To God through science

)hysicist (and Templeton Prize Winner) Paul Davies convinces Martin Koc ha nski :hat religion and science are not inimical entities, but complementary forces.
rHE WAR AGAINST God goes on. Every few months, it seems, another eminent scientist publishes a book of popular science and claims that God does not exist. "The top quark has been discovbred, so there is no God". "There is probably life on other planets, so there is 10 God". "There is probably no life on ither planets, so there is no God". The irgtunents are absurd, of course, and requently self-contradictory, but there ire a lot of them; and they come so thick and fast that you can't help worrying hat all these clever people can't be entirely wrong.
When a young physicist called Paul Davies published God and the New "hysics in 1983, it seemed that the war was entering a new phase. Disdaining the simplistic "there is no God", Davies had :ome up with "there is a God, and Lc-ience offers a surer path to him than .eligion". Tired of trying to wipe us out, he scientists were about to steal our ;lothes.
With the recent anouncement of the 1995 Templeton Prize for Progress in Ieligion, it seemed that those clothes lad been well and truly stolen.
The prize is worth £650,000 this year more than the Nobel Prizes) and has seen awarded in the past to Mother Teresa, Brother Roger of Taize, Billy :Iraham, and Dame Cicely Saunders, Ounder of the hospice movement.
This year the prize has gone to Paul 3avies, by now a top theoretical physi:ist and the Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Adelaide.
The cynical might say that the only :onnection between the author of God znd the New Physics and Progress in ReliTion was that he obviously needed to nake quite a lot of that sort of progress.
The book started with a rant on the !oils of religion that showed that its tuthor had no understanding of the ,ubject at all. Any evil or misguided tenon by a follower of any religion was aken as a sign of what a bad thing reli:ion itself was, even when the religion :oncemed specifically condemned that Lction.
The usual list of anti-religious heroes if science was trotted out, forgetting hat most of them were committed Thristians and some, such as Newton, relieved their religious work to he more mportant than their scientific work. ['here was no mention of Albert the 3reat, Roger Bacon, Mersenne, Mendel, rho were all great scientists at the same ime as being monks and priests.
If the Inquisition was the fault of reli
gion, surely the Holocaust was the fault of science? Such subtleties were not for the young Davies. He had got hold of the wrong end of the stick and was determined not to let go.
But at least it was the right stick. Davies claimed that science was a better way to God than religion because he was for God, not because he was against religion. His God might still be far removed from the God of Abraham and of Isaac, let alone the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; but at least his God existed.
This was a big step forward. No longer was the only possible official scientific position one of militant atheism (it never really was, of course, but it had looked that way).
Equally, attacking science was no longer the only possible way of defending God. It was no longer necessary to deny the theory of evolution (or of relativity) because it justified atheism; and as for Genesis, even St Augustine didn't think that the world was created in six consecutive 24-hour days.
The really big shifts in the climate of opinion do not come because a people change their minds, but because they realise that they are allowed to say publicly what they had believed privately all along. A dialogue between science and religion had been opening up even before God and the New Physics, and it has been growing ever since.
Paul Davies was the first popular author to publicise this dialogue, and in his subsequent books, from The Mind of God to Are We Alone?, he has carried it forward. Book by book, in a grand survey of modem science, he has explained the major theories and shown exactly what their religious and philosophical implications are.
No longer can the atheists hope to blind us with science and claim (for instance) that some aspect of quantum theory leads to the Universe creating itself and making God redundant. Thanks to Davies, and people like him, we now know that this sort of argument is false even if we can't ourselves see precisely how.
Davies' contibution is not just a defensive one. The positive side is even more important. Science shows us a world that is full of signposts pointing away from itself, to something beyond ançl behind it: what many people call God. All God's works proclaim the glory of his name, says the psalmist; and for a cosmologist like Davies, this principle applies even to the laws of physics themselves. Life itself is only possible because the laws are the way they are.
If you changed one fundamental physical constant by the tiniest fraction, then stars, planets, and people simply could not exist. There is no physical reason for the laws of physics to be the way they are, for life to be possible, for us to be here. You can say, if you insist, that it's all down to chance, and of course no-one can disprove you.
But faced with a design that becomes more wonderful the more we explore it, more intricate and daily more unexpected, the existence of a designer becomes an irresistible conclusion.
This is not to say that, for Davies, science proves the existence of God. Just because you can see a signpost, it doesn't mean that the thing it is pointing to exists.
People like Richard Dawkins continue to write books claiming that everything (including each one of us) is mere clockwork, There is nothing to stop them thinking that if they want to, Davies responds, but they shouldn't claim that it's What Science Teaches. It is interesting too, that it is mostly the biologists that are atheists. Physicists and cosmologists, who look beyond appearances into the reality of things, turn out to be mystics more often than not.
It is not my place to comment on Paul Davies' progress in religion (though his rhetoric has certainly abated), but he has certainly made a major contribution to the progress of religion and to the mutual understanding of science and religion. They are, after all, complementary: science describes, religion explains; science brings knowledge, religion brings understanding.
What the unification of these two sides of the human experience needs now is someone who is as knowledgeable about religion as Paul Davies is about science, and at least as good an amateur scientist as Davies is an amateur theologian. It will happen one day soon; and no doubt the Templeton Prize committee will be there to celebrate the event.