When your sums add up weirdly, is it time to pray?

Richard Swinburne argued by analogy with Gödel’s theorem that maths could not describe reality. A theory in maths always takes something as given — something that cannot be proved by the theorem. No maths-type theory can explain all reality at once.

All natural sciences take that approach, as it happens. Even were all the fundamental forces to be linked together in a single grand theory, something remains to be understood. Why should they be there, when they need not be there?

Famously the Big Bang came from a quantum event beyond the point that time fuzzes out and temporal cause makes sense. But as Alister McGrath pointed out, a quantum event presupposes a quantum field.

Some people are content to say there need be no other kind of cause. What Aristotle called a final cause — why something is done, or what it is ‘there’ for — can just be ignored and we can say, ‘the universe is just there’. (Biologists tend to concentrate on what things are there for, the function that is linked to what Aristotle called ‘efficient cause’; these sceptics doubt that we need to ask even what things are ‘there’ for.)

And in a sense, of course, they are right. Things are ‘there’ insofar as we can pick them out as fixed entities. As science corrects its findings it often turns out that other things were ‘there’ all the time. Quanta were there all the time, even before any theory of the atom.

But there is reality that we engage with (and in). A natural scientist and a sceptical philosopher both proceed as though genuine questions have answers. They do not think one kind of approach suits all enquiries, or that one frame of reference fits all data. They proceed in the belief that the universe is intelligible, even across distances both vast and minute. Every fruitful scientific theory proves the worth of natural science by showing that even before we know something for certain we can discover true things by assuming that theory is true. Yet the sceptics will not apply their methods to life — and that is odd. It seems to me that the incredible mutually-reinforcing forms of intelligibility across the expanding visible universe are against all the odds.

I think there are two reasons. Firstly, religions get warped into ideological vehicles and cease to provide a faith that works. When faith is fruitful as some theories can be — though this only an analogy, remember — then people come to understand the realities behind it, even without knowing ‘the mind of God’. That’s a faith that works. But when religions become machines that sublimate our own psychologies, people turn away. A faith that works involves changing as you go along, and faith cannot work when secretly it is an excuse not to change.

Secondly, I think, we are terrified of non-being. Usually religion is presented by sceptics as a comfort for that terror; as Philip Larkin wrote, ‘that vast moth-eaten brocade / Created to pretend we never die’. I think you need to be pretty ignorant of religion — maybe wilfully so — to believe that. The universe is just there; that’s all. A sceptic and a believer in a single room are in the same universe but God is not ‘there’ in both their worlds. Buddhist meditations can show that even the ‘universe’ as we conceive it may not be ‘there’, rather as science keeps on updating the models of ‘universe’ that it uses. The problem is that the sceptic and the believer are both in each believer.

Genuine religion throws away models of God as it goes, and believers must be prepared to do it. God does not present himself as an object, and he is not an object: God creates all the objects and their building-blocks and the levels of their explanation. God is a person, and encounter with this person — like encountering, not exploiting, any person — means throwing away the very preconceptions by which we approached them in the first place. Really to believe in God, first we must confront non-being: the apparent unreality of this being in all the ways that until that moment we had thought of him.

So if scientists are coming to confess the limit-cases of knowledge, that is good. Philosophy got there already, but good. Religion has been sorely mocked along the way, but OK: all good. A natural-science approach never can explain the whole universe, all at once, nor anything else beyond its categories. The question is how to go on from here; this point we’re still at. In an even longer article we could look to the religious philosophy of Karol Wojtyła for some grasp of that, but here, instead, are three take-away points from three popes.

1. Wojtyła (St John Paul II). Persons are essentially relational; they are not things, reducible to their parts, to be killed, used, exploited, harvested.

2. Ratzinger (Benedict XVI). ‘We are not the products of some meaningless evolution’ (leaving open the idea of a meaningful one).

3. Bergoglio (Francis). I paraphrase Gaudium evangelii: the church must cease its obsession with structures and recover spiritual fruitfulness — because that’s the point.