Theology is too important a subject to be just left to theologians, so it is to be commended when an expert from another discipline has the confidence to venture into the theological arena and do some serious reflection. Tom McLeish is a professor of physics who does just that. As the title might suggest, this is not the typical confrontational book where faith and science are pitted against each other, but rather, McLeish takes faith in God as a given and he uses this perspective to reflect on how science might be viewed in the light of faith and how faith might be viewed in the light of science.
McLeish begins by considering the way science is perceived among the general public and from his own experience he feels that many people view science with suspicion. He finds that whilst people are hopeful with regards to the many benefits science might deliver, e.g. cures for cancer, this is mingled with a great fear of the power that science can unleash in the world, e.g. nuclear weapons. But more than this, McLeish finds that there is a general perception that science undermines our own humanity, that it explains away all that is most precious to us.
This sets the scene for McLeish's contention that there is something wrong with humanity's place in the universe, a broken contract with nature that makes us feel strangers in the presence of ‘the sheer inhuman otherness of matter.’ This phrase, ‘the sheer inhuman otherness of matter’ is one that McLeish borrows from George Steiner's book Real Presences and it is a phrase McLeish keeps coming back to, a genuine challenge that needs to be faced up to. Is it possible to bridge the great chasm between ‘the sheer inhuman otherness of matter’ and our own humanity?
Still, one has to question whether viewing matter in terms of sheer inhuman otherness is really anything more than a view. Whenever we see another person, are we not seeing matter which is very definitely human rather than nonhuman? If one believes that a thing is what it is in virtue of its substantial form, then there could be many different types of matter, both human and nonhuman, depending on the substantial form of which the matter was the subject. But it is clear that McLeish is not talking about matter in any Aristotelian sense. Rather he is talking about atomic particles. According to the Nobel laureate, Richard Feynman, whom McLeish quotes, the greatest scientific discovery of all time is that ‘all things are made of atoms – little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another’.
McLeish goes on to recount how this atomic hypothesis allowed him to solve a scientific mystery a young chemist presented to him – why should a weak solution of peptides set into a jelly? After much head scratching McLeish came up with a convincing answer – the peptides are able to self-assemble to form a jelly, not because of any new principle acting as a guiding force, but because the peptides are randomly moving about, and so if given time, there is a high probability they will eventually bump into each other enough times and in the right way so as to stick together and form a jelly. But the atomic hypothesis, although it has great explanatory power, does have its cost. If the atomic hypothesis is true, then there are not lots of different types of matter after all, but only the relatively few types of matter, the fundamental particles which are known to physicists, and these particles certainly are not human. This then is rather disconcerting, because it looks like the same random and purposeless motion that accounts for peptide solutions forming into jelly is at the heart of all biological processes including our own. There is, therefore, this huge chasm between what we think we are and what the atomic hypothesis says we actually are. In the light of faith, though, McLeish believes that this chasm can be bridged, and he finds in the bible a divine mandate for people to investigate the natural world so that humanity can be reconciled with it. This is McLeish's ‘theology of science’, of how humankind's scientific endeavours are meant to fit within God's divine plan.
Whilst McLeish draws on many scriptural passages, he pays particular attention to the book of Job. For McLeish, the book of Job is not primarily about the problem of suffering, but rather it is about the disconnect between humanity and the chaotic disorderliness of the rest of creation. Furthermore, McLeish understands the Lord's answer to Job as saying that ‘chaos is part of the fruitfulness of nature – we cannot hope to control it any more than we can bridle Leviathan, but by understanding we might channel it’.
The role of reconciling humanity with the rest of nature that McLeish sees as science's primary purpose is a far more honourable goal than merely improving a country's competitiveness and quality of life. But it seems possible to share in McLeish's vision of science without necessarily conceding that humanity's uneasy relationship with the natural world is because of the ‘sheer inhuman otherness of matter’, though to see beyond the problem of matter might require a more critical evaluation of the atomic hypothesis than McLeish is willing to give. But given that elementary particles can be in two places at once, can interfere with each other as though they were waves and cannot be separated as distinct entities from each other without destroying their quantum state, is this really just a fine tuning of the atomic hypothesis? Or might not this be an invitation to seek a new and richer hypothesis, perhaps one in which we could genuinely recognise the matter in which we are formed as being truly human.
