Augustine Pamplany CST
Paul Davies is a world-famous Australian physicist, born in 1946. The title of his most celebrated book itself is very suggestive – God and the New Physics. His outlook on science and faith has been articulated in a well-celebrated dictum: “in my opinion, today science offers a surer path to God than religion.” He holds the view that science is about explaining the world and religion’s role is to interpret it. Accordingly, there could be no conflict between science and religion. Davies notices an irony in the very distinctive nature of both science and religion: “In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.”
One of his strong arguments for God’s existence from the viewpoint of science is the idea of the fine tuning of the cosmos. There are certain qualities, which play some crucial role in physics with constant value elsewhere in universe, for example, the charge of electron. If these values are slightly changed our universe will collapse. This means that ours is a finely tuned universe. Hence there is need for a designer. This is one of the ways by which science becomes a “surer way to God.” The laws and order of nature demands a religious vision.
“Science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview… even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith the existence of a law-like order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us.”
He considers the concept of cosmic design to be very imposing and rules out any scientific view that the universe has originated out of necessity without recourse to God:
“There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all… It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe… The impression of design is overwhelming.” “Some scientists have tried to argue that… theory of everything, would describe the only logically consistent world. In other words, the nature of the physical world would be entirely a consequence of logical and mathematical necessity.
There would be no choice about it. I think this is demonstrably wrong. There is not a shred of evidence that the universe is logically necessary.”
God, therefore, is a very natural and holistic concept for Davies. Many issues like the purpose of Universe, role of humans, etc. still remain unanswered in science. Religion is needed to answer these deeper questions. According to Davies, both science and religion inspires in us a sense of wonder and awe for both of them are looking for values, simplicity and harmony.
As a historian of science, he had no hesitation to say that science has its origins in the cradles of religion. He states, “It was from the intellectual ferment brought about by the merging of Greek philosophy and Judeo-Islamic-Christian thought that modern science emerged, with its unidirectional linear time, its insistence on nature’s rationality, and its emphasis on mathematical principles.”
