I tend to agree with Weinberg that we will not find an interested God in the
final laws of nature. The reason is that God will not be "derived" from the
mathematical laws that describe nature. This is somewhat analogous to the
statement that Romeo and Juliet cannot conclude that they are part of a play
written by Shakespeare. Only if Shakespeare wills his appearance into the
play will the protagonists know of his existence. Weinberg correctly
indicates that the history of science is neutral regarding the existence of
God. But that is the true nature of good science. However, our mathematical
laws don't describe, nor attempt to describe, the whole of the human
experience. To claim otherwise would be nonsensical.
It is clear that Weinberg does not confront Christ. His reference to
religion is not specific enough, for instance, to indicate if he rejects the
claims of who Christ is and what He did on the cross. [Of course, from his
writing I can conclude that Weinberg rejects Christ as Lord and Savior.] One
must never forget that Christianity is not a religion. Religion is man/woman
seeking God; whereas, in Christianity God sought man/woman. If one accepts
that God became flesh in the person of Christ, then one can never talk of a
non interested God. The historical element of Christianity is all important,
St. Paul already made that clear. People like Joseph Campbell speak about
myths and indicate that the historicity of Christianity is not important
that what is important are the myths. That is pure nonsense. I believe that
Weinberg and Campbell do not BELIEVE that Christ is who He said He is. Their
conclusions follow from that premise alone and has nothing to do with their
erudition in their field of studies. Like evolutionary theorists when they
state that "evolution is a fact," Weinberg and Campbell conclude what they
already assumed.
Moorad
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I (Don) agree that we will not find God "in" the final laws of nature.
But it might be expected that they would reveal God. When Moorad writes,
"However, our mathematical laws don't describe, nor attempt to describe, the
whole of the human experience," I also agree with him, but I should point out
that "our mathematical laws" at present are not what Weinberg means by "the
final laws of nature," since if I add the next two sentences to what I quoted
from Weinberg, _Dreams of a Final Theory_, page 242, one has, "If there were
anything we could discover in nature that *would* give us some special insight
into the handiwork of God, it would have to be the final laws of nature.
Knowing these laws, we would have in our possession the book of rules that
governs stars and stones and everything else. So it is natural that Stephen
Hawking should refer to the laws of nature as `the mind of God.'"
Thus "the final laws of nature" would indeed govern "the whole of human
experience," as well as "everything else" about our universe (as I take nature
to mean in this context), including all of the actions and revelations of God
the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit in the Bible and elsewhere. One
application is that when "the final laws of nature" are taken with this broad
meaning, seeing God revealed in them is not just "natural theology" in its
usual meaning, but seeing God revealed in anything He has created in this
universe, including the Bible, miracles, promptings of the Holy Spirit, etc.
Of course, there likely is the debatable implicit assumption by
Weinberg that the final laws of nature will be mathemetical laws of a form not
too dissimilar to those we have already discovered. That is what would seem to
give significance to his statement that I quoted from page 245, "All our
experience throughout the history of science has tended in the opposite
direction, toward a chilling impersonality in the laws of nature." So one
partial answer to Weinberg here is that there has been the selection effect
that we have tended to discover the mathematical part of the laws of nature,
and as mathematical laws these tend to be impersonal.
Even a non-Christian like David Chalmers, in _The Conscious Mind_ I
referred to last time, emphasizes that the phenomenal aspects of consciousness
do not seem to be implied logically by the present laws of physics (though many
others seem to disagree, such as Daniel Dennett). Now I think most of us
believe that similar experiences, or at least similar physical goings-on in the
brain, lead to similar conscious awarenesses, so presumably there are laws for
consciousness that we have not formulated very precisely yet. It seems to me
to be an open question of how mathematical such laws are, and how impersonal.
And then one can go to miracles etc. that are recorded in the Bible. I
think with Weinberg's meaning of "the final laws of nature," these laws would
have to govern all of those miracles etc. as well. But of course the open
question is how mathematical, and how impersonal, such laws would be. It is
also by no means obvious that humans ever will be able to know the entirety of
such laws, for they might be too complicated (e.g., containing a description of
all that God has done in this universe, with this description not being
compressible to a set of rules that we humans would call finite).
On the other hand, the enormous simplicity of the mathematical laws we
do partially understand does seem to show that the universe is much, much
simpler than it might have been, and so it suggests that maybe the final laws
of nature are indeed not too complicated, and maybe even simple enough to be
knowable to man (at least if this knowledge is not taken to imply that man can
work out all the consequences of the laws: in a sense we know the laws of
qusntum electrodynamics that govern virtually all of chemistry, though we
certainly cannot work out all the consequences of these laws and so must still
continue to do chemistry experiments).
Thus, in apparent agreement with Weinberg, I would regard "the final
laws of nature" as being a complete description of the universe, including all
human experience (with the complete description being in a compressed form,
just as "the set of all integers," with the background knowledge necessary to
understand this phrase, is a complete compressed description without being an
explicit list of all the integers).
So maybe the distinction that Craig Rusbult and others have been
searching for is rather that between the mathematical aspects of the final laws
of nature, and the other parts, though it is probably hopeless to try to make
this distinction precise either. As a theist, I would certainly not want to
concede any part of the laws of nature, such as the mathematical or the
impersonal-appearing parts, as not being created, sustained, governed, willed,
planned, purposed, concurred, etc. by God, but there is the open question of
whether the final laws of nature can be written entirely in mathematical form,
and whether they are simplest in this form.
Don Page