The Lost World of Adam and Eve - John H Walton

I've read a lot of Christian books that were okay – they didn't set the world alight but they might have reminded me of some important truths or put something in a slightly different way. This is not one of those; this could be a real game changer.

John Walton is professor of Old Testament at the bastion of US religious conservatism that is Wheaton College, and he's written this book to see what Genesis 1-3 really claims about creation, specifically the question of human origins. He doesn't bother with the science, because he isn't a scientist; he just sticks to what he is good at, which is Old Testament exegesis and cultural background. He doesn't even deal with Adam and Eve in the New Testament – he gets N.T. Wright to write that chapter. He also (quite rightly) recognises that the scientific arguments don't really matter much for Christians - we believe that God could have created the universe with the appearance of age and human beings with the appearance of being descended from a common ancestor with chimps; the question is whether he did.

Walton confirms what I have long thought; that Genesis 1-3 doesn't necessarily contradict the claims of modern science. Along the way he demolishes some of the things I'd already noticed were bogus (like the assumption that Adam and Eve were immortal in the Garden of Eden – if they were, they wouldn't have needed the Tree of Life) and some I hadn't spotted before (Adam and Eve are Hebrew nouns and Hebrew wasn't invented until Genesis 11, so they can't be the real names of the couple). He remains utterly committed to Biblical authority throughout; even while working on potentially controversial areas he gives clear, common sense, uncontroversial examples which show the validity of his position. Did several Old Testament authors believe in a solid sky? Yes, I suppose they did. Did the wine Jesus made from water in John 2 have the appearance of a potentially misleading history? Of course it did. Does the ancient belief that the heart was where a person did their thinking and feeling commit us to believe the same? No, it doesn't.

I'm not convinced by everything in the book – I think he over-eggs the concept of sacred space, for example, and there are some bits near the start of the book that badly need editing/rewriting. But I think that for the reader who can cope with his language and style, this book utterly demolishes the idea that you need to believe in young earth creationism to take the Bible seriously, and shows us just how much cultural baggage we bring into our readings of Genesis 1-3. Brilliant, eye-opening, thought-provoking.

Richard Baxter on Science and Religion

Richard Baxter might seem like an unusual person to quote on science and religion. As far as I know, the Vicar of Kidderminster didn't have any real connection with science. But he was clearly part of the Puritan movement, and the scientific revolution of the 1600s largely grew out of Puritanism. Baxter wrote his classic book The Reformed Pastor just 4 years before the Royal Society was founded, so it's an interesting reflection of what sort of thing Puritans were saying about science at the time...

I hope you perceive what I aim at in all this, namely that to see God in his creatures, and to love him, and converse with him, was the employment of man in his upright state; that this is so far from ceasing to be our duty, that it is the work of Christ to bring us, by faith, back to it; and therefore the most holy men are the most excellent students of God's works, and none but the holy can rightly study them or know them 'Great are the works of the Lord, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein;' but not for themselves, but for him that made them. Your study of physics and other sciences is not worth a rush, if it be not God that you seek after in them. To see and admire, to reverence and adore, to love and delight in God, as exhibited in his works - this is the true and only philosophy.
p.83

Has Science Disproved God?

Earlier today, I did a talk called "Has Science Disproved God?" at Apologetics in Manchester. It seemed to be very well received. You can find audio of the talk here, and the handout here.

God, Stephen Hawking and the BBC

The currently most-read article on the BBC website has this headline "Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe". As a Christian who has studied a fair bit of physics, I'm going to discuss that. Quick summary of my conclusions: Hawking has got it a bit wrong, but the media are over-sensationalising it as usual. And in the process, they are providing a massive amount of free advertising for Hawking's new book.

It's worth pointing out that I haven't read Hawking's article, because it's behind the Times' paywall, or Hawking's book, because it hasn't been published yet. But at this stage of his career, Hawking is far more a populariser of ideas than an original thinker, so I've got a pretty good idea where he is coming from on this...

The BBC quotes Hawking as writing:

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.

Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.

It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Science and Religion

It's worth explaining a few things from these quotes. Firstly, Hawking's philosophy of how God acts in the universe. Hawking seems to have a kind of "God of the gaps" idea going on here - he only sees it as "necessary to invoke God" when there is no other explanation for something.

Of course, Hawking isn't stupid enough to go down the classic God of the Gaps line. He'd probably draw a distinction between when it is "necessary to invoke God" - i.e. when there is no other explanation for something, and when it is possible to invoke God - i.e. when there is an explanation for something that includes the possibility that God is behind it. The Christian answer - that science describes the way that God chooses to run the world - would be treated as when it is possible to invoke God rather than when it is necessary to do so.

Hawking is still wrong though. Rowan Williams is better (quoted on the front of the Times Online today):

Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explaining how one thing relates to another within the Universe. It is the belief that there is an intelligent, living agent on whose activity everything ultimately depends for its existence.

In other words, Rowan Williams (correctly IMO) asserts that God's existence and action is necessary for science to keep working at all. God and Science aren't competing explanations for the same phenomenon.

Of course, the journalists seem to have even less understanding of this, and think that because Hawking says it isn't necessary to invoke God, he's denying God was involved at all. That's partly because it sells more papers or gets more people looking at the website, and partly because they don't have sufficient understanding of the topic to report accurately on it.

Creation and Quantum Fluctuations

The other thing that is worth explaining is what it means for Hawking to write that "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing."

In quantum physics, things do sometimes just appear out of nowhere, and then vanish again. But when they do, the total amount of energy involved multiplied by the time they last for has to be less than about 10^-34 Js. So an electron / positron pair, for example, could only last about 10^-21s - one thousand billion billionth of a second. And something bigger would last even less long. So we don't see them very often and they don't usually make much difference to the universe on a big scale.

But that is the only known way of getting something out of nothing. So if the universe wasn't created - it just happened - that's the only known way for it to happen. The problem with that of course is that the universe has lasted quite a while - roughly 14 billion years. Therefore, in order for this theory to work, it needs to have almost exactly zero total energy.

The only known way of having a sufficiently large amount of "negative energy" is through gravity. Imagine that there is a lump of rock a very long way from the Sun, and it isn't moving. Now imagine that it falls towards the Sun, and in doing so it speeds up. It has clearly gained kinetic energy because it is moving. At a year 7 level, we'd say it has converted Gravitational Potential Energy (GPE) to Kinetic Energy (KE). But at the start, its total energy was zero, and at the end its KE is positive, therefore its GPE must be negative.

It's often asserted in astrophysics circles that Black Holes have zero total energy, because all the negative GPE cancels out the positive energy from their mass. And therefore it is possible to get something out of nothing if the something is a black hole because it has zero total energy. On the other hand, I've done a masters course in astrophysics, and I've never once seen that calculation done, or even referenced. Personally, I don't believe it, and I believe it even less when it comes to saying the universe as a whole has zero total energy, but am happy to change my mind if given a good reference that doesn't just assert it.

If it was true, it should mean that you get black holes popping into existence and staying there quite often, and we don't see that happening.

But the idea here is that many cosmologists think that that is what happened with the universe - it popped into existence as a kind of unstable black hole with zero total energy that then exploded. And that's what Hawking means by saying that gravity allows the creation of something from nothing.

(Images from NASA)

Talk on Science and Religion

Yesterday, I did a talk on science and religion at a local-ish university Christian Union. Here's the talk. It's about 24 mins long...

The title of the talk was "Is the Bible Scientifically Reliable?".

Science needing Christianity

Here's an extract from a talk I'm doing next week about science and religion:

As you probably know, people didn't always have science lessons in school and whatever. Science as a field of study in the modern sense only really got going in the 1600s, with people like Francis Bacon, Galileo and Isaac Newton. And it's an interesting question why it didn't happen before that.

See, for people to even try to do science, you've got to have five basic ideas about how the world works.

Firstly, you've got to believe that the world is in some sense rational and by a single author. If the world is just full of lots of gods who are fighting each other, like lots of ancient people used to believe, then there's no point trying to do science. And as we've seen, the Bible teaches that.

Secondly, you've got to believe that there are underlying patterns to the way the world works. It isn't all just random. That's actually a bit of a problem for atheism – it doesn't give any reason why there should be patterns in the way the world works, it just assumes there are. But the Bible gives some reasons. In Jeremiah 33:25, God says that he has established a covenant with day and night and the fixed laws of heaven and earth.

Third, you've got to believe that people are somehow able to understand the patterns in the way the world works. Once again, atheism kind of struggles with that one, because the ability to do science doesn't really confer an evolutionary advantage, unless being a science geek has become sexy since last time I was single. Even Albert Einstein said that “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.” But the Bible comes up with an answer. It says that God made the universe, and we were made in the image of God, so it makes sense that we should be able to understand some of what he's done.

Fourth, science needs us to believe that although we can understand the rules, our minds don't work that well – we need to believe that our human reason is fallen. That's where the ancient Greeks fell down. They thought that we could understand the world around us and they made a fair bit of progress, but they thought we could understand it so well that we could just sit and think and get the right answer and we didn't need to do experiments or actually look at the universe. That was one of the big things Galileo did – he started trying to test some of the Ancient Greek ideas like a big cannonball falling faster than a small one, and he found that they didn't work even though people had been taught them for over a thousand years.

Now why is it that our brains are good enough to make some sense of how the universe works, but not so good that we can do it by just sitting in a chair and thinking? Once again, the Bible has the answer. You see, we weren't just created in God's image, we rebelled against him and we damaged that image. It's still there, just messed up and broken. And so we can understand the world, but we need experiments to do it, and we need people checking our working and trying the same experiments after us. You need science, in other words.

The fifth thing that people need to believe for science to work is that it is possible for people to improve – that we aren't just stuck doing things exactly the way our ancestors did. And once again, that's an idea that's there in the Bible. Christians in the 1600s looked at people like Solomon, who the Bible says knew lots and lots of stuff about nature. They looked at Adam before the Fall, and they thought that they could try to get back there and try to recover some of what had been lost. They also read Daniel 12:4, which says that in the last days, people will go here and there and will increase knowledge, and they thought “that's us!”

And you know what? In the 1600s, just as modern science is starting, you actually get all five of those ideas being talked about, and being talked about from the Bible. Here's the great English physicist Richard Hooke of Hooke's Law fame, writing in the 1600s.

every man, both from a deriv'd corruption, innate and born with him, and from his breeding and converse with men, is very subject to slip into all sorts of errors.... These being the dangers in the process of germane Reason, the remedies of them all can only proceed from the real, the mechanical, the experimental Philosophy.

In other words, he's saying we need to do experiments because we're fallen human beings and so we make all sorts of mistakes.

So why did it take until the 1600s? Well, the answer is that in the 1500s, there was a big movement called the Reformation where people started taking the Bible seriously again. Before that, people hadn't been studying it much and trying to interpret it allegorically and all that sort of thing. But in the 1500s, people really started reading and studying the Bible again, and taking it seriously. Result – in the 1600s, modern science starts.

Now since then, of course, those 5 ideas have kind of become detached from Christianity, and we'd probably all agree with them, whether we're Christians or not, because science is doing such a good job of explaining the universe. But we shouldn't forget where they come from originally.

Some people today think that it's pretty much impossible to be a scientist and a Christian. Actually, I've got to say that I think that if you're a scientist it's much easier to be a Christian than an atheist, because if you're an atheist there's all these nagging questions going on in the background about how science can possibly work, and you've got to take a huge leap of faith to just get on with it.

And actually, historically, an awful lot of scientists have been Christians. The Royal Society is the top scientific organisation in the country. It was founded in 1660, and every single one of its founder members were involved in some religious organisation or other. During the whole of the 19th century, 30% of the members of the Royal Society weren't just religious – they were ordained ministers in the Church of England. 30% of the top scientists in the country were clergy during the 19th century. And lots of the very top scientists were Christians too – Kelvin, Faraday, Maxwell are maybe the top three physicists of the whole 19th century. And all of them were committed Christians.

C.S. Lewis - How Prayer Works

Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of man? For infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it. But neither does God need any of those things that are done by finite agents, whether living or inanimate. He could, if He chose, repair our bodies miraculously without food; or give us food without the aid of farmers, bakers, and butchers; or knowledge without the aid of learned men; or convert the heathen without missionaries. Instead, He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to cooperate in the execution of His will. "God," says Pascal, "instituted prayer in order to lend to His creatures the dignity of causality." But it is not only prayer; whenever we act at all, He lends us that dignity. It is not really stranger, nor less strange, that my prayers should affect the course of events than that my other actions should do so.
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Efficacy of Prayer, pp. 9-10

Hat tip to CQOD.

Cleese on Reductionism

This is a great video...

Denis Alexander - Rebuilding the Matrix

I put off reading this book for years, a) because I knew a fair bit about the subject and b) because I didn't especially get on with Denis Alexander when I'd heard him speak on it. Having said that, it's surprisingly good.

It is aimed to be a fairly academic but accessible book by a Christian who is also a respected scientist about the relationship between Science and Christianity. And it actually does that fairly well. His theology of science seems pretty much right, though he doesn't really make a big thing of it. The book tends to cover the areas that most books and talks on science and religion cover - notably history and creation / evolution.

Alexander spends a lot of time saying not very much, but I guess that's important if this is aimed at a largely non-Christian audience (which it seems to be). I guess this book is best aimed at someone who is university educated without much background in theology, and it does a pretty good job of that. It would probably be the book I'd be most likely to recommend to such people.

If I was being critical, I'd say that he could often be a lot clearer and more concise. But I suppose my biggest criticisms would be that he doesn't allow his theology of science to impact on miracles or the question of general revelation, and that he assumes that science and "faith" tell us complementary truths about reality - an approach which is useful to an extent, but which doesn't actually hold together philosophically especially well.

And for those who are interested in such things, he's very much a theistic evolutionist, to the point where he is really quite critical of Young Earth Creationism, but also of evolutionary naturalism.

Augustine on Miracles and Science

When such a thing happens, it appears to us as an event contrary to nature. But with God, it is not so; for him 'nature' is what he does.

Augustine of Hippo, Literal Commentary on Genesis

Collins - Science and Religion

One of the great tragedies of our time is this impression that has been created that science and religion have to be at war ... I don’t see that as necessary at all and I think it is deeply disappointing that the shrill voices that occupy the extremes of this spectrum have dominated the stage for the past 20 years.

Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project

from here

Carson - Science

Nice to see I'm even further from alone in my understanding of the theology of science...

Designed by [God], the universe hums along according to regular and predictable laws; but it does so only because he constantly exercises his sovereignty over the whole. No part of the system ever operates completely independently.

Moreover at any instant he chooses, he is free to suspend or abolish scientific 'laws'; that alone will account for such a miracle as the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Man can discover scientific 'laws'; indeed, he must, he is commissioned to do so as the steward of creation. But the scientist who has adopted this Biblical cosmology will not only recognise such laws and allow for divinely initiated exceptions, he will realise that these laws continue faithfully because of God's sustaining power. More specifically, since divine sovereignty is mediated through the Son, the Christian will hold that it is the Son who is, even now, 'sustaining all things by his powerful word' (Heb 1:3).

...

Old Testament believers were quite aware that water evaporates, forms clouds which drop their rain, which provide rivulets, streams and rivers which run to the sea; but more customarily they preferred to speak of God sending the rain. Such is the biblical cosmology.

Don Carson, Sermon on Matthew 6:19-34

General Revelation

I've had to do quite a bit of reading recently on the idea of General Revelation and Natural Theology - basically what we can tell about God from looking at the world around us.

I still think Calvin's treatment of it is about as good as they come. He points out that we should be able to tell lots about God from creation, but that we can't see all of it, and we often get bits wrong because we're sinful and blind, and because the blindness and the sinfulness are linked, it's our fault that we don't see God more clearly in the world.

What's interesting though is seeing what the Bible tells us we should be able to tell about God from the world around us.

• That God is real
• That God is powerful beyond our understanding (e.g. Job 38)
• That God is wise beyond our understanding (e.g. Isaiah 55:8-9)
• That God is reliable (e.g. Jeremiah 33:25-26)
• That we should obey God (e.g. Jeremiah 8:7-9, 18:13-15)
• That God is patient

In other words, what we should be able to know about God from the world around us isn't enough that we can be saved. But it is enough that we should be able to see that we desperately need saving, and that we can trust God to do it. It's enough to point us to Jesus, but not enough to replace him.

Being able to see God in the universe doesn't mean that we have authority or power over God - it's because he graciously made us as human beings and made the universe in such a way that we could tell a bit about him from it.

Those things we can tell about God from the universe actually sum up lots of the reasons I enjoyed studying physics so much...

I could put in lots of stuff here about the Barth / Brunner debate, but I can't be bothered, and I don't think it would help that much.

Augustine on Science

The great theologian Augustine of Hippo (c AD 400) was one of the first people to tackle the issue of the relationship of science to Christianity. Of course, "science" in the modern sense didn't exist at the time, but I'm using "science" in the loose sense of things we can know by observing the world around us.

Here's a quote:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens and other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their sizes and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics, an we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life and the kingdom of heaven, which they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

St Augustine of Hippo, The Literal Meaning of Genesis

Ernan McMullin summarises Augustine's view on the relationship between science and religion as follows:

• When trying to discern the meaning of a difficult Scriptural passage, one should keep in mind that different interpretations of the text may be possible, and that, in consequence, one should not rush into premature commitment to one of these, especially since further progress in the search for truth may later undermine this interpretation.
• When there is a conflict between a proven truth about nature and a particular reading of Scripture, an alternative meaning of Scripture must be sought.
• When there is an apparent conflict between a Scripture passage and an assertion about the natural world grounded on sense or reason, the literal reading of the Scripture passage should prevail as long as the latter assertion lacks demonstration
• The choice of language in the scriptural writings is accommodated to the capacities of the intended audience
• Since the primary concern of Scripture is with human salvation, texts of Scripture should not be taken to have a bearing on technical issues of natural science

Galileo's Daughter - Dava Sobel

I suppose, like Dava Sobel's earlier book, Longitude, this is popular history of science and of scientists. It tells the story of Galileo - his life, his faith, his science, his trial, his imprisonment, through the lens of the surviving letters written to him by the person who was closest to him for much of his life – one of his daughters who spent her life in a convent.

This book was recommended to me by one of my lecturers as being a good and fairly accurate way in to the whole situation around Galileo as well as being very readable. It's not on a par with a John Grisham or something for readability, but it's certainly good as a way in, probably especially for people who are interested in relationships and everyday life as well as the science. Good.

History of Science and Religion - Books

Probably the most common question I get asked by Christians is about the whole area of Science and Christianity. I'm still intending to write a book on it, but I'm studying the topic at Oxford first, partly to see where other people are coming from on it.

A good light introduction to the history of science and religion written by a Christian who used to lecture history of science is Unnatural Enemies by Kirsten Birkett. It's short; it's clearly written; it tries to explain why things are the way they are at the moment. Briefly put, part of it is that while many Christians thought Darwin was right about evolution, not all of them did because they still had a potential alternative explanation (God doing it directly, suddenly, recently). That meant that it looked as if Christianity and science were in conflict, which meant that the Christians tended to take up more anti-science positions and some atheists wrote histories of science making it look like they always had.

A better, more detailed, and less explicitly Christian book is Science and Religion - Some Historical Perspectives by John Hedley Brooke (former professor of Science and Religion at Oxford). It's a good academic study exploring the history of the two. It doesn't really require much background in science, religion or history. I wouldn't say it's a gripping read, but it's accessible to the sort of person who reads quite a bit. I'm also shocked I hadn't been told to read this book a long time ago... It might be quite expensive, so it's worth ordering it from a library, or getting a second-hand copy or something.

Alister McGrath - the Dawkins Delusion

Last Tuesday, Alister McGrath (the Rev Professor) did a talk in Oxford called "the Dawkins Delusion", which is also the title of his new book. It seemed to be very well received. I couldn't go because I was being grilled about half a mile away at the same time.

The talk is available for download here, and is copyright St Ebbe’s Church, Oxford (copying talks is prohibited).

Dan Brown - Angels and Demons

This is a book review I wrote quite a while back on a previous site, but I'm reposting it here.

Dan Brown is a controversial author in the light of his book the DaVinci Code. Some of my pupils had told me this book was much better than DVC, and asked me some interesting questions about physics as a result of reading it. So I thought I probably ought to read it and write a review. Here it is...

Links to reviews of the DaVinci code can be found here and here (need to click past ads on the second one, but it's by a non-Christian, so fewer accusations of bias are likely).

The good points first. It seems to me to be very readable. Dan Brown seems to have an ability shared with the likes of Tom Clancy, John Grisham and J.K. Rowling to write long books that can be read in a single sitting. The suspense is generally handled very well, and brings some not especially well known physics into the public domain. I guess that is to be expected - Dan Brown is a professor of creative writing or something like that. But that is also at the heart of some of the bad points of this book.

Also worth noting is that Dan Brown is virulently anti-church in a very similar way to Philip Pullman, and that lies behind a lot of what goes on...

As in the DaVinci Code, Dan Brown is quite clever in the way he introduces spurious facts. He sets the book in a world very similar to this one, set slightly in the future, with lots of references to real people, places, statues and institutions. There is lots of truth here, but then you get people who are claimed to be experts in a field claiming things which aren't true at all, which means that people are likely to take the false on board with the true. Yes, there are fictional aspects to the story, and factual aspects to the world it is set in. What Brown does is that he adds some wrong fictional aspects to a factual world. And not just so the story can work - they are mostly ones which are directly anti-church.

However, again as with the DaVinci code, Brown makes sufficient factual mistakes in other supposedly parts of the book that if people know what is going on with, for example, high energy physics, they can see that he doesn't really know what he is writing about. I don't know much about Roman geography, art history, etc. I do however know about physics and some of the history of science and religion, and some random other stuff. I know little about the Masons and less about the Illuminati. I've only read the book once, not especially carefully, and these are the mistakes I bothered to note down. Yes, there are spoilers.

Physics mistakes first.

Physics

In the FACT section at the start, it claims that “antimatter is identical to physical matter except that it is composed of particles whose electric charges are opposite to those found in normal matter”. This isn't true. Antimatter in fact has all its properties opposite to normal matter except its mass / energy. So charges are opposite, but so are other properties such as lepton number, strangeness, charm, signs of interactions with gauge bosons (of which charge is just one example), etc.

The idea that matter can be created from energy is not especially new. In fact, it happens all the time when photons (“light particles”) get above a certain energy - equivalent to high energy cosmic rays. However, this produces no solution to the problem of where the mass / energy comes from in the Big Bang, since it seems that matter and energy are just different forms of the same thing. It is where either of them came from in the first place that is the problem. But see later for my comments on miracles. We'd also resist the idea that God is “energy” in the sense the word is used in Physics.

In fact, that is the way that antimatter is produced currently - a few atoms at a time. Producing ¼ of a gram would be.... difficult. It contains roughly 1.5e23 atoms.

On p96, Dan Brown strongly implies that electrons and protons are opposites, as are up and down quarks. They aren't. The opposites are respectively positrons, antiprotons, antiup and antidown. Particle physicists are original like that.

Also on p96, a physicist claims that using a vacuum to “suck” antimatter would work. It wouldn't. Vacuums (or vacuua) don't suck - it's the pressure of the air that causes air to rush into them. On the other hand, using the fact that matter and antimatter are bent opposite ways by a magnet is the way that matter and antimatter are currently separated, and it doesn't produce ¼ of a gram.

On page 108, the claim is essentially made that if you make larger quantities, it is more efficient than smaller quantities. This is true. But the gain in efficiency decreases as the quantity increases. The efficiency can never exceed 1. That is why antimatter can never be used as an energy source, because even if we make it using a perfect system, we can never get more energy out than we put in. Antimatter could potentially (in the distant future) be used to store energy, but not as a fuel.

Yes, CERN does exist, and yes, the Web was invented there. I'm not an expert on it - my closest connection is that one of my supervisors at university worked there half the time. I think Dan Brown has very much transferred the US idea of a lab onto Europe, and then scaled it up to account for the size of CERN. Needless to say, I think the chance of the director of CERN ever having a Mach 15 jet at his disposal are very very small. I also very much doubt they go for the whole crazy over-technologising of everything (rooms with air conditioning that can freeze everything inside, etc). Physics in Europe is notoriously underfunded compared to in the US. CERN even have their own page correcting a lot of the mistakes here.

There is a large part of the story spent running around Rome looking for a radio source. All they needed to do was set up three receivers at that frequency, see the time differences between the signals and use that to locate the source.

Miscellaneous

On page p53, “Islamic” is described as a language.

Brown translates “Novus ordo seculorum” is translated as “new secular order” (as opposed to “new order of the age”). The Latin “seculorum” doesn't necessarily have implications of “secular” (though secular is derived from seculorum in the sense of “of this age” rather than “set apart”). For example, the Gloria in Latin reads “Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum.” (or secula seculorum). So “novus ordo seculorum” does not contradict “In God We Trust”. If you don't believe me, see here. Yes, of course there is Masonic influence in the US currency.

Brown claims that every story the BBC runs is “carefully researched and confirmed” (p289). Well, the examples I have known in real life as well as on the BBC haven't been.

Understanding of Christianity

The director of CERN says “There are no churches here. Physics is our religion.” This despite the fact that there are quite a few Christians who work at CERN, even in this story!

Christian belief is continually seen as false because it claims events happened which are contradicted by science. This is to make the same mistake as Hume. The argument goes something like this. “We know that such events are impossible, so we know that any claims they happened are false.” But how do we know those events are impossible? And why are they recorded? The people who recorded Jesus walking on water didn't think it was an everyday event. They knew it was normally impossible, which is why it was so important that it happened, because it showed that Jesus was not a normal man - that he could command nature and it obeyed, especially when that went against the normal way that nature works. If Jesus was God, then he could have commanded the world to do whatever he wanted to. God created the laws of the universe - he can tell it to do whatever it wants. The same goes for creation. Yes, the start of the universe cannot be explained in terms of the observed laws of the universe, as it involved a huge amount of mass / energy coming into existence from nothing. But God can do it - he is above the laws of the universe and they don't apply to him.

Incidentally, the twist at the end is nicked from a Father Brown story (GK Chesterton). Except, there the priest realises that it is being set up so that he seems to have risen from the dead, only for the “miracle” later to be exposed as a fraud. So he is totally honest about it from the start.

This links in to the general attitude to faith in the book. Faith is seen as involving a “suspension of disbelief” (p132) and as being something that, while useful for providing a moral framework, goes against the evidence. That is certainly a common view, but is not the traditional Christian one, nor is it the one taught in the Bible. As far as I recall, it was the view popularised by the Existentialist philosophers like Kierkegaard. The Christian view of faith is basically one of “trust”. On the basis of the available evidence, we decide to trust God. As we trust him more and more, we see that he is more and more trustworthy. Faith is not believing against the evidence; it is trusting our lives to God based on the evidence.

The famous (and wrong) “God of the Gaps” idea is also used on p43. Brown pictures religion and science as both about asking questions, most of which have now been answered by science, restricting religion to fewer and fewer questions. That isn't true at all. Here are some verses from the Bible.

God is more than we imagine; no one can count the years he has lived.
God gathers moisture into the clouds
and supplies us with rain.
Job 36:26-28, CEV

The sun knows its going down.
You make darkness, and it is night,
Psalm 104:19-20, MKJV

The writers, even though they were writing around 1000BC, clearly have a reasonable idea of how rain happens (moisture gathering in clouds) and that night is caused by the Sun going down. But that does not stop them from ascribing those same actions to God. The Bible does not say that the two are competing explanations - it treats them as complementary. Both descriptions are true.

History of Science and Christianity

However, the main area where Brown's treatment of history is hugely different from real life is in the historical relationship between science and Christianity. For example, on p50, Langdon claims that “since the beginning of history, a deep rift has existed between science and religion.” That just plain isn't true. While there were personal tussles and power struggles between scientists and the religious establishment (as happened with Galileo and Bruno), in many ways modern science sprung out of Christianity. The view that they have always been at conflict was actually invented in the late 1800s as part of the debate over Darwinism.

Many of the early opponents of Darwinism were Christians, not always because they believed the Bible taught it to be wrong, but because the evidence was shaky and because they had an alternative theory in direct creation, whereas the atheists had no alternative theories. To discredit these Christians, books were written which distorted the earlier debates with Galileo by saying that the church at the time taught that the Earth was flat and that the church had always opposed science. Neither was true. [At the time, the Roman Catholics had taken on board a lot of Greek philosophy, including Ptolemy's description of the Earth as a sphere at the centre of the universe. This was by no means held by all Christians, and isn't taught in the Bible.] There's a lot more detail on this in Kirsten Birkett's book Unnatural Enemies. Kirsten, if I remember correctly, has a PhD in History of Science, so knows what she is talking about.

See, for example, here or here for stuff on Galileo.

The current hostility is also hugely exaggerated.

I am not aware of any opposition to Particle Physics from Christians for example on principal. There may well be some on the grounds that particles physics tends to be very expensive, and many (Christians and non-Christians) think the money could be better used.

For example, the Vatican is said to be creationist on p159. Odd, since the (now previous) Pope is on record as saying that evolution is not incompatible with Christian belief.

And yet, the Vatican is strongly opposed to in vitro fertilisation, as it involves the production of many fertilised eggs, most of which are destroyed. They are not opposed because it is science, but because they believe it involves the destruction of human life. It is therefore incredibly unlikely that a priest and a nun would be allowed to go through the procedure, as they would need to have done thirty-something years before the story is set.

Of course, Brown's argument is more with the Roman Catholic Church, and especially with its claims to absolute truth than with Christianity itself. I am no great fan of the Roman Catholic Church; I agree that the concentration of power has in the past led to horrible abuses of that power, but the claims for the authority of the Christian message are shared by many other groups of Christians who do not abuse the power in the same way. To an extent, Brown attacks the part of Christianity most open to such attack - the Catholics, and then implies the same is true for all other groups, when his argument holds even less for them than it does for the Catholics.

Conclusion

All in all, an interesting read, but it would be easy for this book to mislead people who did not already know what Christianity taught and something of the history involved. I think that's the idea.

Does Science Work?

In a recent discussion, JL posted some interesting thoughts on the nature of knowledge in science. He's also done them as a post on his blog. I think there are some very interesting points here, that it's well thought through and well written, and while I agree with most of them, there are a few things that need a bit of clarification.

I give you this analogy: Before you walk into a building, you don't know how structurally safe it might be, and whether or not it might collapse on top of you. You might be 50% certain - either it will collapse, or it won't. You decide that your accumulated experience with buildings is a good guide, and enter the building. If you repeatedly return to the same building, and it doesn't collapse on top of you, your previous experience leads you to the conclusion that this building is structurally sound, and is unlikely to fall down while you are inside. You go further into the building each time you visit, increasing the risk of being trapped or hurt if it does start to collapse. You might be 80% sure, or 90%, or given long enough, 99.999999% sure. You can never be 100% sure, but you conclude that given the evidence and experience, the likelihood of this particular building collapsing with you inside is remote in the extreme.

I agree with the majority of what you say about science here (well, I would, I was a physics teacher until last month).

I think the analogy could be improved a little, however.

We don't have experience of anything else "like" science. We don't have a (naturalistic) understanding of why it works. We don't have any explanation of why or how electrons and photons should interact in the way they do in QED - we just observe that they do. In fact, that has to be true of any theory we see as fundamental.

So science is more like seeing a building with no visible means of support. We can't see a priori why it should stay up. We can't go away and test other things like it to see that they stay up, because there isn't anything else like it. We can't use our pre-existing understanding of engineering to say that it looks as if it should stay up, because we don't have any pre-existing understanding of the universe.

But yes, the reason most people believe that science will continue to work is that it has worked so far. That's not the reason I believe science continues to work - I believe it continues to work because God is reliable, and he continues to work it.

Actually, I think what you describe is a very good analogy for faith. Not in the post-existential sense of "a leap in the dark", but a process of putting your trust in something based on a growing understanding (which is how the Bible uses the word). So I observe that God is trustworthy and doesn't let me down, so I trust him a bit more, and so on.

Taking the analogy further, if the building has been carefully planned and thoroughly tested, well designed and constructed, it will survive all manner of adversity unscathed: fires, floods, earthquakes, strong winds. By the same token, small defects might be uncovered after such events, and these deserve much scrutiny and enquiry, and ultimately some resolution.

I agree. This is also largely the point I was making with miracles and people not believing - even the (hypothetical) absolute rationalist could say it was simply an example of some science or technology they had not yet fully understood. I'm pretty certain that miracles have happened. I have good reason to believe that they still happen.

When people don't believe, in my limited experience (others who read this blog have far more), it is usually either because they have not yet realised how trustworthy God is, how amazing Christ is and how wonderful it is to have a relationship with him, or it is because they have decided not to believe.

I very much doubt that it is possible to prove anything to someone who has decided not to believe, unless God first weakens that resolution. I think that's what is meant in the Bible by the phrase "a hard heart".