Sir John Polkinghorne at Southampton University - 9th May 2006

Video and MP3 (also downloaded to WASP PC) available here:
http://www.cis.org.uk/centralsouth/Previous.html

• Listen to the talk (MP3, 12.9MB)
• Listen to the question and answer session (MP3, 13.4MB)
• Download the video (MP4, 106MB)

WASP made brief notes from John Polkinghorne's Lecture (organised by Christians in Science) divided into 3 parts:

1) Science
2) Science / Religion interface
3) Religious belief

John Polkinghorne's knowledge and communication of science is excellent. His religious beliefs are less impressive to WASP.

1) Science

• fine tuning for carbon life helium x3 no good to explain carbon formation need helium 4 to berylium 8 to carbon 12??
• no mention of life based on other elements eg Silicon
• Fred Hoyle and carbon formation
• String Theory
• Universe will end in a big crunch - or more likely due to Dark Energy - a big wimper in which the Universe expands forever and all life will cease to exist

2) Science / Religion interface

• who lit the blue touch paper of the big bang is not the question - the key question is why there is nothing (Leibnitz)
• fine tuning is evidence of either God is real AND/OR their are many and varied universes (John Leslie)
• Multiverse theory is of EQUAL probability to a Creator designing one universe - said JP - very surprisingly
• What physics would change JP mind to believe that a Creator was unlikely to have designed the universe?
  
• God does not do tricks - he does not interfere with Laws of Nature from day to day
• refers to Leslie J (Universes, 1989)
• Cosmos v Chaos; Creator v No Creator
• Paul Davies does not know what he believes in!
• self consciousness of man
• man can foresee the future - apes cannot
• the media is partly to blame with the widespread opinion of Science versus Religion. A simple yes v no story - is always good for the media
• the great divide of science started with Darwin when scientist was set against religion - this is not so - both sides were divided
• Anthropic Principle
• 'a ball of energy has turned into a home for saints and scientists'
• Belief in God in an Age of Science - 1998, is JPs best selling book
• physics by 2100 will be fundamentally be about Matter AND information (is this some reference to The Soul or Entropy or The Mind of God??)

3) Religious belief

• only miracle he believes in was the resurrection of Christ
• is John Polkinghorne's God a Pantheist God?
• God is in it for the long term??
• problem of evil in the natural world - Creator is a very hands off Parent
• if life exists on other planets who is to say that an equivalent Jesus has not already spoken to these people
• science is horizontal - life after death for all of creation gives a vertical dimension
• science and theology are partners in a quest for understanding and truth
• the world is not full of items with the stamp 'made by God' - he is more subtle than that
  
• Steven Weinberg - the staunch atheist
• an understanding of an evolutionary universe as being compatible with a theological doctrine of creatio continua
• epistimology and ontology??
• Paul Dirac - laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful mathematical equations
• Stephen Hawking - a great scientist - knows a lot less about theology
• by bringing the world into existence God has self limited divine power by allowing the other to be truly to be itself. The gift of Love must be the gift of Freedom, the gift of a degree of letting-be - to make itself. It is the nature of:-
• cells mutate, can produce new life or turn cancerous
• tsunami caused by underground earthquake - which is necessary so that minerals on surface of earth are replaced with minerals from the inner core of the earth - so what appears a natural evil (tsunami) is part of a greater process
• science is only a minor part of why JP is a Christian
• scientists dont talk of wonder in their scientific papers - but they do so in conversation
• much more to 'Mind of God' than science will ever discover
• Christ resurrection - event from which New Creation grows
• What is the evidence that God created the universe and continues to run it? The doctrine of creation is not concerned with how things began but why things exist. It is the answer to the great question posed by Liebniz, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ To believe in creation (or the Cosmos cf. Chaos) means that there is a divine Mind and a divine Purpose behind what is happening in the world. To believe in creation is to believe that the universe is not just a random collection of atoms, but it is an orderly world whose patterns reflect the will of a Creator. It is to believe that history is not just a meaningless succession of one thing after another, but it is going somewhere because there is God’s purpose behind what is happening.

Is the Universe Fine Tuned? by Steven Weinberg

Now, it doesn't settle the matter for me to say that we cannot see the hand of a designer in what we know about the fundamental principles of science. It might be that, although these principles do not refer explicitly to life, much less human life, they are nevertheless craftily designed to bring it about.

Some physicists have argued that certain constants of nature have values that seem to have been mysteriously fine-tuned to just the values that allow for the possibility of life, in a way that could only be explained by the intervention of a designer with some special concern for life. I am not impressed with these supposed instances of fine-tuning. For instance, one of the most frequently quoted examples of fine-tuning has to do with the energy of a certain excited state of the carbon nucleus. The build-up in stars of elements necessary for life, like carbon and oxygen, depends on the carbon nucleus having an excited state at an energy within a narrow range, where in fact just such a state is found. The reason that it has to have this energy is to provide a way for carbon nuclei be formed in stars in collisions of helium nuclei with unstable beryllium nuclei, which is a necessary step in the build-up of all elements heavier than helium. But recent calculations show that, as has been long expected, without any fine tuning of the constants of nature one would in any case expect the carbon nucleus to have a state like an unstable molecule, consisting of a helium nucleus and a beryllium nucleus, which would naturally have an energy close to the values necessary for the synthesis of carbon and heavier elements.

There is one constant whose value does seem remarkably well adjusted in our favor. It is the energy density of empty space, also known as the cosmological constant. It could have any value, but from first principles one would guess that this constant should be very large - much too large to allow matter to clump together in the early universe, which is the first step in forming galaxies and stars and planets and people. It's too early to tell if this is a real problem, or if there is some fundamental principle that explains why the cosmological constant must be this small.

But even if there is no such principle, recent developments in cosmology offer the possibility of an explanation why the measured values of the cosmological constant and other physical constants are favorable for the appearance of intelligent life. Sidney Coleman has shown how quantum mechanical effects can lead to a picture of the wave function of the universe in which the wave function is the sum of many different terms, each term corresponding to a big (or little) bang in which what we call the constants of nature take all possible values. Also, as you have heard here from Alan Guth, in the `chaotic inflation' theories of Andre Linde and others our big bang is supposed to be just one episode in a much larger universe in which big bangs go off all the time, each with different values of the fundamental constants.

In any such picture, in which the universe contains many parts with different values for what we call the constants of nature, there would be no difficulty in understanding why these constants take values favorable to intelligent life. There would be a vast number of big bangs in which the constants of nature take values unfavorable for life, and much fewer where life is possible. You don't have to invoke a benevolent designer to explain why we are in one of the parts of the universe where life is possible. In all the other parts of the universe there is no one to raise the question.

To conclude that the constants of nature have been fine-tuned by a benevolent designer is like saying “Isn't it wonderful that God put us here on earth, where there's water and air and the surface gravity and temperature are so comfortable, rather than some horrid place, like Mercury or Pluto.” Where else in the solar system but on earth could we have evolved?

Reasoning like this is called “anthropic.” Sometimes it just amounts to an assertion that the laws of nature are what they are so that we can exist, without further explanation. This seems to me to be little more than mystical mumbo-jumbo. On the other hand, if there really is a large number of worlds in which some constant takes different values, then the anthropic explanation of why in our world it takes values favorable for life is just common sense, like explaining why we live on the earth rather than Mercury or Pluto. The actual value of the cosmological constant, recently measured by observations of the motion of distant supernovas, is about what you would expect from this sort of argument; it is just about small enough to prevent it from interfering with the formation of galaxies and so on. But we don't yet know enough about physics to tell whether there are different parts of the universe in which what are usually called the constants of physics really do take different values. This is not a hopeless question; we will be able to answer it when we know more about the quantum theory of gravitation than we do now.