation, I am fascinated by the potential for science fiction and fantasy. There have been any number of science fiction stories that have used charged, rotating black holes as transit points to other places and times, but I can’t think of any that involve civilizations that actually evolve inside a black hole. But perhaps it would be better as fantasy, given that any society living within a black hole would have to learn to cope with frequent causality violations (not the most conducive environment for the development of any kind of science).

Live at Earls Court

2011-04-12T07:00:00.003+01:00

I'll be at the London Book Fair tomorrow, taking part in a seminar about 'The Partnership between Author and Editor':

The relationship between author and editor is not a straightforward one. Just how does an author work with both the in-house editor/publisher and freelance editor? This seminar looks at how all three work together to their mutual advantage and the panel is comprised of two trios: one trio in general/popular medicine and the other in fiction. The panel members are two authors (Mark Newton and Bridget McCall), two in-house editors (Julie Crisp and Dick Warner) and two freelance editors (Lawrence Osborn and Richenda Milton-Daws).

The seminar will be chaired by Christina Thomas, a member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP).

Date and Time: 13 Apr 2011, 14:30-15:30

Location: Wellington Room, Earls Court 1

Since there has been a good deal of discussion lately about standards of editing, I am expecting it to be a lively session.

Explaining the Fermi paradox

2011-04-11T06:21:00.001+01:00

Over half a century ago, the physicist Enrico Fermi posed the following challenge to those who speculate about the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence: If intelligent life has evolved many times in our galaxy and beyond, why do we see no sign of it?

Several explanations have been offered over the years:

Life is actually quite rare and humanity is the first species to become advanced enough to search for other civilizations.
Intelligent species have emerged regularly throughout the history of the cosmos but end up destroying themselves through misuse of technology (e.g. nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, misguided genetic engineering).
Advanced civilizations are common and aware of us but keep themselves hidden so as not disturb our culture (cf. Star Trek's prime directive).

'Too Damned Quiet?', a paper recently published on arXiv offers another alternative. Its author, Adrian Kent, explores a couple of other possibilities: 'One is that life capable of evidencing itself on interstellar scales has evolved in many places but that evolutionary selection, acting on a cosmic scale, tends to extinguish species which conspicuously advertise themselves and their habitats. The other is that – whatever the true situation – intelligent species might reasonably worry about the possible dangers of self-advertisement and hence incline towards discretion.' He concludes:

If there are no aliens out there,any eﬀorts at communication were obviously wasted. Thus we can assume for the sake of discussion that there are aliens out there likely to receive the messages at some point. The relevant parameter, then, is not the probability of our messages being received by aliens who might potentially do us harm: it is the conditional probability of the aliens who receive the messages doing us harm, given that the messages are indeed received (and understood to be messages). Can we really say that this probability is so negligible, bearing in mind that any such aliens appear to have made no reciprocal attempts to advertise their existence? . . . it often seems to be implicitly assumed, and sometimes is explicitly argued, that colonising or otherwise exploiting the resources of other planets and other solar systems will solve our problems when the Earth’s resources can no longer sustain our consumption. It might perhaps be worth contemplating more seriously the possibility that there may be limits to the territory we can safely colonise and to the resources we can safely exploit, and to consider whether and how it might be possible to evolve towards a way of living that can be sustained (almost) indeﬁnitely on the resources of (say) our solar system alone.

Which leaves me wondering at what point the precautionary principle morphs into paranoia.

The curse of the daily word count

2011-03-10T17:44:00.000Z

David Hewson offers some wise words on why we should not let our writing be dominated by the need to achieve a certain word count:

A bit of space between you and your work is good at times. You come back at it with fresh eyes. Problems which once seemed insurmountable sometimes appear puny and easily dealt with. If the story’s working you’ll soon find your way back into it and begin to hit the kind of output levels you had before you took a breather.

The problem with the ‘I will write 40,000 words a month’ school of fiction is it’s based around quantity alone. What if half those words are the wrong ones? Then you’ve only written 20,000 words really. And worse, you’re going to have to spend time going through that 40K mess working out which ones are good ones and which ones expendable.

Writing’s not a race. At least if it is, it’s a marathon, not a sprint, for most of us anyway. How do I meet those deadlines? Simple, I take what’s in the contract and subtract a month or two of my own. Then carry on to my own schedule, not the contracts.

Books get finished through steady, efficient workmanship, produced by writers in control of their craft. Not by hammering out words incessantly and hoping that somehow in the end they’ll fit.

‘Marked by Ashes’

2011-03-09T07:57:00.001Z

Another prayer from Walter Brueggemann:

Ruler of the Night, Guarantor of the day …
This day – a gift from you.
This day – like none other you have ever given, or we have ever received.
This Wednesday dazzles us with gift and newness and possibility.
This Wednesday burdens us with the tasks of the day, for we are already halfway home
halfway back to committees and memos,
halfway back to calls and appointments,
halfway on to next Sunday,
halfway back, half frazzled, half expectant,
half turned toward you, half rather not.

This Wednesday is a long way from Ash Wednesday,
but all our Wednesdays are marked by ashes –
   we begin this day with that taste of ash in our mouth:
      of failed hope and broken promises,
      of forgotten children and frightened women,
   we ourselves are ashes to ashes, dust to dust;
   we can taste our mortality as we roll the ash around on our tongues.

We are able to ponder our ashness with
some confidence, only because our every Wednesday of ashes
anticipates your Easter victory over that dry, flaky taste of death.

On this Wednesday, we submit our ashen way to you –
you Easter parade of newness.
Before the sun sets, take our Wednesday and Easter us,
   Easter us to joy and energy and courage and freedom;
   Easter us that we may be fearless for your truth.
Come here and Easter our Wednesday with
   mercy and justice and peace and generosity.

We pray as we wait for the Risen One who comes soon.

From Prayers for a Privileged People, Abingdon, 2008.

Shrove Tuesday

2011-03-08T15:22:00.000Z

A prayer/poem for Shrove Tuesday (in light of 1 Samuel 5) by Walter Brueggemann:

We remember the long dark nights of Ashdod;
They were long because you stood
   in the Philistine place passively;
They were dark because the gods of the Philistines
   seemed to prevail.
And now we face the long, dark days of Lent:
   to ponder your strange passivity,
   to hold deep the suffering of Jesus,
   to grasp afresh our fragile mortality, that we too will die;
   to move beyond ourselves to notice the raw loss
   connected to your absence.
We name the brutality among us;
We make the greed so close to us;
We see the poor, the homeless, the exploited,
   while we enjoy the easiness of the leisure class.
And then – dark and long – our eyes shift back to Ashdod;
We wait, a heavy wait edging toward hope,
   not yet as light as hope,
   as heavy as absence.
We pray in the name of the crucified. Amen.

(from Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: Prayers of Walter Brueggemann, Fortress Press, 2003)

More Star Trek physics

2011-03-03T07:59:00.001Z

First it was cloaking devices, now it seems that tractor beams are theoretically possible. In a paper available at arXiv, Physicists at Fudan University Shanghai show how a beam of photons might be used to draw particles towards the source of the beam. According to the abstract,

A photon carries a momentum of hk, so one may anticipate light to "push" on any object standing in its path via the scattering force. In the absence of intensity gradient, using a light beam to pull a particle backwards is counter intuitive. Here, we show that it is possible to realize a backward scattering force which pulls a particle all the way towards the source without an equilibrium point. The underlining physics is the maximization of forward scattering via interference of the radiation multipoles. We show explicitly that the necessary condition to realize a negative (pulling) optical force is the simultaneous excitation of multipoles in the particle and if the projection of the total photon momentum along the propagation direction is small (as in some propagation invariant beams), attractive optical force is possible. This possibility adds "pulling" as an additional degree of freedom to optical micromanipulation.

ASBO Jesus hits the nail on the head

2011-01-19T14:50:00.000Z

For more like this, see ASBO Jesus: The Ongoing Adventures…

Thoughts on borrowing and creativity

2011-01-13T09:00:00.002Z

Here’s an interesting passage on borrowing and creativity from an interview with the American artist Joy Garnett to be published in Cultural Politics:

[V]isual art functions according to the principles of open source, and it always has been open source – art can’t be made otherwise. In other words, borrowing and direct referencing – various forms of ‘copying’ – are the basis of creativity. You would think we might understand that by now, that our understanding of art history would take us well beyond the cliché of artist as lone inspired genius conduit. In truth, all creativity is collaboration, whether one is conscious of it or not. What we call ‘influence’ is nothing if not quotation and allusion. Our culture is generated and driven collectively, and the whole point is to dip in and take parts and change them, to make them ‘new’. To make art is to copy on some profound level, and to copy is of course to communicate: to act as receiver, transformer and transmitter.

The words jumped out at me as I was editing the article because I have often thought the same about writing fantasy, and even more so about doing theology!

Ten reasons why I never wash

2011-01-12T10:05:00.001Z

An old joke, but still amusing:

I was forced to as a child.
People who wash are hypocrites: they think they are cleaner than everybody else.
There are so many different kinds of soap, I can’t decide which one is best.
I used to wash, but I got bored and stopped.
I wash only on special occasions, like Christmas and Easter.
None of my friends wash.
I’ll start washing when I get older and dirtier.
I can’t spare the time.
The bathroom is never warm enough in winter or cool enough in summer.
People who make soap are only after your money.

The Pooh community

2010-12-31T16:51:00.000Z

Winnie the Pooh turns up in the strangest of places. I recently discovered that the New Testament theologian Richard Bauckham has written a short lecture on ‘Reconstructing the Pooh Community’. It is a gentle dig at the kind of sociological speculation that some New Testament theologians are tempted to indulge in. Here is a typical sample:

The figure of Owl, for example, surely represents the group of children who prided themselves on their intellectual achievements and aspired to status in the community on this basis. But the other children, certainly the Pooh and Piglet group, ridiculed them as swots. So throughout the stories the figure of Owl, with his pretentious learning and atrocious spelling, is portrayed as a figure of fun. Probably the Owl group, the swots, in their turn ridiculed the Pooh and Piglet group as ignorant and stupid: they used terms of mockery such as ‘bear of very little brain.’ Stories like the hunt for the Woozle, in which Pooh and Piglet appear at their silliest and most gullible, probably originated in the Owl group, which used them to lampoon the stupidity of the Pooh and Piglet group. But the final redactor, who favours the Pooh and Piglet group, has managed very skilfully to refunction all this material which was originally detrimental to the Pooh and Piglet group so that in the final form of the collection of stories it serves to portray Pooh and Piglet as oafishly lovable. In a paradoxical reversal of values, stupidity is elevated as deserving the community’s admiration.

You can find the entire lecture here. And, if you are new to my blog, you can find my own use of Winnie the Pooh to poke fun at the Enneagram here: ‘The Winnieagram: An Introduction’, ‘The Winnieagram: The eight types’, ‘The Winnieagram: Christopher Robin and personal growth’ and ‘The Winnieagram: A note on Pooh and sexism’.

The best online community

2010-12-28T15:41:00.000Z

In this year's .net awards, the title 'Online Community of the Year' did not go to Facebook or Twitter, No, they were trounced by Ravelry, a social networking site for people knit and/or crochet. Perhaps that's because Ravelry is really a community.

The waiting is over

2010-12-25T09:11:00.000Z

Welcome, all wonders in one night!
Eternity shut in a span,
Summer in winter, day in night,
Heaven in earth, and God in man.
Great Little One! Whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heaven to earth.

The Very Best of Charles de Lint

2010-11-30T14:00:00.000Z

Here’s another review of mine, recently published in Interzone:

The Very Best of Charles de Lint by Charles de Lint, San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2010.

The latest Charles de Lint offering is a collection of 29 short stories spanning the past quarter of a century of his writing career. His previous short story collections have generally been at least loosely thematic. This volume is something of a departure from that approach. Faced with the challenge from his publisher to come up with a collection under the heading ‘The Very Best of . . .’, de Lint apparently turned to his readers, or at least those of them who follow him on FaceBook and MySpace, and asked them to nominate their favourite stories. With a few additions to reflect all the styles he has written in, this volume is the result.

The lack of a clear theme makes the volume very difficult to summarize. He gives us a handful of (mostly early) stories that are set in a conventional pre-modern, agrarian fantasy land, but the majority have a modern urban setting. And, most of the latter are set in or around Newford, de Lint’s mythical American city where magic is an ever-present if unacknowledged reality.

I did notice one omission from this attempt to give a comprehensive survey of his short story writing. For some reason he chose not to include one of his contributions to Terri Windling’s Bordertown series. Since they are not easy to find these days and de Lint’s contributions to the series were some of the stronger stories in the series, that is a pity.

The volume is a showcase of the many virtues of his writing: strong dialogue (he is one of relatively few male fantasy authors who is able to produce really believable female dialogue), characterization and description; a knack for combining lyricism with clarity of language; an ability to expose the magical hidden within the interstices of everyday reality; characters who are searching for something more than the hedonistic pleasures of modern materialism but with no guarantee that they will find what they are looking for, certainly no guarantee that they will find happiness (e.g. ‘Timeskip’, ‘In the Pines’).

The collection also serves to showcase the diversity of his output. It includes stories that could be read as bedtime stories for children (e.g. ‘Pixel Pixies’, ‘Mr Truepenny’s Book Emporium and Gallery’) and stories that deal sensitively with adult themes (e.g. his treatment of child abuse in ‘In the House of my Enemy’). There is humour and horror; loss and discovery (usually self-discovery).

And his choice of concluding story is interesting. ‘The Fields Beyond the Fields’ is by no means the strongest story in the book. In many ways, it seems a strange way to end the collection: a rather downbeat, late-night monologue by a writer who is one of the recurring characters of the Newford stories. But it contains a fascinating meditation on the art of writing. There is more truth here than in many books on writing. And perhaps that does make it a fitting way to end the collection.

In The Very Best of Charles de Lint we have a very useful one-volume compilation of his short story writing. It is essential reading for anyone who is new to de Lint or has previously read only his novels.

Hallelujah Chorus flash mob

2010-11-26T10:20:00.000Z

This is brilliant! I just had to share it:

Normal service will be resumed . . . sometime

2010-11-24T18:30:00.003Z

I have been neglecting this blog lately. In fact, for the past couple of months I have been neglecting everything but work and my part in organizing next year’s SfEP conference. My excuse is the routine operation I had at the beginning of September, followed by a month on a very restricted diet. My appetite still hasn’t fully recovered and by the end of the working day I generally feel exhausted. On a more positive note, I have lost a lot of weight and am now able to wear clothes that have been hidden away in my wardrobe for the past couple of years.

Big Brother will soon be watching you

2010-11-12T12:07:00.000Z

There is a scary report in yesterday’s Guardian. The paper’s home affairs editor summarizes a recent study by the Surveillance Studies Network (SSN), which was requested by the Commons Home Affairs Committee. Apparently the study highlights among other things

new trends in workplace monitoring, including CCTV to monitor teachers’ performance and modified iPhones that enable a Japanese company to monitor the activities of their cleaners
the increasing use of unmanned drones by the Police to carry out covert surveillance
Britain’s e-Borders programme, which maintains records of all our journeys overseas

It all goes to reinforce the warnings of a previous study by the same body which led the previous information commissioner to warn that Britain was ‘sleepwalking into a surveillance society’.

Thought for the day

2010-10-26T13:18:00.000+01:00

A quotation from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google:

We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.

. . . Big Brother is watching you!

Writing as self-discovery

2010-10-20T09:00:00.001+01:00

Some interesting words from Rowan Williams speaking at Heffers Bookshop in Cambridge a couple of years ago:

you only discover what you have to say in the doing of it. Saunders Lewis, the Welsh poet, used to quote somebody saying – a child saying – ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ and I have always resonated rather with that. And that means that for me in writing even a straight forward prose essay or a short book or a lecture, there is that awkward moment when, if you like, the engine is turning over a bit and you are wondering exactly at what point you are going to discover what the argument is. . . . Writing isn’t translating something in here onto the page. Writing is an act. . . . it is an action of self-discovery and an action of trying to put something into being . . .

That certainly resonates with me. In my experience, no matter how carefully I try to outline a story or an article or a lecture, there is something about the process of turning the outline into polished English that surprises. Only when the words stare back at me from the page (or the computer screen) do I really know what I think.

What makes for good theology?

2010-09-21T09:00:00.001+01:00

One of my authoritative others, Robert Jenson, once defined theology thus:

Theology is the persistent asking and disciplined answering of the question: Given that the Christian community has in the past said and done such-and-such, what should it do now? The question may be divided: (1) What has the Christian community in fact said and done? and, (2) What should it say and do in the future? (Story and Promise, vii)

Of course, central to that proclamation and action is the Eternal Love who has created all things and is drawing all things back to Godself.

I have always believed that, if this is what theology is really about, whatever else it does it should fascinate us and challenge us. Recently I discovered that Augustine believed something very similar: ‘the eloquent should speak in such a way as to instruct, delight, and move their listeners’ (doc. Chr. 4.74). And building on that formula for eloquent oratory, he gave the following instruction to would-be preachers (and theologians):

The aim of our orator, then, when speaking of things that are just and holy and good – and he should not speak of anything else – the aim, as I say, that he pursues to the best of his ability when he speaks of these things is to be listened to with understanding, with pleasure, and with obedience. (doc. Chr. 4.87)

Read well to write well

2010-09-17T08:03:00.000+01:00

Some advice on writing from an unexpected source:

Eloquence is picked up more readily by those who read and listen to the words of the eloquent than by those who follow the rules of eloquence. (Augustine, doc. Chr. 4.8)

Of course he was referring to preaching and rhetoric (Augustine was one of the great rhetors of his day), but the advice applies equally to the written word.

Actually, the advice is probably redundant for any decent writer. Certainly all the professional writers (of fiction) that I know became what they are because of their love of books. They could no more stop reading than they could stop breathing. By the same token, anyone who has to be told to get their nose out of the guides to writing a bestseller and read some good books instead will probably never be a good writer (successful, perhaps, but never really good because they write for the wrong reasons).

Christendom as the inversion of Christianity

2010-09-16T07:30:00.017+01:00

I am currently editing a massive volume by Enrique Dussel. Here is a little something from it:

‘Christendom’ is the inversion of Christianity; it is the Christianity that has negotiated by the bureaucratic corruption of its institutions the state’s divine legitimation (in exchange for cushy jobs for the ecclesial bureaucrats). It is the ‘inversion’ of the Christianity of Jesus of Nazareth.

Hardly a new sentiment, but it seemed a particularly appropriate quotation with which to acknowledge the papal visit to the UK.

Praise him in the typo

2010-09-14T07:30:00.000+01:00

I was on retreat at Alnmouth Friary last month and was struck by a change in wording in the Eucharistic prayers. In its older forms the opening sentences of the Eucharistic prayers include the lines:

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

It is right to give him thanks and praise.

In Common Worship the response now reads,

It is right to give thanks and praise.

A very different sentiment!

It would be nice to think that this was just a typo like the one in Friday morning prayers in the shorter form of Celebrating Common Praise. However, I fear that it was actually a cack-handed attempt to impose inclusive language on the text. Now I have nothing against inclusive language properly implemented. Indeed part of my day job is ensuring that inclusive language is properly implemented in the texts I edit. However, introducing inclusivity should not change the meaning of the text quite so much. So from now on, whenever I take part in Church of England Eucharists, you will hear me say:

It is right to give God thanks and praise.

Some writing advice from Walter Benjamin

2010-09-11T12:31:00.000+01:00

I am taking things easy while recovering from an operation. So here, in lieu of a thought of my own, is some writing advice from Walter Benjamin’s ‘Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses’:

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

The rediscovery of cosmology

2010-09-05T07:30:00.001+01:00

5.25 Introduction: ‘Newtonian’ limits to Newtonian physics

From the perspective of Newtonian physics, reality could be exhaustively understood in terms of particles moving in well-defined ways under the influence of certain forces. Of course it was recognised from the outset that real life was more complex than that. Many everyday situations involved too many factors to be amenable to such straightforward treatment. In such cases physicists had to be satisfied with approximations. Nevertheless it was assumed that, in principle, these awkward cases could be treated exactly.^{^[1]}

Take, for example, the motion of planets round the Sun. Using his laws of motion, Newton was able to provide an exact solution to the two-body problem – the case of two physical bodies interacting gravitationally but isolated from other influences. However, Newton’s successors were unable to create exact solutions for larger ensembles of bodies (e.g. the Solar System or even just the Sun, Earth and Moon considered in isolation from all the rest – the three-body problem). Instead they had to adopt a method of approximations – beginning with the simple case, they asked how the presence of an additional element might perturb the orbits of the two bodies, then they calculated the effect of that change on the third body, then corrected the original calculations in the light of that, and so on to higher and higher degrees of accuracy.

It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that astronomers finally abandoned the search for an exact solution to the three-body problem. In 1889 a young mathematical physicist, Henri Poincaré, won a competition sponsored by the King of Sweden with an essay demonstrating the impossibility of such a solution.

5.26 Recognising chaos

Poincaré may justly be called the father of chaos theory. In addition to demonstrating that there were physical systems which could not be precisely analysed using Newtonian physics, he was among the first physicists to comment on the extreme sensitivity of many physical systems to small variations in initial conditions. Little notice was taken of his remarks when he made them in 1903 but, since then, physicists have become much more conscious of the extent to which such chaotic behaviour is to be found in the physical world. This new awareness of chaos and complexity is not so much a recent discovery as a gradually changing perception resulting from a range of factors.

The research that has resulted from Poincaré’s own work on perturbation theory is one of these factors. This has revealed the existence of chaotic behaviour in simple isolated systems. Take, for example, the motion of balls on a snooker table. It can be shown that their motion is so sensitive to external factors that in order to predict the position of the cue ball after a minute of motion (and collisions), one would have to take into account the gravitational attraction of electrons on the far side of the galaxy! Even something as apparently simple as the tossing of a coin or the motion of a water droplet on a convex surface is so sensitive to minute variations in the environment as to be unpredictable.

A second area of research that has encouraged physicists to take chaos more seriously is that of turbulent flow in fluids. Its relevance to engineering and meteorology ensured that this was a growth area in research. Unlike the simple situations described above, turbulence is not merely a matter of uncertainties in the system created by random motion at the molecular level. That aspect of fluid dynamics can be handled statistically. The real issue is the sudden emergence of random motion on a macroscopic scale – eddies and currents involving large collections of molecules. Such situations are bounded but unstable – in many such cases we are now able to generate equations that tell us the boundaries within which the motion will take place. Inside those boundaries, however, the particles involved are subject to irregular fluctuations quite independent of any external perturbation.

A third aspect in the development of chaos theory has been the availability of more and more powerful electronic computers. They have allowed physicists to extend classical perturbation theory to situations that previously were too complicated to calculate. As a result more and more situations have been revealed to be chaotic.

Finally, the widespread acceptance of quantum theory may also have played an important part in changing the attitudes of physicists to unpredictable situations. This is not to suggest that quantum theory is directly relevant to chaos at an everyday leve1.^{^[2]} However, the acceptance of quantum uncertainties may have made it easier for physicists to accept a degree of unpredictability about the physical world at other levels.

5.27 Coming to terms with chaos

This new awareness of complexity implies a profound change in the way in which many physical scientists view the world, a new perception of the relation between freedom and necessity. This can be summarised in the apparently paradoxical statement that chaos is deterministic. The situations described above are not completely anarchic. On the contrary, we are dealing with ensembles of bodies moving at the everyday level where Newtonian laws of motion still hold sway. The behaviour of these chaotic situations is generated by fixed rules that do not involve any elements of chance. Many of the physicists of chaos would insist that, in principle, the future is still completely determined by the past in these situations. In an accessible introduction to the subject Alan Cook advocates that the term ‘deterministic chaos’ should always be used (Cook, 1998:31-41) However, these are situations which are so sensitive to the initial conditions that, in spite of the determinism of the associated physical laws, it is impossible to predict future behaviour. Deterministic physics no longer has the power to impose a deterministic outcome. According to one of the classic papers on the subject, ‘There is order in chaos: underlying chaotic behaviour there are elegant geometric forms that create randomness in the same way as a card dealer shuffles a deck of cards or a blender mixes cake batter’ (Crutchfield et al., 1995:35).

At first glance this may seem entirely negative. The admission that chaos is far more widespread than previously realised appears to impose new fundamental limits on our ability to make predictions. If prediction and control are indeed fundamental to science then chaos is a serious matter. On the other hand, the deterministic element in these chaotic situations implies that many apparently random phenomena may be more predictable than had been thought. The exciting thing about chaos theory is the way in which, across many different sciences, researchers have been able to take a second look at apparently random information and, while not being able to predict exact outcomes, nevertheless explain the random behaviour in terms of simple laws. This is true of meteorology. It can also be applied to dripping taps or to many biological systems (e.g. the mathematical physics of a heart-beat).

5.28 Implications for the philosophy of science

As we have just hinted, the emergence of a science of chaos has profound implications for our understanding of what science is and can do.

One may disagree with the notion that the raison d’être of science is prediction and control. Nevertheless, prediction still retains a central place in the scientific method. How else are we to test our scientific models? The classical approach is to make predictions from the model and devise experiments to test those predictions. Here, however, we are faced with situations in which such predictions seems inherently impossible. In fact, what is required is that we take a more subtle approach to prediction. What we observe may well be random (or pseudo-random). However, the deterministic element in mathematical chaos implies that the random observations will be clustered into predictable patterns.

A second important implication of chaos theory has to do with the continuing tendency to reductionism in the sciences (see 6.11-6.11.1). Chaos and complexity highlight the fact that only in the very simple systems that formed the backbone of classical physics is it true that the whole is merely the sum of the parts. Chaotic systems simply cannot be understood by breaking them down into their component parts and seeing how they fit together again.

Closely allied to this challenge to reductionism is a question about the possibility of completeness in physics. The reality of chaos undermines the hope that such completeness can be achieved by an increasingly detailed understanding of fundamental physical forces and constituents. It also provides a physical basis for the concept of emergence that is so important in philosophical and theological perspectives on the life and human sciences. The behaviour of chaotic systems suggests that interaction of components at one level can lead to complex global behaviour at another level – behaviour that is not predictable from a knowledge of the component parts. Indeed some chaos scientists suggest that ‘chaos provides a mechanism that allows for free will within a world governed by deterministic laws’ (Crutchfield et al., 1995:48).

However, we consider caution is needed at this point. Chaotic randomness is not complete randomness. True, we are unable to predict the detailed outcome of a chaotic scenario. However, the mathematics of chaos does permit us to predict the limits of the possible outcomes. This is randomness within constraints – deterministic constraints. In fact, chaos theory allows us to extend our physical understanding of the world into new areas specifically by applying deterministic covering laws to situations that were previously thought to be completely random. This could be taken as evidence that determinism really works.

On the other hand, the fact that the equations we use are deterministic does not necessarily mean that nature is deterministic. The equations are maps, not the reality. It could be that the apparent determinism is an artefact of the particular way in which we have chosen to map reality – in terms of mathematical physics. The idea that our equations are only approximations to the laws that govern the macroscopic world is an important part of Polkinghorne’s position on divine action [see 10.9(iv)(a) and Polkinghorne 1998a:64-66).

5.29 Conclusion

We have seen that, though Newtonianism remains very influential, in a number of areas modern physics has broken with the Newtonian paradigm. It has given rise to questions of interpretation which relate directly to theology – in the areas of quantum theory and chaos theory (re determinism), the Big Bang origin and final fate of the universe, and the question of evidence for design. A number of these areas will be considered again in our discussion of divine action in Chapter 10.

[1] See 1.17 on Laplace and the determinism of the Newtonian universe.

[2] Except in that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle [5.11 (ii)] sets a limit on the precision of our knowledge of any system.

Modern cosmology and the rediscovery of purpose?

2010-09-04T07:30:00.002+01:00

5.20 Some contemporary cosmological enigmas

Modern cosmology offers us mathematical models of the possible large-scale structure of the universe. Like any other mathematical model, the actual features depend on the numbers that we choose to put in the equations. Thus in 5.17 we noted that different values of the total mass of the universe will give rise to very different cosmological models. In general, the overall structure of many physical systems is strongly influenced by the numerical values of a relatively small number of universal constants (e.g. the gravitational constant). Since the 1970s physicists have become increasingly aware that the physical conditions that enable life to exist are very sensitive to the values of a number of these constants. If they had been only slightly different, life as we know it could not have evolved.

5.20.1 The chemical composition of the universe

As we noted in 5.16.1, the overall chemical composition of the universe was determined by physical conditions during the first seconds of the Big Bang. However, the elements on which life depends (such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur and iron) are the product of nuclear reactions within stars. In both situations the processes by which the chemical elements are formed are governed very precisely by the strengths of four fundamental physical interactions: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear interactions.

If the relative strengths of these forces were different, the resultant universe would also be different. For example, increasing the strong nuclear interaction by 3 per cent relative to the electromagnetic interaction gives a cosmological model in which none of the known chemical elements could form. Conversely, decreasing it by 1 per cent gives a model in which carbon atoms would be unstable. Both scenarios would preclude carbon-based life. Other tiny variations in these forces might have given rise to a universe which was 100 per cent helium or one in which supernova explosions could not occur (since these explosions are thought to be the chief way in which the chemicals necessary for life are ejected from stars, this too would preclude the evolution of life).

5.20.2 ‘Anthropic’ features

The actual chemical composition of the universe is just one way in which the universe appears to have been finely tuned to permit the evolution of life. Until their explanation by inflationary cosmology (5.19), the horizon and fine-tuning problems were also seen in this light by many physicists, and there are still elements within inflation which look fine-tuned (Craig, 2003:158-61) The various unexplained factors that have been perceived as necessary for the emergence of life have come to be known as ‘anthropic’ features (or coincidences).

5.21 Possible responses to the ‘anthropic’ coincidences

There is no obvious physical reason why the parameters mentioned in 5.20.1 should have the observed values. However, very small changes in any of these key parameters would have resulted in a grossly different universe; one in which life as we know it would almost certainly be precluded. The set of life-permitting cosmological models is a vanishingly small subset of the set of all theoretically possible cosmological models. How should the scientist-theologian respond? Murphy and Ellis provide a list of possibilities (1996:49-59).

One response to these enigmas might be to adopt a hard-nosed empiricism and say, ‘So what? It is meaningless to speak of our existence as improbable after the event.’ However, few cosmologists seem prepared to ignore these cosmological coincidences in this fashion.

Another possible response would be to deny the contingency of physical laws and parameters. For example, some physicists speculate about possible developments in physics that would demonstrate that only this precise set of laws and parameters is possible. This is the approach that leads Drees to be cautious about drawing any inferences from the coincidences (1996:269-72).

An important further caution is provided by philosophers who question whether we can really apply the formal measure of probability to a range of possibilities about the universe of which we know so little (see Manson, 2000, McGrew et al., 2003). Nevertheless, however, vaguely defined, the coincidences remain striking and seem to call for some explanation.

A third type of response is to invoke some form of anthropic ‘principle’.

5.22 The Weak Anthropic Principle

The approach which does the least violence to conventional modes of scientific thought is to invoke a Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP). Barrow and Tipler describe it thus:

The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirement that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so. (Barrow and Tipler, 1986:16)

In other words, our existence as observers functions as a cosmological selection effect. There can be no observations without observers. Our observations must satisfy the conditions necessary for our existence.

However, the WAP does not take us very far towards an explanation of the observed coincidences. In conjunction with a conventional Big Bang cosmology, it still gives the impression that our existence is an accident of vanishingly small probability. Thus, in practice, it usually appears in conjunction with a cosmological model that suggests that there is a sense in which all possible universes actually exist. Three such strategies are to be found in the literature.

The first is to extend the closed Big Bang model to permit an endless series of expansions and contractions: the so-called cyclic Big Bang (see 5.18). Each passage through a singularity is supposed to randomise the physical parameters that give rise to the anthropic features. Advocates of this approach argue that in an infinite series of closed universes there will certainly be a subset whose physical features permit the evolution of life and the function of the WAP is to remind us that only in such an atypical subclass of universes could life evolve. The main difficulty faced by this scenario is justifying the assumption that, while the singularity randomises the laws and constants of nature, it leaves the geometry of spacetime untouched. If, as seems reasonable, passage through a singularity also affects the geometry of the universe, we should expect an open Big Bang after a finite number of cycles, thus putting an end to any hope of an infinite sequence of universes.

A second approach would be to opt for Linde’s version of inflationary cosmology (see 5.19). In an infinite chaotic universe in which an infinite number of ‘bubble’ universes are created by the decay of the false vacuum, we should expect every possible stable state to appear an infinite number of times. Again the WAP is a reminder of the atypical nature of the universe in which we find ourselves.

The third and, currently, most popular strategy for relaxing the uniqueness of our universe is to adopt a many‑worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics [5.13 (iii)]. Again it is sufficient to invoke the WAP to ‘explain’ our atypical cosmos.

5.23 The Strong Anthropic Principle

For some cosmologists the WAP does not go far enough. Their response is to invoke the existence of rational carbon-based life forms as an explanation of the anthropic features of the universe. Barrow and Tipler formulate a general version of the Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP) thus: ‘The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history’ (Barrow and Tipler, 1986:21).

One version of the SAP is Wheeler’s Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP). This asserts that the existence of the cosmos and the detailed course of its evolution are dependent on the existence of rational observers at some epoch. In his own words, ‘Observership is a prerequisite of genesis’ (Wheeler, 1977:7). It is essentially an extension of his own particular interpretation of quantum mechanics (see 5.13(i)). All properties, including the very existence of the universe, are brought about by the inter-subjective agreement of observers. Thus the universe may be likened to a self‑excited circuit. Past and future events are so coupled as to obviate any need for a first cause.

Against the PAP, Barrow and Tipler point out that the capacity of human observers to ‘create’ in this way is very limited indeed (Barrow and Tipler, 1986:470). Thus the PAP seems to entail the present or future existence of a community of beings with a ‘higher degree of consciousness’ than our own. They suggest that the process by which the appropriate kind of inter-subjective agreement is reached is the sequential coordination of separate sequences of observations, ‘until all sequences of observations by all observers of all intelligent species that have ever existed and ever will exist, of all events that have ever occurred and will ever occur are finally joined together by the Final Observation by the Ultimate Observer’ (Barrow & Tipler, 1986:471). The theistic implications of such a statement are obvious.^{^[1]} However, Barrow and Tipler avoid such a theistic conclusion by modifying the PAP into their Final Anthropic Principle (FAP). They state the FAP in the following terms: ‘Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out’ (Barrow and Tipler, 1986:23). In other words, intelligent life-forms have cosmological significance by virtue of their future capacity to understand and manipulate matter on a cosmic scale.

This belief leads them to develop a non-theistic ‘physical eschatology’. Tipler has amplified this further in his The Physics of Immortality (1995).^{^[2]} Humankind may not exist forever but human culture will persist, being preserved and developed by self-replicating intelligent machines. The transfer of our cultural software to alternative forms of hardware is one factor in encouraging the indefinite growth of the capacity to process information and to manipulate matter. They envisage the inevitable expansion of human culture to the point where it engulfs the entire cosmos. But let them have the final word:

if life evolves in all of the many universes in a quantum cosmology, and if life continues to exist in all of these universes, then all of these universes, which include all possible histories among them, will approach the Omega Point. At the instant the Omega Point is reached, life will have gained control of all matter and forces not only in a single universe, but in all universes whose existence is logically possible; life will have spread into all spatial regions in all universes which could logically exist, and will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge which it is logically possible to know. And this is the end. (Barrow and Tipler, 1986:676f.)

And, in a footnote, they add, ‘A modern-day theologian might wish to say that the totality of life at the Omega Point is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient!’ (Barrow and Tipler, 1986:682 note 123).

In spite of the metaphysical tone of much of their discussion, Barrow and Tipler stress that the FAP makes clear predictions about the kind of universe we can expect to observe. Most importantly, they argue that, in order for life literally to engulf the universe, the universe must be closed. It must eventually begin to collapse under its own gravitation toward a final singularity.

5.23.1 Is it science?

Implicit in Barrow and Tipler’s insistence on the predictive power of the Anthropic Principles is a claim that they be accorded scientific status. Predictive capacity is a keystone of Popper’s well-known Criterion of Falsifiability. But what sort of scientific status is being claimed?

The SAP claims that the statement, ‘Observers exist’, in some sense constitutes a scientific explanation of the anthropic features of the cosmos. Two ways of interpreting this are possible.

It may be a claim that rational observers are the efficient cause of the universe. However, this would imply that time reversal is a reality on a cosmic scale and that in a very strong sense intelligent observers have (will have?) created their own reality.

Alternatively, the SAP may be read as a denial of the sufficiency of efficient causes as scientific explanations of certain physical problems. This implication of the SAP has caused some scientists and philosophers to reject it out of hand. However, it should be recalled that it was only with the rise of the mechanical model of the world that efficient causes were accepted as complete explanations in physics. Furthermore, the biological sciences have proved remarkably resistant to this view of scientific explanation.

By contrast, the WAP does not claim to be explanatory: it is merely a selection effect. However, like the SAP, it has a covert content. It is pointless unless it is used in conjunction with a cosmological model which postulates an ensemble of universes. Thus it functions as a way of commending to the scientific establishment certain speculative cosmologies which have so far failed to convince when restricted to more conventional forms of scientific argumentation.

5.24 Anthropic design arguments

It is hard to resist the impression of something – some influence capable of transcending spacetime and the confinement of relativistic causality – possessing an overview of the entire cosmos at the instant of its creation, and manipulating all the causally disconnected parts to go bang with almost exactly the same vigour at the same time, and yet not so exactly co-ordinated as to preclude the small scale, slight irregularities that eventually formed the galaxies, and us. (Davies, 1982:95)^{^[3]}

As this quotation from Paul Davies suggests, the apparent fine-tuning of the cosmos is a rich source of material for new forms of design argument for the existence of God. Several such design arguments appear in recent theological (and scientific) literature.

Anthropic design arguments use aspects of cosmic fine-tuning as evidence that the universe was designed to permit (or, in stronger forms, to necessitate) the evolution of rational carbon-based life forms. There can be little doubt that, from the perspective of Christian faith, such features are suggestive of design. However, design arguments based on these features make certain assumptions that may make one cautious about placing too much reliance on them.

To begin with, they assume that the anthropic features of the cosmos are, in themselves, improbable. However, quite apart from the difficulties of assigning probabilities to these parameters, such an assumption is far from proven. As we noted earlier (5.21), it is conceivable that future developments in physics might render these very features quasi-necessary. In such a situation, this entire class of design argument would collapse. There is a hint of the God of the gaps about such arguments:^{^[4]} the universe appears to be a highly improbable structure: we cannot give a rational explanation of these cosmological features: therefore, they constitute evidence of an intelligent designer. And, like the God of the gaps, the role of this deity shrinks with the expansion of scientific understanding. This shrinkage is illustrated neatly by the above quotation from Davies, which refers to the horizon problem now explained by inflationary cosmology.

A second assumption of anthropic design arguments is that the ultimate goal of creation is the existence of rational carbon-based life forms (i.e. humankind). This is in agreement with the dominant view of Western Christian theology. However, it is arguable that the anthropocentricity of western Christianity is derived from sources other than the Christian revelation. For example, instead of presenting humankind as the end of creation, Genesis 1 may be read as insisting that the end of God’s creative activity is his Sabbath rest in the presence of all his creation. A move towards less anthropocentric readings of the Bible (and Christian tradition) is a common feature of contemporary theologies of creation (see Chapter 6). This change of emphasis involves rethinking these arguments and recognising that ‘anthropic’ is an unfortunate term. What is remarkable is that the universe arose in a way fruitful for the formation of carbon-based life. Conditions permitting the simplest colonies of bacteria to arise would still be extremely remarkable.

As we discuss in 10.14-10.15, it is important to distinguish arguments about the initial character of the universe, the ‘settings of the dials’, from arguments about how it happened that, roughly ten billion years later, there arose a ‘Goldilocks planet’ like Earth, a rocky planet at the appropriate sort of distance from the appropriate sort of star to allow life to arise. Anthropic arguments as they are usually understood apply to discussion of the initial ‘settings’ of the universe. The major positions at present are:

a) versions of the many-universes position combined with the WAP (5.22)

b) the fine-tuning of the universe attributed to some sort of designer entity.

The choice between these options will tend to be motivated by metaphysical presuppositions about the coherence of design arguments (see Polkinghorne 1998b:18-22).

[1] Barrow & Tipler see analogies between this Ultimate Observer and the God of Berkeleian idealism. An alternative analogy would be with the self-surpassing deity of process thought.

[2] See also 7.7.

[3] At the same time an inference to the existence of ‘some influence capable of transcending spacetime and the confinement of relativistic causality’ is very far from being an inference to belief in any established religion.

[4] See 10.3 for more on ‘the God of the gaps’.

Modern cosmology and universal history

2010-09-03T07:30:00.001+01:00

5.15 The beginnings of scientific cosmology

The first step towards a scientific cosmology was taken in 1823 when the German astronomer Wilhelm Olbers discussed a paradox that has subsequently been associated with his name. He simply asked ‘Why is the sky dark at night?’ The paradox becomes apparent when you calculate the brightness that should be expected given the assumptions that were current about the overall structure of the universe. If the universe is infinitely large, Euclidean (i.e. the shortest distance between two points is a straight line) and stars (or galaxies) are distributed evenly throughout it, the sky should not be dark at all but as bright as the surface of the average star!

This might have been explained by arguing that the universe is relatively young so that light from distant stars has not had time to reach us. However, by the nineteenth century it was widely accepted that the Earth (and, hence, the universe) was very old. Thus a more popular explanation was that the universe consisted of a finite number of stars concentrated into a finite region of an infinite space – the island universe model of cosmology in which the Milky Way (our own galaxy) constituted a unique island of matter and energy in an infinite void.

In the 1920s astronomers were able to show that some nebulae (clouds of luminous gas and dust) were too far away to be part of the Milky Way – they were island universes or galaxies in their own right. One of the discoverers of extragalactic objects, Edwin Hubble, went a stage further. In 1924 he announced the discovery that light from distant galaxies was systematically redder than light from nearby galaxies and that the degree of red shift was proportional to the distance. This provides a simple explanation for Olbers’ Paradox: if light from distant galaxies is redder, it contributes less energy to the overall brightness of the night sky than light from nearby galaxies. Eventually there comes a point where a galaxy is so distant that it is simply invisible (the ‘event horizon’).

The simplest explanation for this red shift is that it is a case of the Doppler effect. This is the phenomenon that causes the pitch of a train whistle to vary as the train approaches or recedes. According to this explanation, the light is reddened because the galaxies are moving away from us. Since the degree of reddening is also a measure of the speed of recession, Hubble was able to show that more distant galaxies are receding from us faster than nearby ones.

5.16 The Big Bang

At first sight this observation might suggest that the Earth was located at the centre of some cosmic explosion. However, the fact that all motion is relative implies that observers elsewhere in the universe would make similar observations. This observation is consistent with an expanding universe. To illustrate this one might paint spots on a balloon and blow it up. As the balloon expands, the spots recede from each other and more distantly separated spots recede more rapidly.

Extrapolating backwards in time from the observation that the universe is expanding leads to the suggestion that there might have been a time in the distant past (between 10 and 20 billion years ago) when the entire universe was concentrated into a single point. This point would be unimaginably hot and dense. At this ‘t = 0’ the universe would begin to expand rapidly, if not violently. As it expands and cools, matter as we now know it begins to appear. Small variations in the density of that matter lead to condensation and the eventual formation of stars, galaxies and planets. Gradually the mutual gravitational attraction of matter slows the expansion of the universe. The result is the basic picture of the universe as portrayed by modern cosmology.

5.16.1 Evidence for a Big Bang?

Taking the Big Bang as our educated guess about the origin of the universe, we naturally ask what would such a universe look like? Can we deduce potential observations from the hypothesis of a primordial fireball? The answer is ‘yes’.

Since light travels at a finite velocity, observations of distant objects are also observations of conditions in the past. In the distant past, the universe was smaller and therefore denser than it is today. We would therefore expect distant objects to be closer together than those nearby – there is some evidence from radio astronomy that this is the case. We would also expect observations of very distant objects to be consistent with a younger, hotter universe.

In an effort to discredit this theory, Fred Hoyle and some colleagues calculated the chemical composition of a Big Bang universe. This is relatively straightforward since the bulk of the chemical elements would be generated in the first couple of seconds of violent expansion and cooling. Much to their surprise, the outcome of their predictions was very similar to the observed chemical composition of the universe (about 80 per cent hydrogen and 20 per cent helium – all the rest is a mere trace explicable as the result of supernova explosions at the end of the first generation of stellar evolution).

But the most convincing evidence for the Big Bang came from an accidental discovery in 1965. Two young American astronomers, Penzias and Wilson, were attempting to pioneer astronomy in the microwave part of the spectrum. They picked up a very faint signal which seemed to be coming from every part of the sky. At first they thought it was a problem with the telescope. Only when they had thoroughly checked all their equipment did the full significance of their observation became apparent. In the 1940s, George Gamow had predicted that the Big Bang should have left a trace of itself in the form of microwave radiation spread evenly across the sky. Furthermore, the predicted strength of this radiation was comparable with observed results.

5.17 The shape of things to come

The fact that mutual gravitational attraction is causing the expansion of the universe to slow down suggests three possible future scenarios, depending on how much matter there is in the universe. The more matter, the greater the gravitational attraction and the more rapidly the expansion of the universe will slow down. If there is sufficient matter, the gravitational attraction will eventually overcome the expansion and the universe will begin to collapse again. This leads to a family of so-called closed cosmological models. If the total mass of the universe is less than that critical mass, expansion will continue indefinitely – an open universe. At the critical mass itself, the expansion will cease in the infinitely far future.

But what is the mass of the universe? Direct observations of luminous objects suggest a mass that is only a tiny fraction of the critical mass. This would suggest an open universe. However, studies of galaxy clusters reveal that their masses are much greater than what we might expect from their luminosity. In other words, much of the mass of the universe is in the form of ‘dark matter’ that is observable only through its gravitational effects. Estimates of the amount of dark matter vary but many sources suggest that it is sufficient for the actual mass of the universe to be quite close to the critical mass.^{^[1]} We discuss the implications of these predictions for theology in 10.20.

5.18 Is the Big Bang a moment of creation?

Strictly speaking the point associated with the Big Bang itself is a singularity – a point at which our laws of physics break down. In itself, this does not imply an absolute beginning. Nevertheless, it is tempting to read the Big Bang as having theological significance. After all, it does seem remarkably like a moment of creation.

This temptation received strong papal endorsement in 1951. Pope Pius XII announced that ‘everything seems to indicate that the universe has in finite times a mighty beginning’. He went on to claim that unprejudiced scientific thinking indicated that the universe is a ‘work of creative omnipotence, whose power set in motion by the mighty fiat pronounced billions of years ago by the Creating Spirit, spread out over the universe’. To be fair, he did also admit that ‘the facts established up to the present time are not an absolute proof of creation in time’.

Such pronouncements are guaranteed to provoke controversy. Even members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences were divided over the wisdom of the Pope’s remarks. While Sir Edmund Whittaker could agree that the Big Bang might ‘perhaps without impropriety’ be referred to as the Creation, George Lemaître, one of the pioneers of the Big Bang theory, felt strongly that this was a misuse of his hypothesis (see 1.15).

Beyond the Christian community there was even greater unease. One of the fundamental assumptions of modern science is that every physical event can be sufficiently explained solely in terms of preceding physical causes. Quite apart from its possible status as the moment of creation, the Big Bang singularity is an offence to this basic assumption. Thus some philosophers of science have opposed the very idea of the Big Bang as irrational and untestable.

One popular way to evade the suggestion of an absolute beginning has been to argue that the universe must be closed. If it will eventually return to a singular point, why should it not then ‘bounce’? This is the so-called cyclic universe (see 5.22). Other astronomers opposed to the Big Bang, proposed instead a steady state theory. Fred Hoyle took a lead in this proposal. As we indicated in 1.15, his motives were explicitly theological. The steady-state theory argued that, in spite of appearances, the universe was infinitely old and did not evolve over time. Although defended by some very able scientists, this theory suffered a number of major setbacks which led to its demise. In order to maintain a steady state in the face of universal expansion it was necessary to postulate the continuous creation of matter from negative energy – ingenious, but contrived. There was the embarrassment of Hoyle’s failed attempt to show that the Big Bang could not account for the chemical composition of the universe (5.16.1). Finally, the steady state theory was not able to accommodate the new data that appeared – particularly the existence of the microwave background (5.16.1).

5.19 From Big Bang to inflation

The Big Bang theory has been very effective in predicting phenomena that have subsequently been observed by astronomers (5.16.1). However, the theory also raises a number of questions that it is unable to answer.

One of these questions is the so-called ‘horizon problem’. Observations reveal that above a certain scale (about 10²⁴ metres^{^[2]}) the universe is highly uniform in structure. However, this degree of uniformity is an embarrassment to cosmologists. According to relativity theory, there should be no causal connection between points separated by distances greater than c multiplied by t (where c is the velocity of light and t is the age of the universe). Extrapolating this back to the Big Bang suggests that the primordial universe was partitioned into about 10⁸⁰ causally separate regions (Barrow and Tipler, 1986: 420). Nevertheless, all these disconnected regions had to expand at the same rate to maintain the observed degree of uniformity!

Equally embarrassing for conventional Big Bang theory is that fact that although the universe is highly uniform it is not perfectly uniform. According to current theories, galaxy formation depends upon the existence of small initial irregularities in the Big Bang itself. These are amplified by cosmic expansion to the point where gravitation can begin the process of stellar condensation (Barrow and Tipler, 1986:417). If the initial irregularities are too large, the result is the rapid and widespread formation of black holes instead of stars. If the initial irregularities are sufficiently small, the precise expansion rate of the cosmos becomes critical – too rapid and the irregularities will not be amplified enough for galaxy formation to occur; too slow and the cosmos will be closed with a lifetime too short to permit biological evolution. Evidence of the existence of such irregularities in the early universe has been supplied by the COBE (COsmic Background Explorer) satellite’s observations of small irregularities in the cosmic microwave background. There is no mechanism within conventional Big Bang theory to account for these primordial irregularities. This is often called the ‘fine-tuning problem’.

The widespread expectation among cosmologists that the actual mass of the universe is close to the critical mass (5.17) is a further problem for Big Bang theory in that it offers no explanation of this coincidence. Yet another difficulty arises from the fact that, according to particle physics, the cooling of the early universe after the Big Bang should lead to the production of topological anomalies, particularly magnetic monopoles. Indeed, monopoles should be the dominant matter in the universe. And yet, no monopole has ever been observed, directly or indirectly.

In the 1980s dissatisfaction with these shortcomings of conventional Big Bang theory led Alan Guth to propose an alternative – the inflationary universe theory. According to this theory, in the earliest moments of its existence the region we now think of as the universe contained an excited state known as a false vacuum. This false vacuum possessed a repulsive force that caused this region to expand far more rapidly than would be possible in conventional Big Bang theory. In an unimaginably short period (perhaps 10⁻³⁷ s) this region doubled in size at least 100 times. However, due to the peculiar properties of false vacuum, its energy density remained unchanged. In other words, the total energy contained in the region grew enormously. This false-vacuum state is extraordinarily difficult to imagine, but the best non-mathematical account available is provided by Brian Greene (2004: Chs. 9-10).

The period of inflation must have been extremely short because the false vacuum is unstable. A false vacuum ‘decays’ into other forms of matter, converting its energy into a tremendously hot gas of elementary particles; essentially the same conditions as are predicted by conventional Big Bang theory for the period before the formation of the first atoms of hydrogen and helium. However, the inflationary phase means that the universe was originally much smaller than had previously been thought (perhaps a billion times smaller than a proton); small enough for it to have become uniform before inflation began. This primordial uniformity would then have been preserved during the inflationary phase and beyond, thus solving the horizon problem. Again unlike conventional Big Bang theory, the inflationary approach leads to an explanation of why the actual mass of the universe is close to the critical mass. Inflationary models may also account for the fine-tuning problem, if the irregularities in the cosmic background are understood as quantum fluctuations blown up by inflation (Greene, 2004:305-10).

Guth’s original version of inflation was later shown to be unsatisfactory but this approach has spawned an entire family of inflationary models. One popular version is that developed by Andrei Linde. In this ‘chaotic’ version, different regions of the false vacuum decay at different times; each region becoming a separate ‘bubble universe’. However, because the false vacuum as a whole is expanding at an exponential rate, it is outgrowing the decay process. In other words, it is spawning ‘bubble universes’ ad infinitum. For comment on the relation of inflationary models to the problem of God’s action, see 10.15. Greene is one of those working on a ‘superstring’ account of the early universe, using descriptions in eleven dimensions. This approach shows some promise, but also reflects just how difficult it is to devise experimental tests of phenomena which only occur in the very special conditions of the early universe (see Greene 2004:Chs 12-13).

[1] At the moment of writing (August 2004) the prevailing view is that the so-called ‘cosmological constant’ which would accelerate the universe’s expansion (see Guth, 1997:37–42 for the history of this term) may be non-zero, and sufficiently large to guarantee an ever-expanding universe.

[2] The scientific convention for writing very big and very small numbers is used here. 10² is 10 multiplied by itself, or a hundred – 10⁶is ten multiplied by itself four more times, or a million. 10²⁴ is 10 multiplied by itself twenty-four times, or a million million million million. Numbers less than 1 are written with negative indices – so 10^-9 would be one-billionth.

Theology and the new physics: the rediscovery of the observer

2010-09-02T07:30:00.000+01:00

5.10 The observational basis of quantum theory

Einstein’s explanation of the null result of the Michelson–Morley experiment led to a radical revision of our understanding of space and time. If anything, the explanation for Lord Kelvin’s other ‘cloud’ – the spectrum of black-body radiation – has led to even more radical changes in our understanding of the world.

5.10.1 The ultraviolet catastrophe

In line with Kelvin’s warning, the first crack in the edifice of classical physics came with attempts to explain the colour of hot objects using classical physics and electromagnetism. The light from these objects is a mixture of different frequencies (colours). Observations reveal that such objects have a distinctive spectrum (pattern of energy distribution at different frequencies). However, attempts to explain this in classical terms failed abjectly – they predicted instead that the amount of energy would tend towards infinity at the high-energy (violet) end of the spectrum – an ultraviolet catastrophe.

Enter Max Planck. In 1900 he suggested that physics should abandon the assumption that electromagnetic energy is continuous and wavelike. If, instead, energy can only be absorbed and emitted in discrete packets (or quanta), theory can be made to fit observations exactly. However, while his suggestion certainly gave the right answer, its abandonment of a cherished assumption of classical physics gave it an air of contrivance that led to its relative neglect for several years.

5.10.2 The photoelectric effect

Another anomaly that concerned physicists at the beginning of the century was the ability of light to eject electrons from metal. The principle is simple – the light imparts energy to electrons which then effectively ‘evaporate’ from the surface of the metal. The classical analogy with the evaporation of water suggests that some degree of evaporation should occur regardless of the frequency of the light, provided it is sufficiently intense. In reality, there is a clear threshold frequency, which varies from metal to metal, below which the effect will not occur.

It was Einstein who, in 1905, rehabilitated Planck’s quantum theory and explained this anomaly by assuming that the energy imparted by the light is packaged (quantised) in a manner that is related to the frequency of the light rather than spread evenly over the wavefront. Furthermore, he assumed that the way in which electrons absorbed that energy is also quantised – so that they can only acquire the energy necessary to escape if the light is of sufficiently high frequency. Light of frequencies lower than this threshold has no effect regardless of the intensity of the light source.

5.10.3 Collapsing atoms and spectral lines

In 1898 Antoine-Henri Becquerel had discovered an entirely new physical phenomenon – radioactivity. This growth area in physics rapidly led to the realisation that atoms were not simply inert billiard balls. On the contrary, they have an internal structure. By the end of the ﬁrst decade of the twentieth century sufficient research had accumulated for physicists to be able to begin making models of this structure. It was clear that atoms had a very small, dense, positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons.

Ernest Rutherford proposed a planetary model for the atom – electrons in orbit around a nucleus like planets around a star. The fly in the ointment was electromagnetism. An electric charge moving in a circle emits energy. If electrons were classical particles emitting energy in this way, they would very rapidly dissipate all their energy and fall into the nucleus.

A solution was offered by a young Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, whose model of the atom was mentioned in 1.9. Again the key was the abandonment of continuity in favour of quantisation. Bohr simply ruled out the possibility of electrons occupying every possible orbit. Instead they are confined to certain discrete energy levels. Although outlandish, his suggestion had the added attraction that it explained another anomaly – the fact that the light emitted by hot gases is emitted only at certain frequencies (spectral lines).

5.10.4 When is a particle a wave?

The above phenomena indicated that under certain circumstances light can behave in a particle-like manner rather than its usual wave-like manner. The next step in the development of a quantum view of the world was due to an aristocratic French physicist, Prince Louis de Broglie. In his 1924 doctoral thesis, de Broglie proposed that, under certain circumstances, particles might be observed behaving in a wave-like manner. His prediction was confirmed in 1927 by Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer. They found that low-energy electrons fired at a nickel surface were deflected into a series of low and high intensity beams. In other words, diffraction – a characteristic property of waves – occurred.

Similarly, if you take a beam of electrons and pass it through a pair of slits (a classical wave experiment), you get diffraction and interference – properties characteristic of a wave rather than a particle. If you reduce the intensity of the electron beam to a single electron at a time, the detector on the other side of the slits will still gradually accumulate a trace that looks like an interference pattern (see Figure 5.1). Explaining this in classical terms is impossible – if the electrons go through one slit or the other the pattern would look quite different.^{^[1]}

5.11 The quantum revolution

By the early 1920s, these anomalies had grown into a gaping hole in the fabric of physics. At the same time, the explanations proffered by physicists such as Einstein and Bohr held out the promise of a radical reconstruction. The task of integrating these insights into a coherent theory of sub-atomic physics fell to Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. Although they were working independently, their approaches were sufficiently similar to be formally merged into quantum mechanics. This new theory constituted a radical shift in the conceptual foundations of physics. We mention here three key aspects of quantum mechanics.

(i) Wave–particle duality

De Broglie’s demonstration of the possibility of electron diffraction highlights one of the fundamental features of the new theory – wave-particle duality. This is one of the properties enshrined in the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger wave equation – so-called because it takes a mathematical form characteristic of classical wave equations. However, this equation does not refer to physical waves but rather to probabilities, e.g. the probability of finding an electron in one location rather than another. The final outcome may be determinate (an electron in a particular location), but the probability distribution of the possible outcomes has the mathematical form of a wave. This peculiar feature of a very successful equation has led to the intractable problem of how we should interpret quantum mechanics (see 5.13).

(ii) Uncertainty

Uncertainty is one of the best-known implications of quantum mechanics. In 1927 Heisenberg argued that key physical quantities (e.g. position and momentum) are paired up in quantum theory. As a result, they cannot be measured simultaneously to any desired degree of accuracy. Attempts to increase the precision of one measurement result in less precise measures of the other member of the pair.

Take an electron, for example. We might try to determine its position by using electromagnetic radiation. Because electrons are so small, radiation of very short wavelength would be necessary to locate it accurately. However, shorter wavelengths correspond to higher energies. The higher the energy of radiation used, the more the momentum of the electron is altered. Thus any attempt to determine the location accurately will change the velocity of the electron. Conversely, techniques for accurately measuring the velocity of the electron will leave us in ignorance about its precise location. Looked at conservatively, this is an epistemological issue: quantum uncertainty is a principle of ignorance inherent in any measuring technique used on such a small scale. However, Heisenberg himself took a more radical view – he saw this limitation as a property of nature rather than an artefact of experimentation. This radical interpretation of uncertainty as an ontological principle of indeterminism implies that quantum mechanics is inherently statistical – it deals with probabilities rather than well-defined classical trajectories. Such a view is clearly inimical to classical determinism. Equally clearly, this is a metaphysical interpretation that goes beyond what is required by the mathematics of the Uncertainty Principle.

(iii) Radical interdependence

In spite of his crucial role in the early development of quantum mechanics, Einstein was very uneasy about its implications and, in later years, organised a rearguard action against it. His aphorism ‘God does not play dice’ highlights the depths of his distaste for quantum uncertainty. His strongest counter-argument was to call attention to a paradoxical implication of quantum mechanics now known as the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) Paradox.

Take, for example, a pair of protons whose quantum spins cancel out. Now separate them and measure the spin of one proton. Because they were paired, they had a combined wave equation. Measuring the spin of one proton ‘collapses’ that wave equation and determines the spin of the other. It appears that a measurement in one place can have an instantaneous effect on something that may be light years away.

For Einstein this was proof that quantum mechanics must be incomplete. To him this result only made sense if the spins were determinate (but unknown to us) before the protons were separated. In this case, measurement would merely tell what was always the case. But, according to the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics, it is not merely a matter of ignorance. The spin is not determined until it has been measured. In other words, the pair of protons cannot be regarded as separate entities until the measurement has been made.

Some years later, a quantum logician turned this paradox into a testable prediction that now bears his name – Bell’s Inequality. This is an equation which should be true if two principles (assumed by Einstein and his colleagues in formulating the EPR Paradox) hold in the world:

The principle of reality: that we can predict a physical quantity with certainty without disturbing the system, and

The locality principle: that a measurement in one of two isolated systems can produce no real change in the other.

Taken together, these principles imply an upper limit to the degree of co-operation that is possible between isolated systems. In 1982 a team of physicists at the University of Paris led by Alain Aspect demonstrated experimentally that this limit is exceeded in nature. In other words, our physical descriptions of the world in which we live cannot be both real and local in the above sense.

What this means in practice is a greater emphasis on describing quantum-mechanical systems as a whole. This runs counter to the tendency of classical physics towards ‘bottom-up thinking’– treating systems as collections of separate entities, and trying to reduce their properties to the individual properties of the simplest possible components. The quantum world, which deals with the simplest entities we know, seems to resist this reduction – it is in Karl Popper’s famous phrase ‘a world of clouds’ as well as ‘clocks’ (quoted in Polkinghorne, 1991:44). ‘Bottom-up’ thinking has served science extremely well, we simply indicate here that it has its limitations.^{^[2]}

5.12 Shaking the foundations

The quantum view of the world departs from classical assumptions in four main ways.

1. Determinism has given way to an emphasis on probabilities. We simply do not have access to enough information to make deterministic predictions. And this is widely held to be a feature of the world rather than an observational limitation.

2. Reductionism has given way to a more holistic approach to physical systems.

3. Closely allied to this, locality (the impossibility of information being propagated instantaneously) has given way to correlation-at-a-distance.

4. Most basic of all, the classical assumptions of continuity and divisibility (that between any two points there is an infinite number of intermediate values) have given way to quantisation – for certain physical quantities, the range of permissible values is severely restricted.

5.13 Schrödinger’s cat and the meaning of quantum theory

The EPR Paradox described in 5.11 (iii) introduces us to one of the basic problems of quantum mechanics – the relationship between measurement and reality. This is highlighted by a famous thought-experiment involving a hapless cat. The cat is in a box together with a canister of poisonous gas connected to a radioactive device. If an atom in the device decays, the canister is opened and the cat dies. Suppose that there is a 50–50 chance of this happening. Clearly when we open the box we will observe a cat that is either alive or dead. But is the cat alive or dead prior to the opening of the box?

Interpretation (i) Quantum orthodoxy (Copenhagen interpretation)

The dominant view in quantum mechanics is that quantum probabilities become determinate on measurement – that the wave function is collapsed by the intervention of classical measuring apparatus. This means that the cat is neither alive nor dead until the box is opened. The cat is in an indeterminate state.

This interpretation is usually allied with a tendency to extreme instrumentalism (see 1.7). On such a view the probabilities generated by the Schrödinger wave equation do not correspond to any physical reality. There simply is no reality to be described until an act of measurement collapses the wave function. Quantum mechanics is merely a useful calculating device for predicting the possible outcomes of such acts of measurement.

In spite of its dominance in the textbooks, this interpretation is hardly satisfactory. To begin with, it may be regarded as proposing a dualism in physical reality: two worlds – an indeterminate quantum world and a determinate classical world. Then there is the problem of what constitutes classical measuring apparatus. At what level does the wave function actually collapse?

The act of measurement that collapses the wave function cannot be limited to scientific instruments. After all, why should we assume that our scientific measurements are solely responsible for collapsing the wave function? This would give rise to a most peculiar world – one that was indeterminate until the evolution of hominids.

Some physicists, e.g. Wigner and Wheeler, have identified the classical measuring apparatus of the Copenhagen interpretation with consciousness. If so, they must be using a much broader definition of consciousness than is usual. What level of consciousness would be needed to make something determinate? Is the cat sufficiently conscious to determine the outcome of the experiment? Would earthworms do? What about viruses? The effect of pursuing this line of inquiry is to move towards a form of panpsychism – the doctrine that every part of the natural world, no matter how humble, is in some sense conscious!

An alternative might be to postulate a transcendent world observer – a divine mind whose observations collapse the wave functions on our behalf. In effect this would be the quantum-mechanical version of Bishop Berkeley’s idealism.^{^[3]} This is memorably summarised in a couple of limericks:

There was once a man who said ‘God

Must think it exceedingly odd

If he finds that this tree

Continues to be

When there’s no one about in the quad.’

And the reply:

Dear Sir, Your astonishment’s odd:

I am always about in the quad.

And that’s why the tree

Will continue to be,

Since observed by Yours faithfully, God.

The problem with this attractive solution to the measurement problem is that it proves too much. Invoking a divine observer leads to the question of why there should be any quantum measurement problem at all. Why should anything be left indeterminate for us to determine by our measurements? Is God only interested in those aspects of creation that are above a certain size?

Returning to the classical measuring apparatus, perhaps we should put the emphasis on ‘classical’ rather than ‘measuring’ – stressing not so much our intervention in the system as a transition from the world of the very small, in which quantum principles operate, to the everyday world of classical physics. This neo-Copenhagen interpretation has the merit that it avoids the absurdities of the consciousness-based approaches. However, we are still faced with the difficulty of identifying an acceptable transition point. How small is small? (There is now evidence that a molecule of fullerene containing around seventy carbon atoms can exhibit wave-particle duality.) One suggestion is that we choose the level at which physical phenomena become so complex that they are irreversible. Another, from Roger Penrose, is that gravity provides the key (Penrose 1994:Ch.6, 1997:Ch.2)..

Interpretation (ii) Hidden variables (neo-realism)

Einstein was not alone in finding this interpretation of quantum mechanics objectionable. A few physicists have persisted in arguing that the statistical nature of quantum mechanics implies that it is only really applicable to ensembles of particles (just as an opinion poll is only meaningful if a reasonable sample of the population has been polled). In other words, quantum mechanics is an incomplete description of reality. They maintain that underlying this level of indeterminacy there is an objective foundation.

The best-known hidden-variables theory is that of the physicist and philosopher David Bohm (see Bohm, 1980). What Bohm did was to distinguish between the quantum particle, e.g. an electron, and a hidden ‘guiding wave’ that governs its motion. Thus, in this theory electrons are quite clearly particles. When you perform a two-slit experiment, they go through one slit rather than the other. However, their choice of slit is not random but is governed by the guiding wave, resulting in the wave pattern that is observed.

The main weakness of Bohm’s theory is that it looks contrived – which it is. It was deliberately designed to give predictions that are in all details identical to conventional quantum mechanics. His aim was not to make a serious counterproposal but simply to demonstrate that hidden-variables theories are indeed possible.

It is sometimes suggested that hidden-variables theories have been ruled out by the Aspect experiment (5.11 (iii)). This is a misunderstanding of the experiment. What it did was to show that attempts to explain quantum phenomena cannot be both deterministic and local. Hidden-variables theories, with their underlying determinism, must be non-local, maintaining the existence of instantaneous causal relations between physically separated entities. Such a view contradicts the simple location of events in both classical atomism and relativity theory. It points to a more holistic view of the quantum world. Indeed Bohm himself stressed the holistic aspect of quantum theory in his later years, after his conversion from Marxism to theosophy.

Interpretation (iii) The many worlds interpretation

The third main class of interpretations starts from the assumption that scientific theories ought to be self-interpreting. The Schrödinger wave equation in quantum mechanics is smooth, continuous and deterministic. There is nothing in it that corresponds to the collapse of the wave function.

In 1957 Hugh Everett surprised his more conventional colleagues by proposing that the Schrödinger wave equation as a whole is an accurate description of reality. There is no collapse of the wave function. Whenever there is a choice of experimental outcomes, all the possibilities are realised. Somewhere Schrödinger’s cat will be really dead and somewhere it will be really alive. With each decision at the quantum level the universe splits into a number of isolated domains, each corresponding to a different outcome. In one universe the cat dies, in another it lives.

Most physicists find this extremely unattractive. One of the most venerable assumptions of the scientific method is Ockham’s razor – non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem; i.e. entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. In practice this leads to a very strong aesthetic bias in favour of the simplest possible explanation.

Only quantum cosmologists beg to differ. They attempt to apply quantum mechanics to the entire universe. Clearly this leaves no room for a separate classical measuring apparatus. In this context, a many-universes approach such as was described above may seem an attractive non-theistic alternative to the notion of a transcendent world observer. But one wonders which option requires the larger act of faith!

5.14 Quantum consciousness

In classical mechanics, with its close association with Cartesian dualism, the physical world was neatly divorced from the realm of consciousness. As far as classically minded materialists were concerned, the latter was a mere side effect of biochemical interactions. However, as noted above, the dominant Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics envisages a greatly expanded role for the observer. Granted the traditional association of temporal perception with consciousness, the rediscovery of time by modern physics may point in the same direction.

Such considerations have given rise to the suggestion that consciousness itself may be interpreted as a quantum phenomenon. Perhaps the best-known proponent of a quantum explanation of consciousness is Roger Penrose (1989; 1994; 1997). He rejects the currently popular view that human consciousness is essentially computational (that minds are analogous to computer programs) because, in his opinion, this model fails to account for intuitive problem-solving. The brain must be non-algorithmic (i.e. it does not operate by mechanically following a fixed set of procedures in the manner of a computer). Further he argues that classical physics is inherently algorithmic in its nature. Thus consciousness is not explicable in classical terms.

The obvious candidate for a non-algorithmic process in physics is the quantum-mechanical collapse of the wave function. Penrose suggests that the brain uses quantum collapse to solve problems non-algorithmically. But by what means? He pins his hopes on structures called microtubules that occur within cells, speculating that quantum effects within the microtubules may be co-ordinated across groups of neurones to provide the basis for such intuitive processes. However, as many physicists and neurophysiologists have pointed out, this is highly speculative – a weakness that Penrose himself acknowledges.

[1] For a discussion of the two-slit experiment in terms of quantum theory see Davies, 1990:108–11.

[2] For a brief discussion of ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ thinking see Peacocke (1993: 53–55). See also our ‘note on emergence’ in 6.11.1. We take up the question of ‘top-down causation’ in relation to divine action in 10.9(iii)[c]. .

[3] George Berkeley (1685-1753) – a philosopher famous for his apparent denial of the reality of any external world.

Theology and the new physics: the rediscovery of time

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5.5 Classical physics and the exorcism of time

At first sight, classical physics appears to lend support to the commonsense view of time – that only present events exist; past events have ceased to exist, and future ones do not yet exist. In Newtonian physics time is linear and uniform with physical reality restricted to present events and things.

However, on closer examination we find that classical physics treats time as entirely external to and independent of the physical world. In spite of its apparent ontological priority, the present has no special status in the Newtonian scheme. Indeed, far from explaining or integrating time into its theories, the first priority of classical physics appears to have been to eliminate it from consideration. Classical physics is characterised by the quest for laws that do not vary with time (or make no reference to time). This bias amounts to what Ilya Prigogine has described as an exorcism of time (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984:291f.) from classical physics.

This is not to suggest that physicists made a conscious decision to exclude time from consideration. Rather such an exclusion follows naturally (and unconsciously) from certain philosophical and theological assumptions that were widespread in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe.

One of these assumptions was the sharp division of reality into two incommensurable realms. On the one hand, there is res cogitans: the intelligible realm, the province of subjectivity, of mind, soul and spirit (and, hence, of religion and supernature). On the other hand, there is res extensa: the material realm, the province of nature and science. According to Descartes, the entities of res extensa possessed no other properties besides spatial extension. It was a passive world amenable to the physicists’ ideal of quantification.

The significance of this dualism for a physical account of time becomes clear in the light of the very close association between time and mind. As Genevieve Lloyd puts it, ‘we cannot think consciousness without thinking time, or time without thinking consciousness . . . if we take away the thought of consciousness, time also vanishes’ (Lloyd, 1993: 2). The Cartesian elimination of mind from physical reality could only result in a similar elimination of time or, at least, its reduction to an external parameter. As a result, classical physics became the observation of a world characterised only by extension from the vantage point of a quasi-divine spectator, namely, from eternity.

Another factor affecting the classical physical treatment of time was the dominant interpretation of eternity in Christian theology. This tended to be treated either as timelessness or a present that does not pass away. Typical is the following passage from Boethius (470-5—524):

Embracing the infinite lengths of past and future, it [God’s knowledge] considers everything as if it were going on now in a simple mode of awareness. So, if you want to weigh the presentness with which he discerns everything, you will more rightly judge it to be not a foreknowledge as of the future, but the knowledge of a never failing instant. Hence it is called pro-vidence rather than pre-vision, because it looks forth from a position far removed from things below as if from the highest summit of things. (Quoted in Sorabji, 1983:256)

Boethius portrays God’s view of history as that of an observer on a mountain-top viewing the countryside all laid out equally below. Time is likened to space. From God’s (true) perspective there is no passage of time in creation. And it was to these heights that the classical physicist aspired.

5.6 Relativity and the rediscovery of time

As physicists became more confident of their ability to model the world, they set their sights beyond the very simple mechanical phenomena that had been the foundation of Newtonian dynamics. Thus the idea of unvarying or time-free physical laws began to come under pressure during the nineteenth century with the development of thermodynamics. The more complex phenomena associated with heat transfer were simply not amenable to the same treatment as, say, a simple pendulum. As the Ancients realised, ignis mutat res – fire changes things. And change is a fundamental aspect of the commonsense view of time.

However, it is not thermodynamics that is commonly associated with the rediscovery of time in physics but Einstein’s theory of relativity – the answer to the first of Lord Kelvin’s clouds. Published in 1905, Albert Einstein’s innocuously entitled paper ‘On the electrodynamics of moving bodies’ was first and foremost an attempt to explain anomalies arising from attempts to apply Maxwell’s Theory of Electromagnetism to moving bodies. The velocity of light appears in that theory as a universal constant – but relative to what: the source, the intervening medium or the observer?

Drawing on our experience of objects moving at low speeds, we might expect the velocity of light to be constant relative to its source. However, this is not borne out by observation (e.g. it would significantly affect observations of binary star orbits). Thus attention turned to the second option: the velocity of light is constant relative to the intervening medium – absolute space – the aether. If so, it should be possible to detect the aether by looking for variations in the velocity of light caused by the Earth’s motion relative to the aether. Failure to do so was one of the clouds that worried Lord Kelvin.

Einstein’s extraordinary proposal was to treat the velocity of light as constant relative to the observer while, at the same time, insisting that ‘the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good’ (Einstein, 1923:37f.) – his principle of relativity. These apparently irreconcilable postulates allowed Einstein to develop an alternative to Newton’s laws of motion that effectively dissolved the anomalies that had troubled his predecessors.^{^[1]}

However, the new theory required a redefinition of the concept of simultaneity. In a Newtonian world there would be universal agreement that two events had occurred simultaneously. According to Einstein, one observer moving relative to another would not agree with the second that the two events were simultaneous. A corollary of this disagreement is that there can be no universal present moment – what is present to me may be past to one observer and still to come for another! Thus the principle of relativity rules out the possibility of a Newtonian universal ‘now’. The universe may not be thought of as a succession of instantaneous spaces. Space and time are simply not separable in the manner envisaged by Newtonian physics.

5.7 Relativity and the spatialisation of time

Ironically, Einstein’s revolution in our treatment of space and time is often interpreted as supporting the classical view of temporal passage as extraneous to physics. Many physicists maintain that the connection between time and space established by Einstein is of such a kind that time should be thought of as analogous to space – a fourth spatial dimension. For them, reality consists of the entire collection of events that ever have been or ever will be – past, present and future taken together in a static block (sometimes called the stasis theory of time). If so, our perception of time as passing is an artefact of human psychology rather than a physical reality. The following quotations are typical:

The objective world simply is. It does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness crawling upward along the lifeline of my body does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image. (Weyl, 1949:166)

relativity physics has shifted the moving present out from the superstructure of the universe, into the minds of human beings, where it belongs. (Davies, 1974:2f.)

[The physicist] does not regard time as a sequence of events which happen. Instead, all of past and future are simply there, and time extends in either direction from any given moment in much the same way as space stretches away from any particular place. (Davies, 1990:124)

What these assertions (and many others like them) fail to make clear is that this is an interpretation of the special theory of relativity. It is not that relativity theory has somehow proven Boethius’ analogy between time and space to be the case. Rather these physicists are reading relativity in the light of that analogy. Indeed it is an interpretation about which Einstein himself was ambivalent. On occasions he certainly wrote in a similar vein. However, when faced with Meyerson’s critique of this interpretation, Einstein agreed that ‘The element of spatial distance and the element of duration remain distinct in nature, distinct even in the formula giving the square of the world interval of two infinitely near events’ (Einstein [1928] quoted in Capek, 1976:366f.).

5.8 Time and space

What are the implications of accepting a strong analogy between time and space?

It would, to say the least, be odd to entertain the notion that the things and events located in some regions of space were somehow more real than those located elsewhere. By analogy, then, we must deny that present events are more real than past or future events. In other words, events at every temporal location must be equally real. All things and events coexist timelessly. I am ignorant of the events of 2010 only because of my location in 2004 (just as I am ignorant of events in Exeter while revising this chapter in Glasgow). All future events are there to be read off as and when we reach the right spatio-temporal location. Nor do past events pass away into oblivion – they remain (timelessly) in spatio-temporal locations to which I (the conscious observer moving through spacetime) no longer have access.

If this is so, then we must admit the validity of certain strange locutions. For example, few people living in November 2004 would quibble with the assertion that ‘Tony Blair is alive and well, and living in Downing Street’. But the theory that all entities and events exist timelessly (a ‘stasis’ view of time) requires us also to accept such assertions as ‘John F. Kennedy is (timelessly) alive and well and living in 1958’. Of course, oddity does not imply that this is invalid. However, it does highlight the fact that this view of time is strongly counterintuitive.

5.8.1 Spacelike time and determinism

We generally believe the past to be determinate. For example, we may not have access to all the details of the Napoleonic Wars but we do know that a joint Anglo-Prussian force finally defeated Napoleon’s army at the Battle of Waterloo. It simply is the case that this happened – nothing can change the fact (not even the most inspired historical reinterpretation). Conversely it is our experience that the future is not determinate in this sense. We do not know what the future will bring. However, we can make predictions based upon past trends and present knowledge. Our predictions generally take the form of a range of possibilities. We further believe that in certain cases it is possible to influence the outcome by acting in certain ways.

In direct contradiction of our experience of past and future, the spatial treatment of time asserts that future events are determinate in precisely the same way as past events. Advocates of this approach are quick to point out the mind-dependence of the experience described above. They argue that the apparent indeterminacy of the future is entirely explicable in terms of our psychological limitations. There is a merely psychological arrow of time that denies us access to knowledge of events which are located at spatio-temporal locations later than our own.

However, this has interesting physical implications. As we shall discuss in 5.11–5.14, quantum mechanics is usually taken to imply indeterminacy – future states of the universe cannot be totally predicted, even in theory, from the present state.^{^[2]} But on a ‘stasis’ view where all future events are (timelessly) determinate, the most obvious candidate for an adequate interpretation of quantum mechanics would be some kind of hidden-variables theory, one in which the apparent indeterminacy of the quantum world is underpinned by a more fundamental determinism [see 5.13 (ii)]. Thus all uncertainty about the future is merely a product of our ignorance. Alternatively, we may opt for a many-worlds interpretation in which all possible future events are equally real but isolated from each other in parallel universes (see 5.13 (iii)).

5.8.2 Spacelike time and causality

To say that A causes B is to say that A has some (significant) role in bringing B into existence. In our common understanding (with its implicit dependence upon a process theory of time), temporal location is usually implicated in such statements. A temporal relation of ‘earlier than’ is generally assumed to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for asserting a causal relation. Thus, when faced with the challenge to ‘Discuss the influence of James Joyce upon William Shakespeare’, an English undergraduate will either lapse into blank incomprehension or reinterpret it in postmodern terms as a request to explore the impact of Joyce’s work upon all subsequent readings of Shakespeare.

If the stasis theory is correct, there is no warrant for our habit of attempting to explain the present in terms of the past. Temporal location should have no more significance for our investigations of causes than spatial location. And, if there really were a strong analogy between time and space, we might expect the cause of some event to lie in one particular direction rather than another!

In reality, of course, we observe a systematic distinction between past, present and future that is quite unlike the characteristics of space. On the face of it, time and space are distinct even though intimately related.

However the difficulties created by a spacelike view of time are by no means insuperable. One way out might be to assert the timelessness of all causal relations. There is clear precedent for such a move in the classical understanding of divine causality. Another (possibly preferable) option might be to relate causality not to temporal location as such but rather to the physical factors that lead to the apparent distinctions between past and future.

5.9 Space, time and theology

Is time essentially spacelike with all that implies for our understanding of freedom and causation? Or is it the fundamental determinant of being and non-being? Contrary to popular belief, the new physics does not adjudicate between the rival interpretations of time that have been touched on in this section.

Both interpretations are open to theologians. Indeed both have appeared in Christian theology, albeit under very different guises. By and large theologians have tended to adopt a more or less commonsense view of created time. Thus Emil Brunner is typical when he comments that,

Everyone knows that time passes away. Everyone knows that the moment which was just now and is now gone never more returns. What men of all times and countries have been conscious of as the painful experience of time is the unceasing flow of the time stream, transience, the irreversibility and inexorability of this movement from the ‘not yet’ to the ‘now’ and onwards to the ‘no longer’ . . . The flow of time is inseparably bound up with transience, mortality, the not lingering, the not being able to return to what has once been, and just that constitutes the linearity of time. (Brunner, 1953:43)

However, when the same theologians try to imagine what the passage of created time might look like from God’s perspective, the answer they often come up with is akin to the stasis theory of time described above, as though God were looking down on the four-dimensional space-time diagram that relativistic physicists draw. Polkinghorne has repeatedly rejected this view of God, insisting that there is a temporality to the divine experience (1989:Ch.7, 2004: 104-10). Willem B. Drees however questions whether relativity offers any time that could be thought of as God’s time (1996:261-66). The debate over the nature of time initiated by contemporary interpretations of relativity theory reveals a long-standing inconsistency in Christian theology with respect to time. For further discussion of different theories of time, especially of ‘the block universe’, a technical term for the ‘stasis’ view we have described, see Isham and Polkinghorne (1993:135–44) and DeWeese (2004).

[1] Russell Stannard’s Black Holes and Uncle Albert (Stannard, 1991), though aimed at children, provides a very good introduction to the strange implications of Einstein’s theory.

[2] See also 1.17 on the significance of indeterminacy.

Theology and the new physics: classical physics and the Newtonian world-view

2010-08-31T07:30:00.002+01:00

5.2 The scientific revolution

The century and a half from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth is, with some justification, regarded as a watershed in the development of the natural sciences. Beginning with the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’ De revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) in 1543 and culminating in the appearance of Isaac Newton’s Principia mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in 1687, a succession of radical thinkers revolutionised the disciplined study of the physical world. Among the main achievements of these early scientists were the establishment of a potentially simpler heliocentric model of the solar system in preference to the geocentric model favoured at the time (Copernicus, 1473–1543); the application of experimental method and mathematical analysis to the study of motion (Galileo, 1564–1642); the reﬁnement and mathematisation of the heliocentric model (Kepler, 1571–1630); and the grand synthesis of these elements to show that all the situations under consideration, whether Earthbound or celestial, could be explained in terms of three mathematical laws of motion and a law of universal gravitation (Newton, 1642–1727).

Certain common assumptions regarding the nature of the physical world may be gleaned from this body of scientific work. Natural phenomena appear to be unimaginably complex but the founders or modern physics were committed to the view that underlying this complexity the world was rational and simple. In pursuit of this simplicity, they rejected the qualitative approach of traditional Aristotelian physics in favour of an emphasis on measurement. This reinforced a tendency (traceable back as far as the Ancient Greek philosopher Democritus) to distinguish between primary and secondary qualities. The former (mass, extension and duration) can be quantified and measured accurately, and were thought to be characteristic of an object in itself. They were, therefore, amenable to the combination of experimentation and mathematical analysis adopted by classical physics. Secondary qualities (such as colour, temperature and hardness), by contrast, could not be measured accurately and were, at that time, dismissed as subjective. The world envisaged by early modern science was well ordered, stable and predictable. Indeed subsequent generations of classical physicists were prepared to argue that, in principle, the future motion of every particle in the universe is predictable given an accurate knowledge of their positions, masses and velocities at some arbitrary point in time (see our discussion of Laplace in 1.17).

5.3 From method to world-view

This Newtonian paradigm had an impact that extended far beyond the methods of the virtuosi and the doors of the learned societies. According to Holton and Roller,

So impressive were the victories of Newtonian mechanics that, in the early part of the 18th Century, there spread a mechanistic world-view which asserted that man’s confident intellect could eventually reduce all phenomena and problems to the level of mechanical interpretations. The development of this new view through the extrapolation of the findings of science to philosophy was carried out mainly by philosophers, and it had important effects on economics, the ‘science of man’, religion, and political theory. (Holton and Roller, 1958:207)

However, in order to understand why something as far removed from practical concerns as a law of gravity should so catch the public imagination, we must recall that science does not exist in a vacuum. The peculiar attraction of Newtonian mechanics becomes much clearer when it is set in its wider cultural context (a task which is dealt with in detail by Toulmin, 1990:45–87).

Europe had been divided on religious lines after the Reformation. After an initial period of hostility, efforts at reconciliation (or, at least, at finding some way for divided communities to co-exist) began during the sixteenth century, which proved to be a brief golden age during which the arts, the sciences, and indeed a revived magical practice all flourished. However, efforts at reconciliation between Roman Catholic and Protestant failed. The first two decades of the seventeenth century were marked by growing intolerance, culminating with the opening shots of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618. In the wake of war came severe economic instability, famine and disease. Not surprisingly, apocalyptic speculation was rife, with Christ’s return widely expected to occur before the end of the century.

This anarchy inevitably generated a desire for order and stability. But where were these to be found? Religion had been tried in the fires of the Thirty Years’ War and found seriously wanting. The cultural and political leadership of Europe began to seek elsewhere for a secure basis for social order. A crucial part of their answer was the rationalistic philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650). Perhaps human reason could succeed where religious tradition and authority had failed.

Rationalism offered the scientists of the seventeenth century a powerful device for underwriting the reliability and universality of their assertions. The mental discipline of subjecting their interpretations of nature to reason distinguished early modern science from competing ways of viewing the natural world. Classical physics, in turn, provided the exercise of reason (in conjunction with experimentation) with an early success story. The Newtonian paradigm in physics represented the successful adaptation of science to the new emphasis on universal truths of reason. And it did for the natural world what Cartesian rationalism promised to do for human society – it ushered in a new era of order and stability.

In the exhaustion that followed the Peace of Westphalia (1648), Descartes and Newton offered the intellectuals of Europe the hope of a new way forward. Within half a century their ideas dominated Western philosophy and science. The despair and hopelessness that led the intellectuals of 1650 to speculate about the imminent end of the world was swept away. In its place was a new vision – of a just society empowered by human reason, progressing towards an undefined goal in the future.

The success of the Newtonian paradigm in physics encouraged others to emulate it in other spheres. In particular, it offered the ruling élites a new and authoritative image for the ideal society. The modern nation state as it began to emerge in the eighteenth century was modelled upon the world of Newtonian astronomy. Like the solar system, it was centralised – a central authority (whether it be le Roi Soleil, a constitutional monarch, or a democratically elected government) wielding authority over successive circles of subjects, all of whom knew their places. On a smaller scale this centralised pattern was reflected in the paternalistic family. Social Newtonians (notably Newton’s staunch advocate Samuel Clarke) insisted that the order of nature indicated the rightness of the social order – that we should be content with our rulers and with our station in life. This is the outlook enshrined in that politically incorrect verse from ‘All things bright and beautiful’ by Cecil Alexander (1818–95):

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

God made them high and lowly

And ordered their estate.

According to Margaret Wertheim,

The Newtonian society, like the Newtonian cosmos, was a lawful, stable, immutable, and supposedly God-given order. Just as the planets remained fixed in their respective orbits, human beings were to remain fixed in their respective ‘stations’ . . . It was thus humanity’s moral duty to emulate in the social realm the order Newton had discovered in nature. And so, . . . Newtonian science in the eighteenth [century] was enlisted to justify the status quo. (Wertheim, 1995:132)

5.4 Change and continuity in the physical sciences

In the nineteenth century Newton’s laws of motion were successfully used to describe the motion of charged particles in electromagnetic fields, raising hopes that a complete description of the physical world could be achieved within the Newtonian paradigm. Indeed one of the most eminent physicists of the nineteenth century, Lord Kelvin, was so convinced of the completeness of Newtonian physics that in 1900 he told the British Association for the Advancement of Science, ‘There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.’ In the same year he told the Royal Institution that only two clouds remained to obscure the ‘beauty and clearness’ of Newtonian physics.

The first of those clouds was the failure of the Michelson–Morley Experiment to detect the motion of the Earth through the aether (the medium through which it was assumed light must be propagated). The other was the failure of classical physics to account for the colour of hot objects – the spectrum of black-body radiation. Kelvin may have dismissed them as clouds, but within a few years of his death they had grown into great storms. One gave rise ultimately to relativity theory; the other to quantum theory. Together these new theories amounted to a revolution in our understanding of the physical world.

However, while the content of the physical sciences may have changed radically, there remain underlying continuities. These continuities are highlighted by the marginal place of the new physics in elementary science education. Critics sometimes deplore the fact that very little of the new physics appears in the average school science syllabus. But such criticisms betray a superficial understanding of science. Content is less important than method and attitude. For today’s physics students, the role models are still men like Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Joule, Coulomb, Faraday, Maxwell and Kelvin. Einstein and Hawking may have become icons of science in the popular mind but they have so far had little impact on attitudes and methods. As for great women physicists, Marie Curie stands alone as a romantic figure in the popular mind – and her contribution to physics is still undervalued by a physics establishment that perpetuates the sexist myth that her husband Pierre was the creative member of the partnership.^{^[1]}

The formative assumptions of physics may be enumerated in a variety of ways. One example would be Coulson’s account of the scientific method in his Science and Christian Belief (1958:42–83). He presents an idealised vision of the scientist as one who comes to his task with honesty, integrity, hope, enthusiasm, humility, singleness of mind, willingness to co-operate with others, patience and critical judgment – the gifts of the scientific spirit. Furthermore he highlights certain assumptions without which science would make little headway and reminds us of their roots in the Judaeo-Christian world-view:

that common search for a common truth; that unexamined belief that facts are correlatable . . . that unprovable assumption that there is an ‘order and constancy in Nature,’ without which the patient effort of the scientist would be only so much incoherent babbling and his publication of it in a scientific journal for all to read pure hypocrisy; all of it is a legacy from religious conviction. (Coulson, 1958:75)

Specifically, it is a legacy of the mediaeval synthesis, the world-view that informed Christendom. That the legacy continued to influence physics in the twentieth century will be a theme of the next section.

[1] Wertheim (1995: 173) cites comments to this effect made at a meeting of the American Physical Society in 1972.

Theology and the new physics: introduction

2010-08-30T07:30:00.001+01:00

Some years ago I contributed a chapter to the book God, Humanity and the Cosmos. The book is about to go into its third edition, and I have to revise my chapter. As part of the book’s revision process, a day conference is being held in Birmingham next Saturday. Unfortunately I can’t be there, so I have promised to make my chapter available here. If you have any comments on the content and what revisions I might make, please feel free to post them.

First, to give you some idea of what is coming, here is the introduction to the chapter:

In this chapter we shall look first of all at the powerful (and continuing) influence of Newtonian thinking (Section A). Then we shall consider two ways in which physics has parted company with the Newtonian world-view: through the rediscovery of time (Section B), and the rediscovery of the observer (Section C) – noting some theological implications. We go on to look at issues in modern cosmology – the beginning and end of the universe (Section D) and the possible rediscovery of purpose (Section E). Finally we consider the new science of chaos and complexity (Section F).

Is it just me?

2010-08-29T16:10:00.000+01:00

Whenever I see the logo for the 2012 London Olympics, I am reminded of a stylized map of France!

Silent running

2010-08-26T14:43:00.000+01:00

Blog entries have been rather thin on the ground lately. In part, this has been due to unusually large amounts of work over the summer (not that I’m complaining!). But recently my busy-ness has been compounded by the fact that I managed to crack a rib (the second time in six months) while on retreat at Alnmouth Friary. So for the past few weeks life has been lived through a codeine-induced haze – a condition not conducive to working efficiently, never mind thinking of things to put on the blog.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about the cracked rib is that it has prevented me from taking part in a performance of Handel’s Semele in Aberdeen next month. If you are in Aberdeen on Sunday 19th September, do go along to support it. It is taking place at St Andrew’s Cathedral, King Street and is in aid of Breakthrough Breast Cancer.

Why Darth Vader embraced the dark side

2010-08-19T12:04:00.000+01:00

(h/t Scientia et Sapientia)

Transforming Christian Theology

2010-08-13T07:25:00.001+01:00

Another book review:

Philip Clayton, Transforming Christian Theology: For Church and Society, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010.

The blurb on the back of the book describes it as ‘a radical call to return religious reflection to ordinary believers’. Clayton begins by reciting the by now familiar story that Western society is in the midst of a fundamental transition – from the so-called modern worldview to what, for want of a better word, has come to be known as postmodernity. This transition presents a major challenge to our theologies, since in one way or another they have been adapted to the modern worldview that has been our cultural context for the past couple of centuries. As the transition gathers pace, our theologies appear increasingly irrelevant and out of touch with those around us.

Clayton suggests that what we need is not merely a restatement of theology in postmodern terms. That would merely perpetuate the academic elitism that has characterized (and marred) theology in the modern era. Rather, we need a different way of doing theology. His proposal is that theology should become storytelling: the telling and retelling of our stories in light of core Christian questions (Clayton lists seven such, though others might want to modify his list). He hopes that in doing so our theologies might become more inclusive, less inclined to divide the Christian community into so many warring camps. If such an approach were successful, it would indeed lead to ‘theologies that can transform the Church’.

Clayton then goes on to ‘theologies that can transform society’. He proposes that we go beyond the liberal/evangelical divide. What he wants is a progressive synthesis of the best of liberalism and evangelicalism – a synthesis he likens to the pragmatic idealism of Barack Obama. Such a synthesis, he believes, would empower our churches to become missional communities, drawing postmodern men and women to Christ and capable of transforming the societies in which we live.

A brief concluding section offers a collection of ‘conversations worth having’: discussion starters intended to foster the kinds of theological dialogue described earlier in the book.

Clayton offers us a bold vision for the future of Christian theologies, clearly written in (deceptively) straightforward language. There is much here that I found myself agreeing with. However, I remain uneasy about a number of points.

Much as I warm to his vision of an eirenic, inclusive way of doing theology, we should not forget that there are times when theology must be exclusive. There are times when it must denounce falsehood in order to protect the integrity of the Church and promote the well-being of those on the margins of society.

I am uncomfortable with his portrayal of the Church of the future because of its implicit endorsement of emergent churches at the expense of older Christian traditions. Such churches stand out because they have shown themselves adept at accommodating themselves to the (emergent) postmodern worldview. While that is no bad thing, this luxuriant new growth will only flourish if the roots are nourished. And that requires an explicit appreciation of Christian traditions of worship and spirituality.

I am also suspicious of some of Clayton’s language. Is the way forward really a (quasi-Hegelian?) progressive synthesis of liberal and conservative/evangelical. Liberal, conservative, progressive: this is the language of politics not theology. To use the language of secular politics to describe ourselves is to allow those outside the Christian community to define us. And as long as we allow ourselves to be defined by anyone other than Christ, we will struggle to be truly transformative.

And, of course, there is his suggestion that change can and should be managed. I’m sorry but Christian leaders should not be in the business of change management. That smacks too much of putting self in control. Ironical that there should be such a chapter in a book that also contains a chapter on ‘a theology of self-emptying for the Church’!

Philip Clayton has succeeded in producing a thought-provoking little book on what it means to do theology in a postmodern era. Read it: you won’t agree with everything he says, but the book will make you think.

Virgin Media speaks with forked tongue

2010-08-12T22:00:00.008+01:00

I have in front of me a handbill from Virgin Media that the postman thoughtfully left for me this morning. Its headline reads:

Free BlackBerry for just £15 a month

Someone has a very strange understanding of ‘free’!

Choir Boats

2010-07-23T15:07:00.000+01:00

Just a quick mention of a book I discovered yesterday. The Choir Boats by Daniel Rabuzzi is a dark fantasy set in Napoleonic London. This is what the blurb has to say about it:

What would you give to make good on the sins of your past? For merchant Barnabas McDoon, the answer is: everything.

When emissaries from a world called Yount offer Barnabas a chance to redeem himself, he accepts their price—to voyage to Yount with the key that only he can use to unlock the door to their prison. But bleak forces seek to stop him: Yount's jailer, a once-human wizard who craves his own salvation, kidnaps Barnabas's nephew. A fallen angel—a monstrous owl with eyes of fire—will unleash Hell if Yount is freed. And, meanwhile, Barnabas's niece, Sally, and a mysterious pauper named Maggie seek with dream-songs to wake the sleeping goddess who may be the only hope for Yount and Earth alike.

I have only read the first couple of chapters so far, but my first impression is that it is very good indeed. I am certainly enjoying it more than Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Even better, until the end of the month you can download a free copy of it from Wowio.

Climate Justice

2010-07-22T17:50:00.000+01:00

This is the longer version of a review I have just written for Alban Books’ Facebook page:

James B. Martin-Schramm, Climate Justice: Ethics, Energy, and Public Policy, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010.

Climate change is now very well documented, and its apparent connection with the combustion of fossil fuels and certain land use practices raises important ethical questions. In this important new book Martin-Schramm grapples with these issues at a public policy level, looking particularly at the ethical responsibility of industrialized countries, especially the United States.

In his opening chapter, he proposes an ethic of ecological justice based on the moral norms of sustainability, sufficiency, participation and solidarity. These norms are complemented by a series of twelve guidelines – equity, efficiency, adequacy, renewability, appropriateness, risk, peace, cost, employment, flexibility, timely decision-making and aesthetics – to create a toolbox of ethical resources that he applies to the issue of climate justice in the subsequent chapters.

Chapters 2 and 3 offer an optimistic survey of the range of energy options currently available to the United States. The first deals with so-called conventional energy options – coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power – and the second with alternative/renewable sources of energy – solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, marine. He mentions the concept of peak oil but does not dwell on its implications, opting for the relatively optimistic view that global oil production will not peak until about 2026. He is similarly optimistic about uranium supplies. However, he proposes that we should shift from conventional to renewable energy for environmental (and security) reasons and seems to believe this is a feasible (if difficult) way forward.

Chapter 4 explores international climate policy just prior to the Copenhagen summit at the end of 2009. Viewed in the light of the ethical toolbox developed in chapter 1, he commends the Greenhouse Development Rights Framework proposed by the Stockholm Environmental Institute.

His fifth chapter focusing on US climate policy paints a bleak picture of fine words unmatched by effective action. He concludes that “Failure to take aggressive action now to reduce emissions will perpetuate current rates of GHG emissions and condemn future generations to a rate and degree of warming unprecedented in human civilization’ (p. 158).

He concludes with a case study, examining greenhouse gas reduction strategies implemented by Luther College, Decorah, Iowa. This concluding chapter demonstrates how individual institutions and communities can implement energy policies that meet the ethical criteria spelled out at the beginning of the book.

As indicated above, my main reservation is that I think he is unduly optimistic about continuing conventional energy supplies and our capacity to move seamlessly from conventional to renewables. An increasing number of authorities believe that global oil production has already peaked. As for uranium, which he suggests is good for another 80 years or so, other estimates suggest that if there is a significant rise in civilian use production could peak within the decade. That reservation apart, Martin-Schramm has produced a very helpful practical survey of climate justice issues for anyone involved in the development of energy policies whether at community, company or national government level.