Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society. Bill Bryson
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God. Picking up on a tradition that originates in Judaism, he posited space as the medium through which the deity’s presence permeates the world. Space, he said, was God’s sensorium, the substrate through which He sees all, feels all, knows all. Space was indeed synonymous with divine Knowing. As President of the Royal Society Newton understood that the new science had to do much more than make empirical predictions – it had to be acceptable to reasonable society. Galileo and Descartes had both run afoul of such expectations about what a cosmology should deliver and Newton was determined not to make the same deistic mistake. As Britain’s leading representative for science, he comprehended that neither the people nor the patrons would support the endeavour if it was seen to be in conflict with wider spiritual needs. The Royal Society stood on the side of reason, but it also allied itself with the state, the King and God. All this wasn’t just a propaganda exercise, for psychologically speaking, Newton needed reasons to accept the new space himself – God made the void ‘reasonable’ to him.
Newton had good cause to worry, for soon after his death less religious minds stripped the theological embellishments from his system leaving humans alone in the void. Increasingly in the age of science we have confronted the dilemma that if we want to claim something is real, we have to posit its position in physical space. If one can’t point to coordinates on a map, then more and more one invites the accusation that whatever it is, is not real at all. Hence the liberal theological dilemma about Heaven. Where is it? Both Hell and Purgatory could easily be abandoned, but Heaven – the domain of human salvation – is critical to Christian integrity. The soul also became collateral damage as ‘Man’ was transformed into ‘an atomic machine’. Without its own place in the cosmic scheme, the spirit was disen-franchised. Humans became mere bodies, flecks of dust residing on a chunk of rock orbiting a small and insignificant star in the outer suburbs of a very mundane galaxy. We moderns are not only not at the centre of the universe, as spiritual beings we actually don’t exist in this world.
POST-NEWTONIAN SPACE
During the twentieth century physicists developed a post-Newtonian vision of space beginning with Einstein’s relativity theories and proceeding to so-called ‘hyperspace’ theories. How have these ideas impacted on the discussion above? Relativity compounds the problem in a truly fascinating way. General relativity, which is the cosmological version of Einstein’s ideas, replaced the three-dimensional Euclidean void of Newton’s cosmology with a four-dimensional Minkowskian void that now includes time as part of the spatial matrix. Physicists call it spacetime, and treat time as effectively another dimension of space. From a theological perspective the consequences here are non-trivial because in a purely relativistic cosmos nothing really ‘happens’. Time unwinds itself in a manner predetermined by the tensor equations; nothing evolves or comes into being that wasn’t already inherent at the start. In a purely relativistic cosmos (where there are no quantum effects) time is thereby neutered: there is no happening whatever. From a four-dimensional perspective the universe just is, complete and whole as a pre-set form. If this cosmos is a thought in the mind of God, it is one that is effectively static. Now that might be OK for God – who has always been said to see time whole – but it is not OK for human souls whose destiny cannot be pre-ordained. Christian theology demands that time be open so that individuals truly have a choice about what decisions they make. As moral beings our ‘worldlines’ cannot be set by analytic equations; for Heaven to mean anything, we must be able to act on our own volition. In short, the Christian concept of salvation requires a concept of spacetime that is more dynamic and incomplete than relativity allows.
Hyperspace theories add further complications. These theories extend Einstein’s concept of space from four dimensions to ten or eleven. Where Einstein folded time into the spatial matrix, hyperspace theories aim to fold in everything. Here matter itself becomes a by-product of the shape of space. In hyperspace theories there is actually nothing but space curled up into patterns – everything that exists from protons and petunias to planets and people is at core complex enfoldings of space. The English physicist Paul Davies has called this ‘structured nothingness’. We may think of it as a kind of cosmic origami. At the start of our universe, space had no structure – it was simple and unformed like a blank sheet of paper, then as time proceeded the ‘paper’ crinkled up into ever more elaborate structures, eventually giving rise to the complexities we see today.
Where does this take us theologically? Unlike relativity’s God, the God of hyperspace theory is an active and dynamic Creator. As a fan of origami it thrills me to think of Him whiling away the tedium of eternity folding space into increasingly subtle forms. He is an architectonic genius, a veritable master of structure. A standing ovation for origami God, I say. But where do we stand in this picture? Is there a place in the hyperspace cosmos for humans as spiritual beings? It seems to me there is not – at least not in a way that I believe was a central aspect of the medieval world picture. In the hyperspace vision of cosmology, space becomes not just the arena of reality, as it was for Newton and Einstein, but reality itself. Here, there is actually nothing but structured space. This is an extraordinary philosophical move. Newton’s cosmos contained three fundamental things: matter, space and force (epitomised by gravity). With hyperspace theories there is now just one fundamental thing – space – everything else being a by-product of this fundamental ‘stuff’. What we have here is literally a post-material account of the world, for matter has now been relegated to secondary status. At first glance that might seem like a good thing for the spiritualists, and some people have tried to read it that way. Western culture has a long tradition of opposing matter and spirit, so something that is not matter can easily be read within this tradition as ipso facto spiritual. I believe such optimism will prove to be as historically futile as Newton’s hope that space would be read as God’s sensorium.
The problem is that in hyperspace theories everything is reduced to a seamless monism. Everything is collapsed into a single category. This is precisely the mistake that Descartes sought to avoid with his infamous dualism. As a man of science Descartes wanted to articulate what the new science could do, but as a devout Catholic he also wanted to preserve the gift of Christian salvation. His answer was to postulate two distinct ‘realms’ of experience: the res extensa or extended realm of matter in motion, and the res cogitans, the ‘realm’ of thoughts, feelings, morality and spiritual consequence. The new science would tell us about the former, but for Descartes science would have nothing to say about the latter. In effect, Descartes tried to preserve the dualism inherent in medieval thinking while also opening up the possibilities he so boldly saw in the emerging science. As a Catholic, he understood that the Christian soul could not be bound by mathematical laws, and since he believed that mathematics was the language of the material world there had to be some ‘realm’ apart from those laws.
Descartes failed in the same sense that Newton failed; his theological trappings were stripped away by later generations who took what he had done and used it to promulgate a purely secular cosmology. Since the Enlightenment we have come to use the word ‘cosmos’ to mean the purely physical world and ‘cosmology’ to mean our concept of the material domain alone. We have forgotten the wider picture in which ‘the cosmos’ encompassed multiple levels of being; we tell ourselves that older cosmologies are childish tales and that we moderns supposedly have outgrown these stories and faced reality ‘squarely’ to work out where we ‘truly’ are.
SPACE AND SELF
In discussions about science and religion it is often noted how corrosive a mechanistic philosophy was to the Christian idea of a soul; what is not widely understood is how important a role our conception of space has played in this story. Eighteenth-century natural philosophy was premised on a neutral, homogeneous, infinite and passive space. The very qualities of Euclid’s ideal that made it such a fruitful foundation for the development of physical science are just the qualities that have become so problematic for those who wish to assert the reality of a ‘spiritual’ plane of being. For medieval Christians, a dualistic conception of the human person went hand in hand with a dualistic spatial scheme; with the advent of a purely physicalist world picture it has become increasingly difficult to argue for the reality of any kind of non-physical