Transcript
Now today I wish to probe into ways in which this affects theology in the present day world and thus try to show more fully how the dialogue between theological science and natural science operates in our contemporary thought. Now I'd like to think of man, especially of man qua scientist, as the priest of creation. Think of this for a moment in relation to the theological account of man and the universe which we are given in the opening
chapters of Genesis. On the one hand we find the universe is made in such a way that it produces life and form out of itself. Each kind produces its own kind. And on the other hand we find that the universe by itself is dumb, but within the universe there is planted man whose task it is to identify a name that is to bring to expression the manifold realities of the created world around him. Now that is
the basic function of the scientist as priest of creation to bring the universe to view, to understanding in its inherent harmonies and regularities and thus allow the meaning, the basic design of the universe to become disclosed. Now man is that creature within the universe whereby the universe discloses these amazing harmonies and regularities and symmetries in its contingent intelligibilities and so is brought to speech or word and as the universe is unfolded and brought to speech or
word in that way through man as its priest, this universe thus unfolded constitutes a great hymn of praise and adoration to God the creator. Regarded in this way natural science is a religious operation for it is part of man's obedience to the creator who has placed him in this universe and no other and it provides the in which we are all summoned with all creation to worship and praise God. It's in this way that theological science
cooperates with what I call the new science and the new science opens up the intrinsic structures of the universe to understanding, but all this has a reciprocal effect upon the way in which we inevitably pursue theology for it helps theology to be more faithful to itself as the science of God and more faithful to its understanding of the relation of the universe to God and of God to the universe. Now in order to help us see
how this operates I would like to take three epigrammatic sayings of Einstein in which he was want in characteristic fashion to throw into sharp relief certain decisive issues and the first of them is the most familiar God does not play dice. Now the significance of this is evident when we see the connections in which Einstein uttered this saying which he did frequently it was spoken with reference to problems in contemporary quantum theory in which it was
trying to give still basically within I think a Newtonian outlook an account of what was called indeterminacy or uncertainties that arose when our observational instruments prevent us from apprehending nature as it is irrespective of Now when Einstein attacked that form of quantum theory as failing to penetrate into the inner structures of the quanta and develop field structures laws and forms of field structures he was accused of being determinist but that is a fatal mistake scientifically it
means interpreting Einstein in terms of the classical transformations in Newton rather than the relativistic or Lorentz transformations of relativity theory but that by the way there's a correspondence between Einstein and Bohr which carries a couple of letters from Pauli to Bohr which shows after a visit of Pauli to Einstein in Princeton that Einstein was by no means a determinist but a realist and they're very different. God does not play dice refers not to hard determinism but
to the objective intelligibility of the universe independent of our perceiving and conceiving of it. It refers to objective but a dynamic relatedness inherent in nature where we have objective and dynamic field structures. Now here we have the rejection of a Kantian approach according to which we only know what we can make and shape as objects in our own understanding that's to say knowing and objectifying operations go together so that we do not read laws of nature
out of nature as Kant says in the Grundlegung but read laws of nature into nature. The laws of nature are what we construct through the patterns of our understanding. Now that is rejected. Here on the contrary we have the recognition that in science, rigorous science, we are up against structures in reality which we cannot control which are independent of our mind. For example we can pursue our astrophysics in exploration of the outermost bounds of the universe
where we come up against relations in the universe millions and millions of light years before ever man appeared before any sentience appeared. So we there we are clearly in up against objective structures in the universe entirely independent of man and yet and this is science it is man who knows that in its structures independently of him that is what science is about and that is what general relativity is about in this epistemological aspect of it. Now
this can be put in another way by reference to Michael Polanyi who has told us a number of times of an argument he once had with Bukharin in which Bukharin insisted that pure science is a symptom of bourgeois mentality it's a disease and the only science there is is technology the kind of instrumentalist science which is now being he felt was being pursued and wrestling with this question Polanyi realized that you cannot engage in real science
rigorous science unless you have to do with a transcendent reality he uses the word transcendent over which we have no control the truth is something over which we have no control because in truthful relations with whatever there is we are in touch with objective and intrinsic structures under which under the power of which our minds fall as they think truly and scientifically. Now consider the effect of this principle that God does not play dice there is
an objective relatedness order in the universe an objective intelligibility independent of us consider the effect upon that of that upon New Testament scholarship in interpreting Jesus and think of the widespread habit of years many years especially since Harnack's early essay on Das Wesen des Christentum of interpreting the New Testament only as a record of beliefs and experiences of the early church primarily as that in which Jesus himself is reduced to a status of secondary significance and
interpreted in terms of the symbolic objectification that's the Boltmannian of a primitive religious and moral consciousness. Now that way of thinking arises of course on the dualist structure that I've been speaking about earlier as they are given the shape that they derive from Kant. Now in order to put this straight in the light of the scientific revolution if I may call it that let us distinguish between two things between pre-scientific thinking in pictures and images
based on the model of observation in terms merely of a subject-object relation in which we cannot escape from ourselves the observers and which finally reduces theology to anthropology as we see almost everywhere today distinguish between that way of thinking a pre-scientific way of thinking and a genuine scientific way of thinking which while retaining a place for symbolic representation nevertheless penetrates into the objective coherences and structured interrelations of things that is into the object-object
relations in which our subject-object relations are transcended and controlled from beyond by reference to objective ontological structures of the realities being investigated of the kind of objectivity Einstein is talking about now let me give a picture about this problem and I hope that's also to help you to think not in pictures about it let us say here is an object and we'll have it a multiple object and so I write it big because let's say
there are relations the characteristics of it now I think of that in terms of a subject now if I think only in terms of a subject-object relation then I think of the object as it appears to me and inevitably I am unable to get beyond the appearances of things this is the whole problem of Kant and and modern theology so that the subject-object relation always involves that now if you try to break behind appearances
you've got a lot of foolish people today who say you've got to get rid of objectivity but you see that's utter nonsense on the contrary what science does is this science penetrates into the object in such a way that it is concerned with object-object relations but they penetrate in the relation between a and b and b and c and thus through object-object relations it controls the subject-object relations and there's a scientific thinking so
that while you think scientifically you think as the subject you nevertheless think in such a way that your subject-object thinking is controlled from beyond it now if you remain here you're still simply caught up in a Galilean theory of relativity but if you think here you're thinking in terms of an inherent relatedness which controls and transcends your subject-object relation and that's the epistemology of general relativity now scientific theory scientific thinking today is quite clearly
a penetrating into the inner objective relations relation of object to object in which you control and transcend a mere subject-object relation now looked at from this point of view you see by and large the great mass of biblical interpretation in our day is still primitive it's still working with a subject-object observationist approach interpreting it in terms of images and myths and so on and therefore fall short of the radically scientific way of penetrates into
the inner connections that is why so much modern biblical interpretation just doesn't wash with the scientists and they are appalled at the ways of thinking that are involved here now of course we are all primitive as we engage in observational experience especially now we'll go into this in our split space and time with which we operate on the level but in objective scientific thinking the pattern of our observational images so i may put that way the
pattern of our observational images which is correlated to the observing subject is cut and intersected by the pattern of relations at a deeper level by structures that are invisible and intangible but invariant while dynamically objective so that these patterns of our visible relations are cut as it were and intersected by another pattern which controls them and governs them and this means that the this image of object that rises from our observational experience is made is given
meaning as it refers to a non-observable reality beyond it now let me do what i often do in the class i conduct a simple experiment and i say holding up a book or a bit of paper like that i say what shape do you see now invariably i get the answer a rectangle but you see you do not see a rectangle you could not from any angle see a rectangle here what you see is some
form of a trapezium or take it more obviously in a coin you take a coin what do you see whatever angle you look at it you do not see a perfect circle so you see it in different shapes of ellipses and so on but you don't see a circle nor do you see a rectangle but you know this is rectangle and it is the invisible structure of the rectangle which you apprehend makes you believe this is
rectangular but you cannot get at the rectangle by deducing it from the appearances that's impossible and yet that is why what a lot of people say what my biblical colleagues sometimes say to me we provide you with analysis of the new testament observational grounds it is your duty as a theologian then to deduce on that basis what theology is about that's utterly impossible and that is primitive thinking and very very bad science but i'm afraid that
is the way of thinking that has dominated so much of our modern thought well then here in scientific thinking we do not reject the Galilean principles of relativity we do not reject the fact that we are observers and observe things and therefore the image and symbol have a place but they are reduced to a minimum because they are intersected by what is objectively in control and therefore made to refer beyond itself now if you want to
be more technical just for a very brief moment what we are concerned with is the space time metrical field which is inherently non-observable but in and intangible now we have objects and chairs around us and these are there but they are controlled even in their visible observable appearances by the space time structures which are invisible and objective and science is much more concerned with the invisible objective structures which are dynamic because they're spatial temporal which
control the appearances but we're not concerned with appearances in science we're concerned with the internal structures and in light of those internal structures we understand appearances whereas you cannot understand internal structures by appearances so here we have a complete boulevard small of the whole observational approach and this is part of the profound revolution in scientific outlook as i say in which our biblical scholars by and large have not yet fully participated now if we are to
think in this way then it's probably better not to use the terms image or metaphor or symbol but rather to use the word analogy but analogy has to be understood in a very different way from what it has been done in the traditional medieval sense and modern sense where it is derived from Pythagorean doctrine of proportions let's say analogical relations are not relations on one level but they are relations in which the pattern or the image
of one level is made to refer beyond analogia to a level a higher level and it is that objective cross-level relation which is a proper analogical relation that's how we use the analogical relations in multi-level structures in science well then let me get back here we have in this change to the kind of thinking that is epitomized in the statement of einstein god does not play dice we have a transition from muthos to logos
which is characteristic of all rigorous scientific form from image to inner logic from subjectivity to objectivity now when we see what happens when however we move away from the observationalist approach the object subject approach to the historical jesus well that jesus is inevitably lost to us inevitably swamped and submerged in the relativities of our subjectivity see what happens when you penetrate beyond that the inner logos in jesus here we have the humanity of jesus not interpreted
as a symbol of the divine and far from being a mask or an image of divine reality detached from it is found to be the constitutive form of god's self-communication and self-revelation to us the form of god's self-giving an indissoluble union with himself and which is maintained as such in his perfect integrity and reality as humanity now if i had time i would show you that one of the implications the profound implications of
general relativity is the unity of form and being the structure of substance and and and and pattern so that here we cannot divorce the empirical from the theoretical but we think the two together now in that approach when you approach jesus along this way you find that far from getting away from or jumping behind the humanity of jesus here the humanity of jesus in its perfect integrity and reality as humanity is the constitutive form in which
god's own self-giving and self-revelation is made known to us now this has the effect then of throwing us back upon the nysene homoousion the understanding of this jesus who forgives our sins who sanctifies us as one who is of one being the same being with god he is in himself what he is toward us and god is in himself eternally antecedently in himself what he is toward us and so this god who reveals himself
to us in jesus is not a god who plays dice with us for the pattern of his self-revealing the order of his love and grace manifest in the incarnation is of the one order which exists and is dynamically operative in the being of the living god himself of course thus to allow theological interpretation within the context of this scientific approach carries us back to the basic nysene theology of classical times now i wish to pursue
this from another angle in terms of einstein's second saying god does not wear his heart on his sleeve if god does not play dice stands for einstein's conviction that there is an imminent order in the universe and ordered regularity in all events independent of us god does not wear his heart on his sleeve stands for the conviction that the real secrets of nature the reasons for that order cannot be read off the patterns of its phenomenal
surface that is to say we cannot deduce from appearances the real structures of reality now in science einstein was concerned to penetrate into the underlying ontological structure of the ordered regularity of things to which as i've said the phenomenal patterns of that regularity are coordinated and by which they are controlled and in reference to which they are to be accounted for now the pattern of events on the surface are indeed relative to the observer but on
a dualist assumption say that started by Galileo between primary and secondary qualities operated with newton between absolute mathematical time and space relative apparent time and space and so on right down to to cant on any dualist assumption that means let me get back before because the events on the surface are relative to the observer on a dual assumption that means we can never reach knowledge of the real world beyond us and that is why on a
dualist assumption we can never reach knowledge of jesus we can only reach knowledge of the appearances interpreted appearances in the consciousness of early church if we reject dualism however we operate with a unity of form and being an inheritance of form in being and thus operate with a very different procedure and here we have to do as i've just been saying with an inner imageless constitutive structure of things which is invariant to relativity for any and
every human knower but which cannot be grasped by observational means but only by intellective penetration or theoretical insight while outward shape on the surface of existence remains observable and imageable and is variant for every observer the invisible and imageless ontological structures remain constant and invariant for all observers that is we have to think in a dimension of ontological depth in which the surface of things is coordinated with a deep invisible intelligible structure and thus think empirical
and theoretical levels of reality conjunctively together so let me illustrate that this way here we have the empirical level and here we have what we call the theoretical level then we have to think these all the time conjunctively together you cannot go from that to that or that to that you have to think them always together never one separable from the other and therefore while we are empirical beings embodied minds in the universe that has structured
rationality we here on the empirical level have to think always in such a way that the empirical and the theoretical are held together now this doesn't mean to say that your facts and then interpretation put upon the facts that's nonsense you only have facts which are inherently significant have their inherent relations and therefore have an inherent meaning and you apprehend facts in terms of their inherent significance and theory scientific theory is an understanding of the facts
in terms of that inherent significance and meaning or inherent structures that say in a dimension as i put it of ontological depth in which the surface of things is coordinated with a deep invisible intelligible structure god does not wear his heart on his sleeve that's how einstein put it rarely to know is to be in touch with the depth of reality which has the capacity for disclosure beyond what we can anticipate or imagine and so we
think again of jesus christ he is not to be understood therefore but trying to fit jesus into the surface patterns of other phenomena try as you as you will to interpret the resurrection of jesus or the virgin birth of jesus but trying to fit it into the patterns of other phenomena on the same level and it doesn't make sense any more than it makes sense to try and think the kind of connections you derive in a
quantum experiment with the kind of connections that you use when you set up the experiment namely Newtonian mechanics to interpret the kind of connections you have in quantum theory with the kind of connections you have in Newtonian theory means they are reduced to absurdities and contradictions but that doesn't mean that quantum theory is absurd on the contrary it means that quantum theory is so rational and so objective that the kind of connections you have in Newtonian
mechanics have to be broken their symmetries have to be broken if they are to have genuine meaning and limited that's what happened in science and that's how we have to think in any every area and not these here regard to jesus if we try to fit him into the surface patterns of phenomena we lose him in the relativities of man's observational experiences but only by penetrating into the non-observable intelligible reality in such a way that
we grasp christ in his own wholeness and inherent force do we come up against reality itself that is only as we penetrate into his essential logos constitutive of his incarnate reality now here we have to learn the discipline of thinking then conjunctively together of the human historical and the divine eternal levels or aspects of his existence that's to say we think not only on an observational level we think on a scientific level which is a meta
level to the observational level and we think on a meta level to the scientific level a meta scientific level and so on only as we think in this way conjunctively of level to level and think out the correlations of one to the other which northrop used to call the epistemic correlations were well expounded on his part only as we think in that way are we really able to advance in any area of scientific understanding so that
if we are to use a term like metaphor it it must be metaphor the metaphor meaning the relation of one level to a meta level not relation of one thing to another on the same level that again we're back into the old nonsense so that even our fundamental concepts are changed by the advance of scientific knowledge and this is part of the linguistics people who still try to interpret new testament or science in terms of terms
that have grown up under an old-fashioned science obsolete ways of thinking that largely dualists find themselves trapped again and again in trouble and here the very basic terms that we derive from observational experience have themselves to be changed in order that they may be adequate to convey the kind of knowledge that we now have and the way that we now thinking and this applies to theology that is why athanasius who saw this long ago pointed
out again and again that theological concepts properly used have to be elastic or if you like we have to use them in topological ways in order to make them convey what they are to convey in the reference from one level to the other beyond themselves now suppose we bifurcate that level we operate with a dualist mode of thinking what happens to our knowledge of jesus well immediately it lapses into the heretical extremes docetism and ebunitism so
docetism and ebunitism are the inevitable heresies that arise once you try to think of jesus on a dualist foundation but when you get rid of the dualist foundation those old heresies don't crop up because you can't think in that kind of a way and then you cut behind them and you cut behind them in such a way that you can explain how a dual how ebunite heresy arises how docetic heresy arises and that's exactly how we
treat newtonian science you can deduce it as a limiting case from modern field physics and you can explain from that level why the connections arose in split space and time in that way and that way you transcend them but you can understand them and from this way of thinking we can understand how ebunite and docetic counterpositions had to arise on that context but we have cut behind them in a new way of thinking by which they
are transcended and which they need an ought not to arise at all now let me put that in still a different way if you think in the primitive form of images and symbols then you're operating in an old-fashioned scientific theory as either a mechanical model or a pictorial representation a picturing model but that we don't use anymore what we are concerned with is a disclosure model where a disclosure model does not represent it's not the
representative side that is important what is important is the fact that here in your model you are not representing a structure that is beyond and therefore you don't identify the structures in being ontic structures with with your scientific model but rather this refers in and through all its symbolic representations to what is non-symbolic and what is inherently objective beyond it and which controls the symbolic now if you wish to see a study of this which
is the highly illuminating and the great debate between ends mark and max plank mark mark held the atoms didn't exist all we had were symbols and he was thinking as a canteen and a conventionalist model but mark insisted they existed they had reality and at this point that einstein comes in and says yes plank you're right and therefore he's weaned away from mark and he says science is concerned with grasping reality in its depth but what
does this mean to a scientific theory scientific theory therefore is a disclosure model what i call a kind of lens which we keep on refining because it's refined as we keep on asking questions of reality and as reality becomes disclosed to us we refine our models and our theories so they become more and more transparent to the intrinsic structures of reality they become therefore disclosure models through which we apprehend the structures of reality and in that
way we can understand clearly the chalcedonian formula as a marvelous disclosure model through which we apprehend the incredible oneness in being between the divine and the human in the undivided reality of jesus again if you take the chalcedonian model and interpret it in terms of the riding rising dualisms in the Byzantine east or the augustinian west what happens you have a dualist interpretation of chalcedon alas already begun i'm afraid by leo the great and it is
from that dualist interpretation of chalcedon that people like john felippinos were castigated as monophysite because they did not fit into the dualist models of the west so that that is just another form of the ebonite prosthetic problem that arises once you bifurcate the levels well then what happens here now i have not been trying to build theology christology upon the structures of natural science but i'm saying if you take your approach to jesus and think it
out in this context you are flung back up gain upon nysene and chalcedonian christology in such a way that there you can develop it on its own proper foundations and a clearer and a deeper way and this does not mean that say the chalcedonian formulation does not need reconstructing or developing every disclosure model needs more and more refining these glasses of mine are becoming a bit opaque and i need a new set where they are refined
so i can see more clearly through them now the same thing is true with every scientific model and every theological model if you're going to use it in that sense now let me come to my last logion if you wish to call it that of einstein god is deep but not devious now this is my rendering of einstein's intriguing saying which is difficult i think really to convey in the sense of einstein meant it god is
subtle he's intricate but he's not malicious he's not evil if god does not wear his heart on his sleeve is intended to express the idea that the secrets of nature cannot be read off the phenomenal surface god is deep but not devious expresses the complexity and subtlety and ultimate simplicity and reliability of the universe that is to say the imminent order hidden behind the intricate and often baffling interconnections we find in the universe is essentially trustworthy
for in spite of all that might appear to the contrary we come up against sets of events for which there seem to be no rational explanation the universe is not arbitrary or evil god does not play tricks with us now in the conference i was concerned with last week of which i've talked to you we had from the side of reconstructions of thermodynamics attempts to deal with certain fluctuations in nature and stochastic ways of thinking about
them which looks as though we're up against something arbitrary and random in nature and yet here we are forced to think that out in such a way that we believe it has an inherent intelligibility although it is not one that can be reduced to the kind of order we've had say in traditional quantum theory or even in entirely in traditional thermodynamics here also we believe in all the astounding self revelations of nature and in the fluctuations
which we are not able adequately to understand that god does not play tricks with us take the place that light occupies the remarkable place that light occupies in modern science herman vile the great one of the greatest mathematicians of modern times and a jew like most of the people who have given us our great developments said about einstein's theory of relativity this means that light occupies a unique metaphysical status in the universe light occupies a unique
metaphysical status in the universe if all bodies in motion to be technical for a moment are relationally defined with reference to space and time and all space and time are relationally defined with reference to light and its velocity light itself is not defined by anything beyond itself it is the constant and it is by reference to light as the constant that all we know in nature is relationally known defined and upon that constant we may invariably
rely that is why einstein said god does not deceive you he is utterly faithful and reliable he does not play tricks with you that is like light that is light the light of the universe so at all the dynamic multivariable structures which pervade the universe of bodies in motion somehow this constancy of light has always supported the conviction that god in our sense not in einstein's sense does not play tricks with us with us god does
not let us down now think for the moment of the patristic doctrine of light and this is an area which needs a lot of research and can reward some fundamental research because the fathers realized this very clearly why is the the universe the sky dark at night time it's full of light but you can't see it because light is invisible the other day when i was preaching in dundee university i was taken that day to the
meteorological station and we had uh i was shown how the signals were coming in from one of these uh what do you call them these man-made satellites through which the we get information about the weather and i asked to see where the stream of light was coming in and so i took a bit of paper and held it up in the stream of light and immediately saw a spot of light but couldn't see the light
itself you can't see light even the light of the sun what you see is that which is enlightened by the light but light itself remains invisible now this is what the father kept saying you cannot see light but you see in the light of light now god is the light the uncreated light and it's in terms of that invisible uncreated light that the created lights of the world are visible and so you understand the rationality of
nature what i call the contingent rationality in the light of the uncreated rationality you understand created light in the light of uncreated light and because god's light is constant we have the ultimate stability the reliability of the universe which he made and the light that he made in the universe have that stability and constancy and so we here we have a remarkable parallel between the the unique metaphysical status of physical light and the unique status of
light looked at from a theological point of view but here we have a problem with which einstein did not reckon when we generalize from this conception of order and reliability to comprehend all human existence and experience we are faced with the fact that it cannot account for evil and pain and error and sin that is for darkness disorder and irrationality in the world which face to face with god god's self-revelation in jesus we know to
conflict with his divine will and love now here we do have a real parallel again with theology take for example the statement there is order in the universe now this is a statement upon which all science relies if there were no order in the universe there will be no science no rational knowledge whatsoever but that there is order in the universe cannot be proved because you have to assume it in order to prove it so this
the most ultimate assumption of all science is unverifiable and unfalsifiable and that we need to stuff down the throats of our linguistic analysts the the fundamental assumptions are unverifiable and unvulsifiable and yet they determine everything suppose you come up up against sets of events in the universe and let's say problems that arise and this is where so many scientists nowadays enter into the realm of fiction with the black holes and so on white holes wormholes and
all these other things they invent now suppose you come up against a set of events here what you cannot construe in any understanding of physics do you therefore cast aside the view and say oh the world is irrational there's no order to it on the contrary it is precisely because you hold there is order that you will not believe there's anything irrational about these things about quarks or black holes but that here somewhere rather there is
an pattern which you try to understand same thing in in our daily life we come across events let's say the death of a child with cancer and the mother is heartbroken over it why is this the case why does god allow this and then let's say she gives up her faith in god but does she it's only because in some sense she does really believe that god is a god of order and love that she's so
rebellious against this fact that this disorder in the universe that god is love is something we cannot verify it's or falsify it's it's like the ultimate principles of science and yet in the light of that everything else depends that is the order of god by which he governs the universe the creation and maintains its providence and which is so fundamental to the whole order of redemption so we have here a remarkable parallel but in the incarnation
we are to think of the logos of god as penetrating our world and is bringing the source of that order god is love into our disordered world the incarnation therefore is not an intrusion into the creation as though the creation were alien from the love of god not an intrusion into the orderly patterns of nature but on the contrary such a penetration of the patterns of nature in its order and disorder that it brings a creative
reordering at a deeper level which anchors the disturbances of our world in such a way that the love of god transcends and conquers them but the incarnation means the intersection of the divine order of love into the patterns of our world which somehow have gone wrong and have become disorder hence the intersection of the divine order with our disorder or evil involves the passion of god in christ by which our disorder is restored to order through
the ordering love of god now theologically that tells us a good deal about the bearing of the incarnation upon the creation and the interrelation the inseparable interrelation of incarnation and atonement but i won't pursue that scientifically however here a word relating to our basic attitude to the world and here we are faced with the problem of how to relate the divine order of redemption through god's ordering of love to the kind of order disclosed through scientific
inquiry not simply in physical science but in the human sciences and here we are up against very deep problems now i find myself up against this kind of problem when i try to understand a good deal of modern music i find it very difficult frankly i'm not a musician though i love music very difficult to understand ways modern ways of resolving dissonance because often it seems to me that musical events as in painting you have a
collocation patterns of color and form in such a way that there is no forgiveness of sins dissonance is left but it's only put in connection something else but i require to be forgiven and yet looked at from a scientific point of view and i suppose one can apply science in this way to art and to music what we have here might be expressed in this way here we have on one level let's say a certain pattern
of of of of of of of of musical events but this is let me make that would be very clear let's call that the pattern of musical events but this is and it has a symmetry to it but this symmetry is somehow intersected by another and a higher symmetry so that one symmetry breaks the symmetry at a lower level and it looks like dissonance and it is some dissonance but the effect of it is to give
a deeper symmetry a profound harmony a deeper level of of order in music now if that is the case and you can tell me those of you who are theoretical musicians that this is the case i would like also to understand that in terms of counterpoint as well where the counterpoint the canto fermo calls the broken symmetries of the lower level into such contrapponto relation that they are given a harmony beyond anything they are capable of
themselves when left alone their own level so if we take these two together and both these are this would be an and the way in which we think through cross levels in in in analogical thinking in science if we take both these two together we may get some kind of analogy in which we can understand this problem of how the the symmetry of the love of god the ordering love of god breaks into the apparent symmetries
of our life and by breaking those symmetries it reveals that there is disorder there and it gives a deeper dimension to symmetry and thus reorders the whole now in this intersection of the divine symmetries with those of our world we discover that god is and in him is no darkness at all god is love and in him there is no dissonance at all and it is here that we have the the problems this intersection of what
i've called the divine symmetries with the symmetrical patterns or the orderly patterns of our world giving rise to eschatology and time has now left me and i can only speak very briefly about this and i believe that this is important because it we have to relate eschatology i believe the whole future of the universe as we believe it will take through jesus christ we have to relate that to the kind of universe which under god is
being disclosed to us as creation unfolds to our scientific inquiry let us take the problem of scientific prediction now there are two kinds of prediction one i call an improper prediction which is merely a deduction from a set of events which we already know a deduction logically to another similar set of events now this isn't prediction at all because here you already have in a set of events and a body of knowledge you already have something
you know but is concealed in that and that is by logical analysis deduction you can derive logically necessarily from a certain other ideas and that is how positivist concepts in a determinist mechanistic universe regarded prediction but in the new science that is not what prediction is about here in a scientific theory so if you have here a scientific theory in which you have the the empirical and the theoretical thought conjunctively it it you don't simply work
with two levels you work with with unending so that this scientific theory is open upward to the other levels so that if you think in a scientific theory in such a way your theory is in touch with reality and reality is like that then your scientific theory indicates more than you can ever specify at the time so that later on because you are concerned with time and because you are concerned with time and the flow of
time that any theory here necessarily has a future reference and therefore the fertility of any scientific theory is one of the fundamental criteria by which you accept it or reject it so that all true scientific concepts have this analogical and predictive element but the predictions are indications in which they say more than you can specify and although they may indicate something in that direction which you believe will take place if this theory is true it points
in that direction when it you actually find out what happens it takes you by surprise it itself is far more than could ever have been predicted and the universe is like that because of its quality of spontaneity and inexhaustible freedom that i spoke of before correlated to the inexhaustible freedom of god now true theological statements are like that that is why all divine revelation in space and time has a predictive element and because time as a
victorial character as an arrow a genuine self-revelation of god at any moment in time directs us ahead predictively to the future now all our understanding therefore of god in the universe has therefore an eschatological predictive operation but it takes you by surprise as jesus kept on saying that's why you cannot it's so stupid to calculate times in the future all that sort of stuff that is really to apply a Newtonian mechanics linear mathematics to it's
impossible just as impossible with science because god and the universe always take us by surprise even the predictive element is itself surprised how then can we relate to this understanding of the universe with that understanding of the universe that derives from our scientific inquiry at least we can say this that the scientific knowledge of the universe that we have today is itself caught up in this astounding surprise element it's always taking us by surprise and the
deeper we get into it the more we know the universe is correlated as i said before with an infinite differentiality in the sufficient reason beyond it so that every scientific theory takes us by surprise and insofar as it reveals things we could not have anticipated it shows us that we are in touch with reality well what i've been have whatever have i been trying to do today i have not been trying to show that christian theology
is based upon the new science and a remarkable opening of the universe but that if we today try to think theologically even with our traditional theology within the patterns of the new science along these lines i've taken as indicated by einstein's logia we find ourselves point after point driven back to the great truth of classical christian theology which we have already reached on different ways on the proper ground of god self-revelation if we interpret that
self-revelation of god however within the context of this scientific revolution far from finding it a menace to us we find our own basic convictions clarified and deepened and given an even more exciting relevance to the exciting world which daily opens out to our understanding thank you