Chapter 2. Materialism as an Anti-Religious Mythology
1. I am summarizing in my own words views that can be found expressed in countless books and articles.
2. Stanley L. Jaki, Bible and Science (Front Royal, Va.: Christendom Press, 1996), 57, 71.
3. Joseph Card. Ratzinger, In the Beginning, trans. Boniface Ramsey, O.P. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 13–14. For an excellent discussion of the stark contrast between the religion of ancient Israel and the pagan religions of neighboring peoples and of the ancient Near East generally, see Nahum M. Sarna, Understanding Genesis (New York: Schocken Books, 1970).
4. St. Thomas Aquinas, II Sententiarum 12,3,1.
5. The views of the church fathers on the Hexahemeron are reviewed in appendix 7 of volume X of the Blackfriars edition of the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, Ltd., 1967), 203–4.
6. St. Thomas Aquinas, II Sententiarum 12,3,1.
7. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia,68,1. St. Thomas is citing St. Augustine’s De Genesi ad Litteram I,18,19,21 (Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, 34, 260–62).
8. St. Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi ad Litteram), trans. John Hammond Taylor, in Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation, no. 41 (New York: Newman Press, 1982), 1: 42–43.
9. Jerome J. Langford, Galileo, Science and the Church (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971).
10. Quoted in Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 99–100.
11. The most important of these can be found in the standard compendium of doctrinal statements of the Catholic Church, the Enchiridion Symbolorum, Declarationem, et Definitionem, ed. Heinrich Denziger and Adolf Schönmetzer (Barcelona: Herder, 1976). This edition is hereafter abbreviated as DS.
12. There is a long history of ideologically motivated attempts to find other theories or other scientists persecuted by the Catholic Church to place as exhibits alongside of Galileo. Some leading examples: (a) Roger Bacon (1214–1294). Bacon was a Franciscan monk, philosopher, and man of science. For some period of time between 1277 and 1292 he was imprisoned by his order, for reasons that are not entirely clear, but which, according to the 1957 edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica, “could not have been of a scientific nature” and may have been largely caused by “his obnoxious attacks on his contemporaries.” (b) Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). Bruno was burned at the stake on February 18, 1600. Although he advocated the Copernican system and held the bold view for that time that there are an infinity of inhabited worlds, it appears to have been his philosophical and theological teachings that led to his condemnation, rather than his scientific speculations. (c) Bernhard Bolzano (1781–1848). Bolzano, one of the pioneers of nineteenth-century mathematics, was deposed from the chair of the philosophy of religion at the University of Prague on December 24, 1819. However, it was the state not the church that was behind his deposition, and this was not for his mathematical, scientific, or even theological ideas but for his political and social views. The imperial government in Vienna objected to Bolzano’s views on war, social rank, and civic obedience, and ordered therefore that he be charged with heresy. However, the ecclesiastical authorities consistently defended Bolzano as “an orthodox Catholic.” Nevertheless, Bolzano eventually was deposed by imperial decree. See the biographical introduction by Donald Steele, S.J., in Bernard Bolzano, Paradoxes of the Infinite (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950). (d) Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). Teilhard was a paleontologist and Jesuit priest. On June 30, 1962, the Vatican issued a monitum which warned against uncritical acceptance of his theories (Acta Apostolicae Sedis 54 [1962] 526). Some have claimed that it was Teilhard’s belief in biological evolution that brought him under suspicion by the church. The truth is that it was his theological and philosophical speculations. For a penetrating analysis of Teilhard’s theology, which makes a strong case that he was indeed heterodox in his religious views, see the appendix of Trojan Horse in the City of God, Dietrich von Hildebrand (Manchester, N.Y.: Sophia Institute Press, 1993). It should be noted that at no time did the Catholic Church ever express disapproval of the theory of evolution. The only official statements have been by Pope Pius XII in 1950, in Humani Generis, stating that biological evolution, even the evolution of the human body from the bodies of lower organisms, as a scientific hypothesis was not in itself contrary to Catholic teaching, and by Pope John Paul II acknowledging that evolution is now more than merely a hypothesis.
13. A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953). See also A. C. Crombie, The History of Science from Augustine to Galileo (New York: Dover, 1995), 2: 27–38.
14. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 178–80; Crombie, The History of Science from Augustine to Galileo, 2: 69–72; Carl B. Boyer, A History of Mathematics (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1968), 288–89.
15. Crombie, The History of Science from Augustine to Galileo, 2: 87–97, 102–7; Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959); Boyer, A History of Mathematics, 289–95; New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967).
16. Thomas P. McTighe, “Nicolas of Cusa as a Forerunner of Modern Science,” Proceedings: 10th International Congress on the History of Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), 619–22; Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne, and John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1973), 754; Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 3, II, ch. 15.
17. New Catholic Encyclopedia.
18. R. N. Wilson, Reflecting Telescope Optics, vol. I, Basic Design Theory and Its Historical Development (Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1996), 3–4, 469.
19. Johann Schreiber and William F. Rigge, “Jesuit Astronomy,” in Popular Astronomy 12 (1904).
20. Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Scribners, 1970); Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Encyclopedia Press, Inc., 1913).
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Peter Doig, A Concise History of Astronomy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), 298; New Catholic Encyclopedia.
24. Anton Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy (New York: Interscience Publishers, 1961), 352–53; Harlow Shapley and Helen E. Howarth, Source Book in Astronomy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 180–82.
25. Dictionary of Scientific Biography.
26. Robin Marantz Henig, The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2000).
27. A. H. Broderick, Father of Prehistory, the Abbé Henri Breuil: His Life and Times (New York: Morrow, 1963).
28. Andrei Deprit, “Monsignor Georges Lemaître,” in The Big Bang and Georges Lemaître, ed. André Berger (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984), 363–92; Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, Gravitation, 758.
29. Ralph F. Wolf, “Rich Man, Poor Man,” Scientific Monthly (Feb. 1952): 69–75; New Catholic Encyclopedia; J. A. Nieuwland, “Synthetic Rubber from a Gas,” Scientific American (Nov. 1935) 262ff.
30. Boyer, A History of Mathematics; Bolzano, Paradoxes of the Infinite.
31. Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony Books, 1996), 28.
32. Enchiridion Symbolorum, Declarationem, et Definitionem, DS 3009, 3010.
33. Ibid., DS 3033.
34. The First Vatican Council formally condemned the proposition that “the One true God, our Creator and Lord, cannot be known with certainty with the natural light of human reason through the things that are created.” Enchiridion Symbolorum, Declarationem, et Definitionem, DS 3026.
35. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. John Allen (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publications, 1928), bk. I, ch. VIII.
36. Avery Dulles, S.J., The Assurance of Things Hoped For: A Theology of Christian Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Chapter 10 deals with the grounding of faith. John Henry Card. Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979); Catechism of the Catholic Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994), secs. 150–60; Pope John Paul II, encyclical letter Fides et ratio (“Faith and Reason”).
37. St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus Haeresis 2,9,1, English translation in William A. Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1970), 86.
38. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 58.
39. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J., Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1967), 639–77.
40. John Maddox, What Remains to Be Discovered: Mapping the Secrets of the Universe, the Origins of Life, and the Future of the Human Race (New York: The Free Press, Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1998), 281.
41. David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 162.
42. Avshalom C. Elitzur, “Consciousness and the Incompleteness of the Physical Explanation of Behavior,” The Journal of Mind and Behavior 10 (1989): 1–20.
43. W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1960), 264; W. V. O. Quine “Minds and Verbal Dispositions,” in Mind and Language, Wolfson College Lectures, 1974 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 83–95.
44. The idea that the “self” does not exist goes back at least to David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 164–71. It can be found expressed or implied in many recent books about the mind written from a materialist point of view, where the self is regarded as a kind of fictitious actor in the internal “scenarios” that make up what we call consciousness.
Chapter 3. Scientific Materialism and Nature
1. In the words of E. O. Wilson, “Virtually all contemporary scientists and philosophers expert on the subject agree that the mind, which comprises consciousness and rational process, is the brain at work.” E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 98. The prevailing view among philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists is that consciousness, to the extent that it has any reality at all, is merely a reflection of physical processes in the brain, and has no causal influence of its own at all. Consciousness is something entirely passive. This view is so widespread that Avshalom Elitzur, a philosopher and scientist who dissents from it, says, “I think one may talk here about the dogma of passivity.” Elitzur, “Consciousness and the Incompleteness of the Physical Explanation of Behavior.” For a review of contemporary thinking about the mind, see Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.
2. In 1997, the chess program Deep Blue defeated world champion Garry Kasparov 3.5–2.5 in a six-game match. For an expert discussion of the match and the current chess abilities of computers, see Boris Gulko, “Is Chess Finished?” in Commentary (July 1997), 45.
3. According to Democritus of Abdera and the Atomist school of philosophy, nothing is real except “atoms and the void.” Copleston, A History of Philosophy, 1, I, 144–47.
4. See, for example, Gould, Full House, 17–20.
5. There are about 1080 protons and neutrons in the observable universe, and about 4 × 1051 in the earth, giving a ratio of about 2.5 × 1028 to 1. The earth’s oceans have about 1.4 × 1024 cm3 of water, which is in the same ratio to a droplet of 0.06 mm3.
6. Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 222.
7. Dirac’s comments in this paragraph are quoted in Abraham Pais, Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 290–91.
8. Hermann Weyl, The Open World: Three Lectures on the Metaphysical Implications of Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1932), 54–55.
1. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. II, ch. 38, trans. James F. Anderson (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 2: 112–14.
2. The Fourth Lateran Council declared that “from the beginning of time [God] formed created things out of nothing” (“ab initio temporis utramque de nihilo condidit creaturam”), Enchiridion Symbolorum, Declarationem, et Definitionem, DS 800, DS 3002.
3. The word eternal is commonly used to mean “of infinite duration.” However, it can also mean “timeless” or “outside of time,” and does so when applied to God. For a good discussion of the two senses of the word see Mortimer Adler, The Great Ideas, A Lexicon of Western Thought (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1952), 194–201.
4. Although it is conventional to assert that modern physics has dispensed with final causes, this is debatable. There are many cases in modern physics where the simplest way to analyze a physical situation or to get the answer to a physics problem is by reference to a future state or states of the system. This is true, for instance, of systems that are approaching an equilibrium state. (For example, a hot cup of coffee will cool until it reaches the same temperature as the circumambient air.) More generally, the laws of classical physics can be formulated as “action principles,” according to which any physical system will take the path leading from its initial state to its final state, which has the least “action.” The analogous formulation of quantum theory is the so-called “path integral.”
5. P. C. W. Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1983), 42.
1. This is a common misunderstanding of the expanding universe. The well-known science fiction writer Poul Anderson based an entire book, Tau Zero, on this misconception.
2. There is a subtlety here. In a “closed universe,” where the volume of the universe is always finite, the total volume of the universe gets smaller as one goes back toward the Big Bang, and is zero at the first instant. In an “open universe” the volume of the universe is infinite at all times. It is less confusing, in this case, to talk about a finite patch of the universe rather than the whole thing. The volume of any finite patch of an open universe gets smaller as one goes back toward the Big Bang, and is zero at the Big Bang.
3. Abraham Pais took the title of his remarkable scientific biography of Einstein from this saying. Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
4. Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, Gravitation, 759.
5. In 1917, Willem de Sitter found a solution of Einstein’s equations that describes an exponentially expanding universe. This solution is not relevant to describing the cosmic expansion discovered by Slipher, Hubble, and Humason. However, it does describe the expansion that occurs during the “inflationary” phases of the early universe, according to most present models of inflation. (See the section titled The Eternal Inflation Scenario) Moreover, if it turns out that there is a small cosmological constant, as some recent evidence suggests, then eventually the expansion of the universe will approximate more and more closely the de Sitter model.
6. Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: Norton, 1992), 32.
7. These expressions of distaste for the idea of a cosmic beginning are reported by Jastrow in God and the Astronomers, the Einstein quote on p. 21 and the Eddington and Nernst quotes on p. 104.
8. A. Linde, D. Linde, and A. Mezhlumian, “From the Big Bang to the Theory of a Stationary Universe,” Physical Review D49 (1994): 1783.
9. Stephen G. Brush, “How Cosmology Became a Science,” Scientific American (Aug. 1992), 62–70.
10. It should be noted that Eddington was a practicing Quaker. Presumably his initial distaste for the Big Bang Theory was based on other grounds than hostility to religion.
11. The radiation in the early, “radiation dominated” period of the universe’s history was not all in the form of light. Much of it was in the form of neutrinos, and, earlier, in the form of other particles as well.
12. There are some who continue to argue against the Big Bang Theory. See Eric J. Lerner, The Big Bang Never Happened (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1991). However, the scientific evidence for the Big Bang is overwhelming.
Chapter 7. Was the Big Bang Really the Beginning?
1. St. Augustine is commonly misquoted as saying, in answer to the question of what God was doing before he created Heaven and Earth, that he was creating Hell for those who ask such questions. This mistake is repeated, for instance, by Robert Jastrow in God and the Astronomers. This is what St. Augustine actually said: “I do not give the answer that someone is said to have given, evading by a joke the force of the objection: ‘He was preparing hell,’ he said, ‘for those prying into such deep subjects.’ … I do not answer in this way. I would rather respond, ‘I do not know,’ concerning what I do not know than say something for which a man inquiring about such profound matters is laughed at, while the one giving a false answer is praised.” Confessions, trans. John K. Ryan (New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1960), bk. 11, ch. 12.
2. St. Augustine, Confessions, bk. 11, ch. 30.
3. Ibid., bk. 11, ch. 13.
4. Ibid.
5. As noted by Steven Weinberg, “Book XI of Augustine’s Confessions contains a famous discussion of the nature of time, and it seems to have become a tradition to quote from this chapter in writing about quantum cosmology.” Reviews of Modern Physics 61 (1989): 15, n15.
6. Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1946), 373.
7. Most of the philosophers of antiquity taught that the world was eternal. This was certainly true of Aristotle, and probably true of Plato. While Plato in the Timaeus speaks of the Demiurge forming the world, many scholars doubt that he meant this myth to refer to an actual creation in time, and in any event he believed that the matter from which the world is formed is eternal. Some of the later Platonists, such as Plutarch, did believe that the world had a beginning in time. But these thinkers were essentially monotheists. Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher of the early first century, spoke of time having a beginning, as did some other neo-Platonists, but it is not until St. Augustine that the implications of this were fully appreciated and we find such statements as “There was no ‘then’” before the world began.
8. J. Khoury, B. A. Ovrut, N. Seiberg, P. J. Steinhardt, and N. Turok, “From Big Crunch to Big Bang,” Physical Review D65 (2002) 086702; P. J. Steinhardt and N. Turok, “Cosmic Evolution in a Cyclic Universe,” Physical Review D65 (2002) 126003.
9. A universe that is inflating with constant Hubble parameter has a space-time described by the de Sitter solution of Einstein’s equations. But the complete de Sitter solution can be shown actually to describe a universe that contracts from t = -infinity until some finite time, and then expands again to t = +infinity. Such a solution, while it has no beginning in time, would be regarded as “unphysical” by most physicists. It is therefore doubtful that “eternal inflation” can have been going on without a beginning.
Chapter 8. What If the Big Bang Was Not the Beginning?
1. Even the fabric of space shows the effects of the passage of time. The geometry of space-time itself has entropy associated with it. An interesting technical discussion of this is Roger Penrose, “Singularities and Time-asymmetry,” in General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 612–13, 629–30.
2. Ratzinger, In the Beginning, 22.
Chapter 9. The Argument from Design
1. See footnote 3 of chapter 2.
2. Jacob Neusner, Confronting Creation: How Judaism Reads Genesis, an Anthology of Genesis Rabbah (University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 15.
3. Genesis Rabbah Parashiyyot I.I.2, in Neusner, Confronting Creation, 15, 26.
4. Neusner, Confronting Creation, 15.
5. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, 31.
6. See, for example, the Epistle to the Corinthians, written ca. 96 A.D., by Clement of Rome, especially chapters 19 and 20, in Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, ed. Betty Radice, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (New York: Penguin, 1968).
7. Minucius Felix, Octavius 18,4, in Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers, 1: 109.
8. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 58.
9. William Paley, The Works of William Paley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 4: 1.
10. Lord Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays (London: Longman, Green and Company, 1898), 2: 280.
11. Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, Mass.: G. and C. Merriam Company, 1970).
12. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 58.
13. Ibid., 59.
Chapter 10. The Attack on the Argument from Design
1. Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).
2. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 6.
3. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker.
4. Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 6.
5. Gretchen Vogel, “Finding Life’s Limits,” in Science 282 (1998), 1399. This article reports on the conclusions reached by scientists at the Workshop on Size Limits of Very Small Microorganisms, held 22–23 October 1998.
6. William A. Dembski in “Science and Design,” First Things 86 (October 1998): 21.
Chapter 11. The Design Argument and the Laws of Nature
1. James R. Newman, “Laplace,” in Lives in Science, a Scientific American Book (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), 51. According to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, Laplace died a Catholic.
2. Banesh Hoffmann, Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 141.
Chapter 13. “What Immortal Hand or Eye?”
1. Anthony Zee, Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 280–1.
2. Theorists have discovered that superstring theories are really limiting cases of something they call “M-theory.” I will nevertheless keep using the term superstring theory for it in the text.
3. John Horgan, The End of Science (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 69.
4. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. N. Pike (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 50.
5. Weyl, The Open World, 28–29.
6. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989).
7. Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: the Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: The Free Press, 1997).
8. Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers, trans. Peter Heath (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 37.
9. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker.
1. Epistle to Diognetus, 10, in Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, ed. Betty Radice, 181.
2. Victor Stenger, Not by Design: The Origin of the Universe (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1988), 12.
3. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (Glasgow: William Collins, 1977), 148.
4. Richard Dawkins, “Science and God: A Warming Trend?,” Science 277 (1997), 890.
5. Gould, Full House, 17.
6. Ibid., 18.
7. Ibid., 14, 18, 29, 41.
8. Brandon Carter, in Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observation, ed. M. S. Longair (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1974), 291.
Chapter 15. The Anthropic Coincidences
1. Those interested in reading more about anthropic coincidences can turn to J. D. Barrow and F. J. Tipler, The Cosmological Anthropic Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), and P. C. W. Davies, The Accidental Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
2. Barrow and Tipler, The Cosmological Anthropic Principle, ch. 5, sec. 5.5.
3. The twenty-five elements that are used in the human body are, with their atomic numbers, hydrogen (1), boron (5), carbon (6), nitrogen (7), oxygen (8), fluorine (9), sodium (11), magnesium (12), silicon (14), phosphorus (15), sulfur (16), chlorine (17), potassium (19), calcium (20), vanadium (23), chromium (24), manganese (25), iron (26), cobalt (27), copper (29), zinc (30), selenium (34), molybdenum (42), tin (50), and iodine (53).
4. The material in this section is based on Barrow and Tipler, The Cosmological Anthropic Principle, 322.
5. V. Agrawal, S. M. Barr, J. F. Donoghue, and D. Seckel, “Viable Range of the Mass Scale of the Standard Model,” Physical Review D57 (1998): 5480; “Anthropic Considerations in Multiple-domain Theories of the Scale of Electroweak Symmetry Breaking,” Physical Review Letters 80 (1998): 1822.
6. T. E. Jeltema and M. Sher, “The Triple-alpha Process and Anthropically Allowed Values for the Weak Scale,” Physical Review D61 (2000): 017301.
7. Steven Weinberg has suggested that the value of the cosmological constant may be explained by the Weak Anthropic Principle. S. Weinberg, “Anthropic Bound on the Cosmological Constant,” Physical Review Letters 57 (1987): 2607.
8. I am defining the spatial curvature to be the ratio of the square of the horizon length to the square of the radius of curvature of space.
9. The material in this section is based on Barrow and Tipler, The Cosmological Anthropic Principle, ch. 4, sec. 4.8.
Chapter 16. Objections to the Idea of Anthropic Coincidences
1. Communication from an editor of Physical Review to authors of first paper cited in note 5 of chapter 15.
2. Brandon Carter, in Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observation, 291.
3. A. D. Sakharov, Nobel lecture, read by Yelena Bonner at Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, Oslo, Norway, Dec. 11, 1975.
4. B. J. Carr and M. J. Rees, “The anthropic principle and the structure of the physical world,” Nature 278 (1979), 605.
5. Yakov B. Zel’dovich, Pis’ma v A. Zh. (Letters to the Astrophysical Journal) 7 (1981): 579.
6. Barrow and Tipler, The Cosmological Anthropic Principle.
7. S. Weinberg, Physical Review Letters 59 (1987): 2607.
8. L. Okun, “Fundamental Constants in Physics,” in Sakharov Memorial Lectures in Physics, ed. L. V. Kaldyshand and V. Ya. Fainberg (New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 1992), 2: 819–40.
9. A. Linde, Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1990).
10. A. Vilenkin, “Open Universes, Inflation, and the Anthropic Principle,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 38 (1999): 3135; J. Garriga, T. Tanaka, and A. Vilenkin, “Density Parameter and the Anthropic Principle,” Physical Review D60 (1999): 023501.
11. N. Turok and S. Hawking, Physics Letters B432 (1998): 271.
12. G. Feinberg and R. Shapiro, Life Beyond Earth (New York: William Morrow, 1980).
13. The minimal supersymmetric SU(5) model.
14. B. J. Carr and M. J. Rees, Nature 278 (1979), 605.
Chapter 17. Alternative Explanations of the Anthropic Coincidences
1. Barrow and Tipler, The Cosmological Anthropic Principle.
2. V. Agrawal, S. M. Barr, J. F. Donoghue, and D. Seckel, Physical Review Letters 80 (1998): 1822; Physical Review D57 (1998): 5480.
3. David Kellogg Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
4. The philosopher John Leslie has argued along similar lines. J. Leslie, Universes (London: Routledge, 1989).
Chapter 18. Why Is the Universe So Big?
1. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. T. S. Eliot (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1958), 61.
2. Bertrand Russell, “My Mental Development,” in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1944), 19–20.
3. Quoted in J. C. Eccles and K. R. Popper, The Self and Its Brain (New York: Springer, 1977), 61.
4. Copleston, A History of Philosophy, 3, II: 47–48.
5. The arguments in this section are taken from B. J. Carr and M. J. Rees, Nature 278 (1979), 605.
6. αG is defined to be Newton’s constant times the square of the proton mass.
1. St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus Haeresis 4,4,3.
2. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 176.
3. Catechism of the Catholic Church, sec. 1705.
4. Ibid., sec. 33.
5. Simon Easteal, Chris Collet, and David Betty, The Mammalian Molecular Clock (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990).
6. Eccles and Popper, The Self and Its Brain, 338.
7. Malcolm W. Browne, “Who Needs Jokes?: Human brain has a ticklish spot,” in The New York Times, March 10, 1998, sec. F, p. 1.
8. Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (New York: Dover, 1951), 4–5.
9. Since I say that physical determinism is incompatible with human freedom, it may be wondered why divine foreknowledge is not also so. The important point is that physical determinism implies that a human decision can be completely understood solely in terms of what the material constituents of the human body were doing before the decision was made and without reference to the human “will.” But the fact that God “foreknows” a human decision does not make it unfree, since what God knows is precisely that the decision will be made freely. That is, God foreknows our acts as what they truly are, acts of a free will. As St. Augustine pointed out, God’s knowledge of future human decisions no more makes them unfree than our own knowledge of past human decisions makes them unfree. See St. Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will, trans. Anna S. Benjamin and L. H. Hackstaff (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co. Inc., 1964).
10. Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind: The Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 202.
11. Catechism of the Catholic Church, sec. 365.
Chapter 20. Determinism and Free Will
1. The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum theory will be explained in chapter 25. In a certain sense the MWI makes quantum theory deterministic. There is no unpredictable “collapse of the wavefunction” (see chapter 24, esp. the section titled Measurements). Rather, the wavefunction at one time uniquely determines it at all later times. Some have suggested that quantum theory even in the MWI allows free will. The point is that the unique wavefunction has a multiplicity of “branches” corresponding to different paths the world can take. When faced with a choice of alternatives, “I” split up into many alter egos, each of whom goes down a different branch and experiences a different one of the alternatives. Perhaps, it is suggested, I can decide which branch “I” will experience—i.e., which alter ego “I” will be. I do not regard this as genuine free will. But if it is, that would only strengthen the case I am making here that quantum theory creates an opening for free will, since it would no longer rely upon the traditional interpretation of quantum theory.
2. John R. Lucas, The Freedom of the Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); Eccles and Popper, The Self and Its Brain; David Hodgson, The Mind Matters: Consciousness and Choice in a Quantum World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Michael Lockwood, Mind, Brain, and Quantum: The Compound ‘I’, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Euan Squires, Conscious Mind in the Physical World (London: Adam Hilger, IOP Publishing, Ltd., 1990); H. P. Stapp, Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993).
3. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 157.
4. Penrose, Shadows of the Mind, 350.
5. Ibid., 348–49, 367–69.
6. F. Beck and J. C. Eccles, “Quantum aspects of consciousness and the role of consciousness,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 89 (1992): 11357–61; J. C. Eccles, How the Self Controls Its Brain (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1994).
7. Weyl, The Open World, 54–55.
8. John Horgan, The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 247.
9. Wilson, Consilience, 119.
10. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991).
11. Gould, Full House, 28.
12. Quoted in “Science and Religion: Bridging the great divide,” George Johnson, The New York Times, June 30, 1998, sec. F, p.4.
13. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, revised by L. F. Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), 2: 82.
14. Ibid., 4: 239.
Chapter 21. Can Matter “Understand”?
1. Mortimer J. Adler, Intellect: Mind over Matter (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1990), ch. 4.
2. According to Aristotle the human mind, in contrast to the minds of animals, had an immaterial component, which he called the active intellect (Nous). “The active intellect abstracts forms from the [mental] images or phantasmata, which, when received in the passive intellect, are actual concepts.” Copleston, A History of Philosophy, 1, II, 71. The immateriality of the active intellect has been held by many philosophers ancient, mediaeval, and modern.
3. John McCarthy, “Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines,” in Philosophical Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence, ed. Martin Ringle (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979).
4. Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), 3.
5. Maddox, What Remains to Be Discovered, 281.
6. George Johnson, “Does the Universe Follow Mathematical Law?” The New York Times, Feb. 10, 1998.
7. Stanislas Dehaene, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
8. Eccles and Popper, The Self and Its Brain; K. R. Popper, Knowledge and the Mind-Body Problem: In Defense of Interaction (London: Routledge, 1994).
9. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Doubleday, 1959), ch. 3.
10. Sharon Begley, “Thinking Will Make It So,” Newsweek, April 5, 1999, p. 64.
11. Weyl, The Open World, 31–32.
12. J. B. S. Haldane, The Inequality of Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932).
13. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 33.
14. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (London: Bantam, 1988), 12.
15. Cyril Bailey, Epicurus: The Extant Remains (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926).
16. J. B. S. Haldane, “I repent an error,” in The Literary Guide (April 1, 1954), 7, 29.
17. Penrose, Shadows of the Mind, 147–50.
18. Kitty Ferguson, The Fire in the Equations: Science, Religion, and the Search for God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1994), 63.
19. Arguments similar to the ones I am developing here have been put forward by Prof. Katherin Rogers of the University of Delaware.
20. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, 24, 5.
21. G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 70; quoted in Ferguson, The Fire in the Equations, 63.
22. Quoted in Weyl, The Open World, 10–11.
23. Penrose, Shadows of the Mind, 55–56.
24. St. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, bk. 2, ch. 8. The example St. Augustine used was not well chosen, being in essence that a + a = 2 × a for any a, which can be taken to be a definition of multiplication by 2. But if he had used a + a = a × 2, or equivalently 2 × a = a × 2, he would have been using the same example as Penrose, with b taken to be the specific number 2.
25. Sir Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. Andrew Motte (New York: Daniel Adee, 1848), 507.
Chapter 22. Is the Human Mind Just a Computer?
1. I am being a little careless in stating these rules. In the axiom, x does not stand for any string of symbols without restriction. For example, x should not be something like a = b. Similarly, the rule of inference must be stated more carefully. For example, it should not allow x or y to stand for a fragment like “)”.
2. Actually Gödel proved two closely related theorems, the first and second incompleteness theorems, which are sometimes referred to together as Gödel’s Theorem. I shall not bother to distinguish between them. For a semi-popular account see Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Gödel’s Proof (New York: New York University Press, 1958). I present a restatement of Nagel and Newman’s explanation in appendix C.
3. In his original proof, Gödel had to use the somewhat stronger assumption of what is called “ω-consistency rather than mere consistency. However, in 1936 J. Barkley Rosser proved the same results using consistency.
4. This is Gödel’s second theorem. See footnote 2 for this chapter.
5. John R. Lucas, “Minds, machines, and Gödel,” Philosophy 36 (1961): 120, reprinted in The Modeling of Mind, ed. K. M. Sayre and F. J. Crossen (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963); Lucas, The Freedom of the Will.
6. Lucas, “Minds, machines, and Gödel,” in The Modeling of Mind, 255.
7. Quoted in Penrose, Shadows of the Mind, 128.
8. Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
9. “Multiple Book Review of The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4), 1990, 643–705.
10. Penrose, Shadows of the Mind.
11. See especially “Penrose’s Gödelian Argument: A Review of Shadows of the Mind,” by Solomon Feferman, Psyche 2 (7), May 1995. Penrose replied to nine prominent critics in “Beyond the Doubting of a Shadow: A Reply to Commentaries on Shadows of the Mind,” Psyche 2 (23), Jan. 1996.
12. Penrose argues that any explanation of the human mind must involve as-yet-unknown laws of physics and as-yet-unknown “non-computational” mechanisms. See Shadows of the Mind, part II, and especially sec. 4.2.
13. Penrose, Shadows of the Mind, 84–86.
14. Lucas, “Mind, machines, and Gödel,” in The Modeling of Mind, 264.
15. Ibid., 266.
16. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 32.
Chapter 23. What Does the Human Mind Have That Computers Lack?
1. Penrose, Shadows of the Mind, 56.
2. Ibid., 109. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 13–14. It is interesting to compare what Penrose and Lonergan have to say on the subject of understanding what the natural numbers are.
3. Quoted in Stapp, Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics, 11.
4. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 639–77.
5. The simplicity of God was defined as an article of Christian faith by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The council declared that God is a “substantia seu natura simplex omnino” (“substance or nature entirely simple”). (Enchiridion Symbolorum, Declarationem, et Definitionem, DS 800, DS 3002.)
6. St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus Haeresis 2,13,3, trans. Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers, 87.
7. Catechism of the Catholic Church, sec. 365.
Chapter 24. Quantum Theory and the Mind
1. Quantum electrodynamics is the most precisely tested theory in all of science. The “anomalous magnetic moment” of the electron has been calculated using quantum electrodynamics to be ae × 1012 = 1159652201.2 +- 2.1 +- 27.1, and measured in the laboratory to be ae ×1012 = 1159652188.4 +- 4.3. (The numbers after +- are the theoretical and experimental uncertainties.) This is an agreement to one part in a hundred million. That is equivalent to calculating the distance between a point in California and a point in New York and getting it right to within two inches. The anomalous magnetic moment is a purely quantum effect.
2. Quoted in Squires, Conscious Mind in the Physical World, 183.
3. P. C. W. Davies and J. R. Brown, The Ghost in the Atom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 75.
4. Eugene P. Wigner, “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question,” in The Scientist Speculates, ed. I. J. Good (London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1961), reprinted in Eugene P. Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections: Scientific Essays (Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1979), 176.
5. John von Neumann, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, English translation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1955).
6. Fritz London and Edmond Bauer, La Théorie de l’Observation en Mècanique Quantique (Paris: Herrmann and Cie., 1939).
7. Tom Banks, “The State of Matrix Theory,” Nuclear Physics B (Proc. Suppl.) 62A-C (1998): 341.
8. Rudolf Peierls, “Observation in Quantum Mechanics and the ‘Collapse of the Wavefunction,’” in Symposium on the Foundations of Modern Physics, ed. Pekka Lahti and Peter Mittelstaedt (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1985), 193.
9. Davies and Brown, The Ghost in the Atom, 74.
10. In quantum theory one also has coordinates and equations of motion for them. However, they have a different status. The coordinates are operators in a Hilbert space, and the equations of motion are operator equations. Their connection to what is actually observed is not quite as straightforward as in classical physics.
11. In special cases, quantum probability amplitudes may correspond to a probability of 100 percent, which would be certainty, of course. I should therefore say that generally speaking the probability amplitudes given by the Schrödinger evolution do not correspond to definite outcomes.
12. Davies and Brown, The Ghost in the Atom, 74.
13. Peierls, “Observation in Quantum Mechanics and the ‘Collapse of the Wavefunction,’” 193.
14. Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections, 172.
15. Davies and Brown, The Ghost in the Atom, 74.
16. Weyl, The Open World, 54–55.
17. Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections, 172.
18. Peierls, “Observation in Quantum Mechanics and the ‘Collapse of the Wavefunction,’” 193.
19. I am indebted to a discussion with Peierls for giving me a better understanding of his thinking on this subject. He emphasized that it is not simply the non-unitary nature of the collapse that leads one to the conclusion that it cannot be described by the laws of physics, but rather its unpredictability. One could imagine a non-unitary evolution that was nevertheless predictable.
20. Wigner’s views changed significantly toward the end of his life, but not, it should be said, in the direction of materialism. Wigner became convinced, on the basis of some work by H. Dieter Zeh, that it was not realistic to talk about macroscopic systems as being “isolated,” and that therefore the density matrix of any macroscopic object cannot evolve in a unitary way. Consequently, he concluded that in the process of measurement the quantum theoretical description breaks down at a point before the consciousness of the observer is affected, and in particular at the point when a macroscopic object (such as a measuring apparatus) becomes involved. He therefore concluded that the collapse of the wavefunction happens as a result of the interaction of quantum systems with macroscopic systems, rather than as a result of the knowledge of the outcome entering the consciousness of the observer. He felt, however, that if anything these new considerations put the phenomena of consciousness even farther outside the domain of validity of present quantum theory. I believe that Peierls’s way of framing the argument is unaffected by these considerations.
21. Stapp, Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics.
22. Squires, Conscious Mind in the Physical World.
23. Davies and Brown, The Ghost in the Atom, 64.
24. W. Heisenberg, Daedalus 87 (1958): 99, quoted by Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections, 172.
25. Davies and Brown, The Ghost in the Atom, 47.
26. Squires, Conscious Mind in the Physical World, 192.
27. Peierls, “Observation in Quantum Mechanics and the ‘Collapse of the Wavefunction,’” 194.
28. Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections, 176.
Chapter 25. Alternatives to Traditional Quantum Theory
1. Hume’s prescription for how to carry on in practical life despite holding radically skeptical philosophical views was “carelessness and inattention,” that is, to ignore in practice the implications of one’s theory. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 144.
2. “[The] debate [on the conceptual foundations of quantum theory] has been argued at various levels since quantum mechanics was first formulated, but the standard interpretation, the so-called Copenhagen interpretation, has stood the test of time and is widely accepted. Alternative formulations appear ultimately to yield the same description. The major advance in the past thirty years was the analysis of John Bell of possible incompleteness in the quantum description. He proposed an experimental test that was carried out and which provided dramatic evidence for the standard formulation. So unless the debate leads to new experimental tests or provides a simpler description of known facts, it will continue to lie outside of the mainstream of physics.” Daniel Kleppner, “Physics and Common Nonsense,” in The Flight from Science and Reason, ed. Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, and Martin W. Lewis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 129–30.
3. T. Banks, “The State of Matrix Theory,” 341.
4. D. Bohm, “A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of ‘Hidden Variables,’” parts I and II, Physical Review 85 (1952), 166–79, 180–93; D. Dürr, S. Goldstein, and N. Zanghi, “Quantum Equilibrium and the Origin of Quantum Uncertainty,” Journal of Statistical Physics 67 (1992): 843–907, and references therein.
5. Albert Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), 55–56.
6. H. Everett, Review of Modern Physics 29 (1957): 454–62; The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, ed. Bryce S. de Witt and Neill Graham (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).
7. See the analysis of one such attempt in Euan Squires, “On an Alleged ‘Proof’ of the Quantum Probability Law,” Physics Letters A145 (1990): 67.
8. See, for example, J. S. Bell, “Quantum Mechanics for Cosmologists,” in Quantum Gravity, ed. Christopher J. Isham, Roger Penrose, and Dennis W. Sciama, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); and David Bohm and Basil J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (London: Routledge, 1993).
Chapter 26. Is a Pattern Emerging?
1. Penrose, Shadows of the Mind, 28.
2. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 128.
3. Ibid., 168, 379.
4. Nagel and Newman, Gödel’s Proof, 101.
5. Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections, 222.
6. Mark Steiner, The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 13–14.
Appendix A. God, Time, and Creation
1. Many authors express the view that the notion of causality is intrinsically bound up with the notion of time, and that it is a metaphysical necessity that all causes precede their effects in time. However, it would be more accurate to say that our notions of time are bound up with our notions of causality. A careful consideration of the problem of the “arrow of time” in physics leads to the conclusion that the past/future distinction is rooted in the causal structure of the world. The notion of causality would seem to be the more general and fundamental one.
2. See, for example, Trinh Xuan Thuan, The Secret Melody: And Man Created the Universe, trans. Storm Dunlap (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 242–43.
3. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. I, trans. Anton Pegis, F.R.S.C. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 86–95.
4. Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. L. K. Shook, C.S.B. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pt. I, ch. 3.
5. Ibid., 68.
6. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. II, 112.
7. Ibid., 114.
8. Ibid., 113. Unfortunately, the examples that Aquinas used to illustrate the concept of a cause that is simultaneous with its effect were based on naive observations of the physical world or on Aristotelian physics. I have tried to give a better example in the text.
9. Of course, if a mass were to be suddenly moved, the gravitational field at some distance from that mass would only change in response a finite time later. Information cannot propagate faster than the speed of light.
10. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, 67–68.
11. I am not concerned in this appendix to argue for the validity of the First Mover proof. My purpose is only to clarify its meaning. For a claim by a theist that the First Mover proof is invalid, see Mortimer J. Adler, How to Think about God, (New York: Macmillan, 1980). For a proof of the existence of God by a recent philosopher that is essentially along the lines laid out by St. Thomas Aquinas, see Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, ch. XIX. Lonergan considered the famous five proofs of St. Thomas to be valid and to be contained in his own proof. (To understand Lonergan’s proof, one has to have worked through the preceding parts of his book. Though Lonergan’s book is by no means easy reading, it contains formulation of traditional Thomistic philosophy in terms that I think would make sense to many contemporary physicists. They would also find its epistemology reasonable and, given the recent attacks on the objectivity of scientific knowledge, refreshing.)
12. Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 122, quoted in Davies, God and the New Physics, 42.
13. Davies, God and the New Physics, 42.
14. Don Page, “Hawking’s Timely Story,” Nature 332 (21 April 1988), 743.
15. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. II, 46.
16. St. Augustine, Confessions, 287.
17. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 639–77, especially 676–77.
18. See, for example, Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable, 77. Dawkins argues that God, as creator of the universe, would have to be more complicated than the universe, and therefore would himself stand in need of being explained.
19. See, for example, Thuan, The Secret Melody, 241.
20. Stenger, Not by Design, 7. See also Ferguson, The Fire in the Equations, 137–45.
21. Quoted in Davies, God and the New Physics, 122.
22. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 676–77.
23. St. Augustine, Confessions, bk. 11, 283.
24. Genesis Rabbah Parashiyyot I.I.2 (citing Prov. 8:22), quoted and discussed in Neusner, Confronting Genesis, 15, 26.
25. The divine Wisdom is personified in several books of the Old Testament, notably Proverbs, Wisdom, Baruch, and Sirach.
26. St. Augustine, Confessions, 284.
27. Neusner, Confronting Genesis, 15.
Appendix B. Attempts to Explain the Beginning Scientifically
1. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 174.