These scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged simply as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems to be inadequate.
Richard P. Feynman
The “science and religion” library has been steadily growing in recent decades, in part undoubtedly due to the healthy inspiration and provocation of the New Atheism movement, but the reception of individual books has markedly changed. When theoretical physicist and cosmologist Frank Tipler published his Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead back in 1994, it was greeted with almost universal disdain, which included its memorable description as a “masterpiece of pseudoscience” in a review by a fellow cosmologist in Nature.1 The furor was not centered on its empirical content: after all, a distinguished cosmologist such as Tipler was perfectly entitled to any hypothesis whatsoever about the state of the Universe many billions of years in the future. Instead, it was the uncritical and unsubstantiated metaphysical, theological, and ethical inferences Tipler liberally peppered his text with.
Tipler was undaunted and proceeded to publish The Physics of Christianity in 2007, again to rather negative reviews. In retrospect, he should have just bided his time—a decade or so later, a book harnessing fundamental physics to bolster, even indirectly, the Christian dogma would receive glowing praise and enthusiastic blurbs from both scientific and religious sides of the aisle. Thus, in the age of political and cultural populism, as well as wide rejection of the values of the Enlightenment, we get It Keeps Me Seeking: The Invitation from Science, Philosophy and Religion, from a trio of two physicists (Andrew Briggs and Andrew Steane) and a philosopher (Hans Halvorson), all quite distinguished academics and devout Christians. Although the differences in backgrounds and styles between the authors and Tipler are obvious (gentler souls of Oxbridge vs. a Southern firebrand preacher), they are also rather superficial. Briggs et al. are more careful and philosophically sophisticated, but does it really make a difference between the validity of the arguments (i) that the future cosmological c-boundary accounts for divine omniscience [Tipler], and (ii) that the phenomenon of quantum superposition informs our understanding of the Trinity [Briggs et al.]? In comparison with the patronizing imprecation of Briggs et al. that “we do not begin by insulting God with microscopes” (p. 16), Tipler's suggestion that the Star of Bethlehem was indeed a Type Ia/Ic supernova in M31—which actually exploded in 2,500,000 BC or so—even sounds more intellectually honest. This is in fact quite disappointing, since consilience of minds listed as the authors of It Keeps Me Seeking promised much more.
It Keeps Me Seeking is, curiously and paradoxically, both very ambitious and quite subdued. The aim of the book seems unclear—at moments it reads like a deeply personal memoir, while at other points it assumes a clearly polemical air, purporting to show the way of building accord between science and religion which is better than Gould's NOMA or the deism of the Enlightenment thinkers. Some chapters (and sub-chapters and sections and boxed insets, all structured to look more technical than they are) give a fresh popular view of scientific subjects like quantum mechanics, quantum information, or general relativity. At yet other points, the authors yearn to give a deep philosophical treatise, in the spirit of the Reformed epistemology of Plantinga, Lane Craig and similar thinkers—only to suddenly interrupt the narrative, by either a personal recollection or an unrelated subject, and never return to philosophically really interesting topics. Ironically for the authors who explicitly advocate “to try to discern what type of literature we are dealing with,” their narrative is too fragmented, unstructured, emotional, and heterogeneous to be considered a philosophical text. It is indeed quite puzzling what kind of literature we are dealing with here.
The authors exhibit a strange blindness to exactly this kind of inconsistency verging on auto-irony. Those who accuse Bertrand Russell (of all people) of sound-biting should not be so eager to repeat slogans such as “God is being to be known” or “those who try to undermine good evidence with poor arguments are confused” without analyzing the concepts such as “being” or “good evidence,” not to mention the perennial problem of what makes an argument poor. And people who quote research papers and reviews in quantum information and general relativity should not scrupulously avoid mentioning technical results in neurosciences hitting much closer to home.2 (Religious home, that is, in the context of the present book.)
It Keeps Me Seeking exhibits a kind of unhealthy obsession with Richard Dawkins, who's mentioned or quoted at least a dozen times (much more often than indicated by the index, which is unreliable in other respects as well, although this is probably due to the publisher). There is a constant barrage of appeal to emotions, which occasionally stoops to a kind of emotional blackmail of readers, as in bizarre statements such as: “If anyone thinks that a rabbit is no more worthy of attention than a dead piece of fur flapping in the breeze, then this book is not addressed to such a person” (p. 178). In spite of being quite a bunny-lover, I admit complete and utter failure to comprehend what “worthy of attention” means here, how is it measured, or what exact role the breeze plays.
The authors relentlessly repeat that they do not wish to waste time on bad arguments—and proceed to argue that it is a small cadre of “charlatans” that fights against teaching evolution in schools, as bad an argument in defense of politicized religion as any. They excel in application of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, although in a rather predictable fashion. Voodoo and animism are not “true” religions (pp. 233–234), but neither is deism of the Enlightenment (p. 43). Non-Christian religious traditions are mentioned sparingly, if at all. There is little in It Keeps Me Seeking which would appeal to a devout Hindu scientist; or a Buddhist, or a Zoroastrian, or a pagan. Even a Moslem monotheist might raise an eyebrow at the authors' suggestion that quantum superposition illuminates the key concept of Trinity (pp. 112–113). The authors would perhaps reply that they write about what they know best.3 True enough, but it is beyond the point if the unstated goal of the book is showing that there is no gap between science and religion. It seems as if the authors simply lacked the nerve (or an editor found it politically incorrect) to argue—in the authentic Tiplerian fashion—for the privileged position of Christianity among all world's religions in achieving consilience with science.
Strangely enough, the authors apply the tenets of early analytic philosophy in order to produce a large table of their private meaning of words usually employed in the debate (p. 36); this looks like “no true Scotsman” on steroids. In contrast to Tipler, but in accordance with the Reformed epistemology or the Templeton Foundation requests for proposals, the authors of It Keeps Me Seeking demonstrate philosophical sophistication on the level of syntax which does not really translate (pun intended) into adequate sophistication of semantics. Consider the following passage from the very beginning (p. 7):
In the above we have employed the word “God” as a title, or a signpost towards a certain kind of role. We can also learn more intimate names, such as “the liberator of the slaves from Egypt” or “the caller written about in the account of Abraham” or “the father of whom Jesus spoke” or “the one whom Michael Faraday recognized,” or “the reconciler known by Desmond Tutu.”
The extremely selective choice of examples is telling—we don't wish to mention those other intimate names, e.g., “the one served by Tomás de Torquemada” or “the one followed by Osama bin Laden” or “the one celebrated in the Westboro Baptist Church.” To the authors' credit, they later (sec. 19.4.3) admit that the “liberation from Egypt” story does have morally problematic (read: genocidal) elements, but the narrative becomes quite subdued and almost lawyerly by that point. The so-called Islamic State is mentioned once in passing, as an arbitrary example of misguided values rather than as a tangible prototype of the evils of politically organized religion. Galileo's trial has been whitewashed and its discussion contains lengthy exposition of the relativity of motion with the ultimate goal of supporting a bizarre pronouncement that “the Bible reports accurately the experience of living on planet Earth and observing the motion of the Sun” (p. 255), which is hard to describe as anything other than a piece of postmodernist/Orwellian doublethink. Crusades, religiously inspired genocides, banning and burning of books, ostracization of free-thinking people from Baruch Spinoza to Leo Tolstoy, crimes of Popes from the saeculum obscurum to the Borgias to Pius XII, the fatwa against Sir Salman Rushdie, Lord's Resistance Army, Aum Shinrikyo, suicide bombers, abortion clinic bombers, etc.—all that is presumably subsumed under the label of a few “charlatans.” Diligent bunch, those charlatans. These omissions are just made worse by comparatively great attention devoted to arguably first-world topics such as suffering in non-human nature (a sort of inverted apologetics for Darwinism) or the alleged medical miracles.
In terms of philosophy, Briggs et al. perform a moderately good job in showing inadequacy of arguments from design, including the so-called “Intelligent design” version of creationism. They are certainly correct in debunking “irreducible complexity” as an utterly unscientific notion and, to their credit, they have no patience for creationists' whining. They also do a solid job in portraying difficulties with the cosmological fine-tuning or “anthropic” arguments for divine Design, although it is rather transparent from their narrative that the job is done as a part of their campaign against deism/pantheism as the main Enlightenment scarecrow. In dealing with ontology of quantum mechanics, the authors both pose a Sokal-hoax-like question “can we learn anything about the human soul from quantum physics?” (p. 105, emphasis in the original)4 and then, in a smart move, refrain from giving any clear answer, deflecting it with the ageless shibboleth that it is ok to admit our ignorance.
On the plus side, the book has its moments of humor, and personal recollections of the authors are quite interesting and tell you something about the history and sociology of modern science. Parts written in dialog are markedly livelier and better written than the rest. On the technical side, It Keeps Me Seeking passes with flying colors. The volume is robustly made, as well as aesthetically pleasing. The graphic design of the book is attractive and unconventional.
All in all, the book of Briggs et al. is a strange addition to the vastly increasing library of works on the relationship of science and religion. It is far from being perfect, and some of its flaws are really hard to excuse. One should not take it at face value (or without a tonne of salt)—insofar as Tipler's cosmological musings of a quarter century ago were not taken at face value. Its anti-Enlightenment and antinaturalist attitude is, somewhat ironically, a reflection of the Zeitgeist more than a reflection of the authors' unique intellectual and spiritual journeys. Consequently, it is bound to find a dedicated, possibly even devout—pun intended—audience; whether for good or for ill, a prospective reader will need to find out for herself.
References
Although they also write a lot about metaphysics and other subjects in which their expertise (or indeed anyone else's) is very much open to criticism.
Sokal-hoax-like because if the question is legitimate, then it is very hard to deny legitimacy to Sokal's light-hearted suggestion that quantum gravity is highly relevant to gender roles in society.
Milan M. Ćirković is a research professor at the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, (Serbia) and a research associate of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University His primary research interests are in the fields of astrobiology (habitable zones, habitability of galaxies, SETI studies), philosophy of science (future studies, science in pop-culture, philosophy of physics), and risk analysis (global catastrophes, observation selection effects, epistemology of risk). He co-edited the widely-cited anthology Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford University Press, 2008), wrote three monographs (the latest being The Great Silence, Oxford University Press, 2018) and two anthologies of essays, and authored about 200 research and professional papers.
